By Dr. Joseph Mercola | mercola.com
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- The NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, have funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Several such grants were given to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn subcontracted some of that research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)
- A loophole in the review process set up to ensure the safety of gain-of-function research allows funding institutions to bypass review. Fauci and the NIAID are accused of shirking the review process for some of the research performed at the WIV
- Two lengthy reports have been published detailing Fauci’s questionable research activities and attempts to mislead the public on a number of issues, including the benefits of hydroxychloroquine, the effectiveness of masks, and the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 being a lab creation
- Many were aware that gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and other dangerous pathogens was taking place at the WIV, and that the lab had known safety lapses, yet nothing appears to have been done to shore up security and prevent an outbreak
- While government officials would like you to believe that SARS-CoV-2 is one of the most serious threats to life on earth, the reality is that the gain-of-function research they fund is a far greater threat. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t the result of this kind of research, history tells us there will be another leak. It’s only a matter of time, which is why we must ban all gain-of-function research, worldwide
We first reported on this issue with my interview with Francis Boyle over a year ago, which received well over one million views. Of course, our coverage was disparaged as fake news and removed from YouTube, but now one year later it appears the facts are confirming our speculations.
In the April 4, 2021, Sky News report above, award-winning investigations writer Sharri Markson summarizes the findings1,2,3,4 of the World Health Organization’s investigative team, tasked with identifying the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
She blasts the report as a “PR exercise for China,” calling the team’s conclusion that one of the most likely origin theories was that the virus entered Wuhan in or on frozen food from overseas, “embarrassing.” As noted by Markson, even the director-general of the WHO ended up backpedaling in an effort to salvage the organization’s credibility.5
As reported by The Washington Post, March 30, 2021,6 the WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and 13 other world leaders have now joined the U.S. government in expressing “frustration with the level of access China granted an international mission to Wuhan.”
According to Ghebreyesus, the team “did not conduct an ‘extensive enough’ assessment of the possibility the virus was introduced to humans through a laboratory incident,” which will therefore necessitate additional studies with “more timely and comprehensive data sharing.”
NIH Has ‘Systematically Thwarted’ Oversight Efforts
I’ve previously detailed how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, have funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Several such grants were given to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn subcontracted some of that research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
EcoHealth Alliance is led by Dr. Peter Daszak, who is also on the WHO’s investigative team, and who has plenty of reasons to hide the truth, were the virus in fact from the WIV. In 2014, a federal moratorium was placed on gain-of-function research, which focuses on making pathogens more virulent and lethal, due to public safety concerns.
After the moratorium was lifted in 2017, a special review board, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control, and Oversight, or P3CO Review Framework, was created within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), to evaluate “whether grants that involve enhancing dangerous pathogens, such as coronaviruses, are worth the risks and that proper safeguards are in place,” Daily Caller reports.7
According to Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright, an NIH grant for research involving the modification of bat coronaviruses at the WIV was sneaked through because the NIAID failed to flag it for review.8 In other words, the WIV received federal funding from the NIAID without the research first receiving a green light from the HHS review board. According to the Daily Caller:9
“The review framework split oversight responsibilities between two groups — the funding agency … and the P3CO Review Committee … The committee is responsible for recommending whether a research grant involving gain-of-function needs to include any additional risk mitigation measures … But the committee is kept in the dark on any grant until the funding agency flags one for its review …
Ebright said the offices of the director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — the subagency that funded EcoHealth — and the NIH have ‘systematically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review’ …
Had EcoHealth’s grant been subjected to P3CO review, an HHS panel would have independently evaluated the grant and, if necessary, recommended additional biocontainment measures to prevent potential lab leaks — or even recommended that the grant be denied entirely.”
Is the NIAID Telling the Truth?
An NIAID spokesperson told the Daily Caller that the grant in question had not been forwarded for review because it did not involve “the enhancement of the pathogenicity or transmissibility of the viruses studied.” The problem is that the P3CO Framework does not require the HHS review committee to double-check the determination of the funding agency, in this case, the NIAID.
