The Wrong Man
by David Freed
The Atlantic
MAY 2010 ISSUE
In the fall of 2001, a nation reeling from the horror of 9/11 was rocked by a series of deadly anthrax attacks. As the pressure to find a culprit mounted, the FBI, abetted by the media, found one. The wrong one. This is the story of how federal authorities blew the biggest anti-terror investigation of the past decade—and nearly destroyed an innocent man. Here, for the first time, the falsely accused, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, speaks out about his ordeal.
THE FIRST ANTHRAX attacks came days after the jetliner assaults of September 11, 2001. Postmarked Trenton, New Jersey, and believed to have been sent from a mailbox near Princeton University, the initial mailings went to NBC News, the New York Post, and the Florida-based publisher of several supermarket tabloids, including The Sun and The National Enquirer. Three weeks later, two more envelopes containing anthrax arrived at the Senate offices of Democrats Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, each bearing the handwritten return address of a nonexistent “Greendale School” in Franklin Park, New Jersey. Government mail service quickly shut down.
The letters accompanying the anthrax read like the work of a jihadist, suggesting that their author was an Arab extremist—or someone masquerading as one—yet also advised recipients to take antibiotics, implying that whoever had mailed them never really intended to harm anyone. But at least 17 people would fall ill and five would die—a photo editor at The Sun; two postal employees at a Washington, D.C., mail-processing center; a hospital stockroom clerk in Manhattan whose exposure to anthrax could never be fully explained; and a 94-year-old Connecticut widow whose mail apparently crossed paths with an anthrax letter somewhere in the labyrinth of the postal system. The attacks spawned a spate of hoax letters nationwide. Police were swamped with calls from citizens suddenly suspicious of their own mail.
Americans had good reason to fear. Inhaled anthrax bacteria devour the body from within. Anthrax infections typically begin with flu-like symptoms. Massive lesions soon form in the lungs and brain, as a few thousand bacilli propagate within days into literally trillions of voracious parasitic microbes. The final stages before death are excruciatingly painful. As their minds disintegrate, victims literally drown in their own fluids. If you were to peer through a microscope at a cross-section of an anthrax victim’s blood vessel at the moment of death, it would look, says Leonard A. Cole, an expert on bioterrorism at Rutgers University, “as though it were teeming with worms.”
The pressure on American law enforcement to find the perpetrator or perpetrators was enormous. Agents were compelled to consider any and all means of investigation. One such avenue involved Don Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College and a self-styled literary detective, who had achieved modest celebrity by examining punctuation and other linguistic fingerprints to identify Joe Klein, who was then a Newsweek columnist, as the author of the anonymously written 1996 political novel, Primary Colors. Foster had since consulted with the FBI on investigations of the Unabomber and Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park bombing, among other cases. Now he was asked to analyze the anthrax letters for insights as to who may have mailed them. Foster would detail his efforts two years later in a 9,500-word article for Vanity Fair.
Surveying the publicly available evidence, as well as documents sent to him by the FBI, Foster surmised that the killer was an American posing as an Islamic jihadist. Only a limited number of American scientists would have had a working knowledge of anthrax. One of those scientists, Foster concluded, was a man named Steven Hatfill, a medical doctor who had once worked at the Army’s elite Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), which had stocks of anthrax.
On the day al-Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with hijacked jetliners, Hatfill was recovering from nasal surgery in his apartment outside the gates of Fort Detrick, Maryland, where USAMRIID is housed. We’re at war, he remembers thinking as he watched the news that day—but he had no idea that it was a war in which he himself would soon become collateral damage, as the FBI came to regard him as a homegrown bioterrorist, likely responsible for some of the most unsettling multiple murders in recent American history. His story provides a cautionary tale about how federal authorities, fueled by the general panic over terrorism, embraced conjecture and coincidence as evidence, and blindly pursued one suspect while the real anthrax killer roamed free for more than six years. Hatfill’s experience is also the wrenching saga of how an American citizen who saw himself as a patriot came to be vilified and presumed guilty, as his country turned against him.
“It’s like death by a thousand cuts,” Hatfill, who is now 56, says today. “There’s a sheer feeling of hopelessness. You can’t fight back. You have to just sit there and take it, day after day, the constant drip-drip-drip of innuendo, a punching bag for the government and the press. And the thing was, I couldn’t understand why it was happening to me. I mean, I was one of the good guys.”
Don Foster, the Vassar professor, was among those who set the wheels of injustice in motion. Scouring the Internet, Foster found an interview that Hatfill had given while working at the National Institutes of Health, in which he described how bubonic plague could be made with simple equipment and used in a bioterror attack. Foster later tracked down an unpublished novel Hatfill had written, depicting a fictional bioterror attack on Washington. He discovered that Hatfill had been in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) during an anthrax outbreak there in the late 1970s, and that he’d attended medical school near a Rhodesian suburb called Greendale—the name of the invented school in the return address of the anthrax letters mailed to the Senate. The deeper Foster dug, the more Hatfill looked to him like a viable suspect.
“When I lined up Hatfill’s known movements with the postmark locations of reported biothreats,” Foster later wrote, “those hoax anthrax attacks appeared to trail him like a vapor cloud.”
In February 2002, Foster tried to interest the FBI in Hatfill, but says he was told that Hatfill had a good alibi. “A month later, when I pressed the issue,” Foster wrote, “I was told, ‘Look, Don, maybe you’re spending too much time on this.’”
Meanwhile, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a passionate crusader against the use of bioweapons, was also convinced that an American scientist was to blame for the anthrax attacks. In an interview with the BBC in early 2002, she theorized that the murders were the result of a top-secret CIA project gone awry, and that the FBI was hesitant to arrest the killer because it would embarrass Washington. A molecular biologist and professor of environmental science who had once served as a low-level bioweapons adviser to President Clinton, Rosenberg had taken it upon herself to look into the anthrax murders, and her investigations had independently led her to Hatfill. (Hatfill says he believes Rosenberg was made aware of him by a former acquaintance, a defense contractor with whom Hatfill had clashed over a proposed counter-anthrax training program intended for the U.S. Marshals Service.) Rosenberg wrote a paper she called “Possible Portrait of the Anthrax Perpetrator,” which was disseminated on the Internet. Although Rosenberg would later deny ever having identified him publicly or privately, the specific details of her “Portrait” made it clear she had a particular suspect in mind: Steven Hatfill.
Foster says he met Rosenberg over lunch in April 2002, “compared notes,” and “found that our evidence had led us in the same direction.” Weeks dragged on while he and Rosenberg tried to interest the FBI in their theories, but the bureau remained “stubbornly unwilling to listen.” Two months later, her “patience exhausted,” Rosenberg, according to Foster, met on Capitol Hill with Senate staff members “and laid out the evidence, such as it was, hers and mine.” Special Agent Van Harp, the senior FBI agent on what by then had been dubbed the “Amerithrax” investigation, was summoned to the meeting, along with other FBI officials.
Rosenberg criticized the FBI for not being aggressive enough. “She thought we were wasting efforts and resources in a particular—or in several areas, and should focus more on who she concluded was responsible for it,” Harp would later testify.
“Did she mention Dr. Hatfill’s name in her presentation?” Hatfill’s attorney, former federal prosecutor Thomas G. Connolly, asked Harp during a sworn deposition.
“That’s who she was talking about,” Harp testified.
Exactly a week after the Rosenberg meeting, the FBI carried out its first search of Hatfill’s apartment, with television news cameras broadcasting it live.
In his deposition, Harp would dismiss the timing of the search as coincidental.
Beryl Howell, who at the time of the investigation was serving as Senator Patrick Leahy’s point person on all matters anthrax, recently told me that asking Harp and other lead agents to sit down with the “quite persistent” Rosenberg was never meant to pressure the FBI to go after Hatfill. The meeting, Howell says, was intended simply to ensure that investigators cooperated with other experts outside the bureau and objectively considered all theories in the case in order to solve it more quickly.
“Whether or not Rosenberg’s suspicions about Hatfill were correct was really not my business,” Howell says. “It was really law enforcement’s prerogative to figure that one out.”
There was enough circumstantial evidence surrounding Hatfill that zealous investigators could easily elaborate a plausible theory of him as the culprit. As fear about the anthrax attacks spread, government and other workers who might have been exposed to the deadly spores via the mail system were prescribed prophylactic doses of Cipro, a powerful antibiotic that protects against infection caused by inhaled anthrax. Unfamiliar to the general population before September 2001, Cipro quickly became known as the anti-anthrax drug, and prescriptions for it skyrocketed.
As it happened, at the time of the anthrax attacks, Hatfill was taking Cipro.
Hatfill’s eccentricity also generated suspicion among colleagues and FBI agents. Bench scientists tend toward the sedate and gymnasium-challenged. Steve Hatfill was a flag-waving, tobacco-chewing weight lifter partial to blood-rare steaks and black safari suits that showed off his linebacker’s physique, a physician with a bawdy sense of humor and a soldier’s ethos, who told stories over cocktails of parachuting from military aircraft and battling Communists in Africa. While few people who knew him could deny his intellect or his passion as a researcher, some found him arrogant and blustery. Others feared him. Even his allies acknowledge that Hatfill could sometimes come across as different. “If you try to link Steve and the word normal, they’re not going to match up,” says Jim Cline, a retired Special Forces sergeant major and anti-terror expert who worked with Hatfill from 1999 to 2002 at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a large defense contractor.
It also happened that Hatfill was familiar with anthrax. He had done his medical training in Africa, where outbreaks of anthrax infections have been known to occur among livestock herds. In 1999, after going to work for SAIC, Hatfill had a hand in developing a brochure for emergency personnel on ways to handle anthrax hoax letters. In the long run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, he also oversaw the construction of a full-scale model designed to show invading U.S. troops what a mobile Iraqi germ-warfare lab might look like and how best to destroy it. But while he possessed a working knowledge of Bacillus anthracis, Hatfill had never worked in any capacity with the spore-forming, rod-shaped bacterium.
“I was a virus guy,” he told me, “not a bacteria guy.”
Still, when FBI agents asked to interview him 10 months after the anthrax murders, Hatfill says, he wasn’t surprised. In their hunt for what he believed were the foreign terrorists who had sent the letters, Hatfill assumed that agents were routinely interviewing every scientist who’d ever worked at USAMRIID, including those, like himself, who had never set foot in the high-security laboratory where anthrax cultures were kept. Hatfill answered the agents’ questions and willingly took a polygraph test, which he says he was told he passed.
“I thought that was the end of it,” Hatfill says. “But it was only the beginning.”
In June, agents asked to “swab” his apartment. Hatfill complied, feeling he had nothing to hide. On June 25, 2002, after signing a consent form at the FBI’s field office in nearby Frederick, Maryland, he came home to find reporters and camera crews swarming. TV helicopters orbited overhead. “There’s obviously been a leak,” Hatfill says one of the agents told him. He was driven to a Holiday Inn to escape the crush of news media and sat in a motel room, watching incredulously as a full-blown search of his home played out on national television. The experience was surreal.
Agents conducted a second search five weeks later amid a repeated media circus. This time they came equipped with a warrant and bloodhounds. The dogs, Hatfill would later learn, had been responsible for false arrests in other cases. Hatfill says he innocently petted one of hounds, named Tinkerbell. The dog seemed to like him. “He’s identified you from the anthrax letters!” Tinkerbell’s handler exclaimed.
“It took every ounce of restraint to stop from laughing,” Hatfill recalls. “They said, ‘We know you did it. We know you didn’t mean to kill anyone.’ I said, ‘Am I under arrest?’ They said no. I walked out, rented a car, and went to see an attorney about suing the hell out of these people.”
The FBI raided Hatfill’s rented storage locker in Ocala, Florida, where his father owned a thoroughbred horse farm; the agency also searched a townhouse in Washington, D.C., owned by his longtime girlfriend, a slim, elegant accountant whom Hatfill calls “Boo.” (To guard her privacy, he asked that her real name not be used.) Agents rifled through Boo’s closets and drawers, breaking cherished keepsakes. “They told me, ‘Your boyfriend murdered five people,’” she said to me recently, unable to talk about it without tears.
Hatfill was fired from SAIC. The official explanation given was that he had failed to maintain a necessary security clearance; the real reason, he believes, was that the government wanted him fired. He immediately landed the associate directorship of a fledgling Louisiana State University program designed to train firefighters and other emergency personnel to respond to terrorist acts and natural disasters, a job that would have matched the $150,000 annual salary he’d been getting at SAIC. But after Justice Department officials learned of Hatfill’s employment, they told LSU to “immediately cease and desist” from using Hatfill on any federally funded program. He was let go before his first day. Other prospective employment fell through. No one would return his calls. One job vanished after Hatfill emerged from a meeting with prospective employers to find FBI agents videotaping them. His savings dwindling, he moved in with Boo.
By this time, the FBI and the Justice Department were so confident Hatfill was guilty that on August 6, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly declared him a “person of interest”—the only time the nation’s top law-enforcement official has ever so identified the subject of an active criminal investigation. Agents grilled Hatfill’s friends, tapped his phone, installed surveillance cameras outside Boo’s condo, and for more than two years, shadowed him day and night, looking for any grounds on which to arrest him.
Many of Hatfill’s friends, worried for their own reputations, abandoned him as the FBI gave chase. Certain of Hatfill’s innocence, his former colleague Jim Cline was among the few who stood by him, afraid that his increasingly socially isolated friend would kill himself to escape his torment. “When you have the world against you,” Cline says, “and only a few people are willing to look you in the eye and tell you, ‘I believe you’—I mean, to this day, I really don’t know how the guy survived.”
Virtually everywhere Hatfill went, the FBI went too, often right behind him—a deliberately harassing tactic called “bumper locking.” Hatfill believes that local authorities joined in tormenting him at the behest of the Justice Department. Coming home from dinner one Friday night, he was pulled over by a Washington, D.C., police officer who issued him a warning for failing to signal a lane change. Three blocks later, another cop stopped him, again for not using his turn signal. The officer asked if he’d been drinking. Hatfill said he’d had one Bloody Mary. He was ordered out of his car. “Not unless you’re going to arrest me,” Hatfill says he responded indignantly. The officer obliged. Hatfill spent the weekend in jail and would later be ordered to attend a four-day alcohol counseling program. The police, he says, refused to administer a blood-alcohol test that would have proved he wasn’t drunk.
Connolly, Hatfill’s attorney, offered to have Hatfill surrender his passport and be outfitted with a tracking device, to have FBI agents ride with him everywhere, to show them that they were wasting their time. The offer was rejected. “They were purposely sweating him,” Connolly says, “trying to get him to go over the edge.”
Much of what authorities discovered, they leaked anonymously to journalists. The result was an unrelenting stream of inflammatory innuendo that dominated front pages and television news. Hatfill found himself trapped, the powerless central player in what Connolly describes as “a story about the two most powerful institutions in the United States, the government and the press, ganging up on an innocent man. It’s Kafka.”
With Hatfill’s face splashed all over the news, strangers on the street stared. Some asked for his autograph. Hatfill was humiliated. Embarrassed to be recognized, he stopped going to the gym. He stopped visiting friends, concerned that the FBI would harass them, too. Soon, he stopped going out in public altogether. Once an energetic and ambitious professional who reveled in 14-hour workdays, Hatfill now found himself staring at the walls all day. Television became his steady companion.
“I’d never really watched the news before,” Hatfill says, “and now I’m seeing my name all over the place and all these idiots like Geraldo Rivera asking, ‘Is this the anthrax animal? Is this the guy who murdered innocent people?’ You might as well have hooked me up to a battery. It was sanctioned torture.”
Hatfill decided to redecorate Boo’s condo as a distraction from the news. He repainted, hung wallpaper, learned to install crown molding. He also began drinking.
An afternoon glass of red wine became three or more. At night, Hatfill would stay up late, dipping Copenhagen tobacco and getting drunk while waiting in a smoldering rage for his name to appear on television, until finally he would pass out and wake up gagging on the tobacco that had caught in his throat, or stumble around and “crash into something.” Boo would help him to bed. After a few anguished hours of sleep, Hatfill would see her off to work, doze past noon, then rise to repeat the cycle, closing the blinds to block the sun and the video camera the FBI had installed on a pole across the street. For a while, Boo bought newspapers, so the two of them could fume over the latest lies that had been published about him. But soon he asked her to stop bringing them home, because he couldn’t take it anymore.
STEVEN HATFILL WAS BORN ON October 24, 1953, and raised with a younger sister in Mattoon, Illinois. His father designed and sold electrical substations. His mother dabbled in interior decorating. He studied piano, soloed a glider at 14, and wrestled for the varsity team in high school. By his own admission, he was a poor student. “I never took a book home,” Hatfill says. But he read plenty on his own, especially about science and the military. In 1971, he enrolled at Southwestern College, a small liberal-arts school in Kansas affiliated with the Methodist Church, where he majored in biology and signed up for a Marine Corps summer leadership course with dreams of piloting jet fighters. But when his vision was measured at less than 20/20, he opted out of the program rather than accept a navigator slot. Midway through his sophomore year, he left college and went to Africa.
Hatfill says he always wanted to help people in the developing world. He got his chance at a remote Methodist mission hospital in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he learned blood chemistry, parasitology, and basic hematology in a rudimentary lab. A year later, he returned to the United States; he graduated from Southwestern in 1975, and signed up for the Army.
He took a direct-enlistment option to join the Green Berets, attended parachute school, trained as a radio operator, and was assigned to the Army’s 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When a back injury eventually disqualified him from serving with an operational A-Team, Hatfill reentered civilian life. He joined the National Guard, married the daughter of a Methodist surgeon he had worked with in Africa, and returned to Mattoon to work the night shift as a security guard at a radiator factory. His marriage soon faltered. After they separated, his wife delivered their only child, a girl. Hatfill would not see his daughter for 27 years.
From 1978 to 1994, Hatfill lived in Africa. He earned a medical degree from the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Salisbury, Rhodesia, and saw combat as a volunteer medic with the territorial forces of the Rhodesian army, eventually being attached to a unit called the Selous Scouts, which was renowned for its ruthlessness in battle. While he was in Rhodesia, Hatfill says, a truck he was riding in was ambushed by Marxist insurgents. Leaping from the truck, he landed on his face, badly breaking his nose. For decades afterward he would have trouble breathing—which is why, in September 2001, he finally elected to have surgery on his sinuses, an operation that would lead doctors to prescribe him Cipro, to guard against infection.
Following his medical internship in Africa, he spent 14 months as the resident physician at an Antarctic research base. He went on to obtain three master’s degrees in the hard sciences from two South African universities and finish a doctoral thesis in molecular cell biology that described a new marker for radiation-induced leukemia.
Hatfill returned once more to the United States in 1994. He painted barns for six months on his father’s horse farm before taking a one-year fellowship to study a cancer protein at Oxford University. He parlayed the Oxford fellowship into a job researching cancer, HIV, and Lyme disease at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In September 1997, Hatfill accepted a two-year fellowship as a medical doctor and hematologist to study Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers at USAMRIID. He was earning $45,000 a year.
Part of his research involved fatal viral experiments on macaque monkeys. Sometimes, with permission from staff veterinarians, Hatfill would slip the animals Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to assuage his own guilt over helping cause them harm. He found his USAMRIID assignment both anguishing and rewarding. Some months, he never took a day off. “It’s altruism, in a way,” Hatfill says. “You’re trying to find cures for diseases to help people who have no other means of help. It was a privilege just to be there.”
THE FBI WOULD later speculate that Hatfill had somehow gained access to anthrax cultures while working at USAMRIID, perhaps through an inadvertently unlocked door. Drawing in part on the work of the Vassar professor Foster and the anti-bioweapons activist Rosenberg, federal investigators began trying to connect bits of circumstantial evidence, assembling them into a picture of Hatfill as the anthrax killer.
He’d been in Britain and Florida, respectively, when two letters with fake anthrax were mailed from those locations. His girlfriend was Malaysian-born—and a hoax package had been sent from Malaysia to a Microsoft office in Nevada. He’d been in Africa during a major anthrax outbreak in the late 1970s. Rhodesia’s capital city has that suburb called Greendale—and, as noted, “Greendale School” was the return address on the anthrax letters sent to Daschle and Leahy. He’d written that unpublished novel, which Don Foster had unearthed, about a bioterror attack on Washington. He was close to Bill Patrick, widely recognized as the father of America’s bioweapons program, whom he’d met at a conference on bioterror some years earlier. And, of course, he’d taken Cipro just before the anthrax attacks.
The government became convinced all of it had to amount to something.
It didn’t.
The FBI’s sleuthing had produced zero witnesses, no firm evidence, nothing to show that Hatfill had ever touched anthrax, let alone killed anyone with it. So thin was the bureau’s case that Hatfill was never even indicted. But that didn’t stop the FBI from focusing on him to the virtual exclusion of other suspects.
In law enforcement, there is a syndrome known as “detective myopia.” Former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates told me he suspected that FBI agents had succumbed to this condition, becoming so focused on Hatfill that they lost their objectivity. “This mostly happens when the case is important and there is pressure to solve it,” Gates says. “In the case of the FBI, the pressure most certainly can be, and is, political. When a congressman may be a victim of anthrax—well, the case needs to be solved or the suspect made impotent.”
Special Agent Harp, who initially headed the anthrax investigation, conceded after Hatfill sued the government in August 2003 that the FBI had been sensitive to accusations that it had stumbled in other high-profile investigations, and that it had consciously sought to assure the public that it was working hard to crack the anthrax murders. Part of providing such assurance involved actively communicating with news reporters. Questioned under oath, Harp admitted to serving as a confidential source for more than a dozen journalists during the case, but he insisted that he had never leaked privileged information about Hatfill, or anyone else for that matter.
Hatfill’s attorney has his doubts. After taking Harp’s deposition, Connolly says, he went home and half-jokingly told his wife, “We’re building a bomb shelter. If these are the guys in charge of our national security, we’re all in serious trouble.”
In their own depositions, both John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller, the FBI director, said they had expressed concern to underlings about news leaks that appeared to single out and smear Hatfill. Both, however, denied any knowledge of who specifically was doing the leaking.
In August of 2002, following the searches of his apartment, Hatfill held two press conferences to proclaim his innocence. He offered to undergo, and eventually took, blood and handwriting tests in an attempt to help clear his name. “I want to look my fellow Americans directly in the eye and declare to them, ‘I am not the anthrax killer,’” Hatfill told reporters. “I know nothing about the anthrax attacks. I had absolutely nothing to do with this terrible crime. My life is being destroyed by arrogant government bureaucrats who are peddling groundless innuendo and half-information about me to gullible reporters, who in turn repeat this to the public in the guise of news.”
One newspaper reporter even called Boo’s former in-laws in Canada, inquiring whether Hatfill had had anything to do with the death of her late husband—who had succumbed to a stroke a year before Boo met Hatfill. The call, Boo says, prompted her former brother-in-law to fly to Washington and demand, “What are you doing, living with this murderer?”
Months passed with Hatfill cloistered in Boo’s condominium, watching television and drinking alone. He binged on chocolate and fried chicken, putting on weight, growing too lethargic and depressed to even get on the bathroom scale. He developed heart palpitations. He wondered whether he was losing his mind.
Remembering what her boyfriend was like back then, Boo grows emotional. “I got tired of cleaning up your vomit,” she tells him over dinner at an Indian restaurant down the street from her condo. Tears stream down her cheeks. Hatfill chokes up too, the trauma still raw nearly eight years later.
“Every human being has to feel a part of a tribe,” he explains. “It’s programmed into us. And you have to feel that you’re contributing to something. They tried to take all that away from me. No tribe wanted me. I just didn’t feel of value to anything or anyone. I had Boo. Boo was my only tribe.”
The next morning, driving through Georgetown on the way to visit one of his friends in suburban Maryland, I ask Hatfill how close he came to suicide. The muscles in his jaw tighten.
“That was never an option,” Hatfill says, staring straight ahead. “If I would’ve killed myself, I would’ve been automatically judged by the press and the FBI to be guilty.”
SOME JOURNALISTS became convinced there was plenty pointing to Hatfill’s guilt. Among those beating the drum early and loud, in the summer of 2002, was Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times. At least initially, Kristof stopped short of naming Hatfill publicly, instead branding him with the sinister-sounding pseudonym “Mr. Z.” Without identifying his sources, in a July column Kristof wrote:
If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. But he is a true-blue American with close ties to the U.S. Defense Department, the C.I.A. and the American biodefense program. On the other hand, he was once caught with a girlfriend in a biohazard “hot suite” at Fort Detrick, surrounded only by blushing germs.
With many experts buzzing about Mr. Z behind his back, it’s time for the F.B.I. to make a move: either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion.
One of those threads, Kristof reported, pointed to the possibility that Mr. Z was a genocidal racist who had carried out germ warfare to slaughter innocent black Africans. Kristof addressed his column directly to the FBI:
Have you examined whether Mr. Z has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak among humans ever recorded, the one that sickened more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978–80? There is evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian Army fighting against black guerrillas, and Mr. Z has claimed that he participated in the white army’s much-feared Selous Scouts. Could rogue elements of the American military have backed the Rhodesian Army in anthrax and cholera attacks against blacks?
Kristof didn’t mention that the majority of soldiers in the Rhodesian army, and in Hatfill’s unit, were black; or that many well-respected scientists who examined the evidence concluded that the Rhodesian anthrax outbreak emerged naturally when cattle herds went unvaccinated during a turbulent civil war. Kristof also failed to mention that Mr. Z had served in that war as a lowly private. To have been involved in some sort of top-secret Rhodesian germ-weapons program “would’ve been like a Pakistani army private being brought in to work on a project at Los Alamos,” Hatfill says today.
