Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, told Newsmax on Tuesday that Congress is "obligated" to drill down until they get the truth about how and where, exactly, the COVID-19 pandemic originated.
To that end, Wenstrup and three other Republican committee chairs will get another crack at EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak on Wednesday during a hearing on Capitol Hill. GOP lawmakers plan to question Daszak about previous statements that contradict documents and evidence that the House committees have unearthed since his transcribed interview last November.
"We are finding some contradictory type of statements that he has made that might not actually coincide [with] what is the truth," Wenstrup said on "Rob Schmitt Tonight."
"We have an obligation to all the people in the world that have lost their loved ones … and an obligation to taxpayers who were funding some of this type of research, gain-of-function research, where you're taking a virus and making it more infectious to human beings. And that's it in a nutshell," Wenstrup said.
EcoHealth — a U.S.-based non-profit whose mission is to prevent pandemics — used taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
"But when you are doing research that could create a virus and make it more infectious than it already was, by combining different components from other viruses, then you are running the risk of creating a pandemic," Wenstrup told Schmitt. "Dr. [Anthony] Fauci in 2012 said the benefits outweigh the risk. I think in their mind, they thought, if we can create this and cure it, then we can cure anything. But we have a problem here."
EcoHealth was denied a grant by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) because it was "too risky." Daszak would ultimately get a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), but Wenstrup and Republicans dug up concerning emails that showed Daszak was willing to deceive the federal government about EcoHealth's intentions.
"But what we found in their internal emails, before they even applied for that grant, was … Dr. Daszak saying, 'We'll tell them that we're going to do all the research in North Carolina. But once we get the money, then we'll shift some of it over to Wuhan.' And not only shift it to Wuhan, but do it at a less safe lab, what's called a [Biosafety Level] BSL-2 instead of a 3 or 4, and we'll do that there because it will cost less.
"So here is a person that was — through these internal emails — telling us that he was willing to deceive the federal government. But then he goes over to NIH once he's been turned down there and he does get the grant," Wenstrup added.
Fauci is set to testify before Wenstrup's House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on June 3.
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Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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