New documents on NIH-funded Wuhan virus gain-of-function research obtained by FOIA may indicate that Dr. Anthony Fauci has not been completely forthcoming with his knowledge of the origins of COVID-19.
The 900-plus page document, containing two separate research grants, is connected "with ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health" was released to the public on Sept. 6.
The two NIH grants amount to a total of approximately $14 million. The NIH/NIAID grants are a veritable treasure trove of information on the research being conducted and the scientists who perform the research. Fauci, who has consistently denied involvement in the research, is the Director of the NIAID.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald highlights some of the information in his tweet thread below:
At one point, the Greenwald thread mentions the President of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, who was the first to denounce "conspiracy theories," "rumors and misinformation around the origins" of the virus in a Lancet letter.
Daszak's letter helped set the tone for the "entire media dismissal of lab leak theory as conspiracy."
Daszak Letter/Lancet/Feb. 18 2020
Daszak Letter/Lancet/Feb. 18 2020
As recently as March 28, 2021, Daszak, in a 60 Minutes interview with CBS' Leslie Stahl, denied the virus was accidentally leaked from a lab in China.
Leslie Stahl/Daszak Interview/Mar. 2021
Two Separate Grants
The Intercept document states that grants totaling approximately $3.1 million to the EcoHealth Alliance for the Bat Coronavirus Research grant titled, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. The grant "outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals. The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment—and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed. The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident...The grant was initially awarded for a five-year period—from 2014 to 2019. Funding was renewed in 2019 but suspended by the Trump administration in April 2020," writes The Intercept.
UncoverDC found, however, that the grants for the Bat Coronavirus Research more likely total $6.3 million, not the $3.1 reported by The Intercept. The basis for this observation can be found in two consecutive, intertwined grants. The first, referenced by the Intercept, goes by Award Number: R01AI110964, a total of $3,748,715 million in NIH funding. The second is known as Award Number: R01AI079231, totaling $2,579,553 million in NIH funding.
Interestingly, the Bat Coronavirus Emergence grant shows examples on Pp. 22, 23 and 26, of ongoing research support for many projects, most of which are based in China. The document shows many such projects that are receiving ongoing research support, mostly focused on viruses, their origins, vectors and epidemiology.
Ongoing Research Support for China by US Govt./Understanding Risk Bat Coronavirus Emergence Grant 22,23
Ongoing Research Support for China by US Govt./Understanding Risk Bat Coronavirus Emergence Grant/p 26
The "major goals" for the Understanding of the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence research can be found on page 272 of the document. The research "aims" include modifications to the coronaviruses collected by the EcoHealth Alliance.
AIMS/Bat Virus/research NIH Grant
The study targets "human subjects, comprising 220 subjects (market workers and hunters) and 400 controls from the general population in Yunnan, Fujian, and Guangxi provinces plus 600 subjects in Shanghai (total enrolled: 2460)."
"The second grant," writes The Intercept, “Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in Emerging Infectious Disease Hotspots of Southeast Asia,” was awarded in August 2020 and extends through 2025. The proposal, written in 2019, often seems prescient, focusing on scaling up and deploying resources in Asia in case of an outbreak of an “emergent infectious disease." The second NIH grant appears to award approximately $7.5 million.
The award money for the second grant's research is in the chart below.
Grant 2/Award Money
Page 19 of the Zoonotic Virus Emergence Research grant says the research seeks to "build an early warning system to safeguard against pandemic disease threats."
"This proposed EID Research Center (EID-SEARCH) brings leaders in emerging disease research from the US, Thailand, Singapore and the 3 major Malaysian administrative regions together to build an early warning system to safeguard against pandemic disease threats. This team will 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. They will conduct in-depth surveillance of clinical cohorts at hospitals serving these communities to examine if 'cryptic' outbreaks are caused by these novel agents, and to build significant capacity to rapidly detect and respond should there be a major outbreak of a virus in the region."
Public Discourse on SARS-CoV-2, the NIH Grants, and the Pandemic
Byron Wan (not Gary Ruskin, per the Intercept) tweeted the "unpublished grant proposals [are] a roadmap to the high-risk research that could have led to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic."
A Broad Institute Molecular Biologist, Alina Chan, engaged her colleague Shing Hei Zhan on research surrounding the SARS-CoV2 virus and its adaptability to humans. Chan was unwilling to blindly accept the narrative being pushed by public health officials on the origins of the virus. She engaged in discourse on Twitter with Peter Daszak and was intensely criticized by him for her conclusions about the virus and its origins.
Chan became "politically radioactive" in the scientific community early in the pandemic when she pointed out:
"COVID-19 contains an uncommon genetic sequence that has been used by genetic engineers in the past to insert genes into coronaviruses without leaving a trace, and it falls at the exact point that would allow experimenters to swap out different genetic parts to change the infectivity."
