Top GOP congressmen sought additional answers following coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci‘s formal admission this week that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had indirectly funneled money to coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
On Friday, Reps. James Comer of Kentucky and Jim Jordan of Ohio announced a probe into EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit that used grant funds furnished by US tax dollars to support the WIV’s controversial research.
Comer and Jordan—the ranking minority members of the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, respectively—also sent a letter to Fauci—who oversees NIAID—and his presumptive boss, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, to further scrutinize the nature of the EcoHealth grant.
“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,” they wrote.
The congressmen said the key issue was whether EcoHealth knew—or should have known—about the risks involved in China’s research, including the strong possibility that the communist Asian superpower was conducting off-limits “gain of function” experiments.
“These questions suggest that EcoHealth knew of the CCP’s attempts to cover-up the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and failed to act or inform the U.S. government,” said the letter.
It noted that intelligence officials had identified several “alarming” red-flags at the Wuhan lab prior to the pandemic outbreak, including “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
The House GOP probe comes amid growing public acceptance of—and new evidence supporting—the long-held suspicions that the virus resulted from a leak at the lab.
“This investigation is more urgent now considering the recent report that, according to U.S. intelligence sources, three researchers from the WIV became ill and sought hospital care in November 2019,” said the congressmen.
Despite Fauci’s robust past advocacy of gain-of-function methods—which involve mutating naturally occurring viruses into more dangerous and contagious human strains, and could potentially be used for biological warfare—he has pleaded ignorance to knowing whether China was engaged in it.
Fauci unequivocally denied that the US had funded such research, which might have violated a moratorium imposed during the Obama administration.
That denial led Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a notable Fauci nemesis, to accuse him of contempt of Congress due to evidence showing Chinese researchers had expressly thanked Fauci and NIAID for their support of a study that involved a virus “15 times more deadly than COVID.”
The Senate this week unanimously approved a Paul-sponsored bill to permanently ban US support of China’s gain-of-function research.
Regardless of whether Fauci, himself, lied to Congress, his testimony Tuesday before the House Appropriations Committee appeared to throw EcoHealth under the bus.
“When asked if EcoHealth and WIV could have lied to the government, Dr. Fauci, you said, ‘I cannot guarantee that … because you never know,'” noted Comer and Jordan in their letter. “The actions of both EcoHealth and the CCP must be thoroughly investigated.”
Ironically, EcoHealth released a virtue-signaling video in April 2020, in which it claimed to be “working toward a world without pandemics,” but it made no mention of its alleged role in causing the present one.
