EcoHealth Alliance subcontractor  among COVID-19 'patients zero' at Wuhan lab: Report

A damning new report indicates Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Anthony Fauci, and the Chinese military-co-opted Wuhan Institute of Virology all have their fingerprints on research that may have ultimately resulted in the deaths of over 1.1 million Americans and well over 6.9 million worldwide.

Federal documents recently obtained as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit reveal the NIAID and United States Agency for International Development funded an EcoHealth Alliance subcontractor's work on coronaviruses to the tune of $41 million.

That subcontractor, listed as an investigator on the grants, was Ben Hu, whom TheBlaze previously noted was the WIV's lead on gain-of-function research on SARS-like coronaviruses and among the "patients zero" — having been one of the three lab researchers first infected with COVID-19 in November 2019.

Alina Chan, molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said, "Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli. ... He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him."

The White Coat Waste Project has obtained federal accounting records through a 2021 FOIA lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health that confirm Ben Hu had his name on American taxpayer-funded grants awarded by the then-Fauci led NIAID and the USAID.

According to the grant form, an EcoHealth-administered grant of $3,586,760 from the NIAID was marked "pending" for a project titled "understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence" for work to be undertaken from June 2019 through May 2024. The same project had previously received $3,086,735 in American taxpayer money from NIAID between June 2014 and May 2019.

The grant form further indicated that USAID had poured $38 million into an EcoHealth alliance project titled "PREDICT-2" between October 2014 and September 2019, again with Hu's name on it.

A USAID spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that the funding for research at the Wuhan lab ended in 2019 and "was part of the agency’s mission to identify and contain pandemic threats. The project provided about $815,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and $39,000 to Wuhan University."

The White Coat Waste Project noted that "Hu’s animal experiments were being bankrolled with U.S. taxpayer funds from NIAID and USAID grants that received over $41 million," but that the total amount injected into Hu's lab has not yet been disclosed by the U.S. government.

"Agency stonewalling and reporting loopholes made it incredibly challenging to follow the money from government agencies to the Wuhan lab, but the documents make it clear that U.S. taxpayer money funded some of Hu’s experiments," Anthony Bellotti, president of WCW, told the Journal.

The Wall Street Journal reported that much of Hu's research "focused on modifying coronaviruses so they could bind to human cells. The stated purpose of the research was to identify viruses that could lead to a pandemic and facilitate the development of a vaccine."

The WCW summarized its findings thusly: "U.S. taxpayer-funded Wuhan white coats collect wild coronaviruses from bats in remote caves in China without adequate protective gear, transport the viruses to a lab in a major metropolitan area, do gain-of-function animal experiments to make the viruses more contagious and deadly to humans, and then fall ill with COVID-like symptoms and their identities and medical histories are covered up."

Investigative reporter Paul Thacker noted that Fauci denied ever funding this research.

Fauci told Congress in May 2021 that the NIH "has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology" and made similar denials on multiple other occasions.

Then-Principal Deputy Director of the NIH Lawrence A. Tabak appeared to undercut Fauci's denial, writing to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Oct. 20, 2021, that EcoHealth’s "limited experiment" in Wuhan tested whether "spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model."

These mice "became sicker," according to Tabak, who added, "EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant."

According to a January report from the HHS Office of Inspector General, the NIH also knew about potential risks associated with the research being performed in China that had been executed using federal grant money funneled to and through EcoHealth Alliance.

Despite this knowledge, it reportedly "did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth's compliance with some requirements."

British zoologist Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, previously called NIH requests that U.S. federal officials inspect the WIV "heinous" and derided suggestions that the virus might have leaked from the WIV as "conspiracy theories."

Hu did not respond to requests for comment from the Wall Street Journal, as Daszak and the NIH similarly declined to provide comment to Thacker.

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