An investigative report by Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban, based on more than 100,000 EcoHealth Alliance documents, shows a disturbing reality of “murky grant agreements, flimsy NIH oversight and pursuit of government grants by pitching increasingly risky global research”.
In 2014, EcoHealth received a $3.7 million NIAID grant to study the risk of bat coronavirus emergence and the potential for outbreaks in human populations. Nearly $600,000 of that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was a key collaborator.
The 2014 grant highlights the truth of what critics of gain-of-function (GOF) research have been saying for years, which is that this kind of research never achieves its aims. They say it needs to be done to prevent and/or get ahead of pandemics, but not a single pandemic has ever been averted and, instead, GOF research may actually be the cause of them.
EcoHealth president Peter Daszak’s behavior has added fuel to suspicions of a lab leak — potentially of a virus that he himself helped create. In 2015, he warned a global pandemic might occur from a laboratory incident, especially the sort of virus manipulation research being done in Wuhan. Despite this history, in February 2020, Daszak wrote a “scientific consensus statement” published in The Lancet that condemned the lab leak theory as a wild conspiracy theory.
It appears those who insist SARS-CoV-2 is of natural origin, despite all the evidence to the contrary, are doing so because they don’t want risky virological research to be blamed for the COVID pandemic.