FOIA Docs: NIH Held Meetings With Wuhan Lab Scientists to Discuss Coronavirus Experiments

(Source: The New American)

New revelations have intensified the debate surrounding the origins of Covid-19 and the role of the United States government in it. Documents obtained by Freedom of Information campaigners suggest that Shi Zhengli, the senior scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) known as “Batwoman,” held a secretive meeting with officials at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to seek support for her work on emerging bat viruses. The meeting took place in June 2017, shortly before NIH lifted its moratorium on gain-of-function research in December 2017.

According to the document obtained by U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit public health research group, the meeting was arranged Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, an American-based nonprofit partnered with the WIV and subcontracting funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to the lab. The report says,

Daszak arranged the meetings at NIH with the program officer overseeing his research there, Erik Stemmy, who managed coronavirus research at NIAID’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

At that meeting, Zhengli and Daszak performed “a double act,” as put by the head of EcoHealth, and made a presentation titled “SARS, MERS and the risk of novel viral emergence from bats.”