Six weeks ago the Department of Defense (DoD) awarded a $3 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, the New York-based nonprofit which was used to funnel millions of US taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they collaborated to make bat coronaviruses more transmissible to humans via gain-of-function genetic manipulation.
The grant was awarded as part of a DoD program related to countering weapons of mass destruction, as noted by Just the News and Rutgers professor Richard H. Ebright.
This latest grant from the DoD is officially meant for "reducing the threat of viral spillover from wildlife in the Philippines."
In 2014, the Obama administration temporarily suspended federal funding for gain-of-function research into manipulating bat COVID to be more transmissible to humans. Four months prior to that decision, the NIH effectively shifted this research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to EcoHealth, headed by Peter Daszak.
Notably, the WIV "had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions" for years under the leadership of Dr. Shi 'Batwoman' Zhengli, according to the Washington Post's Josh Rogin.
Yet, after Sars-CoV-2 broke out in the same town where Daszak was manipulating Bat Covid, The Lancet published a screed by Daszak (signed by over two-dozen scientists), which insisted the virus could have only come from a natural spillover event, likely from a wet market, and that the scientists "stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." The Lancet only later noted Daszak's conflicts of interest.
Meanwhile, as we noted late last year, a Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions interim report from October 27, 2022 titled “An Analysis of the Origins of the COVID19 Pandemic” concluded that the origins of Covid were more likely based in a lab as part of a “research related incident” and not zoonotic.
The report was the result of a “bipartisan Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee oversight effort into the origins of SARS-CoV-2”. It provides a lengthy analysis that reviews “publicly available, open-source information to examine the two prevailing theories of origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus”.
Among other conclusions, the report notes: “Substantial evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of a research-related incident associated with a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” the report states.
In a section titled “Problems with the Natural Zoonotic Hypothesis”, the report says:
“Based on precedent and genomics, the most likely scenario for a zoonotic origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is that SARS-CoV-2 crossed over the species barrier from an intermediate host to humans. However, the available evidence is also consistent, perhaps more so, with a direct bat-to-human spillover. Both scenarios remain plausible and, in the absence of additional information, should be considered equally valid hypotheses."
"However, nearly three years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, critical evidence that would prove that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and resulting COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a natural zoonotic spillover is missing.”
“Such gaps include the failure to identify the original host reservoir, the failure to identify a candidate intermediate host species, and the lack of serological or epidemiological evidence showing transmission from animals to humans, among others outlined in this report,” the report states.
“As a result of these evidentiary gaps, it is hard to treat the natural zoonotic spillover theory as the presumptive origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Then, in the report’s conclusion, it states:
“Based on the analysis of the publicly available information, it appears reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident. New information, made publicly available and independently verifiable, could change this assessment. However, the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt, or the presumption of accuracy.”
The report was signed off on by Richard Burr, United States Senator and Ranking Member, U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.