“If it quacks and waddles, it’s almost always a duck.”
I’ve stated that hundreds of times in stories explaining the uncountable number of denials by many in our federal government of “questionable” government actions reported in national media. It seems that whenever something very fishy-sounding finds its way to the surface and is exposed, those from the top of various government agencies refuse to acknowledge that the “fishy things” are real.
Take Dr. Anthony Fauci and others at the CDC, for example, regarding “gain of function research” happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Here’s just one example of Fauci’s lying in sworn testimony to the United States Congress. (I’m pretty sure lying to Congress while under oath is a crime.)
At long last, National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted to Congress Thursday that U.S. taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Dr. Tabak,” asked Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, “did NIH fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through [Manhattan-based nonprofit] EcoHealth [Alliance]?”
“It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research,” Tabak answered. “If you’re speaking about the generic term, we did.”
The response comes after more than four years of evasions from federal public health officials—including Tabak himself and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci—about the controversial research practice of modifying viruses to make them more infectious.
Tabak added that “this is research, the generic term [gain-of-function], is research that goes on in many, many labs around the country. It is not regulated. And it’s not regulated because it poses no threat or harm to anybody.”
Dr. Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University and co-founder of the pandemic oversight group Biosafety Now, told The Post the exchange “was two people talking past each other.”
“Tabak was engaging in the usual obfuscation and semantic manipulation that is so frustrating and pointless,” Nickels said, adding that the NIH bigwig was resisting accountability for risky research that can create pathogens of pandemic potential.
“Instead of addressing this directly, Tabak launched into a useless response about how ‘gain-of-function’ encompasses many types of experiments,” he added.
In July 2023, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) barred the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving federal grants for the next 10 years.
On Tuesday, EcoHealth Alliance, whose mission statement declares it is “working to prevent pandemics,” had all of its grant funding pulled by HHS for the next three years.
EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak, in a hearing earlier this month before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, testified that his organization “never has and did not do gain-of-function research, by definition.”
But that claim directly contradicted Daszak’s private correspondence, including a 2016 email in which he celebrated the end of an Obama administration pause on gain-of-function research.
The EcoHealth head was also called out in sworn testimony to the COVID panel by Dr. Ralph Baric, a leading coronavirus virologist who initiated the research himself and declared it to be “absolutely” gain-of-function.
In an October 2021 letter to Congress, Tabak acknowledged NIH funded a “limited experiment” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
He did not describe it as gain-of-function research — but disclosed that EcoHealth “failed to report” the bat coronaviruses modified with SARS and MERS viruses had been made 10,000 times more infectious, in violation of its grant terms.
The NIH scrubbed its website of a longstanding definition for gain-of-function research the same day that the letter was sent.
Tabak also noted in his October 2021 letter that the “sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant” from COVID-19 — but other grant proposals from EcoHealth have since drawn scrutiny for their genetic similarities.
Fauci has repeatedly denied that the Wuhan lab research involved gain-of-function experiments, clashing with Republicans in high-profile hearings and “playing semantics” with the term during a closed-door interview with the House COVID panel earlier this year.
“He needs to define his definition of gain-of-function research because as I have through this process in the last three years, read many, many published articles about gain-of-function research or creation of a chimera, this is a new one,” COVID subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said following Fauci’s grilling in January.
The ex-NIAID head and White House medical adviser under President Biden was escorted by Capitol Police and his attorneys to and from the committee room for his two days of interviews. He repeatedly dodged The Post’s questions about gain-of-function research and pandemic lockdown restrictions.
In 2021, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held Fauci’s feet to the fire in several hearings over the evasions.
“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci declared that May.
In another House hearing the same month, then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins testified that researchers at the Wuhan lab “were not approved by NIH for doing gain-of-function research.”
“We are, of course, not aware of other sources of funds or other activities they might have undertaken outside of what our approved grant allowed,” Collins added cautiously at the time.
During his COVID subcommittee hearing last week, Daszak underscored this ignorance about what experiments resulted from the NIH grants.
The EcoHealth leader acknowledged he had not asked longtime collaborator and Wuhan Institute of Virology deputy director Shi Zhengli for any viral sequences since before the pandemic began.
In his own closed-door testimony to the House subcommittee released Thursday, Collins echoed Tabak’s comments but went further by saying there “is a generic description of gain-of-function which is utilized in scientific and public conversation, but is not appropriate to apply that to a circumstance where we’re talking about a potential pathogen.”
“We need to be highly cognizant of the risks of gain-of-function technology now that scientific capabilities exist for creating something in a lab that didn’t exist 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago,” Wenstrup told The Post following Thursday’s hearing.
“Drs. Fauci and Collins, over a decade ago, both conceded that there are risks associated with gain-of-function research.”
EcoHealth received more than half a million dollars for its work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology as part of a more than $4 million grant to study the emergence of bat coronaviruses between 2014 and 2024.
That grant was revoked in 2020, reinstated in 2023, and finally suspended and proposed for debarment this week.
The House subcommittee is still investigating whether COVID-19 accidentally leaked out of a lab in Wuhan. The FBI, US Energy Department, ex-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Dr. Robert Redfield, and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe have described this as the most likely cause of the pandemic.
Nickels also slammed Tabak Thursday for claiming evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 originating in a “wild animal market in Wuhan.”
Will Dr. Fauci ever be held accountable for his lies while under oath in Congress? He repeatedly denied that gain of function research was ever funded by the U.S. and that none was ever performed at Wuhan.
Fauci Lied!
