No Evidence Scientists Received Grant for Changing Opinion on Pandemic Origins, Contrary to Claims

In 2020, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded 11 grants to scientists so they could investigate how and where infectious agents emerge from wildlife and cause illness in humans.

Although the grants were reviewed and scored by groups of independent scientists prior to public disclosure of any outbreak, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan baselessly suggested that former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci gave scientists one of the grants — worth $9 million — to alter the scientific narrative on how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Key to this shift in opinion, Jordan said, was a Feb. 1, 2020, call involving Fauci and the scientists.

At a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing on March 8, Jordan claimed Fauci pressured virologists Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and Robert Garry of Tulane University to change their minds and support the theory that the virus transferred naturally from animals to humans, rather than originating in a lab. This claim of a quid pro quo has spread widely on social media.

Not only is there no evidence for this, but the timing of the grant is inconsistent with such a claim. Moreover, NIAID directors do not unilaterally decide who gets funding; groups of outside scientists review proposals and provide scores that are the primary determinants of funding.

Andersen and Garry did appear to undergo a shift in early 2020 in their thinking on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. They moved from finding the SARS-CoV-2 genome “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,” as Andersen put it in an , to helping author a Nature Medicine stating that it was not