May 14, 2023
TOTALLY NOT A DEATH CULT...:
How Trump's anti-science meddling erased 3 years of crucial COVID research (Michael Hiltzik, May 12, 2023, LA Times)
The grant to New York-based EcoHealth Alliance has largely ended a political attack on research into COVID-19 that began in 2020 under the Trump administration.It is undisputable that the Trump White House ordered the National Institutes of Health to terminate a $3.4-million grant to EcoHealth in April 2020, based on entirely unfounded right-wingers' claims that EcoHealth was funding so-called gain-of-function virus research in China, something they say could have allowed SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to escape from a Chinese laboratory and infect the world.The consequences for the independence of scientific research generally and for research into COVID's origins have been incalculable.While it is "impossible to say what would have been accomplished if the hiatus in funding did not occur," former NIH director Harold Varmus told me by email, restoring the grant "cannot restore the three years in which [EcoHealth] was deprived of support for such critical work at a critical time."
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 14, 2023 12:00 AM