Promoters of Unproven COVID Lab Leak Narratives Join NIH

Virologists expressed concern over under-qualified ideologues joining Director Bhattacharya.

This piece was updated from its original email version following publication. It was further updated on 7/17/25 to reflect communications from Alex Washburne.

Three public health contrarians with connections to a fringe “biosafety” group have joined the National Institutes of Health, Important Context has learned.

Bryce Nickels, PhD, Edward Hammond, and Alex Washburne, PhD, are all vocal proponents of the narrative that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 was developed in and leaked from a laboratory. All have affiliated with a controversial group called Biosafety Now, which is dedicated to promoting the dubious origin story, and opposing so-called “gain-of-function” research—manipulation of viruses to understand their evolution, predict potential outbreaks, and even develop treatments—which they blame for causing the pandemic.

The group was co-founded by Nickels, a Rutgers University genetics professor, his colleague, Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright, PhD, and Justin Kinney, an associate professor at the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Hammond, who previously headed up his own group called the Sunshine Project dedicated to opposing biological warfare research through Freedom of Information Act requests, was once part of Biosafety Now’s leadership team. Washburne, a mathematical biologist, has written several essays that were published on the organization’s website. All three men have signed onto open letters from the group demanding retractions of academic papers supporting COVID’s natural origins.

Nevertheless, in a private message to Important Context post-publication, Washburne, who signed two Biosafety Now letters—one from June 2024 and another from September—denied having “ties” to the group. He explained that while he knew “some of the people” involved, and had co-authored one paper with them, he had not written anything for Biosafety Now as we had originally written. Rather, he said, anyone can republish his essays. Such open permission is not found anywhere on his Substack, however, and he clarified that people wishing to repost his content have to contact him directly—including Biosafety Now. The Brownstone Institute, an anti-vaccine, COVID conspiracy-promoting dark money group, has also published his work as recently as April.

“This inaccuracy is particularly important to correct because the positions of Biosafety Now do not reflect my own positions on many issues, and the behavior of some people affiliated with Biosafety Now is very unlike the way I've comported myself throughout COVID, trying my best to remain respectful and professional despite the very contentious nature of many of the topics discussed,” he said.

Biosafety Now has worked hand-in-hand with lab leak-supporting Republican leaders like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). Ebright testified in support of the lab leak theory as a guest of Paul’s last June. That September, Nickels and BioSafety Now advocated for Paul’s “Risky Research Review Act,” which would have established a review board to oversee research into potentially dangerous pathogens and products. Despite its prominence, the organization’s board of directors includes no virologists—just Ebright, an artist, and a graduate student in applied physics.

The idea that COVID came from a lab has grown in popularity since Donald Trump began pushing the narrative back in 2020 as his reelection chances were dwindling amid the spiraling public health crisis. While originally popular mainly on the political Right, nearly 70 percent of Americans today believe the story. The Trump White House has sought to solidify the lab leak as the official account of the pandemic’s origins, painting the president as a victim of unscrupulous public health officials who misled the public. In April, the White House replaced the covid.gov website with a page advocating the lab leak claim, and the following month, Trump signed an executive order banning gain-of-function research.

Nevertheless, scientific evidence has consistently pointed to the pandemic having natural origins, with the SARS-CoV-2 virus spilling over to humans from animals. A report released last month from the World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogen—a body of 27 independent, international, multidisciplinary experts—reaffirmed that assessment, finding no compelling evidence pointing to laboratory origins.

According to an official employee directory for the Department of Health and Human Services, lab leak enthusiasts Nickels, Washburne, and Hammond are all now working in the NIH’s Office of the Director (OD), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who hundreds of agency workers accused last month, in a public “declaration,” of politicizing and undermining science. Their profiles list them as “non-government,” meaning they are not actually federal employees, just doing work for the agency. The three men are working in the OD’s Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, which oversees the NIH Common Fund, coordinating trans-NIH initiatives and research. While the DPCPSI does not have a direct role in overseeing biosafety, Hammond’s profile on X reads “Senior Science Policy Analyst for Biosafety at US NIH.”

These three lab leak proponents all have connections to Bhattacharya, a former Brownstone Institute senior scholar who, along with now-Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, briefly served on the board of directors of BioSafety Now last year. The embattled NIH director has repeatedly endorsed the disfavored COVID origins story—including in last year’s conspiracy-pushing film, “COVID Collateral,” and at his first agency town hall in May, which saw a walkout by several dozen staffers. As Important Context has previously reported, Bhattacharya only began embracing the lab leak after the public reveal of an email exchange between Dr. Francis Collins, former head of the NIH, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in which the former called for a published rebuke of his Great Barrington Declaration.

The document, co-authored by Bhattacharya in 2020, advocated for a COVID herd immunity strategy based on mass infection of the healthy population. The plan was called out as dangerous and unscientific by major public health organizations and the WHO director-general but was embraced by the business-aligned Right.

Bhattacharya has worked closely with Nickels. They co-authored a lab leak-pushing piece titled “Science should never try to triumph over nature” for the right-wing New York Post last July. In September the pair launched a Substack called “Science From the Fringe,” which has been co-published by BioSafety Now’s Substack on multiple occasions. They marketed their “Fringe” outlet as dedicated to “open, respectful dialogue on critical issues in science, health policy, biosafety, and bioethics.” Following the announcement of Bhattacharya’s nomination for the NIH director position, Nickels penned a glowing tribute to the health economist for BioSafety Now’s Substack.

