New Fraud Allegations Involving Fauci’s EcoHealth Grant

By Hans Mahncke and Jeff Carlson

You've very likely heard of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grant R01 AI110964, perhaps not by number but certainly by subject matter. This is the now infamous grant through which, starting in 2014, Anthony Fauci funneled US taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The conduit organization through which the money was sent was Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance.

Up to now, the grant's main significance lay in the fact that it demonstrably involved reckless gain-of-function experiments on dangerous coronaviruses at the WIV. In fact, when those gain-of-function experiments resulted in the creation of a virus with a 10,000-fold increase in viral load, EcoHealth promptly stopped sending progress reports to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Despite these violations of the terms of the grant, i.e. performing gain-of-function and non-compliance with reporting obligations, Fauci not only ensured that the money kept flowing but also extended the grant by an additional five years.

Now there are new allegations that have emerged in connection with the grant which suggest that EcoHealth was involved in additional deceptions. The grant application, as well as subsequent progress reports stated that EcoHealth had in-country partners in Cambodia and in Myanmar and that work had been carried out, as part of the grant, with those partners. The problem is that those partners deny having done any work with or for EcoHealth.

We know this because Andre Spiegel, the director of the director of the Pasteur Institute in Cambodia, the institute cited by EcoHealth as its partner, has confirmed that his institute did not participate in the EcoHealth project and that they were not even contacted by EcoHealth about the project. And it was not just in the original grant application that EcoHealth claimed to be partnering with the Pasteur Institute. The claim was repeated many times in various documents and reports, so any excuse that this was just an oversight is not valid.

credit: Gilles Demaneuf

In Myanmar, the story is even stranger. EcoHealth claims to have partnered with San Pya clinic. However, the director of that clinic, Aung Than Toe, told Covid origin research group DRASTIC that his clinic was not part of any EcoHealth project. Even worse, Aung explained that the San Pya clinic is a physiotherapy clinic, not a virus research center. Bizarrely, the clinic appears to be located in front of the Nawarat Hotel in the city of Yangon. That's not exactly the place where you'd expect to find a sophisticated biotechnological facility. Aung’s father, acting in a different capacity, as a government medical researcher, apparently once sent bat samples to the University of California at Davis.

We have not independently confirmed Aung’s or Spiegel’s accounts. However, their accounts appear to be credible. For instance, there is no doubt that the San Pya clinic is not a center for advanced biotechnology. It is a physiotherapist’s office.

The fact that it appears that at least two of EcoHealth’s purported partners weren’t partners at all raises questions about whether there were other deceptions. EcoHealth claims to have partnered with at least five additional organizations: The Primate Research Center in Indonesia, Conservation Medicine in Malaysia, the King Chulalongkong Memorial Hospital in Thailand, Hanoi Agricultural University in Vietnam, and the National Animal Health Laboratory in Laos. Were these really partners on the Fauci grant or were they just names that were thrown out there to impress funders?

We know for a fact that EcoHealth played fast and loose with the gain-of-function aspects of their work at the WIV. We also know that Fauci’s senior advisor of twenty years, David Morens, tried to help EcoHealth cover up the failure to submit a key progress report. What else did EcoHealth lie about and to what extent did Fauci, NIAID and the NIH help them cover up their lies?

It may seem trite in the bigger scheme of things – after all, that bigger scheme of things is millions of Covid deaths – but the fact is that unearthing problems with grants may help put a stop to those grants. Despite being purportedly debarred from receiving federal funding, EcoHealth continues to be lavishly showered with taxpayer money, including on ongoing grant of at least $15 million from USAID.

As of 2021, EcoHealth had received upwards of $123 million in federal money. That amount has only grown since. How much of that money was based on false claims, such as the allegedly non-existent partnership with the Pasteur Institute and with the San Pya clinic on NIAID grant R01 AI110964? We don’t know the answer but at least we know where to look. So far, as is the case for almost every aspect of the Covid disaster, almost all of the investigating has been done by random individuals on Twitter. Indeed, it was random individuals who unearthed the information about EcoHealth’s apparent false statements with respect to their alleged partners. If the federal government was serious about shutting down EcoHealth, they would be doing the same.