Connect with us

COVID-19

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

Published

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.

“The 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,” wrote 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.

“EcoHealth 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,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R–Ohio), chair of the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a statement. “These actions are wholly abhorrent, indefensible, and must be addressed with swift action.”

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 “spillover” into humans and cause a pandemic.

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

This so-called “gain-of-function” 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, NIH flagged EcoHealth’s 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 anyone who watched Daszak’s 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 nonprofit failed its “obligation to meet the utmost standards of transparency and accountability to the American public.”

An HHS Office of the Inspector General report 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 will interview former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci.

Originally published by Reason Foundation. Republished with permission.

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

COVID-19

The dangers of mRNA vaccines explained by Dr. John Campbell

Published on

From the YouTube channel of Dr John Campbell

There aren’t many people as good at explaining complex medical situations at Dr. John Campbell.  That’s probably because this British Health Researcher spent his career teaching medicine to nurses.

Over the last number of years, Campbell has garnered an audience of millions of regular people who want to understand various aspects of the world of medical treatment.

In this important video Campbell explains how the new mRNA platform of vaccines can cause very serious health outcomes.

Dr. Campbell’s notes for this video:

Excess Deaths in the United Kingdom: Midazolam and Euthanasia in the COVID-19 Pandemic https://www.researchgate.net/publicat… Macro-data during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK) are shown to have significant data anomalies and inconsistencies with existing explanations. This paper shows that the UK spike in deaths, wrongly attributed to COVID-19 in April 2020, was not due to SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was largely absent, but was due to the widespread use of Midazolam injections, which were statistically very highly correlated (coefficient over 90%) with excess deaths in all regions of England during 2020. Importantly, excess deaths remained elevated following mass vaccination in 2021, but were statistically uncorrelated to COVID injections, while remaining significantly correlated to Midazolam injections. The widespread and persistent use of Midazolam in UK suggests a possible policy of systemic euthanasia. Unlike Australia, where assessing the statistical impact of COVID injections on excess deaths is relatively straightforward, UK excess deaths were closely associated with the use of Midazolam and other medical intervention. The iatrogenic pandemic in the UK was caused by euthanasia deaths from Midazolam and also, likely caused by COVID injections, but their relative impacts are difficult to measure from the data, due to causal proximity of euthanasia. Global investigations of COVID-19 epidemiology, based only on the relative impacts of COVID disease and vaccination, may be inaccurate, due to the neglect of significant confounding factors in some countries. Graphs April 2020, 98.8% increase 43,796 January 2021, 29.2% increase 16,546 Therefore covid is very dangerous, This interpretation, which is disputable, justified politically the declaration of emergency and all public health measures, including masking, lockdowns, etc. Excess deaths and erroneous conclusions 2020, 76,000 2021, 54,000 2022, 45,000 This evidence of “vaccine effectiveness” was illusory, due to incorrect attribution of the 2020 death spike. PS Despite advances in modern information technology, the accuracy of data collection has not advanced in the United Kingdom for over 150 years, because the same problems of erroneous data entry found then are still found now in the COVID pandemic, not only in the UK but all over the world. We have independently discovered the same UK data problem and solution for assessing COVID-19 vaccination as Alfred Russel Wallace had 150 years ago in investigating the consequences of Vaccination Acts starting in 1840 on smallpox: The Alfred Russel Wallace as used by Wilson Sy “Having thus cleared away the mass of doubtful or erroneous statistics, depending on comparisons of the vaccinated and unvaccinated in limited areas or selected groups of patients, we turn to the only really important evidence, those ‘masses of national experience’…” https://archive.org/details/b21356336… Alfred Russel Wallace, 1880s–1890s 1840 Vaccination Act Provided free smallpox vaccination to the poor Banned variolation Vaccination compulsory in 1853, 1867 Why his interest? C 1885 The Leicester Anti-Vaccination demonstrations (1885) Growing public resistance to compulsory vaccination Wallace’s increasing involvement in social reform and statistical arguments Statistical critique of vaccination Government data on: Smallpox mortality trends before and after compulsory vaccination Case mortality rates Vaccination vs. sanitation effects Mortality trends before and after each Act, 1853 and 1867 “Forty-Five Years of Registration Statistics, Proving Vaccination to Be Both Useless and Dangerous” (1885) “Vaccination a Delusion; Its Penal Enforcement a Crime” (1898) Contributions to the Royal Commission on Vaccination (1890–1896) Wallace argued: Declining smallpox mortality was due to improved sanitation, not vaccination Official statistics were misinterpreted or biased Compulsory vaccination was unjust Re-vaccination did not reliably prevent outbreaks These views were strongly disputed, then and now. Wallace had a strong distrust of medical authority He and believed in: Statistical reasoning Social reform Opposition to coercive government measures The primacy of environmental and sanitary conditions in health

