A Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit from The Intercept has led to over 900 pages of documents related to EcoHealth Alliance and their work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology being released.
Their report reveals new details about coronavirus research in China’s labs, including the revelation of a third lab that research was being conducted at. They also contradict Dr. Fauci’s denials about gain of function research.
Among the documents released include unpublished grant proposals funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and updates to EcoHealth Alliance’s research project.
According to The Post Millennial:
One of the grants, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” looked to screen both bats and those that work in close quarters to these animals for novel coronavirus, and was headed by Dr. Peter Daszak. The Intercept writes “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. Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these represent a significant threat to global public health and biosecurity – as demonstrated by the SARS coronavirus pandemic of 2002-03 and an ongoing SARS-like epidemic in the Middle East,” the proposal states.
“This project seeks to understand what factors allow animal Coronaviruses to evolve and jump into the human population by studying virus diversity in a critical group of animals (bats), at sites of high risk for emergence (wildlife markets) in an emerging disease hotspot (China),” it reads. EcoHealth Alliance was provided with a $3.1 million grant for the research, with $599,000 going to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for research that includes identifying and altering bat coronaviruses.
The funding was renewed for a five year period that ended in 2019, and Trump revoked it in 2020.
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, told The Intercept that the documents showed 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 use of U.S. money to fund risky research in China has been a source of conflict between Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci during their public clashes that never fail to go viral. Fauci defended the nearly $600k in funding for the Wuhan institute back in May, stating “The larger grant was about $600,000 over a period of five years. So it was a modest amount. The purpose of it was to study the animal-human interface, to do surveillance and to determine if these bat viruses were even capable of’ infecting humans.”
When Paul insisted that the cash funded gain of function research, Fauci told him that “you are entirely and completely incorrect.”
Glenn Greenwald, who co-founded The Intercept but resigned in October of last year over disagreements “over the role of edits and the nature of censorship,” pointed out that one of the organization’s political hacks had previously accused Rand Paul of lying for suggesting that Fauci could’ve funded research that caused the pandemic.
2/ But yesterday, the very same @theintercept admits it sought documents about Fauci-funded research by EcoHealth (Peter Daszak's group) that "raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident."https://t.co/R4UbfZSCWa
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 7, 2021
4/ Even when they accidentally do reporting that undermines liberal political causes, Intercept editors have to make sure they stay loyal. The admit that Daszak's highly risking research was funded by NIAID, but never once mention the name "Fauci," the Director of that agency: pic.twitter.com/xRXKT6qyMO
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 7, 2021
Matt Palumbo is the author of The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros, Dumb and Dumber: How Cuomo and de Blasio Ruined New York, Debunk This: Shattering Liberal Lies, and Spygate
