by Emily Kopp, Brownstone:
The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s chief American collaborator leveraged connections in Anthony Fauci’s inner circle to survive federal scrutiny and keep millions in public funding flowing without turning over key data, new records show.
Hundreds of documents — emails obtained under Freedom of Information Act lawsuits or Congressional subpoena, as well as Congressional interview transcripts — show Fauci’s institute protected EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated on novel coronavirus discovery and engineering projects with the Wuhan lab.
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At a congressional hearing this summer, Fauci cast EcoHealth and its president Peter Daszak — who are currently under proposed debarment by the federal government — as minor and rogue grantees.
But EcoHealth was among the first grantees that Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases contacted as news of a novel coronavirus first swirled, and Daszak requested supplemental funds to respond to the crisis. In early February 2020, when NIAID began conducting weekly calls with a few experts about the novel coronavirus, Daszak was among the invitees. And at the height of pandemic confusion and controversy in the summer of 2020, EcoHealth maintained the goodwill of NIAID, which awarded EcoHealth two new grants totaling $19.8 million, weakening the leverage of other officials to obtain information from one of the US government’s only sources of insight into the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Fauci “asked how Peter is doing, as he often does, and he seemed to commiserate with him to a degree,” Fauci’s senior scientific advisor David Morens wrote in apparent reference to Daszak on Nov. 18, 2021.
At the time, officials at the National Institutes of Health’s central headquarters or “Building One” — at the demand of the Trump White House — had suspended EcoHealth’s existing NIAID grant and sought lab notebooks and unpublished genomic data as a condition of getting its funding back. This information could have shed light on the coronavirus research in Wuhan before the pandemic.
But aided by allies within NIAID, millions continued to flow to EcoHealth, and Daszak would not ask his longtime collaborators in Wuhan for information sought by the US government until 20 months later, in January 2022 — two years after the pandemic began.
Some of the NIAID officials who helped Daszak were key to approving his coronavirus research in Wuhan in the first place, including gain-of-function research, research that can enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a pathogen. Some of these NIAID officials had spent years championing gain-of-function research as worth the risks, Congressional transcripts also show. Namely, Morens and another NIAID employee named “Jeff T.” were the liaisons between the scientific community and Fauci during the years-long debates about gain-of-function research leading up to the pandemic, one email shows. After the pandemic arose, Morens and another NIAID scientist named Jeffery Taubenberger wrote an editorial defending EcoHealth and referred to people concerned about gain-of-function research as “luddites” and “the complaining crowd.”
