House COVID-19 committee wants Wuhan lab-linked EcoHealth Alliance boss criminally investigated, barred from receiving grants

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a damning report Wednesday recommending that EcoHealth Alliance be permanently cut off from taxpayer funding and that its lab-leak-theory-denying president, British zoologist Peter Daszak, also be cut off from federal funding and criminally investigated.

The report, released ahead of the subcommittee's hearing with Daszak, reiterated previous findings, confirmed old suspicions, and made abundantly clear that EHA — an organization that critics including Rutgers University biologist Richard Ebright have long suspected kicked off the pandemic — behaved both opaquely and irresponsibly before, during, and after the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

"Dr. Daszak and his organization conducted dangerous gain-of-function research at the WIV, willfully violated the terms of a multi-million-dollar NIH grant, and placed U.S. national security at risk. This blatant contempt for the American people is reprehensible," Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee, said in a statement.

Background

EHA appears to be an organization central to the COVID-19 pandemic — a world-altering event that claimed the lives of millions of people worldwide.

Blaze News previously reported on the basis of federal documents obtained by the watchdog group White Coat Waste Project that the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases, under the leadership of Anthony Fauci, and the United States Agency for International Development funded an EcoHealth subcontractor's work on coronaviruses to the tune of $41 million.

That subcontractor, named as an investigator on the grants, was Ben Hu.

Hu, the Wuhan Institute of Virology's lead gain-of-function researcher on coronaviruses, happened to be one of the three lab researchers infected with COVID-19 in November 2019 — all three possibly patients zero.

The White Coat Waste Project revealed that Hu had his name name on U.S. taxpayer-funded grants awarded by the then-Fauci-led NIAID and the USAID.

An EcoHealth-administered grant of $3,586,760 from the NIAID was marked "pending" for a project titled "understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence" for work to be undertaken from June 2019 through May 2024. The same project had previously received $3,086,735 in American taxpayer money from NIAID between June 2014 and May 2019.

After the pandemic hit and people started asking questions, Daszak immediately got defensive. After all, he likely knew that these and other paper trails linked his organization to dangerous experiments that may have been responsible the manufacture and escape of a mass-killing virus.

In 2020, he called NIH requests that U.S. federal officials inspect the WIV "heinous" and derided suggestions that the virus might have leaked from the WIV as "conspiracy theories."

In a Sept. 7, 2021, email to David M. Morens, senior scientific adviser to the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a witness grilled in the new House report, Daszak wrote, "The lab leakers are already stirring up bullshit lines of attack that will bring more negative publicity our way — which is what this is about — a way to line up the [gain-of-function] attack on Fauci, or the 'risky research' attack on all of us."

The final report

Over a year after the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General made clear that EHA had dropped the ball on oversight regarding the use of grant money on coronavirus research in China and failed to comply with various federal requirements, the COVID Select Subcommittee released its report further exposing EHA's dangerous failures as well as the "serious, systemic weaknesses at the National Institutes of Health that enabled EcoHealth to fund dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China."

The subcommittee concluded after reviewing over 1 million pages of documents and interviewing dozens of witnesses that:

• EHA "violated its grant terms and conditions by failing to report a potentially deadly experiment conducted by the WIV";
• EHA used American taxpayer funds to "facilitate gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in Wuhan at the WIV, contrary to previous public statements, including those by Dr. Anthony Fauci";
• While trying to get his grant reinstated, Daszak "omitted the material fact that unanalyzed samples and sequences — that the U.S. paid for -— are in the custody and control of the WIV"; and
• EHA lied about being unable to submit its Year 5 Report and missed the National Institute of Health's deadline for filing it by two years.

The late submission of the five-year report is particularly interesting, as the report concerned the use of NIH funds on research regarding pandemic prevention. The fifth year in which these funds were received and used "concerningly coincides with the time period immediately preceding the COVID-19 pandemic," according to the committee.

The report was released ahead of the committee's hearing with Daszak.

Anthony Bellotti, president and founder of the White Coat Waste Project, said in a statement to Blaze News, "As the group that first exposed and ended EcoHealth's batty boondoggle with the Wuhan animal lab and uncovered damning documents detailing how EcoHealth's reckless gain-of-function experiments probably infected Patient Zero and prompted the pandemic, we're glad that Peter Daszak is finally being hauled before Congress to answer for lying, wasting taxpayers' money, breaking the law, abusing animals, and threatening public health."

"It's high time EcoHealth and Daszak were held accountable because our investigations have documented how they've gotten off scot-free so far and raked in $60 million of new taxpayers’ cash just since the pandemic began," added Bellotti.

"Peter Daszak is the closest this committee will ever get to questioning a Chinese spy," Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) told the Daily Mail. "His direct role in providing funding for the Wuhan lab and his lies and personal involvement in the COVID cover-up that followed were directly responsible for the public health and economic disaster that followed."

"As the saying goes, 'follow the money,' and the money was flowing directly from Dr. Fauci and the NIH to Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance and his gain-of-function research," continued Jackson. "This IS where COVID originated, and this IS who funded it!"

In his opening remarks, Rep. Wenstrup stressed that "EcoHealth’s actions themselves are a threat to national security."

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