Of all the reactions to President Biden’s vaccine mandate, I imagine Dr. Anthony Fauci was the most grateful. This controversial decision to require vaccination for around 100 million Americans pushed a number of other stories out of the headlines. One of those was the confirmation that Dr. Fauci was probably lying to Senator Rand Paul and the public in Congressional testimony last May when he said the United States did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
According to a new investigative report from the Intercept, NIH documents prove that the US was funding, and a US NGO was participating in, gain-of-function research on bat viruses at the lab. Here are some money quotes from the report:
“Documents obtained by The Intercept contain new evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the nearby Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, along with their collaborator, the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, have engaged in what the U.S. government defines as “gain-of-function research of concern,” intentionally making viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them, despite stipulations from a U.S. funding agency that the money not be used for that purpose.
Grant money for the controversial experiment came from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci.
The experiment also raises questions about assertions from Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins that NIH-funded projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology did not involve gain-of-function research. In May, Fauci testified before Congress: “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” The documents do not establish whether Fauci was directly aware of the work.”
There is some nuance in the report, and even a minority of experts who say that what was happening at WIV was not exactly gain-of-function research. Furthermore, the report takes pains to say that this NIH funded research cannot necessarily be tied to the development of COVID-19 or its release from the lab. The most important revelation is that either Dr. Fauci was unaware that an agency he oversaw was sponsoring gain-of-function research at WIV or he has a non-typical interpretation of what constitutes GOF and failed to share this with Congress.
But for the moment let’s move away from Fauci, from COVID specifically and talk about this fucking weird NGO, the EcoHealth Alliance. For reasons of being an insane person, I was trying to read papers coming out of the WIV closer to the beginning of the pandemic. On one of the first papers to come out of the lab in 2005, Bats Are Natural Reservoirs of SARS-Like Coronaviruses, has a number of named Chinese authors along with authors Craig Smith, Jonathan Epstein and Peter Daszak.
That last name is particularly interesting. Daszak has now come into the public eye because he runs the EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that takes government money and funnels it towards GOF. You may remember, despite the obvious conflict of interest, Daszak was a principal organizer of a letter in Lancet claiming that the lab leak theory was impossible. We also now know thanks to Vanity Fair’s release of thousands of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails that Daszak was in contact with Fauci during the pandemic. At least one other author on the 2005 bat Coronavirus paper, Dr. Hume Field, now works for Daszak at the EcoHealth Alliance. On April 18, 2020 Daszak sent Fauci an email specifically thanking him for dispelling the lab leak theory.
A funny addendum here, when the WHO sent an “investigative team” to check out safety conditions at the WIV at the very beginning of the pandemic, the team included…wait for it…Peter Daszak. Other global health organizations have objected to this clear conflict of interest.
Now just what the hell is the EcoHealth Alliance and why is an obscure NGO at the center of all this shit. We don’t know that much about the group except that it has pumping GOF for at least the past two decades, and as cited above Daszak wielded influence over early coverage of the pandemic and still plays a role in the WHO investigation about COVID-19’s origin. Here is how EHA describes itself on its website.
“EcoHealth Alliance is an international nonprofit dedicated to a 'One Health' approach to protecting the health of people, animals and the environment from emerging infectious diseases. The organization formed with the merger of two highly respected organizations, Wildlife Trust and the Consortium for Conservation Medicine. The urgent concern for wildlife conservation and the overall health of our planet has led EcoHealth Alliance to become an environmental science and public health leader working to prevent pandemics in global hotspot regions across the globe and to promote conservation.”
And here’s the thing: throughout this crisis, the American and Chinese responses to the pandemic have been placed in opposition to one another, and at various points China has been blamed for the conditions under which the virus spread (either through poor safety conditions at the lab or lack of hygiene at the wet market). But it was not a Chinese effort that created the conditions for COVID-19, it was a global effort led by the United States.
In 2014, President Obama temporarily paused all gain-of-function research in the United States. This pause was in part the result of public and expert concern at the dangers inherent in the practice. But the research cited in the Intercept report covers a number of years, including 2014-2018 and the entire period where GOF research was paused within the United States. In other words, even as the United States was responding to political pressure to ban GOF at home, it was actively funding the practice in China. So many things work like this, and although we outsource all sorts of stuff we aren’t allowed to do hear anymore (torture, child labor), China is a regular host despite the supposed acrimony between the two states.
And this is the point, when global organizations like the EcoHealth Alliance can shop around for a national venue for their projects, the organization isn’t subject to any specific national politics. This fact is further empowered when there are well-placed bureaucrats who know which countries might be willing to host research, which might fund etc. This sort of global enterprise, managed by a private actor, but informed and guided by government officials, essentially jumps the bounds of sovereignty. It is a way for technocrats to pursue their projects whether or not a given population rejects them.
Every major crisis of the past few years comes down to this. During Brexit, leavers were told that it was impossible for the UK to actually break away from EU regulations on migration and trade without the economy collapsing. In other words, you don’t have sovereignty. When the American public rejected war, and elected sequential anti-war presidents, the generals successfully forestalled the exit from Afghanistan for another 12 years because we had security and imperial responsibilities on the ground. In other words, the people did not have sovereignty. And when an American president responded to pressure to halt dangerous research within the United States, non-profits that get taxpayer money coordinated with public servants to pick up the slack at a different lab in a different place.
Whatever benefits these global projects bring, they require a coordination and continuity that is unresponsive to domestic politics. That is, globalization is incompatible with democracy, and probably a number of other political systems. I don’t hold out much hope that globalization can be stopped or reversed, as global connectivity is more a technological development than something willed into being by any group of elites. But elites are taking advantage of this system at some cost to their legitimacy. And as far as I’m concerned governments that operate inside this system cannot and should not enjoy anything like democratic legitimacy. Not while Peter Daszak is out there.