(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic issued an interim report Wednesday on its investigation into Peter Daszak and his firm, EcoHealth Alliance, recommending that they be banned from receiving federal taxpayer funds due to their risky coronavirus experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
🚨NEW 🚨
Today, @COVIDSelect released a staff-level report recommending EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak be formally debarred and criminally investigated as a result of his actions prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report also exposes serious, systemic… pic.twitter.com/aOOfiDCgUR
— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (@COVIDSelect) May 1, 2024
The Covid Subcommittee report examined the millions of dollars of grant funds that the National Institutes of Health gave to Daszak’s EcoHealth, including its infamous May 2014 $3.7 million award for “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
The report found that EcoHealth failed to regularly update the NIH about its experiments at Wuhan, as was required by law. The report further found that EcoHealth used taxpayer dollars to conduct gain-of-function experiments—an allegation that had been denied by former NIH Director Anthony Fauci.
Furthermore, the report found that the NIH supported the Trump administration’s decision to terminate the $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth in April 2020.
The grant was reinstated last April. But according to Wednesday’s House Subcommittee report, Daszak and EcoHealth concealed the fact that unanalyzed samples and sequences—that the U.S. paid for—are in the custody and control of the Wuhan Institute.
“Daszak failed to inform NIH that a substantial number of samples or sequences—the same samples or sequences that were a primary purpose for reinstating EcoHealth’s previously suspended grant—were in the custody and control of the WIV, a now debarred organization. It remains unclear how many samples or sequences that the federal government paid for still reside at the WIV,” the report said.
“Since access to sequences and samples was a substantial reason for reinstating EcoHealth’s grant, it raises the question of whether NIH would have still reinstated the grant if it had knowledge of this issue.”
All of those reasons and more call for Daszak and EcoHealth to be cut off from the government dole, according to the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
“It is imperative upon the Administration to immediately begin suspension and debarment proceedings and ensure neither EcoHealth nor Dr. Daszak are awarded another cent, especially for dangerous and poorly monitored research,” the report said.
Daszak appeared Wednesday before the same committee to answer questions about EcoHealth and COVID. There, he denied any wrongdoing.
“The public nature of our work and our long-standing collaborations with Chinese scientists made us a target for speculation,” he lamented.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
