Fauci’s diary sheds light on the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan lab

“It was not the source. It was the amplifier.”

Those are Dr. Anthony Fauci’s words, written privately in his diary in January 2020, about the Wuhan “wet” market he later publicly blamed for setting off the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a private confession that contradicts what he later told the country. Behind that line lies a deeper story about a nonprofit charity few Americans knew about, even though they have given it tens of millions of dollars.

The EcoHealth Alliance was not a lab. It was a middleman, an American research nonprofit that received federal grants from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and then passed a portion of the money along to researchers overseas, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

Think of it like a school district that gets a state grant and then subcontracts part of the work to an outside vendor. Except in this case the vendor was a Chinese government-run lab. The U.S. Department of State now credits the WIV with a “published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses” and says WIV “has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the COVID-19 virus…”

A crude explanation of terms is in order.

When you read “gain-of-function,” (sometimes abbreviated “GoF”) think of it as enhancing viruses to make dangerous and infectious diseases more so. The Obama White House imposed a prohibition on federal funding of GoF research in 2014. Recipients of federal grants that could potentially be used for GoF research (such as EcoHealth) have been required to prove compliance with the prohibition ever since.

Relatedly, when you read “deliberate insertion,” think of it as “a human did this, not nature,” whether on purpose or by accident.

This may not be a perfect scientific way to explain these terms, but clarifying the issues for the tax-paying public is at least as important as perfect scientific language. I spent most of my career in middle and high school classrooms, and I am not a virology expert. Today, I research what America’s charitable sector is up to, particularly when those charities are operating with our tax dollars.

When Senator Rand Paul released more than a thousand pages of Anthony Fauci’s pandemic-era diary in late July, I did not look at it as a scientist, but rather as a taxpayer.

The birth of EcoHealth

EcoHealth Alliance was originally named the Wildlife Trust. Started in 1971 as a 501(c)(3) charity focused on wildlife conservation, it pivoted to conservation medicine in 2010, and with that came a substantial increase in funding. Annual revenue was $5.3 million the year before the pivot. By 2015, six years after the rebrand, it had more than doubled to just under $12 million, with 85 percent of that coming from government grants.

So rather than an NGO, a “nongovernmental organization,” EcoHealth was becoming a “basically government organization.”

The Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security alone sent EcoHealth nearly $39 million between 2013 and 2020, with $34.6 million of that coming from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. DTRA is a Pentagon office charged with deterring the development and use of weapons of mass destruction. So, the single largest funding stream behind the charity now tied to the origins of a global pandemic came from a federal agency that was founded to prevent such things from being used as WMD.

The lucrative relationship between EcoHealth and your tax dollars took a turn for the worse after the pandemic began.

In January 2023, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General (HHS-OIG) concluded that EcoHealth “did not effectively monitor awards and subawards” related to research at the Wuhan Institute and that this had resulted in “missed opportunities to oversee research and other deficiencies.”

At that point, HHS was answering to the Fauci-friendly Biden administration. A major concern for the OIG was that EcoHealth was not sufficiently monitoring whether the Wuhan Institute was complying with the federal prohibition against funding for gain-of-function research. The lack of transparency, and mounting suspicions regarding what the WIV was doing with the money, led to a September 2023 decision to cut off WIV from federal funding for a decade.

The situation escalated further in December 2024, when HHS informed EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak that he had also been debarred for five years “from participating in United States Federal Government procurement and nonprocurement programs.” Daszak was fired by EcoHealth a few weeks later in early January 2025, and later that month (less than a week before the Trump administration took office) HHS issued a 5-year debarment against EcoHealth as well.

By April 2025, having lost the taxpayer support, EcoHealth shut down. Daszak is now suing his former employer for $3 million, describing himself in court filings as unemployed and poor, despite having earned a salary north of $440,000 the year before he lost his job.

Fauci’s diary matters today because EcoHealth no longer exists to answer for what it funded in Wuhan.

Daszak silences debate

A lot of the secrecy about what may have happened in Wuhan goes back to Dr. Daszak.

Fauci repeatedly told the public that a Wuhan wet market was the origin of COVID-19, while downplaying the lab-leak theory. Beginning in April 2020 he publicly called for China’s “wet markets” to be closed.

But his diary tells a different story. “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” Fauci wrote on January 26, 2020.

Then on February 1, 2020 Jeremy Farrar (a scientist later revealed to be a former research collaborator with Daszak) convened a conference call with Fauci and ten other scientists to discuss whether the virus was man-made or natural.

According to Fauci’s diary entry, just two of the twelve participants strongly agreed that COVID-19 was likely born and spread in the wild. The others, according to Fauci, believed that “deliberate insertion was possible” and they pointed directly to Dr. Zheng-Li Shi’s gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute as a plausible source.

Colloquially known as the “Bat Woman” of Wuhan, Zheng-Li Shi had worked with Daszak and EcoHealth for years doing work on bat coronaviruses. So, the potential for Bat Woman’s gain of function work escaping the Wuhan lab and infecting the world was not a fringe theory whispered by amateurs. It was the majority view of the professional researchers that participated in that February 2020 call with Anthony Fauci.

And yet, shortly afterwards, four of the researchers on that call got to work writing The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Appearing in the science journal Nature Medicine in mid-March 2020, the authors of the now-infamous “Proximal Origin” paper argued “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Asked directly about the Wuhan lab leak possibility in an April 17, 2020 White House news conference, Fauci–with the president standing next to him–made his first attempt to assure the world that the Proximal Origin story was the explanation:

There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve.  And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human. [emphasis added]

“From my perspective, your comments are brave, and coming from your trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus’s origins,” wrote Dr. Daszak, in a private note to Fauci the next day.

