In a March 31, 2022, investigative report,1 Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban reviewed the contents of more than 100,000 EcoHealth Alliance documents, including meeting minutes and internal emails and reports, most of which predate the COVID-19 pandemic, showing a disturbing reality of “murky grant agreements, flimsy NIH oversight and pursuit of government grants by pitching increasingly risky global research.”2
April 4, 2022, Eban discussed her investigative report with “Rising” cohosts Ryan Grim and Robby Soave (video above). The various documents were released in accordance with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by several parties, including BuzzFeed, The Intercept, U.S. Right to Know, White Coat Waste, GOP Oversight and others.3
EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak admits to “cultivating” government connections for years by attending fancy cocktail parties in Washington D.C., oftentimes giving presentations alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and internal correspondence reveal his obsession with funding — to the point of pitching risky research proposals to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The Missing Gene Sequence
Eban begins her story with the account of Jesse D. Bloom, Ph.D., a computational virologist and evolutionary biologist with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. June 18, 2021, Bloom sent the draft of a preprint article he’d written to Fauci and Fauci’s boss, Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health.
According to Eban, the paper “contained sensitive revelations” about the NIH, and Bloom wanted Fauci to see it before it went to print and became public knowledge.
“Under ordinary circumstances, the preprint might have sparked a respectful exchange of views. But this was no ordinary preprint, and no ordinary moment,” Eban writes.4
The origin of SARS-CoV-2 was highly contested at this point, with most officials still insisting it had evolved naturally and jumped species, while a growing group of independent investigators kept pointing to genetic discrepancies that made natural evolution highly unlikely.
“A growing contingent were asking if it could have originated inside a nearby laboratory that is known to have conducted risky coronavirus research funded in part by the United States,” Eban writes, referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China, where the COVID-19 outbreak first occurred. Eban continues:5
“Bloom’s paper was the product of detective work he’d undertaken after noticing that a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences mentioned in a published paper from China had somehow vanished without a trace.
The sequences, which map the nucleotides that give a virus its unique genetic identity, are key to tracking when the virus emerged and how it might have evolved.
In Bloom’s view, their disappearance raised the possibility that the Chinese government might be trying to hide evidence about the pandemic’s early spread. Piecing together clues, Bloom established that the NIH itself had deleted the sequences from its own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan.
Now, he was hoping Fauci and his boss, NIH director Francis Collins, could help him identify other deleted sequences that might shed light on the mystery.”
On a brief side note, The Epoch Times addressed the alleged deletion of genetic sequences from its database at the request of a Chinese researcher in an April 2, 2022, article.6 NIH media branch chief Amanda Fine told The Epoch Times that the sequences were not actually erased; the data were merely removed from public access, so the data is now only available to those who have its accession number.
