Quote:“The search for the source of SARS – which killed more than 770 people two decades ago – has given us a headstart for the current hunt.

Quote:Wearing hazmat suits and equipped with mist nets, a team from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, together with the ecologist and president of EcoHealth Alliance Peter Daszak, ventured into limestone caves to collect faeces and blood samples from thousands of roosting bats before testing them for novel coronaviruses in the lab.
‘At the time, we were looking for SARS-related viruses, and this one was 20 percent different,’ says Daszak. ‘We thought it’s interesting, but not high-risk. So we didn’t do anything about it and put it in the freezer.’
The group has found around 500 bat-borne viruses in China over the last 16 years, but only flagged those that most resembled SARS to the authorities – a lack of funding meant they couldn’t further investigate the virus strain now known to be 96 percent genetically similar to the virus that causes Covid-19.”

Quote:“Not everyone thinks that discovering viruses and their hotspots is the best way to prevent pandemics. Dr. Robert B. Tesh, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, says we don’t understand enough about zoonotic viruses to create predictive models. ‘A lot of the stuff they produce is hype. … It’s more PR than science.’”


Daszak’s research might be more hype[sup]14[/sup] and public relations than science, but the Department of Homeland Security’s National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) has chosen to rely on it. NBIC gave Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance a $2.2-million[sup]15[/sup] contract (2016-2019) to create a “Ground Truth Network”[sup]16[/sup] of “subject matter experts” who could provide “contextual information pertaining to biological events.”
The context[sup]17[/sup] Daszak invariably provides is a compelling one. Destruction of forests and other encroachments on wildlife habitats, especially the hunting of wild animals and the sale of live animals in wet markets, is forcing humans and animals into uncomfortable proximity. This is bad for vulnerable and endangered species, as well as for humans who are at increasing risk for contracting novel zoonotic diseases.
Who isn’t shocked and appalled to learn that people eat bats, or that marvelously strange and adorable animals you’ve never heard of ― pangolins, civet cats ― have had their habitats destroyed and are now being sold for meat at live animal markets? Daszak’s framing of the issue ― what has come to be known as the One Health approach ― has been heartily embraced by the U.S. military.
But what if the stories being spun by Daszak and his fellow government-supported subject matter experts aren’t supported by the evidence? Let’s look at EcoHealth Alliance’s story about Ebola and bushmeat.

False Narrative, Tragic Outcomes
From 2011 to 2014, Ecohealth Alliance had a $164,480 purchase order contract from the Centers for Disease Control in Pittsburgh for “Bushmeat.” No more information than that is available on that contract (HHSD2002011M41641P[sup]18[/sup]), but the money likely funded a paper Daszak and his colleagues published in 2012.



The 2012 paper,[sup]19[/sup] “Zoonotic Viruses Associated with Illegally Imported Wildlife Products,” was used in August 2014, at the height of the West African Ebola pandemic, as the basis for a Newsweek article titled, “Smuggled Bushmeat Is Ebola’s Back Door to America.”[sup]20[/sup]
The article, which quoted an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson, spread a false (not to mention racist and xenophobic) narrative, one that subsequently would be thoroughly debunked,[sup]21[/sup] that bushmeat smuggled to the U.S. from Africa could transmit Ebola to Americans.
In January 2015, a meeting of the UK Bushmeat Working Group convened. The group countered Daszak’s misinformation with the facts, in an article titled, “Ebola and Bushmeat: Myth and Reality.”[sup]22[/sup] The article stated:
[quote]“As the Ebola virus can remain viable in untreated carcasses for up to 3-4 days, there is a risk of transporting it to bushmeat markets (although there is no evidence of this to date).
However, the risk of transmitting Ebola in bushmeat overseas to Europe or the USA is extremely low, given the total travel time and the fact that these carcasses are usually smoked (which probably inactivates the virus). The risk of spread to new areas lies with the movement of infected people, not infected meat.”



