Fauci’s Parting Gift to the EcoHealth Alliance The outfit that worked with the Wuhan virology lab gets more NIH cash despite its virus failures.
EcoHealth Alliance hasn’t been forthcoming about how it used National Institutes of Health grants for coronavirus research in China that may have resulted in the Covid-19 outbreak. Yet Anthony Fauci on his way to retirement this year is rewarding the outfit by giving it more money for . . . coronavirus research.
The NIH last month awarded EcoHealth Alliance a $653,392 grant to analyze “the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.” According to the NIH, the region has been identified “as a high risk for future emergence of novel coronaviruses and the potential site where SARS-CoV-2 first ‘spilled over’ from bats to people.”
Note how the NIH is promoting EcoHealth Alliance’s claim that Covid-19 emerged through a “spill over” from animals. Many scientists disagree and say the circumstantial and biological evidence suggest a lab leak. But this is problematic for EcoHealth Alliance, which worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on coronavirus lab experiments.
Early in the pandemic, EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak tried to shut down debate over the virus’s origins by coordinating a letter from scientists in The Lancet that condemned the lab-leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. We’ll probably never know for certain how the virus originated, but the evidence for a lab leak has grown stronger with time.
It’s likely that a coronavirus will again jump from animals to humans as MERS and SARS did, so more research in this area is worthwhile with the proper care and protection against a lab breakout. But aren’t there organizations with better records than EcoHealth Alliance to do it?
The NIH has repeatedly rapped the outfit for failing to monitor its partners and to comply with its grant terms. In August the NIH told the House Oversight Committee that it “has requested on two occasions that [EcoHealth Alliance] provide NIH the laboratory notebooks and original electronic files from the research conducted at WIV. To date, WIV has not provided these records.”
No matter. Once again, failure is rewarded by government with more money.
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