'Science Press' Spins After NIH Overhauls Foreign Research Funding Oversight in Wake of Covid Debacle
The following is a news analysis
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has rolled out a sweeping reform to former, controversial foreign research funding policies. The changes are prompted by past oversight failures involving China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been linked to dangerous gain-of-function research to develop vaccines and other therapies.
The new policy was announced May 7 and aims to enhance accountability and transparency for American taxpayer dollars. It addresses a notorious chapter in NIH history.
Between 2014 and 2020, the communist China-run Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) received approximately $600,000 from a $3.7 million NIH grant funnelled through the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. The WIV also received other U.S. support, and worked with U.S. scientists in partnerships that many independent scientists told me were widely recognized as ill-advised.
The funding supported research on bat coronaviruses, including gain-of-function experiments. These techniques modify a virus that’s harmless to people and make it dangerous to humans in order to invent vaccines and other therapies to address the virus.
After Covid broke out and implicated China’s Wuhan labs in 2022, the Trump administration forced the NIH to terminate the subaward to the Wuhan lab. China and the lab refused to allow inspections and wouldn’t turn over lab notebooks that could have helped in the investigation into Covid’s origins and how best to treat it.
While the NIH policy change installing more accountability and oversight of foreign “subawards” is a commonsense measure, the conflicted “science press” has taken the side of establishment scientists in criticizing it.
Read on for Details.
Under the old policies, grantees like EcoHealth Alliance were responsible for policing their own foreign subawardees. But Trump’s NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya pointed out in a recent X thread this system of self-policing failed dramatically in the Wuhan case.
A 2023 Inspector General report further underscored these failures, revealing that both the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance did not comply with federal oversight standards. The report highlighted the risks of such lapses, with the watchdog White Coat Waste Project noting that the Wuhan lab’s experiments “probably caused the pandemic” and violated federal policies.
Now the new NIH policy mandates that foreign subawards be structured as independent subprojects directly accountable to the NIH. This is designed to ensure the same stringent rules for payment and data sharing apply to foreign institutions as to the primary grantees sending them taxpayer funds. “No more Wuhans,” Bhattacharya declared on X, emphasizing that the reform is a necessary step to safeguard public health and national security while ensuring responsible stewardship of taxpayer funds.
The scientific establishment that parters with pharma and vaccine manufacturers and benefited from the controversial former policies, and helped coverup Covid origins, are against the policy change.
The propaganda magazie Science Magazine, in a recent article, labeled Bhattacharya’s policy change “insane” attack on international collaboration.
Propagandists Spin
Science Magazine’s and Nature Magazine’s coverage of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya’s new policy on foreign subawards exemplifies a troubling pattern of misrepresentation and bias that undermines the publications’ credibility as scientific journalistic outlets.
Science Magazine titled an article on the policy, “‘This is insane’: New NIH policy on funding foreign scientists stirs outrage.”
The article ignored the policy’s clear intent to address past mismanagement, such as the 2022 Wuhan Institute of Virology subaward debacle. Instead, Science Magazine amplifies a narrative of outrage, mischaracterizing the policy’s focus on subawards as a broader assault on global research partnerships. This was the same tact taken during President Trump’s first term when he attempted to make changes to address scientific misconduct and ethical lapses.
Science Magazine’s reporting takes a particularly deceptive turn by falsely implying that Bhattacharya misled writer Jocelyn Kaiser during an interview about the policy.
Science Magazine criticized Bhattacharya of dismissing Nature Magazine’s false reporting on the impending policy change as “rumors.” Nature itself had speculated—based on anonymous leaks—that the NIH might halt all foreign grants. That was not the case and Bhattacharya was right to label the misreporting on the topic as “rumors.”
The false Nature headline is below:
An interview transcript later made public reveals Bhattacharya consistently clarified with a Science Magazine reporter that the policy change targeted subawards, not all foreign grants.
So while Bhattacharya’s rebuttal of the Nature Magazine speculation was accurate, Science Magazine falsely framed his response as deceptive, distorting the narrative to paint him as untrustworthy.
This misrepresentation is compounded by Science Magazine’s initial failure to issue corrections of its false reporting, as noted by science journalist Paul Thacker, highlighting a disregard for journalistic standards in favor of an activist agenda.
Further eroding its credibility, Science Magazine relied on Gerald Keusch, a virologist with documented ties to EcoHealth Alliance. Keusch’s involvement in efforts to defend EcoHealth, as uncovered in a 2024 House report on NIH misconduct, makes his inclusion as a supposedly neutral voice deeply problematic.
Keusch’s false claim that “no compelling evidence supports the allegation that the virus leaked from WIV” is directly contradicted by intelligence assessments from the CIA, British, and German agencies in early 2025, as well as a French National Academy of Medicine report in April 2025, which found a “body of facts and arguments” supporting a lab-origin theory for SARS-CoV-2. By giving Keusch a platform to downplay these findings, Science Magazine perpetuates a narrative that dismisses emerging evidence, revealing a clear bias against lab-origin theories that have gained traction in recent years.
This incident is not an isolated lapse but part of a broader pattern of questionable ethics at Science Magazine and Nature Magazine.
Left-leaning reporter Jon Cohen, who led the coverage of Bhattacharya’s new policy, is the same reporter who allegedly misled in 2020 on an important paper published in Nature Medicine. That paper, “Proximal Origins,” was intended to dismiss the lab origins of Covid. It was later revealed as propaganda written by people other than the listed authors, including those connected to the lab funding and research. The article was then promoted by Dr. Anthony Fauci and other establishment scientists who were involved in the controversial research and funding, as they attempted to divert public attention away from the lab origins.
It turns out Cohen was handed a whistleblower tip in 2020 alleging that the listed authors of “Proximal Origins” were not the true writers of the article. But instead of publishing on the topic or investigating further, Cohen quietly sent the tip to the lead accused author.
The fact that Cohen remains a senior writer for the publication indicates Science Magazine’s goal is to advance particular narratives rather than factual information.
By prioritizing narrative over facts, Science Magazine and Nature Magazine not only mislead their readers but also erode public trust in scientific institutions at a time when such trust is already fragile.
I stopped my 20+ year subscription to Science News in the early 2000’s because the new editrix announced the magazine would no longer be apolitical. She prattled on about how science needed to be political, to advocate and even be partisan. I was disgusted and alarmed, but few people, then, cared or understood the problems this could create. Now, since covid, many people do. I’m glad these changes are being made. Hopefully more changes are coming!
I'm deeply grateful that in a world of political deception and media manipulation, Sharyl is a true investigative reporter. She's on "the right side of history" and will be remembered as such.
Civilizational turmoil like ours has the same tendency as War to test and prove who the real heroes are. And though heroes are always few in number, as Shakespeare said, "the fewer men, the greater share of honor."