On Aug. 19, 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it was requiring a small nonprofit research organization to take unusual—and perhaps impossible—steps to end a controversial suspension of an NIH grant related to bat coronavirus research in China. NIH’s conditions for reinstating the funding to the EcoHealth Alliance are “outrageous,” former NIH Director Harold Varmus told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in an article that first reported the agency’s demands.

The controversy began in April, after President Donald Trump complained about NIH’s grant to the EcoHealth Alliance because it involved researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Conservative commentators, Trump, and Trump administration officials have asserted, without evidence, that the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 escaped from WIV. Shortly after Trump’s complaint, NIH abruptly canceled the grant, stating that its goal of studying bat coronavirus spillovers into humans did not “align with … agency priorities.” NIH’s move drew extensive criticism from the scientific community.

Last month, NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research Michael Lauer sent the EcoHealth Alliance a letter stating the agency was reinstating the grant, but also instantly suspending it again pending the completion of certain actions. (ScienceInsider has now independently reviewed a copy of the 8 July letter.) Among the conditions included:

• The EcoHealth Alliance must provide a sample of the pandemic coronavirus that WIV used to determine its genetic sequence.
• The group must arrange for an outside inspection of WIV and its records “with specific attention to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019,” Lauer wrote.
• The nonprofit must explain purported restrictions at WIV including “diminished cell-phone traffic in October 2019, and the evidence that there may have been roadblocks surrounding the facility from October 14-19, 2019.”
• The nonprofit must “provide the NIH with WIV’s responses to the 2018 Department of State cables regarding safety concerns.”

NIH declined interview requests for Lauer and agency Director Francis Collins, saying in a statement: “NIH does not discuss internal deliberations on specific grants.”

The EcoHealth Alliance said in a statement that “NIH’s letter cynically reinstates and instantly suspends the EcoHealth Alliance’s funding, then attempts to impose impossible and irrelevant conditions that will effectively block us from continuing this critical work.”