‘No Idea’ If COVID-19 Originated in Chinese Laboratory: NIH Director

COVID-19 may have originated in a set of laboratories in China that was conducting experiments with U.S. taxpayer dollars, the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on April 19.

“Did the COVID-19 virus originate from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?” Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) asked Dr. Lawrence Tabak, the acting NIH director, during a hearing in Washington.

“I have no idea,” Tabak said.

The NIH funded experiments done at the institute, which is located in the same city where the first COVID-19 cases were detected in late 2019.

At least some of those experiments resulted in the increase of a virus’s transmissibility, the NIH acknowledged in 2021. Experiments that increase the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a biological agent like a virus are commonly known as gain-of-function.

Tabak said that no gain-of-function experiments were done at the institute, despite authoring the NIH acknowledgment.

He also said he believes that COVID-19 spread from bats to an intermediary animal before infecting humans.

“There are two prevalent theories—a lab accident, or as you say a lab leak, versus a zoonotic transfer from animals to humans,” Tabak said. “In my mind, the available evidence favors the latter, but of course our minds are open to the former possibility.”

Tabak did not cite any of the evidence and the NIH, whose former top officials worked hard to promote the natural origin theory, did not respond to a request for citations.

Natural origin theory proponents have largely said most COVID-19 cases came from a wet market full of animals near the institute, with one recent paper saying new sequencing data supports the theory. Lab leak theory proponents have noted that Chinese officials have withheld key evidence from the labs and that no intermediary animals have been identified more than two years after COVID-19 started.

“Natural emergence typically leaves behind a story, a trail, a footprint,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) told reporters in a briefing this week. “Convincing evidence is yet to be presented.”

Marshall was holding a briefin