This is what happens when funding for coronavirus research is politicized

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Editor's Note: Benjamin Corb is the director of public affairs for the U.S. Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, which represents nearly 12,000 biomedical researchers in that country and around the world. He is also the president-elect of the Coalition for Health Financing and is a member of the board of directors for ScienceCounts. The opinions expressed in this comment are those of the author; See more opinion articles on CNNE.com/opinion.

(CNN) - The public health threat posed by the covid-19 pandemic has made the American public extremely aware of the significance of the work done by researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) .

With federal funding, coast to coast and beyond, researchers are working feverishly to understand SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease. These scientists are in a hurry to decipher its composition, the mechanism of entry into the human body, its characteristics outside it, and existing therapies that can help patients while developing a vaccine.

Why then, as Politico reported last week, did the NIH cancel a grant supporting the main investigation into how coronaviruses can be transferred from bats, their natural hosts, to humans?

I think the answer is because Pete Daszak, the scientist who runs the EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit biomedical research organization that sponsors the project, has collaborated with Shi Zhengli, a Chinese virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

In confirming to CNN that the scholarship funding was terminated, the NIH said "details of the decision-making process regarding specific grants are not being discussed," but referred to sub-fellows, including the Virology Institute of Wuhan. This leaves room for speculation, as the Politico article suggests, that it may have been at the behest, or at least with a strong implicit push from the Trump administration.

Congress sets the agency's budget and the institutes make their own decisions about granting funds, as they are better empowered to understand the costs and needs of projects. But the decision to withdraw funding for Daszak supports the growing effort by some to blame China for this pandemic.

And in early April, President Donald Trump said there could be funding cuts in the investigation after a journalist suggested that scholarship money had been awarded to the Wuhan lab. (According to Politico, Daszak has maintained that "no [scholarship] fund has been sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, nor has any contract been signed.")

Now that the president has apparently followed through on that promise, many scientists are deeply concerned. Meanwhile, NIH-funded researchers have been working tirelessly to investigate the virus that has already killed more Americans than the Vietnam War.

Zhengli and Daszak, whom I know from their reputations for their impressive work, are virus hunters - skilled experts looking for coronaviruses and other diseases that could be transferred from bat populations to humans, the same disease that scientists think is the genesis of the current outbreak.

Together, the researchers collected thousands of samples and identified hundreds of new coronaviruses in order to prevent future pandemics.

Daszak's credentials are impressive. He is a member of the US National Academy of Medicine. and in the past, he has advised the director of medical preparedness policy on the White House national security team.

His first five-year NIH fellowship on this topic began in 2014, after the usual competitive research funding process that scientists across the country must face. Preliminary data is collected, hypotheses are generated, and proposals are written to share the research objectives, methods, and preliminary results.

These projects are then reviewed not by government bureaucrats but by fellow scientists, and often competitors, who are selected to be part of the scholarship application review panels because they are experts in the field. These review panelists understand the science in question and can assess the scientific merit behind the proposal.

So rigorous is the process that last fiscal year, according to the NIH, more than 67,000 grant applications were received and only 22% were approved for funding. In fiscal 2014, when Daszak was first funded, the success rate was only 20%. In 2019, Daszak submitted a proposal to extend his scholarship for another five years, and the panelists found the research so promising that the NIH funded it until 2024.

Included among the 20 scientific papers published during Daszak's initial project is the discovery of how SARS coronaviruses enter cells, critical information needed for those working to develop covid-19 vaccines and therapies.

According to Politico, in a letter to EcoHealth Alliance officials last Friday, Michael Lauer, the NIH's deputy director for extramural research, stated that Daszak's research does not "align with the program's goals and the agency's priorities." No explanation has been reported by the NIH as to why the research no longer aligns with its priorities.

More than a million Americans have been diagnosed with covid-19, and more than 61,000 have died.

However, regardless of whether the Trump administration is responsible for the funding cuts, the president has expressed his opinion that a respected scientist and expert in coronavirus research is no longer worthy of investment. How can that be possible?

It appears that Trump's desire to keep focus on China's role in the pandemic has nullified scientific independence. And this mindset seems to be spreading. Last weekend, Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas suggested that Chinese students should come to the United States to study Shakespeare but not science, arguing that they "return to China ... and design weapons and other devices that can be used against the American people. ”

Could this growing jingoism have influenced the decision to revoke Daszak's research grant?

The politicization of peer-reviewed science is a dangerous threat to the field of independent science in the United States. and it's the first step on a deeply troubling slippery slope.

If Daszak's investigation can be stopped by funding cuts at the President's whim, what other research grants in the future will be withdrawn due to the left or right leanings of any future president? What harm would such a decision do to the world leaders' productivity and reputation of the National Institutes of Health?

Science must remain independent and unpolitical in order to be reliable and productive during this pandemic crisis and beyond.