House Committee Threatens to Subpoena EcoHealth Chief Peter Daszak

Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, testifies before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in Washington on May 1, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

The House committee that is investigating circumstances regarding the COVID-19 outbreak has threatened to issue a subpoena for more answers from the scientist who worked closely with the Chinese lab in the city where the first COVID-19 infections occurred.

The U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic issued a statement on social media platform X on May 26, calling on Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, to comply with the committee’s requests for information related to the role played by EcoHealth Alliance in risky gain-of-function research in China on bat coronaviruses.

Mr. Daszak recently had his funding suspended by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and he faces possible debarment and a permanent block on receiving funding. HHS officials said in a letter that they hold him responsible for the failure of EcoHealth to adequately monitor the activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese facility from which some have claimed the virus that causes COVID-19 leaked.

Mr. Daszak maintains that he is innocent and has denied that EcoHealth ever funded or conducted gain-of-function research, which involves altering the properties of a pathogen, such as its virulence, in order to study its potential effects on human health.

In a recent post on X, Mr. Daszak claimed that he had not yet been given the opportunity to respond to the latest allegations and vowed to challenge them with “substantial evidence.”

“I want to remind everyone that we have not yet had been given a chance to respond to allegations. We will contest every one of them, with substantial evidence, both to the HHS & publicly,” he wrote.

This prompted a response from the House committee—along with the subpoena threat.

“Dr. Daszak—we have been asking for your purported ’substantial evidence' for more than a year,” the committee wrote. “Yet, @COVIDSelect has not received anything that proves your innocence and @NIH has moved to debar you.”

Further, the House committee wrote that EcoHealth, under Mr. Daszak’s direction, “facilitated dangerous gain-of-function research in China and repeatedly violated the terms of its NIH grant,” referring to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“Respond to our requests now or face a subpoena,” the panel added.

Mr. Daszak was not immediately reachable for comment.

Proponents of gain-of-function research argue it can help scientists better learn how the virus behaves and spreads, and so come up with counter-measures more effectively. Opponents say the potential benefits are outweighed by the risks posed by such research, as it makes viruses more lethal.

More Details

EcoHealth Alliance and Mr. Daszak have been accused of supporting and funding research in China that collects bat viruses from the wild and conducts research on them at the Wuhan lab.

Mr. Daszak was listed as the principal investigator on a grant called “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” He and his group took some of the millions of dollars they received from 2014 through 2019 and passed money to the Wuhan Institute, where scientists were carrying out at least one set of experiments that increased the function of bat coronaviruses.

After new rules were introduced in 2016, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of NIH, said the Wuhan project could continue but that EcoHealth must immediately notify U.S. officials if any of the experiments increased virus growth by greater than one log.

Testing in the last year of the grant made mice infected with a modified bat coronavirus sicker than mice infected with the original virus, but EcoHealth did not tell the institute of that fact until 2021.

EcoHealth claimed that it tried submitting the annual report containing details of the experiments in 2019 but was locked out of the government system. A forensic analysis undertaken by the government showed no evidence supporting that claim.

EcoHealth was also unable to provide laboratory notebooks and other documents that would shed more light on the experiments, and Mr. Daszak blamed Wuhan scientists.

Mr. Daszak defended his actions during a congressional hearing on May 1.

“In all of our federally funded projects, we have maintained an open, transparent communication with agency staff … [and] rapidly provided information critical to public health and agriculture,” he said.

An EcoHealth spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an earlier email that the proposed debarment is “based on false assumptions, misrepresentations, misunderstandings of the science involved, and selective use of the evidentiary record.”

Mr. Daszak has 30 days to present information challenging the findings to the HHS that led to his suspension and debarment proposal.

EcoHealth has said evidence would be provided proving that debarment is not warranted.

Previously, the Biden administration debarred the Wuhan Institute and earlier in May suspended EcoHealth and proposed its debarment, for reasons similar to those for Mr. Daszak’s suspension.

Gain-Of-Function Research and COVID-19

Whether U.S. tax dollars were used to fund gain-of-function research in China on coronaviruses has been in the spotlight for some time and remains steeped in controversy, in part because the definition of what exactly constitutes such research is a matter of some debate.

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has insisted that taxpayers ended up unknowingly funding risky gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, in China's central Hubei Province, on April 17, 2020. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

He made the remark while responding to questions during a March 8, 2023, session of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

“I think there’s no doubt that NIH was funding gain-of-function research,” Dr. Redfield told Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.).

Ms. Malliotakis then asked the former CDC official, “Is it likely that American tax dollars funded the gain-of-function research that created [the virus that causes COVID-19]?”

He replied in the affirmative, adding that he believes funding came from the NIH and other federal agencies.

This has been disputed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, former NIAID director, and by former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, Mr. Daszak, and others.

“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Dr. Fauci said at a Senate hearing on May 11, 2021.

Dr. Collins said in a statement on May 19, 2021, that “neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”

In his testimony on Capitol Hill, Dr. Redfield said that the COVID-19 pandemic presented a “case study” on the potential dangers of gain-of-function research and called for such work to be halted.

More recently, Dr. Redfield once again warned about the dangers of gain-of-function research, predicting that scientists tinkering with making the bird flu virus more infectious is what will trigger the next “great pandemic.”

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration is preparing for a scenario in which the bird flu starts to spread among humans.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.