“[A]lthough it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”
That was Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), refusing to answer any questions to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on July 29, instead invoking his constitutional Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.
At the hearing, Fauci faced questions about grants given by NIAID and other government agencies to Ecohealth Alliance — which were debarred in Jan. 2025 — over the grantee’s use of the funds for gain of function research on novel coronaviruses.
In 2014, a $666,442 grant was awarded by the NIAID to the EcoHealth Alliance and subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute. The grant came atop EcoHealth’s participation in the USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT $200 million program.
Those grants helped fund a Nov. 2017 study on bat-to-human Covid transmission co-authored by the Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Dr. Shi Zheng-li. The study itself confirmed it was “jointly funded by… the National Institutes of Health (NIAID R01AI110964), the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT program to PD and ZLS,” among others, according to the study itself.
In questioning from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on May 11, 2021, Fauci stated “[The] NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
When Paul asked if “Covid 19 could not have occurred through serial passage [a method of creating a virus] in a laboratory,” Fauci stated, “I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done and I am fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China,” and added, “However, I will repeat, the NIH…categorically has not funded gain of function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Additionally, on July 20, 2021, in follow up questioning from Senator Paul, Fauci said, “I have never lied before the Congress and I do not retract the statement. This paper that you are referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function.”
Fauci added, “If the point you are making is that the grant that was funded as a subaward from Ecohealth to Wuhan created Sars-Covid 2, that’s where you are getting… I totally resent the lie that you are now propagating, Senator, because if you look at the viruses that were used in the experiments, that were given in the annual reports, that were published in the literature, it is molecularly impossible… to result in Sars-Covid 2.”
“You are implying that what we did was responsible for the deaths of individuals, I totally resent that, and if anybody’s lying here, it is you,” Fauci concluded.
Fauci was later pardoned by former President Joe Biden on Jan. 19: “for any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken partin during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon…”
It does not cover now, and so Fauci is refusing to answer questions that might open up a perjury investigation.
In a Dec. 2019 interview, Dr. Peter Daszak of Ecohealth admitted that the research was in fact looking at novel coronaviruses and that the viruses were being manipulated: “we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS… Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanised mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger… I think … corona viruses – you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with corona virus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You’ve got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine.”
According to the grant itself, the funding was for a study in China of “bat-CoV serology against human-wildlife contact and exposure data to quantify risk factors and health impacts of SARSr-CoV spillover” and to “use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential,” according to the grant award from NIH.
On May 22, 2020, an email NIAID Biomedical research program administrator Erik Stemmy responded to FBI questioning about the research assuring the Justice Department that the grants in question were not used to fund gain of function research at all, and that any chimeric viruses under the grant were made at the University of North Carolina, not at the Wuhan lab in China near where the Covid-19 outbreak began: “GoF experiments were not conducted as part of this award. While chimeric viruses were created via this award, they would not be considered GoF since the results did not confer attributes that were not already exhibited by the wild type versions of the viruses. For example, expressing the spike protein of SARS-CoV in the WIV-1 backbone did not increase the pathogenicity of WIV-1 beyond that of SARS-CoV. This award did not support work to manipulate CoV genomes or create chimeric viruses at Wuhan Institute of Virology; such work was performed at UNC-CH.”
But that’s just a question about what the grant funded and did not fund. Okay, so the chimeric viruses under the grant were done at North Carolina. What that doesn’t ask is what sort of chimeric viruses and/or gain of function viruses were being made at the Wuhan lab. Daszak stated in 2019 that while Ecohealth worked “a lot” with UNC, he did not state they worked exclusively with UNC: “So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this.”
That’s an important distinction. The Wuhan lab was working closely with the UNC team and with Ecohealth, and they were doing their own gain of function research at the Wuhan lab, whether it was funded by U.S. tax dollars or not, and whether it the research benefitted from the taxpayer-funded research or not. Clearly, Ecohealth was sharing information with both UNC and Wuhan.
At the time, in 2020, U.S. intelligence agencies were assessing that the Covid pandemic very well could have originated at the Wuhan lab. But instead of getting to the bottom of that, we get this dog and pony show about who paid for it. Or who lied about it, or just couldn’t admit that they might have been partly responsible because it was too horrifying.
I’m sorry, there are over 20 million people dead worldwide from Covid when excess deaths are taken into account. If it happened at the lab, whether it was a virus that came from the wild or was manipulated, but leaked from the lab, it doesn’t matter, either. The fact is, it could have come from the lab, and we still don’t know all of the details.
Maybe we need this research to combat Covid viruses, and the vaccines helped save millions of lives, or maybe the research contributed to the deaths of millions of people. And maybe it’s both. Just tell us what happened — and let the chips fall where they may.
Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
