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COVID Lab Leak: Over four later, EcoHealth Alliance funding is finally suspended

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8 minute read

From Heartland Daily News

Thursday, May 16, 2024

Federal Funding Stripped From Nonprofit at Center of COVID Lab Leak Controversy

Today, the Biden administration suspended federal funding to the scientific nonprofit whose research is at the center of credible theories that the COVID-19 pandemic was started via a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This morning, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it was immediately suspending three grants provided to the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) as it starts the process of debarring the organization from receiving any federal funds.

ā€œThe immediate suspension of [EcoHealth Alliance] is necessary to protect the public interest and due to a cause of so serious or compelling a nature that it affects EHA’s present responsibility,ā€Ā wroteĀ HHS Deputy Secretary for Acquisitions Henrietta Brisbon in a memorandum signed this morning.

For years now, EcoHealth has generated immense controversy for its use of federal grant money to support gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.

In a memo justifying its funding suspension, HHS said that EcoHealth had failed to properly monitor the work it was supporting at Wuhan. It also failed to properly report on the results of experiments showing that the hybrid viruses it was creating there had an improved ability to infect human cells.

Congressional Republicans leading an investigation into EcoHealth’s research in Wuhan, and the role it may have played in starting the pandemic via a lab leak, cheered HHS’s decision.

ā€œEcoHealth facilitated gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without proper oversight, willingly violated multiple requirements of its multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health [NIH] grant, and apparently made false statements to the NIH,ā€Ā saidĀ Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R–Ohio), chair of the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a statement. ā€œThese actions are wholly abhorrent, indefensible, and must be addressed with swift action.ā€

Beginning in 2014, EcoHealth received a grant from NIH’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to study bat coronavirus in China. Its initial scope of work involved collecting and cataloging viruses in the wild and studying them in the lab to spot which ones might be primed to ā€œspilloverā€ into humans and cause a pandemic.

Soon enough, EcoHealth used some of the viruses they’d collected to create ā€œchimericā€ or hybrid viruses that might be better able to infect human lung cells in genetically engineered (humanized) mice.

This so-called ā€œgain-of-functionā€ research has long been controversial for its potential to create deadly pandemic pathogens. In 2014, the Obama administration paused federal funding of gain-of-function research that might turn SARS, MERS, or flu viruses into more transmissible respiratory diseases in mammals.

In 2016,Ā NIH flagged EcoHealth’sĀ work as likely violating the 2014 pause.

EcoHealth President Peter Daszak argued to NIH at the time that the viruses his outfit was creating had not been proven to infect human cells and were genetically different enough from past pandemic viruses that they didn’t fall under the Obama administration pause.

Wuhan Institute of Virology and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance

NIH accepted this argument under the condition that EcoHealth immediately stop its work and notify the agency if any of its hybrid viruses did show increased viral growth in humanized mice.

But when these hybrid viruses did show increased viral growth in mice, EcoHealth did not immediately stop work or notify NIH. It instead waited until it submitted an annual progress report in 2018 to disclose the results of its experiments.

A second progress report that EcoHealth submitted in 2021, two years after its due date, also showed its hybrid viruses were demonstrating increased viral growth and enhanced lethality in humanized mice.

In testimony to the House’s coronavirus subcommittee earlier this month, Daszak claimed that EcoHealth attempted to report the results of its gain-of-function experiments on time in 2019, but was frozen out of NIH’s reporting system.

The HHS memo released today says a forensic investigation found no evidence that EcoHealth was locked out of NIH’s reporting system. The department also said that EcoHealth had failed to produce requested lab notes and other materials from the Wuhan lab detailing the work being done there and the lab’s biosafety conditions.

These all amount to violations of EcoHealth’s grant agreement and NIH grant policy, thus warranting debarment from future federal funds, reads the HHS memo.

That EcoHealth would be stripped of its federal funding shouldn’t come as too great a shock to anyoneĀ who watched Daszak’sĀ congressional testimony from earlier this month. Even Democrats on the committee openly accused Daszak of being misleading about EcoHealth’s work and manipulating facts.

Rep. Raul Ruiz (D–Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House’s coronavirus subcommittee, welcomed EcoHealth’s suspension, saying in a press release that the nonprofitĀ failedĀ its ā€œobligation to meet the utmost standards of transparency and accountability to the American public.ā€

An HHS Office of the Inspector GeneralĀ reportĀ from last year had already found that EcoHealth had failed to submit progress reports on time or effectively monitor its subgrantee, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

When grilling Daszak, Democrats on the Coronavirus Subcommittee went to great lengths to not criticize NIH’s oversight of EcoHealth’s work. The HHS debarment memo likewise focuses only on EcoHealth’s failures to abide by NIH policy and its grant conditions.

