Republican members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis are calling for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19, citing evidence that research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology could have launched the pandemic.
The calls center on a group called EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Peter Daszak, who received taxpayer-funded grants to conduct gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. EcoHealth and Daszak violated the grant terms and potentially worked to hide the origins of COVID-19, according to the members.
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“EcoHealth Alliance facilitated research at the Wuhan lab that may have caused the COVID pandemic and poses risk to cause future pandemics,” said Kentucky Rep. James Comer, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “Instead of coming forward, Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance have chosen to shield the Chinese Communist Party and cover up their involvement.”
Comer and five other Republicans, including Minority Whip Steve Scalise, sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra calling for the investigation.
“EcoHealth Alliance and Dr. Daszak shouldn’t receive another dime from U.S. taxpayers while they continue to shield the truth of what happened in Wuhan,” Comer said, noting a “pattern of unethical conduct.”
The renewed call stems in part from a Vanity Fair exposé that drew from more than 100,000 leaked documents and 38 interviews. The magazine claims that Daszak orchestrated a public relations campaign at the beginning of the pandemic to cast doubt on the theory that the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab while failing to disclose his own conflicts of interest.
EcoHealth received $3.7 million from the National Institutes of Health in 2014 to study bat coronaviruses. NIH has said that the viruses studied under the grant were too divergent from COVID-19 to have caused the pandemic.
According to Vanity Fair, after arranging for a letter in prestigious medical journal the Lancet calling the lab leak a conspiracy theory, Daszak wrote to two other scientists asking them not to sign it.
“You, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Daszak wrote, according to the magazine.
Attempts to reach HHS, the NIH, EcoHealth Alliance, and the White House for comment were not successful.
When asked by reporters, President Joe Biden and White House press secretary Jen Psaki have said they are pushing the Chinese government to be more forthcoming about how the pandemic started.
“We strongly believe, and the president has been clear and directly clear, about the importance of [China] being transparent and providing data and information related to the origins of the pandemic,” Psaki said in January. “But I don’t have anything to predict for you in terms of additional actions.”
The World Health Organization embarked on a fact-finding mission to China to investigate COVID-19’s origins in November 2020. Chinese leaders vetoed the three candidates for the expedition floated by the United States, leaving Daszak as America’s only representative. The commission found that transmission of the virus from a bat to a human was possible to likely, with a laboratory incident listed as “extremely unlikely.”
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The House Republicans are also calling on another scientist, Dr. Kristian Andersen, to clarify previous statements to Congress that he did not work to suppress any theory about the origins of COVID-19.
“In fact, it appears you were involved in and actually attempted to orchestrate an effort to suppress Dr. [Jesse] Bloom’s paper and thereby scientific research regarding theories about the origins of COVID-19 — particularly the likelihood of a lab leak,” reads a letter the group sent to Andersen. “We invite you to correct the committee record, in person, in a transcribed interview.”
