Updated 12/3/24, 2:05 p.m.
A sprawling final report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic provokes questions over whether some in the scientific community – including EcoHealth Alliance, the American nonprofit that collaborated on novel coronavirus discovery and engineering research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and its president Peter Daszak – could face criminal charges stemming from the COVID-19 tragedy.
The report’s findings – the culmination of two years of work by congressional investigators, the review of more than one million documents and dozens of transcribed interviews and public hearings — include evidence that Daszak misled the committee on questions central to the COVID-19 origins mystery. Daszak exported gain-of-function coronavirus experiments to China; shirked his duty to probe his Wuhan colleagues for lab notebooks, viral samples and genomic data; and helped to falsely persuade millions that the idea of a Wuhan lab leak was a conspiracy theory, the committee’s investigation shows.
Daszak did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In May 2024, the committee’s investigation helped spur the Department of Health and Human Services to initiate debarment proceedings against EcoHealth and Daszak. The debarment process is not yet finished, but could result in EcoHealth and Daszak being ineligible for federal funding for a period of years. But the new revelations spur the possibility of criminal charges related to the COVID-19 pandemic as well, namely making false statements or perjury.
Among the report’s most striking revelations: the Department of Justice empaneled a criminal grand jury to investigate potential federal crimes related to the origins of COVID-19. The status of this grand jury investigation is not public. Though the DOJ dragnet ensnared EcoHealth, neither the nonprofit nor Daszak are the target of the DOJ investigation, EcoHealth’s attorney told the committee.
A February 2023 email indicates that EcoHealth stayed mum on numerous nonpublic investigations.
“The only thought is whether to skip for the time being reference to our other government inquiries,” the email reads. “Especially on the Executive Branch front, where the DOJ grand jury investigation seems so far to remain nonpublic, I think it would be better just to say we’re acting as promptly as possible under the circumstances without inviting inquiry into other demands for info.”
An attorney for EcoHealth emphasized the importance of keeping the federal investigations involving EcoHealth a secret from the public. Some communications between EcoHealth and its attorneys were made available to the committee — despite attorney-client privilege — because Daszak frequently looped in outside advisors.
In a transcribed interview with the committee on June 16, 2023, Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, reported that agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation were asking questions about COVID-19 at a May 2023 virology conference.
The committee’s final report lands just weeks before a new administration is set to assume power in Washington, DC. Several of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees for appointed positions have made the issue a priority in recent years: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Amid speculation that some in Trump’s orbit will push for legal accountability for former longtime National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci – an influential champion of gain-of-function research, and whose NIAID underwrote the U.S.-China collaboration on coronaviruses – the report asserts that the coronavirus experiments under scrutiny indeed qualify as “gain-of-function research,” contradicting Fauci’s sworn congressional testimony to the contrary.
Report reveals Daszak and Fauci misled the committee
Daszak agreed to testify truthfully in a November 2023 transcribed interview and under oath at a May 2024 congressional hearing, but made multiple misstatements, the report shows.
Claim:
Daszak: “Well, there was a little bit said about DARPA declining to fund this, including people who have said that they declined it because of biosecurity concerns … Absolutely not true.”
Fact check:
An EcoHealth research grant proposal dubbed “DEFUSE” pitched generating novel SARS-related viruses with a uniquely infectious feature called a furin cleavage site at a critical juncture on the spike protein called the S1/S2 boundary. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is the only SARS-related coronavirus with a furin cleavage site, which is situated at the S1/S2 boundary, generating questions about whether the intellectual property in the proposal laid the groundwork for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The sought-after funder for DEFUSE, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), rejected the proposal in 2018.
Daszak insisted for years that the project was rejected because of “just a little miff” around resource limitations and not because of the steep risks that the proposed research would generate novel pandemic pathogens.
“Well, there was a little bit said about DARPA declining to fund this, including people who have said that they declined it because of biosecurity concerns,” Daszak said. “Absolutely not true.”
Daszak claimed to have notes from a meeting with DARPA corroborating this, but never supplied them to the committee.
But DARPA Program Manager Jim Gimlett, who made the final call to deny funding for DEFUSE, directly contradicted Daszak’s claim. Gimlet told the committee the rejection stemmed from a lack of due care for rules governing pandemic potential pathogens.
The research team “didn’t address — or basically just denied that they had to address gain-of-function because it didn’t fall under any of the regulatory requirements,” he said.
The EcoHealth-led research team has denied that its coronavirus work qualified for more rigorous review under gain-of-function rules in part because it worked with bat coronaviruses related to SARS, rather than SARS or other viruses known to infect humans.
“Even if it’s a bat virus, it could have risks,” Gimlett said, refuting that idea.
These concerns were summarized in a memo leaked in 2021 and confirmed to be authentic by Gimlett.
“The team’s approach does potentially involve [gain-of-function/dual use research of concern] research (they aim to synthesize spike glycoproteins which bind to human cell receptors and insert them into SARSr-CoV backbones to assess whether they can cause SARS-like disease),” the memo reads.
Claim:
Daszak: “We were locked out of the system.”
