Money continued to flow from Fauci’s NIAID to EcoHealth Alliance even as other NIH officials sought information from Wuhan as a condition of federal funding. Two years would elapse before Daszak emailed his colleagues in Wuhan for information sought by the U.S. government. (Photo credit:
The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s chief American collaborator leveraged connections in Anthony Fauci’s inner circle to survive federal scrutiny and keep millions in public funding flowing without turning over key data, new records show.
Hundreds of documents — emails obtained under Freedom of Information Act lawsuits or Congressional subpoena, as well as Congressional interview transcripts — show Fauci’s institute protected EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated on novel coronavirus discovery and engineering projects with the Wuhan lab.
At a congressional hearing this summer, Fauci cast EcoHealth and its president Peter Daszak — who are currently under proposed debarment by the federal government — as minor and rogue grantees.
But EcoHealth was among the first grantees that Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases contacted as news of a novel coronavirus first swirled, and Daszak requested supplemental funds to respond to the crisis. In early February 2020, when NIAID began conducting weekly calls with a few experts about the novel coronavirus, Daszak was among the invitees. And at the height of pandemic confusion and controversy in the summer of 2020, EcoHealth maintained the goodwill of NIAID, which awarded EcoHealth two new grants totaling $19.8 million, weakening the leverage of other officials to obtain information from one of the US government’s only sources of insight into the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Fauci “asked how Peter is doing, as he often does, and he seemed to commiserate with him to a degree,” Fauci’s senior scientific advisor David Morens wrote in apparent reference to Daszak on Nov. 18, 2021.
At the time, officials at the National Institutes of Health’s central headquarters or “Building One” — at the demand of the Trump White House — had suspended EcoHealth’s existing NIAID grant and sought lab notebooks and unpublished genomic data as a condition of getting its funding back. This information could have shed light on the coronavirus research in Wuhan before the pandemic.
But aided by allies within NIAID, millions continued to flow to EcoHealth, and Daszak would not ask his longtime collaborators in Wuhan for information sought by the US government until 20 months later, in January 2022 — two years after the pandemic began.
Some of the NIAID officials who helped Daszak were key to approving his coronavirus research in Wuhan in the first place, including gain-of-function research, research that can enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a pathogen. Some of these NIAID officials had spent years championing gain-of-function research as worth the risks, Congressional transcripts also show. Namely, Morens and another NIAID employee named “Jeff T.” were the liaisons between the scientific community and Fauci during the years-long debates about gain-of-function research leading up to the pandemic, one email shows. After the pandemic arose, Morens and another NIAID scientist named Jeffery Taubenberger wrote an editorial defending EcoHealth and referred to people concerned about gain-of-function research as “luddites” and “the complaining crowd.”
Thousands of pages of grant proposals and other documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know show that EcoHealth planned to use the new NIAID funding to continue research similar to the work that had brought the group under scrutiny, using the very same viral samples.
Most of the NIAID employees who helped Daszak maintain funding amid the pandemic still retain positions of influence at NIAID.
PUThe revelations come as the US Senate considers legislation championed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that would move regulation of the riskiest gain-of-function research out of the funding agency — which is typically NIAID — and empower an independent panel of scientists to determine when engineering new pathogens is worth the risk.
More than four years after the pandemic began, the Department of Health and Human Services initiated debarment proceedings against EcoHealth and Daszak, citing problems uncovered by government officials outside of Fauci’s institute and the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Funding to the group and its president has been suspended.
Daszak said he would contest the prospective debarment. He has continued to lean on influential allies.
None of the NIAID employees named in this story replied to questions.
‘A Friend in These Efforts…But Not Too out Front’
Daszak was among the first scientists contacted by people within NIAID when news first broke of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan.
Daszak spoke to his program officer Erik Stemmy, who broadly oversaw NIAID’s coronavirus research portfolio, on January 6, 2020.
“Definitely focusing attention on this, Erik,” Daszak wrote. “I spent New Year’s Eve talking with our China contacts and with ProMed staff in between glasses. I’ve got more information but it’s all off the record. Could I give you a call to fill you in?”
