The highly dangerous gain-of-function (GoF) research and funding managed by EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), "began before Fauci's NiH or NIAID became involved," says whistleblower, Andrew Huff, Ph.D., MS who is the former VP of Data and Technology at EcoHealth Alliance (EHA). Moreover, says Huff, EcoHealth Alliance under the direction of its "President, Peter Daszak, was not adhering to its mission of conservation work...EcoHealth was not collecting the right data nor was it employing the methods or models necessary to forecast or prevent pandemics as it states in its mission," says Huff. What was it doing? Huff says it was largely a glorified intelligence collection scheme. "So the Chinese got our superior biotech and, in return, the U.S. thought they would gain transparent access to what was going on in the labs."
Huff also says that not all virus research was equal:
"Normally you’d look at all viruses, and EcoHealth under Daszak had pretty much predetermined it was only Coronaviruses we were going to study. It was the main focus of our work. The U.S. State Department, the missions, and the consulates were cooperating. These were unusually, heavily micromanaged projects. Everything we did and everyone we met with was questioned. And it was strange we were doing such high-risk work in China."
Additionally, Huff states that Daszak seemed to be very interested in the NIAID funding that would justify researching the diseases that would promote vaccine development.
EcoHealth Alliance Pandemic Prediction
Huff spoke with UncoverDC about the inner workings of EHA. He began to look at the way research was tied to funding sources. While participating in various events, meetings, and board meetings he saw Daszak making decisions that were both dangerous and often made no sense. Often Huff's input would be dismissed. He saw many odd things, which, at the time, were puzzling. For example, when he repeatedly weighed in about his reservations about performing GoF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Daszak summarily dismissed his concerns. Ultimately, Huff left in April of 2016 because he could no longer in good conscience continue to work there.
Funding of Grants
Huff says EcoHealth partners with and receives funding from a variety of sources such as other government agencies, and private entities or foundations like Google, Wellcome Trust, and the Gates Foundation. A variety of funding sources allows scientists who know how to work the grant system to leverage the funding they need. It also allows scientists to ensure the grants are there when they need them.
The grant funding trail can be difficult to trace, lacking transparency at times. Multiple sources and types of funding make it easy to hide what is being funded and when. Importantly, says Huff, almost all of the research that EcoHealth Alliance does "is extremely profitable." However, because EcoHealth is a non-profit, they are allowed to funnel the profits they make back into research. The ability to funnel funds back paired with the fact that all research is started ahead of the funding to provide justification for grants, allows EcoHealth to do gain-of-function research without putting their research on the radar until several years later in many cases. It is common practice to “work before the receipt of funding to complete the work. This is how the best scientists collect the necessary ‘preliminary data’ to obtain funding on highly competitive grants," Huff continued.
The timeline below shows the "work before the receipt of funding" timeline starting in 2013. Fauci's NIAID funding GoF research began in June of 2014.
EcoHealth Bat GoF Contract
Additionally, various types of funding and their ever-shifting movement between cost centers allow scientists to obtain and keep their grants. Private funding, for example, is often unrestricted. Finally, says Huff, other entities like USAID provide funding that essentially allows for intelligence collection from highly sensitive labs around the world with virtually little benefit to the United States. The U.S. gets the raw end of the deal in secretive countries like China "because they do not need our money," says Huff. "They trade intelligence for our biotech and intellectual property. It amounts to intelligence collection," he says. Huff believes the EcoHealth Alliance partnership with China is one such intelligence collection operation.
USAID: A Cover for Intelligence Collection
"The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) should not be involved in infectious disease research and funding," says Huff. USAID has been involved since at least 2009 in the funding of zoonotic research through its Global Health Security Program, according to its website. The 2009 USAID Predict program is the primary programmatic driver of such funding. Predict is a global surveillance program that aims to predict pandemics by monitoring zoonotic diseases to protect the welfare of citizens worldwide. Incidentally, funding for Predict was shut down during the Trump administration.
USAID Predict/ Global Surveillance
Huff contends that USAID has its hands in funding dangerous science when really, it has no business doing so. Huff also believes USAID probably engaged in funding EcoHealth research to provide a front for U.S. intelligence agencies (CIA) to collect data from labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan. China does not need U.S. money. Instead, it needs the biotech, scientists, and the intellectual property of American bioresearch entities like EcoHealth alliance.
To be clear, says, Huff, "China does not need money to fund its research. What it does need, however, is our intellectual property. Partnerships like this," he continued, "Should not be involved in infectious disease research. It looks like intelligence collection. It is the dumbest intelligence collection scam ever," he concluded.
Why is it the dumbest intelligence collection scam ever, you may ask? Huff explained, one reason is the Dual Use Research of Concern or DURC and that Gain-of-function (GoF) research is DURC. He says EHA's GoF research on bat coronaviruses in countries like China can be used "peacefully and/or as a weapon." The other reason the partnership with China is a "dumb" idea, according to Huff, is that if, in fact, intelligence collection was the goal in China, EcoHealth Alliance failed miserably. Huff continues:
"Look at what has happened over the past two years. The virus leaked or escaped. How it got here doesn't matter. Our intelligence collection was sh#t. This was gain-of-function research. University systems don't have the right security in place. WIV obviously didn't have the right security in place. China can't be trusted. EcoHealth should never have shared our biotech with the Chinese and USAID should not have been funding dangerous research."