According to Ebright, this is a loophole that can easily be misused. In this case, he strongly disagrees with the NIAID’s statement that the research didn’t involve gain-of-function research. The Daily Caller writes:10
“Ebright told the DCNF that NIAID was wrong to determine that the EcoHealth grant did not involve enhancing the transmissibility of Chinese bat-based coronaviruses.
He said the project’s abstract11 for the 2019 fiscal year, which referenced ‘in vitro and in vivo infection experiments’ on coronaviruses, ‘unequivocally’ required risk-benefit review under the HHS P3CO Framework. Other scientists have said EcoHealth’s NIH-funded work in China involved gain-of-function research on bat-based coronaviruses.
‘It is hard to overemphasize that the central logic of this grant was to test the pandemic potential of SARS-related bat coronaviruses by making ones with pandemic potential, either through genetic engineering or passaging, or both,’ Drs. Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson wrote12 in June [2020].”
Rep. Scott Perry, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is now saying Fauci really needs to answer why his agency bypassed oversight for research done at the WIV and intends to call Fauci in to testify. He’s pessimistic, however, about an open hearing actually taking place, as House Democrats are unlikely to support it. Perry told the Daily Caller:13
“When it comes to oversight of U.S. tax dollars headed to the Chinese Communist Party, Dr. Fauci seems like he’s literally whistling past the graveyard … We seem so cavalier about this approval paradigm for this funding, and the definitions seemingly allow you to drive a truck through them regarding what is gain-of-function research and what isn’t.
It seems to me this was done by design to allow this kind of research to be done in these kinds of places without any kind of scrutiny. And this is the result of that.”
Fauci’s ‘Criminal Violations’ Deserve Review
Fauci has more than one or two questions to answer, though, considering at least two lengthy reports have been issued detailing Fauci’s questionable research activities and attempts to mislead the public on a number of issues, including the benefits of hydroxychloroquine, the effectiveness of masks and the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 being a lab creation.
One report, “Dr. Fauci’s COVID-19 Treachery,”14 was written by Dr. Peter Breggin and published in October 2020. The other, a 205-page paper titled “The Fauci/COVID-19 Dossier,”15 was compiled by Dr. David E. Martin, in which he reviews “numerous criminal violations” by Fauci, the CDC, and others, “that may be associated with the COVID-19 terrorism.” Here’s just a small sampling of paragraphs from Martin’s paper:
“Using the power of NIAID during the alleged pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci actively suppressed proven medical countermeasures used by, and validated in scientific proceedings, that offered alternatives to the products funded by his conspiring entities for which he had provided direct funding and for whom he would receive tangible and intangible benefit …
NIAID’s Director, Dr. Anthony Fauci is listed as an inventor on 8 granted U.S. patents. None of them are reported in NIAID, NIH, or GAO reports of active licensing despite the fact that Dr. Fauci reportedly was compelled to get paid for his interleukin-2 ‘invention’ …
Through non-competitive grant awards to UNC Chapel Hill’s Ralph Baric, to selection of the Bio-Safety Level 4 laboratory locations, to the setting of prices for Remdesivir and mRNA therapies from Moderna and Pfizer, NIAID, CDC, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have been involved in allocating Federal funds to conspiring parties without independent review.
Around March 12, 2020, in an effort to enrich their own economic interests by way of securing additional funding from both Federal and Foundation actors, the CDC and NIAID’s Dr. Fauci elected to suspend testing and classify COVID-19 by capricious symptom presentation alone.
Forcing the public to rely on The COVID Tracking Project — funded by the Bloomberg, Zuckerberg and Gates Foundation and presented by a media outlet — not a public health agency — Dr. Fauci used fraudulent testing technology (RT-PCR) to conflate ‘COVID cases’ with positive PCR tests in the living while insisting that COVID deaths be counted by symptoms alone.
