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| Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post |
Brad Wenstrup was alarmed.
It was February 2020, weeks before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered America’s businesses and schools. But the Ohio congressman, a former military combat surgeon, was reading email from a fellow doctor on how U.S. and Chinese researchers had been experimenting on viruses in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak.
“Look, I’m military, a military doc. … I started thinking about biological weapons,” Wenstrup recalled in a recent interview with The Washington Post.
Four years later, the Republican congressman is still thinking about China’s potential links to covid, as part of his work to shape America’s understanding of the pandemic. As chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic - the only panel in Congress solely devoted to probing a health crisis that left more than 1 million Americans dead - Wenstrup has led investigations into the origins of the virus as well as hearings on school shutdowns, vaccine mandates and possible side effects from coronavirus vaccines. He recruited another doctor - California congressman Raul Ruiz, an emergency medicine specialist - to serve as the panel’s top Democrat last year, promising they would be two physicians working together to get answers and accountability.
But 16 months into their investigations, Wenstrup and Ruiz have splintered on a core question: whether their work is helping prepare America for the next pandemic, or deepening divisions from the last one.
Wenstrup and his fellow Republicans have focused much of their effort on the possible lab origins of the coronavirus, suggesting federal officials worked to cover up U.S. ties to researchers in Wuhan. The issue is set to receive national attention Monday, when Anthony S. Fauci - to many Americans, the face of the nation’s coronavirus response - testifies in front of the panel. Republicans are poised to grill the former National Institutes of Health official on the agency’s funding of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization that participated in risky virus research in China before the pandemic. Federal officials in May halted funding to the organization, citing irregularities uncovered by the coronavirus panel.
Ruiz and other Democrats concede there were episodes of pandemic-era wrongdoing, such as EcoHealth misleading the government on its potential work and a former Fauci adviser admitting he deliberately deleted emails. But they say the GOP-led investigations have amounted to a wild-goose chase, wasting taxpayer dollars and a crucial opportunity to prepare for the next health crisis. --->READ MORE HERE
Federal public health officials and others who have covered up information about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic could face prosecution, the chairman of a special House subcommittee investigating the outbreak tells The Post — with Dr. Anthony Fauci due to appear before the panel on Monday.
“We want the DOJ to weigh in, hopefully they can do something honestly and fairly,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in an exclusive interview Thursday. “But at the same time, we can make criminal referrals. I think we should.”
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has already recommended a criminal probe of Dr. Peter Daszak, the disgraced president of Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance, which received millions in US grants that helped fund experiments on modified bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The panel has also unearthed shocking information about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the failures of the US pandemic response and taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China — the city where the virus emerged more than four years ago.
“The work they were doing was risky,” the chairman noted of the Wuhan experiments, “and, you can see through reverse engineering, was capable of creating something like COVID-19.”
“I started looking at this when we were in lockdown in 2020, through the [House] Intelligence Committee, and what creating a chimera was all about, and what gain-of-function research was about, and it kind of frightened me as far as bioweapons and that’s a new threat going into the future,” added Wenstrup, who is also a doctor and retired US Army colonel.
In a shocking trove of emails obtained by the subcommittee, Fauci’s former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. David Morens, admitted to using a private account to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about EcoHealth’s Wuhan grant, claimed he deleted records related to it — and said he helped his boss to do the same through a “secret back channel.”
“At one point, Dr. Morens said that he never talked to Tony Fauci about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance,” Wenstrup said in reference to Morens’ congressional testimony of May 22, in which he confirmed the emails were sent but dismissed them as “jokes.”
“But he did do that, and we have the proof of that now, and he talks about how he did,” he added of the more than 30,000 records Morens handed over. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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