Kristof wrote that Mr. Z had shown “evasion” in repeated FBI polygraph examinations. He also claimed that following the anthrax attacks, Mr. Z had accessed an “isolated residence” that Kristof described as a possible safe house for American intelligence operatives where, the columnist reported, “Mr. Z gave Cipro to people who visited it.” Other journalists would later describe this mysterious residence as a “remote cabin,” a kind of Ted Kaczynski–style hideout where a deranged scientist could easily have prepared anthrax for mailing.
In fact, the “cabin” was a three-bedroom weekend home with a Jacuzzi on 40 acres of land in rural Virginia owned by a longtime friend of Hatfill’s, George R. Borsari Jr., an avuncular Washington communications lawyer and retired Army lieutenant colonel. Borsari says he found speculation that his place had been a haven for spies or bioterrorists laughable.
When an FBI agent asked Borsari if he would allow a search of the property, Borsari said no. “I told him, ‘I’m not going to be a part of your publicity game,’” Borsari says. No search was ever conducted, but by then the damage to Hatfill had been done.
In late 2001, before being publicly implicated in the anthrax attacks, Hatfill had attended a weekend dinner party at Borsari’s Virginia retreat along with more than a dozen other guests, including some of Hatfill’s co-workers at the defense contractor where he was then employed. Borsari, who’d read a recent article about anthrax-fighting drugs, said he jokingly asked Hatfill, “Hey, by the way, we’re your friends. How come we don’t have any Cipro?” Hatfill advised him to go to a hospital if he felt he’d been exposed to anthrax. In subsequent news reports, Hatfill was alleged to have warned everyone to begin taking Cipro, as if to suggest that another attack was imminent. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Borsari later told me. “But, apparently, they did.”
Though he cannot prove it, Hatfill says he believes that a friend-turned-political-enemy heard about the Cipro conversation from a co-worker who was at Borsari’s house that night, misconstrued it, and passed it on to federal agents. The same former friend, Hatfill asserts, also was responsible for undermining his efforts to secure a higher security clearance that would have enabled him to work on top-secret CIA projects when he was employed at SAIC.
The former friend, who works today at a high level within the intelligence community and requested anonymity after I contacted him, denies Hatfill’s version of events. He says he never approached the FBI regarding Hatfill, but would not discuss whether he ever talked with agents about him, suggesting instead that simmering workplace conflicts between Hatfill and former colleagues at USAMRIID could have prompted someone there to “drop a dime to the bureau.” “Steve always saw himself as having the purest of motivations. I don’t think that was always apparent to everyone around him,” the former friend says. “There’s a line from Tom Jones, ‘It’s not enough to be good. You have to be seen as being good.’ I don’t think Steve ever learned that lesson.”
Though the two have not spoken in more than a decade, he says he still regards Hatfill warmly.
The feelings are hardly mutual. Hatfill believes that his former friend helped perpetuate false and damaging rumors about him. As evidence for this assertion, Hatfill says he once confided to him about having taken a shower with a female colleague inside the decontamination area of a USAMRIID lab. The story, according to Hatfill, was a fiction meant to amuse and titillate. He says he told the story to no one other than this one friend. As the FBI began focusing on Hatfill in July 2002, The Times’s Nicholas Kristof would report Hatfill’s fictitious laboratory dalliance as fact.
Hatfill would later sue The New York Times for that and a host of other alleged libels. The case would eventually be dismissed, after a judge ruled that Hatfill was a public figure. To successfully sue for defamation, public figures must prove that a publication acted with “actual malice.”
IN LATE 2002, news bulletins reported that either an unnamed tipster or bloodhounds, depending on which report was to be believed, had led FBI agents to a pond in the Maryland countryside about eight miles from Hatfill’s former apartment. There, divers discovered what was described as a makeshift laboratory “glove box.” Reports speculated that Hatfill, a certified SCUBA diver, had used the airtight device to stuff anthrax microbes into envelopes underwater to avoid contaminating himself. The Washington Post reported that “vials and gloves wrapped in plastic” also were recovered from the water. Tests to determine the presence of anthrax produced “conflicting results,” The Post reported, yet so “compelling” were these finds that the FBI would later pay $250,000 to have the pond drained in search of more evidence. Nothing retrieved from the pond ever linked Hatfill, or anyone else, to the murders. According to some news reports, the laboratory “glove box” turned out to be a homemade turtle trap. But the pond story helped keep alive the public perception that FBI agents were hot on the trail, with Hatfill in their sights.
At Connolly’s urging, Hatfill reluctantly agreed to a few informal, one-on-one get-togethers with journalists to show them he was no monster. The effort did little to stanch the flow of negative reporting. Two weeks after Hatfill met with CBS correspondent Jim Stewart, in May 2003, Stewart aired a story on the CBS Evening News. The anchor, Dan Rather, read the lead-in:
Rather: It has been more than a year and half now since the string of deadly anthrax attacks in this country, and still no arrests, even though investigators believe they know who the culprit is and where he is. CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart is on the case and has the latest.
Stewart: Bioweapons researcher Dr. Steven Hatfill, sources confirm, remains the FBI’s number-one suspect in the attacks, even though round-the-clock surveillance and extensive searches have failed to develop more than what sources describe as a “highly circumstantial” case.
And now one possible outcome, sources suggest, is that the government could bring charges against Hatfill unrelated to the anthrax attacks at all, if they become convinced that’s the only way to stop future incidents. Not unlike, for example, the income-tax evasion charges finally brought against Al Capone, when evidence of racketeering proved elusive.
After watching Stewart’s report that night, Hatfill recalls, “I just lost it.” He left an angry message on Stewart’s voice mail, vowing to sue. It was, as Hatfill looks back, the last straw. “I just decided I wasn’t going to let it get to me anymore. Screw ’em,” Hatfill says. “I mean, what more could the press and the FBI do to me than they already had?”
Plenty, as it turned out.
Boo was driving Hatfill to a paint store a week later when FBI agents in a Dodge Durango, trying to keep up with them, blew through a red light in a school zone with children present. Hatfill says he got out of his car to snap a photo of the offending agents and give them a piece of his mind. The Durango sped away—running over his right foot. Hatfill declined an ambulance ride to the hospital; unemployed, he had no medical insurance. When Washington police arrived, they issued him a ticket for “walking to create a hazard.” The infraction carried a $5 fine. Hatfill would contest the ticket in court and lose. The agent who ran over his foot was never charged.
“People think they’re free in this country,” Hatfill says. “Don’t kid yourself. This is a police state. The government can pretty much do whatever it wants.”
Sitting alone day after day, Boo’s condo by now completely redecorated, Hatfill realized that he needed something else to keep his mind occupied while waiting for his day in court. He decided to act as though he were starting medical school all over. He dug out his old textbooks and began studying. The hours flew by.
“I was back on familiar ground, something I knew and understood. It was therapy,” Hatfill says. “There wasn’t any doubt in my mind that there would be a payday eventually,” from lawsuits against those who had destroyed his reputation. “At that point, it became a waiting game for me. Everything else became tolerable.”
One afternoon, Hatfill was reading a scientific publication about problems researchers were having in developing promising new antibiotics, when he had a life-changing thought. Many antibiotics and anti-cancer agents, he knew, are synthesized from plants or derived from fungi found in jungles and rainforests. Instead of transporting samples to the lab, why not take the lab to the samples? The concept so excited him that Hatfill ran out and bought modeling clay to begin crafting his vision of a floating laboratory. FBI agents tailed him to a local hobby shop and back.
IN THE AFTERMATH of the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people, Hatfill joined a relief effort and flew to Sri Lanka in early 2005. Tending to the sick and injured reminded him that he still had something to contribute to the world. Finally, he says, he stopped worrying about the press and the FBI. He stopped constantly looking over his shoulder.
By early 2007, after fresh investigators were brought in to reexamine evidence collected in the anthrax case, the FBI came to believe what Hatfill had been saying all along: he’d never had access to the anthrax at USAMRIID; he was a virus guy. The FBI, meanwhile, began to focus on someone who had enjoyed complete access: senior microbiologist Bruce Edward Ivins.
Ivins had spent most of his career at USAMRIID, working with anthrax. Agents had even sought his advice and scientific expertise early in their investigation of Hatfill. Now they subjected Ivins to the same harsh treatment they’d given Hatfill, placing Ivins under 24-hour surveillance, digging into his past, and telling him he was a murder suspect. Soon Ivins was banned from the labs where he had labored for 28 years. In July 2008, following a voluntary two-week stay in a psychiatric clinic for treatment of depression and anxiety, Ivins went home and downed a fatal dose of Tylenol. He was 62.
Less than two weeks later, the Justice Department officially exonerated Steven Hatfill. Six years had passed since he was first named a person of interest.
As it had done with Hatfill, the press dissected the pathology of Ivins’s life, linking him, however speculatively, to the murders. Ivins was a devout Catholic, which could’ve explained why anthrax was sent to two pro-choice senators, Daschle and Leahy. Reports said that Ivins harbored homicidal urges, especially toward women. He had purportedly been obsessed with a particular sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, ever since being rebuffed by one of its members while attending the University of Cincinnati, which could’ve explained why the anthrax letters were mailed from a box near a storage facility used by the sorority’s Princeton chapter. Ivins, of course, was no longer alive to defend himself. But in him, the FBI had found a suspect against whom tangible evidence existed.
Ivins had been the sole custodian of a large flask of highly purified anthrax spores genetically linked to those found in the letters. He had allegedly submitted purposely misleading lab data to the FBI in an attempt to hide the fact that the strain of anthrax used in the attacks was a genetic match with the anthrax in his possession. He had been unable to provide a good explanation for the many late nights he’d put in at the lab, working alone, just before the attacks. Agents found that he had been under intense pressure at USAMRIID to produce an anthrax vaccine for U.S. troops. A few days after the anthrax letters were postmarked, Ivins, according to the FBI, had sent an e-mail to a former colleague, who has never been publicly identified, warning: “Bin Laden terrorists for sure have anthrax and sarin gas,” and have “just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans.” The language was similar to the anthrax letters that warned, “We have this anthrax … Death to America … Death to Israel.”
Following his suicide, some of Ivins’s friends insisted that the FBI had pressured him into doing what Hatfill would not. Ivins’s own attorney, Paul F. Kemp, disagrees. “Dr. Ivins had a host of psychological problems that he was grappling with, that existed long before the anthrax letters were mailed, and long after,” Kemp told me.
Though Hatfill’s apartment in Frederick was less than a quarter mile from Ivins’s modest home on Military Road, and both men worked at Fort Detrick at the same time, Hatfill says the two never met. Hatfill was surprised when the FBI ultimately pinned the anthrax murders on a fellow American scientist.
“I thought it would eventually be proven that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks,” he says.
IN THE YEARS since the attacks, postal officials have equipped more than 270 processing and distribution centers with sensors that “sniff” the air around virtually every piece of incoming mail to detect deadly biohazards. The sensors have never picked up so much as a whiff of anthrax, according to a Postal Inspection Service spokesman, Peter Rendina. “Your mail,” Rendina says, “is safer today than at any other time in our history.”
The same, Hatfill believes, cannot be said about American civil liberties. “I was a guy who trusted the government,” he says. “Now, I don’t trust a damn thing they do.” He trusts reporters even less, dismissing them as little more than lapdogs for law enforcement.
The media’s general willingness to report what was spoon-fed to them, in an effort to reassure a frightened public that an arrest was not far off, is somewhat understandable considering the level of fear that gripped the nation following 9/11. But that doesn’t “justify the sliming of Steven Hatfill,” says Edward Wasserman, who is the Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, in Virginia. “If anything, it’s a reminder that an unquestioning media serves as a potential lever of power to be activated by the government, almost at will.”
In February 2008, Reggie B. Walton, the U.S. District Court judge presiding over Hatfill’s case against the government, announced that he had reviewed secret internal memos on the status of the FBI’s investigation and could find “not a scintilla of evidence that would indicate that Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with” the anthrax attacks.
Four months later, the Justice Department quietly settled with Hatfill for $5.82 million. “It allowed Doc to start over,” Connolly, his lawyer, says.
For Hatfill, rebuilding remains painful and slow. He enters post offices only if he absolutely must, careful to show his face to surveillance cameras so that he can’t be accused of mailing letters surreptitiously. He tries to document his whereabouts at all times, in case he should ever need an alibi. He is permanently damaged, Hatfill says. Yet he still professes to love America. “My country didn’t do this to me,” he is quick to point out. “A bloated, incompetent bureaucracy and a broken press did. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today if I didn’t still love my country.”
Much of Hatfill’s time these days is devoted to teaching life-saving medical techniques to military personnel bound for combat. They are his “band of brothers,” and the hours he spends with them, Hatfill says, are among his happiest. He also serves as an adjunct associate professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University.
Then there is his boat.
Hatfill has committed $1.5 million to building his floating genetic laboratory, a futuristic-looking vessel replete with a helicopter, an operating room to treat rural indigenous peoples, and a Cordon Bleu–trained chef. Hatfill intends to assemble a scientific team and cruise the Amazon for undiscovered or little-known plants and animals. From these organisms, he hopes to develop new medications for leukemia, and for tuberculosis and other diseases that have been growing increasingly resistant to existing antibiotics. Any useful treatments, he says, will be licensed to pharmaceutical companies on the condition that developing nations receive them at cost. Hatfill hopes to christen the boat within two years. Scientists at USAMRIID, where the FBI once suspected him of stealing anthrax, have expressed tentative interest in helping him mount his expedition.
IN ADDITION TO SUING the Justice Department for violating his privacy and The New York Times for defaming him, Hatfill also brought a libel lawsuit against Don Foster, Vanity Fair, and Reader’s Digest, which had reprinted Foster’s article. The lawsuit led to a settlement whose dollar amount all parties have agreed to keep confidential. The news media, which had for so long savaged Hatfill, dutifully reported his legal victories, but from where he stands, that hardly balanced things on the ledger sheet of journalistic fairness.
Three weeks after the FBI exonerated Hatfill, in the summer of 2008, Nicholas Kristof apologized to him in The New York Times for any distress his columns may have caused. The role of the news media, Kristof wrote on August 28, is “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Instead, I managed to afflict the afflicted.”
Many others who raised critical questions about Hatfill have remained silent in the wake of his exoneration. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, the molecular biologist who spurred the FBI to pursue Hatfill, retired two years ago. Through a former colleague, she declined to be interviewed for this article. Jim Stewart, the television correspondent whose report compared Hatfill to Al Capone, left CBS in 2006. Stewart admitted in a deposition to having relied, for his report, on four confidential FBI sources. When I reached the former newsman at his home in Florida, Stewart said he couldn’t talk about Hatfill because he was entertaining houseguests. When I asked when might be a good time to call back, he said, “There isn’t a good time,” and hung up.
“The entire unhappy episode” is how Don Foster, the Vassar professor who wrote the Vanity Fair article, sums up Hatfill’s story and his own role in it. Foster says he no longer consults for the FBI. “The anthrax case was it for me,” he told me recently. “I’m happier teaching. Like Steven Hatfill, I would prefer to be a private person.”
Foster says he never intended to imply that Hatfill was a murderer, yet continues to stand by his reporting as “inaccurate in only minor details.” I asked if he had any regrets about what he’d written.
“On what grounds?” he asked.
“The heartache it caused Hatfill. The heartache it caused you and Vanity Fair.”
Foster pondered the question, then said, “I don’t know Steven Hatfill. I don’t know his heartache. But anytime an American citizen, a journalist, a scientist, a scholar, is made the object of unfair or inaccurate public scrutiny, it’s unfortunate. It’s part of a free press to set that right.”
This past February, the Justice Department formally closed its investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, releasing more than 2,500 pages of documents, many of them heavily redacted, buttressing the government’s assertion that Bruce Ivins was solely responsible for the anthrax letters.
When I asked FBI spokesperson Debra Weierman how much money had been spent chasing Hatfill, she said the bureau was unable to provide such an accounting. She would neither confirm nor deny that the FBI ever opened any administrative inquiries into the news leaks that had defamed him. The FBI, she said, was unwilling to publicly discuss Hatfill in any capacity, “out of privacy considerations for Dr. Hatfill.” Weierman referred me instead to what she described as an “abundance of information” on the FBI’s Web site.
Information about the anthrax case is indeed abundant on the bureau’s Web site, with dozens of documents touting the FBI’s efforts to solve the murders. Included is a transcript of a press conference held in August 2008, a month after Ivins’s suicide, in which federal authorities initially laid out the evidence they had amassed against him. But beyond a handful of questions asked by reporters that day, in which his last name is repeatedly misspelled, and a few scant paragraphs in the 96-page executive summary of the case, there is no mention anywhere on the FBI’s Web site of Steven Hatfill.
David Freed is a novelist, screenwriter, and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who covered both Operation Desert Storm and the Rodney King riots for the Los Angeles Times.
U.S. government gave $3.7 million grant to Wuhan lab at cent
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To Deny the "Lab Leak" COVID Theory, the NYT and WPost Use Dubious and Conflicted Sources. A bizarre and abrupt reversal by scientists regarding COVID's origins, along with clear conflicts of interest, create serious doubts about their integrity. Yet major news outlets keep relying on them.
by Glenn Greenwald
Dec 5, 2021
Peter Daszak, President of EcoHeath Alliance, speaking in 2017 (Wikipedia)
That COVID-19 infected humanity due to a zoonotic leap from a "wet market” in Wuhan — rather than a leak from a lab in the same Chinese city — was declared unquestionable truth at the start of the pandemic. For a full year, anyone dissenting from this narrative was deemed so irresponsible that they were banned from large social media platforms, accused of spreading "disinformation.” No debate about COVID's origins was permitted. It had been settled by The Science™. Every rational person who believed in science, by definition, immediately accepted at the start of the pandemic that COVID made a natural leap from bats or pangolins; that it may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan which just so happens to gather, study and manipulate novel coronaviruses in bats was officially declared a deranged conspiracy theory.
The reason this consensus was so quickly consecrated was that a group of more than two dozen scientists published a letter in the prestigious science journal Lancet in February, 2020 — while very little was known about SARS-CoV-2 — didactically declaring “that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The possibility that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as a "conspiracy theory,” the by-product of “rumours and misinformation” which, they strongly implied, was an unfair and possibly racist attack on “the science and health professionals of China.”
Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19, by Charles Calisher, February 19, 2020. The Lancet.
For months, that letter shaped the permissible range of debate regarding the origins of COVID. Or, more accurately, it ensured that there was no debate permitted. The Science™ concluded that COVID was a zoonotic virus that naturally leaped from non-human animal to human, and any questioning of this decree was deemed an attack on The Science™.
That Lancet letter has fallen into disrepute due to the key role in its publication played by one of its signatories, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance. To say that Daszak had a gigantic but undisclosed conflict of interest in disseminating this narrative about the natural origins of COVID is to understate the case. Daszak had received millions of dollars in grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to conduct research into coronaviruses in bats, and EcoHealth awarded part of that grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab which would be the leading suspect, by far, for any COVID lab leak.
Daszak's enormous self-interest in leading the world to believe that a lab leak was impossible is obvious. It would be a likely career-ending blow to his reputation if the Wuhan laboratory to which EcoHealth had provided funding for coronavirus bat research was responsible for the escape of a virus that has killed millions of people around the world and caused enduring suffering among countless others due to lockdowns and economic shutdowns.
In July of this year, The Lancet published a new letter from the same group which signed that seminal letter in February of last year. The July 2021 letter included two fundamentally new additions. First, the language about COVID's origins was radically softened from the smug certainty of the February letter that closed debate to humble uncertainty given the lack of proof. While continuing to affirm a belief that COVID was naturally occurring (“our working view” is “that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in nature and not in a laboratory"), they moved far away from the definitive posture of that original letter, acknowledging that “opinions are neither data nor conclusions” and urging further investigation on what they called “the critical question we must address now": namely, “how did SARS-CoV-2 reach the human population?” In other words, after telling the world in February that any questioning of the zoonotic origin was a malicious "conspiracy theory,” they now acknowledge it is “the critical question we must now address.”
The other major change was that this July Lancet letter included what the February letter shamefully omitted: namely, the key fact that Daszak's “remuneration is paid solely in the form of a salary from EcoHealth Alliance,” and that EcoHealth had received funding from NIH to study coronaviruses in bats, and used some of that funding to support research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This disclosed conflict of interest about Daszak was included in the new July, 2021 letter as well as a separate “addendum” called “competing interests and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.” No explanation was provided about why these "competing interests” on the part of Daszak were not disclosed in that crucial, debate-closing February letter in the The Lancet.
Science, not speculation, is essential to determine how SARS-CoV-2 reached humans, by Charles H. Calisher, July 5, 2021. The Lancet.
Addendum: competing interests and the origins of SARS-CoV-2, by Editors of The Lancet. The Lancet.
The U.S. Government began aggressively distancing itself from EcoHealth this year. In an October 20, 2021 letter to Congress, the NIH argued that while the coronavirus strains studied by the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth's grant “are not and could not have become SARS-CoV-2,” it argued that EcoHealth violated the terms of the grant by failing to notify NIH of “unusual results" from its research that could make the viruses it was studying more dangerous. They also accused EcoHealth of failing to promptly report the ongoing results of their experiments.
All of this led to an unraveling of the Official Consensus. In May of this year — fifteen months after The Lancet pronounced the debate closed — Facebook reversed its policy of banning anyone who suggested that the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab. The reversal came, said the Silicon Valley giant, “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin”. This about-face came after The Wall Street Journal reported days earlier that U.S. intelligence sources claim that “three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.”
Weeks later, President Biden “ordered intelligence officials to 'redouble' efforts to investigate the origins of Covid-19, including the theory that it came from a laboratory in China.” The president's statement noted that “the US intelligence community was split on whether it came from a lab accident or emerged from human contact with an infected animal.” Suddenly, mainstream outlets such as The New York Times began publishing claims that, just months earlier, were officially declared "disinformation” and resulted in removal from social media platforms: “some scientists have argued that it’s possible SARS-CoV-2 was the result of genetic engineering experiments or simply escaped from a lab in an accident,” said the Paper of Record in October. The Official Consensus had undergone a 180-degree turn in the course of just over a year. "Lab leak” went from insane conspiracy theory that must be censored to serious possibility that must be investigated.
As a result of all this, Daszak's reputation and credibility are crippled, and rightfully so. The once-revered scientist was profiled two weeks ago in Science under the headline “PROPHET IN PURGATORY.” It noted that while his “journey from oracle to pariah has appalled many colleagues,” many scientists — often loath to openly attack each other's ethics — insist that his wounds are both justified and self-inflicted. Even those who believe the vilification of Daszak has been excessive nonetheless acknowledge that EcoHealth was far from honest about questions central to understanding this worldwide pandemic:
That Science profile, similar to the one from The New York Times acknowledging that the "lab leak” is a real possibility, noted that documents unearthed by FOIA litigation from The Intercept call into serious doubt the months of denials by Daszak and EcoHealth, as well as from Dr. Fauci, that funding provided by NIH to the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth was used for "gain of function” research — meaning research designed to manipulate pathogens to make them more contagious and/or dangerous to humans:
Despite the collapse of Daszak's reputation and credibility — due both to his undisclosed conflicts of interest and repeated deceit and even lying — The New York Times continues to cite him as one of its primary sources on the question of COVID's origins. Just two weeks ago, the paper published an article designed to affirm the claim that evidence had once again emerged showing that COVID was naturally occurring. “The first known patient sickened with the coronavirus was a vendor in a large Wuhan animal market,” wrote the Paper of Record about a new paper in Science, arguing that these findings “will revive, though certainly not settle, the debate over whether the pandemic started with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market, a leak from a Wuhan virology lab or some other way.” It had been previously suggested that the first case of COVID infection was found in an accountant who lived miles away from the wet market, suggesting that the wet market was likely not the source. But this new finding — claiming that the first patient was a wet market vendor, not the accountant — would further bolster the view that it has natural origins.
Notably, The Times continues to acknowledge that there is open debate about the origins of COVID, a fact that was deemed off-limits for almost a full year after the pandemic began. “The search for the origins of the greatest public health catastrophe in a century has fueled geopolitical battles, with few new facts emerging in recent months to resolve the question,” it said. But to dismiss the "lab leak” theory as increasingly unlikely, it heavily featured one scientist who insists that this new study provides the strongest evidence yet that COVID was naturally evolving. Who is this source? None other than Peter Daszek. The Times gave Daszak — the completely discredited, conflict-plagued scientist — multiple paragraphs to posture as an objective source to tell readers that the lab leak theory was increasingly unlikely and that the wet market origin was almost certainly true:
While The Times noted in one fleeting subsequent paragraph that their featured source Daszak "has been one of the strongest critics of the lab-leak theory” and that “he and his organization, EcoHealth Alliance, have taken heat for research collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” it does not remotely signal to readers just how invested he is in denying the lab leak possibility. Indeed, there are few people on earth more eager to show — for their own selfish reasons — that COVID did not come from the Wuhan lab than Peter Daszak.
Despite that, and despite the fact that he has been repeatedly caught misleading, The Times continues to cite him as some sort of credible source to convince readers not to believe the lab leak theory. And that one paragraph about his role in this research does not come close to making clear to Times readers just how devastating it would be for Daszak personally if it turned out that the lab leak theory were true. Of all the scientists in the world, why would The Times possibly rely on one of the most conflicted people on the planet to present as an expert on the validity of these various findings about COVID's origins?
