THE US government backed a risky virus-hunting project led by the Wuhan lab at the centre of the Covid origins debate, The Sun can reveal.
The Global Virome Project – a pitch to collect every virus in the world led by Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Batwoman” and New York-based EcoHealth Alliance – had allies in the US government, new documents show.
Security guards keeping watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit from the World Health Organisation in 2021[/caption]
Peter Daszak from New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, pictured in 2021, worked closely with Wuhan Institute of Virology[/caption]
Former US Ambassador Terry Branstad – pictured with Chinese president Xi Jinping – signed a cable endorsing a virus-hunting project involving the Wuhan lab[/caption]
EcoHealth Alliance, whose mission is to prevent pandemics, has been under fire since the early days of the pandemic over its bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab.
The group has faced scrutiny over whether Covid may have emerged from research at the lab that was funded by the US government.
One of their projects, the Global Virome Project, aimed to collect nearly every unknown virus in the world with the potential to infect humans – thought to be 500,000 or more.
Co-led by EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak and Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli, they planned to work with labs across the world on the ambitious 10-year project at a cost of $3billion.
China’s biggest genome sequencing company – which has ties to the Chinese military and is now blacklisted by the Pentagon – was set to be a collaborator.
And China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences was also on board.
Now, new documents – obtained by US Right to Know – show that the US government backed the controversial virus-hunting project.
Records show how the US State Department and USAID helped get it off the ground from 2016 to 2019.
They show that the US forged ahead despite unanswered questions around who would own the data – and whether the Chinese partners would be transparent.
The documents also show the government knew the project could be a national security risk.
A “draft pitch” seen by the State Department warned that a lack of “US leadership” meant the Chinese government “could take a leading position”.
The document is dated May 20, 2019 – just months before the first cases of Covid began circulating in Wuhan.
And it warned that “limited access to the information… may have serious national security implications”.
A comment on the draft pitch states that “an equivalent statement will be inserted into the Chinese doc”.
In other words, US institutions, such as EcoHealth Alliance, were told that China going ahead with the project could be a national security risk to America.
And at the same time, Chinese institutions were told that the US going ahead with the project would pose a security risk to China.
The name of the US government employee who read the pitch and made the comments has been redacted.
But it points to the close ties between the government and American scientists working in China on virus research.
USAID – which coordinates its budget with the State Department – funded with Global Virome Project with $1.3 million, according to a letter sent by Senator Roger Marshall.
The USAID also funded Daszak’s previous project – a $210million virus hunting programme called PREDICT.
Since the Covid pandemic, the project has come under fire due to the leading roles of Daszak and Shi – who worked on risky coronavirus engineering research in Wuhan.
The project aimed to gather intel on 99 per cent of the world’s mystery viral threats, EcoHealth Alliance said in 2017.
The Chinese government has shown a strong interest in the Global Virome Project and is not shy in funding projects where Chinese scientists will take a lead
State Department cable
By building a catalogue of viruses and experimenting with each one to work out whether they threaten humans, the aim was to prevent future pandemics.
But it’s this very research that many experts – and the FBI – fear may have sparked the Covid pandemic.
Experts claim the Wuhan lab endangered the world by carrying out so-called “gain of function” experiments to engineer chimeric viruses.
This “souping up” involves extracting viruses from animals to engineer in a lab to make them more transmissible and deadly to humans.
In 2018, funding for one of Daszak and Shi’s projects was refused by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) over safety concerns.
The proposal – called DEFUSE and leaked by a whistleblower in 2021 – shows they planned to engineer a virus that has a striking similarity to the genetic make-up of Covid.
Despite being refused funding by DARPA, questions have been raised over whether the research was funded by another source and led to the pandemic.
‘RISKY ENDEAVOURS’
Unclassified State Department correspondence from the American Embassy in Beijing also endorsed the Global Virome Project in 2017.
The cable, signed by Terry Branstad – the US ambassador to China at the time – hails collaboration between the US and China in the search for the world’s deadliest viruses.
Shi – China’s “Batwoman” – is mentioned in the cable, along with other government scientists in China.
And it says Chinese government funding had already been given for the Chinese arm of the project, led by Shi.
