Chris Lange, FISM News
An American scientist who worked closely with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology has broken his silence on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming not only that the virus was man-made, but that the U.S. government was largely responsible for the outbreak which he confirmed originated from a lab leak at the Wuhan facility.
Dr. Andrew Huff, an epidemiologist and former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that studies viruses, said the U.S. government’s suppression of information about the pandemic’s origins represented “the biggest cover-up in history” and the “biggest U.S. intelligence failure since 9/11” in a new book, which was first reported by Britain’s The Sun on Saturday.
In his tome titled “The Truth About Wuhan,” Huff said that EcoHealth worked closely with the Wuhan lab as it conducted genetic engineering of coronavirus experiments using U.S.-provided gain-of-function research funding in China.
Huff, who worked with EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016, said that the EcoHealth Alliance had been studying coronaviruses in bats for over a decade with funding from the National Institutes of Health.
“The U.S. government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese,” he said. “I was terrified by what I saw. We were just handing them bioweapon technology.”
He also said that EcoHealth assisted the Wuhan lab in putting together the “best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species,” but that the lab had remarkably lax biosecurity measures in place to prevent a leak.
“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,” the U.S. Army veteran wrote, according to the news outlet, which cited exclusive pre-release access to the book.
“China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent,” he said.
The Intercept in September 2021 uncovered 900 pages of documentation obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request which showed that the U.S. gave EcoHealth Alliance $3.1 million to study bat coronaviruses, including nearly $600,000 that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to “alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans.”
In the weeks following the 2020 outbreak of the deadly virus, some experts sounded the alarm that it could have escaped the Wuhan lab through an infected scientist or improper waste disposal at the facility. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, told a European lawmaker that he feared that the virus escaped from the lab in “a catastrophic accident” in 2019, the Daily Mail reported earlier this year.
FISM reported in October that a Senate committee investigating the pandemic’s origins concluded that there was “substantial evidence” that the deadly virus originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and that the heavily- promoted hypothesis that the outbreak occurred naturally “no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt, or the presumption of accuracy.”
As recently as last week, however, outgoing White House chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci doubled down on his insistence that the COVID-19 pandemic occurred “naturally.”
Fauci, along with other Biden officials, including former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, have been ordered to testify in a lawsuit brought by the Attorneys General of Louisiana and Missouri alleging that they colluded with Big Tech to suppress any information that challenged this assertion, as well as information that Fauci financially benefited from gain-of-function research
Fauci has repeatedly denied that he profited from gain-of-function research as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, though the organization admitted in October 2021 that it did fund the research, refuting Fauci’s claims. The Senate unanimously passed legislation to ban U.S. funding of gain-of-function research in China that was introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused 6,618,579 deaths, according to the latest WHO data, including the deaths of 1,071,245 Americans.
China has aggressively denied that the pandemic originated in Wuhan, with the help of President Biden, who has steered away from questioning Xi about the pandemic’s origins.
Biden did claim that he confronted Xi on the subject at a virtual meeting between the two leaders in January. However, his own press staff made no mention of any such discussion. When asked by reporters why the exchange didn’t appear in his staff’s read-out of the call, Biden responded: “They weren’t with me the entire time.”