Scientist who tried to squash Wuhan lab leak theory gets more cash to study viruses
WASHINGTON — A shadowy NYC non-profit run by a scientist who tried to squelch the theory that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese lab has received millions more from the National Institutes of Health to study similar viruses in Southeast Asia.
A $653,392 grant to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, awarded Sept. 21, is being administered by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — whose director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, announced in August that he was stepping down at the end of this year.
The grant is the first installment of a five-year award totaling $3.3 million — and was doled out on the same day NIAID awarded EcoHealth more than $2.1 million for two more ongoing studies, one of which involves so-called “gain-of-function” to make viruses more dangerous.
EcoHealth Alliance previously received millions in grants — directing some of those funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from where many believe COVID-19 leaked into the city of 11 million and trigged the worst global pandemic in 100 years.
Previously released emails have documented a close relationship between Daszak and Fauci, who received a “personal thank you” from the EcoHealth chief in April 2020 for backing the theory that COVID-19 spread naturally from bats to humans.
Vanity Fair reported in June of last year that Daszak personally organized a February 2020 statement signed by 27 scientists and published in the influential British medical journal The Lancet. The statement, which deplored the lab leak idea as a conspiracy theory, included the signatures of six scientists who had either worked at or been funded by EcoHealth Alliance — conflicts that, along with Daszak’s ties to the Wuhan lab, were not disclosed.
Daszak has so far declined to answer questions from lawmakers about EcoHealth’s work with the Wuhan lab, leading Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to call for the organization to be blocked from receiving federal funds until its leader comes clean.
“This is like a bad sequel with the same plot and characters, but a bigger budget,” Ernst told The Post in a statement Monday.
“It is absolutely batty that NIH would give another cent of taxpayer money to EcoHealth when the group has failed to respond to repeated NIH requests about … turning over information about the dangerous experiments it was conducting in China’s state-run Wuhan Institute.
“EcoHealth’s president has demonstrated his total disregard for scientific inquiry by covering up what was really happening in Wuhan,” Ernst added.
Emails obtained by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch last year revealed that EcoHealth received approximately $3.75 million between fiscal years 2014 and 2019 to carry out its Daszak-led study titled, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” more than $800,000 of which was redirected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
An April 15, 2020, email from NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak to Fauci and then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins described the that project as “a large multi-country study with Wuhan being one site.”
In addition to several EcoHealth research sites in China, Tabak’s email referred to sites in “Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Myanmar.”
That project raised questions about the origin of the coronavirus’s spread as its proposal acknowledged the risky nature of the work, noting that exposure to the virus “while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”
In October of last year, Tabak admitted in a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) that the study included gain-of-function research — in which viruses were made more transmissible or virulent — despite previous denials by Fauci in front of Congress.
According to a description on NIH’s website, the newest EcoHealth project will take place in Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam and study “the behavioral and environmental risk factors” that cause coronavirus wildlife-to-human transmission, “assess the risk and drivers of community transmission and spread” and “test potential public health interventions to disrupt” the spread.
“Our long-term goal is that this work will act as a model to build pandemic preparedness strategies to better predict sites and communities where wildlife-origin viruses are likely to emerge, and to disrupt emergence in [emerging infection disease] hotspots around the world,” the announcement adds.
A second Daszak-led study, which was awarded more than $1.5 million for this fiscal year and runs through 2025, plans to “identify novel viruses from Southeast Asian wildlife, characterize their capacity to infect and cause illness in people, and use serological assays of samples from people in rural communities with high wildlife contact to identify the background rate of exposure, and risk factors that drive this.”
in an email to The Post, Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright confirmed that study involves gain-of-function research.
A third EcoHealth study, not led by Daszak, will receive $600,000 for this fiscal year to examine Nipah, a bat-borne virus that has caused outbreaks of encephalitis in Southeast Asia. That study also runs through 2025.
Daszak and EcoHealth could not be reached for comment on Monday.
