You might think the organization at the heart of the COVID pandemic would be banned forever from receiving any more federal dollars.
You would be wrong.
The organization, Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, is having its best year ever. It has just scored its fourth ongoing grant from Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health for — as incredible as it may sound — “pandemic prevention.” In all, it will rake in almost $3 million tax dollars this year alone, with millions more in the pipeline in coming years.
Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, who has just introduced legislation to blow up the Fauci-EcoHealth funding pipeline, says enough is enough.
“It is absolutely batty that NIH would give another cent of taxpayer money to EcoHealth when the group has failed to respond to repeated NIH requests about violating . . . federal laws and turning over information about the dangerous experiments it was conducting in . . . Wuhan,” says Ernst.
“Giving taxpayer money to EcoHealth to study pandemic prevention is like paying a suspected arsonist to conduct fire safety inspections,” she continued.
Sen. Ernst is being kind. Peter Daszak, the British biologist who runs EcoHealth, virtually has admitted that his organization poured out the accelerant at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then struck a match.
Before the pandemic, Daszak was fond of telling everyone who would listen how he had been funding the collection of coronaviruses and gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab for over a decade.
Coronaviruses were perfect for this work, Daszak told one interviewer: “You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. It’s a spike protein. Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, the zoonotic risk [to humans]. So you can get the sequence, build the protein . . . We insert the [spike protein] sequence into the backbone of another virus and then do some work in the lab.”
And when famed evolutionary biologist Andrew Rambaut questioned the prudence of gain-of-function research on Nov. 19, 2019 — just weeks before news of the Wuhan outbreak leaked out — Daszak shot back:
“Not true–we’ve made great progress with bat SARS-related [Coronaviruses, identifying more than] 50 novel strains, sequencing spike protein genes, identifying ones that bind to human cells, using recombinant viruses [and] humanized mice to see SARS-like signs, and showing some don’t respond to [monoclonal antibodies], vaccines.”
In other words, EcoHealth was helping the Wuhan lab create killer coronaviruses.
Apparently the man had no idea that the Chinese Communist Party might have other uses in mind for dangerous coronaviruses than research into vaccines.
We now know that there was a secret, Chinese military research program — run in parallel with the nominally civilian one — that Daszak (and funder Fauci) were presumably unaware of and were unwittingly supporting. And it seems highly likely that the virus that causes COVID-19 came from that program.
But there is no doubt about what Daszak did next. With the onset of the pandemic, he instantly pivoted from candor to coverup. He orchestrated a letter saying the lab leak theory was misinformation, and social media companies like Facebook and Twitter censored anyone who suggested it. One of my columns was censored.
Given all this, why are Peter Daszak and EcoHealth receiving yet more funding? After all, if this was research that led to the accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon that killed 10 million people and caused trillions in economic damage, those seeking answers would be rioting in the streets.
As I see it, the grant may be a desperate, last-ditch effort to scour the bat caves of Southeast Asia in the vanishingly small hope of finding something — anything — close enough to the COVID virus to claim that it came from nature.
Or it may be a Faucian reward for good behavior, intended to keep Peter Daszak and other EcoHealth employees from going rogue by shackling them with “golden handcuffs.” Daszak makes almost as much money as Anthony Fauci.
But whatever it is, it is unbelievably, even insanely, reckless.
The project’s stated goal is to collect yet more bat coronaviruses. Bat blood, urine, and feces will be collected from dark places where they would never come into contact with humanity and brought into labs located in densely populated cities.
Some will be selected for further gain-of-function research to make them infectious and deadly to human beings. The PLA’s bioweapons experts will be at the head of the line.
What could possibly go wrong?
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics.