‘This must be a joke’: NIH issues another grant for bat coronavirus research

Despite its last gain-of-function research resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Institutes of Health has issued another grant for the same gain-of-function research. 

The project, which will again be “analyzing the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence,” will again be granted to EcoHealth Alliance Inc and will again be led by Peter Daszak. The $650,000 grant is being issued by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and is set to end August 31, 2027. 

However, unlike the last bat coronavirus research project in 2014-2019 which studied China, this project will study the potential for coronavirus in Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. 

Daszak, who led the 2014 coronavirus project, steered over $600,000 in funds to the laboratory in Wuhan, China, which ultimately became the source of the virus leak. But Daszak and Fauci denied that the lab was the source of the COVID-19 pandemic, insisting that it originated in a “Chinese wet market”. 

In February 2020, Daszak helped publish a letter in The Lancet condemning the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. The letter was used by government officials and media outlets to scorn those who suggested the virus was leaked from the lab. Social media platforms placed a ban on the “conspiracy theory”. 

Leaked emails, however, showed that top U.S. and British scientists believed the virus originated in the Wuhan lab, but decided to shut down the theory for political reasons - “international harmony,” as one put it. 

Fauci, in the meantime, was claiming in Congress under oath that the NIH “has not ever and is not now funding gain-of-function research.” Gain-of-function (GoF) research genetically alters an organism to enhance it; in other words, creates viruses so antidotes can be developed. 

But NIH Principal Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak said in a letter last year that EcoHealth admitted the NIH grant was used to infect mice with a modified bat coronavirus to make them sicker. 

Now the band is getting back together for an encore, and this time will also be focusing on making more coronavirus vaccines. 

“Finally, we will rapidly supply viral sequences and isolates for use in vaccine and therapeutic development, including ‘prototype pathogen’ vaccines, via an existing MOU with the NIAID-CREID network,” says the description of the project. 

This must be a joke. Please tell me this is a joke,” tweeted journalist Alex Berenson Sunday. “@nih just gave @EcoHealthNYC and Peter Daszak a NEW grant for bat coronavirus research? Including supplying ‘viral sequences and isolates for use in vaccine development’? Nope. Not a joke. The joke, apparently, is on us.”