Documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit shed light on ties between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the American taxpayer-funded EcoHealth Alliance.
The FOIA suit, which requested records of communications, contracts, and agreements with the Wuhan lab, also provided records showing that billionaire Bill Gates worked closely with the communist Chinese government to facilitate the sale of Chinese-produced medications to be sold outside of China and help “raise China’s voice of governance by placing representatives from China on important international counsels as high level commitment from China.”
Additionally, the set of records obtained by Judicial Watch includes a January 6, 2020, “Wuhan Pneumonia Update” report that describes how EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak was tied to the Wuhan lab and was “funded for work to understand how coronaviruses evolve and jump to human populations.”
In the e-mails, a report from Dr. Ping Chen, who had been the top Fauci agency official working in China, read:
You can ask [NIAID Human Coronavirus, Rhinovirus Research Program Officer] Erik Stemmy for the grant awarded to the Ecohealth in NYC who collaborates with Dr. Shi, Zhengli in Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), who has been doing coronavirus research in cave bats in China. Erik would know what exactly NIH funding supports.
I visited her and others at the Wuhan Ins Viro in 2018 and visited its BSL4 1ab. [Redacted]
Also in 1983 NIH and CAS [Chinese Academy of Sciences] (WIV is one of the research institutes under CAS) signed a MOU and it included sharing research materials. I know [sic] this a long time ago.
The e-mail chain in question was part of an exchange with the subject line “Urgent for Dr. Fauci: China’s lab for studying SARS and Ebola is in Wuhan.”
A January 6, 2020, e-mail exchange on “coronavirus countermeasures,” started by NIAID Chief Medical Officer Hilary Marston features a report called “Wuhan Pneumonia Update,” which was prepared byNIH/DMID.
The report details a NIH coronavirus grant “portfolio” that funded 13 basic science research grants, two treatment research grants and five vaccination research grants related to coronavirus.
“Peter Daszak (R01A|110964-06) is funded for work to understand how coronaviruses evolve and jump to human populations, with an emphasis on bat CoVs and high-risk populations at the human-animal interface. Main foreign sites are in China (including co-investigators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology),” the report reads.
It further notes that one of the grants, made to Fang Li, “is funded to investigate the receptor recognition and cell entry in coronaviruses using structural approaches using spike proteins in complex with receptors. This award found the first evidence of a MERS-related CoV that uses the human receptor and provides evidence of a natural recombination event between bat CoVs.” Another grant involves “a team of investigators using mouse models of SARS and MERS to investigate CoV pathogenesis and develop vaccines and therapeutics.”
A portion of the report centered on vaccines states:
The VRC [Vaccine Research Center] and collaborators have stabilized the MERS-CoV spike protein in its prefusion conformation. The stabilized spike protein is potently immunogenic and elicits protective antibodies to the receptor binding domain, n-terminal domain and other surfaces of the spike protein. The stabilized coronavirus spike protein, and mRNA expressing the spike protein through collaboration with Moderna Therapeutics, is currently being evaluated in the humanized DPP4 mouse model at UNC.
On February 6, 2020, Han Koo, an executive assistant to the Director of NIH who works in the Office of Grants Administration (OGA), e-mailed Chen and Matthew Brown, then-Director of the NIH China Office, and wrote of a “NIAID grant to EcoHealth … studying coronaviruses in animals including bats.”
In 2017, Chen wrote:
Gates Foundation is working with Chinese government on donations to its neighboring countries and African countries such as anti-malaria medicines, bed nest, diagnostics etc. More specifically, it helps Chinese companies to gain pre-qualification on medications so that Chinese company manufactured drugs can be sold outside China, helps the Chinese to establish bilateral collaboration with specific countries in Africa, teaches the Chinese how to do resource mobilization, and helps raise China’s voice of governance by placing representatives from China on important international counsels as high level commitment from China.
The Judicial Watch documents come as the World Health Organization stated that the window for discovering the origin of COVID-19 is closing.
