On Apr. 30, 2020, the research community reacted with alarm and anger to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) abrupt and unusual termination of a grant supporting research in China on how coronaviruses-such as the one causing the current pandemicﾗmove from bats to humans.

The agency axed the grant last week, after conservative U.S. politicians and media repeatedly suggested – without evidence – that the pandemic severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that employs a Chinese virologist who had been receiving funding from the grant.

For some 15 years, the grantﾒs principal investigator, Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City nonprofit, and his colleagues have collaborated with a leading Chinese virologist who studies coronaviruses that infect bats. The virologist, Shi Zhengli, is based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located in the city where researchers first identified SARS-CoV-2.