Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has just awarded a $3.3 grant to EcoHealth Alliance, run by British zoologist Dr. Peter Daszak to study bat coronaviruses in Southeast Asia. The grant will terminate on August 31, 2027, or when the human race becomes extinct, whichever happens first. The contract runs for five years, and the $650,000 covers the first year. So the total bill will be around $3.3 million.

For those of you just coming out of a multiyear, medically induced coma (or a very long drug and alcohol-fuel rampage), this will sound familiar. It was Daszak’s group, working with NIAID funding at the Communist Chinese-operated Wuhan Institute of Virology, when the Wuhan virus, or COVID-19, appeared. Of course, no no one is saying that Dasak’s group helped develop the virus or that the Wuhan Institute of Virology released it as part of some kind of field trial on “gain of function” research; BUT, you could be forgiven for connecting the dots and coming to that conclusion.

The problem with EcoHealth Alliance has not gone unnoticed. Only a week before this grant announcement, 9 US Senators sent a letter to USAID director Samantha f***ing Power, asking her to block all funding for that company.

Letter on EcoHealth Alliance Funding on Scribd

The grant is unconscionable. Giving any research group, particularly one with apparent ties to the Chinese government via their military lab complexes, any amount of money, given EcoHealth’s documented history of lack of transparency, if not outright deception, simply rewards bad actors and encourages similar behavior in others. Given EcoHealth’s involvement in creating COVID-19 and the ensuing pandemic, they should be debarred from all US government grants.

There is an additional aspect of this award that needs to be examined. Daszak is a long-time favorite grantee of NIAID. Given Fauci’s 40-year tenure as the head of that organization, it is not hard to imagine some sort of personal relationship exists between the two. Fauci has announced his intention to leave federal service in December. Given the lightning rod aspect of Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance and the fact that Senator Rand Paul could be chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, why would Fauci give EcoHealth a grant that will probably be canceled?

To understand the “lightning rod” comment, watch Fauci and Senator Paul tangle over Fauci’s misrepresentations about “gain of function” research.

Some have alleged that Fauci is throwing Duszak a grant to keep him silent, sort of the bureaucratic version of the Parable of the Unjust Steward to encourage Duszak to keep his mouth shut. Of course, I’d fully expect this grant to be rescinded once Fauci leaves because the new guy isn’t going to want to pick a fight with the House and Senate on Day One, so I’m taking this as Fauci flipping Senator Paul off on his way out of the door.

In addition to Senator Paul, you are also being flipped off. The businesses shuttered, the lives lost, the years of childhood development missed, the people dying alone in a hospital bed, and the families deprived of a funeral for loved ones are all just collateral damage in the never-ending aggrandizement of power to the bureaucracy. Common decency would require that the people most closely associated with a needless panic not be favored with future grants and contracts. That apparently was just too much to ask.