Legal Insurrection readers will recall our posts on EcoHealth Alliance, which conducted bat virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Currently, one of the theories about the origin of covid is that a bat coronavirus was accidentally leaked in possibly two separate incidents.
EcoHealth Alliance was a major participant in that research.
Starting in 2014, the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, funded the New York-based research nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance with annual grants through 2020 for “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”…Tabak’s letter asserts that the modified virus becoming more virulent “was an unexpected result” and not “something that the researchers set out to do” — an odd claim, considering that the whole point of manipulating the virus was to investigate things that could make it more virulent.
The group’s grant was terminated under the Trump administration after it was revealed that American taxpayer dollars were used to pay for EcoHealth’s activities at the WIV, which conducts risky gain-of-function research – the intentional alteration of viruses to make them more infectious or deadly. The Biden administration has decided to go ahead and resume the research funding.
“Three years after then-President Donald Trump pressured the National Institutes of Health to suspend a research grant to a U.S. group studying bat coronaviruses with partners in China, the agency has restarted the award,” advises a report from Science, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.“The new 4-year grant is a stripped-down version of the original grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization in New York City, providing $576,000 per year. That 2014 award included funding for controversial experiments that mixed parts of different bat viruses related to severe acute respiratory syndrome, the coronavirus that sparked a global outbreak in 2002–04, and included a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The new award omits those studies, and also imposes extensive new accounting rules on EcoHealth, which drew criticism from government auditors for its bookkeeping practices,” the report said.Peter Daszak, EcoHealth’s director, said his embattled group is pleased.“Now we have the ability to finally get back to work,” he said, according to the report.
EcoHealth Alliance will get $2.3 million over the next four years to work on ‘bat-origin coronaviruses.’ The decision to go forward with the funding is being slammed by Republicans.
Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee that found multiple serious violations by EcoHealth of the contractual terms and conditions of the NIH grant, slammed the ‘absolutely reckless’ decision.’It’s absolutely reckless that the NIH has renewed a grant for EcoHealth Alliance given their negligence and the breach of their contract with the NIH on the coronavirus research done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,’ said Griffith in a statement to DailyMail.com Tuesday….Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told DailyMail.com Tuesday that the renewal of the NIH grant fails the ‘COVID smell test.”Giving another penny to EcoHealth to conduct studies on coronaviruses doesn’t pass the COVID smell test,’ she said.’Ecohealth has already betrayed the trust of American taxpayers by funneling funds to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology for risky experiments on bat coronaviruses that may have unleashed the COVID-19 pandemic on the world. Americans deserve accountability, which is why it’s past time to defund EcoHealth.’
Daszak, the head of the group, promises there will be no recombinant DNA work that will occur.
According to the grant award, the main thrust of the research is to “understand what factors allow bat-origin coronaviruses, including close relatives to Sars, to jump into humans” by studying their evolutionary diversity, patterns of spillover and genetic diversity.The work “will produce reagents and genetic sequences that can be used to test vaccines and therapeutics to fight future pandemics, and hotspot maps that can be used to target surveillance and control measures”, it says.Dr Daszak said the work was unlikely to show how the pandemic started, although stored human blood human samples held by EcoHealth may provide “clues”.“We are not going to do any recombinant virus work. We’re not going to subcontract to Wuhan or any other organisation in China but we are going to use the results from our previous work that no one’s had access to,” he said.
Personally, I am looking forward to hearing about how the next pandemic from China originated from raccoon dogs.
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