'That's Not Even Close To What I Asked': Dem Staff Grills EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak

minority staff for not more than 30 minutes of questions maybe 31 since we went over here you thank you Mr chairman Dr dashik thank you for coming in today I think maybe I'll just pick up right where the majority left off that Lancet letter we've talked about it a few times today I'll read just one more time that very same sentence standing together to condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin so you talked about snakes and you talked about HIV I don't see either of those words in that sentence or in the letter why is that because there's a word limit on letters to Lance it they're not going to allow you to just bang on for a long period of time look at the time at the time we if I if I could follow up on that you well let me follow first please um at the time we submitted that letter the prevailing theories other than this came from a bat through a zerotic spillover were HIV inserts bioengineered um I think snake DNA and a bio-engineered bioweapon virus all of those are conspiracy theories the intelligence agency stated that clearly at the beginning of their report that there is no evidence to support that there never was and there still isn't that's helpful thank you and so I just kind of want to hone in on the exact uh nature of what you're saying I think it's that the word limit wouldn't allow you to fit in the word snake well the word snake wouldn't be enough to make any difference that so I it would have to say for instance for example the orig the theories about the um the virus having snake DNA or that it um that it's got HIV inserts or that it's a bio-engineered virus perhaps they were in earlier drafts of the statement but um they're not in that one all right well you're and they were the only prevailing theories other than it came from a xotic spillover sure so as a which is still the prevailing Theory let me let me finish as a reader and writer of the English language how do you think the sentence covid-19 does not have a natural origin reads covid-19 does does not have a natural origin do you read that sentence as being limited to snakes and HIV is that what we said yeah can you read out the context of that please I'm not sure what you that's no problem we stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin yeah that's what we said then and we stand by it at the time that was the right thing to say do you read that sentence as being limited to snakes and HIV I read I read that science in February 2020 as focusing on those conspiracies that were out there and they were the ones that were out there it's not quite the question as a reader of the sentence how do you read it well first of all you would have to go back in time to 2020 put yourself in the mindset of what was going on back then which were those prevailing theories bioengineered virus snake DNA and HIV inserts preposterous conspir teritorial and without any evidence whatsoever yeah I just don't think any reasonable reader of that sentence is going to read it that way well the the editor of Lancet read it and approved it 26 of the leading Public Health authorities in the world read it and agreed with it 20,000 plus people signed on to that letter on a public uh statement everybody seemed to read it and understand exactly what it meant and it was correct at the time and we stand by it you talked a little bit about the diffuse application and and bmbl and you've talked several times about how the bmbl you know either says bsl2 is appropriate or we've heard elsewhere maybe it doesn't actually have a specific requirement at all I I think the thing I want to focus on is your testimony to us in November wasn't just about bmbl you told us that you ensured that we adhered to the same bios safety levels that were used in the US and that were required by the bmbl and those are two different things Ralph Barrett clearly told you that what is used in the US is bsl3 and you knew that that was not the case in Ral Ralph Barrack's entitled to his opinion about best practices which is what he was trying to say in that statement but I have here the language from bmbl sorry just cuz we' heard it right yeah we've heard it three or four times as I said that's not quite the same thing as what do scientists actually do in the United States well it is actually because they're the rules that govern what scientists actually do so if I follow it is it that you disagree with Dr barck and you don't actually think that it's common in the United States to use bsl3 for this type of work it Ral baric may use it for some types of work uh he may go above and beyond the B bmbl um levels good for him and that's good for us too do you understand him to be an outlier in that respect um there is no outlier if the rules State something differently and I want to just add in the diffused proposal we did not propose to use bsl2 for infection experiments with recumbant bares we propos BSL 3 it's right there in black and white at Ralph Barracks lab using his high standards higher than the bmbl requires yeah I think the concern is more that you point to the bmbl and I understand that I think but I thought your job was to oversee this line of research and these are the rules that oversee them if your collaborator comes to you and says what we do here in the United States is use a certain level of biosafety and that's not what they do in China and people in the US will freak out I think that's distinction is probably pretty important for somebody in your well I agreed with Dr Barett which is why the BSL 3 is in the proposal not bsl2 the year five report has