Tragically, the misinformation about bushmeat as a primary cause of Ebola transmission had already been communicated to West Africans in the midst of the crisis, through international health organizations, including Daszak’s funder,[sup]23[/sup] the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Daszak’s misinformation campaign overshadowed the truth — that the only way Ebola was actually being transmitted during the pandemic was via contact with the bodily fluids of people sick with Ebola, or with their corpses.
Perpetuating Mythical Theories
The SARS pandemic is another instance where Daszak’s theories didn’t pan out. It is commonly accepted that the SARS pandemic began in 2002,[sup]24[/sup] when humans caught a bat virus from civet cats at a wet market in Guangdong, China. But Daszak and his collaborators admit they have no evidence to explain how the virus leapt from bats to civets to humans.
SARS-CoV was found in civets at the Guangdong wet market, but civets aren’t the natural reservoir of this virus. Bats are. Only the civets at the market — and no farm-raised or wild civets — carried the virus. None of the animal traders handling the civets at the market had SARS.
When Daszak and his collaborators at the WIV[sup]25[/sup] searched the cave in Yunnan for strains of coronavirus similar to human versions, no single bat actually had SARS. Genetic pieces of the various strains would have to be recombined to make up the human version. Adding to the confusion, Yunnan is about 1,000 kilometers from Guangdong.



So, how did viruses from bats in Yunnan combine to become deadly to humans, and then travel to civets and people in Guangdong, without causing any illnesses along the way during this 1,000 kilometer trip? No one knows. Just like no one knows how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, leapt from bats to pangolins to humans.
(The most recent study, “Broad host range of SARS-CoV-2 predicted by comparative and structural analysis of ACE2 in vertebrates”[sup]26[/sup] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,[sup]27[/sup]showed that the SARS-CoV-2, which infects human cells through binding of the viral Spike protein to ACE2, has a “very high” binding affinity to ACE2 in “Old World” monkeys apes, and humans.
But in bats, the binding affinity is “low” and in pangolins it is “very low.” The authors also noted that “neither experimental infection nor in vitro infection with SARS-CoV-2 has been reported for pangolins.”)
Daszak continues to tell his bat-origin story,[sup]28[/sup] but the science doesn’t back it up. That ― along with the fact that dozens of labs conduct “gain-of-function”[sup]29[/sup] research on bat coronaviruses and there are troubling safety issues[sup]30[/sup] at these labs ― is why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is investigating the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab.
Inquiring Minds at the NIH Want to Know
On July 8, the NIH sent a letter[sup]31[/sup] to Daszak asking EcoHealth Alliance to arrange for an inspection of the WIV by an outside team that would examine the facility’s lab and records “with specific attention to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019.”



The WIV and the Wuhan University School of Public Health are listed as subcontractors for EcoHealth Alliance under a $3.7-million NIH grant[sup]32[/sup] titled, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
The two institutions also worked as collaborators under another $2.6-million grant,[sup]33[/sup] “Risk of Viral Emergence from Bats,” and under EcoHealth Alliance’s largest single source of funding, a $44.2 million sub-grant[sup]34[/sup] from the University of California at Davis for the PREDICT project (2015-2020).
It’s the $44.2-million PREDICT grant that EcoHealth Alliance used to fund[sup]35[/sup] the gain-of-function experiment by WIV scientist Zhengli Shi and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Ralph Baric.[sup]36[/sup]
Shi and Baric used genetic engineering and synthetic biology to create a “new bat SARS-like virus … that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.” Daszak described the work being done by Shi and Baric in a 2019 interview:[sup]37[/sup]
[quote]“You can manipulate them [coronaviruses] in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, zoonotic risk. So, you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert it into a backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab.”



The work, “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,”[sup]38[/sup] published in Nature in 2015 during the NIH’s moratorium[sup]39[/sup] on gain-of-function research, was grandfathered in because it was initiated before the moratorium (officially called the U.S. Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses), and because the request by Shi and Baric to continue their research during the moratorium was approved by the NIH.
As a condition of publication, Nature, like most scientific journals, requires[sup]40[/sup] authors to submit new DNA and RNA sequences to GenBank, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information Database. Yet the new SARS-like virus Shi and Baric created wasn’t deposited[sup]41[/sup] in GenBank until May 2020.
Why Stop With Wuhan?
NIH is right to require that the WIV’s lab and records be opened to outside inspectors. But why is the government focusing on just one of EcoHealth Alliance’s projects, when the organization has received $100.9 million[sup]42[/sup] in grants, primarily from the Department of Defense, to sample, store and study bat coronaviruses at labs around the world?
Coronaviruses, both those that have been collected from animals and those that have been created through genetic engineering and synthetic biology, at all of these labs should be compared with SARS-CoV-2.
Daszak’s collaborators working under contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aren’t allowed to conduct gain-of-function research unless specifically approved to do so by the Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) committee. This committee was set up as a condition for lifting[sup]43[/sup] the 2014-2017 moratorium on gain-of-function research.



