Federal authorities suspend and propose personal funding ban for Peter Daszak of Wuhan funder EcoHealth Alliance

The Department of Health and Human Services followed its suspension and proposed expelling EcoHealth Alliance, which funneled taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a suspected source of COVID-19, by doing the same for its president, Peter Daszak, a week later.

The only difference between the documents cited in the May 15 and 21 letters of communication to EcoHealth and Daszak to justify the immediate and proposed permanent funding bans appears to be that the latter refers to the former.

Tuesday’s letter and the formal “Action Referral Memorandum” released Wednesday by the House Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic are from a redacted “Suspension and Expulsion Officer and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisitions.”

It tells Daszak that the suspension and proposed permanent funding ban are “related to your respective roles” as president of EcoHealth and as program director and principal investigator of a grant from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease to study “the risk the emergence of the bat coronavirus”.

Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup said in a news release Wednesday that at a hearing with NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak last week, he called for Daszak’s personal exclusion from functional research and his willful violation of the terms of his NIH scholarship.

This “ensures that (Daszak) will never receive a single penny from U.S. taxpayers again nor will he have the opportunity to create a new, untrustworthy organization,” but it “does not absolve him of responsibility for possibly doing so.” “lied under oath about its relationship with the U.S. Wuhan Institute of Virology and its compliance with NIH grant procedures,” the Ohio lawmaker said.

The White Coat Waste Project, praised four years ago for focusing research on EcoHealth, said Daszak was “the latest domino to fall, but should not be the last” in funding “wasteful and reckless virus hunting and animal testing, who can cause pandemics and produce bioweapons.”

Senior Vice President Justin Goodman noted that the investigation found that the NIH allocated $8 million in 2021 and 2023 to build a new bat laboratory at Colorado State University that would work with infected bats through the EcoHealth Alliance which WCW called “Wuhan West”.