VIDEO: Peter Daszak confirms Fauci funded his dangerous coronavirus research

By Art Moore

Peter Daszak and Dr. Anthony Fauci (via Twitter)

The evidence keeps mounting that, despite his vehement denials, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s agency funded dangerous “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that aimed to engineer SARS viruses among bats in China and make them transmissible to humans.

The latest is the unearthing of 2017 video in which British zoologist Peter Daszak told a global health conference his “work on coronaviruses in China” was conducted with “funding through” Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Pulse reported.

Daszak, speaking on a panel that included Fauci, said that with “funding through NIAID to work on coronaviruses in China, we were able to test out this idea of predicting what the next emerging diseases might be.”

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony S. Fauci attends a coronavirus update briefing Tuesday, April 7, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)

“So we’ve all heard of SARS. We know that SARS is carried by civets. Well, actually, the host of SARS-like viruses, the viruses that the SARS coronavirus emerged from are bats,” Daszak said at the “Healthy People, Healthy Ecosystems” conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.

Daszak and Fauci were part of a three-member panel with the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Anne Schuchat. Titled “Future of Infectious Disease Pandemics: From Ebola to Zika, and Beyond,” the panel focused on pandemic preparedness.

A description of the panel said: “Although much is known about how to detect and respond to existing infections, more research is needed to predict the likelihood of their emergence and spread, and to improve the precision and timeliness of public health responsiveness.”

On Wednesday, the Telegraph of London reported a U.S. grant proposal shows Daszak and his team of researchers at the Wuhan lab sought funding for a plan to make coronavirus particles transmissible to humans and release them in bat populations. The 2018 proposal confirms researchers funded by the U.S. government were conducting dangerous gain-of-function research, engineering coronaviruses that possibly escaped the lab and caused the global pandemic.

The research – to make the SARS, MERS and flu viruses more virulent and transmissible to help understand them and prepare treatments and vaccines – was so dangerous that the Obama administration put a moritorium on it in 2014. The New York Times reported when the moratorium was lifted in 2017 that the research “alters germs to make them more lethal.”

“Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic,” the Times reported at at the time.

‘World without borders’

The 2017 conference host, the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, said the event supported its vision for a “world without borders,” the National Pulse reported.

Daszak said his team “worked in China to go out and do surveillance in other bat species and say how many other SARS-like viruses are there.”

“Is there something even close to SARS? And sure enough, there was,” he said.

The panel summary said disease outbreaks “illustrate that we are ill-prepared to mitigate the impact of a novel virus or prevent its emergence.”

“A global initiative to identify and characterize every significant viral threat circulating in the world is achievable over the next ten years – a critical and essential step towards ending the pandemic era.”

See video of Daszak’s remarks:

Daszak silenced debate over origins

Last Friday, the British journal The Lancet published a letter from 16 scientists calling for another look at the lab-leak theory.

The scientists said The Lancet’s publishing last year of a letter organized by Daszak disregarding the lab-leak theory as “conspiracy” had “a silencing effect on the wider scientific debate, including among science journalists.”

In July, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice accusing Fauci of lying to Congress about his role in funding research at the Wuhan lab.

Among many confrontations in Senate hearings, Paul asked Fauci in May if the NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Fauci declared “the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute.”

Fauci is seen on video at a January 2018 NIAID Advisory Council meeting announcing the reinstatement of gain-of-function research and defending its use.

See the video:

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Art Moore

Art Moore, co-author of the best-selling book "See Something, Say Nothing," entered the media world as a PR assistant for the Seattle Mariners and a correspondent covering pro and college sports for Associated Press Radio. He reported for a Chicago-area daily newspaper and was senior news writer for Christianity Today magazine and an editor for Worldwide Newsroom before joining WND shortly after 9/11. He earned a master's degree in communications from Wheaton College. Read more of Art Moore's articles here.


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