U.S. expert Peter Daszak (far right) arrives at the Wuhan Virus Laboratory to investigate.
Just as the world questions Wuhan Virus Laboratory as the source of the COVID19 virus, the U.S. National Institutes of health (NIH) confirmed to The Daily Caller News Fund that the Wuhan Virus Laboratory is eligible for U.S. taxpayer funding through 2024.
NIH data show that the Wuhan Institute for Virus Research (WIV) is authorized to receive U.S. taxpayer funding for animal research projects through January 2024.
WIV received $600,000 in taxpayer funding for research on bat-type coronaviruses through the nonprofit organization EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2019.
Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, participated as the only American in this year’s WHO expert panel trip to Wuhan to trace the origin of the virus.
Daszak said the White House should unconditionally accept the WHO’s conclusion that the virus could not have been unintentionally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research.
One of two speculations about the origin of the virus is an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab. Researchers at the lab were working on bat-like coronaviruses before the outbreak, and the project was also supported by $600,000 in U.S. taxpayer money.
U.S. intelligence agencies disclosed that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research were infected and showing symptoms similar to COVID19 before the first known case in December 2019.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the EcoHealth Alliance’s work to study bat-type coronaviruses in the Chinese communist country was funded by $3.7 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 2014.
NIH terminated the grant in April amid allegations of the EcoHealth Alliance’s ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, saying in a letter that the nonprofit’s work in the Chinese communist country was inconsistent with “program goals and institutional priorities.
NIH told the EcoHealth Alliance in July that the grant could be reinstated if certain conditions were met. One of the conditions was to arrange for an independent team to investigate the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research to determine whether it had the SARS-COV-2 virus before the first confirmed case of infection in December 2019.
Daszczak said the condition was “ridiculous” and that “I’m not trained as a private investigator. It’s not my job to do that.”
A spokeswoman for the NIH told The Daily Caller News Fund that the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research’s foreign assurance was approved on Jan. 9, 2019, which allows it to continue receiving U.S. taxpayer funds for animal research. The assurance expires on Jan. 31, 2024.
The spokesperson did not confirm whether the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research is receiving direct or indirect taxpayer funds for research activities involving animals. According to USASpending.Gov, the last subgrant from the EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research was in May 2019.
The EcoHealth Alliance received an additional $7.5 million in new money from NIH to help establish a research center for emerging infectious diseases. Daszczak told NPR that the new grant will not be used for any research in China.
Anthony Bellotti, president of the nonpartisan watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, told The Daily Caller News Fund that the funding for the EcoHealth Alliance should be stopped immediately because it has funded “reckless (virus) function-enhancing animal experiments that could lead to a pandemic of new coronas. should be stopped immediately and the White House and Congress urged to conduct an independent investigation into its dangerous experiments at the Wuhan Virus Institute.
Suspicious behavior weeks before the outbreak
The Daily Caller News Fund reported on Jan. 21 that in an interview weeks before the Wuhan outbreak, Dazszak described how easy it was to manipulate the bat-based coronavirus.
“You can manipulate them easily in the lab,” he said. “The spike protein drives the coronavirus. There is a risk of zoonotic disease. So we can get the sequence and also build the protein, and we worked with Ralph Baric (at the University of North Carolina) and inserted the backbone of another virus and did some manipulation in the lab.”
Daszczak also said in the podcast that he and his team found “more than 100 new SARS-associated coronaviruses” after seven years of surveillance of bats in southern China.
“We even found people in Yunnan who had antibodies to SARS-associated coronavirus, so people would be exposed to it,” Dazszak said. “We’ve just started another five years of work to look at populations in southern China to see how often spillover occurs.”
Shi Zhengli, deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, who is known to her colleagues as “the bat lady,” said in early 2017 that she and colleagues had identified 11 new SARS-associated virus strains from horseshoe bats in Yunnan province. Wuhan is more than 1,000 miles away.
In March 2020, Zhengli Shi told Scientific American that she was losing sleep over concerns that COVID-19, which first broke out in December 2019, might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan.
In 2014, Daszczak transferred funds from former President Barack Obama’s Predict program and the NIH to Shi’s bat surveillance team through his nonprofit organization, the EcoHealth Alliance, according to New York magazine.
A study published by Shih in February 2020 reported that COVID-19 was 96.2 percent identical to a strain of the virus detected in a Yunnan horseshoe bat.
The State Council announced in late January of this year that evidence had been obtained that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research suffered from flu-like symptoms in the fall of 2019 before the first known case of COVID-19, an indication that experts had previously found allegedly suggests the virus inadvertently leaked out of the Wuhan lab.
Prior to the serious study of COVID-19’s origins, Daszczak orchestrated a statement published in The Lancet in February denouncing “conspiracy theories” that the virus was not of natural origin. His spokesman later told the Wall Street Journal that the claim was made to protect Chinese scientists. “The Lancet letter was written at a Time when Chinese scientists were receiving death threats, and it was intended to show support for them as they were caught between the important work of trying to stop the outbreak and the oppression of online harassment,” the spokesman said.
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