Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said that 15 federal agencies were aware of a proposed project from 2018 that would have allowed virus research organization EcoHealth Alliance to genetically engineer a virus similar to SARS-CoV-2, sparking concerns about the extent to which the Trump administration should have been aware of the risks of research into dangerous viruses before the start of the COVID pandemic.
The project ultimately was not funded, but EcoHealth Alliance-funded research in Wuhan, China, has been at the center of speculation on the part of congressional investigators about the origins of the coronavirus.
“At least 15 federal agencies knew from the beginning of the pandemic that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were seeking federal funding in 2018 to create a virus genetically very similar if not identical to COVID-19,” Paul said on Tuesday. “Disturbingly, not one of these 15 agencies spoke up to warn us that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been pitching this research.”
Documents revealed by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, of which Paul is the top Republican member, indicate that several agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Homeland Security, were aware of EcoHealth’s hope to create in China what Paul calls “a novel chimeric virus” with pandemic potential.
EcoHealth Alliance and the DEFUSE project
EcoHealth, a research nonprofit organization with the goal of preventing pandemics, has played a central role in the congressional investigation into the origins of COVID because of the grant funding the organization receives from the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies.
Since 2021, Paul has drawn attention to a 2018 grant proposal from EcoHealth to the Department of Defense under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The research proposal, referred to as the DEFUSE project, would have been conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
House Republicans recently uncovered information indicating that EcoHealth President Peter Daszak may have misled DARPA as to how much of the research would have been done in the United States rather than China in order to ensure that the DOD was “comfortable with [the] team.”
If the project had been funded by DARPA, the research would have involved manipulation of the spike proteins on various viruses related to SARS-CoV, which would have subsequently been injected into “humanized mice to assess [the modified viruses’] capability to cause SARS-like disease.”
Paul said that the DEFUSE project would have specifically inserted a furin cleavage site onto a coronavirus, a key feature of SARS-CoV-2 that makes it easily transmissible among humans.
The DARPA “PREEMPT Proposers Day”
Paul announced first in an opinion piece on Tuesday that he had received documentation from the Biden administration that key agencies in public health and national security were made aware of the DEFUSE project at an event hosted by DARPA before the outbreak of the pandemic.
Because the DEFUSE project was submitted to the DARPA under the PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats, or PREEMPT, program, EcoHealth and the WIV were invited to participate in the so-called PREEMPT Proposers Day.
“Under duress, the administration finally released documents that show that the DEFUSE project was pitched to at least 15 agencies in January 2018,” Paul said.
According to Paul, this means that these agencies “knew from the beginning of the pandemic” about the project, including the NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under the leadership of then-Director Anthony Fauci.
“Did NIAID warn us? Did Anthony Fauci warn us? No! All lips remained sealed,” Paul wrote in his op-ed.
House Republicans investigate EcoHealth
Daszak participated in a closed-door transcribed interview session with the House Oversight and Energy and Commerce committees in November.
Discrepancies between Daszak’s testimony and documents about the DEFUSE project uncovered via Freedom of Information Act requests prompted the committees to schedule a public hearing to question Daszak about the project.
Daszak is slated to appear for public testimony on May 1.
When asked about Paul’s revelation, a spokesperson for the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic told the Washington Examiner that members will be likely asking Daszak about the degree of federal knowledge about the DEFUSE project outside of DARPA.
“Dr. Peter Daszak has many questions to answer when he appears before the Select Subcommittee in May,” said the subcommittee spokesperson. “The American people deserve a full transparent investigation into the relationship between EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including any funding federal agencies reviewed and granted prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
EcoHealth Alliance denies any role in COVID-19
A spokesperson for EcoHealth said in a statement that Paul’s opinion piece is full of “several unfounded and false claims.”
“EcoHealth Alliance did submit a proposal for a project named DEFUSE to DARPA for funding, but the agency declined to select the project for support and the proposed research was never done,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The spokesperson maintained that EcoHealth did not pursue funding from any other federal agency for the DEFUSE project.
In response to a different opinion piece from Paul published in February related to dangerous pathogen research, the EcoHealth spokesperson previously told the Washington Examiner that the research conducted at the WIV had nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2.
“The fact is that the bat coronavirus research conducted by EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology could not have started the COVID-19 pandemic,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also said that if the DEFUSE project had been approved by DARPA, it would have been carefully monitored by the DOD.