A November 18 article from The Washington Post used similarly questionable tactics for the same goal. The headline of that article tells the story of what The Post set out to do: “Prominent scientist who said lab-leak theory of covid-19 origin should be probed now believes evidence points to Wuhan market.” It begins: “The location of early coronavirus infections in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, suggests the virus probably spread to humans from a market where wild and domestically farmed animals were sold and butchered, according to a peer-reviewed article published Thursday in the journal Science,” citing the same study as the one touted by The Times.
The Post acknowledges that there is widespread criticism among scientists of this new study. “'It is based on fragmentary information and to a large degree, hearsay,' David A. Relman, a professor of microbiology at Stanford University, said in an email after reading an embargoed copy. 'In general, there is no way of verifying much of what he describes, and then concludes'.” Yet the most definitive view of this new study in the Post article comes from Robert F. Garry Jr., a virologist described as “one of the most vocal proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis.” To Garry, the debate is now closed: “Mike’s piece shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact the Huanan market was the epicenter of the outbreak.”
It is remarkable that a scientist like Dr. Garry would be so emphatic that the debate is now closed — the new study “shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact the Huanan market was the epicenter of the outbreak” — given how many scientists continue to insist that the question is far from answered. So who is this Dr. Garry, eager to proclaim the debate closed? The Post does not provide the key facts to enable the reader to assess his credibility. All we know from the Post article is that he is “a virologist at Tulane University and one of the most vocal proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis.” But there is so much more to him than that.
An August article from The Bulletin of Atomic Sciences by the science writer Nicholas Wade does provide some key information. That article begins by noting what was until recently, thanks to that Daszak-led Lancet letter, a prohibited view: “Some 20 months after the Covid-19 pandemic first broke out, its origins remain obscure.” Then this article explains this remarkable series of events that led to the rapid disappearance of the early view of many scientists that COVID was man-made.
When Dr. Fauci's emails were made public in June, the archive contained a discussion of a conference of scientists held early on in the pandemic. That conference was hastily arranged by Fauci and his key British counterpart due to a January 31, 2020 email Fauci received from a group of scientists stating they had studied the SARS2 virus and determined it was man-made. This was days before the Daszak-led letter had consecrated the zoonotic theory as Truth. But these scientists held exactly the opposite view as the one The Lancet letter would impose, and this Fauci-ordered conference “was held to discuss the unanimous view of a group of virologists that the SARS2 virus had been manipulated in a lab.” The day before that conference, one of the scientists, Kristian G. Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research institute in California, emailed Fauci to tell him “that the virus seemed to be man-made.”
And yet, for reasons never explained, two of those scientists radically reversed their views, and signed onto Daszak's Lancet letter that decreed the lab leak theory to be a deranged "conspiracy theory” based on “disinformation.” As The Bulletin explains, Dr. Andersen had written on January 31 to Dr. Fauci that “the unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome.” That observation, explains The Bulletin, was “referring presumably to a genetic component known as a furin cleavage site, which greatly enhances the virus’s infectivity." Dr. Andersen continued: “so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”
The "Bob” referenced in that email as one of the scientists who viewed “the genome” of the virus to be "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory” is Dr. Robert F. Garry Jr., the virologist quoted in the recent Post article as pronouncing: “Mike’s piece shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact the Huanan market was the epicenter of the outbreak.”
That January 31 email, for obvious reasons, sent Fauci and other NIH officials into a panic — or what The Bulletin describes as “a whirlwind of activity.” Fauci ordered his top aides to immediately investigate whether any NIH funds were used for research in the Wuhan Lab that manipulated coronaviruses. They convened a conference of carefully selected scientists, and Fauci recruited Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, a large medical research charity in London. As The Bulletin notes, the union of Fauci and Farrar in this investigation created “a notable imbalance of power between the virologists and the officials,” since those two — Fauci and Farrar — “together control a large portion of the funds available for virological research in the Western world,” and “a virologist keen to continue his career would be very attentive to their wishes.” Indeed, “two of the conference participants had multimillion-dollar grant proposals under final review with NIAID at the time of the call.”
The Fauci/Farrar conference call resulted in immediate and stunning results. We do not know what happened there because most of the references to this conference were redacted when the Fauci emails were released. But what we do know is that the scientists who had insisted that COVID was man-made completely abandoned that view. "Whatever was said at the meeting, it was followed by a remarkable and almost immediate about-face,” writes The Bulletin. The scientists who instantly abandoned their original conclusions began sounding like hostages:
By June, Farrar was back to claiming that The Science™ already definitively determined with certainty what the origins of COVID were. It was not, proclaimed the British scientist, a lab leak, a view he pronounced as a "conspiracy theory” that should be “ignored.” To support this decree, he recommended a Guardian article by Daszak that insisted that COVID was naturally occurring. But that article promoted by Farrar did not, needless to say, even hint at Dasazk's immense conflict of interest in denying that COVID came from a lab he helped fund. Two days later, The Guardian was forced to add an Editor's Note acknowledging this rather crucial fact: “This article was amended on 11 June 2020 to make clear the writer’s past work with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
At the behest of Farrar, the five scientists who had originally told Fauci that it seemed clear that COVID was man-made re-appeared just weeks later with an article in Nature Medicine which, with exactly the same degree of conviction, announced the exact opposite conclusion. "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” they wrote.
The rapid reversal of Andersen is particularly odd: the Bulletin details why his explanation for his abrupt turn-around makes no chronological sense. But another of the scientists who was part of this group that magically reversed their views on COVID's origins after a "conference” arranged by the Fauci/Farrar cabal was Dr. Garry, now cited by The Post as some sort of objective expert to tell us that the debate over COVID's origin is closed.
Whatever the explanation was for their rapid and complete reversal of view that COVID was made in a lab, the three scientists responsible for this reversal were richly rewarded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the vastly funded agency which Fauci directs:
Just as it would be impossible for readers of The Times to realize just how conflicted Daszak is when they read in a news article about his emphatic insistence that COVID was naturally occurring, it would be equally impossible for Post readers to know about the complete and bizarre reversal of its source, Dr. Garry, under very suspicious and opaque conditions.
That Garry, shortly after abandoning and publicly repudiating his view that COVID was made in a lab, received substantial largesse from Fauci certainly does not prove a corrupt motive. But it is certainly something Post readers ought to know when he is being offered up to issue such definitive proclamations that COVID came from the wet market at the time when most scientists continue to view this as an open debate. And any reliance of a news outlet on Daszak as a source about COVID's origins is inherently dubious, and is outright deceitful if it is not made abundantly clear how desperate Daszak obviously is to discredit the lab leak possibility.
by Glenn Greenwald
Dec 5, 2021
Peter Daszak, President of EcoHeath Alliance, speaking in 2017 (Wikipedia)
That COVID-19 infected humanity due to a zoonotic leap from a "wet market” in Wuhan — rather than a leak from a lab in the same Chinese city — was declared unquestionable truth at the start of the pandemic. For a full year, anyone dissenting from this narrative was deemed so irresponsible that they were banned from large social media platforms, accused of spreading "disinformation.” No debate about COVID's origins was permitted. It had been settled by The Science™. Every rational person who believed in science, by definition, immediately accepted at the start of the pandemic that COVID made a natural leap from bats or pangolins; that it may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan which just so happens to gather, study and manipulate novel coronaviruses in bats was officially declared a deranged conspiracy theory.
The reason this consensus was so quickly consecrated was that a group of more than two dozen scientists published a letter in the prestigious science journal Lancet in February, 2020 — while very little was known about SARS-CoV-2 — didactically declaring “that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The possibility that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as a "conspiracy theory,” the by-product of “rumours and misinformation” which, they strongly implied, was an unfair and possibly racist attack on “the science and health professionals of China.”
Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19, by Charles Calisher, February 19, 2020. The Lancet.
For months, that letter shaped the permissible range of debate regarding the origins of COVID. Or, more accurately, it ensured that there was no debate permitted. The Science™ concluded that COVID was a zoonotic virus that naturally leaped from non-human animal to human, and any questioning of this decree was deemed an attack on The Science™.
That Lancet letter has fallen into disrepute due to the key role in its publication played by one of its signatories, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance. To say that Daszak had a gigantic but undisclosed conflict of interest in disseminating this narrative about the natural origins of COVID is to understate the case. Daszak had received millions of dollars in grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to conduct research into coronaviruses in bats, and EcoHealth awarded part of that grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab which would be the leading suspect, by far, for any COVID lab leak.
Daszak's enormous self-interest in leading the world to believe that a lab leak was impossible is obvious. It would be a likely career-ending blow to his reputation if the Wuhan laboratory to which EcoHealth had provided funding for coronavirus bat research was responsible for the escape of a virus that has killed millions of people around the world and caused enduring suffering among countless others due to lockdowns and economic shutdowns.
In July of this year, The Lancet published a new letter from the same group which signed that seminal letter in February of last year. The July 2021 letter included two fundamentally new additions. First, the language about COVID's origins was radically softened from the smug certainty of the February letter that closed debate to humble uncertainty given the lack of proof. While continuing to affirm a belief that COVID was naturally occurring (“our working view” is “that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in nature and not in a laboratory"), they moved far away from the definitive posture of that original letter, acknowledging that “opinions are neither data nor conclusions” and urging further investigation on what they called “the critical question we must address now": namely, “how did SARS-CoV-2 reach the human population?” In other words, after telling the world in February that any questioning of the zoonotic origin was a malicious "conspiracy theory,” they now acknowledge it is “the critical question we must now address.”
The other major change was that this July Lancet letter included what the February letter shamefully omitted: namely, the key fact that Daszak's “remuneration is paid solely in the form of a salary from EcoHealth Alliance,” and that EcoHealth had received funding from NIH to study coronaviruses in bats, and used some of that funding to support research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This disclosed conflict of interest about Daszak was included in the new July, 2021 letter as well as a separate “addendum” called “competing interests and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.” No explanation was provided about why these "competing interests” on the part of Daszak were not disclosed in that crucial, debate-closing February letter in the The Lancet.
Science, not speculation, is essential to determine how SARS-CoV-2 reached humans, by Charles H. Calisher, July 5, 2021. The Lancet.
Addendum: competing interests and the origins of SARS-CoV-2, by Editors of The Lancet. The Lancet.
The U.S. Government began aggressively distancing itself from EcoHealth this year. In an October 20, 2021 letter to Congress, the NIH argued that while the coronavirus strains studied by the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth's grant “are not and could not have become SARS-CoV-2,” it argued that EcoHealth violated the terms of the grant by failing to notify NIH of “unusual results" from its research that could make the viruses it was studying more dangerous. They also accused EcoHealth of failing to promptly report the ongoing results of their experiments.
All of this led to an unraveling of the Official Consensus. In May of this year — fifteen months after The Lancet pronounced the debate closed — Facebook reversed its policy of banning anyone who suggested that the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab. The reversal came, said the Silicon Valley giant, “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin”. This about-face came after The Wall Street Journal reported days earlier that U.S. intelligence sources claim that “three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.”
Weeks later, President Biden “ordered intelligence officials to 'redouble' efforts to investigate the origins of Covid-19, including the theory that it came from a laboratory in China.” The president's statement noted that “the US intelligence community was split on whether it came from a lab accident or emerged from human contact with an infected animal.” Suddenly, mainstream outlets such as The New York Times began publishing claims that, just months earlier, were officially declared "disinformation” and resulted in removal from social media platforms: “some scientists have argued that it’s possible SARS-CoV-2 was the result of genetic engineering experiments or simply escaped from a lab in an accident,” said the Paper of Record in October. The Official Consensus had undergone a 180-degree turn in the course of just over a year. "Lab leak” went from insane conspiracy theory that must be censored to serious possibility that must be investigated.
As a result of all this, Daszak's reputation and credibility are crippled, and rightfully so. The once-revered scientist was profiled two weeks ago in Science under the headline “PROPHET IN PURGATORY.” It noted that while his “journey from oracle to pariah has appalled many colleagues,” many scientists — often loath to openly attack each other's ethics — insist that his wounds are both justified and self-inflicted. Even those who believe the vilification of Daszak has been excessive nonetheless acknowledge that EcoHealth was far from honest about questions central to understanding this worldwide pandemic:
But some scientists, even those dismayed by the attacks, say Daszak is in part a victim of his own making. They argue he failed to reveal important information that later surfaced through embarrassing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and leaks, and some accuse him of making false statements. “Daszak has been far from forthcoming about EcoHealth’s research, much of which is highly relevant to the pandemic origin discussion,” says Filippa Lentzos, a social scientist at King’s College London who specializes in biosecurity. “It is the pattern of continuing obfuscation and deceit that I find alarming.”
Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney who’s solidly in the natural origins camp—he calls the debate a “tempest in an espresso cup”—says Daszak has been “unfairly vilified.” But EcoHealth “is guilty of shockingly poor communication and a naïvete that it would not come under scrutiny,” Holmes says.
That Science profile, similar to the one from The New York Times acknowledging that the "lab leak” is a real possibility, noted that documents unearthed by FOIA litigation from The Intercept call into serious doubt the months of denials by Daszak and EcoHealth, as well as from Dr. Fauci, that funding provided by NIH to the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth was used for "gain of function” research — meaning research designed to manipulate pathogens to make them more contagious and/or dangerous to humans:
In September, a FOIA request to NIH from The Intercept—which required a lawsuit to obtain documents—also yielded details about controversial experiments done at WIV by [WIV virologist Shi Zhengli] during her collaboration with EcoHealth. Her lab has more than 2000 samples of bodily fluids from bats that have tested positive for coronaviruses. To assess the risk of those viruses to humans, Shi’s team took sequences coding for their viral surface protein and stitched them into a bat coronavirus called WIV1, one of only three she has succeeded in growing in lab cultures. Daszak and Shi described these chimeric viruses in a 2017 paper. None of them has a close relationship to SARS-CoV-2. But some lab-leak proponents believe Shi, possibly with Daszak’s knowledge, hid other chimeric virus experiments that led to SARS-CoV-2.
The same batch of documents also showed that in “humanized” mice, some of the chimeric viruses grew better and were more lethal than WIV1. An NIH official, in response to an inquiry from a member of Congress, claimed EcoHealth had “failed to report” the worrisome results immediately, as the grant required. Daszak sent NIH a detailed letter strongly rebutting that accusation.
The documents also included a grant report that described an additional experiment, in which Shi added bat coronavirus surface proteins to the coronavirus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), a highly lethal human pathogen. Ferocious debates erupted about whether this work and the WIV1 studies constituted gain of function (GOF), the type of experiment that can make disease agents more transmissible or pathogenic and that requires extra layers of review. Richard Ebright, a biochemist at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, who has long lobbied against GOF research, tweeted that both “unequivocally” met the definition of [gain-of-function].
Despite the collapse of Daszak's reputation and credibility — due both to his undisclosed conflicts of interest and repeated deceit and even lying — The New York Times continues to cite him as one of its primary sources on the question of COVID's origins. Just two weeks ago, the paper published an article designed to affirm the claim that evidence had once again emerged showing that COVID was naturally occurring. “The first known patient sickened with the coronavirus was a vendor in a large Wuhan animal market,” wrote the Paper of Record about a new paper in Science, arguing that these findings “will revive, though certainly not settle, the debate over whether the pandemic started with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market, a leak from a Wuhan virology lab or some other way.” It had been previously suggested that the first case of COVID infection was found in an accountant who lived miles away from the wet market, suggesting that the wet market was likely not the source. But this new finding — claiming that the first patient was a wet market vendor, not the accountant — would further bolster the view that it has natural origins.
Notably, The Times continues to acknowledge that there is open debate about the origins of COVID, a fact that was deemed off-limits for almost a full year after the pandemic began. “The search for the origins of the greatest public health catastrophe in a century has fueled geopolitical battles, with few new facts emerging in recent months to resolve the question,” it said. But to dismiss the "lab leak” theory as increasingly unlikely, it heavily featured one scientist who insists that this new study provides the strongest evidence yet that COVID was naturally evolving. Who is this source? None other than Peter Daszek. The Times gave Daszak — the completely discredited, conflict-plagued scientist — multiple paragraphs to posture as an objective source to tell readers that the lab leak theory was increasingly unlikely and that the wet market origin was almost certainly true:
But Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist at EcoHealth Alliance who was part of the W.H.O. team, said that he was convinced by Dr. Worobey’s analysis that [researchers showing that COVID originated with the accountant] had been wrong.
“That December the eighth date was a mistake,” Dr. Daszak said. The W.H.O. team never asked the accountant the date his symptoms began, he said. Instead, they were given the Dec. 8 date by doctors from Hubei Xinhua Hospital, who handled other early cases but did not care for Mr. Chen. “So the mistake lies there,” Dr. Daszak said.
For the W.H.O. experts, Dr. Daszak said, the interview was a dead end: The accountant had no apparent links to an animal market, lab or a mass gathering. He told them he liked spending time on the internet and jogging, and he did not travel much. “He was as vanilla as you could get,” Dr. Daszak said.
Had the team identified the seafood vendor as the first known case, Dr. Daszak said, it would have more aggressively pursued questions like what stall she worked in and where her products came from.
While The Times noted in one fleeting subsequent paragraph that their featured source Daszak "has been one of the strongest critics of the lab-leak theory” and that “he and his organization, EcoHealth Alliance, have taken heat for research collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” it does not remotely signal to readers just how invested he is in denying the lab leak possibility. Indeed, there are few people on earth more eager to show — for their own selfish reasons — that COVID did not come from the Wuhan lab than Peter Daszak.
Despite that, and despite the fact that he has been repeatedly caught misleading, The Times continues to cite him as some sort of credible source to convince readers not to believe the lab leak theory. And that one paragraph about his role in this research does not come close to making clear to Times readers just how devastating it would be for Daszak personally if it turned out that the lab leak theory were true. Of all the scientists in the world, why would The Times possibly rely on one of the most conflicted people on the planet to present as an expert on the validity of these various findings about COVID's origins?
A November 18 article from The Washington Post used similarly questionable tactics for the same goal. The headline of that article tells the story of what The Post set out to do: “Prominent scientist who said lab-leak theory of covid-19 origin should be probed now believes evidence points to Wuhan market.” It begins: “The location of early coronavirus infections in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, suggests the virus probably spread to humans from a market where wild and domestically farmed animals were sold and butchered, according to a peer-reviewed article published Thursday in the journal Science,” citing the same study as the one touted by The Times.
The Post acknowledges that there is widespread criticism among scientists of this new study. “'It is based on fragmentary information and to a large degree, hearsay,' David A. Relman, a professor of microbiology at Stanford University, said in an email after reading an embargoed copy. 'In general, there is no way of verifying much of what he describes, and then concludes'.” Yet the most definitive view of this new study in the Post article comes from Robert F. Garry Jr., a virologist described as “one of the most vocal proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis.” To Garry, the debate is now closed: “Mike’s piece shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact the Huanan market was the epicenter of the outbreak.”
It is remarkable that a scientist like Dr. Garry would be so emphatic that the debate is now closed — the new study “shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact the Huanan market was the epicenter of the outbreak” — given how many scientists continue to insist that the question is far from answered. So who is this Dr. Garry, eager to proclaim the debate closed? The Post does not provide the key facts to enable the reader to assess his credibility. All we know from the Post article is that he is “a virologist at Tulane University and one of the most vocal proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis.” But there is so much more to him than that.
An August article from The Bulletin of Atomic Sciences by the science writer Nicholas Wade does provide some key information. That article begins by noting what was until recently, thanks to that Daszak-led Lancet letter, a prohibited view: “Some 20 months after the Covid-19 pandemic first broke out, its origins remain obscure.” Then this article explains this remarkable series of events that led to the rapid disappearance of the early view of many scientists that COVID was man-made.
When Dr. Fauci's emails were made public in June, the archive contained a discussion of a conference of scientists held early on in the pandemic. That conference was hastily arranged by Fauci and his key British counterpart due to a January 31, 2020 email Fauci received from a group of scientists stating they had studied the SARS2 virus and determined it was man-made. This was days before the Daszak-led letter had consecrated the zoonotic theory as Truth. But these scientists held exactly the opposite view as the one The Lancet letter would impose, and this Fauci-ordered conference “was held to discuss the unanimous view of a group of virologists that the SARS2 virus had been manipulated in a lab.” The day before that conference, one of the scientists, Kristian G. Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research institute in California, emailed Fauci to tell him “that the virus seemed to be man-made.”
And yet, for reasons never explained, two of those scientists radically reversed their views, and signed onto Daszak's Lancet letter that decreed the lab leak theory to be a deranged "conspiracy theory” based on “disinformation.” As The Bulletin explains, Dr. Andersen had written on January 31 to Dr. Fauci that “the unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome.” That observation, explains The Bulletin, was “referring presumably to a genetic component known as a furin cleavage site, which greatly enhances the virus’s infectivity." Dr. Andersen continued: “so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”
From: Kristian G. Andersen [DELETE]
Sent: Friday, January 31, 2020 10:32 PM
To: Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) (E) [DELETE]
Cc: Jeremy Farrar [DELETE]
Subject: Re: FW: Science: Mining coronavirus genomes for clues to the outbreak's origins.
Hi Tony,
Thanks for sharing. Yes, I saw this earlier today and both Eddie and myself are actually quoted in it. It's a great article, but the problem is that our phylogenetic analyses aren't able to answer whether the sequences are unusual at individual residues, except if they are completely off. On a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir. The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.
We have a good team lined up to look very critically at this, so we should know much more at the end of the weekend. I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.
Best,
Kristian
The "Bob” referenced in that email as one of the scientists who viewed “the genome” of the virus to be "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory” is Dr. Robert F. Garry Jr., the virologist quoted in the recent Post article as pronouncing: “Mike’s piece shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact the Huanan market was the epicenter of the outbreak.”
That January 31 email, for obvious reasons, sent Fauci and other NIH officials into a panic — or what The Bulletin describes as “a whirlwind of activity.” Fauci ordered his top aides to immediately investigate whether any NIH funds were used for research in the Wuhan Lab that manipulated coronaviruses. They convened a conference of carefully selected scientists, and Fauci recruited Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, a large medical research charity in London. As The Bulletin notes, the union of Fauci and Farrar in this investigation created “a notable imbalance of power between the virologists and the officials,” since those two — Fauci and Farrar — “together control a large portion of the funds available for virological research in the Western world,” and “a virologist keen to continue his career would be very attentive to their wishes.” Indeed, “two of the conference participants had multimillion-dollar grant proposals under final review with NIAID at the time of the call.”
The Fauci/Farrar conference call resulted in immediate and stunning results. We do not know what happened there because most of the references to this conference were redacted when the Fauci emails were released. But what we do know is that the scientists who had insisted that COVID was man-made completely abandoned that view. "Whatever was said at the meeting, it was followed by a remarkable and almost immediate about-face,” writes The Bulletin. The scientists who instantly abandoned their original conclusions began sounding like hostages:
By at most three days later, Andersen had executed a 180 degree turn in his views about the virus. In an email of February 4, 2020 to Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which had directed NIAID funds to Shi, Andersen wrote, “The main crackpot theories going around at the moment relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case.” The email was obtained by U.S. Right to Know, an investigatory group.
Participants have not explained what was said at the meeting or found in the days immediately following it to induce the change of mind. Media offices at the Wellcome Trust and NIAID declined to comment on this article. Andersen, Holmes and Rambaut did not reply to emails seeking an account of the reversal.
By June, Farrar was back to claiming that The Science™ already definitively determined with certainty what the origins of COVID were. It was not, proclaimed the British scientist, a lab leak, a view he pronounced as a "conspiracy theory” that should be “ignored.” To support this decree, he recommended a Guardian article by Daszak that insisted that COVID was naturally occurring. But that article promoted by Farrar did not, needless to say, even hint at Dasazk's immense conflict of interest in denying that COVID came from a lab he helped fund. Two days later, The Guardian was forced to add an Editor's Note acknowledging this rather crucial fact: “This article was amended on 11 June 2020 to make clear the writer’s past work with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Jeremy Farrar
@JeremyFarrar
Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn't created in a lab - as always worth reading @PeterDaszak
Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab | Peter Daszak
Instead of making false claims, we should focus our efforts on the regions where the next pandemic is likely to emerge, says Peter Daszak, an expert in pandemic prevention
theguardian.com
June 9th 2020
119 Retweets225 Likes
At the behest of Farrar, the five scientists who had originally told Fauci that it seemed clear that COVID was man-made re-appeared just weeks later with an article in Nature Medicine which, with exactly the same degree of conviction, announced the exact opposite conclusion. "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” they wrote.
The rapid reversal of Andersen is particularly odd: the Bulletin details why his explanation for his abrupt turn-around makes no chronological sense. But another of the scientists who was part of this group that magically reversed their views on COVID's origins after a "conference” arranged by the Fauci/Farrar cabal was Dr. Garry, now cited by The Post as some sort of objective expert to tell us that the debate over COVID's origin is closed.
Whatever the explanation was for their rapid and complete reversal of view that COVID was made in a lab, the three scientists responsible for this reversal were richly rewarded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the vastly funded agency which Fauci directs:
In August 2020 the NIAID announced it would award $82 million over five years to 10 participants in its new network for detecting infectious diseases. Among the lucky winners: Daszak, Andersen, and his associate Robert Garry.
Just as it would be impossible for readers of The Times to realize just how conflicted Daszak is when they read in a news article about his emphatic insistence that COVID was naturally occurring, it would be equally impossible for Post readers to know about the complete and bizarre reversal of its source, Dr. Garry, under very suspicious and opaque conditions.
