More than 900 pages of documents released detail U.S.-funded research by EcoHealth Alliance on several types of coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As reported by The Intercept, the documents describe the work of EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based health organization that used federal funding to conduct research at the Chinese lab. These documents include two previously unpublished grant proposals funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as project updates relating to the research.
The documents were released following ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Intercept against the National Institute of Health.
“This is a roadmap to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic,” Gary Ruskin, the executive director of U.S. Right to Know, said.
Indeed, one of the grants, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” details an effort spearheaded by EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for coronavirus. The research also included screening people who work with live animals.
The grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a whopping $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans.
The grant proposal even warned of the potential dangers associated with experiments of this kind.
“Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled,” one warning read.
The documents also included information on key experimental work with humanized mice that was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as previously believed.
As reported by Zero Hedge:
The materials reveal that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells (“humanized mice”).
The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses–one not been previously disclosed publicly–was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed…
…and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.
The materials further reveal that the the grants also supported the construction–in Wuhan–of novel chimeric MERS-related coronaviruses that combined spike genes from one MERS-related coronavirus with genetic information from another MERS-related coronavirus.
The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.
When asked in the replies where to find specific evidence on GoF research, user @SnupSnus replied:
the same page is also numbered page 11- whoever made all those numberings set us up for lot's of confusion, "3.3.c humanised mouse experiments"
— Simon Lackner (@SnupSnus) September 7, 2021
In response to inquiries from The Intercept, EcoHealth communications manager Robert Kessler replied: “We applied for grants to conduct research. The relevant agencies deemed that to be important research, and thus funded it. So I don’t know that there’s a whole lot to say.”there is an easy clue; the acknowledgments section of the paper attached in Fauci's panicked e-mails obtained via FOIA. this is the work "expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone". pic.twitter.com/WbLIGDouRE
— counterpopp (@counterpopp) September 7, 2021
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