The P3CO committee operates in secret. Not even a membership list has been released. The only information provided to the public is that Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec[sup]44[/sup] appointed HHS Senior Science Advisor Christian Hassell[sup]45[/sup] as its chair.
It’s time to open the records of the PC3O committee’s deliberations and decisions to examine all gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. And every lab manipulating these viruses should have their coronaviruses compared to SARS-CoV-2.
The Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for its Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (now called the Biological Threat Reduction Program) isn’t supposed to fund gain-of-function (what they call “dual-use”[sup]46[/sup]) research at all.
It’s time to determine whether this prohibition on “dual-use” funding has been adhered to, especially in light of the investments the Pentagon is making across the globe in the construction of new laboratories for the “consolidation and securing of pathogens.” DTRA’s mission was to dismantle the biological weapons programs of hostile or destabilized countries.
Instead it is being used to develop new biological weapons programs in dozens of countries around the world.



Even if these programs are purely defensive, they proliferate, around the globe, pathogens with pandemic potential, even though it’s been difficult to keep these dangerous germs under control here in the U.S. (See “The Global Proliferation of High-Containment Biological Laboratories: Understanding the Phenomenon and Its Implications,”[sup]47[/sup] and the Government Accountability Office’s reports, “Biological Select Agents and Toxins: Actions Needed to Improve Management of DOD’s Biosafety and Biosecurity Program,”[sup]48[/sup] and “High-containment Laboratories: Comprehensive and Up-to-Date Policies and Stronger Oversight Mechanisms Needed to Improve Safety”[sup]49[/sup]).
EcoHealth’s Tentacles Reach Far and Wide
EcoHealth Alliance is very much involved in the Pentagon’s proliferation of high-containment biological laboratories. It is conducting DTRA-funded work in the following countries, which are all participants in the Pentagon’s Biological Threat Reduction Program.[sup]50[/sup]
• Tanzania — In Tanzania, a country that is considered only “partly free,”[sup]51[/sup] which has a history of foreign medical experimentation[sup]52[/sup] and which didn’t ratify the Biological Weapons Convention[sup]53[/sup]until 2019, EcoHealth Alliance has a $5-million Pentagon contract,[sup]54[/sup] “Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever: Reducing an Emerging Health Threat in Tanzania.”
Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF)[sup]55[/sup] is a tick-borne disease, originally only infecting animals, that was discovered by Ottis and Calista Causey while working for the Rockefeller Foundation in Nigeria. There was only ever one case[sup]56[/sup] of CCHF in Tanzania, and that was in 1986.
Gain-of-function research[sup]57[/sup] on CCHF is being conducted at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) to determine the “mechanisms of CCHF transmission including development of CCHF tick and animal infection methods and CCHF tick-animal transmission models.” (The National Bio and Agro Defense Facility will take over the mission of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and become the lead facility for Foreign Animal Disease research.)



The National Bio and Agro Defense Facility Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4) Zoonotic and Emerging Infectious Disease team’s CCHF Virus Surveillance Project[sup]58[/sup] is investigating “the interface between tick vectors, livestock and pastoralist and resource-poor farming communities in Tanzania” as well as the disease’s “molecular pathogenesis.”
Tanzania is the origin of chikungunya,[sup]59[/sup] a mosquito-borne virus that the U.S. has long cultivated[sup]60[/sup] as a potential biological weapon. according to a patent[sup]61[/sup] held by the University of Texas for a “chimeric” chikungunya virus created through genetic engineering and synthetic biology:
[quote]“The 39 documented laboratory infections reported by HHS in 1981 strongly suggest that Chikungunya virus is infectious via aerosol route. Chikungunya virus was being weaponized by the U.S. Army army when the offensive program was terminated.”