Scientist Peter Daszak pitched the project to the U.S. Army, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and a dozen other agencies at a 2018 event held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), according to the documents.
Speakers at the 2018 event included officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and DARPA, including Jim Gimlett, who ultimately rejected the proposal, according to a webpage for the event.
“What we didn’t know was that that proposal wasn’t just at DARPA, it was presented to 15 different agencies,” Dr. Paul told The Epoch Times.
The proposal, dubbed DEFUSE, outlined experiments that would make coronaviruses more virulent by inserting a furin cleavage site, which is present in COVID-19.
After the COVID-19 sequence was disclosed in January 2020, showing that the virus contained a furin cleavage site, the agencies should have raised alarms, according to Dr. Paul.
“None of these agencies, nobody that was at the briefing, has ever informed anyone of the danger that this was coming from the Chinese lab because they were asking for money to do something very similar,” he said.
Dr. Paul is the ranking Republican member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
USAID Administrator Samantha Power on April 10 acknowledged that her agency participated in the event.
“U.S. government agencies, often on good days, show up for one another, go to each other’s meetings,” she told Dr. Paul. “This is not something that USAID ever considered funding or was ever engaged on in some substantive way.”
Ms. Power said she would consider making the USAID representative who heard the proposal available to the senator for an interview.
Most of the U.S. agencies that were briefed did not respond to requests for comment.
- NIH
- National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
- Department of Health and Human Services
- DARPA
- USAID
- Department of Agriculture
- Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Navy
- CDC
- Army
- Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response
- U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
- National Institute of Food and Agriculture
- Military Operational Medicine Research Program
- Defense Health Agency
“COVID is a public health and national security nightmare that was caused by reckless taxpayer-funded animal experimenters who need to be reined in before they prompt another pandemic.”
Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that any people who knew about the EcoHealth proposal “but who did not speak up when it became clear such a novel coronavirus was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic has significant accounting to do.”
EcoHealth stated this week that the DEFUSE proposal was only submitted to DARPA.
“The list of EcoHealth Alliance partners shared at a January 2018 ‘Proposer’s Day’ event includes people and organizations who were not ultimately involved in drafting the DEFUSE proposal, which was submitted months later,” the group stated. “Furthermore, the presence of a federal agency at the Proposer’s Day event does not mean that they had detailed information on the DEFUSE proposal, which had not yet been drafted.”
Dr. Paul said any statements from EcoHealth need to be “taken with a grain of salt” considering its role in funneling money to the lab in Wuhan.
The documents also show that a scientist named Vincent Munster, an employee of the Rocky Mountain Lab, run by the NIAID—headed at the time by Dr. Anthony Fauci—was listed as a partner for the project, according to Dr. Paul. A query to Mr. Munster received an out-of-office message in response.
More on Experiments
Dr. Paul’s announcement comes after members of Congress said Mr. Daszak would be appearing before several committees on May 1 to answer questions.“If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the U.S. side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team,” Mr. Daszak wrote in one comment unearthed by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know. “Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well.”
Those remarks appear to be “materially inconsistent” with Mr. Daszak’s earlier claims, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), chairwoman of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, and other committee members said.
“These revelations undermine your credibility as well as every factual assertion you made during your transcribed interview,” they told Mr. Daszak.
EcoHealth stated without providing details that the committee members made inaccurate allegations.
“[Mr. Daszak] looks forward to answering the committee’s questions, clarifying the areas of misunderstanding, and informing them about the vital research that EcoHealth Alliance conducts globally,” it stated.
