By Nick Givas
Updated: February 13, 2023 - 11:37pm
House Republicans are launching their investigation into the origins of COVID-19 with demands for interviews and documents and a promise to exhaust all means to determine whether the U.S. government hid information from the American public on how the pandemic started and whether the federal response was mismanaged.
And their roadmap — made public Monday — clearly leads to the man who quarterbacked the nation's strategy: Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Fauci was "alerted early on that COVID-19 had markings of a manipulated virus yet may have chosen to cover it up instead of blowing the whistle," House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) declared as he unveiled the subcommittee that will investigate the pandemic's origins and response and released its first demands for evidence.
"We will continue to follow the facts to determine what could have been done differently to better protect Americans from this virus and hold U.S. government officials that took part in any sort of cover up accountable," Comer promised.
Comer reiterated his concerns that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China and not from a wet market as some scientists like Fauci long claimed. The Kentucky Republican also said he wants to determine whether "gain of function" research — in which dangerous viruses are enhanced to study them — may have been conducted with U.S. funding at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Though Fauci has argued COVID-19 evolved naturally, the U.S. intelligence community said there is also evidence that it was released from a lab leak. Fauci has battled with Republicans but also made clear late last year he'd be willing to testify anew in a GOP-led inquiry.
Comer's investigators sent letters Monday to Fauci, who recently retired as the government's infectious disease chief as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit that used an NIH grant to fund bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines; and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra.
“Evidence continues to mount pointing to the virus leaking from an unsecure lab in Wuhan," Comer said. "We know EcoHealth Alliance acted as a middleman, improperly funneling thousands of taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan lab to conduct risky gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses which could have started the pandemic."
House lawmakers appear to be homing in on suspicions that top public health officials at NIH were aware of concerns that the virus had been engineered, yet acted deliberately to conceal those concerns as the virus was spreading worldwide.
Comer accused the Chinese Communist Party of orchestrating its own coverup, one allegedly aided by American officials.
"U.S. taxpayer dollars were being funneled to the Wuhan Lab to conduct risky gain-of-function research on novel bat coronaviruses; and Dr. Fauci was aware of this information at the start of the pandemic and may have acted to conceal the information by intentionally downplaying the lab leak theory," he charged.
https://justthenews.com/accountability/what-endgame-house-republicans-new-covid-19-subcommittee-paging-dr-fauci
Anti-animal testing lobby group the White Coat Waste Project (WCW) found in an investigation that EcoHealth Alliance has received at least $46 million from government agencies since the start of the COVID pandemic—despite the shady group’s questionable experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and its history of experimenting on animals.
The Alliance, headed by British zoologist Dr. Peter Daszak, just happened to be working at the Wuhan lab with funding from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases when the virus magically appeared and turned the world upside down for the better part of two years.
But that hasn’t stopped the government from continuing to dish out millions to the group, according to WCW. Handouts include:
$26 million from the Dept of Defense, including from a “Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction” account
$7 million from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, including for dangerous virus experiments on humanized mice and hamsters in foreign labs
$11 million from USAID (which also funded EHA’s animal experiments at the Wuhan lab)
$263K from the National Science Foundation
But there’s more—the Alliance even took pandemic relief funds:
As we previously exposed, EcoHealth also inexplicably managed to squeeze another $1.5 million in pandemic bailout funds out of taxpayers’ pockets, even though they may have actually sparked the pandemic and were raking in millions of tax dollars!
The Sun reports that Daszak has not lost his love for studying viruses and animals:
Current EcoHealth Alliance projects include experiments with bats and hamsters on the deadly brain-swelling Nipah virus in Bangladesh.
Nipah is listed as a potential threat to mankind by the World Health Organisation.
In other tests, humanised mice are infected with zoonotic viruses in Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, according to grant documents.
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2023/02/13/ecohealth-alliance-raked-in-over-46-million-in-government-money-since-start-of-pandemic-investigation-shows-n703376