Washington D.C. – Federal public health officials and others who have covered up information about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic could face prosecution according to the chairman of a special House subcommittee investigating the outbreak.
The New York Post reported on possibility of prosecution as Dr.Anthony Fauci is set to testify on Monday.
“We want the DOJ to weigh in, hopefully they can do something honestly and fairly,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in an exclusive interview Thursday. “But at the same time, we can make criminal referrals. I think we should.”
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has already recommended a criminal probe of Dr. Peter Daszak, the disgraced president of Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance, which received millions in US grants that helped fund experiments on modified bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Dr. Fauci has testified several times in front of Congress and he previously denied funding gain of function research in China.
The subcommittee uncovered thousands of emails that go against what Fauci and others were telling the American public during the pandemic.
Fauci’s former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. David Morens, admitted to using a private account to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about EcoHealth’s Wuhan grant, claimed he deleted records related to it — and said he helped Fauci to do the same.
The NIH funneled more than half a million in taxpayer dollars to WIV for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” between 2014 and 2021, according to a Government Accountability Office report released last year.
The project included “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains.”
The US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General determined that the research on lab mice resulted in a modified virus that was 10,000 times more infectious, which EcoHealth failed to report.
A June 2023 report from the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence also found that WIV was conducting pathogens research between 2017 and 2019 “for defensive and biosecurity needs of the [Chinese] military.”
NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak testified to the House COVID subcommittee in May that the experiments constituted gain-of-function research — the first agency official to have publicly said so since more than 1.1 million Americans have been killed by the virus.
