Two House Republican leaders launched a congressional inquiry into the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) failure to review grants of American tax dollars funding potential gain of function (GOF) research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) pressed HHS Senior Science Adviser David Hassell in a letter to answer questions surrounding the reason his agency failed to conduct oversight for the $600,000 annual five-year grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducting bat coronavirus research from 2014 to 2019. Hassell leads HHS’s Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight review committee (P3CO), which was formed in 2017 to conduct oversight of GOF-type research. GOF research involves increasing the lethal level [virulence] or transmissibility of pathogens in order to better understand and predict the emergence of disease-causing agents so that a solution can be devised before the disease emerges as …