The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has completed its investigation and has published its final report.
The report concludes that COVID-19 “most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China." The panel cites "biological characteristics of the virus and illnesses among researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in fall 2019" to justify their conclusion.
The full story of how the virus emerged and how it spread may never be known. The Chinese government is keeping vital information from the earliest days of the pandemic from Western researchers. And shamefully, the National Institutes of Health is refusing to give Republicans on the committee key documents that could shed light on the continuing question of whether or not the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus had been tampered with to make it thousands of times more contagious and more lethal.
The Department of Justice has been secretly investigating one of the primary suspects in the lab leak theory. EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) and its president, Dr. Peter Daszak, are being scrutinized because of questions surrounding several grants that EHA received from various U.S. government agencies.
The details of the investigation remain secret. However, emails and documents from EcoHealth Alliance and other sources point to the investigation centering on genetic sequences used at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (EIH) and correspondence between Dazsak and the scientist at Wuhan known as "The Bat Lady," Dr. Shi Zhengli.
The House COVID panel also agreed on a bipartisan basis that Daszak, who was already referred for criminal prosecution before his organization was federally debarred, “should never again receive U.S. taxpayer dollars,” a letter attached to the report by subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) states.
In response to questions from The Post, a spokesman for House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) vowed that the committee will “continue pursuing records and answers that have so far been withheld from its investigations.”
Rep. Morgan Griffith, who sits on the Energy and Commerce panel, told The Post that the report “reveals the inadequacies of NIH oversight.”
“NIH failed to get the required information, progress reports and vital information as paid for by the American taxpayers,” Griffith said, while adding that it “confirms some of the ideas that I advanced in hearings and depositions with leading NIH officials and Dr. Daszak.”
One $1.4 million NIH grant was titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” "Emergence," in this case, meant studying how the virus could jump from bat to human. Former NIH deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak later admitted that the $1.4 million earmarked for EcoHealth Alliance's bat coronavirus emergence study was for gain-of-function- research. In order to study the emergence thoroughly, the virus was made 10,000 times more contagious.
That particular virus was not related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. But it indicates the shocking stupidity of Daszak, who put a lot of trust into China's third-world lab at WIV.
The resulting viruses were distinct from SARS-CoV-2 — but another EcoHealth grant proposal, for which Daszak downplayed the involvement of collaboration with Chinese researchers, has since been flagged as a possible “blueprint” for engineering the virus.
In a congressional grilling earlier this year, Daszak also admitted he had not asked Zhengli, his longtime collaborator who serves as deputy director of the WIV, for any viral sequences since before the pandemic began.
Previous findings and hearings held by the subcommittee exposed how EcoHealth specifically violated the terms of its grant agreement with NIH, leading to the suspension of its funding.
Daszak's arrogance knows no limits. EHA was more than two years late in reviewing one of its Wuhan projects on bat coronaviruses. Those experiments "likely violated safety protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety," said HHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisitions Katrina Brisbon. As part of the grant, EHA had been allowed to disprove that taxpayer money was spent on gain-of-function research — but “failed to do so.”
Something insidious was going on in Wuhan. The Chinese are still stonewalling more than three years after the investigation into the origins of COVID-19 began, and Peter Daszak is running interference for them. The Communists either destroyed critical evidence or are still hiding it.
The National Institutes of Health are also withholding documents that the committee thinks it needs to complete its investigation. They claim the House committee is "politicizing" the investigation. Even if they are, it's not up to a civil servant to make that determination.
The various committees in Congress looking into the pandemic's origins will continue to grind away, looking for the truth. It's a slow process but vital to discovering how we might avoid the next pandemic and what to do to fight it if it comes to that.
