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Gallagher: This is Bigger than Dr. Fauci

May 20, 2021
WASHINGTON, D.C. –Following therelease of a House Intelligence Committee report stating that "significant circumstantial evidence" supports the lab leak hypothesis, Rep. Gallagher today urged members of Congress and members of the media to more closely scrutinize additional US funding streams that sent taxpayer dollars to the EcoHealth Alliance and potentially the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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In a video statement released Thursday,Rep. Gallagher said, "It's good that people are now focused on Dr. Fauci's role and that NIAID and NIH funding going to the EcoHealth Alliance and by extension, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But if you start to do basic research, it quickly becomes apparent that this is much bigger than Dr. Fauci – it involves the entire US government."
Gallagher then proceeded to highlight USAID and DoD funds that went to the EcoHealth Alliance, as well as DHS funds that supported many of the experts who dismissed the lab leak hypothesis last year.
Watch the video HERE or read the transcript below.
"Okay, time for another Charlie Kelly, Pepe Silvia tutorial here.
"Last week we covered the fact that Dr. Fauci's organization, NIAID, and NIH, the parent organization, were sending money to something called the EcoHealth Alliance, which was doing dangerous gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where it is increasingly likely that this entire pandemic started. What's interesting is now, the media, the very same media sources – mainstream media sources – who threw cold water on the lab leak hypothesis a year ago and said it was crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, are now actually starting to reluctantly admit that there may be something to it. But you have to go back and look at what the mainstream media was saying a year ago.
"The New York Times called it a fringe theory dismissed by the scientists. That's going to become important, in a second I'll explain why. CNN basically parroted Chinese Communist Party propaganda saying that this was a disinformation effort on the part of the Trump Administration. The Washington Post attacked Senator Tom Cotton and said that he fanned the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts.
"The entire mainstream media's narrative was reliant on their expert sources. Let's plant a flag there and come back to that.
"Okay, it's good that people are now focused on Dr. Fauci's role and that NIAID and NIH funding going to the EcoHealth Alliance and by extension, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But if you start to do basic research, it quickly becomes apparent that this is much bigger than Dr. Fauci – it involves the entire US government.
"For example, USAID from 2013 to 2018 roughly, gave the EcoHealth Alliance $2.5 million. So $2.5 million to Daszak. This is Peter Daszak, the guy that runs EcoHealth Alliance. Part of that money was used to do research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And that's not conjecture. There's a 2017 paper that Daszak co-authored with Dr. Shi, the so-called bat lady who works at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who, by the way, was referenced by some mainstream media sources, uncritically as she dismissed the idea that this would have leaked from a lab. She's under the control of an autocratic foreign government – the Chinese Communist Party. The State Department told us that there was military research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute. You can't accept her as a credible source.
"Anyways, her and Daszak published a paper in 2017 about gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on chimeric bat coronaviruses. And in that paper, they not only reference NIAID funding – that's Dr. Fauci's organization – they talk about USAID's PREDICT program, this program where we were going to go around collect viruses in order to prevent the pandemic. There's a ton of USAID money over the last decade that has gone to the PREDICT program that was cited by Daszak in this paper.
"They also cite the Chinese Academy of Sciences Hundred Talents Program. Anyone familiar with the Thousand Talents Program will know these are programs through which the Chinese leverage their influence in order to steal technology and recruit foreign assets. And Daszak and Shi are referencing the CCP recruitment and theft organization in this paper. I mean, you can't make this up. There's a whole stream of funding from USAID that needs to be unpacked and analyzed.
"There's a whole stream of funding from DOD that also needs to be analyzed and unpacked. DOD provided $30 million through DTRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to the EcoHealth Alliance, in part to study a number of different projects, including bat-borne zoonotic diseases coming from animals. And some of these grants appear actually to be ongoing. So we need clarity on whether any of the DOD funds going through DTRA pass through intermediaries to support research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, particularly since the State Department told us that there was Chinese military personnel using the Wuhan Institute to conduct military research.
