A former senior adviser to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci shared “confidential” communications with EcoHealth Alliance about how the agency was preparing to respond to accusations that it funded risky gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.
The House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released an email on Friday between NIAID’s Dr. David Morens and EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak, in which the senior scientific adviser noted Fauci had been briefed about the accusations of substandard biosafety levels at the Chinese research lab.
“Peter, the below CONFIDENTIAL email went to Tony,” Morens wrote on June 5, 2021, “so that Tony will be prepared to speak to the subject of BSL,” an abbreviation for the term biosafety levels.
“This is what I was typing up when we spoke last night,” Morens also told Daszak, another infectious disease expert and molecular biologist and other National Institutes of Health officials on the email thread.
“I am sure he will ‘get’ this and be able to respond to the crazies if necessary,” he said.
COVID subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) issued a subpoena to Morens on Tuesday, following allegations that he had used his private email account to share information with EcoHealth, in an apparent violation of federal record-keeping laws.
The Post obtained a copy of the confidential email sent to EcoHealth, which had received more than $1.4 million in federal grants to help conduct research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), some of which was later revealed to have enhanced the transmissibility of SARS-like viruses, in violation of the grant.
The email includes talking points cobbled together for Fauci to respond to allegations that the US government funded the dangerous experiments in Wuhan — one month after he had emphatically denied the fact in a Senate hearing.
In a tense back-and-forth with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the then-NIAID director said, “Sen. Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely, entirely and completely incorrect … the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute.”
Nearly three weeks after that, the fact sheet shared with Fauci stated that the experiments at WIV involved “chimeric viruses” that “replaced” spike proteins of one bat coronavirus with another but were not “unsafe lab practices.”
The SARS-CoV-2 research had been conducted at a Biosafety Level 2 (BSL-2) lab, though another portion of the fact sheet acknowledges that the US and “most countries” require a BSL-3 lab.
“Most importantly, the 3 bat SARSr-CoVs in culture in WIV are not related to SARS-CoV-2, therefore this has no bearing on the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the fact sheet reads.
This appears to directly contradict an email released by EcoHealth last week in response to The Post’s request for comment on Morens’ private emails, when Daszak in an April 26, 2020, email discusses having “15,000 samples in freezers in Wuhan.”
“Since only 5-10% of individual bats carry coronaviruses at any given time, the vast majority of samples collected were negative for any coronaviruses,” an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson told The Post. “It’s also very difficult to culture viruses in the lab, so even out of the few hundred viral genetic sequences found, the lab was only able to culture a handful of SARS-related coronaviruses.”
Another email quotes Rutgers University molecular biologist Dr. Richard Ebright, who in a May 2021 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article was quoted as saying, “It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard — biosafety level 2, the biosafety level of a standard US dentist’s office — that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2.”
Ebright has repeatedly told The Post that EcoHealth’s claim to have not conducted gain-of-function or enhanced potential pandemic pathogen experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is “knowingly, willfully, and brazenly untruthful,” pointing to the legally controlling definitions for such research in federal policy guidelines.
In October 2021, NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak admitted that the grants to EcoHealth used “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor” in mice — without using the term “gain-of-function.”
The mice “became sicker” when infected with the modified virus than those infected with the unmodified virus, according to Tabak, but EcoHealth “failed to report” having created novel coronaviruses that exceeded “a one log increase in growth.”
Tabak added that the resulting virus was “genetically very distant” from COVID-19 — but Ebright pointed out a separate proposal from EcoHealth rose to the level of “smoking gun” evidence that SARS-CoV-2 came from a Wuhan research lab.
In 2021, Ebright told the Intercept in the first report on the proposal, which was submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency three years before, that “the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction.”
“And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses,” he said of the project, with research set to take place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
DARPA never approved funding, but drafts and notes on the proposal revealed by US Right to Know last year show Daszak had sought to “downplay” the involvement of Chinese researchers.
EcoHealth Alliance has repeatedly denied that it conducted gain-of-function research.
“DARPA did not select this proposal for funding and the research was never done. To suggest that an unfunded proposal for research that was never done amounts to a ‘smoking gun’ strains credulity,” an EcoHealth spokesperson told The Post.
It’s unclear who authored the fact sheet, though another NIAID official on the chain with Morens suggested it “comes from EcHealth,” implying a high degree of coordination between Fauci and the Manhattan-based nonprofit in crushing an inquiry into COVID origins.
The omission of the “o” in “EcoHealth” may also have been a tactic to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests using the group’s name, a source told The Post.
EcoHealth has received more than $4.3 million in NIH grant funding for the same project — “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” — since 2014 and it remains ongoing.
The grant was paused from 2020 to 2023 and then reinstated, even as the US Department of Health and Human Services banned the Wuhan Institute of Virology last year from receiving government funding for research for the next 10 years.
The EcoHealth spokesperson noted “the NIH grant reinstatement reflects revised aims developed in consultation with NIAID and NIH staff to remove all on-the-ground work in China and all recombinant virus culture or infection experiments.”
“EcoHealth Alliance has also addressed the issues noted in the HHS OIG’s audit report and agreed to additional oversight mechanisms applied by NIH,” the spokesperson added. “The renewed work will involve collaboration only between EcoHealth Alliance and the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School, with revised specific aims. These details and more have been made public.”
Daszak is scheduled to appear before the House COVID Subcommittee for a public hearing on May 1.
The Energy Department and FBI determined in 2023 that an accidental lab leak was the most likely explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic, though HHS Secretary Xavier downplayed the evidence as “speculation” in an interview with Semafor on Thursday.
