Health

Johns Hopkins Doctor Details Money Flow That Allegedly Stifled COVID Lab Leak Inquires

(Screenshot/House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis)

Dylan Housman Deputy News Editor
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Johns Hopkins professor and surgeon Dr. Marty Makary testified before Congress on Tuesday, saying that two top virologists who initially supported the lab leak theory changed their stances before receiving major grant funding.

Makary testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, claiming it was a “no brainer” that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). He was responding to a question about grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit organization that funneled American taxpayer dollars to the WIV.

Makary eventually focused on an early 2020 exchange between Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and two leading virologists in the United States — Scripps’ Institute immunologist Dr. Michael Farzan and Tulane University’s Dr. Robert Garry. Both men raised a high level of concern about a potential lab leak to Fauci, but soon changed their stories, since-revealed emails show.

“Two leading virologists, maybe the two top virologists in the United States … told Dr. Fauci on his emergency call in January of 2020, when he was scrambling soon after learning the NIH was funding the lab, they both said that it was likely from the lab,” Makary explained. “Both scientists changed their tunes days later in the media, and then both scientists received $9 million subsequent in funding from the NIH.”

Many of the scientists tasked with explaining or investigating the origins of COVID-19 have had financial conflicts of interest based on their own research activities. The only American member of the World Health Organization (WHO) team initially formed to investigate the origins of the pandemic in China was Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance itself. (RELATED: Elon Musk Receives Ominous Warning From China After Endorsing Lab Leak Theory)

Emails obtained over the past two years via public records requests have shown that Fauci and his colleagues were quite worried in the early weeks of the pandemic about the possibility that the virus emerged from the Wuhan lab, and even that U.S.-funded research may have played a role. Many of those same individuals expressed a different stance publicly, though, staunchly arguing that the virus must have been naturally occurring.