The families of four people who died from COVID-19 are suing EcoHealth alliance, the New York-based nonprofit that was conducting gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, before COVID-19 broke out across town.
According to the Aug. 2 lawsuit filed before the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, EcoHealth and its president, Peter Daszak, knew the virus was “capable of causing a worldwide pandemic.”
Not only did EcoHealth help to create a ‘genetically manipulated virus,’ the lawsuit claims, it worked to cover up the origins of the outbreak.
“If we had known the source or origin of this virus and had not been misled that it was from a pangolin in a wet market, and rather we knew that it was a genetically manipulated virus, and that the scientists involved were concealing that from our clients, the outcome could have been very different,” victims’ attorney Patricia Finn told the NY Post.
The families of Mary Conroy, of Pennsylvania; Emma D. Holley, of Rochester, NY; Larry Carr, of Crossville, Tennessee; and Raul Osuna, of Bennington, Nebraska, are seeking unspecified damages.
“[The families of the deceased] are definitely in mourning, but moreover they’re enraged because the truth of what really happened appears to be coming forward,” Finn added.
Paul Rinker, of Pennsylvania, is also suing Midtown-based EcoHealth and Daszak over the “serious injuries” he suffered from his bout with the bug.
Finn is also suing EcoHealth and Daszak in Nassau and Rockland Counties on behalf of the families of other victims killed by the virus, as well as two who survived.
“This particular case is highly offensive because it appears they knew and concealed the origin of the virus,” said Finn, adding “The treatment or approach taken in dealing with the virus could have been radically different than it was.”
EcoHealth notably received a re-activated grant from the NIH for over $576,000 in May to study how outbreaks of deadly viruses like SARS, MERS, and now COVID-19 originate from wildlife and transfers to humans, despite failing to meet the NIH’s conditions for reinstatement.
As the Epoch Times noted;
The grant, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” was originally awarded in 2014 by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Under the terms of the grant, EcoHealth Alliance, a government-funded nonprofit that purportedly engages in research to prevent pandemics, was awarded $3.8 million over five years to assess the spillover potential of bat viruses “using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments in cell culture and humanized mice.” Put in simple terms, NIAID was paying EcoHealth to genetically engineer and manipulate bat viruses in labs.
In May 2016, the grant was suspended after Erik Stemmy, a NIAID program officer, noticed that federal government funds may have been used for prohibited gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. At the time, the Obama administration had put in place a moratorium on gain-of-function experiments. However, for reasons that remain unclear, the suspension was lifted in July 2016. At the time, EcoHealth’s president, Peter Daszak, thanked NIAID in an email for lifting the gain-of-function funding pause.
As part of the conditions of the grant, EcoHealth had to file regular activity reports. However, starting in 2018, EcoHealth stopped submitting these reports. EcoHealth would later blame technical difficulties for their failure to submit. The missing reports comprised the critical 2018–2019 timeframe right before the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan.
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More:
In 2014, the Obama administration temporarily suspended federal funding for gain-of-function research into manipulating bat COVID to be more transmissible to humans. Four months prior to that decision, the NIH effectively shifted this research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to EcoHealth, headed by Peter Daszak.
Notably, the WIV “had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions” for years under the leadership of Dr. Shi ‘Batwoman’ Zhengli, according to the Washington Post‘s Josh Rogin.
Yet, after Sars-CoV-2 broke out in the same town where Daszak was manipulating Bat Covid, The Lancet published a screed by Daszak (signed by over two-dozen scientists), which insisted the virus could have only come from a natural spillover event, likely from a wet market, and that the scientists “stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The Lancet only later noted Daszak’s conflicts of interest.
Meanwhile, as we noted late last year, a Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions interim report from October 27, 2022 titled “An Analysis of the Origins of the COVID19 Pandemic” concluded that the origins of Covid were more likely based in a lab as part of a “research related incident” and not zoonotic.
The report was the result of a “bipartisan Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee oversight effort into the origins of SARS-CoV-2”. It provides a lengthy analysis that reviews “publicly available, open-source information to examine the two prevailing theories of origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus”.
Insanity…
This post was originally published at Zero Hedge