http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/preposterous-77-nobel-laureates-blast-nih-decision-cancel-coronavirus-grant-demand

Seventy-seven U.S. scientists who have won the Nobel Prize today asked Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to “act urgently” to review a controversial NIH decision to terminate a grant that supported research into bat coronaviruses in China. NIH’s explanation for killing the grant was “preposterous,” the laureates write.

On 24 April, NIH informed the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, led by wildlife disease specialist Peter Daszak, that it was ending a grant, first awarded in 2014 and renewed in 2019, because it no longer aligned with the agency’s priorities. The move came after conservative U.S. politicians and media suggested—without evidence—that the coronavirus causing the pandemic escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that employs a Chinese virologist who had received funding from the grant. The termination also came a week after President Donald Trump, asked about the project at a press conference, said: “We will end that grant very quickly.”