Two 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.
“The NIH has not ever and does not now, fund gain-of-function research,” Fauci said in May during a back-and-forth with Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul when challenged on an annual $600,000 grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) through EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based non-profit. “Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect.”
Fauci lied to congress under oath.
In a letter to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak contended EcoHealth failed to comply with a mandated report as stipulated by the grant that would have triggered a supplemental review process for “gain-of-function” research.
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.
In July, Fauci doubled down on his denial that any U.S.-funded research constituted gain-of-function study, in another sparring match with Paul.
“Sen. Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I would like to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about,” Fauci said.
The letter from the NIH follows two weeks after the agency director, Francis Collins, announced his resignation.
In June, the HHS inspector general launched a probe of the NIH grant funding of research to study bat coronaviruses at the WIV.
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Fauci should be tried for Crimes Against Humanity.