America’s technology transfer to China resulted in the Covid-19 pandemic, a former EcoHealth Alliance executive claims
FILE PHOTO. A World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus arrives at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. © Hector RETAMAL / AFP
US-funded bioresearch on foreign soil appears to be a “giant intelligence operation” for assessing biowarfare capabilities, according to a whistleblower. Collecting and tinkering with bat coronaviruses in China ultimately resulted in the accidental release of SARS-CoV-2, the infection that causes Covid-19, he believes.
Dr. Andrew Huff once worked as the vice president of EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO involved in funneling US taxpayer dollars to bioresearch projects around the world. One of them, which was conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), was the origin of Covid-19 pandemic, and both Beijing and Washington were involved in a massive cover-up, he claimed. On Saturday, British tabloid The Sun reported on the allegations, which Huff has detailed in an upcoming book.
According to his revelations, in 2009, EcoHealth Alliance launched a program called PREDICT. Funded by foreign aid agency USAID, it was aimed at collecting samples of potentially harmful diseases throughout the world, ostensibly to prepare humanity for potential outbreaks. The Wuhan lab was one of the foreign partners of the program, studying coronaviruses in bats, Huff said.
According to the whistleblower, who has a background in bioweapons threat assessment for the US military, the PREDICT program was not collecting the data that it should have, but appeared to be an intelligence operation for assessing foreign biolab capabilities.
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Huff was also involved in assessing a 2014 funding proposal for gain-of-function research at the WIV. The work was funded through EcoHealth Alliance by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Gain-of-function is the modification of pathogens to enhance them in various potential ways, including transmissibility. The rationale is that scientists can study new strains and find ways to stop them before similar adaptations emerge naturally.
“EcoHealth Alliance … was responsible for the development of the agent SARS-CoV-2 during my employment at the organization,” Huff alleged. He believes that the virus was created at the Wuhan lab with technologies it received from the US and accidentally leaked into the general population.
“It could be reasonably argued that EcoHealth Alliance set up China to fail,” he said, claiming that the Chinese institute suffered from shortage of qualified personnel and that US government officials were well aware of it.
The ‘lab leak’ theory – that the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab – was popularized by then-US President Donald Trump, who made the allegation amid a trade war with China. Major US media organizations and tech platforms initially labeled it as ‘disinformation’ and tried to suppress the theory from public discourse.
The World Health Organization investigated the origins of Covid-19 and concluded that natural evolution was the most likely explanation. Beijing also says accidental transmission from animals to humans is the most plausible theory, blasting the ‘lab leak’ allegations as ‘lies’.