This perpetuated a market demand for his desired vaccine agenda which was recited by him and his conspiring parties around the world until the present. Not surprisingly, this was necessitated by the apparent fall in cases that constituted Dr. Fauci’s and others’ criteria for depriving citizens of their 1st Amendment rights …
While Moderna enjoys hundreds of millions of dollars of funding allegiance and advocacy from Anthony Fauci and his NIAID, since its inception, it has been engaged in illegal patent activity and demonstrated contempt for U.S. Patent law. To make matters worse, the U.S. Government has given it financial backing in the face of undisclosed infringement risks potentially contributing to the very infringement for which they are indemnified.”
Many Were Aware of Lab Leak Threat Yet Did Nothing
The harsh reality is that any number of people, both in the U.S. and China, were aware that gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and other dangerous pathogens was taking place at the WIV, and that the lab had known safety lapses. Yet nothing appears to have been done to shore up security and prevent an outbreak.
As reported by the National Review16 in July 2020, American State Department officials who visited the WIV in 2018 wrote two separate memos — one in January and one in April — detailing safety concerns. This included “a shortage of the highly-trained technicians and investigators required to safely operate a [Biosafety Level] 4 laboratory and lack of clarity in related Chinese government policies and guidelines.”
“These memos do not prove that SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was caused by a laboratory accident,” the National Review wrote,17 “But they do dispel one of the less-plausible arguments against the lab-accident theory: That the Chinese scientists working at WIV were simply too professional and diligent to ever have an accident that released a contagious virus.”
Ironically, this is precisely the argument presented by the WHO’s corrupted investigative team. The team leader, Danish food safety and zoonosis scientist Ben Embarek went on record saying that lab accidents are “extremely rare;” hence, it’s “very unlikely” that SARS-CoV-2 could have escaped from the WIV or any other lab18 — so much so, the team dismissed the possibility entirely and said it would no longer consider it.
Meanwhile, in the real world, biosafety incidents involving dangerous pathogens occur twice a week, on average, in the U.S. alone,19,20 and virology labs accidentally released the original SARS virus on no less than four separate occasions.21,22
Gain-of-Function Research Is the Real Threat
While government health officials would like you to believe that SARS-CoV-2 is one of the most serious threats to life on earth, the reality is that the gain-of-function research they fund is a far greater threat. It’s quite possible that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of this kind of research, but even if it wasn’t, history tells us there will be another release, another leak, another accident. They happen far more frequently than people like to imagine.
Already, as detailed in “New Engineered Coronaviruses Are Under Development” and “Bioweapons Labs Get More NIH Funding for Deadly Research,” scientists are tinkering around with SARS-CoV-2, trying to see if they can make an even worse version. Meanwhile, the same establishment is drumming up panic in the streets, warning of new, more infectious, and dangerous variants. Never do they tell you that they’re also busy creating them.
This hypocrisy must end. I firmly believe we need to ban gain-of-function research across the world. We do not need it. As noted by Marc Lipsitch in his 2018 review, “Why Do Exceptionally Dangerous Gain-of-Function Experiments in Influenza?”:23
“While there are indisputably certain questions that can be answered only by gain-of-function experiments in highly pathogenic strains, these questions are narrow and unlikely to meaningfully advance public health goals such as vaccine production and pandemic prediction.
Alternative approaches to experimental influenza virology and characterization of existing strains are in general completely safe, higher throughput, more generalizable, and less costly than creation of PPP [potential pandemic pathogens] in the laboratory and can thereby better inform public health.
Indeed, virtually every finding of recent PPP experiments that has been cited for its public health value was predated by similar findings using safe methodologies.”
While the origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains to be conclusively proven, a paper24 published in Nature in 2015 discussed how a “lab-made coronavirus related to SARS” capable of infecting human cells had stirred up debate as to whether or not this kind of research is worth the risks:
“Although the extent of any risk is difficult to assess, Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that the researchers have created a novel virus that ‘grows remarkably well’ in human cells. ‘If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,’ he says.”
With 20/20 hindsight, we now have a much clearer idea of what the release of such a virus can do. We may chalk it up to luck that SARS-CoV-2 turned out to be orders of magnitude less lethal than initially suspected, although government containment measures have turned out to be devastating and deadly as well. If this kind of research is allowed to continue, the next time there’s a leak, we may not be as lucky.