The cable says: “The Chinese government has shown a strong interest in the Global Virome Project and is not shy in funding projects where Chinese scientists will take a lead.”
But the cable acknowledged that “like all risky endeavours, failure is a possibility”.
It said questions about ownership of genomic data and viral samples had not yet been answered.
The cable reads: “Who will own the samples that are collected by many countries? Where will they be analyzed? Will all GVP data be freely available to the public?”
Despite concerns, collaboration between US and Chinese institutions on cutting-edge virology in Wuhan moved forward.
Today, viral samples with potential clues about the pandemic remain unexplored and inaccessible.
When the pandemic hit, at least 11,051 samples were left in freezers at the Wuhan lab by US government-backed scientists, documents show.
These include 6,380 samples from bats, 3,000 human samples and 1,671 rodent samples.
And some of the samples are from Yunnan Province – the area in China where coronaviruses closely related to Covid can be found.
The samples remain inaccessible in Wuhan freezers, according to Daszak.
In March 2020, the State Department tried to obtain viral samples from the lab – but failed.
With funding secured for collaboration between the Wuhan lab and EcoHealth Alliance, questions remain over whether scientists moved forward with the plans to engineer coronaviruses with the features of Covid.
BLACKLISTED FIRM
The 2017 unclassified cable also strikes an uncertain tone about the Chinese’s largest genomics sequencing company being a partner on the project.
Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) had offered to test 30 per cent of the virus samples – a significant stake.
But the cable said: “BGI’s commitment… to GVP’s values of open, free access to data has not been officially stated.”
It added that BGI “did not provide details on how that sequencing would take place or where the subsequent data would be housed”.
And it pointed out that “BGI has enjoyed significant funding from the Chinese government”.
A government official visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in October 2017 – one month after the cable – and was not allowed inside the laboratories.
Still, American and Chinese institutions continued to collaborate on virus hunting work.
Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology[/caption]
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a world leader in coronavirus research[/caption]
In the seven years since the 2017 cable proposed collaboration, BGI’s ambitions have come into fuller view.
In 2021, BGI was blacklisted by the Pentagon as a Chinese military company.
A bombshell investigation claimed that it was collecting genetic data using a popular test taken by millions of pregnant women.
The State Department and USAID apparently backed the Global Virome Project to gain insight about the risk of disease spillover from animals to humans.
EcoHealth also pitched it as a way to help prevent biowarfare and lab accidents.
But after the outbreak of Covid, the US government was urged to axe funding for the Global Virome Project.
Ping Chen, who was the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases rep at the US Embassy in Beijing in 2020, said: “USAID funded Global Virome Project and worked very closely with WIV.
“Maybe they want to revisit their decision… not to continue the support to the virome project after Covid-19.”
The Sun and USRTK have contacted the State Department, USAID and Daszak for comment.
The US government has since suspended EcoHealth Alliance from receiving government funds.
The non-profit and Daszak are both under investigation over failures to properly oversee the research in Wuhan.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was also banned from receiving US government funding for 10 years in September last year for a failure to hand over lab notebooks and data.
Grants from US agencies, including National Institutes of Heath, made up most of EcoHealth Alliance’s budget – which was about $14million in 2022.
EcoHealth Alliance has denied any wrongdoing over its experiments – and categorically denied any link to the origins of Covid.
The funding suspension came after The Sun revealed that the US government has dished out some $60million of public money to the organisation since the start of the pandemic – despite questions still raging over its work at the Wuhan lab.
The State Department facilitates responsible international cooperation to address shared challenges, including to mitigate threats of infectious diseases
US State Department spokesperson
They had continued to collect and test hundreds of samples of bat coronaviruses since 2020 with US government funding.
The FBI and the US Department of Energy believe Covid most likely leaked from a lab in China.
Dozens of experts, including the World Health Organisation, have also suggested Covid could have escaped from the Wuhan lab – and linked the outbreak to projects by EcoHealth Alliance.
Nearly five years after the pandemic started, the world still has no definitive answers on where the virus came from.
The natural origins theory contends that Covid jumped from bats into humans through an “intermediate host”.
But an animal host has not been found after four years of searching.
China has refused to cooperate with a full-scale probe into the origins and experts claim a “cover up” is continuing today.