EcoHealth Alliance – the research group using funds from Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health agency to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology – counted several high-ranking American government officials as research partners during its controversial collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party-run lab.
The unearthed affiliation follows the National Institutes of Health (NIH) admitting the New York-based nonprofit carried out gain of function research with the Chinese military-linked Wuhan lab and failed to report its findings to the federal agency. Gain of function research, which counts support from EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, increases the virulence, lethality, and transmissibility of viruses including bat coronaviruses. Daszak has previously described the viruses he and his Chinese colleagues were manipulating as “killers” in video unearthed by The National Pulse.
In addition to receiving sizable grants from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and hosting Fauci repeatedly as a speaker at its events, EcoHealth Alliance also appears to retain close relationships to additional federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) through its research partnerships.
Three officials from the CDC are listed as active “partners” of EcoHealth Alliance along with one NIH official on the group’s website.
Since September 2012, two years before Fauci’s NIH agency funded EcoHealth Alliance’s bat coronavirus research with the Wuhan lab, Dr. Rima Khabbaz, the Director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases has been listed as on the group’s official partners.
Since April 2015, Dr. Heinz Feldmann, a Senior Investigator at the NIH, has also been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance. Feldman’s NIH biography describes him as a “laboratory expert on high containment viruses (BSL-4)” – the same biosafety level of the Wuhan Institue of Virology facility working on bat coronaviruses. Capt. Jason Thomas, the Biosurveillance Coordinator at the CDC, along with Dr. Stuart Nichol, Chief of the Molecular Biology Section of the Special Pathogens Branch at the CDC, have also been listed as EcoHealth Alliance partners since April 2015.
All aforementioned federal officials are still listed as EcoHealth Alliance partners, classified as “Science and Policy Advisors,” at the time of publication. Among the group’s other advisors is the Deputy Director for Surveillance and Epidemiology at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and World Health Organization (WHO) officials.
