Federal public health officials who concealed information about the origins of COVID-19 could face prosecution, the chairman of a House select subcommittee investigating COVID-19, and Dr. Anthony Fauci is scheduled to appear before the committee on Monday.
“I’m hopeful that the Department of Justice will step in and deal with this honestly and fairly,” Rep. Brando Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in an exclusive interview Thursday. “But at the same time, they can and should file criminal charges.”
The House Select Subcommittee on COVID-19 has already recommended a criminal investigation into Dr. Peter Daszak, the disgraced president of the Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance, which received millions of dollars in U.S. grants to fund experiments on modified bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The committee also uncovered shocking revelations about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the missteps of the U.S. pandemic response, and taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, the city where the virus originated more than four years ago.
“The research they were doing was dangerous,” he said of the Wuhan experiments. “We can see that through reverse engineering, it was possible to create something like COVID-19.”
“We started looking at this during the 2020 lockdown. [House] “When I was on the intelligence committee and learned about what it’s like to create chimeras and what it’s like to do gain-of-function research, I got a little scared about biological weapons. It’s a new threat for the future,” added Wenstrup, a physician and former U.S. Army colonel.
In a shocking trove of emails obtained by the Subcommittee, Dr. David Morens, a former senior adviser to Dr. Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), admitted to using a personal account to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for EcoHealth’s Wuhan grant, claimed to have deleted records related to it, and further said he helped his superiors do the same through “confidential back channels.”
“At one point, Dr. Morens said he never spoke to Tony Fauci about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the EcoHealth Alliance,” Wenstrup said, referring to Morens’ congressional testimony on May 22, in which he acknowledged the emails were sent but denied it as a “joke.”
“But he did it and we now have the evidence and he’s telling us how he did it,” he added, referring to the more than 30,000 records turned over by Mr. Morens.
When asked whether the transcript of Dr. Fauci’s two-day interview with the COVID subcommittee in January also included the false claim that he had “no involvement” in funding EcoHealth’s gain-of-function research, Wenstrup responded simply that “someone is not telling the truth.”
Fauci, 83, said at the time that he “does not recall any specific interactions” with Daszak before the pandemic and denied having “multiple discussions” with the EcoHealth president.
But Mollen’s emails reveal that medical advisers to the former Biden administration had expressed “concerns” about Daszak and the suspension of EcoHealth’s research grants.
“Peter, from what Tony has said to me many times recently, and from what Francis has spoken out loud over the past five days, they are trying to protect you, and in turn, their own reputation,” Morens wrote to Daszak on Oct. 25, 2021. This came just days after National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials revealed to Congress that EcoHealth had violated the terms of its grant to the WIV.
“I met with Tony in person to discuss science issues,” Morens also said in an email on Nov. 18, 2021. “He asked how Peter was doing, as he always does, and seemed to have some sympathy.”
Wenstrup said the subcommittee had “a lot of questions” for Fauci and had requested his personal email and cell phone records based on revelations about high-level discussions that allegedly concealed and destroyed records crucial to investigating the origins of COVID-19.
The NIH said it funneled more than $500,000 in taxpayer money to the WIV between 2014 and 2021 for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Emergence of Bat Coronaviruses.” Government Accountability Office The report was published last year.
The project involved “genetic experiments combining naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with the SARS and MERS viruses, creating hybrid (also called chimeric) coronavirus strains.”
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General Decided Studies in lab mice produced a modified virus that was 10,000 times more infectious, but EcoHealth did not report it.
a June 2023 Report An investigation by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence also found that the WIV conducted pathogen research “for national defense and biosecurity needs” between 2017 and 2019. [Chinese] army. “
NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak testified before a House COVID subcommittee in May that the experiments constituted gain-of-function research, the first agency official to say so publicly since the virus has killed more than 1.1 million Americans.
Last year, the Ministry of Health and Human Services proposed banning the WIV from receiving US funding for 10 years and disqualifying Daszak and his organization for three years for failing to report research results and comply with appropriate biosafety levels.
In previous congressional testimony, Fauci and former NIH director Dr. Francis Collins have repeatedly denied the study took place, and the agency in 2021 changed its long-standing definition of the term on its webpage.
In 2012, Fauci published a scientific paper describing a series of events strikingly similar to those alleged by US intelligence agencies and scientific experts. Former Federal Government Official Lawmakers have suggested this led to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Leaving aside the fear of bioterrorism, consider this hypothetical scenario: A critical gain-of-function experiment with a virus that could cause a severe pandemic is conducted in a well-regulated, world-class laboratory by experienced researchers, but the information gained from the experiment is used by different scientists who do not have the same training or equipment, and are not subject to the same regulations,” Fauci said.Research on highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza viruses: future directions. “
“What if, in the unlikely but possible event, the scientist were to become infected with the virus, which would lead to an outbreak and ultimately a pandemic?,” he asked. “Many have a natural question: if such a scenario was even possible, no matter how remote, should the initial experiment have been carried out and made public in the first place, and what process was involved in this decision?”
“Scientists working in this field might say, as I said, that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks,” he concluded.
While Tabak stresses that the viral sequences emerging from “Understanding the Risk of Emergence of Bat Coronaviruses” are “genetically very distant” from COVID-19, another proposal from EcoHealth is cited as “conclusive evidence” that the virus was created in Wuhan.
The grant application, known as Project DEFUSE, was not funded, but in earlier drafts and memos obtained by U.S. Right to Know, Daszak said he would “downplay” the involvement of researchers at the Wuhan lab in seeking federal funding.
In his testimony to the Wenstrup Commission, Daszak acknowledged that EcoHealth had not received any viral genome sequences from the WIV even before the pandemic.
Wenstrup told The Washington Post that he has “seen very little evidence” that the coronavirus originated naturally, adding that “there’s a lot we don’t know because of the Chinese.”
Wenstrup said that shortly after he became subcommittee chairman, he received a letter from the Chinese Embassy in Washington expressing “serious concerns” about his investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
The FBI, the Department of Energy, and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield have all cited an accidental laboratory leak as the most likely cause of the pandemic, with former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe calling it the “only” cause.
In a private interview with a House subcommittee, Fauci acknowledged that the lab leak claim was not a “conspiracy,” even though a scientific paper was published in February 2020 that disproved the theory and he later cited the paper in a White House press conference to dismiss the concerns.
“I don’t believe anyone in the White House or the public knew that he was arranging for that paper to be written,” Wenstrup noted, adding that the former NIAID director testified that he “never saw any scientific studies or papers that discussed how this was made in a lab.”
“We were getting some information through declassified intelligence,” he added. “They were having issues with leaks and the type of activities that the Chinese government was doing, and the work of the EcoHealth Alliance, and we were funding it.”
Wenstrup is not convinced the U.S. can definitively prove the origins of COVID-19 without cooperation with China, but he has called for tougher penalties for public health officials who break the rules.
“I was a soldier and served 25 years,” said the Ohio native, who served as a combat medic during the Iraq War and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.
He argued that Pentagon agencies and military branches are the only places in Washington where “unethical behavior is illegal.”
“I think we need to have higher standards for people who work in our institutions,” Wenstrup asserted. “They may have standards on paper, but what happens when they don’t adhere to them? [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court?”
“So now we have criminal liability,” he said, referring to the recent congressional reauthorization of government intelligence agencies. “I think that should probably be the case for all agencies.”
“In this case, Dr. Fauci appears to have approved the outflow of billions of dollars without much oversight.”
