Research group funded by Fauci’s NIH reportedly worked to cast doubt on lab-leak theory
A research group funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s agency has been at the forefront of efforts to silence the COVID-19 “lab-leak” theory, an explosive report says.
An exhaustive investigation by Vanity Fair magazine claims that Peter Daszak, who helms EchoHealth Alliance, orchestrated a stealth PR campaign in the early days of the pandemic to cast doubt on the theory that COVID-19 came from a lab.
EcoHealth Alliance received $3.7 million from Fauci’s National Institutes of Health in 2014 to study bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan, China, lab accused by some of either accidentally or intentionally leaking COVID-19, triggering the deadly pandemic.
Fauci was involved in a private Zoom discussion with other scientists last year about whether to try to squelch a draft of a research paper by an evolutionary biologist that questioned whether China may have had a role in a lab release of the virus, VF reported.
The evolutionary biologist, Jesse Bloom, said the debate over his paper became “extremely contentious” during the meeting, with an NIH biologist ally threatening to quash the paper from a public pre-print server, the mag said.
Fauci quickly said, “Just for the record, I want to be clear that I never suggested you delete or revise the pre-print,” according to the magazine.
Bloom went on to publish his paper.
EcoHealth Alliance, which partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in its bat coronavirus studies, was involved in the manufacture of “chimeric viruses,” made up of the genetic codes of other viruses.
Using such assembled pathogens, scientists hope to predict the natural evolution of viral threats to try to stop them before they spread.
The NIH has said the viruses being studied under the EcoHealth grant are too dissimilar from the disease that causes COVID to be responsible for the pandemic.
“While it might appear that the similarity of RaTG13 [collected at the Wuhan lab] and BANAL-52 [a virus found naturally existing in Laotian bats] bat coronaviruses to SARS-CoV-2 is because it overlaps by 96 to 97 percent, experts agree that even these viruses are far too divergent to have been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2,” then-NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak said in a letter in October, when questions about EcoHealth’s studies arose.
“For comparison, today’s human genome is 96 percent similar to our closest ancestor, the chimpanzee. Humans and chimpanzees are thought to have diverged approximately 6 million years ago.”
The mag’s probe — based on 100,000 internal documents from EcoHealth Alliance, as well as interviews with five former staff members and 33 “other sources” — suggested that Daszak orchestrated the effort to squash the lab-leak theory as early as February 2020.
That month, 27 scientists published a letter in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, stating, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” bolstering claims that the virus developed in the wild.
Emails obtained by Vanity Fair allegedly show Daszak arranged behind the scenes for that letter to come about.
“You, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Daszak wrote in an email to two other scientists, the mag said.
“We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice,” the medical research leader allegedly added.
Daszak did ultimately sign the letter. Its final line reads, “We declare no competing interests.”