been talked about a few times as well you said something that I just wanted to follow up on you said something to the effect of look there's a record that I tried to submit that report and that we as a subcommittee have that record I think what you referring to which we do have and which is not quite what you say it is is a screenshot that your folks initi iated the year five report on July 24th of that year and we agree we have that we're all from the NIH system yeah we're all on the same page there the problem is routing the report submitting the report is two years later there's no evidence that you submitted the report in 2019 correct this well that's not quite what you said about an hour and a half ago and I think it's those types of little misrepresentation what did I say an hour and a half ago you told us that there was documentary evidence that you had submitted the report in 2019 what what I have here is a timeline with documentary evidence of attempts to submit the report to open up the system we had a draft of a report back in June we tried to get it in the system and it locked us out I have the record here we'll send any other the evidence that you don't yet have we will send to the committee well I'll distinguish for a starting point I think we have what you're talking about and we went over it in November well we'll find out I'll check there might be some that you don't have yet I think it's safe to speak for both sides here to say that if we don't have what you're talking about then at this point that's a pretty big problem as well what do you mean if you have extra documents on the year five issue that you have not handled I'm talking about um we've reviewed all of our systems to try and find information to see if we've got any evidence at all that that report was uploaded which we know it was we know we had an inability to get through to the system it locked us out and I'm looking for evidence we may have some here that you don't yet have we will find it and send it okay I just want to be really clear that the documentary evidence we do have that I think you might be talking about shows that you all opened up the system I know that yeah I have that written does not show that you submitted or attempted to submit the report well I'm telling you here under oath that we did okay uh I'd like to Pivot to some of the more science heavy aspects of uh really what we've already talked about back in November probably starting with you had this detailed back and forth with niad in the summer of 2016 on the question of whether or not the work you were prop proposing was affected by the 2014 Federal pause on gain of function work so niad ultimately decided that your work was not affected by that pause you've said that several times here today I I don't think we have a problem with that decision I have not heard the majority have a problem with that decision so so it's not the decision that is in dispute but I do think we're interested in and would like to focus on some of the arguments you made niad cuz their reasoning I think was slightly different from what you were suggesting so I just kind of want to walk through how you I I just want to correct one thing this wasn't a wa wait wait wait wait this wasn't back and Dr dasik I let you finish and I was happy to I asked that you do the same so those arguments sort of ran in order and I'd like to touch on them and talk about them yeah the first one I think was pretty easy it was making the point that the 2014 policy should be viewed as applying to SARS because that's what it says SARS but not to the SARS like viruses that you were planning on working with I I think we understand that argument and acknowledge that the pause was a little bit unclear from a textual point of view there so I really don't have too many questions about that you then pivoted though to talk about wi one which I think is that virus that you all were planning to use as a backbone in your experiments and you said to niad that wiv one quote has never been demonstrated to infect humans or cause human disease later in the letter for other reasons you included a parenthetical to an article that's called wi one is poised for human emergence and that article concludes that quote the results indicate that wi one has the ability to directly infect humans I think it's really hard for us as readers to understand how that context was not addressed in your letter um both can be correct it it is correct that it has never infected people to our knowledge and it's also correct that it infects human cells in the lab not people there's no evidence of that now that we cite that paper in the response to NIH NIH is the is the body that oversees this if an should have said wait a minute this paper that you site yourselves suggests that we need to rethink we would have not gone ahead with the experiment don't forget we proposed alternatives to this work um we we've sent them a paragraph of modeling studies we could do uh pseudovirus work we could do if they decided that the work should not go ahead ni had every possibility every um reason to go through that and say no if they wanted to and we would have not done that work this is something to ask NIH not Eco Health Alliance we did our best our best shot at trying to explain why we believe the work was not um covered by the G of function as they asked us what alternatives we could do and then it's an age that makes a decision on that yeah so you cited the article for a different reason you would have had to open the article and read it to appreciate what I just quoted from it and I understand that I think you're drawing a distinction between human cells in a lab and