NIH and EcoHealth Colluded to Evade Research Restrictions

The walls are closing in on Dr. Anthony Fauci as emails reveal the National Institutes of Health colluded with EcoHealth Alliance to circumvent federal restrictions on gain-of-function (GOF) research.

The damning revelations were published by The Intercept¹ and Daily Caller,² November 3, 2021. While the NIH has kept the grant correspondence secret, only allowing select congressional staff to review the documentation in a private session, The Intercept was given access to their personal notes.

Considering federal grants are of clear public interest, the NIH’s decision to not make the correspondence public is suspicious in and of itself. Are they hiding something? You bet. As reported by Intercept journalists Sharon Lerner and Mara Hvistendahl

“Emails show that NIH officials allowed EcoHealth Alliance to craft oversight language governing its own gain-of-function research …

Detailed notes on NIH communications obtained by The Intercept show that beginning in May 2016, agency staff had an unusual exchange with Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, about experiments his group was planning to conduct on coronaviruses under an NIH grant called ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence’⁴ …

EcoHealth was entering the third year of the five-year, $3.1 million grant that included research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other partners. In a 2016 progress report, the group described to NIH its plans to carry out two planned experiments infecting humanized mice with hybrid viruses, known as ‘chimeras.’

The plans triggered concerns at NIH. Two staff members — Jenny Greer, a grants management specialist, and Erik Stemmy, a program officer handling coronavirus research — wrote to EcoHealth Alliance to say that the experiments ‘appear to involve research covered under the pause,’ referring to a temporary moratorium⁵ on funding for gain-of-function research that would be reasonably anticipated to make MERS and SARS viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in mammals …

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