Before that, Daszak couldn’t even wait for publication of Proximal Origin to protect his position. A retrospective analysis of COVID media coverage by The British Medical Journal explains:

Shortly after the pandemic began, Daszak effectively silenced debate over the possibility of a lab leak with a February 2020 statement in the Lancet. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” said the letter, which listed Daszak as one of 27 coauthors. Daszak did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The BMJ. [emphasis added]

And from there, mainstream news outlets across the globe would spend more than a year citing Proximal Origin as the truth and claims about the lab leak and/or a human-created virus as “conspiracy theories.”

And there it stood until late-2021 when rumors began to leak out that the FBI had “moderate confidence” in a lab leak. Then in March 2023 the FBI director confirmed “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.” The CIA officially concurred with this in January 2025.

EcoHealth and what you paid for

I am not in the business of alleging conspiracies without evidence. But at some point, the number of coincidences starts to add up to something. There’s good reason to suspect that the pandemic escaped from the Wuhan Institute, so it’s more than appropriate to point at least a skeptical finger at EcoHealth and ask what it did with our tax dollars.

The HHS inspector general obviously agreed.

National Institutes of Health grant number 1R01AI110964-01, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” was a five-year, $3.1 million award to EcoHealth Alliance with Daszak named as project leader. The grant specifically lists the Wuhan Institute of Virology as one of the project site locations for the research to be performed. Dr. Zheng-Li Shi, the “Bat Woman,” was noted as WIV’s main researcher.

The ominous termination date, when all the research was to be completed at Wuhan and elsewhere, was listed as May 31, 2019. American intelligence officials would later pin down November 2019 as the date when three WIV researchers needed hospitalization for “symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.” According to the U.S. State Department, Dr. Zheng-Li Shi claimed there was “zero infection” among her team and the Chinese Communist Party wasn’t letting anyone ask further questions.

The U.S. government’s project description for the aforementioned EcoHealth grant says it was meant to fund “in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China,” molecular characterization of the exact receptor-binding genes that let a coronavirus latch onto human cells, and laboratory studies of how far these viruses could jump between species.

This is the grant record, not an allegation, and the implications of it were hard for Fauci to accept.

By May 28, 2021 Fauci had learned that HHS would refer EcoHealth to its inspector general for the investigation that would later get the Wuhan Institute, EcoHealth and Daszak debarred. “Certainly, whatever they find, it will be misconstrued by those who want to make a case for our involvement in the outbreak. I am starting to feel that it is important for me to write an editorial or an opinion piece giving our side of the story,” wrote Fauci to his diary that evening.

“Our side” was Fauci’s “side,” not the taxpayer’s.

Then in July 2021 Fauci wrote in his diary that it was “molecularly impossible” for the viruses studied under the NIH grant to have turned into SARS-CoV-2.

He also had a name for anyone asking questions. “Things continue to heat up regarding the innuendoes about our being responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic because of our grant to EcoHealth,” he wrote in May 2021. “Amazing!!! All the right-wing conspiracy theorists are piling on with no data at all,” [emphasis added].

That line does a lot of work, because Fauci was not just defending a position. The lab leak theory got branded by the press as a right-wing conspiracy, which caused many Americans to dismiss it automatically. Even to this day, with the FBI and CIA both accepting the lab leak as likely, many people’s minds have not changed.

The defense campaign did not stop at op-eds from Fauci. David Morens, Fauci’s former senior advisor at NIAID, now faces a federal indictment for allegedly conspiring to restore a canceled NIH grant tied to bat coronavirus research and for allegedly destroying records related to the origins of COVID. EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak is reported to be an unnamed co-conspirator in that indictment.

So, according to the government’s allegation, what we have here is the man who ran the nonprofit at the center of the outbreak being accused of working with a top Fauci deputy to erase the paper trail.

Ecohealth didn’t fail quietly

There’s a longer trail that cannot be erased.

EcoHealth Alliance’s 2009 tax filing, a full year before the public rebrand from Wildlife Trust was announced, lists its three largest program services as a USAID pandemic threat surveillance program, a bat and animal viral surveillance project in Bangladesh, and an NIAID-funded project with a program description that reads, in the organization’s own words, “model hotspots for viral diversity in bats and identify new viruses in bats.”

NIAID was funding bat virus discovery work five years before it began funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab at the center of the pandemic investigation. An organization built to research new viruses in bats went on to fund the exact lab where a new virus in bats is suspected to have started a global pandemic.

Maybe all this money for bat research and alleged efforts to conceal some of it is just a coincidence that has nothing at all to do with the pandemic that shut the world down. It is also what it would look like if it were not.

EcoHealth Alliance’s mission statement, still preserved on Wikipedia, describes an organization dedicated to “protecting people, animals, and the environment from emerging infectious diseases,” with a research focus on preventing pandemics.

Set the supposed conspiracy theories aside entirely and just grade EcoHealth on their homework. This was the organization studying the bats. This was the organization funding the lab. This was the organization with its fingerprints on nearly every part of the cover story.

EcoHealth Alliance did not fail quietly. It failed at the one job it claimed to exist for, using the exact tools it claimed would prevent it. And what makes this all much worse is that we paid for it. We paid for the bats, the lab, and the cover story, and we are still paying for what came after.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/faucis-diary-sheds-light-on-the-ecohealth-alliance-and-the-wuhan-lab/