CoV Subcommittee Questions Peter Daszak

Issues report of findings that we've known for two years.

The best disguise, even better than humor and sentimentality, is the truth, because no one believes it. —Max Frisch, Biedermann and the Arsonists

Yesterday, May 1, 2024, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak appeared before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, chaired by Representative Brad Wenstrup. The Committee tweeted the following Key Findings:

KEY FINDINGS

EcoHealth violated the terms and conditions of its NIH grant by failing to report a potentially dangerous gain-of-function experiment conducted at the WIV. Evidence shows that Dr. Daszak was aware of this potentially dangerous research, yet he failed to inform the NIH.

EcoHealth also violated NIH grant requirements when it failed to submit a required research update report until nearly TWO YEARS after the NIH deadline. This report contained details about EcoHealth's dangerous gain-of-function work at the WIV.

The Trump Administration identified serious concerns with EcoHealth Alliance’s funding of the WIV and instructed NIH to fix the problem. Then, NIH terminated EcoHealth’s grant. This intervention likely prevented EcoHealth from continuing to conduct dangerous research.

NIH is currently violating the terms of the WIV’s formal debarment by funding EcoHealth’s research. When Dr. Daszak applied for grant reinstatement, he omitted a material fact and misled the NIH about the location of untested samples.

The Subcommittee also released a staff-level report recommending EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak be formally debarred and criminally investigated as a result of his actions prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Finally, the Subcommittee issued the following report:

It’s an astonishing fact that this Kabuki Theater is still going on, while none of the principle actors (Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Anthony Fauci et al.) have been charged. For two years we’ve been treated to innumerable Congressional hearings with interminable discussion about whether EcoHealth Alliance’s research—in cooperation with biologists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—constituted dangerous Gain-of-Function research that had been prohibited in 2014.

And yet, Baric et al. have candidly stated in writing that they were performing Gain-of-Function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in order to make bat coronaviruses infectious to humanized mice. As I pointed out in my post last year titled The Great SARS-CoV-2 Charade: Chapter II, Baric and his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology published papers about their GoF work on bat coronaviruses in the years 2015 and 2016.

1). A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence (published in Nature Medicine)

2). SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence (published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS).

They recounted their process for creating the chimeric virus as follows:

….changes in related SARS-CoV strains had been reported to allow ACE2 binding, suggesting that additional functional testing was required for verification. Therefore, we synthesized the SHC014 spike in the context of the replication-competent, mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone (we hereafter refer to the chimeric CoV as SHC014-MA15) to maximize the opportunity for pathogenesis and vaccine studies in mice.

It would be hard to find a more perfect description of gain-of-function work. Indeed, as they state in their “Biosafety and biosecurity” section:

Reported studies were initiated after the University of North Carolina Institutional Biosafety Committee approved the experimental protocol. These studies were initiated before the US Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses (This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH).

In other words, because the project was initially approved before the Pause on GOF research, it was allowed to continue even after the pause was initiated. This is the equivalent of imposing a speed limit in a new urban development on everyone except people who used the road before the speed limit was imposed— that is,“You guys who drove here when it was just a country road may still drive 60 MPH on it, even though it now passes through a newly constructed school zone.”

Shortly after Baric et al. published their first paper in Nature Medicine, they published another paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence in which they created another chimeric virus using bat SL-CoV-WIV1, which they called WIV1-MA15.

In the Discussion section, the authors note:

Overall, the results from these studies highlight the utility of a platform that leverages metagenomics findings and reverse genetics to identify prepandemic threats. For SARS-like WIV1-CoV, the data can inform surveillance programs, improve diagnostic reagents, and facilitate effective treatments to mitigate future emergence events. However, building new and chimeric reagents must be carefully weighed against potential gain-of-function (GOF) concerns. Whereas not generally expected to increase pathogenicity, studies that build reagents based on viruses from animal sources cannot exclude the possibility of increased virulence or altered immunogenicity that promote escape from current countermeasures. As such, the potential of a threat, real or perceived, may cause similar exploratory studies to be limited out of an “abundance of caution.” Importantly, the government pause on GOF studies may have already impacted the scope and direction of these studies.

Everyone who has followed the vast paper trail of this research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology understands the absurdity of the proposition that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan—which just happens to be a few miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where bat coronaviruses were being deliberately manipulated to make them infectious to humans.

The endless theater, humbug, hairsplitting, lawyers’ dodges, and outright lying around this episode—surely one of the sorriest in human history—are positively revolting.