HHS and NIH stonewalling for over a year and a half.
https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Letter-to-NIH-Follow-Up1.pdfOn May 28, 2021, we wrote former Director Francis Collins requesting documents regarding the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 2014 grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. (EcoHealth). The subgrantee was the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). NIH failed to produce a single document responsive to that first request. On July 15, 2021, we again wrote to NIH, pursuant to 5 U.S.C. §2954, requesting the same documents and information previously requested on May 28, 2021 (hereinafter collectively referred to as “the Requests”). To date, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and NIH have refused to produce any responsive documents or information not previously or immediately thereafter made public through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. This request is urgent as no one disputes the necessity of understanding the origins of the ongoing pandemic.
A series of events documented in communications from February to April 2020 raise serious concerns about conflicts of interest and abuse of government resources. On February 1, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and at least eleven other scientists convened a conference call to discuss COVID-19. On this conference call, Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned by top virologists that COVID-19 may have leaked from the WIV, and further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated. It is unclear if either Dr. Fauci or Dr. Collins ever passed these warnings along to other government officials or if they simply ignored them.
On February 4, 2020, six participants of the conference call—who warned about the likelihood of a lab leak just three days earlier—authored or were involved with a paper entitled, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The paper dismissed their previously held lab leak theory, and a first draft was sent to Drs. Fauci and Collins. Prior to final publication in Nature Medicine, the paper was sent to Dr. Fauci for editing and approval. It is unclear whether Drs. Collins or Fauci edited the paper. It is also unclear if any new evidence was presented or if the underlying science suddenly changed. But it is clear that after speaking with Drs. Fauci and Collins, the authors abandoned their belief COVID-19 was the result of a laboratory leak.
