"We have 15,000 samples in freezers in Wuhan..."

Dissecting Peter Daszak's April 26, 2020 e-mails with NIAID's David Morens

Senator Rand Paul shared on Twitter e-mail correspondence between EcoHealth Alliance President, Peter Daszak, and senior NIAID official, David Morens, dated April 26, 2020.

The subject is NIAID’s decision to terminate its grant to EcoHealth (Award Number: R01AI110964) titled UNDERSTANDING THE RISK OF BAT CORONAVIRUS EMERGENCE—a grant that provided funding to EcoHealth every year between 2014-2020.

The e-mail does not explicitly state why NIAID decided to terminate this grant in April 2020, and the official reason given by Morens is vague gibberish about EcoHealth’s work “not aligning” with NIAID’s objectives following the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. An especially notable passage from Daszak’s e-mail is the following:

Note the following extraordinary facts:

1). A “novel” coronavirus that is infectious to humans emerges in Wuhan, China near a BSL laboratory in which American biotechnology is being used to perform GoF work on bat SARS-CoVs in order to make them infectious to the human respiratory tract, as set forth in a NIAID grant to EcoHealth Alliance titled UNDERSTANDING THE RISK OF BAT CORONAVIRUS EMERGENCE.

2). Following the emergence of a virus in Wuhan derived from a bat coronavirus, NIAID decides to terminate the grant it has been funding since 2014.

3). Grant recipient, Peter Daszak, tells his NIAID buddy that “we have 15,000 samples in freezers in Wuhan and could do the full genomes of 700+ CoVs we’ve identified if we don’t cut this thread.

4). Daszak says he will communicate henceforth with Morens via personal G-mail instead of through his NIAID government e-mail.

The subtext of the e-mail exchange is that both EcoHealth Alliance and NIAID are in trouble. Morens explicitly states that Tony “is involved in some sort of damage control…”. By terminating the grant, NIAID is signaling to Daszak that the circumstances compel a severing of ties. Daszak replies by referring to the 15,000 samples that EcoHealth Alliance has in freezers in Wuhan and the work they could do on these samples if official relations are maintained with its research partner, the Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens, Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Here Daszak seems to be letting Morens know that if NIAID terminates the grant, it will lose access to this biological capital that EcoHealth has stored in the Wuhan lab. To me, this raises a fascinating question: Is it possible that the guys at NIAID who approved the grant to EcoHealth did not fully understand the extent of what EcoHealth was doing with its colleagues at the WIV?

Implied in Daszak’s statement is that it’s too late for NIAID to withdrawal its approval of the EcoHealth-WIV collaboration—i.e., it’s better to maintain the working relationship instead of severing it.

Reviewing this e-mail exchange reminded me of the most perplexing question of this entire story: Why did a U.S. government agency knowingly and willingly approve and endorse the sharing of American biotechnology with a Chinese laboratory known to be operating under the control of the Chinese government and military?

All of the bellicose talk about possible war with China—using kinetic weaponry—over a dispute about Taiwan seems strangely inconsistent with a U.S. federal agency approving of U.S. scientists providing the WIV with biotechnology that could applied to developing bioweapons of potentially vast strategic value.