NIH reinstates grant for controversial coronavirus research

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reinstated a grant to a highly scrutinized research organization that studies bat coronaviruses — but the agency has placed several stipulations on the scope of the research and on the organization’s accounting practices.

The move caps a years-long saga that has thrust the EcoHealth Alliance, a small non-profit organization in New York City, into the political fray for its collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. In April 2020, after then-US-president Donald Trump hinted that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a WIV laboratory, the NIH terminated EcoHealth’s grant. Its goal was to study how coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, jump from bats to humans. A few months later, the NIH reinstated and immediately suspended the award until certain conditions were met that, at the time, EcoHealth said were impossible to complete.