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 grandy 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 formally communicated to Daszak in a letter, which was leaked in 2021, and confirmed to be authentic by Gimlett.
“The proposal is considered to potentially involve [gain-of-function/dual use research of concern] research because they propose 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 letter 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 Acting Director of the NIH 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!”
