“This work was jointly funded by the strategic priority research program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant XDB29010101) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grants 31770175 and 31621061) to Z.-L.S.”
Nicholas Wade does not assert that EcoHealth funded any of the biosafety level 2 gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Instituate of Virology that likely created the pandemic just that they did fund gain-of-function research done under biosafety level 3 in the lab that did research that likely created the pandemic.
Reality is complex, avoid trying to dumb down complex claims when discussing on LessWrong.
Nicholas Wade does assert that! NIAID funded it, EcoHealth was the prime contractor, Dr Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was an official sub-contractor. He has a link to the NIH website.
From June 2014 to May 2019, Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
There’s no assertion that this grant directly paid for the experiments from which COVID-19 escaped. The Baric&Shi paper from 2015 which came out of that grant reports work happening under biosafety level III.
Biosafety level II doesn’t provide effective protection for the researchers when they deal with an airborne virus. Despite the denailist at the WHO SARS-COV-2, seems to spread via airborne infections, so it makes sense that the leak was from one of the experiments under biosafety level II which were not EcoHealth funded.
There’s no reason to create inaccurate headlines on LessWrong. The article doesn’t claim that EcoHealth created SARS-CoV-2.
Shi’s lab did gain-of-function research under biosafety level 2 as they describe in their own papers like Evolutionary Arms Race between Virus and Host Drives Genetic Diversity in Bat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Related Coronavirus Spike Genes. The acknowledgement section of that paper describes that funding as:
“This work was jointly funded by the strategic priority research program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant XDB29010101) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grants 31770175 and 31621061) to Z.-L.S.”
Nicholas Wade does not assert that EcoHealth funded any of the biosafety level 2 gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Instituate of Virology that likely created the pandemic just that they did fund gain-of-function research done under biosafety level 3 in the lab that did research that likely created the pandemic.
Reality is complex, avoid trying to dumb down complex claims when discussing on LessWrong.
Nicholas Wade does assert that! NIAID funded it, EcoHealth was the prime contractor, Dr Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was an official sub-contractor. He has a link to the NIH website.
There’s no assertion that this grant directly paid for the experiments from which COVID-19 escaped. The Baric&Shi paper from 2015 which came out of that grant reports work happening under biosafety level III.
Biosafety level II doesn’t provide effective protection for the researchers when they deal with an airborne virus. Despite the denailist at the WHO SARS-COV-2, seems to spread via airborne infections, so it makes sense that the leak was from one of the experiments under biosafety level II which were not EcoHealth funded.