Boston Magazine, in its Sept. 2020 interview with Chan, wrote:
"One thing Chan noticed about the original SARS was that the virus in the first human cases was subtly different—a few dozen letters of genetic code—from the one in the civets. That meant it had immediately morphed. She asked Zhan to pull up the genomes for the coronaviruses that had been found on surfaces in the Wuhan seafood market. Were they at all different from the earliest documented cases in humans?
Zhan ran the analysis. Nope, they were 100 percent the same. Definitely from humans, not animals. The seafood-market theory, which Chinese health officials and the World Health Organization espoused in the early days of the pandemic, was wrong."
In response to the newly released documents, Chan's tweets say the documents are "mind-changing" and the origins of the virus should be reconsidered.
"The documents show that EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab-leak theory seriously. In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten—and they kept records of everyone who got bitten, Chan said. Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?”
Dr. Andrew Fauci: Did He Lie?
Questioned by Sen. Rand Paul during a May 11 Senate hearing on COVID-19, UncoverDC reported an exchange between Paul and Fauci.
“Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?” he asked, to which Fauci replied, “Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely, entirely, and completely incorrect. The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
According to Paul in his appearance on Fox News's Hannity, Fauci committed a felony because he lied to Congress if the documents are to be believed. Paul said he had referred the matter to the Department of Justice.
A dossier compiled by Dr. David Martin, entitled "The Fauci/COVID-19 Dossier," is a 205-page, well-sourced indictment on Fauci's actions through the years, including his insistence on an HIV vaccine. It discusses NIH and the Department of Health's "funding of amplifying the infectious nature of coronavirus between 1999 and 2002 before SARS was ever detected in humans." It documents the legality or illegality of such research and "work associated with [the SARS virus] by their select collaborators includ[ing] considerable amounts of chimeric engineering, gain-of-function studies, viral characterization, detection, treatment (both vaccine and therapeutic intervention), and weaponization inquiries."
The dossier also discusses government overreach with mandates like masking. It sheds light on the many statements made by Fauci as well as his financial relationships and patent records.
A substack article by TechnoFog, details the email correspondence with Fauci and several NIH colleagues regarding, among other things, the "unusual features" that "look engineered," referring to the COVID-19 virus. The article also highlights a conversation between Hugh Hewitt and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins. Collins told Hewitt point blank,
"We absolutely did not fund gain of function research in Wuhan."
TechnoFog concludes:
"Properly understood, the two most powerful public health officials in the United States—Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci—are running an intelligence operation against the American people. Assisting in the operation is the Biden Department of Justice, who apparently refuses to prosecute Dr. Fauci for his false statements to Senator Paul. Also providing help are those within the government who have been obstructing public and media FOIA requests into the funding of gain of function research."
UncoverDC wrote extensively in July on the emails and the eye-opening teleconference in early 2020 between Fauci "and eleven of his international colleagues revolving around gain-of-function research and the origins of SARS-CoV-2."
A sparsely circulated fact sheet released by Pompeo's U.S. Department of State on Jan. 15, 2021, during the waning days of the Trump administration, referred to the "deceit and disinformation" surrounding "the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin." The letter directly refers to illnesses inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), research at the WIV, and secret military activity at the WIV. The letter mentions the lack of transparency from WIV about evidence of gain-of-function and the risks of engineering chimeric viruses.
Excerpts of the concerns can be found below:
Pompeo's Letter
Pompeo spoke to Fox News in this short interview clip at the end of July about his investigation and firm belief that the NIH funded the research and may have contributed to the impact of the pandemic due to their "deception."
In March, Robert Redfield, Former CDC Director, told CNN that he still believes the "coronavirus 'escaped' from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that it was spreading as early as September or October of 2019."
The most recent is an August final report released by the House Foreign Affairs Committee led by Republican Michael T. McCaul. The 84-page report documents the "timeline of the WIV lab leak and the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic," with documented evidence of a lab leak cover-up, evidence of genetic modification, and hypothesizes the leak as the root of the pandemic. The report concludes:
"It is the opinion of Committee Minority Staff, based on the preponderance of available information; the documented efforts to obfuscate, hide, and destroy evidence; and the lack of physical evidence to the contrary; that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory sometime prior to September 12, 2019. The virus, which may be natural in origin or the result of genetic manipulation, was likely collected in the identified cave in Yunnan province, PRC, sometime between 2012 and 2015. Its release was due to poor lab safety standards and practices, exacerbated by dangerous gain-of-function research being conducted at inadequate biosafety levels, including BSL-2. The virus was then spread throughout central Wuhan, likely via the Wuhan Metro, in the weeks prior to the Military World Games. Those games became an international vector, spreading the virus to multiple continents around the world."
