The Frammis Part II

When I posted about the frammis on Thursday, I came up with several questions that I thought would go to the base of the con: money was going to the Wuhan lab; someone benefitted from that money; if we find out who, we make some progress. Indeed, we're making some progress.

The story is developing quickly, and information trickles out by the day. This story in Independent Science News provides what I think are productive clues about the money.

For much of this year, [Peter] Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance garnered a great deal of sympathetic media coverage after its $3.7 million five-year NIH grant was prematurely cut when the Trump administration learned that EcoHealth Alliance funded bat coronavirus research at the WIV.

The temporary cut was widely depicted in major media as Trump undermining the EcoHealth Alliance’s noble fight against pandemics. The termination was reversed by NIH in late August, and even upped to $7.5 million. But entirely overlooked amid the claims and counter-claims was that far more funding for the EcoHealth Alliance comes from the Pentagon than the NIH.

. . . Only buried under their “Privacy Policy,” under a section titled “EcoHealth Alliance Policy Regarding Conflict of Interest in Research,” does the EcoHealth Alliance concede it is the “recipient of various grant awards from federal agencies including the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.”

Even this listing is deceptive. It obscures that its two largest funders are the Pentagon and the State Department (USAID); whereas the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which accounts for a minuscule $74,487, comes before either.

Meticulous investigation of U.S. government databases reveals that Pentagon funding for the EcoHealth Alliance from 2013 to 2020, including contracts, grants and subcontracts, was just under $39 million. Most, $34.6 million, was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the DOD which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”

Most of the remaining money to EHA was from USAID (State Dept.), comprising at least $64,700,000. These two sources thus total over $103 million.

According to the New York Post,

Daszak received more than $410,000 in annual compensation from EcoHealth and “related organizations” during the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2019, according to an IRS filing posted online by the ProPublica news organization.

The nonprofit, which says it’s “dedicated to protecting wildlife and public health from the emergency of disease,” has received as much as $15 million a year in grant money from various federal agencies, Vanity Fair said.

EcoHealth has used those grants to fund controversial “gain-of-function” research — which can increase the infectiousness and virulence of viruses — at facilities that include the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to Vanity Fair.

The Vanity Fair story referenced gives more detail:

British-born Peter Daszak, 55, is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit with the laudable goal of preventing the outbreak of emerging diseases by safeguarding ecosystems. In May 2014, five months before the moratorium on gain-of-function research was announced, EcoHealth secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated in part to various entities engaged in collecting bat samples, building models, and performing gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were able to jump to humans. The grant was not halted under the moratorium or the P3CO framework.

By 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was pulling in up to $15 million a year in grant money from an array of federal agencies, including the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to 990 tax exemption forms it filed with the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau. Shi Zhengli herself listed U.S. government grant support of more than $1.2 million on her curriculum vitae: $665,000 from the NIH between 2014 and 2019; and $559,500 over the same period from USAID. At least some of those funds were routed through EcoHealth Alliance.

EcoHealth Alliance’s practice of divvying up large government grants into smaller sub-grants for individual labs and institutions gave it enormous sway within the field of virology. The sums at stake allow it to “purchase a lot of omertà” from the labs it supports, said Richard Ebright of Rutgers. (In response to detailed questions, an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson said on behalf of the organization and Daszak, “We have no comment.”)

Thus NIH Director Francis Collins was less than fully ingenuous in his PBS interview this week with Judy Woodruff:

We never authorized any support of a virus that would infect a human to make it more lethal or more transmissible. That would have been absolutely off-limits.

The amount of money that went to that particular institute was quite modest. I can't tell you whether they, with their millions, tens of millions, or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars of other research, were doing other things that they didn't tell us about. But I will tell you that what NIH supported, what we approved is not something that would have contributed to the arrival of this very dangerous pandemic.

Collins was implicitly acknowledging that the NIH piece of the total in grant money that went to the Wuhan Institute was modest -- we see estimates in the $600,000 range -- but he's implicitly referring to "maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in other research" that are coming from other US agencies for Chinese gain-of-function research, apparently all, or almost all, funneled through Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance.

There's much, much more to this story, but clearly Collins and Fauci are aware of much more than they've said so far. This is clear in a Daily Caller story:

The director of the National Institutes of Health wants to answer congressional inquiries about the agency’s links to a Wuhan lab in private, he told the Hugh Hewitt Show on Wednesday.

Referring to a congressional letter on his agency’s work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said, “in our response, we offered to have a chance to simply get into a secure space and have a conversation. . . . Much of the information they’re asking for, we don’t have the answers to. Some of it is pretty sensitive, not quite classified, but getting close to that.”

So it seems like the US deep state has more or less secretly laundered hundreds of millions (by Collins's own estimate) to China via EcoHealth Alliance for virus gain-of-function research, which almost certainly resulted in a lab leak that killed millions worldwide, threw millions more out of work, and severely disrupted the lives of just about everyone.

And Collins wants to chat about this in private, strictly entre nous.