The chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is looking ahead to the next steps of the panel’s investigation of taxpayer-funded research in Wuhan, China.
National Review interviewed Representative Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) Wednesday afternoon after the conclusion of EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) president Dr. Peter Daszak’s public testimony about his organization’s use of taxpayer dollars to fund bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) over a number of years.
He told NR the next steps of the subcommittee’s probe involve parsing through 30,000 pages of private emails by Dr. David Morens, a top adviser to former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“We just got 30,000 pages of emails from Dr. Morens’s Gmail,” Wenstrup said. “I expect that there will be some with Peter Daszak that he hasn’t brought forward to us. We’ll find out.”
The subcommittee subpoenaed Morens in April for the emails after EcoHealth Alliance released a batch of them following a whistleblower allegation to the subcommittee that Morens and Daszak sought to violate federal records laws. The pair discussed coronavirus origins and Daszak’s efforts to reinstate federal funding to the lab in Wuhan, China, after it was scrutinized during the pandemic.
Daszak downplayed the emails as being conversations with a personal friend and said he spoke to many top public health officials about how to get his grant reinstated.
“They might be talking about going to dinner and talking further about how he can the grant reinstated. I mean that’s official business,” Wenstrup asserted. “So we’ll see what in [the emails] and I’m glad we finally have them.”
The subcommittee released a report and accompanying documents Wednesday morning recommending EcoHealth no longer receive federal funding and the Justice Department criminally investigate Daszak.
“We’ve come to the conclusion in a bipartisan fashion that Dr. Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance should no longer receive one penny for any type of research forever,” Wenstrup said, while emphasizing the risks of gain-of-function research.
“I think we would want DOJ’s assistance in guiding us as to whether something is engaging in a criminal activity,” he later added.
Coronavirus research samples continue to be held at the Wuhan lab, Daszak confirmed during his testimony. The subcommittee found Daszak failed to disclose the location of the samples when EcoHealth re-applied for the bat coronavirus grant funding after the coronavirus pandemic, adding to the questions over EHA’s lack of transparency when it comes to the research in Wuhan.
“EcoHealth did not have [the samples], China does. We’ll never know because China not going to be transparent. We’ll never know what they destroyed, samples or sequences or whatever,” Wenstrup noted.
Daszak objected to characterizations of the WIV research as gain-of-function, although the subcommittee report indicates the coronavirus enhancement experiments at WIV fell under the traditional, broad definition of gain-of-function research. Despite his longtime affiliation with the facility, he was unaware of WIV’s suspected ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army.
Wenstrup pointed to NIH officials’ answers to the the affirmative when asked during closed-door testimony to the subcommittee if the Wuhan lab experiments were gain-of-function research. The experiments tested enhanced coronaviruses on mice, and Daszak claimed these tests were not gain-of-function because humans were not directly involved.
A point of controversy during Daszak’s testimony was a five-year transparency report on the Wuhan research submitted by EHA in August 2021, two years later than it was due. Representative Morgan Griffith (R., Va.) pressed Daszak on a May 2020 draft version of the report downplaying the potential for viral spillovers, a contradiction from the final report’s emphasis on the danger of spillovers.
EHA found new data between May 2020 and August 2021 as it developed the report, Daszak said to Griffith. Wenstrup told NR he was not buying Daszak’s explanation and likened the lack of transparency to a “black hole” by EHA.
“That’s a huge black hole that he’s claiming. When did [the data] come in? Where’s your documentation of when it came in?” Wenstrup said. “We’re going to be pouring over those discrepancies as well.”
Daszak also said the transparency report was delayed because of issues in the NIH submission portal, a claim the subcommittee report suggests is unfounded.
Wenstrup hopes the subcommittee investigation leads to greater oversight of research grants in foreign lands and their potential threats to national security. He believes the subcommittee’s work is necessary to strengthen global health research by determining what took place in Wuhan.