Fact check:
Daszak submitted a progress report on the NIAID grant that underwrote his research collaboration on novel bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology – the report describing the period from June 2018 through May 2019 – nearly two years late, in August 2021, when an enormous incentive existed not to report experiments that could reflect poorly on EcoHealth or the WIV.
When pressed on the delay, Daszak claimed it was due to technical difficulties.
“We were locked out of the system,” Daszak said in a transcribed interview.
However, an internal NIH forensic audit, made public for the first time in the congressional report, shows that Daszak accessed the “eRA” system used to submit reports on 72 days in between the report’s due date and its submission nearly two years later.
Perhaps the most publicly debated testimony was that of Fauci, the former head of NIAID and a champion of gain-of-function research.
Claim:
Fauci: “I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you were referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.”
Fact check:
In a series of Senate hearings in 2021 under questioning by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Fauci repeatedly denied that the coronavirus experiments undertaken by American scientists in collaboration with the Wuhan lab qualified as “gain-of-function research.”
“This paper that you were referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function,” Fauci said.
At a June 2024 hearing before the House Select Subcommittee, Fauci doubled down on his original claim.
“Did the National Institutes of Health fund the potentially dangerous enhanced pandemic potential pathogen, gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?” Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., asked.
“I’m saying no because I’ve said no multiple times,” Fauci responded tersely.
By contrast, several experts confirmed to the committee that the coronavirus experiments under scrutiny met the definition of gain-of-function research.
Although the definition of gain-of-function research was removed from the NIAID website, it was described as recently as 2021 as “a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers a new or enhanced activity to that agent.”
Both NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak and coronavirologist Ralph Baric, the architect of many of the coronavirus experiments under dispute, confirmed the work qualified as “gain-of-function research.”
“Is it a gain-of-function phenotype? Absolutely. You can’t argue with that,” Baric said.
“Dr. Fauci’s testimony was, at a minimum, misleading,” the report reads. “Witness testimony and a plain reading of EcoHealth’s research conducted at the WIV using U.S. taxpayer dollars confirm it facilitated an experiment that conveyed new or enhanced activity to a pathogen—thus, satisfying the definition of gain-of-function research.”
Daszak avoided ‘lab leak’ talk with Zhengli Shi
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, EcoHealth had marketed its research as valuable for distinguishing between natural and lab borne pathogens and as pivotal for gaining a foothold into labs in China and its allied countries.
Yet after the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in the same city as his partnering lab, Daszak brushed off demands to obtain lab notebooks, viral samples and genetic sequences from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even though the experiments were underwritten by U.S. funding. Daszak expressed indignation at demands from the National Institutes of Health’s central headquarters, which suspended EcoHealth’s NIAID grant and asked Daszak to supply data that could exculpate the Wuhan lab from suspicions an accident caused the pandemic. Daszak was aided by Fauci’s former institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which surged new funding to EcoHealth amid the controversy, weakening Daszak’s incentive to turn over documents.
An email made available by the committee for the first time shows that Daszak in fact never asked Shi for critical data in compliance with the NIH’s investigation. Instead he simply forwarded a letter sent to EcoHealth from NIH.
Daszak has blamed his inaction on “extremely strained” communications with Wuhan colleagues due to President Donald Trump’s posture towards Beijing and the U.S. government’s decision to debar the lab.
But new emails show that he has maintained a friendly correspondence with Wuhan Institute of Virology Senior Scientist Zhengli Shi.
Paradoxically, while flouting requests for information about the research in Wuhan from NIH, Daszak allegedly stressed to his funders at NIAID that it was important for a suspended grant to be reinstated in order to obtain viral samples from Wuhan, according to the report. When push came to shove, Daszak told congressional investigators that the samples were likely to remain in the Wuhan lab’s freezers and denied ever promising the U.S. government access to them.
Far from pressing his Wuhan colleagues for information, Daszak groused with Shi about the congressional investigation before his testimony in May 2024.
Daszak and Shi expressed shared outrage that the U.S. government was investigating their research.
“Dear Peter, I fully support you!” Shi wrote on April 28, 2024. “I believe you will beat them down. Shame on those stupid politicians!”
Daszak’s reluctance to jeopardize his connection to the Wuhan lab is also evident in an April 2024 message in which he expresses concern that his international partners would learn he advised the FBI on the COVID origins question. He told his counsel to conceal his communications with the FBI, worried that the perception of him as an informant could hurt his reputation abroad.
“It’s massively damaging to our reputation to reveal the discussions I had with [FBI] about this and we need to avoid this at all costs,” he wrote. “We’ll be seen as spies, not scientists.”
Obstruction and secrecy
The report also details how a lack of transparency exacerbated the pandemic.
The report describes how the Chinese Communist Party suppressed evidence of human-to-human transmission and other critical data in the early pandemic days, and missteps by the World Health Organization as it apparently capitulated to the demands of Beijing authorities.
But perhaps most alarmingly, the report details the ways in which American institutions also concealed information from Americans.
EcoHealth and Daszak allegedly obstructed the committee’s investigation in several ways.
Daszak also apparently slowed the production of documents to the committee until the threat of subpoena loomed.
“[O]nce they write to us with issues on our production, we’ll rapidly produce more and try to head this off at the pass,” Daszak wrote on April 26, 2024.
