Whistleblower who worked for US-funded Wuhan lab claims Covid WAS genetically engineered and leaked

A scientist who worked closely with a US-funded Wuhan lab has claimed that covid was genetically engineered and leaked from the Chinese facility.

Dr Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, has called it the ‘one of the greatest cover-ups in history’ and the ‘biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11.’

The pandemic swept across the globe and has so far claimed the lives of 6.64 million people after first being reported as a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China in late 2019.

Shortly after, a novel coronavirus was eventually identified, the first case outside China recorded in January 2020 in Thailand.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high security lab specializing in coronaviruses, has been cast into the spotlight over the past two years, many questioning whether it could be the source of the highly contagious disease.

Dr Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, has claims that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered and leaked from a facility in China

Led by Dr Peter Daszak there were concerns about the ties between Wuhan and EcoHealth Alliance – there most recent grant coming from Anthony Fauci in September 2021

Huff points to China’s gain-of-function (GOF) experiments, which he believes were carried out within relaxed biosecurity environments and led to the leak at the US-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology

Both China and the lab have vehemently denied allegations, but evidence of a lab leak have been gaining traction as scientists, researchers and governments hunt for answers.

Experts have suggested covid may have escaped from the Wuhan facility through an infected researcher, improper disposal of waste or potential breaches in security at the site.

In explosive allegations made in his new book, The Truth About Wuhan, Huff claims that the pandemic was the result of the US government funding of dangerous genetic engineering of coronaviruses in China.

Speaking to The Sun, Huff said that ‘the US government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese.’

He points to China’s gain-of-function (GOF) experiments, which he believes were carried out within relaxed biosecurity environments, led to a lab leak at the US-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology.

‘EcoHealth Alliance and foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,’ he said.

The army veteran, from Michigan, said the organization taught the Wuhan lab the ‘best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species’ for many years.

‘China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent,’ he said.

‘I was terrified by what I saw. We were just handing them bioweapon technology.’

In his book, the emerging infectious diseases expert claims ‘greedy scientists killed millions of people globally,’ and goes as far as to claim the US government covered it all up.

Huff said that it shouldn’t be a surprise that China lied about the outbreak and then went to ‘extraordinary lengths to make it appear as if the disease emerged naturally.’

‘The shocking part of all of this is how the United States government lied to all of us,’ he said.

Huff said that it shouldn’t be a surprise that China lied about the outbreak and then went to ‘extraordinary lengths to make it appear as if the disease emerged naturally’

In September, Fauci, who has spent over five decades in the federal government and has been the face of the coronavirus pandemic response, awarded EcoHealth more money

The organization received a $653,392 grant to analyze ‘the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam’

Huff has since filed a lawsuit with Renz Law LLC against EcoHealth Alliance in the state of New York

EcoHealth Alliance had been studying different coronaviruses in bats for more than ten years with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – and developed close working ties with the Wuhan lab.

In September, Anthony Fauci, who has spent over five decades in the federal government and has been the face of the coronavirus pandemic response, awarded EcoHealth more money. 

The organization received a $653,392 grant to analyze ‘the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam,’ according to the Wall Street Journal.

NIH have identified the region as ‘high risk for future emergence of novel coronaviruses and the potential site where SARS-CoV-2 first ‘spilled over’ from bats to people.’

While the NIH is promoting EcoHealth Alliance’s claim that Covid-19 emerged through a ‘spill over’ from animals.

Many scientists disagree and have said the circumstantial and biological evidence suggest a lab leak.

Huff, who worked at EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016, serving as vice president from 2015, said he worked on the classified side of the research program as a US government scientist.

Former intelligence chiefs and diplomats have already claimed Covid was leaked from a Wuhan lab in the ‘cover-up of the century.’

America’s former top diplomat in East Asia, David Stilwell, telling The Sun in September 2021 that ‘This makes Watergate look easy.’

‘People are for some reason bent on insisting on having a slam-dunk, air-tight case that China produced this virus,’ he said at the time.

‘Of course, the PRC is not going to let you in there to see their labs, but so many people have used that problem to stop further inquiry.

‘This isn’t a legal case, we are not looking for indisputable evidence; there is enough circumstantial evidence.’

In 2019, the Wuhan lab started working with the EcoHealth Alliance on a USAID programme called PREDICT, which focuses on emerging pandemic threats.

PREDICT had been designed to detect and find zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential – including coronaviruses.

EcoHealth Alliance states on their website that zoonotic diseases–those that can be transmitted between animals and humans–represent approximately 75 percent of the newly emerging diseases currently affecting people.

Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan virologist who famously became known as ‘Batwoman’ had hoped the program would create an early-warning system for pandemics.

Huff said he has no proof that the leak was deliberate however does claim in his explosive tell-all book that biosecurity at the Chinese facility was compromised

Huff alleges the US were using the project to assess the bioweapon capabilities of foreign labs – including the Wuhan Institute of Virology

But in 2014, Huff was asked to review a funding proposal which revealed that GOF work was being carried out to create SARS-CoV-2 – which causes Covid.

GOF work sees viruses accelerated to more easily infect humans to help researchers test scientific theories, develop new technologies and find treatments for infectious diseases.

The risky research method can pose safety and security concerns – and is banned in many countries.

It was originally banned in the US in 2014 but was reintroduced by the NIH in 2017.

Huff realized the EcoHealth Alliance was working closely with the Wuhan lab on this type of research, with the support of USAID – a US government department.

He claims that the virus would never occur in nature and had been developed into a much more powerful pathogen in the lab.

‘EcoHealth Alliance developed SARS-CoV-2 and was responsible for the development of the agent SARS-CoV-2 during my employment at the organization,’ he said.

He said that he has no evidence China deliberately released the virus but believes the US-funded project was ‘mostly a global fishing expedition for coronaviruses’ to carry out GOF work or for intelligence collection – rather than preventing future pandemics.

‘At the time, I felt like the project seemed more like intelligence collection than scientific research and development,’ he said in his book.

The scientist said the PREDICT programme wasn’t collecting the data it should have been and Huff told The Sun that it appeared to be a ‘giant intelligence operation’.

He alleges the US were using the project to assess the bioweapon capabilities of foreign labs – including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Huff claims the US-funded project was ‘mostly a global fishing expedition for coronaviruses’ to carry out GOF work or for intelligence collection – rather than preventing future pandemics

The pandemic swept across the globe and has so far claimed the lives of 6.64 million people after first being reported as a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China in late 2019

Shortly after, a novel coronavirus was eventually identified, the first case outside China recorded in January 2020 in Thailand

During a meeting with top executives in 2015 and 2016 Huff claims that he tried to sound the alarm over the biosafety and biosecurity risks in contract labs.

‘I was concerned that EcoHealth Alliance did not have enough visibility or firsthand knowledge of what was happening at foreign laboratories contracted and managed by EcoHealth Alliance,’ he said.

Huff said US government officials again issued warnings in January 2018 about the Wuhan lab – including the major shortage of experts needed to safely manage research on deadly coronaviruses.

‘It could be reasonably argued that EcoHealth Alliance set up China to fail,’ he said.

And when Covid emerged in late 2019, he said China ‘and some of their US government collaborators at the Department of State, USAID, and the Department of Defense went into full cover-up mode.’

Huff said he believes that the US government was alerted to the outbreak in August or October of 2019 months before the first clusters were starting to emerge.

He quit EcoHealth Alliance in 2016 ‘due to a large number of ethical concerns with the scientific work and EcoHealth Alliance as a whole.’

But in late 2019, he was suddenly offered a position at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – and was told he would need top security clearance and a polygraph for the job.

Huff now believes he was approached for the role to keep him quiet about the origins of Covid.

‘It is my belief that people working within the US government potentially identified me as a risk to knowing first-hand that the SARS-CoV-2 disease emergence event was a consequence of the US government’s sponsorship of the genetic engineering of SARS-CoV-2 domestically and abroad,’ he said in his book.

‘If I would have accepted the position, then I suspect that DARPA would have disclosed restricted information to me, which would have consequently prevented me from discussing any of this information publicly, like I have been and am doing now.’

About a month after the pandemic began in the early months of 2020, Huff said he was ‘adamant that SARS-CoV-2 was a manmade agent.’

‘I suddenly realized what the potential motivation and persistence for recruiting me were,’ he said.

‘The intelligence community realized that I was the only person in a senior position that had left EHA, and the fact I was working outside the government’s control made me a threat to their agenda.’

Huff believes government officials offered him the role so he could be ‘sworn into silence for the rest of my life.’

As he began to unravel the alleged cover-up by the US government, he claims that authorities have launched a massive campaign of harassment against him.

He claimed military-grade drones would often appear at his home, he was stalked at the supermarket, and he was followed by unknown vehicles.

Huff has since filed a lawsuit with Renz Law LLC against EcoHealth Alliance in the state of New York.

In September, Huff tweeted: ‘Below is link to the copy of the report about the REAL Origin of SARS-CoV2 sent to the US Senate and Congress.

‘My declaration in the document was provided under oath with penalty of perjury.’

