Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (center), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, asked the nonprofit medical research organization EcoHealthAlliance 34 questions about its relationship with the Wuhan Institute for Viral Research.
Three Republican members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee challenged the nonprofit EcoHealthAlliance (EHA) to answer questions about its relationship with the Wuhan Institute for Viral Research, among other things. The Reps noted that the answers to these questions could play a key role in determining the origin of the CCP virus (New Coronavirus) outbreak.
Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, submitted a 10-page joint letter with Reps. Brett Guthrie (R-Okla.) and Morgan Griffith (R-Okla.) on April 16. The letter asks 34 detailed questions of Dr. Peter Daszak, president of the EHA, a New York-based nonprofit medical research organization.
In the letter, the three congressmen said, “We are writing to request information and documentation from the Ecological Health Alliance (EHA) related to the origin of the virus that caused the COVID-19 (New Crown) outbreak, SARS-CoV-2, including a potential link between the origin of the outbreak and the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research (WIV).”
Communist officials previously claimed that the outbreak was transmitted to humans through bats sold at an open-air market not far from the Wuhan Institute for Virus Research. However, multiple government and public health experts in the United States and other countries believe the virus may have been leaked from the Wuhan laboratory. The Wuhan Virus Institute has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party military and benefits from U.S. government funding.
In the letter, the congressman said, “The EHA has studied bat coronaviruses in China extensively in the past. Some of these (bat coronaviruses) are believed to be the ancestors of SARS CoV-2. In addition, EHA has a collaborative relationship with WIV in this area of research, and WIV lists EHA as one of its eight international partners, and the only one in the United States.”
The letter also denounces the organization’s continued and knowing funding from the government to the Wuhan Institute.
“In addition, for several years, EHA has provided a portion of federal funds from the (U.S.) National Institutes of Health (NIH) to WIV as a federal subgrant recipient for bat coronavirus research for high-quality testing, sequencing, field sample analysis, sample storage and testing, and collaboration on scientific publications and reports. The EHA’s Chinese bat research program is reportedly funded entirely through an NIH award.”
Since 2008, Daszak’s nonprofit has received nearly $13 million in 37 federal government contracts and more than $206 million in 82 grants, according to data compiled by USASpending.gov, a website that documents U.S. government funding. These funded agencies include the (U.S.) Department of Defense (DOD), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of the Interior (DoI) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA).
In their letter, the three congressmen said Daszak’s nonprofit organization has collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research on research since at least 2003. Much of that research has focused on coronaviruses and has been documented in a highly confidential database. The letter says it “contains information on an estimated 500 coronaviruses identified by the EHA, as well as at least 100 unpublished sequences of bat beta coronaviruses relevant to the investigation of the origin of SARS-CoV-2.”
Daszak has been at the center of the ongoing controversy over the origin of the outbreak since it spread around the world. When deaths due to the CCP virus began to be reported in the United States and Europe in early 2020, questions were raised about the Wuhan laboratory’s safety record and whether it was somehow responsible for the outbreak.
Emails obtained by the U.S. organization U.S. Right to Know through public disclosure in November 2020 show that Daszak drafted the so-called “clarification” letter published in The Lancet on the source of the outbreak and was the author of the letter. ” letter published in The Lancet, and was the primary promoter of that letter. The letter claims that the outbreak originated at the Wuhan Virus Institute from a “conspiracy theory,” but cites only two studies as evidence for its conclusion, both of which were done by the EHA and Wuhan Virus Laboratory.
In response, Republican lawmakers noted that “there has been substantial and growing support from the international scientific community and public health experts, including WHO Director-General Desai Tan, for further investigation into the source of COVID, including the possibility of a laboratory leak.”
An aide to Republican lawmakers on the House committee revealed that the EcoHealth Coalition must respond to lawmakers’ questions by May 17, but the aide declined to say whether anyone had asked for an extension, English-language Epoch Times said.
Previously on the federal Senate side, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana have introduced bills to require the Biden administration to declassify information gathered by U.S. intelligence on the origins of the virus.
“For more than a year, anyone who raised questions about the Wuhan Virus Institute has been branded a conspiracy theorist. The world needs to know if the pandemic is the product of negligence at the Wuhan lab, but the Chinese Communist Party is doing its best to prevent a credible investigation,” Hawley said in a statement introducing the proposal in the Senate.
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