Cutting $18 billion from NIH over a conspiracy theory
Insane: Trump Regime uses Wuhan lab claim to justify a massive reduction in research funding for all kinds of diseases
Another measure of the insanity gripping the United States government: The Trump Regime and House Republicans want to cut $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health over an unproven hypothesis about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.
A Johns Hopkins scholar in health security calls it “a fictional, conspiratorial worldview” that an NIH subcontract to China's Wuhan Institute of Virology led to the virus leaking from a lab.
On May 2, Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect now in charge of Trump’s budget, explained the proposed NIH cut with prose you’d associate with the finest right-wing conspiracy nuts:
“NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”
It’s not clear what supports such an overheated indictment of NIH. Vought cites no evidence supporting his assertions and provides no specifics. His allegations echo the hackneyed criticisms that MAGA extremists registered during and immediately after the pandemic. It’s just a broadside against the world’s leading funder of biomedical research to justify a massive cut in spending.
Here’s more:
“While evidence of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic leaking from a laboratory is now confirmed by several intelligence agencies, the NIH’s inability to prove that its grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology were not complicit in such a possible leak, or get data and hold recipients of Federal funding accountable is evidence that NIH has grown too big and unfocused.”
Here, where Vought gets specific, he gets it wrong. In fact, it looks like just another lie to support the funding cut.
There has been no confirmation of the popular hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the laboratory in Wuhan.
The Central Intelligence Agency, with a new director appointed by Trump, reported in January that it was leaning toward the lab explanation, but with “low confidence.”
A competing hypothesis, that the virus went from infected animals to humans in a live animal market in Wuhan, is also plausible, and possibly more so. (More on that in a minute.)
So that’s why it appears that Vought lied in the narrative about the NIH cut that he submitted to Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who serves as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The NIH made a relatively small grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So Vought jumps to a conclusion, based only on suspicions, then makes the leap that the NIH was complicit in a lab leak. And, though that leak might not have happened, NIH should therefore pay the price, to the tune of $18 billion in funding cuts.
It’s nuts.
Vought and others in MAGA World want badly for the lab-leak explanation to be true. The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, told Breitbart he wanted the agency to get “off the sidelines” and concur with his belief that the virus came from the Wuhan lab.
But that’s not how legitimate inquiry works in the real world. In scientific research, in police investigations, in intelligence analysis, firm conclusions are not always possible. The boss cannot simply pick a winning side in a debate and announce “case closed.”
In the matter of the Covid-19 origins, there is good reason to believe the virus spread in a natural way.
In an excellent essay for the online bulletin, Think Global Health, and in a lunch-hour lecture to colleagues earlier this week, Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, reported, as I do here, that Trump’s cuts to scientific research are, incredibly, based on the lab-leak hypothesis.
Everyone should read it or watch the recording of Gronvall’s lecture.
I’ll summarize just three points from Gronvall’s essay here:
Considerable evidence points to a natural spillover of SARS-CoV-2 from animals to people in the live animal market, undercutting the certainty within the Trump Regime that COVID-19 started as a lab leak.
Early cases of COVID-19 were associated with the live animal market more than 10 miles away from the Wuhan lab. The lab leak theory cannot explain “how two versions of the virus were present in the early cases, only one of which went on to cause the pandemic.”
The genetic diversity of the virus in early cases is most easily explained by an “ongoing epidemic in animals and multiple people getting infected by different sick animals.” A lab leak would not explain the genetic diversity.
Gronvall warns that the Trump attack on NIH, based on the unjustified certainty that COVID-19 started as a lab leak, has pulled scientific research away from another potential threat to public health: “H5N1 avian influenza is circulating in dairy cows and migratory birds and occasionally spilling over to humans. Person-to-person transmission is yet to occur. But if the virus adapts to humans and gains the mutations necessary to do so, it could generate a pandemic worse than COVID-19.”
Read Grovnall’s essay or, if you can spare an hour, listen to her lecture. That such a massive funding cut to NIH is being considered is outrageous; that it’s being considered for this reason — and to satisfy other right-wing obsessions — is insane.
This is exactly the kind of reporting needed to combat the authoritarian’s playbook, which is based on the attempt to take total command of “truth” and shape it to serve whatever program the leader is selling. It is an attempt to destroy one of the pillars of democracy. We need to combat it with every tool we have, and this kind of journalism is critical
Trump and his cult are one judge ordered psych evaluation from a psych hospital.