The Record of the NIH & Origin of Covid-19

60 Minutes and former NIH director Francis Collins portray the NIH as a paragon of life-saving scientific excellence, but its actual record is mixed and uncertain, especially when it comes to the origin of Covid-19.

SOURCES:

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, Francis Collins said, “Deaths from heart disease are down by 75% in the last 40 years. That’s NIH. Deaths from stroke are down about 75%. That’s NIH.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/scientists-fear-trump-administration-nih-cuts-could-impact-health-60-minutes-transcript/

Scott Pelly, a top reporter for 60 Minutes, claims that they “fact-check every story.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/team/scott-pelley/
https://x.com/GavinNewsom/status/1843493880144244798

Virtually none of the decline in U.S. cardiovascular mortality occurred under Collins’ 12-year tenure as director of the NIH from 2009 to 2021.
https://platform.who.int/mortality/themes/theme-details/topics/topic-details/MDB/cardiovascular-diseases
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-Collins

A paper about the U.S. “decline in cardiovascular mortality” makes clear that the potential causes are wide-ranging and based on “modeling studies” that have “great imprecision” and “must be interpreted cautiously.” https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.116.309115

In the same 60 Minutes episode, host Sharyn Alfonsi reported that a “Journal of the American Medical Association study found that between 2010 and 2019, 99% of FDA-approved drugs had ties to research funded by the NIH.”

The study cited by Alfonsi also found that “NIH has made limited contributions” to the “clinical development” of new drugs approved by the FDA, specifically “9.8% to 10.7% of estimated industry costs.” The study also notes that “clinical research … represents 3.3% of total NIH funding for basic or applied research related to these products,” meaning that 97% of NIH funding of drug research occurs in the preclinical phase. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2807184

In 2012, the journal Nature published a study by scientists who attempted to reproduce the findings of 53 “landmark” papers that present the results of preclinical studies related to cancer drugs. The scientists were able to confirm “only 6 (11%)” of the results, despite the fact that “when findings could not be reproduced, an attempt was made to contact the original authors, discuss the discrepant findings, exchange reagents and repeat experiments under the authors’ direction, occasionally even in the laboratory of the original investigator.” The authors summarize the implications of their findings by declaring, “Although hundreds of thousands of research papers are published annually, too few clinical successes have been produced given the public investment of significant financial resources.” https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a

Alfonsi also reported that the NIH spends 80% of its $47 billion budget on grants to outside researchers and then broadcast Collins stating, “Most of that goes out to the universities and institutes all over the country. They’re the ones that do the work, but they get the funds from NIH by writing very compelling grant applications that go through the most rigorous peer review system in the world.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/scientists-fear-trump-administration-nih-cuts-could-impact-health-60-minutes-transcript/

The NIH recently issued grants for:
• a study of “social networks” among “black and Latino sexual minority men in New Jersey.” https://x.com/DOGE/status/1899656989665615909
• studying “Structural Racism and Discrimination” against “older gay men of color.” https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10474152#description
• an “LGB+ inclusive teen pregnancy prevention program for transgender boys.” https://x.com/DOGE/status/1899656989665615909
• studying the “sexual health” of “LGTBQ+ Latinx youth in an agricultural community.” https://x.com/DOGE/status/1899656989665615909

As documented by the U.S. Government Accountability Office:
• The NIH gave $1,413,720 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) during 2014–2019 via a group called EcoHealth Alliance.
• Some of that money was used to fund “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains.”
• The “research to generate” those “coronaviruses was not subject to the gain-of-function research funding pause.”
• The Wuhan Lab conducted a “limited” experiment to “test whether the spike protein from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China was capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor.”
• The “NIH analyzed the WIV experiments in 2021 and concluded that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses were genetically distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not have been the source of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-106119.pdf

In 2022, the journal Nature published a paper documenting these facts:
• “To decipher the origin of SARS-CoV-2, it is therefore essential to ascertain the diversity of animal coronaviruses, and more specifically, that of bat coronaviruses.”
• “The spike sequence seems essential, as it determines the binding affinity and accessibility of the receptor-binding domain (RBD) to the cellular ACE2 receptor....”
• “SARS-CoV-2 progenitor bat viruses genetically close to SARS-CoV-2 and able to enter human cells through a human ACE2 (hACE2) pathway … circulate in cave bats living in the limestone karstic terrain in northern Laos, in the Indochinese peninsula.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04532-4

In 2021, The Intercept released NIH grant documents for “EcoHealth Alliance” to fund research at the “Wuhan Institute of Virology” involving “experimental work” to “understand the ability of bat coronaviruses to bind to human receptors” with “14 bat genera in 5 provinces and in Laos….”
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/06/new-details-emerge-about-coronavirus-research-at-chinese-lab/
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21055989/understanding-risk-bat-coronavirus-emergence-grant-notice.pdf

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