House Republicans secured a voluntary transcribed interview with EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak in mid-November as part of the congressional investigation into the origins of COVID-19 on Friday.
"As mounting evidence and intelligence intensify concerns about the possible release of the COVID-19 pandemic from a laboratory incident in Wuhan, Dr. Daszak’s testimony will be critical to helping the Committees obtain information related to the origins of COVID-19 and any role [EcoHealth Alliance] may have played," reads a joint press statement from both the House Oversight and Energy and Commerce committees.
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EcoHealth Alliance has been a prominent entity in the investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, because of the grant funding the organization has received from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Internal communications from January 2020 between then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and his senior aides show that they described EcoHealth Alliance as among the biggest players in coronavirus research.
In July, an interim report released by Oversight Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) said that EcoHealth Alliance and the NIAID worked together to sidestep federal blocks on controversial gain of function research, or experimentation on viruses that increase their infectiousness or disease capacity.
EcoHealth Alliance was awarded grant dollars by the NIAID in 2014 for coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the project was led by Daszak. As a part of this project, EcoHealth Alliance-funded researchers in Wuhan discovered 52 novel SARS coronaviruses from over 10,000 bat samples and 2,000 unspecified mammalian samples. The research also discovered Swine Acute Diarrheal Syndrom Virus and discovered the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2.
Daszak has long been an outspoken critic of the lab leak theory of origin for SARS-CoV-2. In February 2020, Daszak and 26 other colleagues published an open letter in The Lancet ruling out the possibility of a lab leak and stating that the virus originated in wildlife.
Daszak, who lives in New York, was also appointed by the World Health Organization as the sole American representative on the team sent to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Many considered this to be a conflict of interest because of Daszak's connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its director, Shi Zhengli.
A spokesperson for EHA previously told the Washington Examiner that any claim that it has engaged in or funded gain-of-function research is "either based on misinterpretation or willful misrepresentation of the actual research conducted."
EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to the Washington Examiner's request for comment.
In the letter sent by House Republicans to Daszak confirming the interview date, the committees renewed their request for documents and communications in relation to the early days of the pandemic. Of particular interest is information regarding the Feb. 1 phone call between NIH leaders and research scientists that eventually led to the publication of the scientific paper "The proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2," which was widely cited to discredit early investigations into human involvement in the development of the virus.
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The committees' letter gives a staggered list of dates for compliance in the provision of information and says that it "will be forced to consider the use of the compulsory process" if documentation is not provided in time.
The interview will take place on Nov. 14.