NIH Admits Funding 'Gain-Of-Function' Covid Experiments

NIH Admits Funding Gain-Of-Function COVID Experiments; Gives EcoHealth Five Days To Report Data

TYLER DURDEN

A top NIH official admitted in a Wednesday letter that the US-funded so-called "gain-of-function" research in Wuhan, China - and that the US nonprofit which conducted it, EcoHealth Alliance - led by the controversial Peter Daszak, "failed to report" that they had created a chimeric bat coronavirus which could infect humans.

In a letter addressed to Rep. James Comer (R-KY), NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence A. Tabak cites a "limited experiment" to determine whether "spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model." According to the letter, humanized mice infected with the modified bat virus "became sicker" than those exposed to an unmodified version of the same bat coronavirus.

Daszak failed to report this finding, and has been given five days to submit "any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted" under the NIH grant.

Rutgers University Board of Governors Chemistry Professor Richard H. Ebright sums it up. :

The NIH received the relevant documents in 2018 and reviewed the documents in 2020 and again in 2021. The NIH--specifically, Collins, Fauci, and Tabak--lied to Congress, lied to the press, and lied to the public. Knowingly. Willfully. Brazenly.

While Tabak's letter goes to great lengths to insist that EcoHealth's work couldn't have produced SARS-CoV-2, it absolutely vindicates Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who Fauci repeatedly called a liar in July for accusing him of funding GoF research in Wuhan, China.

As we noted in September, proof that the US funded of GoF research was blown wide open thanks to materials (here and here) released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health, revealing that EcoHealth was paid to make chimeric SARS-based Covid that they confirmed could infect human cells.

While evidence of this research has been pointed to in published studies, the FOIA release provides a key piece to the puzzle which sheds new light on what was going on.

"This is a roadmap to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To Know, a group that has been investigating the origins of Covid-19 (via The Intercept).

We also learned in September that 18 months before the Pandemic, Daszak applied for a grant to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into the wild in an effort to inoculate them against diseases that could have otherwise jumped to humans, according to The Telegraph, citing leaked grant proposals from 2018.

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