That Garry, shortly after abandoning and publicly repudiating his view that COVID was made in a lab, received substantial largesse from Fauci certainly does not prove a corrupt motive. But it is certainly something Post readers ought to know when he is being offered up to issue such definitive proclamations that COVID came from the wet market at the time when most scientists continue to view this as an open debate. And any reliance of a news outlet on Daszak as a source about COVID's origins is inherently dubious, and is outright deceitful if it is not made abundantly clear how desperate Daszak obviously is to discredit the lab leak possibility.
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Re: U.S. government gave $3.7 million grant to Wuhan lab at
by admin » Tue Dec 07, 2021 12:55 am
British head of science-funding body Wellcome Trust is accused of a "chilling" bid to stifle debate on Wuhan lab leak theory
by Ian Birrell
The Mail on Sunday
12 June 2021
* Sir Jeremy Farrar said he had "tremendous responsibility to be accountable"
* He claimed scientists "know" Covid not created in lab and theory is "conspiracy"
* The Mail on Sunday can reveal emails from US diseases chief, Anthony Fauci
Shortly before the pandemic, Sir Jeremy Farrar, head of the globally respected Wellcome Trust, delivered a speech offering his prescription for protection of public health: it required good leadership, free-thinking scientists and universal trust in their work.
The director of the world’s biggest philanthropic science funding body said he had "tremendous responsibility to be accountable for what we do and to be as transparent as we can be".
So it is curious that since the Covid pandemic began, this hugely influential figure has been at the heart of the scientific establishment’s efforts to stifle debate on the origins of the virus that emerged in Wuhan.
The Oxford, Edinburgh and London-educated infectious diseases expert has claimed scientists "know" Covid was not created in a lab, suggested such an idea was a "conspiracy theory" and insisted that "evidence" indicates it spilled over naturally from animals.
Now, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that emails from America’s top infectious disease chief, Anthony Fauci, show how Farrar played a key role behind the scenes in marshalling top scientists’ response to concerns over the virus’s origins, even demanding secrecy on their discussions.
Crucially, he was a central figure behind two landmark statements published by leading science journals that helped to silence dissident views, arguing against the plausibility of "any type of laboratory-based scenario".
Scientists who have sought a proper investigation into the possibility that the novel coronavirus might have leaked from a Wuhan laboratory accuse Farrar of helping establish a "false narrative" that has set back understanding of the disease.
His actions have also prompted alarm in Westminster.
"Farrar is clearly an impressive individual, so we should all be concerned when someone of his stature appears to be stifling debate," said Bob Seely, a Tory member of the foreign affairs select committee. "It is chilling. The job of science is to go where the truth leads, not to stop us going there.
"Distinguished people such as Jeremy Farrar should not have been participating in systematic and organised attempts to shut down open debate on such a vital issue for the entire world. We have a right to be worried."
Sadly, this seems to have been precisely what the 59-year-old Wellcome chief has been doing.
The controversy over Farrar’s role comes amid growing international acceptance of a possibility that the pandemic began with a leak from one of the vaccine or virus research centres in Wuhan, despite China’s vigorous efforts to blame other causes.
But after President Joe Biden gave US intelligence agencies 90 days to detail how the virus might have spread from bats to humans, there has been mounting concern over how top scientific figures "colluded" to divert attention from risky research in Wuhan.
Many insisted that science showed Sars-CoV-2 – the strain of coronavirus that causes Covid-19 – was a spill-over from nature, despite known safety concerns at Wuhan labs and some unusual features of the disease. Farrar – a former Oxford University professor who was appointed to lead the Wellcome Trust eight years ago –has been among the foremost voices making such arguments.
His position gives him immense power as the head of one of the world’s wealthiest charitable foundations, which has funds of £29 billion and spent more than £1 billion last year alone.
He is also a member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.
Just weeks before the pandemic erupted, Farrar helped oversee a report alongside Fauci for the World Health Organisation that highlighted an increasing risk of global pandemic from a pathogen escaping after being engineered in a lab.
Significantly, it said scientific advances allowed ‘disease-causing micro-organisms to be engineered or recreated in laboratories’, warning that ‘accidental or deliberate events caused by high-impact respiratory pathogens pose global catastrophic biological risks’.
The authors may well have been proved right: the world was not prepared for a ‘fast-moving, virulent respiratory pathogen pandemic’ and the consequences are catastrophic.
Yet Farrar’s previous warnings jar with his actions during the pandemic. Last year, for instance, he said that people should "ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab". His comment promoted an article in The Guardian by British scientist Dr Peter Daszak which criticised former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove for suggesting Covid might have escaped accidentally from a lab, and sneered at those critical of his research partners at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The truth is, scientists have found no firm evidence on the cause of this pandemic, despite testing 80,000 samples from animals to find a possible natural link – but there is some circumstantial evidence to raise concerns over a leak from a Wuhan lab.
Yet Daszak and Farrar were among 27 leading experts who published a statement in The Lancet in February last year attacking "conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin".
Daszak is a former Kingston University snail researcher who earns $410,000-a-year heading a virus-hunting charity called EcoHealth Alliance.
He has long-standing links with Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology expert on coronaviruses nicknamed "Bat woman" for her sample-gathering trips to caves in southern China.
Farrar’s endorsement of that controversial Lancet letter – clearly intended to shut down debate – looks even more intriguing after the publication by the news site Buzzfeed this month of 3,234 pages of Fauci’s emails from the early months of the pandemic.
They show that on January 31 last year, Fauci was sent a copy of an article in Science magazine that examined how researchers were doing investigative work on genomes to unravel the virus’s beginnings. The article detailed work by Daszak and Shi in sampling more than 10,000 bats and finding 500 new coronaviruses.
It also examined controversies over risky "gain of function" work, which uses genetic technology to make natural viruses more dangerous, including mention of a 2015 paper on experiments by Shi and a US researcher that modified a Sars-like bat virus to boost infectivity to humans.
Science magazine quoted Richard Ebright, a bio-security expert and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, New Jersey, stating that data at the time was "consistent with entry into the human population as either a natural accident or a laboratory accident".
Fauci immediately circulated the article to senior US officials. To one, he marked the email "IMPORTANT" and attached the "gain of function" paper. "Keep your phone on," he said.
A senior figure at the US National Institutes of Health replied that they were trying ‘to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad’. The Mail on Sunday later revealed the institute was funding Shi’s work, which was stopped by then president Donald Trump.
Fauci also sent the article to Farrar, saying, "It is of interest to the current discussion."
In turn, Farrar set up an urgent conference-call involving himself, Fauci and 11 other global experts –including Sir Patrick Vallance, England’s chief scientific adviser. The Wellcome director, who appears to have led the teleconference, warned their discussions were ‘in total confidence’ and information was ‘not to be shared’ without agreement.
Farrar then became the centre of a flurry of emails that included mention of a discussion with World Health Organisation head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, amid fears that he might "prevaricate".
Two days later, Dr Tedros issued a call to "combat the spread of rumours and misinformation" and for "all countries to work together in a spirit of solidarity and co-operation". Farrar also alerted Fauci to an article on ZeroHedge, a financial blog, that linked a Wuhan researcher to the virus outbreak.
Five days after Farrar’s conference-call, Daszak started circulating a draft around potential signatories for his Lancet letter, saying he was "dismayed by the recent spreading of rumours, misinformation and conspiracy theories on its origins".
He cautioned, however, that they should ensure the statement was not "identifiable" as coming from one person or organisation, so that it would be seen as ‘simply a letter from leading scientists’. Another key participant in Farrar’s call was Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research institute in California who was the lead author on another highly influential commentary published just six weeks later by Nature Medicine journal.
This commentary, headlined "The proximal origin of Sars-CoV-2" and cited almost 1,500 times in other scientific papers, boldly stated that the five authors do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible".
However, critics contested its claim of "evidence" that proved Sars-CoV-2 was not a purposefully manipulated virus – yet like The Lancet letter, this document played a central role to dampen down scientific, political and media discussion of a possible lab leak.
When I asked Farrar to share his "evidence" pointing to natural "zoonotic" (animal to human) transmission, he cited this article.
Significantly, his office told me that he helped convene the five authors of The Lancet letter – who included the Australian professor Edward Holmes, an adviser to the Chinese health authorities, and Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University. Both were on his conference call. "The conclusions reached by these world-leading experts have informed Jeremy’s views, along with other evidence-based research," said a spokesman.
‘He took a step back once the researchers were introduced and followed their results keenly.
"He does not suggest that all other theories or explanations are conspiracy theories. But, as always in any branch of scientific research, any other theories must be evidence-based to hold any credibility.
Yet the Fauci emails disclose that Andersen, who was sent the Science article, admitted a close look at all the genetic sequences showed "some of the features (potentially) look engineered" and that several other experts agreed with him that the genome was ‘inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory’.
After this emerged, Andersen argued that the discussion was a "clear example of the scientific process" – then deleted his Twitter account that had been full of tweets challenging those calling for a lab leak to be taken seriously.
Bio-security expert Richard Ebright said that he was "shocked" Farrar has given such weight to the "pseudoscientific analysis".
"It is disturbing that both Fauci and Farrar have played key roles in establishing the false narratives of the last 15 months and that neither has made a clean break with them," he said.
For his part, Daszak thanked Fauci in April for "publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for Covid-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from Wuhan Institute of Virology".
Yet, at least three Lancet signatories have since admitted that the lab leak theory merits serious investigation.
They included Bernard Roizman, a University of Chicago virologist, who is "convinced" the virus was taken to a lab, worked on and then ‘some sloppy individual’ took it out.
Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist honoured by China for his work in the country, who was one of the five authors of the Nature Medicine commentary, has also voiced concern over safety standards at the Wuhan institute.
Farrar told The Mail on Sunday he believes "the best scientific evidence available to date points to a scenario where the virus crossed from animals to humans and then evolved in humans".
While saying it is critical to understand Covid’s origins to prevent future outbreaks, the Wellcome boss claimed there had been too much "conjecture and theory without data or evidence’ with no evidence to support the idea of a ‘laboratory-linked outbreak".
In all this, there is one thing that surely all parties can agree on with Sir Jeremy Farrar – that everyone "stays open-minded while efforts continue to gather and share the evidence needed" and that regardless of the outcome of investigations, it is absolutely vital to ensure all laboratories are safe.
by Ian Birrell
The Mail on Sunday
12 June 2021
* Sir Jeremy Farrar said he had "tremendous responsibility to be accountable"
* He claimed scientists "know" Covid not created in lab and theory is "conspiracy"
* The Mail on Sunday can reveal emails from US diseases chief, Anthony Fauci
Shortly before the pandemic, Sir Jeremy Farrar, head of the globally respected Wellcome Trust, delivered a speech offering his prescription for protection of public health: it required good leadership, free-thinking scientists and universal trust in their work.
The director of the world’s biggest philanthropic science funding body said he had "tremendous responsibility to be accountable for what we do and to be as transparent as we can be".
So it is curious that since the Covid pandemic began, this hugely influential figure has been at the heart of the scientific establishment’s efforts to stifle debate on the origins of the virus that emerged in Wuhan.
The Oxford, Edinburgh and London-educated infectious diseases expert has claimed scientists "know" Covid was not created in a lab, suggested such an idea was a "conspiracy theory" and insisted that "evidence" indicates it spilled over naturally from animals.
Now, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that emails from America’s top infectious disease chief, Anthony Fauci, show how Farrar played a key role behind the scenes in marshalling top scientists’ response to concerns over the virus’s origins, even demanding secrecy on their discussions.
Crucially, he was a central figure behind two landmark statements published by leading science journals that helped to silence dissident views, arguing against the plausibility of "any type of laboratory-based scenario".
Scientists who have sought a proper investigation into the possibility that the novel coronavirus might have leaked from a Wuhan laboratory accuse Farrar of helping establish a "false narrative" that has set back understanding of the disease.
His actions have also prompted alarm in Westminster.
"Farrar is clearly an impressive individual, so we should all be concerned when someone of his stature appears to be stifling debate," said Bob Seely, a Tory member of the foreign affairs select committee. "It is chilling. The job of science is to go where the truth leads, not to stop us going there.
"Distinguished people such as Jeremy Farrar should not have been participating in systematic and organised attempts to shut down open debate on such a vital issue for the entire world. We have a right to be worried."
Sadly, this seems to have been precisely what the 59-year-old Wellcome chief has been doing.
The controversy over Farrar’s role comes amid growing international acceptance of a possibility that the pandemic began with a leak from one of the vaccine or virus research centres in Wuhan, despite China’s vigorous efforts to blame other causes.
But after President Joe Biden gave US intelligence agencies 90 days to detail how the virus might have spread from bats to humans, there has been mounting concern over how top scientific figures "colluded" to divert attention from risky research in Wuhan.
Many insisted that science showed Sars-CoV-2 – the strain of coronavirus that causes Covid-19 – was a spill-over from nature, despite known safety concerns at Wuhan labs and some unusual features of the disease. Farrar – a former Oxford University professor who was appointed to lead the Wellcome Trust eight years ago –has been among the foremost voices making such arguments.
His position gives him immense power as the head of one of the world’s wealthiest charitable foundations, which has funds of £29 billion and spent more than £1 billion last year alone.
He is also a member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.
Just weeks before the pandemic erupted, Farrar helped oversee a report alongside Fauci for the World Health Organisation that highlighted an increasing risk of global pandemic from a pathogen escaping after being engineered in a lab.
Significantly, it said scientific advances allowed ‘disease-causing micro-organisms to be engineered or recreated in laboratories’, warning that ‘accidental or deliberate events caused by high-impact respiratory pathogens pose global catastrophic biological risks’.
The authors may well have been proved right: the world was not prepared for a ‘fast-moving, virulent respiratory pathogen pandemic’ and the consequences are catastrophic.
Yet Farrar’s previous warnings jar with his actions during the pandemic. Last year, for instance, he said that people should "ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab". His comment promoted an article in The Guardian by British scientist Dr Peter Daszak which criticised former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove for suggesting Covid might have escaped accidentally from a lab, and sneered at those critical of his research partners at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The truth is, scientists have found no firm evidence on the cause of this pandemic, despite testing 80,000 samples from animals to find a possible natural link – but there is some circumstantial evidence to raise concerns over a leak from a Wuhan lab.
Yet Daszak and Farrar were among 27 leading experts who published a statement in The Lancet in February last year attacking "conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin".
Daszak is a former Kingston University snail researcher who earns $410,000-a-year heading a virus-hunting charity called EcoHealth Alliance.
He has long-standing links with Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology expert on coronaviruses nicknamed "Bat woman" for her sample-gathering trips to caves in southern China.
Farrar’s endorsement of that controversial Lancet letter – clearly intended to shut down debate – looks even more intriguing after the publication by the news site Buzzfeed this month of 3,234 pages of Fauci’s emails from the early months of the pandemic.
They show that on January 31 last year, Fauci was sent a copy of an article in Science magazine that examined how researchers were doing investigative work on genomes to unravel the virus’s beginnings. The article detailed work by Daszak and Shi in sampling more than 10,000 bats and finding 500 new coronaviruses.
It also examined controversies over risky "gain of function" work, which uses genetic technology to make natural viruses more dangerous, including mention of a 2015 paper on experiments by Shi and a US researcher that modified a Sars-like bat virus to boost infectivity to humans.
Science magazine quoted Richard Ebright, a bio-security expert and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, New Jersey, stating that data at the time was "consistent with entry into the human population as either a natural accident or a laboratory accident".
Fauci immediately circulated the article to senior US officials. To one, he marked the email "IMPORTANT" and attached the "gain of function" paper. "Keep your phone on," he said.
A senior figure at the US National Institutes of Health replied that they were trying ‘to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad’. The Mail on Sunday later revealed the institute was funding Shi’s work, which was stopped by then president Donald Trump.
Fauci also sent the article to Farrar, saying, "It is of interest to the current discussion."
In turn, Farrar set up an urgent conference-call involving himself, Fauci and 11 other global experts –including Sir Patrick Vallance, England’s chief scientific adviser. The Wellcome director, who appears to have led the teleconference, warned their discussions were ‘in total confidence’ and information was ‘not to be shared’ without agreement.
Farrar then became the centre of a flurry of emails that included mention of a discussion with World Health Organisation head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, amid fears that he might "prevaricate".
Two days later, Dr Tedros issued a call to "combat the spread of rumours and misinformation" and for "all countries to work together in a spirit of solidarity and co-operation". Farrar also alerted Fauci to an article on ZeroHedge, a financial blog, that linked a Wuhan researcher to the virus outbreak.
Five days after Farrar’s conference-call, Daszak started circulating a draft around potential signatories for his Lancet letter, saying he was "dismayed by the recent spreading of rumours, misinformation and conspiracy theories on its origins".
He cautioned, however, that they should ensure the statement was not "identifiable" as coming from one person or organisation, so that it would be seen as ‘simply a letter from leading scientists’. Another key participant in Farrar’s call was Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research institute in California who was the lead author on another highly influential commentary published just six weeks later by Nature Medicine journal.
This commentary, headlined "The proximal origin of Sars-CoV-2" and cited almost 1,500 times in other scientific papers, boldly stated that the five authors do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible".
However, critics contested its claim of "evidence" that proved Sars-CoV-2 was not a purposefully manipulated virus – yet like The Lancet letter, this document played a central role to dampen down scientific, political and media discussion of a possible lab leak.
When I asked Farrar to share his "evidence" pointing to natural "zoonotic" (animal to human) transmission, he cited this article.
Significantly, his office told me that he helped convene the five authors of The Lancet letter – who included the Australian professor Edward Holmes, an adviser to the Chinese health authorities, and Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University. Both were on his conference call. "The conclusions reached by these world-leading experts have informed Jeremy’s views, along with other evidence-based research," said a spokesman.
‘He took a step back once the researchers were introduced and followed their results keenly.
"He does not suggest that all other theories or explanations are conspiracy theories. But, as always in any branch of scientific research, any other theories must be evidence-based to hold any credibility.
Yet the Fauci emails disclose that Andersen, who was sent the Science article, admitted a close look at all the genetic sequences showed "some of the features (potentially) look engineered" and that several other experts agreed with him that the genome was ‘inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory’.
After this emerged, Andersen argued that the discussion was a "clear example of the scientific process" – then deleted his Twitter account that had been full of tweets challenging those calling for a lab leak to be taken seriously.
Bio-security expert Richard Ebright said that he was "shocked" Farrar has given such weight to the "pseudoscientific analysis".
"It is disturbing that both Fauci and Farrar have played key roles in establishing the false narratives of the last 15 months and that neither has made a clean break with them," he said.
For his part, Daszak thanked Fauci in April for "publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for Covid-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from Wuhan Institute of Virology".
Yet, at least three Lancet signatories have since admitted that the lab leak theory merits serious investigation.
They included Bernard Roizman, a University of Chicago virologist, who is "convinced" the virus was taken to a lab, worked on and then ‘some sloppy individual’ took it out.
Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist honoured by China for his work in the country, who was one of the five authors of the Nature Medicine commentary, has also voiced concern over safety standards at the Wuhan institute.
Farrar told The Mail on Sunday he believes "the best scientific evidence available to date points to a scenario where the virus crossed from animals to humans and then evolved in humans".
While saying it is critical to understand Covid’s origins to prevent future outbreaks, the Wellcome boss claimed there had been too much "conjecture and theory without data or evidence’ with no evidence to support the idea of a ‘laboratory-linked outbreak".
In all this, there is one thing that surely all parties can agree on with Sir Jeremy Farrar – that everyone "stays open-minded while efforts continue to gather and share the evidence needed" and that regardless of the outcome of investigations, it is absolutely vital to ensure all laboratories are safe.
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Re: U.S. government gave $3.7 million grant to Wuhan lab at
by admin » Tue Dec 07, 2021 1:02 am
NIH acknowledges US funded gain-of-function at Wuhan lab, Sen. Rand Paul reacts
by Allie Hennard
abc13 WBKO News
Published: Oct. 21, 2021 at 4:25 PM MST
https://www.wbko.com/2021/10/21/nih-ack ... ul-reacts/
BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WBKO) - “The NIH kept saying, ‘No, we didn’t do it, we didn’t do it,’ until last night they admitted, ‘Yes, they did do it,” said Sen. Rand Paul.
The National Institutes of Health is now admitting to funding gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan, China despite repeated denials from Dr. Anthony Fauci that U.S. tax dollars were used on the funding.
“So, the head of the Congressional Oversight Committee from the House of Representatives demanded the information and for once we got somebody who actually responded and told the truth. See I’ve been asking my counterparts, Democrats across the aisle, to investigate this. Not for partisan reasons, but because both sides should want to prevent another pandemic from occurring,” Sen. Rand Paul said.
In a letter to Rep. James Comer, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, an NIH official admits that a “limited experiment” was conducted in order to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ace2 receptor in a mouse model.”
“Right now we have a virus where the hold world has been turned on its head, it has a 1% mortality. Can you imagine if they create something in a lab that has a 15% mortality or 50% mortality? Some of the viruses they have been experimenting with in Wuhan have 50% mortality,” Sen. Rand Paul said. “So, this isn’t just about Dr. Fauci lying, this is about trying to make sure that we don’t get an even worse plague or pandemic that comes out of a lab. We do this research in our country, it needs to be looked at.”
Fauci has testified before congress stating multiple times that NIH does not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, but Sen. Paul has insisted that Fauci is lying to congress.
“He’s now being disingenuous saying he’s never been a supporter of it. He is the world’s biggest supporter of gain-of-function. He’s said that many many times, but now the truth has come out. Even the NIH admits that Dr. Fauci was lying. Dr. Fauci has been avoiding the truth for months and months and months,” Sen. Rand Paul said.
Paul responded to the news on twitter saying quote “I told you so doesn’t even begin to cover it here.
“This is a big deal because now the NIH is admitting gain-of-function research did occur in Wuhan and it was funded by the lab. And there’s also been a cover up of this for over a year now. He should accept responsibility and immediately resign and step down from government,” Sen. Paul said.
*************************
The National Institutes of Health has corrected what it calls the untruthful assertions by NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard spoke with Kentucky Senator Rand Paul this morning who has questioned Dr. Fauci on numerous occasions claiming he did fund the research.
[Senator Rand Paul] “The NIH kept saying, ‘No, we didn’t do it, we didn’t do it,’ until last night they admitted, ‘Yes, we did do it.”
[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] The National Institutes of Health now admitting to funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, despite repeated denials from Dr. Anthony Fauci that U.S. tax dollars were used.
[Senator Rand Paul] “So, the head of the Congressional Oversight Committee from the House of Representatives demanded the information and for once we got somebody who actually responded and told the truth. See I’ve been asking my counterparts, Democrats across the aisle, to investigate this. Not for partisan reasons, but because both sides should want to prevent another pandemic from occurring.”
[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] In a letter to Rep. James Comer, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, an NIH official admits that a “limited experiment” was conducted in order to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ace2 receptor in a mouse model.”
[Senator Rand Paul] “Right now we have a virus, you know, the whole world has been turned on its head, and it has a 1% mortality. Can you imagine if they create something in a lab that has 15% mortality or 50% mortality? Some of the viruses that they have been experimenting with in Wuhan have 50% mortality. So, this isn’t just about Dr. Fauci lying, this is about trying to make sure we don’t get an even worse plague or pandemic that comes out of a lab. We do this research in our country. It needs to be looked at.”
[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] Dr. Fauci has testified before congress stating multiple times that NIH does not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, but Sen. Paul has insisted that Fauci is lying to congress.
[Senator Rand Paul] “And he’s now being disingenuous saying he’s never been a supporter of it. He is the world’s biggest supporter of gain-of-function. He’s said that many many times, but now the truth has come out. Even the NIH admits that Dr. Fauci was lying. And so, yes, Dr. Fauci has been avoiding the truth for months and months and months.”
Paul responded to the news on twitter saying quote “I told you so doesn’t even begin to cover it here.
[Senator Rand Paul] “This is a big deal because now the NIH is admitting gain-of-function research did occur in Wuhan and it was funded by the lab. And there’s also been a cover up of this for over a year now. He should accept responsibility and immediately resign and step down from government.
[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] Allie Hennard, WBKO News.
by Allie Hennard
abc13 WBKO News
Published: Oct. 21, 2021 at 4:25 PM MST
https://www.wbko.com/2021/10/21/nih-ack ... ul-reacts/
BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WBKO) - “The NIH kept saying, ‘No, we didn’t do it, we didn’t do it,’ until last night they admitted, ‘Yes, they did do it,” said Sen. Rand Paul.
The National Institutes of Health is now admitting to funding gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan, China despite repeated denials from Dr. Anthony Fauci that U.S. tax dollars were used on the funding.
“So, the head of the Congressional Oversight Committee from the House of Representatives demanded the information and for once we got somebody who actually responded and told the truth. See I’ve been asking my counterparts, Democrats across the aisle, to investigate this. Not for partisan reasons, but because both sides should want to prevent another pandemic from occurring,” Sen. Rand Paul said.
In a letter to Rep. James Comer, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, an NIH official admits that a “limited experiment” was conducted in order to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ace2 receptor in a mouse model.”
“Right now we have a virus where the hold world has been turned on its head, it has a 1% mortality. Can you imagine if they create something in a lab that has a 15% mortality or 50% mortality? Some of the viruses they have been experimenting with in Wuhan have 50% mortality,” Sen. Rand Paul said. “So, this isn’t just about Dr. Fauci lying, this is about trying to make sure that we don’t get an even worse plague or pandemic that comes out of a lab. We do this research in our country, it needs to be looked at.”
Fauci has testified before congress stating multiple times that NIH does not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, but Sen. Paul has insisted that Fauci is lying to congress.
