Dr. Antony Fauci and a scientist with a close connection to the Wuhan lab corresponded in April 2020 while the pandemic spread throughout the world. Peter Daszak steered tens of millions of U.S. government dollars to the Chinese lab in order to fund his gain-of-function research projects.
By this time, Fauci had become a vocal opponent of investigating the lab-leak theory, for which Daszak was grateful.
“I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Daszak wrote to Fauci on April 18, 2020.
“From my perspective, your comments are brave, and coming from your trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus’s origins,” Daszak added. Fauci responded on April 19, writing, “Many thanks for your kind note.”
Related: BOMBSHELL: U.S. State Department Tried to Block Investigation of Lab Leak at Wuhan
Daszak was thanking Fauci for a statement he made on April 17. “There was a study recently…where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve,” Fauci said at the time, dismissing Chinese lab origins of the virus. “The mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human,” he had opined.
We now know that Fauci’s certainty was premature. Three months prior to that, Fauci had received an email from another researcher, Kristian Anderson, who wasn’t sure about the “jump in species” scenario.
“On a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats serve as the reservoir,” Andersen said in one of the emails. “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look at this much more closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” [Emphasis added]
It’s not a “smoking gun” because just a few days later, Anderson was one of the authors of a study that totally discounted the lab-leak theory. But it calls into question what it is about this bug that has scientists questioning the natural-origin theory.
The virus uses its spike protein to bind to cellular receptors in the human body. It burrows into the cell and starts replicating itself until the cell explodes and thousands of baby viruses enter the bloodstream to repeat the process. But the spike protein in question doesn’t appear in many other bat species, although it’s not unheard of in the animal world. That’s why Anderson and a few other researchers are perplexed about the way the virus enters the body.
This is exactly what gain-of-function research does: it makes it easier for a virus to invade the human body despite being originally infectious only to bats.
This has been self-evident all along and it’s a wonder that responsible, prominent scientists would go so far as to dismiss the lab-leak theory before all the evidence was in. And it appears that Peter Daszak has played a big role in trying to deflect any investigation away from the Wuhan lab.
Daszak not only received several million dollars from the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci’s infectious disease group, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, but he also received millions more from the Pentagon which was interested in EcoHealth Alliance activities in gain-of-function research.
Meticulous investigation of U.S. government databases reveals that Pentagon funding for the EcoHealth Alliance from 2013 to 2020, including contracts, grants and subcontracts, was just under $39 million. Most, $34.6 million, was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the DOD which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”
Most of the remaining money to EHA was from USAID (State Dept.), comprising at least $64,700,000 (1). These two sources thus total over $103 million.
The Pentagon funding explains why Daszak was so eager to keep his gain-of-function research from going on the chopping block.
Daszak was on the WHO team that investigated the virus origins in China and was all over the media downplaying the lab-leak theory. And Fauci encouraged him because of his own culpability in driving gain-of-function research. When science becomes a slave to government and scientists benefit monetarily from their work, the truth becomes difficult if not impossible to separate from the self-interest and self-aggrandizement of scientists like Fauci and Daszak.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member