EcoHealth Alliance

Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, EcoHealth Alliance has been the subject of controversy and increased scrutiny due to its ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—which has been at the center of speculation since early 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 may have escaped in a lab incident.[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] Prior to the pandemic, EcoHealth Alliance was the only U.S.-based organization researching coronavirus evolution and transmission in China, where they partnered with the WIV, among others.[29] EcoHealth president Peter Daszak co-authored a February 2020 letter in The Lancet condemning "conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin".[30] However, Daszak failed to disclose EcoHealth's ties to the WIV, which some observers noted as an apparent conflict of interest.[31][32] In June 2021, The Lancet published an addendum in which Daszak disclosed his cooperation with researchers in China.[33]

In April 2020, the NIH ordered EcoHealth Alliance to cease spending the remaining $369,819 from its current NIH grant at the request of the Trump administration,[34] pressuring them by stating "it must hand over information and materials from the Chinese research facility to resume funding for suspended grant" in reference to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The canceled grant was supposed to run through 2024.[35] Funding from NIH resumed in August 2020 after an uproar from "77 U.S. Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies".[8]

Work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology under an NIH grant to the EHA has been at the center of political controversies during the pandemic. One such controversy centered on whether any experiments conducted under the grant could be accurately described as "gain-of-function" (GoF) research.[36] NIH officials (including Anthony Fauci) unequivocally denied during 2020 congressional hearings that the EHA had conducted GoF research with NIH funding.[37]

In October 2021, the EHA submitted a progress report detailing the results of a past experiment where some laboratory mice lost more weight than expected after being infected with a modified bat coronavirus.[38] The NIH subsequently sent a letter to the congressional committee on Energy and Commerce describing this experiment, but did not refer to it as "gain-of-function".[36] Whether such research qualifies as "gain-of-function" is a matter of considerable debate among relevant experts.[39]

EcoHealth Alliance partners with USAID on the PREDICT subset of USAID's EPT (Emerging Pandemic Threats) program.[40] PREDICT seeks to identify which emerging infectious diseases are of the greatest risk to human health. Many of EcoHealth Alliance's international collaborations with in-country organizations and institutions fall under the PREDICT umbrella. Scientists in the field collect samples from local fauna in order to track the spread of potentially harmful pathogens and to stop them from becoming outbreaks. Scientists also train local technicians and veterinarians in animal sampling and information gathering.

Active countries include Bangladesh, Cameroon, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Liberia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Sudan, South Sudan, Thailand, Uganda, and Vietnam.

IDEEAL (Infectious Disease Emergence and Economics of Altered Landscapes Program)[41] attempts to investigate the impact of deforestation and land-use change on the risk of zoonoses in Sabah, Malaysia. This project focuses on the local palm oil industry in particular. The study also offers to the country's corporate leaders and policymakers long-term alternatives to large-scale deforestation. The program is headquartered at the Malaysian Development Health Research Unit (DHRU), which was developed in collaboration with the Malaysian University of Sabah.

Rift Valley fever (RVFV) has detrimental effect on the livestock industry in sub-Saharan Africa where it is most prominent. EcoHealth Alliance is working in South Africa to better predict outbreaks by studying the impact of the environment and human behavior in regard to the mosquito-spread virus. EcoHealth Alliance is also already at work with policymakers on a plan to prevent the spread of RVFV to the United States.

A growing body of research indicates that bats are an important factor in both ecosystem health and disease emergence. A number of hypotheses have been proposed for the high number of zoonoses that have come from bat populations in recent decades. One group of researchers hypothesized “that flight, a factor common to all bats but to no other mammals, provides an intensive selective force for coexistence with viral parasites through a daily cycle that elevates metabolism and body temperature analogous to the fever response in other mammals. On an evolutionary scale, this host-virus interaction might have resulted in the large diversity of zoonotic viruses in bats, possibly through bat viruses adapting to be more tolerant of the fever response and less virulent to their natural hosts.” [42]

According to the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), roughly 18 million acres of forest (roughly the size of Panama) are lost every year due to deforestation.[43] Increased contact between humans and the animal species whose habitat is being destroyed has led to increases in zoonotic disease. EcoHealth Alliance scientists are testing species for pathogens in areas with very little, moderate, and complete deforestation in order to track potential outbreaks. This data is used to promote the preservation of natural lands and diminish the negative effects of land-use change.

Project DEFUSE was a rejected DARPA grant application, which proposed to sample bat coronaviruses from various locations in China.[44] To evaluate whether bat coronaviruses might spill over into the human population, the grantees proposed to create chimeric coronaviruses which were mutated in different locations, before evaluating their ability to infect human cells in the laboratory.[45] One proposed alteration was to modify bat coronaviruses to insert a cleavage site for the Furin protease at the S1/S2 junction of the spike (S) viral protein. Another part of the grant aimed to create noninfectious protein-based vaccines containing just the spike protein of dangerous coronaviruses. These vaccines would then be administered to bats in caves in southern China to help prevent future outbreaks.[44] Co-investigators on the rejected proposal included Ralph Baric from UNC, Linfa Wang from Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore, and Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[46]