Nevertheless, it seems pretty obvious that NIH was failing to abide by the 2014 pause on gain-of-function funding when it allowed EcoHealth to go ahead with creating hybrid coronaviruses under the condition that they stop if the viruses did prove more virulent.

NIH compounded that oversight failure by not stopping EcoHealth’s funding when the nonprofit did, in fact, create more virulent viruses, and not following up on a never-submitted progress report detailing more gain-of-function research until two years later.

The House Subcommittee’s investigation into NIH’s role in gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab is ongoing. Tomorrow it will interview NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawerence Tabak. In June, it willĀ interviewĀ former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci.

Originally published byĀ Reason Foundation. Republished with permission.

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International

Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

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From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S.Ā Defense Advanced Research Projects AgencyĀ (DARPA) put out aĀ Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding ā€œstate-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.ā€

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop ā€œadvanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasuresā€ in order to ā€œimprove preparedness for future public health emergencies.ā€

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants ā€œFatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?ā€œ

Does ā€œnatural or vaccine-inducedā€ relate to ā€œpopulation immunityā€ or ā€œfatality ratesā€ or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

ā€œWe are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.ā€ — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

ā€œIdentification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.ā€ ­— DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: ā€œPlease describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.ā€

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your ā€œpublic health communications strategies?ā€

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs likeĀ KallistiĀ andĀ MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

ā€œThe MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.ā€ — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for aĀ new program called ā€œMethodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex SystemsĀ (MAGICS)ā€ that seeks ā€œnew methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.ā€

Nowhere in theĀ MAGICSĀ description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of ā€œadversaries,ā€ as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about ā€œmodelingĀ humanĀ systems,ā€ along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting ā€œcollectiveĀ humanĀ behaviorā€ and ā€œcomplex social phenomenaā€ derived from ā€œsociotechnical data sets.ā€

Could DARPA’sĀ MAGICSĀ program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

ā€œThe goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.ā€ — DARPA,Ā Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program calledĀ Theory of Mind, which was renamedĀ KallistiĀ a month later.

The goal ofĀ Theory of MindĀ is to develop ā€œnew capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,ā€ according to a very briefĀ special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those ā€œadversariesā€ are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for ā€œnational security,ā€ but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance ā€“Ā ā€œimproving preparedness for future public health emergenciesā€ is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

ā€œWe are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.ā€ — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission fromĀ The Sociable.

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Audit report reveals Canada’s controversial COVID travel app violated multiple rules

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s Auditor General found that government procurement rules were not followed in creating the ArriveCAN app.

Canada’s Auditor General revealed that the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed multiple times by violating contract procurement rules to create ArriveCAN, its controversial COVID travel app.

In aĀ report released Tuesday, Auditor General Karen Hogan noted that between April 2015 to March 2024, the Trudeau government gave out 106 professional service contracts to GC Strategies Inc. This is the same company that made the ArriveCAN app.

The contracts were worth $92.7 million, with $64.5 million being paid out.

According to Hogan, Canada’s Border Services Agency gave four contracts to GC Strategies valued at $49.9 million. She noted that only 54 percent of the contracts delivered any goods.

ā€œWe concluded that professional services contracts awarded and payments made by federal organizations to GC Strategies and other companies incorporated by its co-founders were not in accordance with applicable policy instruments and that value for money for these contracts was not obtained,ā€ Hogan said.

She continued, ā€œDespite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments.ā€

The report concluded that ā€œFederal organizations need to ensure that public funds are spent with due regard for value for money, including in decisions about the procurement of professional services contracts.ā€

Hogan announced an investigation of ArriveCAN in November 2022 after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.

Last year, Hogan published an audit of ArriveCAN and on Tuesday published a larger audit of the 106 contracts awarded to GC Strategies by 31 federal organizations under Trudeau’s watch.

ā€˜Massive scandal,’ says Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said Hogan’s report on the audit exposed multiple improprieties.

ā€œThis is a massive scandal,ā€Ā he toldĀ reporters Tuesday.

ā€œThe facts are extraordinary. There was no evidence of added value. In a case where you see no added value, why are you paying the bill?ā€

ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Trudeau government and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary.

ArriveCANĀ was supposed to have cost $80,000, but the number quickly ballooned to $54 million, with the latest figures showing it cost $59.5 million.

As for the app itself, it was riddled with technical glitches along with privacy concerns from users.

LifeSiteNews hasĀ publishedĀ a wide variety of reports related to the ArriveCAN travel app.

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