Coronavirus: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Sat May 13 08:39:48 PDT 2023


Why Was EcoHealth Alliance's Grant Reinstated Despite Group's Apparent
Failure To Comply With NIH Conditions?

Authored by Hans Mahncke via The Epoch Times

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reinstated a grant that
had been terminated by President Donald Trump in April 2020. However,
a document first obtained by the House Oversight Committee reveals
that the NIH’s conditions for reinstatement have not been met.
Peter Daszak, right, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, is seen
in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty
Images)

The grant, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus
Emergence,” was originally awarded in 2014 by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Under
the terms of the grant, EcoHealth Alliance, a government-funded
nonprofit that purportedly engages in research to prevent pandemics,
was awarded $3.8 million over five years to assess the spillover
potential of bat viruses “using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and
receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments in cell
culture and humanized mice.” Put in simple terms, NIAID was paying
EcoHealth to genetically engineer and manipulate bat viruses in labs.

In May 2016, the grant was suspended after Erik Stemmy, a NIAID
program officer, noticed that federal government funds may have been
used for prohibited gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. At the time, the Obama
administration had put in place a moratorium on gain-of-function
experiments. However, for reasons that remain unclear, the suspension
was lifted in July 2016. At the time, EcoHealth’s president, Peter
Daszak, thanked NIAID in an email for lifting the gain-of-function
funding pause.

As part of the conditions of the grant, EcoHealth had to file regular
activity reports. However, starting in 2018, EcoHealth stopped
submitting these reports. EcoHealth would later blame technical
difficulties for their failure to submit. The missing reports
comprised the critical 2018–2019 timeframe right before the outbreak
of COVID-19 in Wuhan.

Despite EcoHealth’s delinquency in filing the status reports, NIAID
did not stop funding the project. It was only after a Freedom of
Information Act request for the reports was filed in 2021 that
EcoHealth was prompted by NIAID to provide the reports. The reports,
which were finally submitted by EcoHealth at least two years too late,
in 2021, revealed that the NIAID grant had been used by EcoHealth and
the WIV in part to create laboratory-engineered bat viruses. Had this
fact been reported in a timely manner, the experiments would likely
have been shut down by NIAID.

When the connections between the WIV and NIAID’s grant became known in
April 2020, Trump terminated the grant. Trump’s decision caused an
outcry among the media and his critics. However, the NIH, which is
NIAID’s parent body, appears to have been well aware that Trump’s
actions were merited.

On July 8, 2020, Michael Lauer, the NIH’s deputy director for
extramural research who was in charge of “ensuring scientific
integrity, public accountability, and effective stewardship of the NIH
extramural research portfolio,” wrote a letter to EcoHealth, listing
seven demands that needed to be fulfilled as a condition for
reinstatement of the grant.
NIH Issued 7 Demands

First, EcoHealth needed to provide a sample of the COVID-19 virus
which it used to determine the virus’ genetic sequence. The ostensible
purpose of this demand was to compare this original sample with other
samples in order to assess when it first emerged.

Second, EcoHealth was required to “explain the apparent disappearance
of Huang Yanling, a scientist / technician who worked in the WIV lab
but whose lab web presence has been deleted.” Huang Yanling has long
been thought to be patient zero. Her profile was scrubbed from the
WIV’s website shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic in 2019 and
she has not been seen since.
NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci listens to President Joe Biden (out
of frame) speak during a visit to the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) in Bethesda, Md., on Feb. 11, 2021. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty
Images)

Third, EcoHealth was asked to share the “WIV’s responses to the 2018
U.S. Department of State cables regarding safety concerns.” These
cables had warned of a “serious shortage of appropriately trained
technicians and investigators needed to safely operate” the WIV’s
high-level containment laboratories. They also warned that the
National Health and Family Planning Commission, a state agency of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), had denied a request to conduct
coronavirus experiments at biosafety level 4. The actual experiments
were carried out in low biosafety level 2 facilities.

Fourth, EcoHealth was required to “disclose and explain
out-of-ordinary restrictions on laboratory facilities, as suggested,
for example, by diminished cell-phone traffic in October 2019, and the
evidence that there may have been roadblocks surrounding the facility
from October 14-19, 2019.”

Read more here...


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