President Joe Biden participates in a Q&A townhall with Chief Medical Adviser to the President Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday, May 17, 2021, in the Blue Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Information released to The Intercept via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, has exposed the details of ongoing NIAID funding of bat research in Wuhan. The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reports (abridged):
New details to emerge surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grant approval for high-risk experiments overseas contradicts the agency director’s repeated denials under oath about whether the NIAID had funded “gain-of-function” research.
On Monday, the Intercept reported findings from 900 pages of material released from an active Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that details the work of the New York-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The trove of documents, according to the Intercept, uncovered new specifics into a pair of grant proposals that received U.S. tax dollars from Fauci’s NIAID.
While the existence of the first grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” had already been reported and used to challenge Dr. Fauci for NIAID funding for gain-of-function research, documents from The Intercept expanded the public scope of the research conducted in Wuhan beyond bats.
The annual grant of roughly $600,000 ran from 2014 to 2019. For the first three years of the grant, funding for “gain-of-function” research — wherein scientists extract viruses from the wild and engineer them to infect humans to study potential therapeutics such as vaccines — was banned.
Prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill, from Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn to Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, began to call for Dr. Fauci’s resignation weeks after the first exchange with Sen. Paul, when the NIAID director’s emails became public showing Fauci aggressively sought to suppress COVID-19 origin theories of a possible lab leak in Wuhan.
Fauci has maintained his popularity among Democrats and the White House thanks to a friendly press corps wielded to manufacture a false consensus among public health officials that embraces never-ending pandemic lockdowns.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist.
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