The document issued by Renz Law LLC states: ‘Donald Trump, Senator Ron Johnson, Senator Rand Paul, Rep. Jim Jordan and others were right.

‘As early as later April or early May 2020 former President Trump spoke of the creation of SARS-CoV-2 in a lab in Wuhan, China.

‘Since that time both the investigation and the cover-up have continued but the evidence provided herein clearly demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2 was indeed created in a lab in Wuhan China by EcoHealth Alliance and with funding from Anthony Fauci’s NIH/NIAID.

The document goes on to say that the evidence gathered hopes to back five statements of claim.

‘SARS-CoV-2 was created in lab in Wuhan China, Anthony Fauci funded the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and lied to Congress about funding gain-of-function work, the US intelligence community was aware of and appeared to have been involved with the funding of said gain-of-function work,’ it read.

‘A number of well-connected public and private partners were involved in gain-of-function work that resulted in the creation and release of SARS-CoV-2 and Anthony Fauci and other coordinated to cover-up the funding of the gain-of-function work which resulted in SARS-CoV-2.’

It goes on to say that the expectations are that there will be a ‘immediate investigation that will see bi-partisan support in light of this newly compiled information.’

‘Renz Law and Make Americans Free Again (MAFA) will provide any and all support possible in such an investigation and prosecutions,’ the document continues.

Official records show EcoHealth Alliance has received seven grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since June 2020 for research into animal-borne viruses in Asia and Africa 

Who IS Peter Daszak? The frog-focused zoologist and friend of Dr Anthony Fauci

One of the most stringent deniers of the man-made hypothesis is British zoologist Dr Peter Daszak (pictured), who is known among friends as a ‘funny northerner’ but considered a potential orchestrator of the pandemic by advocates of the lab-leak theory

The debate around the origins of Covid has been ongoing since the virus first began causing chaos in early 2020.

Some top virologists believe the coronavirus spread to humans from an infected animal, potentially in a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Others think it leaked from a secretive laboratory in the same city. Whether or not it was deliberate or accidental is an even more contentious part of the ‘lab leak’ theory.

One of the most stringent deniers of the man-made hypothesis is British zoologist Dr Peter Daszak, who is known among friends as a ‘funny northerner’ but considered a potential orchestrator of the pandemic by advocates of the lab-leak theory.

He became renowned for his role in facilitating ‘risky’ coronavirus research in China through EcoHealth Alliance, the non-profit he is president of.

The New York-based organisation has secured $60million (£53million) of US Government funds for scientific research over the past decade.

Some of this cash, it has emerged, has since ended up in the pocket of researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the lab at the centre of lab leak claims. Some of this research involved manipulating Covid-like viruses.

Now, it has been revealed that EcoHealth Alliance has gained another $650,000 (£580,000) from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to trawl through caves in Southeast Asia looking for bats carrying coronaviruses, despite fears similar work sparked the pandemic.

The new contract gives the green light to project leader Dr Daszak and his team to analyse the behaviour and environmental risk factors for coronaviruses to spillover into humans from animals.

It warns that that part of the world has a ‘high diversity of wildlife coronaviruses’ and a large proportion of the population is regularly exposed to wildlife that could be infected. 

Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam are particularly high risk, according to the project details published by the US National Institutes of Health. 

Over the course of five years, the team will identify cases where people become infected with coronaviruses, assess the risk and drivers of community transmission and spread and test public health interventions to contain an outbreak.

Scientists argue such research is vital to contain diseases like Covid. But others have raised alarm over its potential involvement in outbreaks. 

The latest contract puts the spotlight back on Dr Daszak, who hails from the mining town Dukinfield, on the outskirts of Manchester.

The researcher, who grew up with a younger brother, Ukrainian father and Welsh mother, studied zoology at the University of Bangor in Wales and the University of East London.

The expert in zoonosis — the spread of viruses from animals to humans — has authored more than 300 scientific papers over his career, which has spanned more than three decades, and seen him become friendly with Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the US President. 

Dr Daszak, who lives in New York with his wife Janet, joined EcoHealth — formerly The Wildlife Trust — in 2001. His early career focused on diseases spread by frogs.

But he has also worked with researchers in China for 15 years, including Dr Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the WIV nicknamed ‘Bat Woman’.

EcoHealth, which originally focused on conservation, now works around the world to find out the origins of viruses, map where they have spread and analyse them to find out where the next outbreak could occur. 

Records show Dr Daszak raked in millions of dollars’ worth of grants from US Government bodies on behalf of EcoHealth alliance and was paid $354,000 (£314,000) in 2019.

This funding was often dished out to other laboratories, including the WIV, to conduct research in mines to examine bat coronaviruses.

