by Steven Richards
Newly declassified documents show the Intelligence Community had circulated a video of a U.S. government grantee describing experiments in China to manipulate coronaviruses to predict human transmission.
The year after the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States, a U.S. intelligence official flagged a video circulating online showing a government-funded scientist admitting publicly that his colleagues in China had manipulated spike proteins on coronaviruses.
During this time, leading health official Dr. Anthony Fauci continued to double down on his claim his office had not funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab in China where scientists conducted such experiments.
Fauci’s apparatus had also ruthlessly cracked down on questions into the origins of COVID-19, seeking to discredit theories that the virus may have escaped containment in a laboratory accident.
“Hey guys, Just saw this video online,” an intelligence community official wrote in an email to colleagues. The email was released in a new batch of COVID-19 documents declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in the last hours of her tenure.
“It’s from a 2016 NY Academy of Medicine meeting where Daszak talks about his colleagues in China manipulating the spike protein on coronavirus to make them more virulent,” the individual added.
In the video, which was posted to the online streaming platform Rumble, Dr. Peter Daszak explained how his “colleagues in China” grafted spike proteins from discovered coronaviruses onto “pseudoparticles” in order to test whether they could infect human cells.
“We found other coronaviruses in bats … some of them looked very similar to SARS. So, we sequenced the spike protein, the protein that attaches to cells, then we–well I didn’t do this work, my colleagues in China did the work–you create pseudoparticles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells,” Daszak said. “And each step of this you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people.”
Daszak and his research organization, EcoHealth Alliance, were at the center of scrutiny over origins of the COVID-19 pandemic because of the risky science they supported in China known as gain-of-function research. EcoHealth, a global nonprofit supported by U.S. government grants, helped fund research in Wuhan, China, where the virus is said to have originated.
Shortly after President Donald Trump took office last January, the Department of Health and Human Services banned both Daszak and EcoHealth from receiving federal funding for five years for allegedly facilitating and passing taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China before the beginning of the pandemic.
The existence of the video and Daszak’s comments at the conference provide further evidence that raising the possibility that Fauci likely possessed an understanding that the United States government had, at least indirectly, funded the very gain-of-function research that he continued to insist it had not.
Just a month before the internal Intelligence Community email, Fauci had repeated his testimony to the Senate, denying his office had funded such research. He told Sen. Rand Paul, "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
Later that year, however, the National Institutes of Health changed the story and admitted to Congress that it had funded a Wuhan Institute of Virology experiment that altered a bat coronavirus through gain-of-function.
The newly declassified documents also show that the Biden administration buried a whistleblower complaint to the Intelligence Community Inspector General that alleged Dr. Fauci had lied to Congress when he testified about the conduct of gain of function research at the National Institutes of Health, Just the News previously reported.
“The complaint alleges Dr. Fauci provided false testimony to Congress related to the conduct of gain of function research at the National Institutes of Health, thereby ‘misleading the American people and Congressional oversight,’” Acting Intelligence Community Inspector General Tamara Johnson wrote Aug. 11, 2021, to then-DNI Avril Haines.
Rather than refer the alleged lie to the independent watchdog at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was responsible for probing misconduct in Fauci's office, Haines referred the concerns instead to Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, a Biden political appointee who is now running to be California governor.
Johnson also made clear she didn't want to send the complaint to her peer at HHS, the inspector general.
"The general dispute about 'gain-of-function' research is already in the public domain making it highly probable that the HHS-OIG would already be aware of the allegation that the Dr. Fauci’s testimony was inaccurate (albeit from a different source, not our ICWPA submitter). Consequently, we determined there would be no merit in referring the matter to HHS OIG," she wrote.
Gabbard said the documents she released late Thursday in her final hours as DNI demonstrate that government officials, including Fauci, engaged in a cover-up to mislead the public about how the COVID-19 pandemic started.
“The tactics used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook: politicized self-serving leaders like Dr. Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly elected President by restricting his access to vital facts needed to keep the country safe," Gabbard said, "It’s time the American people learn the real story.”
Fauci, who retired before President Donald Trump returned to the White House, has repeatedly denied engaging in wrongdoing or lying to Congress. But he did accept a pardon from President Joe Biden in late 2024.
Beyond the intelligence community whistleblower's allegations, Gabbard said she too believed Fauci lied to Congress on another matter in 2024 when he claimed he had not talked to intelligence agencies about virus research.
Steven Richards
Source: https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/intelligence-community-shared-video-proving-virus-research-china
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