“He’s now being disingenuous saying he’s never been a supporter of it. He is the world’s biggest supporter of gain-of-function. He’s said that many many times, but now the truth has come out. Even the NIH admits that Dr. Fauci was lying. Dr. Fauci has been avoiding the truth for months and months and months,” Sen. Rand Paul said.
Paul responded to the news on twitter saying quote “I told you so doesn’t even begin to cover it here.
“This is a big deal because now the NIH is admitting gain-of-function research did occur in Wuhan and it was funded by the lab. And there’s also been a cover up of this for over a year now. He should accept responsibility and immediately resign and step down from government,” Sen. Paul said.
*************************
The National Institutes of Health has corrected what it calls the untruthful assertions by NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard spoke with Kentucky Senator Rand Paul this morning who has questioned Dr. Fauci on numerous occasions claiming he did fund the research.
[Senator Rand Paul] “The NIH kept saying, ‘No, we didn’t do it, we didn’t do it,’ until last night they admitted, ‘Yes, we did do it.”
[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] The National Institutes of Health now admitting to funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, despite repeated denials from Dr. Anthony Fauci that U.S. tax dollars were used.
[Senator Rand Paul] “So, the head of the Congressional Oversight Committee from the House of Representatives demanded the information and for once we got somebody who actually responded and told the truth. See I’ve been asking my counterparts, Democrats across the aisle, to investigate this. Not for partisan reasons, but because both sides should want to prevent another pandemic from occurring.”
[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] In a letter to Rep. James Comer, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, an NIH official admits that a “limited experiment” was conducted in order to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ace2 receptor in a mouse model.”
Department of Health & Human Services
Public Health Service
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland 20892
October 20, 2021
The Honorable James Comer
Ranking Member, Committee on Oversight and Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Representative Comer:
Thank you for your continued interest in the work of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I am writing today to provide additional information and documents regarding NIH's grant to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc.
It is important to state at the outset that published genomic data demonstrate that the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. and subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) are not and could not have become SARS-CoV-2 . Both the progress report and the analysis attached here again confirm that conclusion, as the sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant.
The fifth and final progress report for Grant R01AI110964, awarded to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. is attached with redactions only for personally identifiable information. This progress report was submitted to NIH in August 2021 in response to NIH’s compliance enforcement efforts. It includes data from a research project conducted during the 2018-19 grant period using bat coronavirus genome sequences already existing in nature.
The limited experiment described in the final progress report provided by EcoHealth Alliance was testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the humanACE2 receptor in a mouse model. All other aspects of the mice, including the immune system, remained unchanged. In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus. As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do. Regardless, the viruses being studied under this grant were genetically very distant from SARS-CoV-2.
The research plan was reviewed by NIH in advance of funding, and NIH determined that it did not to fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential (ePPP) because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans. As such, the research was not subject to departmental review under the HHSP3CO Framework. However, out of an abundance of caution and as an additional layer of oversight, language was included in the terms and conditions of the grant award to EcoHealth that outlined criteria for a secondary review, such as a requirement that the grantee report immediately a one log increase in growth. These measures would prompt a secondary review to determine whether the research aims should be reevaluated or new biosafety measures should be enacted.
EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant. 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. Additional compliance efforts continue.
The second document is a genetic analysis demonstrating that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses used in experiments under the NIH grant from 2014-2018 are decades removed from SARS-CoV-2 evolutionarily. The analysis compares the sequence relationships between
• SARS-CoV- 1, the cause of the SARS outbreak in 2003;
• SARS-CoV-2, the cause of COVID-19 pandemic
• WIV-1, a naturally occurring bat coronavirus used in experiments funded by the NIH;
• RaTG13, one of the closest bat coronavirus relatives to SARS-CoV-2 collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology; and
• BANAL-52, one of several bat coronaviruses recently identified from bats living in caves in Laos
While it might appear that the similarity of RaTG13and BANAL-52 bat coronaviruses to SARS CoV-2 is close because it overlaps by 96-97%, experts agree that even these viruses are far too divergent to have been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. For comparison, today's human genome is 96% similar to our closest ancestor, the chimpanzee. Humans and chimpanzees are thought to have diverged approximately 6 million years ago.
The analysis attached confirms that the bat coronaviruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic. If you or your staff have questions, NIH would be pleased to brief you on these documents.
Lawrence A. Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D.
Principal Deputy Director
[Senator Rand Paul] “Right now we have a virus, you know, the whole world has been turned on its head, and it has a 1% mortality. Can you imagine if they create something in a lab that has 15% mortality or 50% mortality? Some of the viruses that they have been experimenting with in Wuhan have 50% mortality. So, this isn’t just about Dr. Fauci lying, this is about trying to make sure we don’t get an even worse plague or pandemic that comes out of a lab. We do this research in our country. It needs to be looked at.”
[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] Dr. Fauci has testified before congress stating multiple times that NIH does not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, but Sen. Paul has insisted that Fauci is lying to congress.
[Senator Rand Paul] “And he’s now being disingenuous saying he’s never been a supporter of it. He is the world’s biggest supporter of gain-of-function. He’s said that many many times, but now the truth has come out. Even the NIH admits that Dr. Fauci was lying. And so, yes, Dr. Fauci has been avoiding the truth for months and months and months.”
Paul responded to the news on twitter saying quote “I told you so doesn’t even begin to cover it here.
Richard H. Ebright
@R_H_Ebright
The novel chimeric coronaviruses constructed under the NIH grant to EcoHealth unequivocally meet the definition of "enhanced potential pandemic pathogens" in the P3CO Framework.
8:03 PM · Oct 21, 2021·Twitter Web App
https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/ ... 3795551242
Richard H. Ebright !R_H_Ebright Oct 20
NIH corrects untruthful assertions by NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci that NIH had not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
NIH states that EcoHealth Alliance violated Terms and Conditions of NIH grant AI110964.
***
Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 20
Replying to @R_H_Ebright
The NIH received the relevant documents in 2018 and reviewed the documents in 2020 and again in 2021.
The NIH -- specifically, Collins, Fauci, and Tabak -- lied to Congress, lied to the press, and lied to the public. Knowingly. Willfully. Brazenly.
***
Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 20
See thread at:
Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
How many times can one grantee violate the Terms and Conditions of one NIH grant without being penalized?
(Apparently, if the grantee is EcoHealth Alliance, the number is at least four.)
theintercept.com/2021/10/10/01/nih.
theintercept.com
NIH Bat Coronavirus Grant Report Was Submitted More Than Two Years... The unusual timing of a bat coronavirus grant suggests that an earlier version may have been revised.
4:48 PM Oct 1, 2021
***
Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Replying to @R_H_Ebright
Violation 1:
"No funds are provided and no funds can be used to support gain-of-function research covered under the October 17, 2014 White House Announcement (NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-15-011)."
Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 2:
"[S]hould any of the MERS-like SARS-like chimeras generated under this grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain you must stop all experiments with these viruses"
Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 3:
"[S]hould any of the MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras generated under this grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain you must..provide..NIAID Program Officer and Grants Management Specialist..with..data"
Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 4:
"Progress reports document grantee recipient accomplishments and compliance with terms of award. Progress reports... are due the 15th of the month preceding the month in which the budget period ends" (e.g., if the budget period ends 11/30, the due date is 10/15)."
Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 5:
"Effective February 9, 2017, if the recipient organization has submitted a renewal application on or before the data by which a..Final-RPPR..would be required for the current competitive segment, then submission of an 'Interim-RPPR' via eRA Commons is now required."
Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 6:
"NIAID defines a Highly Pathogenic Agent as an infectious Agent or Toxin that may warrant a biocontainment safety level of BSL3 or higher..When submitting future Progress Reports indicate at the beginning of the report if your IBC or equivalent body or official has determined, for example, by conducting a risk assessment, that the work being planned or performed under this grant may be conducted at a..safety level that is lower than BSL3."
Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 7:
"When submitting future Progress Reports indicate at the beginning of the report:.. Any changes in the use of the Agent(s)..including its restricted experiments that have resulted in a change in the required biocontainment level, and any..change in location."
Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright Oct 1
Violation 8:
"When submitting future Progress Reports indicate at the beginning of the report:.. If work with a new or additional Agent(s)..is proposed in the upcoming project period, provide..list of the new and/or additional Agent(s) that will be studied"
[Senator Rand Paul] “This is a big deal because now the NIH is admitting gain-of-function research did occur in Wuhan and it was funded by the lab. And there’s also been a cover up of this for over a year now. He should accept responsibility and immediately resign and step down from government.
[WBKO News Reporter Allie Hennard] Allie Hennard, WBKO News.
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Re: U.S. government gave $3.7 million grant to Wuhan lab at
by admin » Tue Dec 07, 2021 2:10 am
NIH Bat Coronavirus Grant Report Was Submitted More Than Two Years Late. The unusual timing of a bat coronavirus grant report suggests that an earlier version may have been revised.
by Mara Hvistendahl, Sharon Lerner
The Intercept
October 1 2021, 10:11 a.m.
A PROGRESS REPORT detailing controversial U.S.-funded research into bat coronaviruses in China was filed more than two years after it was due and long after the corresponding grant had concluded. The U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance submitted the report to its funder, the National Institutes of Health, in September 2020, while the group was engulfed in controversy surrounding its work with partners in China. The Intercept obtained the report, along with the grant proposal and other documents, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Scientists consulted by The Intercept described the late date as highly unusual and said it merited an explanation, given the controversy surrounding the EcoHealth Alliance’s work at the time that the report was submitted. The scientists spoke under the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic with the NIH, the world’s leading funder of biomedical research.
The annual report described the group’s work from June 2017 to May 2018, which involved creating new viruses using different parts of existing bat coronaviruses and inserting them into humanized mice in a lab in Wuhan, China. The work was overseen by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci.
Neither the NIH nor the EcoHealth Alliance offered an explanation for the date of the report or responded to questions from The Intercept about whether another version of the report had been submitted on time and, if so, in what ways that version may have been altered.
The Intercept is seeking any missing progress reports, among other documents, through ongoing litigation against the NIH.
The agency has been criticized for withholding information that might relate to the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, which is now responsible for more than 4.5 million deaths around the world. “NIH has a public responsibility to be fully transparent on why it gave funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, whether it considered the potential of a possible accidental leak of dangerous bat viruses, and the ethics of approving the study,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University’s school of law and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “Overall, it is important to fund good basic research on bat viruses, but the project has been shrouded in uncertainty and lacks full transparency.”
The progress report and other documents were released by the NIH over a year after The Intercept and others requested them. “What [the NIH] really needs to do is not just react to FOIA requests. They need to be proactive and say, ‘OK, here’s the process, and here’s the outcome.’ And they haven’t done that,” said Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University. “That just raises questions about why they’re dragging their heels. They should have provided all relevant information months ago.”
The EcoHealth Alliance and its longtime partner the Wuhan Institute of Virology have come under intense scrutiny in the search for the pandemic’s origins. The two groups are at the center of the lab-origin hypothesis, the idea that the coronavirus could have emerged through a lab accident, the collection and storage of thousands of bat coronavirus samples, or through divisive research that makes viruses more transmissible in order to study how they evolve.
There has been no shortage of unsubstantiated ideas in circulation about SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, several of which continue to be used as political wedges by former President Donald Trump and the far right. But EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak helped organize scientists to tar any discussion of a possible lab origin, even if it was science-based, as a conspiracy theory.
In February 2020, the medical journal The Lancet published a statement decrying the spread of “rumours and misinformation” around the origins of the pandemic. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” read the letter. Emails later obtained by U.S. Right to Know showed that Daszak had orchestrated the effort. Daszak has also served on two international committees tasked with investigating the origins of the pandemic, despite having a clear conflict of interest. (Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that one of these committees, a task force convened by The Lancet, would be disbanded.)
For months, Daszak continued to push the notion that a lab origin was preposterous. “They’re coming at this with the belief system that there’s a cabal of mysterious international folks who are trying to kill people,” he said in an online seminar in October 2020, of those who believe it’s possible that the virus that causes Covid-19 emerged from a lab. “They come at it with a belief system. So logic jumps out the window.”
The unusually dated EcoHealth Alliance progress report adds to a string of missing, incomplete, or disappeared information that could be relevant to the origins of the pandemic.
The report describes work done in year four of the five-year, $3.1 million NIH grant “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” It was due in April 2018. The version released by the NIH was submitted over two years later, after The Intercept had filed a public records request seeking the bat coronavirus and other NIH grants to the EcoHealth Alliance.
The NIH sends out automatic reminders ahead of key due dates and makes the distribution of new funding contingent upon receipt of the previous years’ annual reports. According to an NIH instruction manual, submission dates are automatically generated, meaning that the date could not be a typo.
Adding to the evidence that the annual update was submitted in 2020 are references to studies that were published after 2018, when the update was due. NIH progress reports include a section in which researchers list any papers that have been published or accepted for publication. In the EcoHealth Alliance progress report, the section lists papers published in 2019 and 2020.
Many researchers say the experiment that involved infecting humanized mice with altered bat coronaviruses described in the annual report qualifies as “gain-of-function research of concern.” None of the viruses described in the experiment are related to SARS-CoV-2 closely enough to have evolved into it. But scientists said the odd submission date raises questions about whether information in an earlier draft of the report had been altered — or omitted — amid controversy over the EcoHealth Alliance’s work in Wuhan.
Early on, several groups, media outlets, and individuals requested the grant documents and communications surrounding them, an effort that apparently irked Daszak. “Conspiracy-theory outlets and politically motivated organizations have made Freedom of Information Act requests on our grants and all of our letters and e-mails to the NIH,” he told Nature in August 2020. “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.”
The Intercept requested the grant documents from the NIH on September 3 of that year. The anomalous progress report was submitted less than two weeks later, on September 16.
The documents released to The Intercept are also missing a year-five progress report, covering the crucial period of June 2018 to May 2019, which was due in September 2019, according to NIH guidelines. Scientists said that NIH program officers sometimes overlook reports for the final reporting period, but taken together with the odd date on the year-four report, the omission raises questions that the agency should answer.
Federal funding documents are routinely released under the Freedom of Information Act. In this case, public interest in the origins of the pandemic should have led to a timely and full release of documents, transparency experts say. “The presumption of disclosure is all the more crucial when dealing with documents that are squarely in the public interest,” said Gunita Singh, a staff attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “And records about how the pandemic may have originated and where our taxpayer dollars have been spent are clearly worthy of public observation and scrutiny and debate.”
The origins of the pandemic remain hotly debated. In August, President Joe Biden announced that a three-month inquiry into the matter by U.S. intelligence agencies was inconclusive. Many scientists lean toward a natural origin, but in recent months an increasing number of prominent researchers have gone on record as saying that a lab origin deserves thorough investigation.
The progress report is just one of many missing puzzle pieces that could shed light on the question. In June, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom reported that key data from Wuhan had been deleted from an NIH database, a move allowed by NIH rules but that is nonetheless unusual. From a Google Cloud server, he recovered 13 partial viral sequences collected from people in the city in the early days of the pandemic. These added to evidence that the coronavirus was circulating in the city long before the December 2019 outbreak at the city’s Huanan seafood market, which was a major focus of the recent WHO report on the origins of the pandemic. It turned out that researchers from Wuhan University had emailed the NIH in June 2020 to request that the sequences be deleted.
Then in July, after the Washington Post reported on other discrepancies in early WHO data, the WHO changed the virus sequence IDs associated with three early patients described in the joint report.
There are also important gaps in what we know about the history of RaTG13, a relative of SARS-CoV-2, which was sequenced and written about by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Last summer, Shi Zhengli, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, admitted to Science magazine that RaTG13 was a renamed version of a virus found in a Chinese mineshaft where miners fell ill in 2012. But that admission only came following pressure from independent scientists.
Also unresolved are questions about revisions made to public databases of viruses that infect pangolins and about a database that the Wuhan Institute of Virology took offline in September 2019, claiming that it had been hacked.
In 2019, the NIH renewed the EcoHealth Alliance bat coronavirus grant for a second five-year period. The Trump administration suspended funding in April 2020. (The NIH reinstated the grant in July 2020, under strict terms that Daszak said his group could not meet.) It is unclear whether the EcoHealth Alliance would have been required to file a progress report for the final year of the grant, given that it was terminated.
Correction: October 3, 2021
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Peter Daszak did not sign a February 2020 letter in The Lancet. Although Daszak had originally suggested keeping his name off the letter, in the end he did in fact sign it.
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Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research. The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.
by Sharon Lerner, Maia Hibbett
The Intercept
September 23 2021, 11:16 a.m.
A GRANT PROPOSAL written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.
The EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to inquiries about the document, despite having answered previous queries from The Intercept about the group’s government-funded coronavirus research. The group’s president, Peter Daszak, acknowledged the public discussion of an unfunded EcoHealth proposal in a tweet on Saturday. He did not dispute its authenticity.
Since the genetic code of the coronavirus that caused the pandemic was first sequenced, scientists have puzzled over the “furin cleavage site.” This strange feature on the spike protein of the virus had never been seen in SARS-related betacoronaviruses, the class to which SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, belongs.
The furin cleavage site enables the virus to more efficiently bind to and release its genetic material into a human cell and is one of the reasons that the virus is so easily transmissible and harmful. But scientists are divided over how this particular site wound up in the virus, and the cleavage site became a major focus of the heated debate over the origins of the pandemic.
Many who believe that the virus that caused the pandemic emerged from a laboratory have pointed out that it is unlikely that the particular sequence of amino acids that make up the furin cleavage site would have occurred naturally.
Adherents of the idea that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a natural spillover from animal hosts have argued that it could have evolved naturally from an as-yet undiscovered virus. Further, they argued, scientists were unlikely to have engineered the feature.
“There is no logical reason why an engineered virus would utilize such a suboptimal furin cleavage site, which would entail such an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering,” 23 scientists wrote earlier this month in an article in the journal Cell. “There is no evidence of prior research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.”
But the proposal describes the process of looking for novel furin cleavage sites in bat coronaviruses the scientists had sampled and inserting them into the spikes of SARS-related viruses in the laboratory.
“We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,” referring to cells found in the lining of the human airway, the proposal states.
The new proposal, which also described a plan to mass vaccinate bats in caves, does not provide conclusive evidence that the virus that caused the pandemic emerged from a lab. And virus experts remain sharply divided over its origins. But several scientists who work with coronaviruses told The Intercept that they felt that the proposal shifted the terrain of the debate.
Tipping the Scales
“Some kind of threshold has been crossed,” said Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and co-author of the upcoming book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” Chan has been vocal about the need to thoroughly investigate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab while remaining open to both possible theories of its development. For Chan, the revelation from the proposal was the description of the insertion of a novel furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses — something people previously speculated, but had no evidence, may have happened.
“Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”
Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, whose work tracking bats and other animals was referenced in the grant application without his knowledge, also said it made him more open to the idea that the pandemic may have its roots in a lab. “The information in the proposal certainly changes my thoughts about a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Wikelski told The Intercept. “In fact, a possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”
But others insisted that the research posed little or no threat and pointed out that the proposal called for most of the genetic engineering work to be done in North Carolina rather than China. “Given that the work wasn’t funded and wasn’t proposed to take place in Wuhan anyway it’s hard to assess any bearing on the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Stephen Goldstein, a scientist who studies the evolution of viral genes at the University of Utah, and an author of the recent Cell article, wrote in an email to The Intercept.
Other scientists contacted by The Intercept noted that there is published evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was already engaged in some of the genetic engineering work described in the proposal and that viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China. “The mail is filled with little envelopes with plasmid dried on to filter paper that scientists routinely send each other,” said Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center at the University of Montana.
Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, was adamant that the proposal did not change his opinion that the pandemic was caused by a natural spillover from animals to humans. “There are zero data to support a lab origin ‘notion,’” Racaniello wrote in an email. He said he believed that the research being proposed had the potential to fall in the category of gain-of-function research of concern, as did an experiment that was detailed in another grant proposal recently obtained by The Intercept. The government funds such research, in which scientists intentionally make viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them, only in a narrow range of circumstances. And DARPA rejected the proposal at least in part because of concerns that it involved such research.
While Racaniello acknowledged that the research in the DARPA proposal entailed some danger, he said “the benefits far, far outweigh the risk.” He also said the fact that the viruses described in the proposal were not known pathogens mitigated the concern. “This is not SARS,” he said, referring to SARS-CoV-1, the virus that caused a 2003 outbreak. “It’s SARS-related.”
But SARS-CoV-2 is not a direct descendant of that virus — it’s a relative.
In fact, the viruses described in the grant proposal, which was first posted online by the research group DRASTIC, were not known pathogens. And the authors of the grant proposal make the case that because the scientists would be using SARS-related bat viruses, as opposed to the SARS virus that was known to infect humans, the research was exempt from “gain-of-function concerns.” But according to several scientists interviewed by The Intercept, the viruses presented a threat nevertheless.
“The work describes generating full-length bat SARS-related coronaviruses that are thought to pose a risk of human spillover. And that’s the type of work that people could plausibly postulate could have led to a lab-associated origin of SARS-CoV-2,” said Jesse Bloom, a professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and director of the Bloom Lab, which studies the evolution of viruses. Bloom pointed out that the scientists acknowledge the risk to humans in their proposal. “It’s an explicit goal of the grant to identify the bat SARS-related coronaviruses that they think pose the highest risk.”
Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology who directs the developmental biology laboratory at New York Medical College, also said the fact that the viruses weren’t known to be dangerous didn’t preclude the possibility that they might become so. “That’s really disingenuous,” Newman said of the argument. “The people that are claiming natural emergence say that it begins with a bat virus that evolved to be compatible with humans. If you use that logic, then this virus could be a threat because it could also make that transition.” Newman, a longtime critic of gain-of-function research and founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, said that the proposal confirmed some of his worst fears. “This is not like slightly stepping over the line,” said Newman. “This is doing everything that people say is going to cause a pandemic if you do it.”
While the grant proposal does not provide the smoking gun that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab, for some scientists it adds to the evidence that it might have. “Whether that particular study did or didn’t [lead to the pandemic], it certainly could have,” said Nunberg, of Montana Biotechnology Center. “Once you make an unnatural virus, you’re basically setting it up in an unstable evolutionary place. The virus is going to undergo a whole bunch of changes to try and cope with its imperfections. So who knows what will come of it.” The risks of such research are profound and irreversible, he said. “You can’t call back the virus once you release it into the environment.”
DARPA, a division of the Department of Defense, said regulations prevented it from confirming that it had reviewed the proposal. “Since EcoHealth Alliance may or may not be the direct source of the material in question, and we are precluded by Federal Acquisition Regulations from divulging bidders or any associated proposal details, we recommend that you reach out to them to confirm the document’s authenticity,” a DARPA spokesperson wrote in an email to The Intercept. The British Daily Telegraph reported that it had confirmed the document’s legitimacy with a former member of the Trump administration.
The Telegraph story erroneously reported that the scientists proposed to inoculate bats with live viruses. In fact, they hoped to inoculate them with chimeric S proteins, which were proposed to be developed through a subcontract in the grant in Ralph Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, not in Wuhan. Baric did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
Conflict of Interest
Many questions remain about the proposal, including whether any of the research described in it was completed. Even without the DARPA funding, there were many other potential ways to pay for the experiments. And scientists interviewed for this article agreed that often researchers do some of the science they describe in proposals before or after they submit them.
“This was a highly funded group of researchers that wouldn’t let one rejection halt their work,” said Chan, the “Viral” author.
Perhaps the most troubling question about the proposal is why, within the small group of scientists who have been searching for information that could shed light on the origins of the pandemic, there has apparently been so little awareness of the planned work until now. Peter Daszak and Linfa Wang, two of the researchers who submitted the proposal, did not previously acknowledge it.
Daszak, the EcoHealth Alliance president, has actively sought to quash interest in the idea that the novel coronavirus originated in a lab. In February 2020, as the pandemic began to grip major cities in the U.S., he began organizing scientists to write an open letter that was published in the Lancet addressing the origins of the virus. “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins,” read the statement signed by Daszak and 26 co-authors. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
Daszak directed and gathered signatures for the letter, all the while suggesting that he and his collaborators on the proposed DARPA project, Baric and Wang, distance themselves from the effort.
“I spoke with Linfa [Wang] last night about the statement we sent round. He thinks, and I agree with him, that 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 to Baric in February 2020, just weeks before it appeared in the journal, according to an email surfaced a year later by public health investigative research group U.S. Right to Know. “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.” Ultimately, Daszak did sign the letter.
“I also think this is a good decision,” Baric replied. “Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”
Baric and Wang — a professor in the emerging infectious diseases program at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore — did not respond to inquiries from The Intercept about their decision not to sign the letter in the Lancet.
Daszak was also a member of the joint team the World Health Organization sent to China in February 2020 to investigate the origins of the pandemic, which concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus had been released from a laboratory. (In March, WHO called for further investigation of the origins of the virus and stated that “all hypotheses remain open.”)
“I find it really disappointing that one of the members of the joint WHO-China team, which is essentially the group of scientists that were tasked as representatives of both the scientific community and the World Health Organization of investigating this, are actually on this proposal, knew that this line of research was at least under consideration, and didn’t mention it all,” said Bloom, of Fred Hutch. “Whatever information that relates to help people think about this just needs to be made transparently available and explained.”
Correction: September 24, 2021
A previous version of this article stated incorrectly that the EcoHealth Alliance proposal had been featured on Sky News Australia.
Correction: September 23, 2021, 3:30 p.m.
A previous version of this article stated incorrectly that Linfa Wang was a member of the WHO-China team.
by Mara Hvistendahl, Sharon Lerner
The Intercept
October 1 2021, 10:11 a.m.
