Fauci Didn’t Tell Senate He Funded China Virus Creation At Wuhan Virology Lab

Everyone has seen the heated exchange between Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a Senate hearing last Thursday. The disagreement centered around Dr. Fauci’s advice that people already vaccinated should continue to wear masks, due to the risks from COVID-19 variants. Sen. Paul had no patience with a feckless, bloviating, and press-hungry Fauci who has lied about mask-wearing and everything else. But what was missing was a key question – Dr. Fauci, how responsible are you for helping create this pandemic in the first place?

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) has recently confirmed two things that  I wrote about a year ago, that the Chinese Wuhan virus likely escaped from a Chinese lab where bats were brought from their distant habitat to the Wuhan Virology Lab for so-called “gain-of-function” research and that Dr. Anthony Fauci got around a U.S. ban on such research by helping to issue an NIH grant funding the same dangerous research in China.

As I wrote a year ago, part of the funding was funneled through a leftist environmental front group called the EcoHealth Alliance.  As reported by Breitbart News:

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told Breitbart News on Wednesday that the federal government provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for researching bat coronaviruses.

“Through our research and some great researchers out there working in various levels of the press, they have discovered that through the NIH, we did have grant dollars that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Ernst said in an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily….

“So yes, we have actually subsidized research at the Wuhan lab — how scary — and for a number of years we actually had U.S. diplomats that were warning us about the dangers associated with this lab, and yet we were subsidizing it,” Ernst stated….

The National Institute of Health (NIH) sent at least $600,000 to China’s state-run virology laboratory in Wuhan via EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), a left-wing nonprofit based in New York City that alleges a link between “climate change” and pandemics. EcoHealth Alliance failed to disclose the money it sent to the Chinese government’s Wuhan laboratory came from an NIH grant, the Daily Caller reported.

Back in April 2020, Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz asked an obvious question, one that has not come up at all in the mainstream media’s echo of the Harris-Biden administration’s blaming of President Donald H. Trump for the Chinese Wuhan coronavirus pandemic – why was the Wuhan Virology Lab a grantee of the National Institutes of Health, of which  Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is a member, and a recipient of $3.7 million to study coronavirus in bats? Gaetz went beyond mere curiosity,  writing a letter to then HHS Secretary Azar demanding the grant be terminated:

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., called on Health & Human Services Secretary Alex Azar Tuesday to cease funding a research grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, telling “Tucker Carlson Tonight” the action could be accomplished “with the stroke of a pen.”

“I’m against funding Chinese research in our country, but I’m sure against funding it in China,” Gaetz said. “The NIH [National Institutes of Health] gives a $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology [and] they then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers and following that, coronavirus erupts in Wuhan.”…

“What’s really troubling to me is either conspicuously or miraculously the Wuhan Institute of Virology is able to sequence the virus on January 2 but China doesn’t admit to the virus existing until January 9 and then the Wuhan Institute of Virology doesn’t release this important scientific information to the world until January 12,” Gaetz said.

“So at best, Americans are funding people who are lying to us and at worst, we’re funding people who we knew had problems handling pathogens, who then birthed a monster virus onto the world,” he added.

If you go to the Wuhan Institute of Virology website ad look under “Partnerships” you will see listed “the National Institutes of Health of the United States” along with the likes of the University of  Alabama, the University of North Texas, Harvard University, EcoHealth Alliance, among others.

Yet, after the virus outbreak, China would not let U.S. health authorities in to examine the labs and their safeguards, interview staff, or collect samples, both from the animals used in tests at the lab or tissue samples from early victims. Tissue samples were destroyed, bodies hidden and cremated, and false statements were made about the possibility of human-to-human transmission passed on to the world through China’s sock puppet, the World (or is it Wuhan) Health Organization.  To this day, serious access and scrutiny are barred.

How could the press not know about the NIH funding and be curious about it? Could the lack of notice and discussion concerning why we were funding the possible, if not likely, source of a global pandemic be because Dr. Fauci is somewhat of a media favorite for his ambivalence and cautiousness towards President Trump’s virus response initiatives? Fortunately, the Daily Mail has provided us some fascinating information:

The Chinese laboratory at the center of scrutiny over a potential coronavirus leak has been using U.S. government money to carry out research on bats from the caves which scientists believe are the original source of the deadly outbreak.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan which were funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government.

Sequencing of the COVID-19 genome has traced it back to bats found in Yunnan caves but it was first thought to have transferred to humans at an animal market in Wuhan.

The revelation that the Wuhan Institute was experimenting on bats from the area already known to be the source of COVID-19 – and doing so with American money – has sparked further fears that the lab, and not the market, is the original outbreak source. …

According to documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday, scientists there experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which continues to licence the Wuhan laboratory to receive American money for experiments….