Yet he had stopped receiving updates on the emerging pathogen from his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology 12 days prior. He had last heard from Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan lab on December 25, 2019, six days before the world became aware of a new pathogen in Wuhan on December 31, 2019.
By the spring, speculation that the lab had been the pandemic’s source reached a fever pitch.
On April 17, 2020, Trump called for EcoHealth’s grant to be ended “very quickly.”
Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, got in contact with the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a Congressional report.
NIH Director of Extramural Research Michael Lauer in the weeks following sent letters to EcoHealth in an attempt to end and investigate the grant, culminating in a July 8, 2020, letter that suspended all activities under the grant.
The letters sought information about the coronavirus work underway at the subcontracted lab. Lauer asked that Daszak arrange for an outside inspection. The letter asked that “specific attention” be paid “to addressing the question of whether WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019.”
Lauer had previously spearheaded NIH’s response to the intellectual property and fraud concerns posed by China’s Thousand Talents Program, which Daszak noted with apparent annoyance to colleagues.
Daszak contacted NIAID for help.
David Morens and Jeffery Taubenberger
Daszak leaned on the advice of his close friend and a longtime senior advisor to Fauci, Morens.
“The fact that the determination letter came from ‘Building 1,’ that is, the NIH director’s office, and not NIAID, is telling,” Morens wrote on April 26, 2020. “There are things I can’t say except Tony is aware and I have learned that there are ongoing efforts within NIH to steer this with minimal damage.”
Morens said in another email that NIAID was a “friend” of EcoHealth.
“I have spent alot of time over the last few months…to try to undo the harm that was done to Peter’s grant, PREDICT, and related things,” Morens wrote on August 18, 2020. “Lots is happening behind the scenes…Given that I work for NIAID, and that Tony Fauci is my boss, I have to be careful and generally talk to reporters off the record, but I think I can say that NIAID, at least, is a friend in these efforts, just not able at this time to be too out front.”
Daszak was advised not to respond to Building One until the funding for a new multimillion-dollar project had landed in EcoHealth’s coffers.
“This is an affront to science,” Gerald Keusch, director of the Collaborative Research Core at Boston University’s maximum security lab, said on April 24, 2020. Keusch is the former director of NIH’s Fogarty International Center. “It must be challenged. The question is not only how but also when – certainly not before the EIDRC funding comes through. And then in a smart manner.”
He promised to lean on influential contacts, including former NIH Director Harold Varmus, Foundation for the National Institutes of Health President Maria Freire, and Research!America President Mary Woolley to vouch for him.
Keusch’s lab was set to be a collaborator on EcoHealth’s EIDRC project, grant documents show.
The acronym EIDRC, or alternatively CREID, stands for Emerging Infectious Diseases Research Center. EcoHealth was being considered as one of just 11 of these multimillion-dollar projects across the country.
Daszak had good reason to tread carefully.
A formally binding term of award for his new EIDRC project had not yet been issued by the time Building One came knocking. According to the NIH website, an “NoA” or notice of award is “the official grant award document notifying the recipient and others that an award has been made.” Daszak conceded the project could “just quietly disappear” before any funding was guaranteed.
“I am also very concerned that Trump could target our organization or me personally, leading to our EIDRC being nixed and we don’t even have an NoA on that, so it could just quietly disappear,” Daszak said.
Morens noted that people within NIAID “will be your advocates.”
Morens is “going to talk with Greg Folkers (Chief of Staff for Tony Fauci) to find out if Tony knows, and why it happened. He’s then going to let Tony know…We won’t respond to the termination notice (Michael Lauer) until we’ve found out more,” Daszak said on April 25, 2020.
An editorial coauthored by an NIAID virologist gave credence to Daszak’s cause.
Jeffery Taubenberger, chief of the viral pathogenesis and evolution section at NIAID and a pioneer in the controversial reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, was carbon-copied on a May 2020 email strategizing about how to recruit leadership at the prestigious American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene to protect EcoHealth.
To that end, Morens and Taubenberger co-published a July 2020 op-ed in the society’s scientific journal, the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Taubenberger lent his credibility to the argument that the “theories about a hypothetical man-made origin of SARS-CoV-2 have been thoroughly discredited by multiple coronavirus experts.”