Peter Daszak pushed back against the National Institutes of Health, saying his U.S.-based research group violated agency rules when it failed to report in a timely fashion how well bat coronaviruses grow in mice at a lab in Wuhan, China, in 2018 and 2019.
The leader of EcoHealth Alliance condemned what he says is the NIH’s “misinterpretations” and lamented how the agency told him to stop funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology last year in a new letter obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
He was responding to Lawrence Tabak, the NIH’s principal deputy director, saying in a letter to Congress last week that EcoHealth provided a five-year progress report on bat coronavirus research conducted under an NIH grant and that, “in this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus.”
“As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do,” the NIH official said, adding, “EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant.”
Republican lawmakers and others argue this shows the NIH admitting that EcoHealth had conducted risky gain-of-function research with institute funding. The NIH insists it has not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, where COVID-19 first emerged.
In his letter, which was reported Thursday, Daszak contends the experiment in question was “the same one” EcoHealth reported in its “Year 4 Report” in April 2018. He said that “there was just the one experiment conducted, with results from follow-up analyses included in the Year 5 Report.”
EcoHealth, Daszak said, “did in fact comply with all reporting requirements.” He also said the facts “clearly show that EcoHealth Alliance is not out of compliance with our oversight and reporting obligations, and in fact reported this experiment over 3 years and 6 months ago.”
HOUSE GOP WANTS GARLAND TO INVESTIGATE IF ECOHEALTH BROKE LAW
Republican Reps. Jim Jordan and James Comer penned a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday, asking the DOJ to look into whether EcoHealth had broken federal laws against grant fraud.
Daszak defended his experiments in his new letter.
“Given the small number of mice, it is also uncertain whether the survival and weight loss data were statistically relevant,” he said.
Daszak also wrote: “As we informed you previously, and as is documented by the NIH receipt system itself, we first uploaded this report on time, in July 2019 (the final allowable date for submission would have been September 30th 2019). However, by the time we tried to officially submit, our R01 grant had been renewed (July 24th 2019) and the system locked us out from submitting a normal annual final Year 5 report at that point.”
Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University who has repeatedly criticized the NIH and EcoHealth for their actions before and during the pandemic, told the Washington Examiner that Daszak’s letter didn’t stand up to scrutiny.
“The claims in the EcoHealth letter strain credulity,” Ebright said. “Particularly the claim that the reason EcoHealth failed to submit a progress report when due in 2019 is that it had a problem accessing the NIH web server on day July 24, 2019, and that, somehow, it did not occur to EcoHealth to try again on any of the next 750 days. This claim makes ‘the dog ate my homework’ seem masterful by comparison.”
Ebright added: “Overall, the take-home messages of EcoHealth’s letter to the NIH seem to be: (1) ‘Pound sand, NIH,’ and (2) ‘If NIH is gonna try to take us down, we’re gonna try to take NIH down with us.’”
Amid the search for the origins of COVID-19, two of the Biden administration’s top health officials, Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci, have been adamant in insisting the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. But both men, the respective leaders of the NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also admit they don’t actually know everything that goes on in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Daszak complained about the NIH telling EcoHealth to discontinue its funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in April 2020.
“Both the lack of funding and the instruction to cease contractual work with WIV have led to significant disruption of the normal interactions and dialog among collaborating scientists,” he said.
The EcoHealth leader maintained a long working relationship with Wuhan lab “bat lady” Shi Zhengli, sending her lab at least $600,000 in NIH funding. Daszak was also part of the World Health Organization-China team that dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as “extremely unlikely” earlier this year. Meeting minutes from discussions between Wuhan lab scientists and the WHO-China COVID-19 origins joint study team reveal lab leak concerns were referred to as “conspiracy theories.”
Daszak helped organize a February 2020 Lancet letter that defended China and dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. He criticized the Biden administration for its skepticism of the WHO’s findings and defended China on Chinese Communist Party-linked outlets.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul requested in July that Garland criminally investigate Fauci over Senate testimony in which he said the NIH never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
Over the weekend, Fauci stood by his denial, responding to a clip of Paul calling him a liar.
Fauci replied, “I obviously totally disagree with Sen. Paul. He’s absolutely incorrect. Neither I nor Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, lied or misled about what we’ve done.” He also said EcoHealth “should have put their progress report in a timely manner — no denial of that, and there will be administrative consequences.”
Meanwhile, Collins told the Washington Post that EcoHealth “messed up” and would be facing “consequences” in some fashion.
The level of blowback is unwarranted, Daszak argued.
“We would like to point out that these types of mistakes about the timing or nature of our reporting can be better addressed by contacting us to request clarification prior to responding to any congressional inquiry,” he said. “This will help ensure factually correct responses and will save our organization and staff from undue disparagement and unjustified accusation of inappropriate behavior that have now ensued in the press.”
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Ebright previously told the Washington Examiner that a letter in which the NIH conceded that the group run by Daszak violated its rules was a “bombshell” admission because it “corrects the untruthful assertions” by Fauci and Collins.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment this summer stating that one U.S. intelligence agency assessed with “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believe with “low confidence” COVID-19 most likely has a natural origin.
Documents unearthed last month show the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency rejected a $14.2 million funding request from EcoHealth in 2018 because DARPA worried that the coronavirus experiment funding request could “potentially involve [gain-of-function] research” and “could have put local communities at risk.”