EHA partnered with WIV and several other institutes in China, to study novel bat coronaviruses and their connection with the "risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife," according to a 2013 research grant, entitled "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence" awarded to President Peter Daszak of EcoHealth alliance. Ralph Baric and his research lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill trained and supplied many of the scientists to support the work because, in China, the biotechnology and advancements in the field were way behind the U.S.
EcoHealth Partners/China
USAID Used as Front for CIA Abroad
There is evidence Huff may be correct about the connection between USAID programs and the CIA—Huff says it is well known in governmental agency circles. Numerous stories, including those in this FOIA reading room show USAID has been used as cover by the CIA to collect intelligence and affect policy abroad. An excerpt from one such story is featured below:
USAID/CIA front
The USAID Predict Project
Huff provided UncoverDC with a number of important documents from his tenure at EHA. Included was a PowerPoint presentation on USAID's Predict 1 & 2 program. The Predict program is a project run by USAID's Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) program. The 34-slide presentation clearly lays out a global mission to hunt down virus/disease risk with a major focus on coronaviruses. Another notable goal of the program is to drive unified, global governmental policy on disease. Slide 29 states the intention to validate "One Health Approaches" by "promoting policies and practices that reduce the risk of virus evolution, spillover, amplification, and spread" with future plans to partner with World Bank.
World Bank/Predict Partnership/slide 29
Predict 2/Funding EPT/slide 30
According to its own website, USAID is "an independent federal government agency that receives overall policy guidance from the Secretary of State. USAID provides economic, development, and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the United States." Huff says that USAID's mission does not manifestly include the funding of dangerous research for entities like EcoHealth Alliance. The first two pages of its website seem to confirm his opinion.
USAID/Who We Are
USAID: Mission, Vision, and Values
Daszak's 2015 InQTel Pitch Deck
InQTel is a CIA venture capital investment firm, a well-known fact in intelligence circles. In 2015, Daszak pitched his research to InQTel with a detailed PowerPoint presentation entitled “Identifying predictable patterns in disease emergence.”
InQTel Pitch Deck/2015/Slide 14
InQTel Pitch Deck/Daszak/Slide15
It was around this same time that Daszak discussed with Huff his having been asked to work with the CIA. "For about 6 weeks after and into 2016," Daszak gave Huff updates on his CIA involvement. However, at one point Daszak stopped sharing information. "Once you sign on with InQTel," says Huff, "You sign all kinds of non-disclosure agreements. InQTel is dark money. It is very possible Daszak signed off on a deal with them to help fund his research." While Huff wrote a letter of resignation in April, he ultimately left in June of 2016.
Censors and Daszak's Deletions and Denials
Early Tuesday morning, Huff's publicist contacted UncoverDC to say that her account had been temporarily suspended for sharing a tweet that Daszak deleted about a Chinese scientist, Shi Zhengli, speaking at a conference.
Daszak Tweet/2019/Deleted
In her tweet, she had stated "Inquiring minds might ask, why would this Dec. 2019 tweet about the #Wuhan Institute of Virology and the international scientific collaboration be deleted if there was nothing to hide?"
Delete or Else
In 2018, Daszak posted a series of tweets concerning EHA's research on SARS-CoV and its ability to "infect and cause illness in the humanized mouse SARS model." The research purports to support the "notion that some bat SARSr-CoVs are able to directly infect humans without intermediate hosts." Clearly, Daszak was conducting research on the subject and Shi Zhengli is one of the contributing scientists for the work.
And yet, Daszak's Oct. 29, 2021 tweet denies EcoHealth Alliance involvement in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The tweet came on the heels of a letter from the NIH allegedly proving that Fauci had not lied when he said the NIH with their grant to EcoHealth Alliance (Award Number R01AI110964) was not involved in GoF research and could not have caused SARS-CoV-2. The total for the funding of this award was $3,748,715.
A news report out of India shows video clips from 2000 and 2016 of Daszak showing him speaking about EcoHealth Alliance's collaboration to manipulate a "killer SARs like the virus" at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Gain-Of-Function Research Should be Treated Like a Bioweapon
Sooner or later, the evidence surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic will all rise to the surface. In the meantime, Huff says the U.S. should re-evaluate where it allows its bioweapons research to take place.
Several institutions, including UNC-Chapel Hill, are still doing dangerous GoF work in the U.S., says Huff. This is "sensitive and dangerous work should be performed in the National Laboratory System or Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) that are secured for bioweapons research. Unfortunately, it is the academic institutions or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that often get the funding." Huff also says that Americans need to understand that the intelligence community is inextricably involved in the "cover-up of the True Origin of COVID." Huff states, "It is time we treat the research of bioweapons the same way we treat the development of our nuclear weapons."
