COVID-19
Fauci’s NIH gives another $3.5 million to EcoHealth despite dangerous past of coronavirus research
Just before he retires, Dr. Anthony Fauci has pushed through a new five-year grant for EcoHealth. EcoHealth Alliance, is the U.S. nonprofit that Fauci and the National Institute of Health’s funds, “to conduct dangerous coronavirus research in partnership with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the global Covid-19 pandemic” reports National Review.
Over the next five years, the troublesome EcoHealth will receive over $3.25 million; their first check comes this year for $653,392. The grant is one of four concurrent NIH grants that EcoHealth has; three of the grants were awarded after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The description of the grant on the NIH RePORTER website is to analyze “the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.”
“This is high-risk research that involves going into remote, often inaccessible areas, and sampling bats and bat excreta, and then returning those samples to laboratories in population centers where they attempt to isolate the virus … and then seek to characterize the threat level posed by the virus,” said Richard Ebright, a biosafety expert and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University. “This is one of the kinds of research that may have been directly responsible for the current pandemic.”
The term gain-of-function research has become very controversial since the global Covid-19 pandemic, and National Review reports on the subject:
This newest EcoHealth project wouldn’t qualify as gain-of-function research, Ebright said. Gain-of-function research involves extracting viruses from animals and engineering them in a lab to make them more transmissible or dangerous to humans. But Ebright said two of EcoHealth’s grants do involve gain-of-function research and enhanced potential pandemic research on coronaviruses. And even if the current description of the new project doesn’t involve gain-of-function research, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t later.
From securing funding to completing the research, it is a six-year process, Ebright said, and the project is bound to change over those six years. “If researchers robotically followed what they proposed six years ago, they would not be taking into account developments in their own labs and in the field at any point along the way,” he said. “You have to have this flexibility. That also means you need oversight to make sure the flexibility isn’t going into forbidden areas.”
Going into forbidden areas is exactly how EcoHealth and its president, Peter Daszak, previously got into trouble. Starting in 2014, the U.S. government temporarily paused funding for gain-of-function research due to concerns over biosafety and biosecurity. When some of EcoHealth’s research – involving infecting genetically-engineered mice with hybrid viruses – seemed to cross that line, NIAID staff and EcoHealth leaders crafted work-around guidelines to allow the nonprofit to continue its work.
COVID-19
Bombshell: State Department Funded Foreign Organizations That Promoted the Censorship of Reporters, Conservatives
This outlet has obtained a letter sent by U.S. Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken regarding the “the State Department’s funding of foreign organizations that have promoted the censorship of American citizens.”
The New York Post published an exclusive article on the bombshell story:
The State Department sought to denigrate two reporters and a member of Congress as part of damage control attempts over having helped fund an advertisers’ “blacklist” of The Post and other outlets allegedly spreading “misinformation,” according to internal documents.
In March 2023, the department distributed press guidance about how to counter bombshell reports by “Twitter Files” scribe Matt Taibbi and Washington Examiner investigative journalist Gabe Kaminskyconcerning the State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).
Taibbi’s first report about the GEC, in a lengthy Twitter thread published Jan. 3, 2023, revealed efforts to pressure US social media platforms early in the COVID-19 pandemic to censor Americans online, purportedly to counter “disinformation.”
Banks’ letter explains the scenario of Gabe Kaminsky, the Washington Examiner reporter who “Published a series of articles outlining the State Department’s funding of a ‘disinformation’-related non-governmental organization called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). GDI had been maintaining a list of up to 200 news outlets that allegedly publish disinformation and then sending their list to advertising companies”
The Post continues:
Taibbi testified to Congress in March of 2023: “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”
Kaminsky also uncovered a $100,000 grant from GEC to the London-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI) in 2021 and 2022, an entity that calls itself “the world’s first rating of the media sites based on the risk of the outlet carrying disinformation.”
Despite GEC’s mandate proclaiming that it is only involved in international affairs, GDI went on to concoct a blacklist of 10 outlets, including The Post, with conservative or libertarian-leaning opinion sections in an effort to demonetize them, The Post continues.
Ad associations further participated in GDI’s efforts to blacklist the media outlets, though some called the list “bewildering” for having “somehow placed the NYPost [sic] as ‘at most risk’ paper in the USA for disinformation.”
Both the GEC grant, distributed between October 2021 and March 2022, and another $756,923 government-funded grant from the National Endowment for Democracy to GDI, have not been renewed.
The State Department records, exclusively obtained by The Post, make no mention of these taxpayer-funded entities’ conduct, choosing instead to fault Taibbi, Kaminsky and now-X owner Elon Musk for spreading alleged falsehoods about GEC.
Banks’ letter continues:
An interim report that was released by the House Committee on Small Business last week confirms GDI’s support for domestic censorship and confirms that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the National Endowment for Democracy sent GDI a combined nearly $1 million dollars in grants. The report also explains that the GEC privately supported GDI in its interactions with U.S. tech companies.
In response to Mr. Kaminsky’s reporting, the State Department sent out press guidance defending its attempted suppression of U.S. news organizations. That guidance misleadingly changes a quote that I sent to Gabe Kaminsky and the Washington Examiner criticizing the GEC. The intentional misquotation gives the impression that I had been speaking with a Russian propaganda outlet.
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