by Andrew Kerr at The Daily Caller
Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania said it is “very concerning” that the federal infectious disease research organization led by Dr. Anthony Fauci bypassed federal oversight of a grant that funded a lab in Wuhan, China to genetically modify bat-based coronaviruses.
Infectious disease experts say the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) grant with the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance, which involved the transfer of $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), described scientists conducting gain-of-function research on SARS-like viruses to make them even more contagious. But a federal oversight board created in 2017 to scrutinize such research was not notified of the grant because the NIAID opted against forwarding it for review, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported.
“When it comes to oversight of U.S. tax dollars headed to the Chinese Communist Party, Dr. Fauci seems like he’s literally whistling past the graveyard,” Perry told the DCNF. (RELATED: US Grant To Wuhan Lab To Enhance Bat-Based Coronaviruses Was Never Scrutinized By HHS Review Board, NIH Says)
The WIV is at the center of widespread speculation that COVID-19 could have accidentally leaked from its lab into the human population. A World Health Organization investigation into the origins of the pandemic concluded in late March that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus could have escaped from a lab.
But WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said his organization’s assessment of the lab leak theory was not sufficient and that further investigation was necessary.
The Department of Health and Human Service created the Potential Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) review framework in late 2017 following a three-year federal funding moratorium on gain-of-function research. Had the EcoHealth grant been subjected to P3CO review, an HHS panel would have independently evaluated the grant and, if necessary, recommended additional biocontainment measures to prevent potential lab leaks — or even recommended that the grant be denied entirely.
Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard H. Ebright previously told the DCNF that NIAID’s ability to sidestep the P3CO framework is a “systemic problem.”
Ebright said the offices of the director for NIAID and the National Institutes of Health have “systematically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review.”
EcoHealth president Peter Daszak, who was the only American member of the WHO’s investigation into COVID-19’s origins, spoke about how easy it was to manipulate bat-based coronaviruses during a podcast interview filmed just weeks before the first cases were reported in Wuhan…
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