Further complicating the mystery of the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a report on Sunday revealed that Pentagon gave $39 million to EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) – the charity that funded controversial coronavirus research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The report comes as the charity’s chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories.
The U.S. nonprofit, set up to research new diseases, has also partly funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells.
Trump canceled USD 3.7 million funding to EHA
In 2020, Donald Trump, the then President of the United States canceled the USD 3.7 million funding to the EHA, after reports surfaced claiming that COVID-19 was either created in Wuhan lab funded by the EHA or leaked from there. Federal grant data accessed by independent researchers shows that the charity received more than USD 123 million from the government from 2017 to 2020 with the Department of Defense (DoD) being one of its biggest funders. A majority of DoD funding came from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a combat support agency with the goal to reduce the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction. It has provided almost USD 39 million to the organization since 2013.
However, the report does not state the exact amount of money that was given to WIV.
US Report On NIH Funding PLA-linked Wuhan Lab
A report by the Republicans’ House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence suggested that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the COVID-19 infection, was manufactured in a lab in China, against the claimed thesis of natural occurrence. The 21-page unclassified report accessed by Republic Media Network speaks in detail of alleged experiments being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) since 2016, warnings of which had been relayed by the US envoys in China. The report also questions the role of an American institute (NIAID) headed by top medical expert Dr. Anthony Fauci which allegedly funded labs in Wuhan to carry out research on Coronaviruses.
The committee, which has been examining the growing threat to America posed by the CCP and the Chinese PLA, accuses the Chinese authorities of undermining the investigation into the origins of the COVID-19. Giving a brief timeline of the events, the Republican report has claimed that Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers had been conducting experiments since 2016 which involved RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as the closest sample to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Recently, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was among the first to suggest that the virus developed organically, took a backtrack and admitted that there was a need to ‘get to the bottom’ of the origins of the pandemic, saying a possibility of lab leak could not be ruled out.
But later, to everyone’s surprise, several media outlets in the US released thousands of emails sent by Fauci when the coronavirus infection was just on the rise. In one such email, an executive at EcoHealth which funded research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology into the COVID-19 origin thanked Dr. Fauci for publicly stating that scientific evidence supports a ‘natural origin’ for the Coronavirus and not a lab leak. However, the White House medical adviser labeled it as “nonsense” and stressed that he has been “open-minded” about the origin of COVID.
(Credit-AP/Pixabay/Twitter-@PeterDaszak)