FAUCI FALSE AGAIN
NIH did fund study
It’s another Fauci flub. The National Institutes of Health has stunningly admitted to funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at China’s Wuhan lab — despite Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly insisting to Congress that no such thing happened.
In a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Wednesday, a top NIH official blamed EcoHealth Alliance — the New York Citybased nonprofit that funneled US funds to the Wuhan lab — for not being transparent about the work it was doing.
NIH’s principal deputy director, Lawrence A. Tabak, wrote in the letter that EcoHealth’s “limited experiment” tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
The lab mice infected with the modified virus “became sicker” than those that were given the unmodified virus, according to Tabak, who said, “As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do.”
Gain-of-function research refers to viruses being taken from animals and genetically altered in a lab to make them more transmissible to humans.
The admission directly contradicts Fauci’s testimony to Congress in May and July, when he denied the US had funded gain-of-function projects in Wuhan.
Fauci (inset) has clashed with GOP senators, including Rand Paul of Kentucky, who have accused him of lying about the gain-offunction research.
Following the emergence of the NIH letter, Paul tweeted, “‘I told you so’ doesn’t even begin to cover it here.”
Tabak said EcoHealth — which is run by British scientist Peter Daszak — failed to comply with the terms of the grant, which required it to “report immediately a one log increase in growth.”
“EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away . . . EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award,” Tabak said.
He insisted the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant could not have become COVID-19 because the “sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant.”
The grant, awarded for a five-year period between 2014 and 2019, directed $599,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It turns out US taxpayer money did go for “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, despite Dr. Anthony Fauci’s heated denials of just that.
Gain-of-function work involves engineering a virus to be more effective against humans. The “lab leak” theory for COVID-19’s origins posits that such a superbug escaped the WIV to kill nearly 5 million worldwide.
Top National Institutes of Health official Lawrence Tabak just admitted the ugly truth, while blaming the NIH’s grantee, New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, for failing to report it. This particular work doesn’t seem COVID-related, but the news increases the odds that other EcoHealth projects also went off the reservation.
Tabak broke the news in a letter to Rep. James Comer, the House Oversight Committee’s top Republican. The “limited experiment” used humanized mice to show modified bat coronaviruses were more infectious to people. But “EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant,” Tabak wrote, vowing to demand full disclosure from the grantee.
Laughably, he also claims the 2018 experiments didn’t violate the US ban on funding gain-of-function work on potential pandemic-causers “because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans.”
This isn’t the only shady EcoHealth experiment coming to light nearly two years after COVID broke out. The Intercept reported last month that EcoHealth violated the terms of its grant at least four times by “creating new viruses using different parts of existing bat coronaviruses and inserting them into humanized mice” in the Wuhan lab, which was overseen by the NIH’s Fauci-led National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
NIH chief Francis Collins insists none of the bat viruses studied under this grant could “possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.” But what of other grants? And how can he be sure EcoHealth or the Wuhan researchers didn’t break more rules than the one NIH just admitted? Notably, he’s still claiming the bug evolved naturally, while saying it’s impossible to prove without China’s help and ignoring the strong evidence implicating the Wuhan lab.
EcoHealth, the NIH and Fauci all have a lot of explaining to do.