Washburne has also been a fan of Bhattacharya’s for some time. He published a piece titled “The Grace of Dr. Jay” for his own Substack in December prior to Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearings. Washburne has praised the Great Barrington Declaration. The first piece of Washburne’s posted by Brownstone, from December 2021 when Bhattacharya was a senior scholar at the group, took aim at COVID mitigation measures.

Washburne’s ascendence appears to be tied to a controversial pre-print he co-authored in 2022 which argued for a lab origin of SARS CoV-2. While the paper, which has yet to be properly published, has received significant criticism from the scientific community, it has been embraced by powerful forces on the Right. The Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025, has amplified his pre-print on multiple occasions. They cited it in their “road map” for a congressional COVID inquiry, published in January 2023—a month ahead of the first hearing of the GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP), which featured Bhattacharya and Makary as experts for the Republicans—and again in their July 2024 report from their own commission on China and COVID.

The Heritage “road map” listed “suppression” of scientific dissent from Bhattacharya and his discredited Great Barrington Declaration co-authors alongside “veiling” of COVID origins as key weaknesses in the US pandemic response. In its final report, published in December 2024, HSSCP called the lab leak “likely” and claimed Fauci sought to cover it up. Claims of ‘silencing’ and ‘censorship’ have been central to the lab leak narrative and herd immunity pushers. At the same time, Bhattacharya co-signed two of Biosafety Now’s open letters unsuccessfully calling for retractions of scientific papers supporting the natural origins of COVID, including the one from September that Washburne signed. Hammond and Nickels were also on that letter.

Last August, Washburne and Nickels participated in a panel discussion on COVID origins at a pandemic policy conference that Bhattacharya organized at Stanford University. The panel was moderated by a reporter from the pro-Trump, conspiracy-peddling Epoch Times.

The event was widely criticized for its heavy representation of fringe and anti-vaccine voices. At the time, there was some speculation among public health observers that the conference might be a proving ground for contrarians looking to get in on Trump’s second term. To wit, the speaker list included a number of individuals now working in the administration. Along with Bhattacharya, Nickels, and Washburne, there were Makary and Dr. Vinay Prasad, now head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

Experts Important Context spoke with expressed alarm at the new NIH workers, explaining that they lacked the requisite experience for their roles and were ideologically extreme.

Virologist and AJI scientific advisor Angela Rasmussen, PhD, for example, said that only Washburne—who earned his PhD in 2015—had done virology research, but nothing with live viruses or related to biosafety.

“By putting researchers in situations where inadequate or poorly conceived biosafety policies are being enforced by regulators who are insufficiently experienced with this type of research, risk assessments will be inaccurate and risks will be insufficiently mitigated,” Rasmussen explained. “These policy advisors were chosen for their hostility toward virology and vaccine research, not their expertise or commitment to biosafety.”

“This squad of hobbyists and zealots actually increases the likelihood of a lab leak resulting from NIH-funded research,” she added.

Washburne told Important Context that he “just remembered” that he had worked with live viruses during his undergraduate research—specifically phages—and accused AJI of having “significant connections to gain of function lobbyists,” pointing at Rasmussen and Dr. Peter Daszak, who sits on AJI’s board of directors.

Daszak’s former group, EcoHealth Alliance, has been the subject of lab leak conspiracy theories as the alleged funder of the pandemic-causing gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Rasmussen responded to Washburne’s remarks by questioning what a “gain of function lobbyist” is, and noted that phages are viruses that infect bacteria and are not a biosafety threat to humans. She said this experience is not relevant to the virology work Washburne is so critical of.

Immunologist Gigi Gronvall, PhD, a Senior Associate at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and visiting faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, had similar concerns, having interacted with Nickels and having known Hammond for over two decades. She noted that she was especially surprised by the latter working at NIH, explaining he “doesn’t have the professional background one would expect for this role, even aside his opinions.”

“Bryce and Ed are zealots—very anti- virology research, they see the world in black and white, they do not understand biosafety, having never been responsible for practicing it or teaching it (despite naming their group Biosafety Now), and they see all virology research as risky,” she said. “This is very dangerous because in their roles at NIH, I think they could do even more damage than is already being done by the [executive orders] and lack of funding. We have serious viral threats that won’t solve themselves by putting our collective heads in the sand, but these people aren’t going to help us prepare for them or understand what we are dealing with.”

Nickels has earned a reputation for online combativeness. He has a history of attacking researchers whose work supports natural origins for COVID and was even the subject of a formal complaint at Rutgers, which alleged that he and Ebright had violated the school’s free expression policies by posting “provably false” and defamatory remarks online about a dozen scientists, potentially putting their safety at risk.

One of Nickels’ targets has been Fauci. He has called for the former public health official to be prosecuted for “perjury” and lamented that President Biden pardoned him amid growing right-wing attacks. He also appeared in the conspiracy-fueled film “Thank You, Dr. Fauci,” a Tucker Carlson Network exclusive, which suggested that COVID, HIV, Ebola, and Lyme disease were all the result of gain-of-function research and lab leaks. Nickels boosted the film, alleging that there was a media and government conspiracy to suppress the truth about the pandemic.

Hammond was similarly outraged by the Fauci pardon, writing, “There have been many disgraceful pardons but the worst ones I remember relate to financial crimes. As terrible as those can be, they don't rise to the level of Fauci's potential culpability in relation to gain of function research that caused the pandemic.”

Like Nickels, Hammond also has a reputation for pugilistic encounters with virologists. Shortly after AJI launched, he sent multiple emails to members of our board of directors suggesting our group had been ethically compromised due to the involvement of Daszak and several of our scientific advisors, including Rasmussen, who he said was “nothing but a mouth (and a dirty one at that).”

He also left several comments on our BlueSky posts. His account has since been deleted.