House Panel Urges Criminal Probe into Wuhan Gain-of-Function Research

House COVID panel urges criminal probe over gain-of-function virus research in Wuhan https://t.co/Czx5SjHd6e pic.twitter.com/jZKsZ50iRm

— New York Post (@nypost) May 1, 2024

New York Post reports:

A House subcommittee investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic urged a criminal investigation of EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak ahead of a Wednesday hearing, releasing a trove of documents about the Manhattan-based nonprofit’s controversial virus experiments in Wuhan, China.

Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, released a 59-page report and interview transcripts with half a dozen National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials and scientists linked to EcoHealth’s research — including Daszak himself.

EcoHealth has received millions in federal grants to conduct research around the globe — including more than $4 million for an NIH project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”

Beginning in 2014, the project conducted experiments on mice at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that modified novel bat coronaviruses and made them 10,000 times more infectious — but “failed to report” that fact to the NIH.

NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak — who was interviewed by the House COVID subcommittee — disclosed to Congress in 2021 that EcoHealth had violated the terms of its grant in the Wuhan lab, leading to the grant’s suspension.

The same day that Tabak made the disclosure, the NIH scrubbed its website of the agency’s longstanding definition of gain-of-function research, which enhances the transmissibility of viruses.

“We have found that EcoHealth was nearly two years late in submitting a routine progress report to NIH, that EcoHealth failed to report, as required, a potentially dangerous experiment conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that EcoHealth used taxpayer dollars to facilitate risky gain-of-function research, and that Dr. Daszak omitted a material fact regarding his access to unanalyzed virus samples and sequences at the WIV in his successful effort to have his grant reinstated by NIH,” Wenstrup said in his opening statement.

“Dr. Daszak has been less-than-cooperative with the select subcommittee, he has been slow to produce requested documents, and has regularly played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function research, even in his previous testimony,” he added.

Wenstrup then blasted Daszak for the material omissions and failures to be forthcoming with the subcommittee, declaring his nonprofit “a threat to national security.”

“We see no reason the American people should be paying for EcoHealth’s research, or any other work Dr. Daszak conducts,” he concluded. “And let me be clear, I support global health research. I support work that will make the world safer. That’s why we are investigating. Our concern is that this research and research similar does the opposite — puts the world at risk of a pandemic.”

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The report also calls out former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci — who was also interviewed by the subcommittee in January — for having “played semantics” with the definition of gain-of-function research.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Republicans and Democrats were united in their denunciations of Daszak for his conflicting testimony about US taxpayer funds his organization received for the risky experiments.

“Did any of the research that you funded through your organization at the Wuhan lab modify a virus to make it more infectious among humans? Yes or no?” Staten Island GOP Rep. Nicole Malliotakis pressed.

“No, that was not the goal of our work, and that’s why it was not considered gain-of-function,” Daszak said.

In a 2016 email to NIH, Malliotakis noted, Daszak said he was “very happy to hear that our Gain of Function research funding pause has been lifted.”

“EcoHealth never has and did not do gain-of-function research, by definition,” he repeated moments later — a remark strikingly similar to one made by Fauci during a tense May 2021 exchange with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

“Sen. Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely, entirely and completely incorrect … the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute,” Fauci said.

But Daszak’s testimony also contradicted sworn statements by Tabak and Dr. Ralph Baric, who collaborated with EcoHealth and the Wuhan lab on the project.

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Baric, one of the world’s leading coronavirologists who kicked off the experiments in his lab at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, told panel members in a Jan. 22, 2024, interview that the work “absolutely” constituted gain-of-function research.

In a 2015 research paper, Baric and Shi Zhengli, the top coronavirus researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, also flagged that the artificial virus, or chimera, could infect human cells and “scientific review panels may deem similar studies … too risky to pursue.”

Baric’s testimony, which was first reported by Vanity Fair, also revealed that the coronavirologist urged Zhengli to conduct experiments in a biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab, rather than the lower levels at which it was being conducted.

But Zhengli declined to upgrade the Wuhan lab from BSL-2 conditions, prompting Baric to tell congressional investigators of a potential lab accident: “You can’t rule that out … You just can’t.”

In an email obtained by the COVID subcommittee, Baric had also privately told Daszak it was “a load of BS” to maintain the SARS-like experiments were undertaken with sufficient safety measures.

“EcoHealth maintains the appropriate biosafety levels for our research,” Daszak reaffirmed during his testimony, adding that COVID-19 starting from a lab accident was “possible but extremely unlikely.”

“Lab biosafety … has nothing to do with the COVID origins,” he claimed.

The FBI and US Energy Department have determined that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the pandemic, while the CIA was unable to conclude how the virus originated.

In his interview with Wenstrup’s panel, Baric broke his silence on the lab-leak theory, arguing that the COVID-19 pandemic was more likely the result of a natural spillover from animals to humans but denying that it emerged from a Wuhan wet market.

“Clearly, the market was a conduit for expansion,” Baric said, noting that the virus was already circulating among humans two months before the first public cases in December 2019 at the market. “Is that where it started? I don’t think so.”

While Daszak repeatedly claimed the Wuhan bat coronavirus research “was shown not to infect people,” Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) accused the EcoHealth president of lying to the committee in past testimony about the likelihood of a natural spillover occurring.

“You changed perhaps one of the most important findings, the likelihood of bat coronavirus spillover into humans, from ‘very rare’ in early 2020 … to possibly over a million spillovers annually in southeast Asia and southeast China alone by late 2021,” Griffith noted. “You don’t think this is a significant change?”

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“No,” Daszak said.

“Wow. You know what? I practiced in the criminal courts for many, many years, and I will just tell you, if you were my client, I would tell you that that dog won’t hunt, and the judge ain’t gonna believe that,” Griffith replied.

Asked later by the lead counsel for the Republican majority, Daszak tried to recover: “Both things are true — that this is a rare event and it infects a lot of people every year.”

Tabak and others have denied that the NIH grant resulted in COVID-19, since the chimeric virus from the WIV experiments were “genetically very distant.”

But a 2018 proposal that EcoHealth submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has since been referred to as “smoking gun” evidence that COVID-19 was engineered in a lab.

Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, told The Intercept in 2021 that the pandemic coronavirus“is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses” to have “a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction.”