Tag Archives: EcoHealth Alliance

When Politics Interferes With Science

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Yesterday The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about the search for the origins of the coronavirus. It seems as if not everyone wanted to uncover the truth.

The article reports:

Career staffers at the State Department ‘warned’ officials not to investigate the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab, fearing it would expose U.S. funding for gain-of-function research there, according to a new report.

Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance raised the concern in a memo reported by Vanity Fair on Thursday. 

DiNanno wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, ‘warned’ leaders ‘not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19’ because it would ‘open a can of worms’ if it continued. 

In one State Department meeting, officials say colleagues explicitly told them not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to the U.S. taxpayer funds that were supporting the work.

The article continues:

It’s unclear exactly much U.S. government funding was going to the WIV, but at least some of it was being routed through a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance.

By 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was pulling in up to $15 million a year in grant money from an array of federal agencies, including the Defense Department, Homeland Security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to tax filings.

EcoHealth Alliance and its founder Peter Daszak have been working with Shi Zhengli, the WIV virologist known as the ‘bat lady’, for more than 15 years. 

British-born Daszak, 55, is the president of EcoHealth Alliance — and in the early days of the pandemic, he was key in establishing the veneer of a ‘scientific consensus’ that the lab-leak origin was impossible.

Daszak not only signed but spearheaded a letter signed by 27 scientists rejecting the lab leak hypothesis, which was published on February 19, 2020 in the medical journal The Lancet.

Leaked emails later revealed that he encouraged colleagues who do gain-of-function research on coronaviruses not to sign the letter, in order to obscure the connection.

The letter declared that the scientists had ‘no competing interests’ — but it seems clear that Daszak did, as a lab leak origin would likely derail his entire field, but an animal origin would justify his life’s work.  

I don’t know whether or not knowing the origin of the coronavirus would have been helpful in finding a cure or a vaccine, but it bothers me that we have people in our government working against the interests of American citizens.

 

Following The Money Trail

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I have previously noted that Dr. Fauci has stated that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Well, this is one of those statements that may not tell the whole story.

The U.K. Daily Mail reported the following yesterday (updated today):

Anthony Fauci has defended the United States’ ‘modest’ and ‘very respectable’ funding of the Wuhan laboratory – which is now at the center of speculation as a possible source of the COVID-19 virus.

Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), appeared before a Congressional budget committee on Tuesday.

He defended allocating $600,000 to a group called EcoHealth Alliance, which then paid the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study the risk that bat coronaviruses could infect humans.

Under the terms of the funding, the money could not be spend on ‘gain of function’ research – a controversial practice which explores how viruses mutate and become more transmissible or more dangerous.

Fauci said the research was essential, pointing out that the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s was eventually traced back to bats.

‘I would have been almost a dereliction of our duty if we didn’t study this, and the only way you can study these things is you’ve got to go where the action is,’ he said.

Considering the events of the past year or so, does anyone actually believe that the money was not spent on ‘gain of function’ research?

Please follow the link above to the article–it chronicles the misreporting during the past year about the coronavirus. All of us remember that anyone early in the year who suggested that the virus was the result of a laboratory leak was accused of presenting a conspiracy theory. It is interesting to see how much of what the mainstream media chose not to report in the past year has turned out to be true.