A House subcommittee investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic urged a criminal investigation of EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak ahead of a Wednesday hearing, releasing a trove of documents about the Manhattan-based nonprofit’s controversial virus experiments in Wuhan, China.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, released a 59-page report and interview transcripts with half a dozen National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials and scientists linked to EcoHealth’s research — including Daszak himself.
EcoHealth has received millions in federal grants to conduct research around the globe — including more than $4 million for an NIH project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
Beginning in 2014, the project conducted experiments at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that modified SARS-like viruses and made them 10 times more infectious — but “failed to report” that fact to the NIH.
NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak — who was interviewed by the House COVID subcommittee — disclosed to Congress in 2021 that EcoHealth had violated the terms of its grant in the Wuhan lab, leading to the grant’s suspension.
The same day that Tabak made the disclosure, the NIH scrubbed its website of the agency’s longstanding definition of gain-of-function research, which enhances the transmissibility of viruses.
The report also calls out former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci — who was also interviewed by the subcommittee in January — for having “played semantics” with the definition of gain-of-function research.
“EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak is not a good steward of US taxpayer dollars and should never again receive funding from the US taxpayer,” Wenstrup said in a statement.
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“Dr. Daszak and his organization conducted dangerous gain-of-function research at the WIV, willfully violated the terms of a multimillion-dollar NIH grant, and placed US national security at risk,” he added.
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In addition to a request for formal debarment and a criminal investigation by the Justice Department, Wenstrup’s subcommittee has recommended eight improvements to the federal grants process to “increase biosafety and biosecurity of high-risk research.”
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