Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – which collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology or coronavirus-related research – hosted Dr. Anthony Fauci for several speeches.
EcoHealth’s Twitter account contains a picture of Daszak – whose Chinese Communist Party research and financial ties have been extensively documented by the National Pulse – smiling next to what they call the “incomparable” Dr. Fauci in 2016.
The 2016 tweet also contains the hashtag “#EHAEvent,” which coincides with three other tweets from the same day referencing an event where Dr. Fauci spoke about the Zika virus. At the time, Dr. Fauci was the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) – a title he still holds in addition to Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden.
“Thanks to everyone who joined us last night in D.C. for our Zika talk, and special thanks to Dr. Fauci for a terrific presentation. Dr. Fauci demonstrated perfectly why it’s so important to put more resources toward disease prevention efforts,” the group’s Facebook page captioned the same picture of Daszak and Dr. Fauci.
The March 30th event – ‘Zika virus: A Pandemic in Progress” – counted Daszak as the primary presenter and Dr. Fauci as a special guest, according to the invitation:
The EcoHealth Alliance website also reveals the organization hosted an event – “A special free screening!” – on November 15th, 2016 that featured Dr. Fauci as a speaker.
Another link dated to 2016 containing the following picture of Dr. Fauci has been scrubbed from the EcoHealth site, prompting users with a “403 – Forbidden” message”:
The unearthed relationship between Dr. Fauci, Daszak, and EcoHealth Alliance is sure to complicate the fact that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sent millions of taxpayer dollars to fund EcoHealth’s research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Despite criticisms prompting the NIH to withdraw federal funding from the group, the NIH reinstated a $7.5 million grant to the group in August 2020.
The type of research conducted by the group in tandem with the Wuhan Institute of Virology prompted concern among NIH officials for its role in COVID-related research, as outlined in a letter by NIH’s Deputy Director for Extramural Research Dr. Michael Lauer.
Dr. Lauer announced the suspension of NIH grants to the group, which saw its studies engineer the “highly specific doorway into the human body” as COVID-19, as a response:
“It is our understanding that one of the sub-recipients of the grant funds is the Wuhan Institute of Virology (‘WIV’). It is our understanding that WIV studies the interaction between corona viruses and bats. The scientific community believes that the coronavirus causing COVID-19 jumped from bats to humans likely in Wuhan where the COVID-19 pandemic began. There are now allegations that the current crisis was precipitated by the release from WIV of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19. Given these concerns, we are pursuing suspension of WIV from participation in Federal programs.”
