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Rosendale moves to strip pathogen research funding from Rocky Mountain Laboratories – Daily Montanan [1]

['Blair Miller', 'More From Author', '- November']

Date: 2023-11-29  

Earlier this month, eastern Montana’s Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale included an amendment in a federal appropriations bill to strip research funding from Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, a key U.S. pathogen research facility, because of its prior work researching coronaviruses.

But according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which operates the facility, the effort to do so came on the heels of erroneous reports spread by right-wing pundits and some Montana politicians.

Rosendale offered Amendment No. 133 to the appropriations package for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, which prohibits any funding to support gain-of-function research “involving a potential pandemic pathogen” for the nearly century-old research facility. The amendment was adopted in a voice vote.

Another amendment Rosendale had offered sought to drop the salary for Vincent Munster, the chief of the virus ecology section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), to $1.

That proposal failed on a 155-268 vote, however, with Rosendale supporting the measure and western Montana’s U.S. Rep Ryan Zinke, also a Republican, opposed.

While groups of right-wingers have for years now blamed China and some U.S. officials for purposely releasing the virus on the public, the fervor over Rocky Mountain Laboratories and Rosendale’s subsequent amendment appear to stem from an article published Oct. 31 by the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, with the headline: “REVEALED: Anthony Fauci-run lab in MONTANA experimented with coronavirus strain shipped in from Wuhan a year BEFORE Covid pandemic began.”

The article claimed that research done on bats at the lab in 2016 with a different coronavirus, WIV-1, meant there was “more evidence of ties between the US government and the Wuhan lab, as well as the funding of dangerous virus research across the globe.”

The next day, Fox News host Jesse Watters amplified the claims on his show and on social media, claiming in a Facebook post that “Fauci frankensteined Covid bats on our soil a year before the pandemic” and calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former NIAID director, and everyone “in Montana that is responsible” to be imprisoned.

Rosendale tweeted a screenshot of the Daily Mail headline, saying: “Our government helped create the Wuhan flu, then shut the country down when it escaped from the lab! Fauci and his cohorts must be held accountable!”

That evening, he went on the right-wing One American News to further the conspiracy, insinuating Fauci retired from his position because “he knew this information was going to be coming out.”

“We also knew that this strain had been developed by the Wuhan lab and now we’re finding out that the National Institutes of Health’ Rocky Mountain Labs in Hamilton, Montana, had also played a role in this,” he said. “But the big question was: Was it released intentionally as some kind of a test or did it escape accidentally? I don’t know that we’ll ever have the answer to that.”

Tim Sheehy, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate backed by U.S. Sen. Steve Daines and other top Montana Republicans, tweeted that Fauci “should be rotting in a jail cell for the rest of his life” and pushed the idea that Americans had worked with China to release the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus.

Zinke also quote-tweeted a post about the Daily Mail story: “Fauci is a fraud,” he said.

Further, Republican U.S. Sens. Joni Ernst, of Iowa, and Eric Schmitt, of Missouri, wrote a letter to National Institutes of Health Director Monica Bertagnolli asking “to learn more about potentially risky research” at the Hamilton lab.

On Nov. 15, Rosendale urged his colleagues to support his amendment cutting research funding for the lab in a speech on the House floor, again calling gain-of-function research “dangerous” and criticizing the lab’s 2008 expansion to include a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) lab at the Hamilton facility.

“Many experts warn these practices could lead to widespread community infections and death, which is exactly what we saw during the 2020 pandemic,” he said. “Taxpayers in Montana and across the nation should not be funding unnecessarily dangerous animal research that can spark another pandemic.”

After lawmakers voted on the amendments, House leadership postponed further action on the bill.

Though the NIAID said it does not comment on pending legislation, it said in a statement this week that the coverage propped up by certain groups of Republicans “erroneously characterized” a December 2016 study done at Rocky Mountain Laboratories that was published in the journal Viruses in 2018. The statement also debunked several of the statements put forth by Rosendale and others.

“In the study, RML researchers studied WIV-1, a coronavirus, in Egyptian fruit bats. WIV-1 is a different virus than the SARS-CoV-2 virus involved with the COVID-19 pandemic and this study did not involve gain-of-function research. As noted in the published manuscript, the virus did not replicate well in the bats. Additionally, the virus used in these experiments was not shipped from China. Rather, it was generated using common laboratory techniques, based on genetic information that was publicly shared by Chinese scientists. The research was conducted at a high level of biosecurity (BSL-4) than was required (BSL-3),” the statement said.

The NIAID added that the BSL-3 lab at the facility – one of three labs on the campus – is also approved for studies on the SARS-CoV-2 virus but researchers used the higher-security lab for the work due to logistics.

Rocky Mountain Laboratories employs about 450 people in the Bitterroot Valley, including some of the top scientists studying infectious microbes that cause diseases in efforts to develop new vaccines and treatments. It was the first NIH facility to have BSL-2, BSL-3, and BSL-4 labs housed at one facility.

The first building at the facility was finished in 1928, but work had begun 20 years earlier in the area studying what would eventually be known as Rocky Mountain spotted fever in ticks in the valley.

During the years, scientists there helped develop a Yellow fever vaccine, discovered the microbes that lead to spotted fever, Q fever and Lyme disease, and have done research on coronaviruses, influenza, mad cow disease, chronic wasting disease and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, among other diseases and pathogens.

That also includes the research scientists at the lab conduct on the WIV-1 coronavirus first identified in 2013, which shared similarities with the SARS-CoV-1 virus that was behind the 2003 SARS outbreak but is not a close relative of the coronavirus that caused the COVID-19 outbreak, according to research. The lab received its first sample of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in February 2020 for research purposes from an American patient, the Missoulian reported at the time.

The NIAID says Rocky Mountain Laboratories plays a leading role in expanding the nation’s knowledge about emerging infectious diseases and “will continue to focus its studies on developing new diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments for a wide variety of diseases.”

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