New
Cache of Documents Exposes Lies to Congress
· Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Intercept
against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has resulted in the release of
900+ pages of previously undisclosed documents detailing the work of EcoHealth Alliance, an NIH/NIAID-funded organization that
subcontracted gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses to the Wuhan
Institute of Virology (WIV) in China
· Released documents include two previously
unpublished grant proposals funded by the NIAID and project updates relating to
EcoHealth Alliance’s research
· The documents allegedly reveal a novel
SARS-related coronavirus was created that was more pathogenic to humanized mice
than the virus from which it was constructed
· According to Richard Ebright,
Ph.D., a molecular biologist and biodefense expert at
Rutgers University, “The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH
director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH
did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen
enhancement at WIV are untruthful”
·
In the wake of The
Intercept report and the additional grant documentation, some GOP members are
calling on Fauci to resign while others want him fired from his position on the
White House COVID-19 response team
A story that is now exploding and being reported
across political party lines is damning new evidence showing Dr. Anthony Fauci,
director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID),
lied when he insisted he’d never funded
gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
Ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation by The
Intercept against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has resulted in the
release of 900+ pages of previously undisclosed documents detailing the work of
EcoHealth Alliance, an NIH/NIAID-funded organization
that subcontracted gain-of-function (GoF) research on
bat coronaviruses to the WIV.
“The trove of documents
includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as project
updates relating to EcoHealth Alliance’s research,
which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the
pandemic …
‘This is a road map to
the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic,’ said Gary
Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To Know, a group that has been
investigating the origins of Covid-19.
One of the grants,
titled ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,’2 outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak
to screen thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also
involved screening people who work with live animals.
The documents contain
several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that
key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3
lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed.
The documents raise
additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab
accident, an idea that Daszak has aggressively
dismissed.”
The “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” grant3 was originally awarded in 2014 for a five-year period
lasting until 2019. The second grant, “Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus
Emergency in Emerging Infectious Disease Hotspots of Southeast Asia,”4 was awarded in August 2020 and is ongoing through 2025.
In October 2014, a U.S. moratorium on federal funding of GoF research “that may be reasonably anticipated to confer
attributes to influenza, Mers, or Sars
viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or
transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route,” took effect.5,6
The ban came on the heels of high-profile lab mishaps at the CDC
and controversial experiments in which the bird flu virus was engineered to
become more lethal and contagious between ferrets.
However, the NIH/NIAID did not put a stop to the EcoHealth Alliance’s research subcontracted to the WIV.
They allowed the research to proceed, despite the moratorium, ostensibly
because it was initiated before the federal funding pause was put in place.
The decision was criticized by Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at
Pasteur Institute in Paris, who pointed out that “If the [new] virus escaped,
nobody could predict the trajectory.”7 The moratorium was officially lifted at the end of December
2017.8
Curiously, while the moratorium was a direct order by President
Obama, when the moratorium was lifted at the end of 2017, it was done so by the
NIH and NIAID, without explanation or public debate. Fauci reportedly didn’t
even discuss it with his boss, health secretary Alex Azar. Azar found out the
moratorium had been lifted through reading media reports three years later, in
2021.9
After the moratorium was lifted in 2017, a special review board,
the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (the P3CO Review
Framework), was created within the Department of Human Health Services (DHHS)
to evaluate whether grants involving dangerous pathogens are worth the risks.
The review board is also responsible for ensuring proper safeguards are in
place for approved research.10
According to Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a
molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University, an NIH grant
for research involving the modification of bat coronaviruses at the WIV was
sneaked through because the NIAID didn’t flag it for review.11
In other words, the WIV received federal funding from the NIAID
without the research first receiving a green-light
from the HHS review board. The NIAID apparently used a convenient loophole in
the review framework. As it turns out, it’s the funding agency’s responsibility
to flag potential gain-of-function research for review. If it doesn’t, the
review board has no knowledge of it.
According to Ebright, the NIAID and NIH
have “systemically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework
by declining to flag and forward proposals for review.”12
As reported by The Intercept, under the “Understanding the Risk of
Bat Coronavirus Emergence” grant,13 EcoHealth Alliance received a
total of $3.1 million, $599,000 of which went to the WIV to identify and alter
bat coronaviruses suspected of being able to infect humans.
Long before the COVID-19 outbreak, scientists had expressed
concerns about these kinds of experiments, as researchers may end up creating
the very thing they fear the most. The grant in question
actually acknowledged such concerns, stating that:
“Fieldwork involves the
highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while
working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal
dust to be inhaled.”
The Intercept quotes molecular biologist Alina Chan, who insists
the grant document shows Daszak has every reason to
take the lab-leak theory seriously.
“In this proposal, they
actually point out that they know how risky this work is,” she told The Intercept.14 “They keep talking
about people potentially getting bitten — and they kept records of everyone who
got bitten. Does EcoHealth have those records? And if
not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?”
The Intercept also contacted Ebright to
get his take on the new grant documents and what they tell us about the
creation of novel viruses in the Wuhan lab:15
“’The viruses they
constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered
to display human type receptors on their cell,’ Ebright
wrote to The Intercept after reviewing the documents. Ebright
also said the documents make it clear that two different types of novel
coronaviruses were able to infect humanized mice.
‘While they were
working on SARS-related coronavirus, they were carrying out a parallel project
at the same time on MERS-related coronavirus,’ Ebright
said, referring to the virus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.”
In a series of Twitter posts, Ebright
went further, stating:16,17
“The materials show
that the 2014 and 2019 NIH grants to EcoHealth with
subcontracts to WIV funded gain-of-function research as defined in federal
policies in effect in 2014-2017 and potential pandemic pathogen enhancement as
defined in federal policies in effect in 2017-present.
(This had been evident
previously from published research papers that credited the 2014 grant and from
the publicly available summary of the 2019 grant. But this now can be stated
definitively from progress reports of the 2014 grant and the full proposal of
the 2017 grant.)
The materials confirm
the grants supported the construction — in Wuhan — of novel chimeric
SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with
genetic information from another coronavirus, and
confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells.
The materials reveal
that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also
could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells (‘humanized
mice’).
The materials further
reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel,
laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses — one not been previously
disclosed publicly — was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting
virus from which it was constructed … and thus not only was reasonably
anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was demonstrated to
exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.
The documents make it
clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID
Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research
or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.”
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has already referred Fauci to the
Department of Justice for an investigation for possible perjury charges,
relating to his Congressional testimony in May19 and July20 2021, where he vehemently denied ever having funded
gain-of-function research.
Paul specifically asked the DOJ to investigate whether Fauci
violated 18 U.S. Code § 100121 — which makes it a federal crime to make “any materially
false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation” as part of “any
investigation or review" conducted by Congress — or any other statute.
Why does it matter whether the NIH/NIAID funded GoF research at the WIV? Well, as noted by The Hill anchors
Ryan Grim, Kim Iversen and Robby Soave in the video above, the public has a
right to know how our tax dollars are being used and the right to have a say
when it comes to deciding whether risky research that could wipe out humanity
should be conducted.
Public officials and researchers themselves are not necessarily
the best people to make decisions that involve morals and ethics, and unless
curtailed by the public, many will happily engage in dangerous and ethically
questionable experiments for the sake of science. But just because something
can be done doesn’t mean it should be done.
When it comes to GoF research on
pathogens, history is replete with examples of deadly diseases escaping from
laboratories. A Vox article22 written just months before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic
documents many of them and shows how it has only been luck that they haven’t
caused a major global pandemic.
Fauci’s decision to fund GoF research at
the WIV through EcoHealth Alliance is particularly
questionable in light of evidence suggesting the WIV
was known to have poor safety standards.