Private emails show Daszak appealed to his counsel to slow the timeline of document production and reduce the scope of documents received by the committee.
Daszak wrote that the documents were “very reduced in scope” and that EcoHealth was not “sending every record” nor searching “all staff,” the report states.
In response to the committee’s subpoena, Daszak apparently personally doctored responsive emails and withheld others. In one email cited by the committee, Daszak signals his intention to withhold emails considered “embarrassing” to his colleagues, Boston University School of Medicine Professor Gerald “Jerry” Keusch and NIAID Senior Scientific Advisor David Morens.
“Jerry, David – I’ve not included some of your responses or earlier emails because there’s no need at this point. This will help dampen down stories,” Daszak wrote on April 11, 2024.
Daszak looked to “diplomatic immunity” and “WHO privacy rules” to avoid turning over communications with Erasmus Medical Center virologist Marion Koopmans, who served alongside Daszak on the politically compromised WHO-China mission on the pandemic’s origins in 2021.
EcoHealth’s funders at NIAID and its parent agencies – NIH and HHS – also apparently attempted to slow or obstruct the committee’s work.
HHS sought to limit the testimony of two NIH officials through memos that the report describes as “questionably illegal.”
“Instructing a federal government employee to not comply with Congress is unacceptable and unlawful,” the report reads.
The report details how American government agencies also played a major role in the biosecurity lapses that preceded the pandemic, which may have motived the subsequent suppression of information about a possible lab leak.
DARPA declined to fund the DEFUSE proposal due to concerns about the risks, but Gimlett conceded to the committee that he is not aware of any mechanism to vet Chinese labs working with U.S. scientists in the name of American biosecurity. A Pentagon inspector general report published earlier this year could not determine how much American funding has flowed to Chinese labs for pandemic potential research.
But biosecurity failures were likely most consequential at NIAID, which funds most gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens. After a novel coronavirus emerged, NIAID took measures to obscure its potential complicity.
Fauci and other officials within NIAID had begun secretly circulating concerns about a possible lab origin and their connection to the Wuhan lab as early as February 1, 2020. But it wasn’t until April 17, 2020 — when Trump received a press question about the lab and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows got in touch with HHS about ending EcoHealth’s grant — that NIH began requesting more information from Daszak about his novel coronavirus discovery and engineering work, the report emphasizes.
On April 13, 2020, Fauci received a summary from NIAID Associate Director for International Affairs Gray Handley about grantees in China. The summary, obtained by the committee, listed grants connecting the institute to a People’s Liberation Army scientist with expertise in coronaviruses, Zhou Yusen. Zhou died in the spring of 2020.
After the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, several officials within Fauci’s office at NIAID took steps to avoid having their communications released through the Freedom of Information Act.
At least three individuals within the director’s inner circle — David Morens, Fauci’s senior scientific advisor, Margaret Moore, Fauci’s former special assistant and FOIA liaison, and Greg Folkers, Fauci’s longtime chief of staff — all took steps to evade FOIA.
Folkers apparently sought to hide emails about EcoHealth, gain-of-function research, and Andersen, who was one of the virologists who helped Fauci persuade the public COVID-19 had a natural origin in early 2020. Folkers misspelled keywords so they wouldn’t be flagged in FOIA searches. He typed “Ec~Health,” “g#in-of-function research,” and “anders$n.”
Morens, a close friend of Daszak’s, used his influence and experience within NIAID to help him navigate through the controversy surrounding his NIAID grant.
Morens apparently sought to evade scrutiny of these actions by deleting emails and using private email addresses.
“[W]e are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” Morens said to Daszak on June 2022, Morens excused the comment in May 2024 congressional testimony as “black humor.”
On February 25, 2021, Morens said that he learned from Fauci’s former special assistant Marge Moore “who heads our FOIA office” and “also hates FOIAs,” how to ensure emails are not recoverable.
Rather than testify about this to the committee, Moore invoked the Fifth Amendment.
In July 2023, when Morens’s efforts to evade FOIA first became public, he wrote, “I will need to read up on whether what I did was a ‘crime’ or, as I have always understood, merely a policy.”
After years of evasion and misdirection by his inner circle and allied virologists, Fauci has conceded a lab origin of COVID-19 is possible. Yet he dismisses any suggestion of a connection between COVID-19 and the U.S.-China collaboration on novel coronavirus discovery and engineering as part of a smear campaign.
“The smear campaign soon boiled over into conspiracy theories. One of the most appalling examples of this was the allegation, without a shred of evidence, that a NIAID grant to EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) with a sub-grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China funded research that caused the COVID-19 pandemic,” Fauci wrote in his 2024 memoir On Call.
The congressional report cast Fauci’s certainly on this point as unsupported and motivated by his desire to safeguard his legacy.
“Although Dr. Fauci believed the lab-leak theory to be a conspiracy theory at the start of the pandemic, it now appears that his position is that he does have an open mind about the origin of the virus – so long as it does not implicate EcoHealth Alliance, and by extension himself and NIAID,” the report reads. “Understandably, as he signed off on the EcoHealth Alliance grant.”
