Head of Nonprofit With Ties to Wuhan Lab Should Face Criminal Investigation, House Committee Says

A House committee investigating the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday called for a criminal investigation into…

Children's Health Defense

A House committee investigating the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday called for a criminal investigation into Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, and further investigation into failures in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant-funding procedures.

In a statement released after the hearing — accompanied by a 59-page report — the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic called for permanently terminating funding for EcoHealth Alliance, which has ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Both Republican and Democrat representatives explicitly called for defunding EcoHealth Alliance, which Daszak said receives about $16 million in government grants annually.

However, journalist Paul D. Thacker cautioned against allowing Daszak to become “the fall guy” — because the NIH and Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), aided Daszak “in this multi-year cover-up,” he said.

Thacker, who has extensively covered Daszak and other COVID-19 origins-related news, told The Defender the Democrats seemed more concerned during the hearing about EcoHealth’s paperwork and conflicts of interest than the core allegations of dangerous gain-of-function research.

“The American people deserve accountability, and Daszak should be prosecuted for helping to misdirect USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] funds to create the Global Virome Project,” Thacker said.

He pointed to a 2022 U.S. Right to Know investigation showing Daszak co-founded the Global Virome Project with then-director of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats Program Dennis Carroll, who “siphoned taxpayer funds” to launch the project.

The Global Virome Project aims to collect more than 1 million viruses from wildlife for research to forecast future pandemics.

Thacker also noted the change in the Democrats’ messaging throughout the hearing, which was more critical of Daszak. “No great evidence came to light,” he said. “But something is going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about yet…