In her book, “What Really Happened in Wuhan: the
Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research,” Sharri Markson goes
through this evidence. An excerpt from the book was published in The Times,
September 4, 2021:23
“It’s late March 2018
and the U.S. career diplomat Rick Switzer has just flown home to Beijing after
a trip to Wuhan. Along with his colleague Jamie Fouss,
the U.S. consul-general in Wuhan, he’d led a delegation of American
environmental, science, technology and health consular
staff to inspect the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where he’d met Shi Zhengli, the ‘batwoman.’
It was two years before
a pandemic would arise from that very city — perhaps even that very laboratory
— and he was deeply concerned about what he saw during his visit. The consular
official at the US embassy in Beijing tapped out a ‘sensitive but unclassified’
cable to send back to the State Department.
He needed to let
Washington know just what was going on inside China’s new level-4
biocontainment facility dealing with the world’s deadliest and most contagious
pathogens. The cable warned of poor safety practices at the laboratory.”
Switzer’s cable specifically warned that the lab’s work on
coronaviruses’ human transmission potential represented a pandemic risk, were
such viruses to escape.
Shi Zhengli, director for the Centre for
Emerging Infectious Diseases at the WIV, had for years been “trying to
determine how coronaviruses gain the ability to skip from one species to
another by ‘inserting different segments from the human SARS-CoV spike protein into the spike protein of the bat
virus,’” Markson writes.
Switzer feared the escape of a pathogen with pandemic potential
was quite possible, as the lab was short on appropriately trained technicians
and investigators needed for safe operations. Switzer was also concerned about
the fact that institute officials were limiting approval for international
scientists to conduct work at the lab. Markson writes:24
“What made this
particularly alarming was the work the laboratory was conducting. Disturbingly,
Switzer and Fouss discovered the laboratory was
setting up its very own database identifying all deadly viruses with pandemic
potential.
It would be its own
version of a concept called the Global Virome Project
(GVP), the cable stated. ‘The GVP aims to launch this year as an international
collaborative effort to identify within ten years virtually all of the planet’s
viruses that have pandemic or epidemic potential and the ability to jump to
humans,’ the cable read.
This revelation — of
such a database being developed by a laboratory where the U.S. had no oversight
— should have been highly alarming. Except it’s unclear whether anybody with
any level of seniority ever read this cable after it was sent to the State
Department and intelligence apparatus in Washington.”
Despite this obvious lack of oversight or insight into the work at
the WIV, the NIH has been a major funder of the lab, along with the National
Science Foundation of China. Over the past decade, the NIH has funded at least
60 scientific projects at the lab.25
Other U.S. agencies have also funded research at the WIV,
including USAID, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of
Defense, the Department of Energy, the China–U.S. Collaborative Program on
Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases, as well as the New York Blood
Center, the University of North Carolina and the
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.26
That Fauci and the WIV have a cherished relationship is also
suggested by the fact that once Fauci started being questioned about his funding
of GoF at the lab, the WIV apparently tried to help out by deleting mentions of its collaboration with the
NIAID/NIH and other American research partners from its website. It also
deleted descriptions of GoF on the SARS virus.
Markson writes:27
“In hindsight we can
clearly see that health authorities, the U.S. government and international
governments all ignored the warnings from eminent scientists,
and allowed the dangerous scientific research to go ahead. The public
was never brought into these debates.
A pandemic is something
that affects all of us — we have lost loved ones, battled serious illness, lost
jobs, had our businesses and ways of life destroyed. While the origins of
Covid-19 have not yet been established, it’s clear this type of research carries
grave risks.
What was even more
terrifying was that not only was the NIH funding gain-of-function research in
the U.S. — but it was funding research in China, where it had no oversight and
no way of knowing how safe the laboratories were where these risky experiments
were taking place.”
Fauci is clearly committed to continuing risky GoF
research, seeing how the NIAID, in August 2020, announced a five-year,
$82-million investment in a new global network of Centers for Research in
Emerging Infectious Diseases.28
The EcoHealth Alliance will receive $7.5
million29 from this grant, and
planned research will include GoF-type experiments
that the NIAID says30 will "determine
what genetic or other changes make [animal] pathogens capable of infecting
humans." In other words, more of the exact same kind of research suspected
of being the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic will be funded for the next five years
unless somebody stops it.
