Tipsheet

Exposed: New FOIA Docs on Wuhan Research Should Make Fauci Very Nervous

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  September 07, 2021 2:45 PM

I’m sure you saw the latest bit on the coronavirus. It’s not about death rates, the levels of infection, or even more panic porn. It’s about that lying sack Anthony Fauci who appears that he might have misled Congress about the gain on function research funds the National Institutes of Health gave to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci was always testy when someone brought up the grants. Well, we might know why. After trying to keep it buried for months, The Intercept sued after their FOIA request was stonewalled. Well, here’s what some 900 new pages have revealed: 

NEWLY RELEASED DOCUMENTS provide details of U.S.-funded research on several types of coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The Intercept has obtained more than 900 pages of documents detailing the work of EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based health organization that used federal money to fund bat coronavirus research at the Chinese laboratory. The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as project updates relating to EcoHealth Alliance’s research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic.

The documents were released in connection with ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health. The Intercept is making the full documents available to the public.

“This is a road map to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To Know, a group that has been investigating the origins of Covid-19.

One of the grants, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals. The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed. The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has aggressively dismissed.

The bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans. Even before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such experiments. The grant proposal acknowledges some of those dangers: “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.”

Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab-leak theory seriously.

[…]

According to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, the documents contain critical information about the research done in Wuhan, including about the creation of novel viruses. “The viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell,” Ebright wrote to The Intercept after reviewing the documents. Ebright also said the documents make it clear that two different types of novel coronaviruses were able to infect humanized mice.

Now, The Intercept did go after our own Julio Rosas, which was utterly laughable since their main gripe was that he covered the endless rioting in Democrat-run cities last summer. How dare Julio cover…a national news story? Yet, a broken clock is right twice a day. At the same time, our friends at RedState had this story eons ago. Scott Hounsell has been working on this story for weeks and even followed the money as well. And should we be shocked that his FOIA requests ran aground pervasively? No. that’s government—dragging their feet in all things, but especially ones that could make Biden, Fauci, and the rest of the COVID panic crew look like idiots. This came from a lab, which was a theory that was mocked as a conspiracy tin foil hat material. Now, it looks very much like the truth—and Fauci looks very much like a liar. Well, we knew that already, but now there could be legal consequences for those lies.