Continue Reading

COVID-19

FDA says COVID shots ‘killed’ at least 10 children, promises new vaccine safeguards

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

“This is a profound revelation. For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children”

At least 10 children have died because of the COVID shots, according to a recently publicized email from Trump Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials.

“At least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” FDA Chief Medical Officer Vinay Prasad wrote on Friday in an email to staff, obtained by The Daily Caller.

“This is a profound revelation. For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children,” Prasad said in the memo.

The finding corroborates that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recently linked at least 25 pediatric deaths to the COVID shot, via information from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Both counts likely significantly underestimate the real number of pediatric deaths from the shots, considering that studies have found vaccine injuries have been seriously underreported to VAERS.

In his Friday memo, Prasad ripped the Biden administration for pressuring the injection of these experimental mRNA shots into children.

“Healthy young children who faced tremendously low risk of death were coerced, at the behest of the Biden administration, via school and work mandates, to receive a vaccine that could result in death,” wrote Prasad.

“In many cases, such mandates were harmful. It is difficult to read cases where kids aged 7 to 16 may be dead as a result of covid vaccines.”

The disturbing admission by the Trump administration’s health agency highlights the silence of the Biden administration about these deaths and raises further questions about its integrity or lack thereof.

“Why did it take until 2025 to perform this analysis, and take necessary further actions? Deaths were reported between 2021 and 2024, and ignored for years,” wrote Prasad. He acknowledged that the vaccines potentially killed more children on balance, considering that they had virtually no risk of dying from COVID.

The Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) will reportedly strengthen its safety protocols for vaccines, including by requiring more clinical trials as opposed to relying on antibody laboratory studies, modifying the annual flu vaccine release, and examining the effect of administering multiple vaccines in one round.

This year, the CDC removed COVID shots from its recommended “vaccines” for healthy children. A CDC panel had voted in 2022 to add the COVID shots to the childhood immunization schedule despite their experimental nature and the fact that they were produced in a fraction of the time ordinarily required to bring a vaccine to market.

The push for COVID shots for children was spearheaded at least in part by CBER Director Peter Marks, who pushed for full approval of the COVID shots even for the young and healthy and laid the foundation for COVID shot mandates.

A large, growing body of evidence shows that the mRNA shots were dangerous to human health in a wide variety of ways and caused deaths at a rate far exceeding usual safety standards for vaccines. As Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, an ear, nose and throat specialist in Houston, Texas, explained to Tucker Carlson in April:

Normally, the FDA will put a black box warning on a medication if there have been five deaths. They will pull it off the market if there have been 50. Well, according to VAERS, (the) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – and it’s vastly under-reported, which I have seen firsthand – there have been 38,000 deaths from these COVID shots.

That number has since increased, according to VAERS, which now reports 38,773 deaths, 221,257 hospitalizations, 22,362 heart attacks, and 29,012 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis due to the COVID shot as of August 29, among other ailments.

Continue Reading

Trending

X