a human receptor in a lab so I I think the eventual conclusion of that is it does not count until a live Human walks in and drops to the ground sick no until it infects a person uhhuh that's a big difference between infecting a cell in a lab and also you point out that you would have to read the open the paper and read it surely the NIH system that deliberates on these issues actually opens the papers reads them as the scientists I mean we assume that that is this group is doing they they they know the literature they're going to make a um a knowledgeable decision based on their knowledge of literature which we cited in our letter to them yeah so the concern is less on the backend of the reader of your letter because we do assume that those folks are knowledgeable and they'll open the article the concern is more on the front end as a grantee that that articles out there and you didn't say anything about its concl we cited it you cited it for a different reason we listed the paper in in our letter to ni8 yes you did you managed not to include the title of that paper in your email I noticed I well if the citation there the title will be there if if not they can look it up on the web but it's a well-known paper at the time from the group that were already doing similar work they knew about it surely they they funded it actually surely they knew about that work if the papers results were true that wiv one quote has the ability to directly infect humans would that be a problem for your argument that wi one has never been demonstrated to infect humans if wi one had been demonstrated to infect people then that argument that I made would not be true so that would be a problem it had not therefore it was not don't worry about the human cells and human cells are not humans they're cells in a lab it's a very different thing any any biologist will tell you that same as mice are different to humans you know you step up from the um cell Line work to the um Mouse work to then we know from other work that people doing primates and the rest of it it's a big gap between a virus that can infect a cell in a lab and one that can actually infect people in the wild so the progression from there went to well because wi one is about 10% distant from SARS and the spikes that we want to insert are getting progressively more distant from there it seems progressively less likely that any of these chimeric viruses would be more pathogenic more transmissible we talked about this in November you hopefully explained to us that the theory was okay we know that SARS 1 is a human pathogen uh we know of 95 or 97% SARS like viruses that simply are not able to infect humans and so it seems reasonable to hypothesize that as you move away from SARS you have reduced human pathogenicity I think what we struggle with a little bit is at the time if you know that SARS one is a human pathogen and you know that a 95% SARS light cannot infect humans and we know that we won at 90% similarity seems as if it it can at the very least infect human cells it seems as if it would be reasonable to think that there might just not be a linear relationship in this family of viruses if that were the case why didn't ni come back to us and say well actually we we we refute your suggestion this was the standard thought at the time scientifically that that the further you go away from that evolutionarily it's the less chance of it's going to be a significant pathogen NIH had every opportunity to review that and say actually we disagree you're not going to do that experiment we would have said okay can we do the alternative that's non-infectious I'm sure that we would have gone ahead with that and got interesting results maybe not quite as useful yeah so as I said it's not so much about niad because their eventual reasoning I think was not related to what I've talked about so far I think this Dr dashik my point is there are three or four different reasons in your letter not all of them factored ultimately into nad's reasoning but as a reader when we think about grantee transpar Arcy and integrity there's a concern that you're leaving out an awful lot of context from the letter I don't know how many reams of paper you wanted us to respond to we we cited references in our response I sought the best advice in the world from Dr barck who's an author on that paper he could have told us wait that's not a good paper to site he suggested we site it I mean we did everything we could to lay out the case NIH then had every opportunity to refuse it and say no do the alternative that's helpful and so that sort of last argu was that Dr Ralph Barracks group took a wi one Spike put it on a sar's backbone and showed a loss of function not a gain of function and I think for us the question is your work was going to be with a wi one backbone and other spikes and so the wi one Spike would be the only part of wi one that was not relevant at all for your work and so I'm confused about that I think if you look at the results from that experiment because we I think we did the experiment and the results showed that there was no difference in any aspect of that in my point I think I think our predictions were absolutely spoton so I don't know why this this this should be an issue now almost 10 years later well I think it's that you haven't quite answered what I was asking about in other words you pointed to experiments testing the wi one Spike right in the lets it to ni yeah you were going to use the wi one backbone the only part of wi one that you were not going to use at all is the wi one Spike so I I think as a reader I'm a little bit uncertain about well I'm sorry but at this point I'm confused on over