Leading virologists who initially raised concerns about the possibility of COVID-19 leaking from a lab in Wuhan, China, before later changing their tune on the issue oversaw projects that received tens of millions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health under Dr. Anthony Fauci, records show.
Dr. Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute and Tulane University’s Dr. Robert Garry raised concerns in 2020 to Fauci that there could be legitimacy to COVID-19 leaking from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has received funds from the NIH-backed EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit group. These same virologists, who later rejected the leak hypothesis, led research projects that pocketed over $25.2 million between 2020 and 2022 from the NIH, according to federal grant data reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
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“Since changing their tune and publicly dismissing a potential lab leak following secretive conversations with Anthony Fauci, Garry and Andersen have received tens of millions in new taxpayer funds from the NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] for wasteful, deadly, and dangerous virus experiments on primates and other animals,” Justin Goodman, the vice president of advocacy and public policy at the White Coat Waste Project, a federal spending watchdog, told the Washington Examiner.
“Given all of the waste, fraud and abuse we’ve exposed at NIAID since early 2020, it wouldn’t be surprising if gain-of-function’s ‘funding father’ Anthony Fauci was rewarding his fellow animal experimenters for their compliance and complicity in covering up what really happened at the Wuhan lab.”
The Energy Department has determined, based on intelligence, that a lab leak was most likely the cause for the spread of COVID-19, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The FBI said in 2021 with “moderate confidence” that a lab leak was likely, while the CIA and another agency have yet to reach a conclusion.
As COVID-19 began to spread across the globe in early 2020, Fauci often communicated with top virologists who were concerned that the disease could have been “engineered,” according to unredacted emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Andersen and Garry participated in calls and emails with Fauci and former Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute Francis Collins in late January and early February 2020, emails show.
“The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered. I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change,” Andersen wrote to Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020.
“I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. … It’s stunning,” Garry apparently told Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, a British health research nonprofit group, on Feb. 2, 2020, according to emails.
Garry also wrote in a Feb. 8, 2020, email to Fauci and Collins that lab work could have inadvertently spawned the virus.
However, these early lab leak suspicions by the researchers were apparently put to rest. Fauci has repeatedly rejected the lab leak hypothesis and said in April 2020 that it’s like “a shiny object that will go away.”
One month earlier, in March 2020, Andersen and Garry joined other researchers in publishing a study titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The study’s final version said that “any type of laboratory-based scenario is [not] plausible” despite prior versions claiming that a lab leak hypothesis could be accurate.
It’s unclear why the researchers changed their tune. However, public records show they have maintained close ties with the NIH.
Andersen has led research projects that have received around $20.4 million from the agency between 2020 and 2022, grant records show. On the other hand, projects led by Garry have pocketed over $4.7 million from the NIH between 2020 and 2021, according to government documents.
“I hope the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus conducts a thorough investigation on this and other related items from the last several years, including the degree to which the federal government’s response to COVID-19 prioritized the profit of the medical establishment over the public health of the American people,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), who is also a member of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, told the Washington Examiner.
For instance, Garry was the lead for a project called “Structure-based design of novel Lassa virus glycoproteins for vaccine development,” which ran from 2017 to 2021. The project, which focused on vaccines for a disease called viral hemorrhagic fever, received over $2.3 million from the NIH in 2021, records show.
Andersen has led a project called the “West African Emerging Infectious Disease Research Center,” which aims to thwart disease outbreaks in Africa. In 2020 alone, the center received over $1.8 million from the NIH and over $2 million in 2021, records show.
“Americans were told to ‘trust the science,’ but these emails reveal that the integrity of this science may be compromised,” Pete McGinnis, a spokesman for the Functional Government Initiative, an ethics watchdog, told the Washington Examiner. “What a coincidence that millions of dollars in grant money went to these virologists after they changed their story to back the NIH’s narrative.”
During a Wednesday hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, Johns Hopkins University professor Dr. Marty Makary testified in connection to the lab leak theory. The surgeon criticized Andersen and Garry for not continuing to publicize the potential of the hypothesis.
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“Two leading virologists, maybe the two top virologists in the United States … told Dr. Fauci on his emergency call in January of 2020, when he was scrambling soon after learning the NIH was funding the lab, they both said that it was likely from the lab,” said Makary, adding that the scientists “changed their tunes” and later led projects that pocketed millions from the NIH.
The NIH did not reply to a request for comment, nor did Anderson or Garry.
