Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, lied to Congress when said his agency did not fund dangerous gain-of-function research on viruses at Red China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The revelation surfaced in a letter from Lawrence Tabak, principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, to Representative James Comer of Kentucky. Tabak’s letter says Fauci’s NIH subsidiary funded a grant for research that enhanced the ability of a bat coronavirus to infect humanized mice.
Richard Ebright, who heads the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, said the letter means Fauci, Tabak, and their boss, outgoing NIH chieftain Francis Collins, “brazenly” lied about the research. Ebright also observed that EcoHealth Alliance, which funneled the money to WIV, repeatedly violated the terms of the grant.
Experts believe the China Virus — SARS-CoV-2 — escaped the lab to infect the world. The question is whether gain-of-function research fortified it to infect humans.
The letter raises the question of whether Fauci or anyone else can or will be indicted for perjury.
NIH Letter
Last month, responding to a report at the Intercept about NIH/NIAID grants to WIV, Ebright fingered Fauci and Collins as “untruthful” in claiming U.S. taxpayers did not fund the institute’s potentially catastrophic research. Those experiments enhance bat coronaviruses so they can infect humans. The obvious concern is that an enhanced virus escaped the lab and caused the pandemic that killed millions.
Last night Ebright went after Fauci and Collins again.
“NIH corrects untruthful assertions by NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci that NIH had not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan,” Ebright tweeted with Tabak’s letter. “NIH states that EcoHealth Alliance violated Terms and Conditions of NIH grant AI110964.”
The key admissions in Tabak’s letter are that the experiment funded by EcoHealth “was testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
As well, he admitted, “laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus.”
Still, the viruses under study are “genetically very distant” from the microbe that raced around the world.
The grant did not fall under protocols that would require a close review because “NIH determined that it did not fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential (PPP) because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans,” Tabak wrote:
However, out of an abundance of caution and as an additional layer of oversight, language was included in the terms and conditions of the grant award to EcoHealth that outlined criteria for a secondary review, such as a requirement that the grantee report immediately a one log increase in growth. These measures would prompt a secondary review to determine whether the research aims should be re-evaluated or new biosafety measures should be enacted.
But EcoHealth didn’t report the new development, Tabak confessed:
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 submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award. Additional compliance efforts continue.
Four viruses studied with taxpayer money between 2014 and 2018, Tabak explained, resembled but were not identical to SARS-CoV-2.
While the China Virus “overlaps by 96-97%, experts agree that even these viruses are far too divergent to have been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2,” he wrote.
Comer 1 Comer 2Ebright’s Thread
“The NIH received the relevant documents in 2018 and reviewed the documents in 2020 and again in 2021,” Ebright tweeted, citing a report at The Intercept:
The NIH — specifically, Collins, Fauci, and Tabak — lied to Congress, lied to the press, and lied to the public. Knowingly. Willfully. Brazenly.…
The NIH funded the construction of novel chimeric coronaviruses that combined spike gene of one SARS-related coronavirus with rest of genetic information of another, and that yielded viruses that exhibited 10,000-fold higher viral load and higher pathogenicity in humanized mice.
Ebright also provided a list of eight violations of the grant contract, the first of which forbid gain-of-function research:
No funds are provided and no funds can be used to support gain-of-function research covered under the October 17, 2014 White House Announcement (NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-15-011).
“I told you so” doesn’t even begin to cover it here,” GOP Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky tweeted.
Paul sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department in July after Fauci, during sworn testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, denied that NIAID funded gain-of-function experiments. Fauci had refused to retract an earlier denial of the funding. “You do not know what you’re talking about,” Fauci fumed when Paul said NIAID funded the research.
But Paul did know what he was talking about, as NIH has confessed.
“Fauci knew,” Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas added. “He should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
H/T: Breitbart
