The news on Covid-19 origins is getting dirtier. Readers would recall that NewsBred had published a piece stating that the lab-leak theory is gaining ground and pinning all blame on China when the United States could have played its part in funding the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), headed by virologist Peter Deszak, which was involved in engineering mutants of organic virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. No less damning is the alleged role of Dr Anthony Fauci, chief scientific advisor to the president Joe Biden, who had advocated the “funding” after Barack Obama had put a restriction on it during his tenure.
Both Fauci and Daszak have been busy last year in discrediting the lab-leak theory and concentrating on wet-market origins of the pandemic which increasingly is in tatters now.
Now it has emerged that Pentagon gave $39 million to EHA for its research at Wuhan Institute.
The U.S. nonprofit, set up to research new diseases, has also partly funded deeply controversial ‘gain-of-function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells.
In 2020, Donald Trump, the then president of the United States, had cancelled the $3.7 million funding to the EHA after reports surfaced claiming that Covid-19 was either created in Wuhan lab, funded by the EHA, or leaked from there.
Federal grant data accessed by independent researchers show that the charity received more than $123 million from the government from 2017-2020 with the Department of Defense (DoD) being one of its biggest funders.
A majority of DoD funding came from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a combat support agency with the goal to reduce the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction. It has provided almost $39 to the organization since 2013.
A report by the Republicans’ House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has suggested that Covid-19 infection was manufactured in a lab in China. The 21-page unclassified report speaks in detail of alleged experiments being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology since 2016, warnings of which had been relayed by the US envoys in China.
The report also questioned the role of an American Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), headed by Dr Anthony Fauci which allegedly funded labs in Wuhan to carry out research on Coronaviruses.
The committee, which has been examining the growing threat to America posed by the CCP and the Chinese PLA, accused the Chinese authorities of undermining the investigation into the origins of the Covid-19.
The Republic report has claimed that Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers had been conducting experiments since 2016 which involved RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020.
Several media outlets in the US have released thousands of emails sent by Fauci when the Coronavirus infection was just on the rise.
In one such email, an executive at EcoHealth, which funded research at China’s Wuhan Institute into the Covid-19 origin thanked Dr Fauci for publicly stating that scientific evidence supports a “natural origin” for the Coronavirus and not a lab leak.
(This is a modified version of a report appearing in RepublicWorld ).
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