A full two years after Wuhan hosted the 2019 Military World Games, determined by House Foreign Affairs Republicans to be one of the planet’s first superspreader events of the novel coronavirus pandemic, a top official at the National Institutes of Health has conceded that contrary to the repeated assertions of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIH did indeed fund highly dangerous gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In a letter to Kentucky Republican James Comer, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, Lawrence A. Tabak of the NIH admitted that “out of an abundance of caution,” and, of course, after two years of external outrage over the possibility of the lab leak hypothesis, the nation’s top medical research agency conducted an additional review of how the funds authorized by Fauci and friends were used by EcoHealth Alliance, the New York City-based nonprofit organization headed by frequent WIV collaborator Peter Daszak.
The bulk of Tabak’s letter is spent on covering the potential culpability of the NIH, claiming some sort of false equivalence between the possible mutation time of the WIV-controlled RaTG13 to become SARS-Cov-2 to that of chimpanzees into contemporary human beings. But the admission is no less gratifying.
Per the letter, EcoHealth did indeed “fail to report” findings required by the terms of the NIH grant, and even more crucially, the biohacking of viruses obtained by EcoHealth, which fall under the obvious definition of gain-of-function experiments, was conducted at the WIV. Tabak ultimately says that the organization headed by Daszak, who spearheaded the silencing of scientists considering whether the novel coronavirus originated from a lab like the WIV, has just five days to respond to the infraction.
Compare the NIH’s apparent concession to Fauci’s pearl-clutching outrage over the sheer notion that his department carved out exceptions from the Obama-era ban of gain-of-function research to fund the likes of EcoHealth. Not even a year ago, tried and true virologists like Robert Redfield, President Donald Trump’s head of the CDC, were smeared as Sinophobic bigots for entertaining the lab leak hypothesis, let alone the notion that Fauci and his friends funded the virus’s creation.
And now it’s clear that few stateside would have any reason to hide the origins of the pandemic. That is unless you subverted one President Barack Obama’s ban on funding such research out of fear that a catastrophe the likes of COVID-19 might just happen.
Story cited here.
