EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S.-funded research firm linked to the Wuhan lab, sought to delay temporarily the release of taxpayer-funded viral sequences early in the COVID-19 pandemic in part because Chinese authorities had not yet approved the data’s release, according to new emails obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request.
EcoHealth President Peter Daszak urged his colleagues in a late April 2020 email to delay the release of the data, which was part of his organization’s work with the U.S. Agency for International Development’s PREDICT program, to a public National Institutes of Health database because it would bring “very unwelcome attention to UC Davis, PREDICT and USAID.”
“It’s extremely important that we don’t have these sequences as part of our PREDICT release to Genbank at this point,” Daszak said in the April 28, 2020, email.
“As you may have heard, these were part of a grant just terminated by NIH,” Daszak added, linking to a Politico article covering former President Donald Trump’s move to suspend his group’s $3.4 million NIH grant to research bat-based coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “Having them as part of PREDICT will being very unwelcome attention to UC Davis, PREDICT and USAID.”
EcoHealth researcher Hongying Li wrote in an email earlier the same day that her group wanted to hold off on uploading the viral sequences because, “due to the COVID-19, any relevant data publication needs to be reviewed and approved by the institution in China, we have started the process, but the timeline is unpredictable at this moment.”
Li also wrote that they needed to double-check the data for duplicated submissions before uploading information to the NIH’s GenBank database.
USAID has provided $64.7 million in PREDICT funding to EcoHealth. The program was launched in 2009 to detect novel pathogens around the world that could pose a significant public health threat.
EcoHealth’s work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to modify bat-based coronaviruses prior to the pandemic has been the subject of intense scrutiny from Republican members of Congress and outside virologists who believe the lab could be linked to the release of COVID-19 into the human population.
Former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci have steadfastly denied its grants with EcoHealth funded gain-of-function research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the pandemic.
However, NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak notified lawmakers in October that EcoHealth failed to notify the agency immediately that it generated a SARS-related coronavirus in Wuhan that made lab mice sicker than those infected with the natural virus it was made from.
FAUCI CRITICS SAY NIH LETTER DEBUNKS ‘GAIN OF FUNCTION’ DENIAL
USAID and the NIH did not return requests for comment.
Daszak denied that his group withheld any viral sequences from the NIH’s GenBank database in a statement to U.S. Right to Know.
“All sequences of SARS-related coronaviruses discovered by EcoHealth Alliance in China were sequenced using NIH funding and have been made public in peer-reviewed scientific papers and via the publicly available Genbank database,” Daszak told the watchdog group. “Two further sequences were identified and submitted separately to NIH on 11/18/21.”
EcoHealth did not return a request for comment.
EcoHealth’s efforts to delay the release of taxpayer-funded viral sequences came two months before the NIH deleted the genetic sequencing of early pandemic COVID-19 cases from another public database at the request of Chinese researchers.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The NIH added the COVID-19 case sequences back to the database a year later in July after Seattle-based virologist Jesse Bloom with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center reported that the sequences were likely scrubbed from the database to obscure their existence.