As part of the NIH research at the institute, scientists grew a coronavirus in a lab and injected it into three-day-old piglets.

Say what? We helped fund this monster before it broke out of the lab? And we complain about China lying to us? We have been keeping the truth from ourselves.  What has Dr. Fauci kept quiet about these fascinating factoids? That NIH-funded research into piglets and coronavirus is worth a serious look:

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) (a member of the NIH) actually funded a study on Bat Coronavirus, which was a project that included scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab at the center of controversy over their bat research. That study confirmed in 2018 that humans have died from coronavirus.

Here’s an excerpt from the April 4, 2018, NIAID website entry entitled “New Coronavirus Emerges From Bats in China, Devastates Young Swine”: “A newly identified coronavirus that killed nearly 25,000 piglets in 2016-17 in China emerged from horseshoe bats near the origin of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), which emerged in 2002 in the same bat species. The new virus is named swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus (SADS-CoV). It does not appear to infect people, unlike SARS-CoV which infected more than 8,000 people and killed 774. No SARS-CoV cases have been identified since 2004. The study investigators identified SADS-CoV on four pig farms in China’s Guangdong Province. The work was a collaboration among scientists from EcoHealth Alliance, Duke-NUS Medical School, Wuhan Institute of Virology, and other organizations, and was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The research is published in the journal Nature. The researchers say the finding is an important reminder that identifying new viruses in animals and quickly determining their potential to infect people is a key way to reduce global health threats.”

Well, the road to pandemic hell was paved with seemingly good intentions, at least on our part. We were not only funding Chinese research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology but we knew the lab was a leaky, unsafe, ticking time bomb in 2018, according to leaked State Department cables:

Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats….

In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology, and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. …

The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.

Fox News analyst Steve Hilton has done the heavy lifting in unearthing the truth about the virus’s origins in the Wuhan Virology Lab and Dr. Fauci’s role in the research that created the Wuhan Chinese virus. In a series of broadcasts, Hilton detailed Fauci’s fascination with “gain-of-function” research – giving virus features and transmissibility it doesn’t have – as something worth the risk.

Fox News’ Steve Hilton shared an investigation that breaks down the origins of the coronavirus, and not only links it back to the U.S. commissioned research but also to Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The host of “The Next Revolution” told his viewers that the evidence uncovered “points to the most likely cause of the pandemic and it’s worse than anything that we have heard so far.”

Highlighting a study 10 years ago in the Netherlands involving ferrets, which have respiratory systems that operate similar to humans, Hilton said researchers “were trying to see if the virus that starts out without the ability to be transmitted through the air can eventually gain that ability.”

“This led to the creation of an entirely new type of scientific research made possible by advances in gene technology,” he said. “It was called gain-of-function virus research. The idea was to replicate in a lab what had been done with those ferrets — to take the virus and manipulate the genetic code to make it stronger and more powerful. The virus would gain new function, hence the name.”…

The great risk being if a highly contagious virus managed to escape the lab, it could cause calamity — much like the world is seeing today with COVID-19.

Hilton shared that the Obama administration put a moratorium on the controversial research.

“Despite the controversy surrounding this type of research,” he said, “it always had one steadfast champion, a leading figure in the world of infectious diseases, Anthony Fauci. His institute funded that first ferret study. At the time he co-wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post describing the research as “a risk worth taking… important information and insight can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory.”

“Shortly before the Obama Administration’s ban on gain-of-function research in 2014, Dr. Fauci commissioned … a project to assess the risk of new coronaviruses emerging from wild animals like bats — one of the aims was to see what viruses can infect animals and humans,” Hilton said.

The Fox News host said that while the Obama administration stopped the research, Fauci “continued on by subcontracting it” to the NY-based EcoHealth Alliance.

Sharing what he called a “crucial step that has never been reported,” Hilton noted that EcoHealth Alliance then subcontracted the gain-of-function piece to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The rest, as they say, is history. Dr. Fauci found a way around a U.S. ban on this deadly research by subcontracting it out all the way to his friends in Wuhan, China, and the lab where it escaped to infect the world. He arguably broke the law, the spirit if not the letter. Dr. Fauci is arguably culpable in the deaths of over half a million Americans.

The deadly research might have gone on anyway without NIH-Fauci funding, but he knew about it, could have exposed it, could have stopped it, or at the very least told us the truth about it.

As it turns out, Fauci’s NIH was funding dangerous research in Wuhan while the state Department was warning a global pandemic could leak from the lab, something Chinese scientists said was likely in a South China University study paper. A pandemic study commission formed by the British government concluded that the lab leak could no longer be dismissed out of hand as just another tin-foil hat conspiracy theory. Neither should we. Meanwhile, Dr. Fauci has some ‘splainin’ to do.