Donald Trump has credited the apparent improvement of his coronavirus infection to, as he put it in one tweet, “some really great drugs” that were “developed, under the Trump Administration.”
The assertion carries special irony for researcher Peter Daszak.
Daszak, for years, led a U.S.-funded project that played an important role in the emergence of one of those drugs, Remdesivir, as a promising treatment for COVID-19.
Specifically, Daszak’s U.S.-based research group, EcoHealth Alliance, collaborated with scientists at the Wuhan Institute to collect fluid samples from bats there in search of coronaviruses that could pose a threat if they spilled over into humans.
Experts in the U.S. tested remdesivir against some of the bat strains that EcoHealth Alliance had discovered. The results were so promising that when the current coronavirus hit, the drug was one of the first options scientists proposed trying.
The National Institutes of Health terminated funding for the research project.
At a White House press conference days before the funding was pulled, Trump erroneously implied that the entirety of the money had gone to the Wuhan Institute and promised that his administration would take action on the issue.