A PROGRESS REPORT detailing controversial U.S.-funded research into bat coronaviruses in China was filed more than two years after it was due and long after the corresponding grant had concluded. The U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance submitted the report to its funder, the National Institutes of Health, in September 2020, while the group was engulfed in controversy surrounding its work with partners in China. The Intercept obtained the report, along with the grant proposal and other documents, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Scientists consulted by The Intercept described the late date as highly unusual and said it merited an explanation, given the controversy surrounding the EcoHealth Alliance’s work at the time that the report was submitted. The scientists spoke under the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic with the NIH, the world’s leading funder of biomedical research.
The annual report described the group’s work from June 2017 to May 2018, which involved creating new viruses using different parts of existing bat coronaviruses and inserting them into humanized mice in a lab in Wuhan, China. The work was overseen by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci.
Neither the NIH nor the EcoHealth Alliance offered an explanation for the date of the report or responded to questions from The Intercept about whether another version of the report had been submitted on time and, if so, in what ways that version may have been altered.
The Intercept is seeking any missing progress reports, among other documents, through ongoing litigation against the NIH.
The agency has been criticized for withholding information that might relate to the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, which is now responsible for more than 4.5 million deaths around the world. “NIH has a public responsibility to be fully transparent on why it gave funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, whether it considered the potential of a possible accidental leak of dangerous bat viruses, and the ethics of approving the study,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University’s school of law and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “Overall, it is important to fund good basic research on bat viruses, but the project has been shrouded in uncertainty and lacks full transparency.”
The progress report and other documents were released by the NIH over a year after The Intercept and others requested them. “What [the NIH] really needs to do is not just react to FOIA requests. They need to be proactive and say, ‘OK, here’s the process, and here’s the outcome.’ And they haven’t done that,” said Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University. “That just raises questions about why they’re dragging their heels. They should have provided all relevant information months ago.”
The EcoHealth Alliance and its longtime partner the Wuhan Institute of Virology have come under intense scrutiny in the search for the pandemic’s origins. The two groups are at the center of the lab-origin hypothesis, the idea that the coronavirus could have emerged through a lab accident, the collection and storage of thousands of bat coronavirus samples, or through divisive research that makes viruses more transmissible in order to study how they evolve.
There has been no shortage of unsubstantiated ideas in circulation about SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, several of which continue to be used as political wedges by former President Donald Trump and the far right. But EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak helped organize scientists to tar any discussion of a possible lab origin, even if it was science-based, as a conspiracy theory.
In February 2020, the medical journal The Lancet published a statement decrying the spread of “rumours and misinformation” around the origins of the pandemic. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” read the letter. Emails later obtained by U.S. Right to Know showed that Daszak had orchestrated the effort. Daszak has also served on two international committees tasked with investigating the origins of the pandemic, despite having a clear conflict of interest. (Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that one of these committees, a task force convened by The Lancet, would be disbanded.)
For months, Daszak continued to push the notion that a lab origin was preposterous. “They’re coming at this with the belief system that there’s a cabal of mysterious international folks who are trying to kill people,” he said in an online seminar in October 2020, of those who believe it’s possible that the virus that causes Covid-19 emerged from a lab. “They come at it with a belief system. So logic jumps out the window.”
The unusually dated EcoHealth Alliance progress report adds to a string of missing, incomplete, or disappeared information that could be relevant to the origins of the pandemic.
The report describes work done in year four of the five-year, $3.1 million NIH grant “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” It was due in April 2018. The version released by the NIH was submitted over two years later, after The Intercept had filed a public records request seeking the bat coronavirus and other NIH grants to the EcoHealth Alliance.
The NIH sends out automatic reminders ahead of key due dates and makes the distribution of new funding contingent upon receipt of the previous years’ annual reports. According to an NIH instruction manual, submission dates are automatically generated, meaning that the date could not be a typo.
Adding to the evidence that the annual update was submitted in 2020 are references to studies that were published after 2018, when the update was due. NIH progress reports include a section in which researchers list any papers that have been published or accepted for publication. In the EcoHealth Alliance progress report, the section lists papers published in 2019 and 2020.
Many researchers say the experiment that involved infecting humanized mice with altered bat coronaviruses described in the annual report qualifies as “gain-of-function research of concern.” None of the viruses described in the experiment are related to SARS-CoV-2 closely enough to have evolved into it. But scientists said the odd submission date raises questions about whether information in an earlier draft of the report had been altered — or omitted — amid controversy over the EcoHealth Alliance’s work in Wuhan.
Early on, several groups, media outlets, and individuals requested the grant documents and communications surrounding them, an effort that apparently irked Daszak. “Conspiracy-theory outlets and politically motivated organizations have made Freedom of Information Act requests on our grants and all of our letters and e-mails to the NIH,” he told Nature in August 2020. “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.”
The Intercept requested the grant documents from the NIH on September 3 of that year. The anomalous progress report was submitted less than two weeks later, on September 16.
The documents released to The Intercept are also missing a year-five progress report, covering the crucial period of June 2018 to May 2019, which was due in September 2019, according to NIH guidelines. Scientists said that NIH program officers sometimes overlook reports for the final reporting period, but taken together with the odd date on the year-four report, the omission raises questions that the agency should answer.
Federal funding documents are routinely released under the Freedom of Information Act. In this case, public interest in the origins of the pandemic should have led to a timely and full release of documents, transparency experts say. “The presumption of disclosure is all the more crucial when dealing with documents that are squarely in the public interest,” said Gunita Singh, a staff attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “And records about how the pandemic may have originated and where our taxpayer dollars have been spent are clearly worthy of public observation and scrutiny and debate.”
“Records about how the pandemic may have originated and where our taxpayer dollars have been spent are clearly worthy of public observation and scrutiny and debate.”
The origins of the pandemic remain hotly debated. In August, President Joe Biden announced that a three-month inquiry into the matter by U.S. intelligence agencies was inconclusive. Many scientists lean toward a natural origin, but in recent months an increasing number of prominent researchers have gone on record as saying that a lab origin deserves thorough investigation.
The progress report is just one of many missing puzzle pieces that could shed light on the question. In June, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom reported that key data from Wuhan had been deleted from an NIH database, a move allowed by NIH rules but that is nonetheless unusual. From a Google Cloud server, he recovered 13 partial viral sequences collected from people in the city in the early days of the pandemic. These added to evidence that the coronavirus was circulating in the city long before the December 2019 outbreak at the city’s Huanan seafood market, which was a major focus of the recent WHO report on the origins of the pandemic. It turned out that researchers from Wuhan University had emailed the NIH in June 2020 to request that the sequences be deleted.
Then in July, after the Washington Post reported on other discrepancies in early WHO data, the WHO changed the virus sequence IDs associated with three early patients described in the joint report.
There are also important gaps in what we know about the history of RaTG13, a relative of SARS-CoV-2, which was sequenced and written about by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Last summer, Shi Zhengli, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, admitted to Science magazine that RaTG13 was a renamed version of a virus found in a Chinese mineshaft where miners fell ill in 2012. But that admission only came following pressure from independent scientists.
Also unresolved are questions about revisions made to public databases of viruses that infect pangolins and about a database that the Wuhan Institute of Virology took offline in September 2019, claiming that it had been hacked.
In 2019, the NIH renewed the EcoHealth Alliance bat coronavirus grant for a second five-year period. The Trump administration suspended funding in April 2020. (The NIH reinstated the grant in July 2020, under strict terms that Daszak said his group could not meet.) It is unclear whether the EcoHealth Alliance would have been required to file a progress report for the final year of the grant, given that it was terminated.
Correction: October 3, 2021
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Peter Daszak did not sign a February 2020 letter in The Lancet. Although Daszak had originally suggested keeping his name off the letter, in the end he did in fact sign it.
***********************
Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research. The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.
by Sharon Lerner, Maia Hibbett
The Intercept
September 23 2021, 11:16 a.m.
A GRANT PROPOSAL written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.
The EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to inquiries about the document, despite having answered previous queries from The Intercept about the group’s government-funded coronavirus research. The group’s president, Peter Daszak, acknowledged the public discussion of an unfunded EcoHealth proposal in a tweet on Saturday. He did not dispute its authenticity.
Since the genetic code of the coronavirus that caused the pandemic was first sequenced, scientists have puzzled over the “furin cleavage site.” This strange feature on the spike protein of the virus had never been seen in SARS-related betacoronaviruses, the class to which SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, belongs.
The furin cleavage site enables the virus to more efficiently bind to and release its genetic material into a human cell and is one of the reasons that the virus is so easily transmissible and harmful. But scientists are divided over how this particular site wound up in the virus, and the cleavage site became a major focus of the heated debate over the origins of the pandemic.
Many who believe that the virus that caused the pandemic emerged from a laboratory have pointed out that it is unlikely that the particular sequence of amino acids that make up the furin cleavage site would have occurred naturally.
Adherents of the idea that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a natural spillover from animal hosts have argued that it could have evolved naturally from an as-yet undiscovered virus. Further, they argued, scientists were unlikely to have engineered the feature.
“There is no logical reason why an engineered virus would utilize such a suboptimal furin cleavage site, which would entail such an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering,” 23 scientists wrote earlier this month in an article in the journal Cell. “There is no evidence of prior research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.”
But the proposal describes the process of looking for novel furin cleavage sites in bat coronaviruses the scientists had sampled and inserting them into the spikes of SARS-related viruses in the laboratory.
“We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,” referring to cells found in the lining of the human airway, the proposal states.
The origin of SARS-CoV-2 that we propose below is based on the case histories of these miners and their hospital treatment. This simple theory accounts for all the key features of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus, including ones that have puzzled virologists since the outbreak began.
The theory can account for the origin of the polybasic furin cleavage site, which is a region of the viral spike protein that makes it susceptible to cleavage by the host enzyme furin and which greatly enhances viral spread in the body. This furin site is novel to SARS-CoV-2 compared to its near relatives (Coutard, et al., 2020). The theory also explains the exceptional affinity of the virus spike protein for human receptors, which has also surprised virologists (Letko et al., 2020; Piplani et al, 2020; Wrapp et al., 2020; Walls et al., 2020). The theory further explains why the virus has barely evolved since the pandemic began, which is also a deeply puzzling aspect of a virus supposedly new to humans (Zhan et al., 2020; van Dorp et al., 2020; Chaw et al., 2020). Lastly, the theory neatly explains why SARS-CoV-2 targets the lungs, which is unusual for a coronavirus (Huang et al., 2020).
-- A Proposed Origin for SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic [W/Comments], by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD
How I Learned to Start Worrying
Oh, come on. Lab-made? Nonsense! Back in January, that was my knee-jerk reaction when ideas that Covid-19 is caused by a laboratory leak had just surfaced. Bioweapon? Well, that is just Flat Earth crazies territory. Thus, whenever I kept hearing anything about non-natural origins of SARS-CoV-2, I brushed it aside under similar sentiments. So what if there is a virology institute in Wuhan? Who knows how many of those are sprinkled throughout China.
At some point, it became necessary to brush such theories aside in a substantiated manner, as their proponents began to back up their theses about the possible artificial nature of the virus with arguments from molecular biology, and when engaging them in debate, I wanted to smash their conspiracy theories with cold, hard scientific facts. Just like that Nature paper (or so I thought).
So it was then, in pursuit of arguments against the virus’s lab-madeness, that I got infected by the virus of doubt. What was the source of my doubts? The fact that the deeper you dive into the research activities of coronavirologists over the past 15–20 years, the more you realize that creating chimeras like CoV2 was commonplace in their labs.
And CoV2 is an obvious chimera (though not necessarily a lab-made one), which is based on the ancestral bat strain RaTG13, in which the receptor binding motif (RBM) in its spike protein is replaced by the RBM from a pangolin strain, and in addition, a small but very special stretch of 4 amino acids is inserted, which creates a furin cleavage site that, as virologists have previously established, significantly expands the “repertoire” of the virus in terms of whose cells it can penetrate. Most likely, it was thanks to this new furin site that the new mutant managed to jump species from its original host to humans.
Indeed, virologists, including the leader of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, have done many similar things in the past — both replacing the RBM in one type of virus by an RBM from another, or adding a new furin site that can provide a species-specific coronavirus with an ability to start using the same receptor (e.g. ACE2) in other species. In fact, Shi Zhengli’s group was creating chimeric constructs as far back as 2007 and as recently as 2017, when they created a whole of 8 new chimeric coronaviruses with various RBMs. In 2019 such work was in full swing, as WIV was part of a $3.7 million NIH grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. Under its auspices, Shi Zhengli co-authored a 2019 paper that called for continued research into synthetic viruses and testing them in vitro and in vivo...
A Killer Intro
It is impossible to ignore the introduction of a PRRA insert between S1 and S2: it sticks out like a splinter. This insert creates the furin cleavage site, which I mentioned at the very beginning. Let me explain what a furin site is....
-- Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research, by Yuri Deigin
IV. “Is It a Complete Coincidence?”
Even so, in January and February of 2020, there were thoughtful people who were speaking up, formulating their perplexities.
One person was Sam Husseini, an independent journalist. He went to a CDC press conference at the National Press Club on February 11, 2020. By then, 42,000 people had gotten sick in China and more than a thousand had died. But there were only 13 confirmed cases in the U.S. Halfway through the Q&A period, Husseini went to the microphone and asked the CDC’s representative, Anne Schuchat, where the virus had come from. His head was spinning, he told me later.
“Obviously the main concern is how to stop the virus,” Husseini said; nonetheless, he wanted to know more about its source. “Is it the CDC’s contention,” he asked, “that there’s absolutely no relation to the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan? It’s my understanding that this is the only place in China with a BSL-4 lab. We in the United States have, I think, two dozen or so, and there have been problems and incidents.” (A BSL-4 laboratory is a maximum-security biosafety-level-four facility, used to house research on the most dangerous known pathogens. New York has confirmed there are at least 11 BSL-4 facilities currently operating in the U.S.) Husseini hastened to say that he wasn’t implying that what happened in Wuhan was in any way intentional. “I’m just asking, Is it a complete coincidence that this outbreak happened in the one city in China with a BSL-4 lab?”
Schuchat thanked Husseini for his questions and comments. Everything she’d seen was quite consistent with a natural, zoonotic origin for the disease, she said.
That same month, a group of French scientists from Aix-Marseille University posted a paper describing their investigation of a small insertion in the genome of the new SARS-2 virus. The virus’s spike protein contained a sequence of amino acids that formed what Etienne Decroly and colleagues called a “peculiar furin-like cleavage site” — a chemically sensitive region on the lobster claw of the spike protein that would react in the presence of an enzyme called furin, which is a type of protein found everywhere within the human body, but especially in the lungs. When the spike senses human furin, it shudders, chemically speaking, and the enzyme opens the protein, commencing the tiny morbid ballet whereby the virus burns a hole in a host cell’s outer membrane and finds its way inside.
The code for this particular molecular feature — not found in SARS or any SARS-like bat viruses, but present in a slightly different form in the more lethal MERS virus — is easy to remember because it’s a roar: “R-R-A-R.” The letter code stands for amino acids: arginine, arginine, alanine, and arginine. Its presence, so Decroly and his colleagues observed, may heighten the “pathogenicity” — that is, the god-awfulness — of a disease.
Botao Xiao, a professor at the South China University of Technology, posted a short paper on a preprint server titled “The Possible Origins of 2019-nCoV Coronavirus.” Two laboratories, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (WHCDC) and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, were not far from the seafood market, which was where the disease was said to have originated, Xiao wrote — in fact, the WHCDC was only a few hundred yards away from the market — whereas the horseshoe bats that hosted the disease were hundreds of miles to the south. (No bats were sold in the market, he pointed out.) It was unlikely, he wrote, that a bat would have flown to a densely populated metropolitan area of 15 million people. “The killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan,” Xiao believed. He urged the relocation of “biohazardous laboratories” away from densely populated places. His article disappeared from the server.
And late in the month, a professor at National Taiwan University, Fang Chi-tai, gave a lecture on the coronavirus in which he described the anomalous R-R-A-R furin cleavage site. The virus was “unlikely to have four amino acids added all at once,” Fang said — natural mutations were smaller and more haphazard, he argued. “From an academic point of view, it is indeed possible that the amino acids were added to COVID-19 in the lab by humans.” When the Taiwan News published an article about Fang’s talk, Fang disavowed his own comments, and the video copy of the talk disappeared from the website of the Taiwan Public Health Association. “It has been taken down for a certain reason,” the association explained. “Thank you for your understanding.”
-- The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?, by Nicholson Baker
“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.
Comparing the rival scenarios of SARS2 origin.
The evidence above adds up to a serious case that the SARS2 virus could have been created in a lab, from which it then escaped. But the case, however substantial, falls short of proof. Proof would consist of evidence from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or related labs in Wuhan, that SARS2 or a predecessor virus was under development there. For lack of access to such records, another approach is to take certain salient facts about the SARS2 virus and ask how well each is explained by the two rival scenarios of origin, those of natural emergence and lab escape. Here are four tests of the two hypotheses. A couple have some technical detail, but these are among the most persuasive for those who may care to follow the argument.1) The place of origin. Start with geography. The two closest known relatives of the SARS2 virus were collected from bats living in caves in Yunnan, a province of southern China. If the SARS2 virus had first infected people living around the Yunnan caves, that would strongly support the idea that the virus had spilled over to people naturally. But this isn’t what happened. The pandemic broke out 1,500 kilometers away, in Wuhan.
Beta-coronaviruses, the family of bat viruses to which SARS2 belongs, infect the horseshoe bat Rhinolophus affinis, which ranges across southern China. The bats’ range is 50 kilometers, so it’s unlikely that any made it to Wuhan. In any case, the first cases of the COVID-19 pandemic probably occurred in September, when temperatures in Hubei province are already cold enough to send bats into hibernation.
What if the bat viruses infected some intermediate host first? You would need a longstanding population of bats in frequent proximity with an intermediate host, which in turn must often cross paths with people. All these exchanges of virus must take place somewhere outside Wuhan, a busy metropolis which so far as is known is not a natural habitat of Rhinolophus bat colonies. The infected person (or animal) carrying this highly transmissible virus must have traveled to Wuhan without infecting anyone else. No one in his or her family got sick. If the person jumped on a train to Wuhan, no fellow passengers fell ill.
It’s a stretch, in other words, to get the pandemic to break out naturally outside Wuhan and then, without leaving any trace, to make its first appearance there.
For the lab escape scenario, a Wuhan origin for the virus is a no-brainer. Wuhan is home to China’s leading center of coronavirus research where, as noted above, researchers were genetically engineering bat coronaviruses to attack human cells. They were doing so under the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 lab. If a virus with the unexpected infectiousness of SARS2 had been generated there, its escape would be no surprise.
2) Natural history and evolution. The initial location of the pandemic is a small part of a larger problem, that of its natural history. Viruses don’t just make one time jumps from one species to another. The coronavirus spike protein, adapted to attack bat cells, needs repeated jumps to another species, most of which fail, before it gains a lucky mutation. Mutation — a change in one of its RNA units — causes a different amino acid unit to be incorporated into its spike protein and makes the spike protein better able to attack the cells of some other species.
Through several more such mutation-driven adjustments, the virus adapts to its new host, say some animal with which bats are in frequent contact. The whole process then resumes as the virus moves from this intermediate host to people.
In the case of SARS1, researchers have documented the successive changes in its spike protein as the virus evolved step by step into a dangerous pathogen. After it had gotten from bats into civets, there were six further changes in its spike protein before it became a mild pathogen in people. After a further 14 changes, the virus was much better adapted to humans, and with a further four, the epidemic took off.
But when you look for the fingerprints of a similar transition in SARS2, a strange surprise awaits. The virus has changed hardly at all, at least until recently. From its very first appearance, it was well adapted to human cells. Researchers led by Alina Chan of the Broad Institute compared SARS2 with late stage SARS1, which by then was well adapted to human cells, and found that the two viruses were similarly well adapted. “By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV,” they wrote.
Even those who think lab origin unlikely agree that SARS2 genomes are remarkably uniform. Baric writes that “early strains identified in Wuhan, China, showed limited genetic diversity, which suggests that the virus may have been introduced from a single source.”
A single source would of course be compatible with lab escape, less so with the massive variation and selection which is evolution’s hallmark way of doing business.
The uniform structure of SARS2 genomes gives no hint of any passage through an intermediate animal host, and no such host has been identified in nature.
Proponents of natural emergence suggest that SARS2 incubated in a yet-to-be found human population before gaining its special properties. Or that it jumped to a host animal outside China.
All these conjectures are possible, but strained. Proponents of a lab leak have a simpler explanation. SARS2 was adapted to human cells from the start because it was grown in humanized mice or in lab cultures of human cells, just as described in Daszak’s grant proposal. Its genome shows little diversity because the hallmark of lab cultures is uniformity.
Proponents of laboratory escape joke that of course the SARS2 virus infected an intermediary host species before spreading to people, and that they have identified it — a humanized mouse from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
3) The furin cleavage site. The furin cleavage site is a minute part of the virus’s anatomy but one that exerts great influence on its infectivity. It sits in the middle of the SARS2 spike protein. It also lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from.
The spike protein has two sub-units with different roles. The first, called S1, recognizes the virus’s target, a protein called angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (or ACE2) which studs the surface of cells lining the human airways. The second, S2, helps the virus, once anchored to the cell, to fuse with the cell’s membrane. After the virus’s outer membrane has coalesced with that of the stricken cell, the viral genome is injected into the cell, hijacks its protein-making machinery and forces it to generate new viruses.
But this invasion cannot begin until the S1 and S2 subunits have been cut apart. And there, right at the S1/S2 junction, is the furin cleavage site that ensures the spike protein will be cleaved in exactly the right place.
The virus, a model of economic design, does not carry its own cleaver. It relies on the cell to do the cleaving for it. Human cells have a protein cutting tool on their surface known as furin. Furin will cut any protein chain that carries its signature target cutting site. This is the sequence of amino acid units proline-arginine-arginine-alanine, or PRRA in the code that refers to each amino acid by a letter of the alphabet. PRRA is the amino acid sequence at the core of SARS2’s furin cleavage site.
Viruses have all kinds of clever tricks, so why does the furin cleavage site stand out? Because of all known SARS-related beta-coronaviruses, only SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site. All the other viruses have their S2 unit cleaved at a different site and by a different mechanism.
How then did SARS2 acquire its furin cleavage site? Either the site evolved naturally, or it was inserted by researchers at the S1/S2 junction in a gain-of-function experiment.
Consider natural origin first. Two ways viruses evolve are by mutation and by recombination. Mutation is the process of random change in DNA (or RNA for coronaviruses) that usually results in one amino acid in a protein chain being switched for another. Many of these changes harm the virus but natural selection retains the few that do something useful. Mutation is the process by which the SARS1 spike protein gradually switched its preferred target cells from those of bats to civets, and then to humans.
Mutation seems a less likely way for SARS2’s furin cleavage site to be generated, even though it can’t completely be ruled out. The site’s four amino acid units are all together, and all at just the right place in the S1/S2 junction. Mutation is a random process triggered by copying errors (when new viral genomes are being generated) or by chemical decay of genomic units. So it typically affects single amino acids at different spots in a protein chain. A string of amino acids like that of the furin cleavage site is much more likely to be acquired all together through a quite different process known as recombination.
Recombination is an inadvertent swapping of genomic material that occurs when two viruses happen to invade the same cell, and their progeny are assembled with bits and pieces of RNA belonging to the other. Beta-coronaviruses will only combine with other beta-coronaviruses but can acquire, by recombination, almost any genetic element present in the collective genomic pool. What they cannot acquire is an element the pool does not possess. And no known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, the class to which SARS2 belongs, possesses a furin cleavage site.
Proponents of natural emergence say SARS2 could have picked up the site from some as yet unknown beta-coronavirus. But bat SARS-related beta-coronaviruses evidently don’t need a furin cleavage site to infect bat cells, so there’s no great likelihood that any in fact possesses one, and indeed none has been found so far.
The proponents’ next argument is that SARS2 acquired its furin cleavage site from people. A predecessor of SARS2 could have been circulating in the human population for months or years until at some point it acquired a furin cleavage site from human cells. It would then have been ready to break out as a pandemic.
If this is what happened, there should be traces in hospital surveillance records of the people infected by the slowly evolving virus. But none has so far come to light. According to the WHO report on the origins of the virus, the sentinel hospitals in Hubei province, home of Wuhan, routinely monitor influenza-like illnesses and “no evidence to suggest substantial SARSCoV-2 transmission in the months preceding the outbreak in December was observed.”
So it’s hard to explain how the SARS2 virus picked up its furin cleavage site naturally, whether by mutation or recombination.
That leaves a gain-of-function experiment. For those who think SARS2 may have escaped from a lab, explaining the furin cleavage site is no problem at all. “Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2. “At least 11 gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
4) A question of codons. There’s another aspect of the furin cleavage site that narrows the path for a natural emergence origin even further.
As everyone knows (or may at least recall from high school), the genetic code uses three units of DNA to specify each amino acid unit of a protein chain. When read in groups of 3, the 4 different kinds of DNA unit can specify 4 x 4 x 4 or 64 different triplets, or codons as they are called. Since there are only 20 kinds of amino acid, there are more than enough codons to go around, allowing some amino acids to be specified by more than one codon. The amino acid arginine, for instance, can be designated by any of the six codons CGU, CGC, CGA, CGG, AGA or AGG, where A, U, G and C stand for the four different kinds of unit in RNA.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Different organisms have different codon preferences. Human cells like to designate arginine with the codons CGT, CGC or CGG. But CGG is coronavirus’s least popular codon for arginine. Keep that in mind when looking at how the amino acids in the furin cleavage site are encoded in the SARS2 genome.
