http://  (Approx. 10 Min)

April 4, 2022

Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban answers Ryan Grim and Robby Soave’s questions about her new lab leak reporting which is detailed in the article below.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/explosive-report-provides-new-details-on-fauci-s-lab-leak-cover-

Explosive report provides new details on Fauci’s lab-leak cover-up

Chris Pandolfo

April 1, 2022

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top expert on COVID-19, was privately urged by former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield to vigorously investigate both the lab-leak and natural origins theories of virus in early 2020, only to then exclude Redfield from discussions with world-renowned virologists and wage a PR campaign denouncing the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy theory, according to an investigative report.

The explosive report from Vanity Fair reveals new details of how Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins strongly pushed back against scientists who raised legitimate questions about the origins of the virus — questions that could implicate the NIH’s financial support for the non-governmental group EcoHealth Alliance and risky bat virus research in China.

By analyzing more than 100,000 internal EcoHealth documents, interviewing five former staff members, and speaking with 33 other sources, Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban uncovered how EcoHealth Alliance operated in a world of “murky grant agreements, flimsy oversight, and the pursuit of government funds for scientific advancement, in part by pitching research of steeply escalating risk.”

Her report delves deep inside EcoHealth Alliance, showing how the group’s president, Peter Daszak, spent years wooing Fauci — at times literally at D.C. cocktail parties — to win federal support for gain-of-function studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab central to the lab-leak hypothesis of COVID-19’s origins. Fauci, in turn, worked with Daszak, Collins, and other top virologists to lead a well-documented campaign discrediting the lab-leak theory, all the while never being completely transparent about their potential conflicts of interest should the theory prove true.  (See link for article)

_________________

SUMMARY:

  • EcoHealth Alliance received a $3.7 million federal grant in 2014 to study a deadly new coronavirus from wild bats in China
  • EcoHealth partnered with the Wuhan Institute for Virology and gave them $600,000 in federal funds to collect virus samples from bats and analyze them
  • The 2020 COVID ‘pandemic’ was traced to Wuhan, Chinawhere the lab is located
  • Early analysis suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was 96.2% similar to a previously discovered bat coronavirus, and top virologists raised the possibility it was laboratory-engineered
  • Former CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, asked whether EcoHealth paid for gain-of-function (making viruses more deadly and infectious) research in Wuhan & whether Chinese scientists engineered the virus before it escaped the lab
  • Redfield was aware of a 2015 gain-of-function study funded by EcoHealth Alliance, carried out in Dr. Ralph Baric’s lab in the University of North Carolina’s lab, and published by a Wuhan lab scientist Dr. Zhengli Shi
    • The study showed it was possible to manipulate a SARS-like bat coronavirus so that it would infect human cells
  • Redfield brought his concerns to Fauci, the UK Wellcome Trust, and WHO
  • A FOIA request revealed Fauci emailed NIAID principal deputy director a copy of the 2015 study and told him he needed to speak to him, to keep his phone on, and that he would have tasks that must be done.
    • The NIAID director organized a secret conference call “in total confidence” with 11 top international virologists but omitted Redfield, the very person in charge of the leading the government’s response to the ‘pandemic’, who initially brought up the issue
    • Prior to the call some of the virologists had noted features of SARS-CoV-2 “(potentially) look engineered.”
    • After the call, these same virologists would condemn the lab-leak hypothesis and those who believed in it and published “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” in the journal Nature Medicine on March 17. Mainstream media seized on the statement, inaccurately referring to it as a “study” that purportedly debunked the lab-leak theory
  • Redfield states: “They made a decision, almost a P.R. decision, that they were going to push one point of view only” he told Vanity Fair. “They argued they did it in defense of science, but it was antithetical to science.”
  • Then, there was Peter Daszak’s own campaign to organize scientists to denounce the lab-leak theory as a “conspiracy” and his effusive praise for Fauci’s public comments asserting the same.
  • Fauci and Collins continue to play defense for Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance, in public and in private.
  • American scientist, Dr. Jesse Bloom discovered Chinese researchers appeared to have deleted data from a NIH virus sample database on early genomic sequences for COVID
  • When Bloom took this info to Fauci to review, he learned the NIH itself had deleted the data, at the request of Chinese researchers at the Wuhan institute
  • Collins organized a Zoom meeting to discuss all of this, but the meeting was “extremely contentious” and Bloom was told it would be unethical to analyze the deleted viral sequences since Chinese scientists wanted them deleted
  • Instead of giving scientific points to counter Bloom’s points, a shouting match ensued and one of the virologists stated he “needed security outside his house, and my preprint would fuel conspiratorial notions that China was hiding data and thereby lead to more criticism of scientists such as himself.” 
  • The icing on the cake came when a virologist who is a screener at the preprint server offered to delete Bloom’s preprint or revise it “in a way that would leave no record that this had been done”
  • Bloom responded that it would not be appropriate to secretly delete or alter the paper “given the contentious nature of the meeting.”
  • A NIH representative quibbles with the word “delete” and insists that they in fact “suppressed” the genetic sequences of the virus, kind of like when Walensky states they are “pivoting” language on what it means to be fully vaxxed. The NIH did not respond to congressional oversight requests or The Epoch Times FOIA request.  Only after The Epic Times sued to enforce its request did the institute release the redacted documents. Source
  • “Discovering the origin of COVID-19 is vital to ensuring that no pandemic like it ever happens again. Yet, shortly after it began, the NIH bowed to the wishes of researchers in Wuhan to terminate public access to genetic sequences that could shed light on how it began,” said Jason Foster, founder and president of The Epic Times, in a statement when releasing the FOIA documents.

But that is the point, isn’t it?  The ‘powers that be’ have ZERO desire to ensure another pandemic like COVID ever happens again.  These pandemics are huge cash cows and give them unlimited power and control.

Important quote:

This account is disturbing. At the very least, it shows how Fauci, Collins, and the others strongly pushed back against any criticism of their preferred COVID-19 origins narrative, even dismissing legitimate questions raised by scientists earnestly seeking the truth. There is no scientific reason for silencing that debate. But as the NIH’s ties to EcoHealth Alliance and the potential conflicts of interest therein demonstrate, there were plenty of political reasons for doing so.

For more: