The head of the US organization that helped to fund and oversee coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology appeared to boast about conducting controversial gain-of-function experiments during a 2016 forum, the National Pulse reported.
The method—which involves mutating naturally occurring viruses into deadlier, more contagious strains, ostensibly for research purposes—is widely believed to have led to a laboratory leak may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
During a panel at the New York Academy of Medicine, which was broadcast by C-SPAN, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak acknowledged being aware of the Chinese conducting such research.
However, he stopped just short of admitting involvement in the activities—which the US had declared a moratorium on at the time, except in special circumstances involving national-security issues.
“We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them—some of them looked very similar to SARS, so we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells,” Daszak began.
“Then we—well, I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work,” he continued. “You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells.”
EcoHealth was responsible for helping disperse some $3.7 million in grant funding through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. That is believed to have included more than $600,000 directly supporting Wuhan’s research into the transmission of coronaviruses from bats to humans.
But during recent testimony before Congress, coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci, the longtime NIAID director, said he did not know whether the grantees—including both EcoHealth and its Chinese research partners—might have lied about the nature of their research.
Although Fauci denied, on penalty of perjury, that US taxpayers had supported gain-of-function experiments, one of the leading Wuhan researchers who was involved in those experiments, Shi Zhengli, linked NIAID to the work in her own resume and other research materials, said the National Report.
The Wuhan lab appeared to have stealthily scrubbed some of its references to the US grant-makers earlier this year, raising even more suspicion about the motives.
Following Fauci’s damning testimony last month, Republican members of Congress sent a letter to him and his presumptive boss, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, seeking more information as to what they knew—or should have known—concerning EcoHealth’s involvement in the Wuhan operations.
They also planned to open a formal congressional probe into the matter.
“It is vital to understand if U.S. taxpayer funds were at all affiliated with a pandemic that has taken the lives of nearly 600,000 Americans so we can prevent similar future catastrophes,” wrote Reps. James Comer of Kentucky and Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking minority members of the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, respectively.
BuzzFeed’s public release last week of more than 3,000 Fauci emails that it had obtained via the Freedom of Information Act led to a flurry of new breakthroughs, particularly in conservative media, where skepticism of the Chinese COVID narrative has been dutifully reported despite unprecedented US censorship efforts in mainstream and social media.
In addition to revealing Fauci’s callous indecision and hypocrisy in the early days of the virus, as he focused on building up his personal brand instead of working with the Trump administration on decisive containment measures, some emails suggested potentially sinister motives underpinning his actions.
On the very day that then-President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, Fauci may have been due to speak at the Trilateral Commission—a globalist, illuminati-like cabal that was addressing the topic of “Democracy and Capitalism at a Crossroads.”
In a subsequent August teleconference, the group asked Fauci point-blank: “Do we need a reset or restart in the United States, and what would that look like?”
Meanwhile, speculation has continued to mount that China’s true purpose in conducting gain-of-function research was to develop biological weapons—and that it may have succeeded in unleashing one.
Daszak’s 2016 panel admissions did little to quell those suspicions.
While discussing the lab-based evolution of pathogenic agents, he confessed, “You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers.”
