The Washington Post published an editorial Monday calling for Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, to testify before Congress regarding his role in organizing gain-of-function research on bat coronoaviruses.
The research was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and took place at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to NIH’s own admission.
However, key figures including Daszak, COVID czar Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Frances Collins all have previously denied aspects of the narrative, sometimes under oath.
According to the Post editors, “unanswered questions keep emerging about Mr. Daszak and the WIV,” and “Mr. Daszak must answer these questions before Congress.”
Among those questions:
- “Why did he not disclose his 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for research on bat coronaviruses with the WIV and others, which called for engineering a modification onto spike proteins of chimeric viruses that would make them infect human cells in the way the pandemic strain did?”
- “Does he know what research the WIV may have done on its own, during or after their collaboration?”
- “What was being done at WIV in the months before the pandemic?”
The editorial follows the publication on Oct. 20 of a letter sent by Lawrence Dabak, principal deputy director of the NIH, to US Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
In it, he admitted that the NIH funded an EcoHealth Alliance experiment “testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
???
July 28th NIH says “no NIAID funding was approved for Gain of Function research at the WIV.”
Obviously, they were lied to.
NIH confirmed today EcoHealth and the WIV conducted GOF research on bat coronaviruses.
@PeterDaszak with EcoHealth hid it from the USG. pic.twitter.com/Ou3ZLKto0L— Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) October 20, 2021
This is, of course, precisely the research about which Sen. Rand Paul asked Fauci on both May 11 and June 20.
After the May hearing, the Washington Post fact-checked Paul and gave him “Two Pinnochios.”
NIH corrects untruthful assertions by NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci that NIH had not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
NIH states that EcoHealth Alliance violated Terms and Conditions of NIH grant AI110964. pic.twitter.com/cFOtJlRoWl
— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) October 20, 2021
Both Fauci and Daszak spoke on “Pandemic Preparedness” at a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine conference in September.
According to Fox News, Daszak was also responsible for “the widely cited February 2020 letter in The Lancet from 27 scientists who “strongly condemn[ed] conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
Public records requests of Fauci’s correspondence from around the time that COVID-19 first hit the US also show Daszak reaching out to thank Fauci for going along with the false claim that the virus originated at a Chinese wet market.