Now the functional reason why SARS2 has a furin cleavage site, and its cousin viruses don’t, can be seen by lining up (in a computer) the string of nearly 30,000 nucleotides in its genome with those of its cousin coronaviruses, of which the closest so far known is one called RaTG13. Compared with RaTG13, SARS2 has a 12-nucleotide insert right at the S1/S2 junction. The insert is the sequence T-CCT-CGG-CGG-GC. The CCT codes for proline, the two CGG’s for two arginines, and the GC is the beginning of a GCA codon that codes for alanine.
There are several curious features about this insert but the oddest is that of the two side-by-side CGG codons. Only 5 percent of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus. So how did SARS2 acquire a pair of arginine codons that are favored by human cells but not by coronaviruses?
Proponents of natural emergence have an up-hill task to explain all the features of SARS2’s furin cleavage site. They have to postulate a recombination event at a site on the virus’s genome where recombinations are rare, and the insertion of a 12-nucleotide sequence with a double arginine codon unknown in the beta-coronavirus repertoire, at the only site in the genome that would significantly expand the virus’s infectivity.
“Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events,” is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory. “Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein and these codons appear unusual exactly because we’ve not sampled enough.”
Robertson is correct that evolution is always producing results that may seem unlikely but in fact are not. Viruses can generate untold numbers of variants but we see only the one-in-a-billion that natural selection picks for survival. But this argument could be pushed too far. For instance, any result of a gain-of-function experiment could be explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time. And the numbers game can be played the other way. For the furin cleavage site to arise naturally in SARS2, a chain of events has to happen, each of which is quite unlikely for the reasons given above. A long chain with several improbable steps is unlikely to ever be completed.
For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus’s genome would synthesize the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to use CGG codons to do so.
“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.
-- The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?, by Nicholas Wade
The new proposal, which also described a plan to mass vaccinate bats in caves, does not provide conclusive evidence that the virus that caused the pandemic emerged from a lab. And virus experts remain sharply divided over its origins. But several scientists who work with coronaviruses told The Intercept that they felt that the proposal shifted the terrain of the debate.
Tipping the Scales
“Some kind of threshold has been crossed,” said Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and co-author of the upcoming book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” Chan has been vocal about the need to thoroughly investigate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab while remaining open to both possible theories of its development. For Chan, the revelation from the proposal was the description of the insertion of a novel furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses — something people previously speculated, but had no evidence, may have happened.
“Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”
“A possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”
Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, whose work tracking bats and other animals was referenced in the grant application without his knowledge, also said it made him more open to the idea that the pandemic may have its roots in a lab. “The information in the proposal certainly changes my thoughts about a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Wikelski told The Intercept. “In fact, a possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”
But others insisted that the research posed little or no threat and pointed out that the proposal called for most of the genetic engineering work to be done in North Carolina rather than China. “Given that the work wasn’t funded and wasn’t proposed to take place in Wuhan anyway it’s hard to assess any bearing on the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Stephen Goldstein, a scientist who studies the evolution of viral genes at the University of Utah, and an author of the recent Cell article, wrote in an email to The Intercept.
Other scientists contacted by The Intercept noted that there is published evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was already engaged in some of the genetic engineering work described in the proposal and that viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China. “The mail is filled with little envelopes with plasmid dried on to filter paper that scientists routinely send each other,” said Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center at the University of Montana.
Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, was adamant that the proposal did not change his opinion that the pandemic was caused by a natural spillover from animals to humans. “There are zero data to support a lab origin ‘notion,’” Racaniello wrote in an email. He said he believed that the research being proposed had the potential to fall in the category of gain-of-function research of concern, as did an experiment that was detailed in another grant proposal recently obtained by The Intercept. The government funds such research, in which scientists intentionally make viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them, only in a narrow range of circumstances. And DARPA rejected the proposal at least in part because of concerns that it involved such research.
While Racaniello acknowledged that the research in the DARPA proposal entailed some danger, he said “the benefits far, far outweigh the risk.” He also said the fact that the viruses described in the proposal were not known pathogens mitigated the concern. “This is not SARS,” he said, referring to SARS-CoV-1, the virus that caused a 2003 outbreak. “It’s SARS-related.”
But SARS-CoV-2 is not a direct descendant of that virus — it’s a relative.
In fact, the viruses described in the grant proposal, which was first posted online by the research group DRASTIC, were not known pathogens. And the authors of the grant proposal make the case that because the scientists would be using SARS-related bat viruses, as opposed to the SARS virus that was known to infect humans, the research was exempt from “gain-of-function concerns.” But according to several scientists interviewed by The Intercept, the viruses presented a threat nevertheless.
“The work describes generating full-length bat SARS-related coronaviruses that are thought to pose a risk of human spillover. And that’s the type of work that people could plausibly postulate could have led to a lab-associated origin of SARS-CoV-2,” said Jesse Bloom, a professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and director of the Bloom Lab, which studies the evolution of viruses. Bloom pointed out that the scientists acknowledge the risk to humans in their proposal. “It’s an explicit goal of the grant to identify the bat SARS-related coronaviruses that they think pose the highest risk.”
Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology who directs the developmental biology laboratory at New York Medical College, also said the fact that the viruses weren’t known to be dangerous didn’t preclude the possibility that they might become so. “That’s really disingenuous,” Newman said of the argument. “The people that are claiming natural emergence say that it begins with a bat virus that evolved to be compatible with humans. If you use that logic, then this virus could be a threat because it could also make that transition.” Newman, a longtime critic of gain-of-function research and founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, said that the proposal confirmed some of his worst fears. “This is not like slightly stepping over the line,” said Newman. “This is doing everything that people say is going to cause a pandemic if you do it.”
While the grant proposal does not provide the smoking gun that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab, for some scientists it adds to the evidence that it might have. “Whether that particular study did or didn’t [lead to the pandemic], it certainly could have,” said Nunberg, of Montana Biotechnology Center. “Once you make an unnatural virus, you’re basically setting it up in an unstable evolutionary place. The virus is going to undergo a whole bunch of changes to try and cope with its imperfections. So who knows what will come of it.” The risks of such research are profound and irreversible, he said. “You can’t call back the virus once you release it into the environment.”
DARPA, a division of the Department of Defense, said regulations prevented it from confirming that it had reviewed the proposal. “Since EcoHealth Alliance may or may not be the direct source of the material in question, and we are precluded by Federal Acquisition Regulations from divulging bidders or any associated proposal details, we recommend that you reach out to them to confirm the document’s authenticity,” a DARPA spokesperson wrote in an email to The Intercept. The British Daily Telegraph reported that it had confirmed the document’s legitimacy with a former member of the Trump administration.
The Telegraph story erroneously reported that the scientists proposed to inoculate bats with live viruses. In fact, they hoped to inoculate them with chimeric S proteins, which were proposed to be developed through a subcontract in the grant in Ralph Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, not in Wuhan. Baric did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
Conflict of Interest
Many questions remain about the proposal, including whether any of the research described in it was completed. Even without the DARPA funding, there were many other potential ways to pay for the experiments. And scientists interviewed for this article agreed that often researchers do some of the science they describe in proposals before or after they submit them.
“This was a highly funded group of researchers that wouldn’t let one rejection halt their work,” said Chan, the “Viral” author.
Perhaps the most troubling question about the proposal is why, within the small group of scientists who have been searching for information that could shed light on the origins of the pandemic, there has apparently been so little awareness of the planned work until now. Peter Daszak and Linfa Wang, two of the researchers who submitted the proposal, did not previously acknowledge it.
Daszak, the EcoHealth Alliance president, has actively sought to quash interest in the idea that the novel coronavirus originated in a lab. In February 2020, as the pandemic began to grip major cities in the U.S., he began organizing scientists to write an open letter that was published in the Lancet addressing the origins of the virus. “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins,” read the statement signed by Daszak and 26 co-authors. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
Daszak directed and gathered signatures for the letter, all the while suggesting that he and his collaborators on the proposed DARPA project, Baric and Wang, distance themselves from the effort.
“I spoke with Linfa [Wang] last night about the statement we sent round. He thinks, and I agree with him, that 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 to Baric in February 2020, just weeks before it appeared in the journal, according to an email surfaced a year later by public health investigative research group U.S. Right to Know. “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.” Ultimately, Daszak did sign the letter.
“I also think this is a good decision,” Baric replied. “Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”
Baric and Wang — a professor in the emerging infectious diseases program at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore — did not respond to inquiries from The Intercept about their decision not to sign the letter in the Lancet.
Daszak was also a member of the joint team the World Health Organization sent to China in February 2020 to investigate the origins of the pandemic, which concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus had been released from a laboratory. (In March, WHO called for further investigation of the origins of the virus and stated that “all hypotheses remain open.”)
“I find it really disappointing that one of the members of the joint WHO-China team, which is essentially the group of scientists that were tasked as representatives of both the scientific community and the World Health Organization of investigating this, are actually on this proposal, knew that this line of research was at least under consideration, and didn’t mention it all,” said Bloom, of Fred Hutch. “Whatever information that relates to help people think about this just needs to be made transparently available and explained.”
Correction: September 24, 2021
A previous version of this article stated incorrectly that the EcoHealth Alliance proposal had been featured on Sky News Australia.
Correction: September 23, 2021, 3:30 p.m.
A previous version of this article stated incorrectly that Linfa Wang was a member of the WHO-China team.
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Re: U.S. government gave $3.7 million grant to Wuhan lab at
by admin » Thu Dec 15, 2022 12:45 am
Whistleblower US scientist who worked with Wuhan lab claims COVID WAS genetically engineered and leaked from the site - and says 'the US government is to blame' because it funded the research
by Aneeta Bhole
Daily Mail.com
PUBLISHED: 11:00 EST, 3 December 2022 | UPDATED: 16:47 EST, 3 December 2022
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ed-replace
• Dr Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, has claimed that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered and leaked from a facility in China
• Huff said he has no proof that the leak was deliberate however does claim in his explosive tell-all book that biosecurity at the Chinese facility was compromised
• EcoHealth Alliance had been studying different coronaviruses in bats for more than ten years with funding from the National Institutes of Health
• Led by Dr Peter Daszak - there were concerns about the ties between Wuhan and EcoHealth Alliance - there most recent grant came in September 2021
A scientist who worked closely with a US-funded Wuhan lab has claimed that Covid was genetically engineered and leaked from the Chinese facility.
Dr Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, called the pandemic 'one of the greatest cover-ups in history' and the 'biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11.'
In his expert opinion, whistleblower Huff believes that grant funding provided by Anthony Fauci by way of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to EcoHealth Alliance, was linked to the 'creation of SARS-CoV-2.'
He claims NIH '[funded] gain-of-function work and the US intelligence community was aware of and appeared to have been involved' with this work.
Gain-of-function (GOF) work has been widely believed to have created SARS-CoV-2, Huff stressing that it was key in creating the aggressive and contagious disease.
[x]
Dr Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, has claims that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered and leaked from a facility in China
[x]
Led by Dr Peter Daszak (left) there were concerns about the ties between Wuhan and EcoHealth Alliance - there most recent grant coming from Anthony Fauci in September 2021
[x]
Huff points to China's gain-of-function (GOF) experiments, which he believes were carried out within relaxed biosecurity environments and led to the leak at the US-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology
The pandemic swept across the globe and has so far claimed the lives of 6.64 million people after first being reported as a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high security lab specializing in coronaviruses, has been cast into the spotlight over the past two years, many questioning whether it could be the source of the highly contagious disease.
Both China and the lab have vehemently denied allegations, but evidence of a lab leak, have been gaining traction as scientists, researchers and governments hunt for answers.
Experts have suggested Covid may have escaped from the Wuhan facility through an infected researcher, improper disposal of waste or potential breaches in security at the site.
In explosive allegations made in his new book, The Truth About Wuhan, Huff claims that the pandemic was the result of the US government funding of dangerous genetic engineering of coronaviruses in China.
Speaking to The Sun, Huff said that 'the US government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese.'
He points to China's GOF experiments, which he believes were carried out within relaxed biosecurity environments which led to a lab leak at the US-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology.
[x]
Huff said that it shouldn't be a surprise that China lied about the outbreak and then went to 'extraordinary lengths to make it appear as if the disease emerged naturally'
[x]
In September, Fauci, who has spent over five decades in the federal government and has been the face of the coronavirus pandemic response, awarded EcoHealth more money
'EcoHealth Alliance and foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,' he said.
The army veteran, from Michigan, said the organization taught the Wuhan lab the 'best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species' for many years.
'China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent,' he said.
'I was terrified by what I saw. We were just handing them bioweapon technology.'
In his book, the infectious diseases expert claims 'greedy scientists killed millions of people globally,' and goes as far as to claim the US government covered it all up.
Huff said that it shouldn't be a surprise that China lied about the outbreak and then went to 'extraordinary lengths to make it appear as if the disease emerged naturally.'
'The shocking part of all of this is how the United States government lied to all of us,' he said.
[x]
The organization received a $653,392 grant to analyze 'the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam'
[x]
EcoHealth Alliance had been studying different coronaviruses in bats for more than ten years with funding from the NIH - and developed close working ties with the Wuhan lab.
In September, Anthony Fauci, who has spent over five decades in the federal government and has been the face of the coronavirus pandemic response, awarded EcoHealth more money.
The organization received a $653,392 grant to analyze 'the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam,' according to the Wall Street Journal.
NIH have identified the region as 'high risk for future emergence of novel coronaviruses and the potential site where SARS-CoV-2 first 'spilled over' from bats to people.'
While the NIH is promoting EcoHealth Alliance's claim that Covid-19 emerged through a 'spill over' from animals.
Many scientists disagree and have said the circumstantial and biological evidence suggests a lab leak.
Huff, who worked at EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016, serving as vice president from 2015, said he worked on the classified side of the research program as a US government scientist.
Former intelligence chiefs and diplomats have already claimed Covid was leaked from a Wuhan lab in the 'cover-up of the century.'
America's former top diplomat in East Asia, David Stilwell, telling The Sun in September 2021 that 'this makes Watergate look easy.'
'People are for some reason bent on insisting on having a slam-dunk, air-tight case that China produced this virus,' he said at the time.
'Of course, the PRC is not going to let you in there to see their labs, but so many people have used that problem to stop further inquiry.
'This isn't a legal case, we are not looking for indisputable evidence; there is enough circumstantial evidence.'
In 2019, the Wuhan lab started working with the EcoHealth Alliance on a USAID program called PREDICT, which focuses on emerging pandemic threats.
PREDICT had been designed to detect and find zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential – including coronaviruses.
EcoHealth Alliance states on their website that zoonotic diseases–those that can be transmitted between animals and humans–represent approximately 75 percent of the newly emerging diseases currently affecting people.
Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan virologist who famously became known as 'Batwoman' had hoped the program would create an early-warning system for pandemics.
[x]
Huff said he has no proof that the leak was deliberate however does claim in his explosive tell-all book that biosecurity at the Chinese facility was compromised
[x]
Huff alleges the US were using the project to assess the bioweapon capabilities of foreign labs - including the Wuhan Institute of Virology
[x]
But in 2014, Huff was asked to review a funding proposal which revealed that GOF work was being carried out to create SARS-CoV-2 - which causes Covid.
GOF work sees viruses accelerated to more easily infect humans to help researchers test scientific theories, develop new technologies and find treatments for infectious diseases.
The risky research method can pose safety and security concerns - and is banned in many countries.
It was originally banned in the US in 2014 but was reintroduced by the NIH in 2017.
Huff realized the EcoHealth Alliance was working closely with the Wuhan lab on this type of research, with the support of USAID - a US government department.
He claims that the virus would never occur in nature and had been developed into a much more powerful pathogen in the lab.
'EcoHealth Alliance developed SARS-CoV-2 and was responsible for the development of the agent SARS-CoV-2 during my employment at the organization,' he said.
He said that he has no evidence China deliberately released the virus but believes the US-funded project was 'mostly a global fishing expedition for coronaviruses' to carry out GOF work or for intelligence collection - rather than preventing future pandemics.
'At the time, I felt like the project seemed more like intelligence collection than scientific research and development,' he said in his book.
The scientist said the PREDICT program wasn't collecting the data it should have been and Huff told The Sun that it appeared to be a 'giant intelligence operation'.
He alleges the US were using the project to assess the bioweapon capabilities of foreign labs - including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
[x]
Huff claims the US-funded project was 'mostly a global fishing expedition for coronaviruses' to carry out GOF work or for intelligence collection - rather than preventing future pandemics
[x]
The pandemic swept across the globe and has so far claimed the lives of 6.64 million people after first being reported as a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China in late 2019
[x]
Shortly after, a novel coronavirus was eventually identified, the first case outside China recorded in January 2020 in Thailand
During a meeting with top executives in 2015 and 2016 Huff claims that he tried to sound the alarm over the biosafety and biosecurity risks in contract labs.
'I was concerned that EcoHealth Alliance did not have enough visibility or firsthand knowledge of what was happening at foreign laboratories contracted and managed by EcoHealth Alliance,' he said.
Huff said US government officials again issued warnings in January 2018 about the Wuhan lab - including the major shortage of experts needed to safely manage research on deadly coronaviruses.
'It could be reasonably argued that EcoHealth Alliance set up China to fail,' he said.
And when Covid emerged in late 2019, he said China 'and some of their US government collaborators at the Department of State, USAID, and the Department of Defense went into full cover-up mode.'
Huff said he believes that the US government was alerted to the outbreak in August or October of 2019 months before the first clusters were starting to emerge.
He quit EcoHealth Alliance in 2016 'due to a large number of ethical concerns with the scientific work and EcoHealth Alliance as a whole.'
But in late 2019, he was suddenly offered a position at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) - and was told he would need top security clearance and a polygraph for the job.
Huff now believes he was approached for the role to keep him quiet about the origins of Covid.
'It is my belief that people working within the US government potentially identified me as a risk to knowing first-hand that the SARS-CoV-2 disease emergence event was a consequence of the US government's sponsorship of the genetic engineering of SARS-CoV-2 domestically and abroad,' he said in his book.
'If I would have accepted the position, then I suspect that DARPA would have disclosed restricted information to me, which would have consequently prevented me from discussing any of this information publicly, like I have been and am doing now.'
About a month after the pandemic began in the early months of 2020, Huff said he was 'adamant that SARS-CoV-2 was a manmade agent.'
'I suddenly realized what the potential motivation and persistence for recruiting me were,' he said.
'The intelligence community realized that I was the only person in a senior position that had left EHA, and the fact I was working outside the government's control made me a threat to their agenda.'
Huff believes government officials offered him the role so he could be 'sworn into silence for the rest of my life.'
As he began to unravel the alleged cover-up by the US government, he claims that authorities have launched a massive campaign of harassment against him.
He claimed military-grade drones would often appear at his home, he was stalked at the supermarket, and he was followed by unknown vehicles.
Huff has since filed a lawsuit with Renz Law LLC against EcoHealth Alliance in the state of New York.
In September, Huff tweeted: 'Below is link to the copy of the report about the REAL Origin of SARS-CoV2 sent to the US Senate and Congress.
'My declaration in the document was provided under oath with penalty of perjury.'
The document issued by Renz Law LLC states: 'Donald Trump, Senator Ron Johnson, Senator Rand Paul, Rep. Jim Jordan and others were right.
'As early as later April or early May 2020 former President Trump spoke of the creation of SARS-CoV-2 in a lab in Wuhan, China.
'Since that time both the investigation and the cover-up have continued but the evidence provided herein clearly demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2 was indeed created in a lab in Wuhan China by EcoHealth Alliance and with funding from Anthony Fauci's NIH/NIAID.
The document goes on to say that the evidence gathered hopes to back five statements of claim.
'SARS-CoV-2 was created in lab in Wuhan China, Anthony Fauci funded the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and lied to Congress about funding gain-of-function work, the US intelligence community was aware of and appeared to have been involved with the funding of said gain-of-function work,' it read.
'A number of well-connected public and private partners were involved in gain-of-function work that resulted in the creation and release of SARS-CoV-2 and Anthony Fauci and other coordinated to cover-up the funding of the gain-of-function work which resulted in SARS-CoV-2.'
It goes on to say that the expectations are that there will be a 'immediate investigation that will see bi-partisan support in light of this newly compiled information.'
'Renz Law and Make Americans Free Again (MAFA) will provide any and all support possible in such an investigation and prosecutions,' the document continues.
[x]
Official records show EcoHealth Alliance has received seven grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since June 2020 for research into animal-borne viruses in Asia and Africa
'Further, with the additional high-profile revelations that certain segments of the government have promoted censoring this information, presumably as part of the cover up, we will voluntarily support any good faith efforts by the media to correct the record.
'[We] will continue to seek truth and justice in this matter for all that have been impacted by the worst man-made pandemic in human history.'
Huff provided a declaration alongside the documents stating that he would attest a true and accurate representation of facts and experiences.
In October, DailyMail.com revealed that EcoHealth Alliance had been handed nearly $7 million in taxpayer's money during the pandemic.
Official records show EcoHealth Alliance has received seven grants from the NIH since June 2020 for research into animal-borne viruses in Asia and Africa.
Four of those grants were handed to the non-profit after it was uncovered EcoHealth Alliance channeled funds to the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic.
It also collaborated on controversial virus-tinkering research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some scientists fear led to the Covid crisis.
Dr Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who was accused of trying to cover-up serious inquiry into the so-called lab leak theory, is listed as the project lead on a majority of the research programs.
Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn told DailyMail.com: 'EcoHealth Alliance has still not answered key questions about its role in the pandemic.
'They should be held to account and not be receiving taxpayers' dollars until a full investigation is complete.'
The most recent NIH grant awarded to EchoHealth Alliance came on September 21. The $653,392 package went towards studying Covid-like viruses in bats across Asia and Africa.
That five-year experiment will likely investigate 'the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence', with scientists set to trawl caves in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam in the hunt to prevent another viral crisis.
Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, told DailyMail.com: 'Giving taxpayer money to EcoHealth to study pandemic prevention is like paying a suspected arsonist to conduct fire safety inspections.'
Daszak is a close friend of the US' top Covid doctor Fauci and even thanked him for publicly downplaying theories that Covid may have been created in a lab.
EcoHealth Alliance has been receiving federal research funding since 2002.
Daszak, who has maintained the view that the coronavirus jumped to humans from animal reservoirs, has a checkered history when it comes to the kind of research that his critics argue helped pave the way for highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 to escape the safety of a lab.
He has been slammed by Republicans in Congress for taking part in GOF research.
Those who believed there was a chance the virus escaped from the WIV were cast aside as fringe thinkers, in part due to Daszak's influence in the community of epidemiologists and infectious disease experts.
He and fellow infectious disease experts Ralph Baric and Linfa Wang circulated a statement that was later published in The Lancet in which 27 prominent scientists from nine countries to strongly condemned 'conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.'
But Daszak appeared to want to distance himself from the letter after a Freedom of Information Request revealed that he and his fellows 'should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't work in a counterproductive way.'
Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said in December 2021 that it took 16 months to publish an official conflict of interest statement in which he revealed Daszak had links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Despite charges of having a conflict of interest, given that his organization had worked with the WIV on coronavirus research in the past, Daszak was appointed to the World Health Organization's team charged with going to China to investigate the origin of the virus.
The WHO dispelled those claims though, saying that 'all declared interests were assessed and found not to interfere with the independence and transparency of the work.'
Officials in the Trump and Biden administrations have said the Chinese government worked to thwart investigations into the origins of the virus and hoodwinked WHO investigators when they arrived.
Daszak revealed in March 2021 that he and the team took China's word for it when officials there insisted that the virus could not have escaped from their lab.
'We met with them. We said, 'Do you audit the lab?' And they said, 'Annually.' 'Did you audit it after the outbreak?' 'Yes.' 'Was anything found?' 'No.' 'Do you test your staff?' 'Yes.' No one was —' Daszak said.
In response to Lesley Stahl, who said he was taking the Chinese researcher's word for it, Daszak said, 'Well, what else can we do?'
'We asked them tough questions. They weren't vetted in advance. And the answers they gave, we found to be believable, correct and convincing,' Daszak said.
In April 2020, former President Donald Trump chose to axe Daszak's grant awarded in 2019 over unsubstantiated claims that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab that employs a Chinese virologist who had been receiving funding from the grant.
'NIH got it right when it canceled the funding for the experiments EcoHealth Alliance was conducting with China's state-run Wuhan Institute,' Ernst said.
She added, 'In addition to violating multiple federal laws, EcoHealth has still not turned over documents about these dangerous studies that NIH has requested on multiple occasions that could offer vital clues to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.'
by Aneeta Bhole
Daily Mail.com
PUBLISHED: 11:00 EST, 3 December 2022 | UPDATED: 16:47 EST, 3 December 2022
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ed-replace
• Dr Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, has claimed that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered and leaked from a facility in China
• Huff said he has no proof that the leak was deliberate however does claim in his explosive tell-all book that biosecurity at the Chinese facility was compromised
• EcoHealth Alliance had been studying different coronaviruses in bats for more than ten years with funding from the National Institutes of Health
• Led by Dr Peter Daszak - there were concerns about the ties between Wuhan and EcoHealth Alliance - there most recent grant came in September 2021
A scientist who worked closely with a US-funded Wuhan lab has claimed that Covid was genetically engineered and leaked from the Chinese facility.
Dr Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, called the pandemic 'one of the greatest cover-ups in history' and the 'biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11.'
In his expert opinion, whistleblower Huff believes that grant funding provided by Anthony Fauci by way of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to EcoHealth Alliance, was linked to the 'creation of SARS-CoV-2.'
