Federal public health officials and others who have covered up information about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic could face prosecution, the chairman of a special House subcommittee investigating the outbreak tells The Post — with Dr. Anthony Fauci due to appear before the panel on Monday.
“We want the DOJ to weigh in, hopefully they can do something honestly and fairly,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in an exclusive interview Thursday. “But at the same time, we can make criminal referrals. I think we should.”
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has already recommended a criminal probe of Dr. Peter Daszak, the disgraced president of Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance, which received millions in US grants that helped fund experiments on modified bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
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The panel has also unearthed shocking information about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the failures of the US pandemic response and taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China — the city where the virus emerged more than four years ago.
“The work they were doing was risky,” the chairman noted of the Wuhan experiments, “and, you can see through reverse engineering, was capable of creating something like COVID-19.”
“I started looking at this when we were in lockdown in 2020, through the [House] Intelligence Committee, and what creating a chimera was all about, and what gain-of-function research was about, and it kind of frightened me as far as bioweapons and that’s a new threat going into the future,” added Wenstrup, who is also a doctor and retired US Army colonel.
In a shocking trove of emails obtained by the subcommittee, Fauci’s former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. David Morens, admitted to using a private account to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about EcoHealth’s Wuhan grant, claimed he deleted records related to it — and said he helped his boss to do the same through a “secret back channel.”
“At one point, Dr. Morens said that he never talked to Tony Fauci about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance,” Wenstrup said in reference to Morens’ congressional testimony of May 22, in which he confirmed the emails were sent but dismissed them as “jokes.”
“But he did do that, and we have the proof of that now, and he talks about how he did,” he added of the more than 30,000 records Morens handed over.
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When asked whether Fauci’s two-day transcribed interview from January with the COVID subcommittee also included false claims about not being “involved” in EcoHealth’s funding of gain-of-function research, Wenstrup would only say: “Somebody’s not telling the truth.”
Fauci, 83, said at the time that he did not “recall any specific interaction” with Daszak before the pandemic — and denied having “back-and-forth discussions” with EcoHealth’s president.
But the Morens emails reveal the ex-Biden White House medical adviser expressing “concern” for Daszak and the suspension of EcoHealth’s research grant.
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“Peter, from Tony’s numerous recent comments to me, and from what Francis has been vocal about over the past 5 days, they are trying to protect you, which also protects their own reputations,” Morens wrote to Daszak on Oct. 25, 2021, just days after a National Institutes of Health (NIH) official disclosed to Congress that EcoHealth violated its grant terms for WIV.
“I had face to face meetings with Tony to discuss science issues,” Morens also said in a Nov. 18, 2021, email. “He asked how Peter was doing, as he often does, and seemed to commiserate with him to a degree.”
Wenstrup said the subcommittee had “a lot of questions” for Fauci — and has requested his private email and cell phone records — based on disclosures about high-level discussions to hide and allegedly destroy records critical to investigating the origins of COVID.
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The NIH funneled more than half a million in taxpayer dollars to WIV for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” between 2014 and 2021, according to a Government Accountability Office report released last year.
The project included “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains.”
The US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General determined that the research on lab mice resulted in a modified virus that was 10,000 times more infectious, which EcoHealth failed to report.
A June 2023 report from the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence also found that WIV was conducting pathogens research between 2017 and 2019 “for defensive and biosecurity needs of the [Chinese] military.”
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NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak testified to the House COVID subcommittee in May that the experiments constituted gain-of-function research — the first agency official to have publicly said so since more than 1.1 million Americans have been killed by the virus.
HHS last year barred WIV from receiving US funding for the next 10 years, and proposed Daszak and his organization for debarment for the next three years, citing its failure to report the research results and adhere to appropriate biosafety levels.
In previous congressional testimony, Fauci and former NIH director Dr. Francis Collins repeatedly denied that the research occurred, and the agency in 2021 replaced a long-held definition of the term on its webpage.
Fauci even published a scientific paper in 2012 describing a remarkably similar chain of events to those that some members of the US intelligence community, scientific experts, former federal officials and members of Congress have suggested led to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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“Putting aside the specter of bioterrorism for the moment, consider this hypothetical scenario: an important gain-of-function experiment involving a virus with serious pandemic potential is performed in a well-regulated, world-class laboratory by experienced investigators, but the information from the experiment is then used by another scientist who does not have the same training and facilities and is not subject to the same regulations,” Fauci wrote in a paper titled “Research on Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus: The Way Forward.”
“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” he asked. “Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario—however remote—should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?”
“Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks,” he concluded.
While Tabak has stressed that the viral sequences that emerged from the “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” were “genetically very distant” from COVID-19, another EcoHealth proposal has been cited as “smoking gun” evidence that the virus was engineered in Wuhan.
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That grant proposal, known as Project DEFUSE, was not funded — but in early drafts and notes on it obtained by US Right to Know, Daszak said he would “downplay” the involvement of a researcher at the Wuhan lab when asking for federal funding.
In his own testimony before Wenstrup’s committee, Daszak admitted that EcoHealth had not received any genomic sequences of viruses from WIV since before the pandemic.
Wenstrup told The Post he has not seen “nearly any evidence” that the coronavirus emerged from nature, while adding that “there’s a lot we’ll never know because of the Chinese.”
Soon after assuming chairmanship of the subcommittee, Wenstrup said the Chinese embassy in Washington sent him a letter saying that they had “grave concerns” about him investigating the origins of COVID.
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The FBI, Energy Department and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield have all pointed to an accidental lab leak as the most likely explanation for the pandemic — with former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe calling it the “only” explanation.
Fauci in his closed-door interview with the House subcommittee acknowledged that the lab leak theory was not a “conspiracy” — despite having prompted a scientific paper in February 2020 to disprove it, which he then cited in a White House press briefing to dismiss concerns.
“I don’t know that anyone in the White House or in the general public knew that he had coordinated to have that paper written,” Wenstrup pointed out, saying the ex-NIAID head testified to having “never looked at any of the scientific research and papers that talked about how this could be made in a lab.”
“We were learning some through intelligence that has been declassified,” he added. “They had problems with leaks and the type of work that the Chinese government was doing, as well as what EcoHealth Alliance was doing — and we were funding it.”
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While Wenstrup remains unconvinced the US could ever definitely prove the origins of COVID-19 without Chinese cooperation, he is calling for harsher penalties for public health bureaucrats who break the rules.
“I’m a soldier, served 25 years,” said the Ohioan, who received a Bronze Star for his work as a combat surgeon during the Iraq War.
Agencies and military branches under the Pentagon umbrella are the only places in Washington “where unethical is unlawful,” he claimed.
“I think we have to set a higher standard for people that work within our agencies,” Wenstrup affirmed. “They may have standards on paper, but what happens when you don’t adhere to them, like we saw with the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court?”
“So now we have criminal liabilities built in,” he said in reference to the recent congressional reauthorization of the government’s spying authorities, “and I think we need to do that probably in every agency.”
“In this case, with Dr. Fauci, he didn’t seem to have much oversight over the billions of dollars that he was OKing to go out the door.”