While frank and open discussion about the lab-leak theory was
banned for over a year, it’s finally getting some well-deserved airtime. The
British Channel 4 investigative documentary, “Did COVID Leak From
a Lab in China?” offers up strong evidence for just that.
It also makes explicit how China misled the world about its
research with dangerous pathogens, and makes clear
that Fauci lied when claiming no GoF research was
ever funded by the NIH/NIAID.
One “smoking gun” is a research article written by WIV scientists
titled “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses
Provides New Insights Into the Origin of SARS
Coronavirus.”31 This research was
funded by the NIH and meets the Department of Health and Human Services’
definition of gain-of-function research.32,33
The Channel 4 documentary addressed this paper. When asked whether
the NIH ever funded gain-of-function research at the WIV, David Relman, a research physician at Stanford University,
replies, “Yes. Indirectly, but yes. How do we know? The paper says, right on
the front page, ‘Supported by NIAID, NIH.’”
At President Biden’s request, the Intelligence Community (IC)
released an unclassified summary34 of its investigation into the origin of SARS-CoV-2, August
27, 2021. Was the virus genetically engineered and/or the result of a lab leak?
The report is overall inconclusive, but does state that:
“One IC element
assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with
SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident,
probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan
Institute of Virology. These analysts give weight to the inherently risky nature
of work on coronaviruses.”
According to the IC, the U.S. government is simply unable to reach
a conclusive assessment on the origins of the virus without the assistance and
cooperation of China. In a commentary published by the Organic Consumers Association,
Alexis Baden states,35 “This is an entirely
unsatisfactory and disingenuous statement that fails to acknowledge
fact-finding that can and must be completed by the U.S. government.”
Baden calls for a “full investigation into U.S.-funded virus
hunting, gain-of-function experiments on potential pandemic pathogens and
biological weapons research.” She goes on to list “five questions that only the
U.S. can answer.” In summary, those questions include:
1. Did Ralph Baric hide the relationship between
SARS-CoV-2 and his infamous lab-created virus SHC014-MA15, published in the
2015 paper36 “A SARS-like Cluster of
Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence”?
In this experiment, the spike protein from SHC014 was inserted
into a SARS coronavirus backbone, thereby creating a coronavirus capable of
binding to human ACE2 receptors and efficiently replicate in human airway
cells. The virus also circumvented antibodies and vaccines.
While published in 2015, Baric didn’t deposit the new virus sequence
into the GenBank until late May 2020, and when he did, he misnamed it
SHC015-MA15. At present, all we have is Baric’s word
that this virus bears no resemblance to SARS-CoV-2.
2. Why did U.S. government officials collude to
hide evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered?
3. How did U.S. funding contribute to the origin
of SARS-CoV-2?
4. What can U.S. doctors, scientists, military personnel and citizens who were in Wuhan in the second half
of 2019 tell us about the first cases?
5. Can the U.S. rebut Chinese accusations that
SARS-CoV-2 came from Fort Detrick?
Baden comes up with many additional questions under each rubric,
and I highly recommend reading her article in its entirety. Like me, Baden,
believes we must ban GoF research if we want to avoid
another pandemic like COVID-19.
In the House Foreign Affairs Committee report37 “The Origins of COVID-19: An Investigation of the Wuhan
Institute of Virology,” published in August 2021, Congressman Michael McCaul
states:
“[T]here is legislation
Congress can pass that would not only hold those responsible accountable but
also help to prevent a future pandemic, including but not limited to: Institute
a ban on conducting and funding any work that includes gain-of-function
research until an international and legally binding standard is set, and only
where that standard is verifiably being followed.”
So far, more than 50,000 Americans have signed the Organic
Consumers Association’s petition to ban GoF research.
If you agree, please take a moment to sign your name to it now.