The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is one of those executive branch agencies that few have heard of but have a big impact on policy.
Its mission is "Providing advice to the President and the Executive Office of the President on matters related to science and technology." It advises the president on issues ranging from climate change to guidelines on artificial intelligence (AI).
It is also home to an archive that would chill your blood. In the archive are the results of experiments that could be abused to endanger national security or public health.
The archive exists as a result of a 2012 federal directive to track dual-use research in the biological sciences. Most of the experiments are classified, but if you've been following the investigation into the origins of COVID-19, you have probably heard of "gain-of-function" research. In essence, gain-of-function attempts to make a bad bug even worse by increasing a virus's infectious properties.
It should be noted that gain-of-function research is critical to developing treatments for infectious diseases. It's not just some mad scientist playing God.
The problem is not with the gain-of-function experiments. Carried out in up-to-date labs, the prospect of an escaped virus is next to nil. The problem is in performing gain-of-function experiments in a Third World laboratory like the Wuhan Institute of Virology with lax safety standards and an ill-trained staff.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) thinks that some of the answers to the origin of COVID-19 can be found in the OSTP archives. But the Biden administration is refusing requests for congressional investigators to search for them.
Paul thinks the files could be vital to unlocking the continuing mystery of the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
“We’re nearing the beginning of the real investigation because come January, with a friendly administration, we think we’re going to get all of this information,” Paul told the New York Post.
The information is gathered and reviewed biannually, under a policy called US Government Policy of Oversight of Life Sciences Dual Use Research of Concern.
A document about the policy says its purpose is to gather information about “life sciences research that … could be directly misapplied to pose a significant threat with broad potential consequences to public health and safety … or national security.”
To Paul, it’s an admission that public health officials were aware that controversial research practices like gain-of-function were potentially dangerous — long before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.
Many experts have speculated COVID-19 may have been the result of gain-of-function research performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It may have been a gain-of-function experiment gone bad when a careless worker exposed several colleagues to the modified virus.
But there is also compelling evidence that the virus jumped from a still unidentified animal to human beings, probably in the Wuhan food market.
Both theories are plausible. Both lack the "smoking gun" that would definitively tell us which theory is right or if there is another piece to the puzzle we're missing.
The White House needs to release those documents so that Congress can do its job of fully investigating the government's role in this gain-of-function research and determine if it, indeed, caused the pandemic.
Most importantly, the documents may shed light on the role of EcoHealth Alliance in the research at Wuhan. The company, founded by Dr. Peter Daszak, has been very close to the Chinese government. Daszak spearheaded the effort to gather signatures on a letter that said the lab leak theory was bogus.
“Many people insist that EcoHealth Alliance conducted gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That is categorically untrue,” EcoHealth Alliance said in a statement about the allegations. “EHA and its sub-awardee, Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), were studying bat coronaviruses that were never shown to be capable of infecting humans.”
Daszak was one of the primary researchers on an NIH project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” "Beginning in 2014, the project conducted experiments on mice at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that modified novel bat coronaviruses and made them 10,000 times more infectious — but “failed to report” that fact to the NIH," reports the Post.
Daszak is not lying about EHA not performing gain-of-function research at Wuhan. The fact is that gain-of-function defines a very specific experimental process. The process used by EHA to modify bat viruses was slightly different from the scientific definition of gain-of-function.
Hence, both Daszak and his colleague Dr. Antony Fauci can claim that gain-of-function research was not being employed even though for all intents and purposes it was.
“Here’s the question," wondered Paul. "If they think it’s dangerous enough that they’re sending it up to the White House so they can oversee it, was the Wuhan research sent up?”
On Monday, Paul sent letters to director of the White House OSTP Arati Prabhakar, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and President Biden.
The OSTP did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
He requested unredacted copies of “any classified reporting” submitted for Institutional Oversight of Life Sciences Dual Use Research of Concern. He also put them on notice to preserve all relevant documents and communications.
I don't expect to be alive when the truth is finally revealed about the origin of COVID-19, mostly because the real smoking gun evidence has either been destroyed or is in a secret vault in China along with all the other secrets the Communists don't want anyone to know about.