The partnership saw researchers sample thousands of bats and determine that Sars originated in horseshoe bats, which are common in southern and central China and traded in wet markets.

And two years before Covid emerged, Dr Daszak proposed working with WIV scientists to alter coronaviruses and release them into bats as part of a plan to inoculate them against the virus. 

‘Further, with the additional high-profile revelations that certain segments of the government have promoted censoring this information, presumably as part of the cover up, we will voluntarily support any good faith efforts by the media to correct the record.

‘[We] will continue to seek truth and justice in this matter for all that have been impacted by the worst man-made pandemic in human history.’

Huff provided a declaration alongside the documents stating that he would attest a true and accurate representation of facts and experiences.

In October, Dailymail.com revealed that EcoHealth Alliance had been handed nearly $7 million in taxpayer’s money during the pandemic.

Official records show EcoHealth Alliance has received seven grants from the NIH since June 2020 for research into animal-borne viruses in Asia and Africa.

Four of those grants were handed to the non-profit after it was uncovered EcoHealth Alliance channeled funds to the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic.

It also collaborated on controversial virus-tinkering research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some scientists fear led to the Covid crisis.

Dr Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who was accused of trying to cover-up serious inquiry into the so-called lab leak theory, is listed as the project lead on a majority of the research programs.

Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn told DailyMail.com: ‘EcoHealth Alliance has still not answered key questions about its role in the pandemic.

‘They should be held to account and not be receiving taxpayers’ dollars until a full investigation is complete.’

The most recent NIH grant awarded to EchoHealth Alliance came on September 21. The $653,392 package went towards studying Covid-like viruses in bats across Asia and Africa.

That five-year experiment will likely investigate ‘the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence’, with scientists set to trawl caves in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam in the hunt to prevent another viral crisis.

Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, told DailyMail.com: ‘Giving taxpayer money to EcoHealth to study pandemic prevention is like paying a suspected arsonist to conduct fire safety inspections.’

Daszak is a close friend of the US’ top Covid doctor Fauci and even thanked him for publicly downplaying theories that Covid may have been created in a lab.

EcoHealth Alliance has been receiving federal research funding since 2002.

Daszak, who has maintained the view that the coronavirus jumped to humans from animal reservoirs, has a checkered history when it comes to the kind of research that his critics argue helped pave the way for highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 to escape the safety of a lab.

He has been slammed by Republicans in Congress for taking part in GOF research.

Those who believed there was a chance the virus escaped from the WIV were cast aside as fringe thinkers, in part due to Daszak’s influence in the community of epidemiologists and infectious disease experts.

He and fellow infectious disease experts Ralph Baric and Linfa Wang circulated a statement that was later published in The Lancet in which 27 prominent scientists from nine countries to strongly condemned ‘conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.’

But Daszak appeared to want to distance himself from the letter after a Freedom of Information Request revealed that he and his fellows ‘should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.’

Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said in December 2021 that it took 16 months to publish an official conflict of interest statement in which he revealed Daszak had links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Despite charges of having a conflict of interest, given that his organization had worked with the WIV on coronavirus research in the past, Daszak was appointed to the World Health Organization’s team charged with going to China to investigate the origin of the virus.

The WHO dispelled those claims though, saying that ‘all declared interests were assessed and found not to interfere with the independence and transparency of the work.’

Officials in the Trump and Biden administrations have said the Chinese government worked to thwart investigations into the origins of the virus and hoodwinked WHO investigators when they arrived.

Daszak revealed in March 2021 that he and the team took China’s word for it when officials there insisted that the virus could not have escaped from their lab.

‘We met with them. We said, ‘Do you audit the lab?’ And they said, ‘Annually.’ ‘Did you audit it after the outbreak?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Was anything found?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you test your staff?’ ‘Yes.’ No one was —’ Daszak said.

In response to Lesley Stahl, who said he was taking the Chinese researcher’s word for it, Daszak said, ‘Well, what else can we do?’

‘We asked them tough questions. They weren’t vetted in advance. And the answers they gave, we found to be believable, correct and convincing,’ Daszak said.

In April 2020, former President Donald Trump chose to axe Daszak’s grant awarded in 2019 over unsubstantiated claims that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab that employs a Chinese virologist who had been receiving funding from the grant.

‘NIH got it right when it canceled the funding for the experiments EcoHealth Alliance was conducting with China’s state-run Wuhan Institute,’ Ernst said.

She added, ‘In addition to violating multiple federal laws, EcoHealth has still not turned over documents about these dangerous studies that NIH has requested on multiple occasions that could offer vital clues to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.’