He claims NIH '[funded] gain-of-function work and the US intelligence community was aware of and appeared to have been involved' with this work.
Gain-of-function (GOF) work has been widely believed to have created SARS-CoV-2, Huff stressing that it was key in creating the aggressive and contagious disease.
[x]
Dr Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, has claims that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered and leaked from a facility in China
[x]
Led by Dr Peter Daszak (left) there were concerns about the ties between Wuhan and EcoHealth Alliance - there most recent grant coming from Anthony Fauci in September 2021
[x]
Huff points to China's gain-of-function (GOF) experiments, which he believes were carried out within relaxed biosecurity environments and led to the leak at the US-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology
The pandemic swept across the globe and has so far claimed the lives of 6.64 million people after first being reported as a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high security lab specializing in coronaviruses, has been cast into the spotlight over the past two years, many questioning whether it could be the source of the highly contagious disease.
Both China and the lab have vehemently denied allegations, but evidence of a lab leak, have been gaining traction as scientists, researchers and governments hunt for answers.
Experts have suggested Covid may have escaped from the Wuhan facility through an infected researcher, improper disposal of waste or potential breaches in security at the site.
In explosive allegations made in his new book, The Truth About Wuhan, Huff claims that the pandemic was the result of the US government funding of dangerous genetic engineering of coronaviruses in China.
Speaking to The Sun, Huff said that 'the US government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese.'
He points to China's GOF experiments, which he believes were carried out within relaxed biosecurity environments which led to a lab leak at the US-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology.
[x]
Huff said that it shouldn't be a surprise that China lied about the outbreak and then went to 'extraordinary lengths to make it appear as if the disease emerged naturally'
[x]
In September, Fauci, who has spent over five decades in the federal government and has been the face of the coronavirus pandemic response, awarded EcoHealth more money
'EcoHealth Alliance and foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,' he said.
The army veteran, from Michigan, said the organization taught the Wuhan lab the 'best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species' for many years.
'China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent,' he said.
'I was terrified by what I saw. We were just handing them bioweapon technology.'
In his book, the infectious diseases expert claims 'greedy scientists killed millions of people globally,' and goes as far as to claim the US government covered it all up.
Huff said that it shouldn't be a surprise that China lied about the outbreak and then went to 'extraordinary lengths to make it appear as if the disease emerged naturally.'
'The shocking part of all of this is how the United States government lied to all of us,' he said.
[x]
The organization received a $653,392 grant to analyze 'the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam'
[x]
EcoHealth Alliance had been studying different coronaviruses in bats for more than ten years with funding from the NIH - and developed close working ties with the Wuhan lab.
In September, Anthony Fauci, who has spent over five decades in the federal government and has been the face of the coronavirus pandemic response, awarded EcoHealth more money.
The organization received a $653,392 grant to analyze 'the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam,' according to the Wall Street Journal.
NIH have identified the region as 'high risk for future emergence of novel coronaviruses and the potential site where SARS-CoV-2 first 'spilled over' from bats to people.'
While the NIH is promoting EcoHealth Alliance's claim that Covid-19 emerged through a 'spill over' from animals.
Many scientists disagree and have said the circumstantial and biological evidence suggests a lab leak.
Huff, who worked at EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016, serving as vice president from 2015, said he worked on the classified side of the research program as a US government scientist.
Former intelligence chiefs and diplomats have already claimed Covid was leaked from a Wuhan lab in the 'cover-up of the century.'
America's former top diplomat in East Asia, David Stilwell, telling The Sun in September 2021 that 'this makes Watergate look easy.'
'People are for some reason bent on insisting on having a slam-dunk, air-tight case that China produced this virus,' he said at the time.
'Of course, the PRC is not going to let you in there to see their labs, but so many people have used that problem to stop further inquiry.
'This isn't a legal case, we are not looking for indisputable evidence; there is enough circumstantial evidence.'
In 2019, the Wuhan lab started working with the EcoHealth Alliance on a USAID program called PREDICT, which focuses on emerging pandemic threats.
PREDICT had been designed to detect and find zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential – including coronaviruses.
EcoHealth Alliance states on their website that zoonotic diseases–those that can be transmitted between animals and humans–represent approximately 75 percent of the newly emerging diseases currently affecting people.
Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan virologist who famously became known as 'Batwoman' had hoped the program would create an early-warning system for pandemics.
[x]
Huff said he has no proof that the leak was deliberate however does claim in his explosive tell-all book that biosecurity at the Chinese facility was compromised
[x]
Huff alleges the US were using the project to assess the bioweapon capabilities of foreign labs - including the Wuhan Institute of Virology
[x]
But in 2014, Huff was asked to review a funding proposal which revealed that GOF work was being carried out to create SARS-CoV-2 - which causes Covid.
GOF work sees viruses accelerated to more easily infect humans to help researchers test scientific theories, develop new technologies and find treatments for infectious diseases.
The risky research method can pose safety and security concerns - and is banned in many countries.
It was originally banned in the US in 2014 but was reintroduced by the NIH in 2017.
Huff realized the EcoHealth Alliance was working closely with the Wuhan lab on this type of research, with the support of USAID - a US government department.
He claims that the virus would never occur in nature and had been developed into a much more powerful pathogen in the lab.
'EcoHealth Alliance developed SARS-CoV-2 and was responsible for the development of the agent SARS-CoV-2 during my employment at the organization,' he said.
He said that he has no evidence China deliberately released the virus but believes the US-funded project was 'mostly a global fishing expedition for coronaviruses' to carry out GOF work or for intelligence collection - rather than preventing future pandemics.
'At the time, I felt like the project seemed more like intelligence collection than scientific research and development,' he said in his book.
The scientist said the PREDICT program wasn't collecting the data it should have been and Huff told The Sun that it appeared to be a 'giant intelligence operation'.
He alleges the US were using the project to assess the bioweapon capabilities of foreign labs - including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
[x]
Huff claims the US-funded project was 'mostly a global fishing expedition for coronaviruses' to carry out GOF work or for intelligence collection - rather than preventing future pandemics
[x]
The pandemic swept across the globe and has so far claimed the lives of 6.64 million people after first being reported as a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China in late 2019
[x]
Shortly after, a novel coronavirus was eventually identified, the first case outside China recorded in January 2020 in Thailand
During a meeting with top executives in 2015 and 2016 Huff claims that he tried to sound the alarm over the biosafety and biosecurity risks in contract labs.
'I was concerned that EcoHealth Alliance did not have enough visibility or firsthand knowledge of what was happening at foreign laboratories contracted and managed by EcoHealth Alliance,' he said.
Huff said US government officials again issued warnings in January 2018 about the Wuhan lab - including the major shortage of experts needed to safely manage research on deadly coronaviruses.
'It could be reasonably argued that EcoHealth Alliance set up China to fail,' he said.
And when Covid emerged in late 2019, he said China 'and some of their US government collaborators at the Department of State, USAID, and the Department of Defense went into full cover-up mode.'
What did Fauci get wrong? From telling people not to wear masks to claiming vaccines stopped infections
Dr Anthony Fauci is due to step down from his position as one of America's top infectious disease advisors at the end of this year.
Below are listed some of his key blunders when the virus struck
Don't wear masks, do wear masks
As global concern for Covid was surfacing in March 2020, Fauci told Americans that there was 'no need' to wear a face mask.
He said they may only help people 'feel a little better', and 'might even block a droplet' — but would not provide good protection.
Less than a month later, he was forced into an embarrassing climbdown after it emerged the virus spread via droplets in the air.
Dr Fauci later insisted he advised people not to wear masks to ensure there were enough available for hospitals and healthcare centers.
Covid did not come from a lab
Dr Fauci has also repeatedly insisted that Covid did not leak from a lab in China.
He called the theory a 'shiny object that will go away', and brushed aside claims from other top experts as an 'opinion'.
Dr Fauci has now backpedalled, saying instead that he keeps an 'open mind' although insisting that it remains 'most likely' that the virus spilled over from animals to humans.
Two jabs will stop you catching Covid
When the Covid vaccine roll-out was in full swing, Dr Fauci said the immunity from shots made doubly-vaccinated people a 'dead end' for the virus, and even suggested they may no longer need to wear masks.
Schools shutdown
Schools were closed from March through to August 2020, something Dr Fauci later expressed regret about.
But he said last month that he 'should have realized' there would be 'deleterious collateral consequences'.
Children are now bearing the brunt of the US's tripledemic, after lockdowns left them without proper immune defense.
Funding Wuhan lab
In 2014, Dr Facui's agency issued a $3.7million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which some allege was used to support gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Huff said he believes that the US government was alerted to the outbreak in August or October of 2019 months before the first clusters were starting to emerge.
He quit EcoHealth Alliance in 2016 'due to a large number of ethical concerns with the scientific work and EcoHealth Alliance as a whole.'
But in late 2019, he was suddenly offered a position at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) - and was told he would need top security clearance and a polygraph for the job.
Huff now believes he was approached for the role to keep him quiet about the origins of Covid.
'It is my belief that people working within the US government potentially identified me as a risk to knowing first-hand that the SARS-CoV-2 disease emergence event was a consequence of the US government's sponsorship of the genetic engineering of SARS-CoV-2 domestically and abroad,' he said in his book.
'If I would have accepted the position, then I suspect that DARPA would have disclosed restricted information to me, which would have consequently prevented me from discussing any of this information publicly, like I have been and am doing now.'
About a month after the pandemic began in the early months of 2020, Huff said he was 'adamant that SARS-CoV-2 was a manmade agent.'
'I suddenly realized what the potential motivation and persistence for recruiting me were,' he said.
'The intelligence community realized that I was the only person in a senior position that had left EHA, and the fact I was working outside the government's control made me a threat to their agenda.'
Huff believes government officials offered him the role so he could be 'sworn into silence for the rest of my life.'
As he began to unravel the alleged cover-up by the US government, he claims that authorities have launched a massive campaign of harassment against him.
He claimed military-grade drones would often appear at his home, he was stalked at the supermarket, and he was followed by unknown vehicles.
Huff has since filed a lawsuit with Renz Law LLC against EcoHealth Alliance in the state of New York.
In September, Huff tweeted: 'Below is link to the copy of the report about the REAL Origin of SARS-CoV2 sent to the US Senate and Congress.
'My declaration in the document was provided under oath with penalty of perjury.'
The document issued by Renz Law LLC states: 'Donald Trump, Senator Ron Johnson, Senator Rand Paul, Rep. Jim Jordan and others were right.
'As early as later April or early May 2020 former President Trump spoke of the creation of SARS-CoV-2 in a lab in Wuhan, China.
'Since that time both the investigation and the cover-up have continued but the evidence provided herein clearly demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2 was indeed created in a lab in Wuhan China by EcoHealth Alliance and with funding from Anthony Fauci's NIH/NIAID.
The document goes on to say that the evidence gathered hopes to back five statements of claim.
'SARS-CoV-2 was created in lab in Wuhan China, Anthony Fauci funded the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and lied to Congress about funding gain-of-function work, the US intelligence community was aware of and appeared to have been involved with the funding of said gain-of-function work,' it read.
'A number of well-connected public and private partners were involved in gain-of-function work that resulted in the creation and release of SARS-CoV-2 and Anthony Fauci and other coordinated to cover-up the funding of the gain-of-function work which resulted in SARS-CoV-2.'
It goes on to say that the expectations are that there will be a 'immediate investigation that will see bi-partisan support in light of this newly compiled information.'
'Renz Law and Make Americans Free Again (MAFA) will provide any and all support possible in such an investigation and prosecutions,' the document continues.
[x]
Official records show EcoHealth Alliance has received seven grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since June 2020 for research into animal-borne viruses in Asia and Africa
'Further, with the additional high-profile revelations that certain segments of the government have promoted censoring this information, presumably as part of the cover up, we will voluntarily support any good faith efforts by the media to correct the record.
'[We] will continue to seek truth and justice in this matter for all that have been impacted by the worst man-made pandemic in human history.'
Huff provided a declaration alongside the documents stating that he would attest a true and accurate representation of facts and experiences.
In October, DailyMail.com revealed that EcoHealth Alliance had been handed nearly $7 million in taxpayer's money during the pandemic.
Official records show EcoHealth Alliance has received seven grants from the NIH since June 2020 for research into animal-borne viruses in Asia and Africa.
Four of those grants were handed to the non-profit after it was uncovered EcoHealth Alliance channeled funds to the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic.
It also collaborated on controversial virus-tinkering research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some scientists fear led to the Covid crisis.
Dr Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who was accused of trying to cover-up serious inquiry into the so-called lab leak theory, is listed as the project lead on a majority of the research programs.
Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn told DailyMail.com: 'EcoHealth Alliance has still not answered key questions about its role in the pandemic.
'They should be held to account and not be receiving taxpayers' dollars until a full investigation is complete.'
Who IS Peter Daszak? The frog-focused zoologist and friend of Dr Anthony Fauci
[x]
One of the most stringent deniers of the man-made hypothesis is British zoologist Dr Peter Daszak (pictured), who is known among friends as a 'funny northerner' but considered a potential orchestrator of the pandemic by advocates of the lab-leak theory
The debate around the origins of Covid has been ongoing since the virus first began causing chaos in early 2020.
Some top virologists believe the coronavirus spread to humans from an infected animal, potentially in a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Others think it leaked from a secretive laboratory in the same city. Whether or not it was deliberate or accidental is an even more contentious part of the 'lab leak' theory.
One of the most stringent deniers of the man-made hypothesis is British zoologist Dr Peter Daszak, who is known among friends as a 'funny northerner' but considered a potential orchestrator of the pandemic by advocates of the lab-leak theory.
He became renowned for his role in facilitating 'risky' coronavirus research in China through EcoHealth Alliance, the non-profit he is president of.
The New York-based organisation has secured $60million (£53million) of US Government funds for scientific research over the past decade.
Some of this cash, it has emerged, has since ended up in the pocket of researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the lab at the centre of lab leak claims. Some of this research involved manipulating Covid-like viruses.
Now, it has been revealed that EcoHealth Alliance has gained another $650,000 (£580,000) from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to trawl through caves in Southeast Asia looking for bats carrying coronaviruses, despite fears similar work sparked the pandemic.
The new contract gives the green light to project leader Dr Daszak and his team to analyse the behaviour and environmental risk factors for coronaviruses to spillover into humans from animals.
It warns that that part of the world has a 'high diversity of wildlife coronaviruses' and a large proportion of the population is regularly exposed to wildlife that could be infected.
Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam are particularly high risk, according to the project details published by the US National Institutes of Health.
Over the course of five years, the team will identify cases where people become infected with coronaviruses, assess the risk and drivers of community transmission and spread and test public health interventions to contain an outbreak.
Scientists argue such research is vital to contain diseases like Covid. But others have raised alarm over its potential involvement in outbreaks.
The latest contract puts the spotlight back on Dr Daszak, who hails from the mining town Dukinfield, on the outskirts of Manchester.
The researcher, who grew up with a younger brother, Ukrainian father and Welsh mother, studied zoology at the University of Bangor in Wales and the University of East London.
The expert in zoonosis — the spread of viruses from animals to humans — has authored more than 300 scientific papers over his career, which has spanned more than three decades, and seen him become friendly with Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the US President.
Dr Daszak, who lives in New York with his wife Janet, joined EcoHealth — formerly The Wildlife Trust — in 2001. His early career focused on diseases spread by frogs.
But he has also worked with researchers in China for 15 years, including Dr Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the WIV nicknamed 'Bat Woman'.
EcoHealth, which originally focused on conservation, now works around the world to find out the origins of viruses, map where they have spread and analyse them to find out where the next outbreak could occur.
Records show Dr Daszak raked in millions of dollars' worth of grants from US Government bodies on behalf of EcoHealth alliance and was paid $354,000 (£314,000) in 2019.
This funding was often dished out to other laboratories, including the WIV, to conduct research in mines to examine bat coronaviruses.
The partnership saw researchers sample thousands of bats and determine that Sars originated in horseshoe bats, which are common in southern and central China and traded in wet markets.
And two years before Covid emerged, Dr Daszak proposed working with WIV scientists to alter coronaviruses and release them into bats as part of a plan to inoculate them against the virus.
The most recent NIH grant awarded to EchoHealth Alliance came on September 21. The $653,392 package went towards studying Covid-like viruses in bats across Asia and Africa.
That five-year experiment will likely investigate 'the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence', with scientists set to trawl caves in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam in the hunt to prevent another viral crisis.
Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, told DailyMail.com: 'Giving taxpayer money to EcoHealth to study pandemic prevention is like paying a suspected arsonist to conduct fire safety inspections.'
Daszak is a close friend of the US' top Covid doctor Fauci and even thanked him for publicly downplaying theories that Covid may have been created in a lab.
EcoHealth Alliance has been receiving federal research funding since 2002.
Daszak, who has maintained the view that the coronavirus jumped to humans from animal reservoirs, has a checkered history when it comes to the kind of research that his critics argue helped pave the way for highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 to escape the safety of a lab.
He has been slammed by Republicans in Congress for taking part in GOF research.
Those who believed there was a chance the virus escaped from the WIV were cast aside as fringe thinkers, in part due to Daszak's influence in the community of epidemiologists and infectious disease experts.
He and fellow infectious disease experts Ralph Baric and Linfa Wang circulated a statement that was later published in The Lancet in which 27 prominent scientists from nine countries to strongly condemned 'conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.'
But Daszak appeared to want to distance himself from the letter after a Freedom of Information Request revealed that he and his fellows 'should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't work in a counterproductive way.'
Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said in December 2021 that it took 16 months to publish an official conflict of interest statement in which he revealed Daszak had links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Despite charges of having a conflict of interest, given that his organization had worked with the WIV on coronavirus research in the past, Daszak was appointed to the World Health Organization's team charged with going to China to investigate the origin of the virus.
The WHO dispelled those claims though, saying that 'all declared interests were assessed and found not to interfere with the independence and transparency of the work.'
Officials in the Trump and Biden administrations have said the Chinese government worked to thwart investigations into the origins of the virus and hoodwinked WHO investigators when they arrived.
Daszak revealed in March 2021 that he and the team took China's word for it when officials there insisted that the virus could not have escaped from their lab.
'We met with them. We said, 'Do you audit the lab?' And they said, 'Annually.' 'Did you audit it after the outbreak?' 'Yes.' 'Was anything found?' 'No.' 'Do you test your staff?' 'Yes.' No one was —' Daszak said.
In response to Lesley Stahl, who said he was taking the Chinese researcher's word for it, Daszak said, 'Well, what else can we do?'
'We asked them tough questions. They weren't vetted in advance. And the answers they gave, we found to be believable, correct and convincing,' Daszak said.
In April 2020, former President Donald Trump chose to axe Daszak's grant awarded in 2019 over unsubstantiated claims that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab that employs a Chinese virologist who had been receiving funding from the grant.
'NIH got it right when it canceled the funding for the experiments EcoHealth Alliance was conducting with China's state-run Wuhan Institute,' Ernst said.
She added, 'In addition to violating multiple federal laws, EcoHealth has still not turned over documents about these dangerous studies that NIH has requested on multiple occasions that could offer vital clues to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.'
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Re: U.S. government gave $3.7 million grant to Wuhan lab at
by admin » Sat Nov 25, 2023 1:32 am
Interview with Bob Westbrooks, IG/watchdog over pandemic relief money with chilling tales of fraud
Glenn Kirschner
Nov 18, 2023
Bob Westbrook's undertook the enormously challenging task of being the inspector general/watchdog over how pandemic relief money was spent. As Executive Director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), Bob found a truly staggering amount of fraud committed by those who would take advantage of a global pandemic to steal from the American taxpayers.
Bob documents his work and his findings in an important book titled, "Left Holding the Bag: A Watchdog's Account of How Washington Fumbled its COVID Test."
Interview Part 2: Bob Westbrooks, IG/watchdog over pandemic relief money w/chilling tales of fraud [500 Billion in fraud]
Glenn Kirschner
Nov 23, 2023
Bob Westbrook's undertook the enormously challenging task of being the inspector general/watchdog over how pandemic relief money was spent. As Executive Director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), Bob found a truly staggering amount of fraud committed by those who would take advantage of a global pandemic to steal from the American taxpayers.
Bob documents his work and his findings in an important book titled, "Left Holding the Bag: A Watchdog's Account of How Washington Fumbled its COVID Test."
Glenn Kirschner
Nov 18, 2023
Bob Westbrook's undertook the enormously challenging task of being the inspector general/watchdog over how pandemic relief money was spent. As Executive Director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), Bob found a truly staggering amount of fraud committed by those who would take advantage of a global pandemic to steal from the American taxpayers.
Bob documents his work and his findings in an important book titled, "Left Holding the Bag: A Watchdog's Account of How Washington Fumbled its COVID Test."
Interview Part 2: Bob Westbrooks, IG/watchdog over pandemic relief money w/chilling tales of fraud [500 Billion in fraud]
Glenn Kirschner
Nov 23, 2023
Bob Westbrook's undertook the enormously challenging task of being the inspector general/watchdog over how pandemic relief money was spent. As Executive Director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), Bob found a truly staggering amount of fraud committed by those who would take advantage of a global pandemic to steal from the American taxpayers.
Bob documents his work and his findings in an important book titled, "Left Holding the Bag: A Watchdog's Account of How Washington Fumbled its COVID Test."
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Re: U.S. government gave $3.7 million grant to Wuhan lab at
by admin » Sun Oct 13, 2024 10:51 pm
Boris Johnson: "They Were Looking at Engineering the Virus & The Government Bribed Me!"
by the Diary Of A CEO
Oct 10, 2024
When Did You Call China To Address Covid
1:18:41
did you call China February had it February 2020 there was a call you made to the leader of China to Xin ping yeah
1:18:48
yeah I mean I would have called him I mean it'll be in the it'll be in it'll be in the book and you were sending supplies yeah that stage we were we were
1:18:55
still sending um supplies to help them there we were we were sending prote what did
1:19:00
he say about the virus well I said
1:19:08
um I look my remember the conversation is hazy now I I I think I you know
1:19:15
um congratulated him on what seemed to be his efforts to control the disease
1:19:20
but said I was I was anxious about the what was happening in these wet markets
1:19:25
because at that stage we were given to understand that these the disease had had
1:19:30
occurred um spontaneously in a in a market in Wuhan what did he say and I
1:19:37
can't remember what he said to to that um I don't think I he look I mean he's a
1:19:43
he a president of China I don't think he wanted to particularly the implication that China was in any way at at fault
1:19:50
and I can take understand that but I now think that wasn't right I know I think
1:19:55
it almost certainly was a um a lab accident or it was as a result of
1:20:01
something that went wrong in that lab
Can I ask about this, because this started as a conspiracy theory that is now widely accepted as the probable
1:20:09
likely outcome. Why were they messing around with a virus in a lab in Wuhan?
The Virus Was Actually Created In A Lab
Well you may well ask I mean I think it
1:20:16
I think they were why do you think they were someone that is so far away from why people do these s such a thing I I I
1:20:22
genuinely don't know but I think that they were they were exp you know science the
1:20:29
the point of science is to keep pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge everywhere and to see what you see what
1:20:34
they could do you think it was a weapon I don't I didn't have any reason to think so I didn't have any reason to
1:20:40
think so I think it was a terrible accident I think the thing um escaped from the lab I think you know they they
1:20:46
were uh looking at engineering these viruses a function gain of the of the um
1:20:54
of the virus and and ways that they could manipulate it and um sadly
1:21:00
something went wrong um that's that's my best guess and a lot of people now seem to think that.
by the Diary Of A CEO
Oct 10, 2024
When Did You Call China To Address Covid
1:18:41
did you call China February had it February 2020 there was a call you made to the leader of China to Xin ping yeah
1:18:48
yeah I mean I would have called him I mean it'll be in the it'll be in it'll be in the book and you were sending supplies yeah that stage we were we were
1:18:55
still sending um supplies to help them there we were we were sending prote what did
1:19:00
he say about the virus well I said
1:19:08
um I look my remember the conversation is hazy now I I I think I you know
1:19:15
um congratulated him on what seemed to be his efforts to control the disease
1:19:20
but said I was I was anxious about the what was happening in these wet markets
1:19:25
because at that stage we were given to understand that these the disease had had
1:19:30
occurred um spontaneously in a in a market in Wuhan what did he say and I
1:19:37
can't remember what he said to to that um I don't think I he look I mean he's a
1:19:43
he a president of China I don't think he wanted to particularly the implication that China was in any way at at fault
1:19:50
and I can take understand that but I now think that wasn't right I know I think
1:19:55
it almost certainly was a um a lab accident or it was as a result of
1:20:01
something that went wrong in that lab
Can I ask about this, because this started as a conspiracy theory that is now widely accepted as the probable
1:20:09
likely outcome. Why were they messing around with a virus in a lab in Wuhan?
The Virus Was Actually Created In A Lab
Well you may well ask I mean I think it
1:20:16
I think they were why do you think they were someone that is so far away from why people do these s such a thing I I I
1:20:22
genuinely don't know but I think that they were they were exp you know science the
1:20:29
the point of science is to keep pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge everywhere and to see what you see what
1:20:34
they could do you think it was a weapon I don't I didn't have any reason to think so I didn't have any reason to
1:20:40
think so I think it was a terrible accident I think the thing um escaped from the lab I think you know they they
1:20:46
were uh looking at engineering these viruses a function gain of the of the um
1:20:54
of the virus and and ways that they could manipulate it and um sadly
1:21:00
something went wrong um that's that's my best guess and a lot of people now seem to think that.
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