COVID-19 may have originated in a set of laboratories in China that was conducting experiments with U.S. taxpayer dollars, the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on April 19.
“Did the COVID-19 virus originate from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?” Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) asked Dr. Lawrence Tabak, the acting NIH director, during a hearing in Washington.
“I have no idea,” Tabak said.
The NIH funded experiments done at the institute, which is located in the same city where the first COVID-19 cases were detected in late 2019.
At least some of those experiments resulted in the increase of a virus’s transmissibility, the NIH acknowledged in 2021. Experiments that increase the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a biological agent like a virus are commonly known as gain-of-function….