New documents obtained through FOIA against the National Institutes of Health reveal that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases granted EcoHealth Alliance $3.1 million in federal funds, including $599,000 going to the Wuhan Institute of Virology “used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans,” according to a damning new report by The Intercept, citing documents obtained by a FOIA request.
This comes shortly after the Biden administration’s intelligence community probe into the origins of coronavirus came up inconclusive.
As was reported by The Intercept, newly released documents have exposed the US-funded research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Communist China. The 900 pages of documents reveal the work of EcoHealth Alliance, an American health organization that utilized federal funds to research bat coronaviruses at the Communist Chinese laboratory. The document dump has uncovered two federal grant proposals by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, directed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, that were previously unpublished.
The documents were released in connection with ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health. The Intercept is making the full documents available to the public.
“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, reported The Intercept.
One of the grants, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” provided EcoHealth Alliance with $3.1 million in federal funds, including $599,000 going to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which were used “in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans.” The grant proposal detailed how the 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.”
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab-leak theory seriously. “In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten — and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,” Chan said. “Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?”
The effort was led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, who oversaw the screening of “thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals.” The revelations add more fuel to concerns that coronavirus pandemic originated from the Wuhan lab in Communist China, which Daszak aggressively maintains is not true.
“The viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell,” said Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ulbright. “While they were working on SARS-related coronavirus, they were carrying out a parallel project at the same time on MERS-related coronavirus.”
The grant was initially awarded for a five-year period — from 2014 to 2019. Funding was renewed in 2019 but suspended by the Trump administration in April 2020.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who says that Fauci “could be culpable for the entire pandemic,” recently said “I have already asked the DOJ to review Fauci’s testimony for lying to Congress. This report should make it abundantly clear that he needs to be held accountable” in reaction to the new revelations.
Surprise surprise – Fauci lied again
And I was right about his agency funding novel Coronavirus research at Wuhan.
Read this thread and the papers released. https://t.co/zQizKXLdbd
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) September 7, 2021
