UNTRANSPARENT

FOR HALF A YEAR, ANTHONY FAUCI, THE nation’s top infectious-disease official, and Kentucky senator and physician Rand Paul have been locked in a battle over whether the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded dangerous “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and whether that research could have played a role in the pandemic. Against Senator Paul’s aggressive questioning over three separate hearings, Dr. Fauci adamantly denied the charge. “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he said in their first fracas on May 11, a position he has steadfastly maintained.

Gain-of-function experiments are those in which viruses are genetically engineered to give them new powers, including the ability to infect and kill humans. The work is controversial. Some scientists say studying new deadly viruses in the lab is important preparation for novel viruses that leap from animals to humans with great regularity. Others say the risk of handling deadly viruses in the lab, where they could escape by accident or wrongdoing, outweighs the benefits.

The U.S. government froze funding for gain-of-function research in 2014 when a group of scientists petitioned the NIH, then allowed it again in 2017 on a case-by-case basis. The work became a hot-button issue when the pandemic started and some scientists speculated that SARS-CoV-2 could possibly be the product of gain-of-function research. There is no proof whatsoever that it is, but