Pentagon funded NGO $39 mn for 'gain of function' SARS-CoV-2 research at Wuhan Lab: Report

Further complicating the mystery of the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a report on Sunday revealed that Pentagon gave $39 million to EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) - the charity that funded controversial coronavirus research at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

A report by the Republicans' House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence suggested that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the pandemic, was manufactured in a lab in China, against the claimed thesis of natural occurrence.

The report also questions the role of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an American institute headed by top medical expert Dr Anthony Fauci, which allegedly funded labs in Wuhan to carry out research on Coronaviruses.

The report comes as the charity’s chief, British-born scientist Dr Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories.

The US non-profit, 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.

Reports also said that in 2020 the then US President Donald Trump cancelled a $3.7 million funding to the EHA, after reports surfaced claiming that the SARS-CoV-2 was either created in Wuhan lab funded by the EHA or leaked from there. 

Data on US federal grants accessed by independent researchers show that the charity received more than $123 million from the government between 2017 and 2020 with the Department of Defence (DoD) being one of its biggest funders. A majority of DoD funding came from the Defence 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 million to the organisation since 2013.

The 21-page unclassified report accessed by Republic Media Network gives details of alleged experiments being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) since 2016, warnings of the growing threat to America posed by the CCP and the Chinese PLA. 

The committee accuses the Chinese authorities of undermining the investigation into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2. The Republican 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 as the closest sample to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. 

Recently, Dr Anthony Fauci, who was among the first to suggest that the virus developed organically, took a backtrack and admitted that there was a need to 'get to the bottom' of the origins of the pandemic, saying a possibility of lab leak could not be ruled out.

Later, however, several media outlets in the US 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 of Virology into the SARS-CoV-2 origin thanked Dr Fauci for publicly stating that scientific evidence supports a 'natural origin’ for the Coronavirus and not a lab leak. However, the White House medical adviser labelled it as “nonsense” and stressed that he has been misquoted.”