"There's also a separate pot of DOD money that DARPA runs called the PREEMPT program, which is related in some cases to the PREDICT program. I've heard from some people in this space that it's basically the same program officers are working on it. It's sort of the same intent. The stated intent is to collect samples from animals in the field, and then use them to predict how viruses may evolve. We need to know whether any of the funds from DARPA's PREDICT program went through EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That is the critical connection. All these cutouts that are then doing dangerous research at the Wuhan Institute, where even Dr. Fauci admitted, we don't have 100% visibility into everything they're doing.
"And then the third major funding stream, though much smaller, it's actually the most interesting and the most troubling to me. And that's through the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security gave the EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak's organization, $1 million to fund something called the Ground Truth Network.
"According to DHS, the Ground Truth Network is designed to, "contextualize information pertaining to biological events," utilizing a network of subject matter experts. So DHS is giving money to the EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak. Daszak is then giving it to a bunch of his friends who are experts, and they're going to use it. He got it in 2018, two years prior to the pandemic. And they're creating this network of experts to combat disinformation in the event of a pandemic. So the US government is paying a bunch of scientists to combat disinformation in the event of a pandemic.
"Well, here's the problem. These are the exact same people that a year ago were telling us that the lab leak theory was a crazy conspiracy theory. So they're being paid to combat disinformation. But they are spreading disinformation.
"These are the same experts who I guarantee you were being used as sources for the New York Times, CNN, NPR, Washington Post, and the AP. They all reference expert scientists. But they have clear conflicts of interest, right? Particularly a guy like Daszak, who's built his whole career on doing research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
"Think about how insane this is. The federal government is paying scientists to combat disinformation. But they're basically feeding bogus information to the media, which is spreading a crazy narrative and not even looking into the remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology happens to be located where this entire pandemic started. And that's just sort of scratching the surface. We're talking about, you know, a week of open source research that I and my small staff have done. These are the major things we've discovered. But there's also funding streams that we've discovered, beyond NIH beyond these three smaller grants to EcoHealth that have come from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Interior.
"Essentially, we have a ton of federal government agencies that were sending money to EcoHealth and EcoHealth was then doing dangerous research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We need to unpack this whole thing and understand why this has been done, whether these grants continue, and whether we intend to increase funding for this type of research.
"And honestly, I don't understand why Congress isn't more interested in investigating this. I'm glad that suddenly people are waking up to the Fauci, NIH, and NIAID angle, but it is much bigger than that. It's much bigger than Dr. Fauci.
"Jim Jordan actually raised a good point on Wednesday. He's on the Select Committee on the Coronavirus. As he said, if this is a Select Committee on Coronavirus, why aren't we investigating how the coronavirus pandemic started in the first place? Where are the Democrats on investigating this?
"I don't think this should be a partisan issue. Is there any more pressing question in the world that how this thing started? Because we're talking about one of the biggest most destructive crises at least since World War II. And we're also talking about one of the biggest media failures in a century, right? We're talking about whether we can trust basic media sources for accurate information. And I just don't understand the lack of interest in getting to the bottom of it.
"I know this is a very tangled web. I know this is a Pepe Silvia thing. But this is all open-source information. You can double-check me on it. We have to get to the bottom of this, if for no other reason, than we want to prevent a pandemic like this from ever happening again. And if we uncover that there was a ton of laziness or lack of oversight from our federal government, or even from Congress in terms of scrutinizing these grants that went to EcoHealth and that went to Wuhan Institute of Virology, we need to fix that. That's unacceptable performance from our federal government."
Background:
Rep. Gallagher has been fighting to find answers on the origins of COVID-19, writing to Dr. Fauci earlier this month to ask whether Dr. Fauci supported an investigation into the lab leak hypothesis and whether U.S. taxpayer dollars went to fund risky gain of function research that some scientists have suggested could be responsible for the outbreak of this disease. He has alsointroduced legislation that would declassify all U.S. intelligence surrounding the origins of COVID-19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.