News/Commentary

Fauci pal Peter Daszak awarded new 5-year, $3M bat virus grant despite link to lab-leak suspicions

October 2, 2022 | | Print Article

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has reportedly handed yet another large dollar grant to the EcoHealth Alliance. Issued late last month, the grant is once again designed to fund the study of bat viruses.

This is a huge bombshell because of Fauci’s direct ties to EcoHealth Alliance, whose boss, Peter Daszak, is a close associate — one, in fact, who went viral a year ago after emails between him and Fauci were released publicly.

Written in the spring of 2020, the emails showed Daszak thanking Fauci for downplaying the coronavirus lab leak theory that states the virus most likely emerged from an accidental leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Daszak cared deeply about this issue because he himself is tied to the institute. In fact, much of EcoHealth’s prior grant money has been funneled directly to the institute.

As previously reported, NIAID issued its first grant in 2014. EcoHealth Alliance then forwarded some of that money to the Wuhan institute. The problem is that the evidence suggests the money was then used to perform controversial “gain of function” research — the exact type of research that some suspect was responsible for COVID.

By the way, guess what the 2014 grant was specifically for …

“Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”

No joke.

The grant was subsequently suspended in 2020 because of COVID:

Yet two years later, NIAID is back to awarding the EcoHealth Alliance with more money to again study bat viruses? Why?

What’s known is that Fauci has repeatedly denied that the NIAID’s money has been used to fund “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul is one of a few congressmen who’s sought to hold him accountable for this apparent lie.

“Your repeated denials have worn thin and the majority of Americans, frankly, don’t believe you. Your persistent denials are not just a stain on your reputation but are a clear and present danger to the country and to the world. You’ve changed the definition on your website to cover your ass,” Paul said to him during a hearing last November.

The allegation he made was true:

It’s just like how the Biden administration redefined the term “recession” to avoid admitting to the American people that the U.S. economy is currently in a recession.

Fauci has similarly jumped through hoops to deny that his agency had indirectly funded “gain of function” research.

Even when The Intercept, a left-wing outlet, reported that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had indeed been engaging in “gain of function” research, he still continued to deny, deny, deny.

“Documents obtained by The Intercept contain new evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the nearby Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, along with their collaborator, the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, have engaged in what the U.S. government defines as ‘gain-of-function research of concern,’ intentionally making viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them, despite stipulations from a U.S. funding agency that the money not be used for that purpose,” the left-wing outlet reported in September of 2021.

Yet asked about the findings while appearing on MSNBC, Fauci played it off.

“The Intercept reporting is completely misleading, because ‘gain-of-function’ … is a completely meaningless term unless you put it into context, and what has happened is that years ago we paused all function on manipulating viruses, which is an absolutely essential part of virology, in order to get certain guard rules and guidelines about what constitutes research that in fact might be dangerous and need special oversight,” he said.

“That took three years of deliberation to set guardrails and guidelines and to get rid of the ambiguous and misleading term of gain of function so that you could proceed with experiments if they fall within those guidelines. The NIH funded studies, which were highly, highly peer-reviewed and felt to be very important to understand what the risk is. … The fact is, that was done under very strict guidelines.”

He added, “Then, all of a sudden, somebody comes in and says, I don’t like your guidelines, even though it took three years from the National Academy of Sciences, the NSABB, the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House to come up with these strict guardrails, which were followed very carefully. Then, someone comes along and says, you know, I don’t like that definition and according to my definition, you did ‘gain of function.'”

Listen:

The question now, given the news about EcoHealth Alliance’s newest grant, is how much of the money will be forwarded to the Wuhan Institute — and how much of that money will be used to again perform “gain of function” research?

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Vivek Saxena
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