with one with one Spike with 16 shc4 multiple experiments we did yeah so it's a little bit concerning that you're confused I think as well because I don't have the documents in front of me you you you've got a a question there about it look I I we were asked by NIH to explain why we believed this this experiment would not lead to any abent reactions we explained why we felt that we were then asked to produce an alternative we did NIH reviewed it and as you said that they spent some time reviewing this detailed proposal and then came back I think in July of 2016 and said this is not covered by the gain of function PA the experiment could move ahead I think this is a system where the oversight was there it was brought into play because we proposed that work and they saw it and said hold on let's check they checked and allowed it to move forward and for that particular experiment there was no issue at all um and for all of the experiments we did we submitted the results to IH and they had no concerns whatsoever with those results so I think this shows the system was working maybe there are ways we could tighten it up and I fully support that and Eco will do everything we can to comply with any new rules you think are adequate and I think that's a good thing so I think it's helpful to transition to the oversight we've talked a little bit about the One log rule that NAD on your grant that rule I'll just read it out it's just one sentence should any of the SARS likee chimeras show evidence of enhanced growth greater than one log over the B backbone you got to stop all the experiments notify your program officer you told us that you'd received data from wh and that you and your team at ecoh Health would review that to make sure everybody's in compliance with the One log rule which makes sense I think we just have a couple of questions about how that unfolded in the year three report you gave the experiment results from that year showing what the chimeric viruses did uh with one the backbone just wasn't in the report we talked about this in November I don't think it should be new to the full length with one wasn't included in oh this is the report but then it was in the publication yeah that almost makes it worse in other words without there was no significant difference between the two graphs actually I mean I don't see why that's of any relevance really so other than the timing I mean clearly the the results they had for w one weren't ready to submit for the report but were available when they submitted the paper and we're all on the paper together I believe so that's a standard normal thing in doing science what you do with NI oversight when you submit a report you send them everything you've got and it's often unpublished data it might be wrong it might need to be analyzed further there may be missing parts of it so I think what you're finding is something that was missing that then was done and then put into the paper so without the backbone you can't possibly know if you are or are not in compliance with the on log rule is that right no that's not right I mean we we um we we well no one can know in advance for sure one with reasonable um uh um hypothesis based on that evolutionary distance B based on everything we know about these viruses um we put forward the rationale for us thinking that this would not lead to a a striking significant difference um NIH approved it because they also believe that we did the experiment reported it back nobody came back to us and said This is highly concerning because it wasn't the results were unremarkable I'm sorry cuz that's that's not even close to what I asked so the question is without the backbone strain it is not possible to know whether you are or are not in compliance with the One log rule is that right I don't think that's correct why not well I just don't I'd have to look at the data but I don't think that's correct well it's pretty easy so the One log we'll go back over it the one log rule is you can't go one log above the backbone and so if you don't know what the backbone is how can you measure compliance well I you'd have to look at the EV the um the actual filing of what the backbone proposed backbone was I agree and you don't have it in your report so so let me ask you did that go over one log higher than the with backbone no it didn't end up doing that then why why is this an issue at all for anybody well that's easy I think it's because in year four the subsequent year it went way over one lock that that was a different virus sure it indicates however issue it indicates however that the subsequent year when you did start measuring the backbone strains performance went over a log and you've talked to us about why you think you you're not comparing Apples to Apples that's a completely different experiment and by the way you say it went over one log viral growth those were genome copies per gram they're widely known to be inaccurate and and not a very um ideal measure of true viral growth that should be a viral tighter so I think that's that's an unfair comparison and not relevant I can appreciate that what thanks what did the viral titer say I think you know the answer to that it would help I think folks to hear um we we never got received viral titis in the end did you ever asked for him well if you look at the results you'll see that there's no significant difference in in the final day of that experiment by day six the um the the number of genome copies per grammar returned to normal there would would have been no need to go back and do extra work in an experiment that was unremarkable with no significant problems just because again we are focused on the details which I know can be tedious but it was day eight that they evened out so it was I think day six they were pretty much even down statistically were well let's check that's fine we can do that and so I think the situation you were in there is the other accompanying figure shows that those mice are losing more weight than the mice that are infected with that backbone strain and you've got one log of growth on days two four and six and you're telling me well it evened out on day eight so it doesn't well you know you seem somehow concerned about that we submitted that report to NIH the program officer clearly read it um NH never once got back and said look we have concerns over that issue um if they had have done we would have said okay let's discuss let's get the data let's conduct viral Titus let's check all the raw data nobody reported anything because it wasn't remarkable there was a normal variations within a small group of mice we didn't even get to publish it because it probably wouldn't have been publishable it just wasn't that significant if you look at my conclusions in the report in the report I don't say wow we had this striking response from a group of mice that suggest this virus is highly dangerous we certainly didn't say what you read out from a paper by Dr barck um evidence that it's on the on the um cusp of a pandemic no we said and this this experiment shows that there are sometimes different responses to different viruses and different conditions that's it it wasn't remarkable it isn't a cause for concern I also want to remind the committee these are SARS kov related bat viruses they're not known to be infected I to people they're nothing to do with covid-19 they're not related to SAS k 2 so again going back to um reporting of an experiment uh almost 10 years ago and sort of saying well we need to go back and get more information that won't be possible no one asked for it at the time we showed the results all the results we had to ni and they were unremarkable and ni clearly agreed they then um awarded the next year's funding and we continued our work yeah yeah and I think you've helpfully said that even if that year four is viewed as going over one log it's the same experiment as year five it's one single experiment I think that's your testimony right yes that's right that's that's my understanding and I I think as the majority alluded to we're a little bit unsure about that but just some data points on it the year five report says in year five we continued with inv Vivo experiments just as a starting point does that not sound to you like in year five they continued with experiments this is this is um the language received from Chinese Nationals writing in English um our understanding of that was they continued analyzing from their invivo experiments which is what's in the report it's the pathology from the experiment so it's an English proficiency problem it's a your misinterpretation of what they meant problem uh my interpretation is that which I think is shown by the data that they were doing the pathology on an experiment that was concluded a year ago which is normal yeah so those two experiments absolutely normal those two experiments are also measured over different time spans the figure in year four is 6 days the figure in year five is 14 days that sounds like a different experiment well we were told it isn't a different experiment it's the same experiment and unfortunately it's going to be very difficult to get any information on that now I did try and but we were told it's the same experiment now now the time difference Maybe easily explained by the way they set up the experiment maybe some of those mice were allowed to live longer before they were um terminated killed maybe and so that that helps I mean that's it's totally reasonable well I I I don't quite agree there but I suppose you can say maybe we asked what your Source was for it being a single experiment am I right that the source for that is the Wuhan Institute of orology Told You So the source is the lab that did the experiment that's what they told us that's the Wuhan Institute of virology and that was after the pandemic when they told you that it was when I asked when I was asked to ask by ni was that after the pandemic oh yeah yeah okay yeah after it begun yeah is do you think there's any possibility that they might have been incentivized to be less than truthful with you in that situation I'm I'm not going to comment on people's motives that I don't know I I've had a long um relationship with the scientists in that lab I've told you about that you get to understand people and you get to know them and um you know you hear the same stories over 20 years you hear if there any discrepancies in those stories they've always been honest with us they've always been truthful there's never been any UNT underhand things going on um I have no reason to think that they were under pressure to lie um there was no indication of that they've not lied about other things to my knowledge um you know the these are good scientists that are trying to do their job um and the some of the best scientists in the world okay uh I'll yield some time back but I think the the broader theme throughout that is a little bit of a concern that when you discuss your work either here at the select subcommittee or with Regulators or in public facing situations it's possible perhaps that you're framing issues in the way that is most favorable to you and less so in a way that's confronting the science at any given moment and that is just a concern I've I've only told you the truth I would

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Published: Sat May 04 2024