What Else Is EcoHealth Alliance Hiding?

We now know that EcoHealth Alliance, the American research nonprofit that was funneling NIH grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was not entirely truthful when explaining to the NIH how its money was being used.

In a letter to Kentucky Republican James Comer, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, top NIH official Lawrence Tabak revealed that EcoHealth violated the conditions of a grant that was being used to fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While he doesn’t use “gain-of-function” in his letter, his description of the work being done — testing whether natural bat coronaviruses can bind to human receptors — matches the commonplace definition precisely.

This alone is significant because it contradicts NIAID director Dr. Fauci, who has repeatedly testified under oath that the NIH has never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. But we already knew, thanks to leaked documents, that Fauci was playing semantic games around the definition of “gain of function” to avoid handing ammunition to critics who believe U.S. tax dollars were used to create COVID-19 in a lab.

More significant still is Tabak’s admission that EcoHealth flouted its reporting responsibilities.

“Out of an abundance of caution” the NIH required EcoHealth to submit to a “secondary review” of its research in the event of certain developments that might increase the risks of accidental transmission. So, when Wuhan researchers successfully bound naturally occurring bat coronaviruses to a human ACE2 receptor in mice, making the mice sick, they were supposed to report it to the NIH. They didn’t.

Instead, they sat on it from 2018, when the work was done, until August 2021, when they came clean in a final progress report.

“EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant. EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to report any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award. Additional compliance efforts continue,” Tabak wrote.

Those lines should give pause to anyone who relied on Fauci’s testimony to dismiss the lab-leak theory. Thanks to Tabak’s letter, we know that top NIH officials were unaware of how U.S. funds were being used in Wuhan and are only now — a year and a half into the pandemic — starting to figure it out.

So, what other Wuhan research developments — or accidents — has EcoHealth concealed?

Far from cooperating with an open inquiry into the origins of the virus, EcoHealth president Peter Daszak has worked hard to narrow the field of acceptable debate on the topic. He organized a Lancet letter, published weeks after most of the world found out that COVID-19 existed, which cast the lab-leak theory as out of bounds. Rather than signing the letter, he tried to conceal his involvement in it so that the public wouldn’t call out his conflict of interest. And he was the lone American whom Beijing permitted to participate in the WHO’s initial COVID-origins investigation, which concluded that the lab-leak theory was “extremely unlikely” based on such little information that the WHO director himself rejected their conclusion.

Tabak takes pains in his letter to rule out the possibility that the work done under this specific grant produced COVID-19, but if EcoHealth wasn’t being fully transparent in this case, what else are they hiding?