Key South East Asia Grants — Overview

These articles were shared with the USAID Special Investigator in early 2024. I have decided to release them.

Introduction: The Big Picture

Left behind:

From 2018 on, China was rushing ahead with its own sampling program and with synthetic biology. Everything you hear from Daszak and co corresponds to the image until around 2017, but the reality is a much more interesting situation that explains a lot.

By 2018, the US was trying very hard to stay in the Track II game, despite it obviously hitting a wall.

• The P4 labs were coming up, first Kunming, then Wuhan. Kunming (the old ‘new’ P4, large primates) was out of reach. China was humiliating the US consulate in Wuhan. Harbin was unreachable too.
• On the sampling side, China had its own programs and doing it its own way.
• On the synthetic biology side, they were already ahead.

Red lights everywhere.

Limited options:

The GVP was an attempt to get the sampling back into a shared framework. EHA was hoping to see China take the lead of the GVP. Some in the US were not too keen because they knew China would likely not share its data.

DEFUSE was another attempt at staying in the game via Wuhan. It was turned down because of the nonsense of the scheme, including the fact that by that time the US intel was more interested in Harbin and Kunming, which were much more opaque than the Wuhan P4.

About Daszak’s R01 grant:

You can see that Daszak had to recognise the reality, and was going to use in-country partners in South East Asia just to ship the samples to the WIV (i.e. send some back to the US) and make sure they kept record of them.

But why would Chinese teams, after sampling on their own, handle their samples over to an in-country partner, just to see them sent to the WIV? The whole hare-brained scheme described in the grant smacks of desperation.

So what is described in the grant did not happen. And what for sure did not happen is the in-country partners getting in the middle of it. It is quite likely that China still sampled.

Clumsily, Daszak still attested that the in-country partners did their work in these countries in the official reporting for his R01 grant AI110964, but we (DRASTIC and others) asked them, and they stated that they did not (we have more communications that we have not yet published).

The likely reason is that Daszak was still hoping to bring these activities by Chinese teams back into some form of sharing under the grant, while, at the same time, he was not too keen to show that he was becoming irrelevant.

About the NIAID/NIH reaction:

There is no doubt that Peter Daszak may not have been very open with the NIAID/NIH about the fact that he was effectively struggling to stay relevant as Chinese sampling and laboratory work was steaming ahead, with or without him.
At the same time, there was not much appetite for the NIAID/NIH (which since 2002 had picked up the responsibility for biodefense research in the US [footnote 1]) to be stopping his grants. On the contrary, some seem to have argued the opposite, i.e.: that it was precisely when China was starting to steam ahead on its own that EHA needed to stay onboard, even if that meant just about clinging to its seat [footnote 2].

The result is a dereliction of duty, if you consider the NIH grant conditions, or a logical decision, if you consider instead that NIAID/NIH had been chosen in 2002 to host a Track II Biodefense and intelligence program under the supervision of Fauci.

Whatever you consider, it was the reckless failure of a badly conceived program.

The following articles illustrate various aspects of this scramble.

Part #1: PREDICT-2 (USAID) and the way it pushed the envelope to avoid U.S. Sanctions over Myanmar and Laos

Key South East Asia Grants — Part 1: PREDICT-2 (USAID) and the U.S. Sanctions over Myanmar and Laos

Findings:

• In January 2018, USAID signed a Contracting Agreement with LBVD (Livestock Breeding and Veterinary Department), a Myanmar government entity, for testing of animal samples collected by the Smithsonian Institution in that country, to be completed by March 2019.
• Shortly after, it became quickly clear that direct payment to LBVD may be impossible under the then applicable US sanctions over Myanmar and the particular attention paid by the White House to these.
• This triggered the discussion and risk-evaluation, by PREDICT legal counsel and PREDICT head-office (UC Davis), of what appears to be US sanctions avoidance schemes.
• Eventually the scheme retained by April 2018 was one of those discussed, whereby an inflated salary was to be paid to an employee of LBVD, seemingly off-boarded to USAID, who would work within LBVD lab and would share her salary with other LBVD employees involved in testing.
• At the same time, all necessary equipments and materials for testing (freezers, reagent, etc) were to be paid for under the USAID grant and given to LBVD.
• The final scheme did raise concerns within PREDICT, but was retained in the absence of any better option.
• Testing of the Smithsonian animal samples did happen at LBVD in 2018/19, exactly as planned.
• In the same way, human samples were tested at the Department of Medical Research (DMR) laboratory under the Myanmar Ministry of Health and Sports (MOHS). This involved buying equipment and reagents for the laboratory, plus what looks like a salary.
• Additionally, various carry-overs of unrelated non-disbursed FY 2017 funds from the Global Virome Project and Metabiota were used by USAID to maintain the PREDICT-2 disbursement of funds to another TVPA country, Laos, to the desired level in FY 2018.

As such, various aspects may be worth investigating in relation to PREDICT-2 activities in 2018/19 in TVPA level-3 countries, normally subject to US Sanctions:

• Myanmar: LBVD Laboratory
  (1) Possible false representations (i) in the Contracting Agreement with LBVD and (ii) in an associated ‘letter of assurance’ signed by LBVD and exhibited by Jonna Mazet in support of the retained avoidance scheme (the ‘agreeable solution’).
  (2) Contemplated and actual payment schemes possibly in violation of US special sanctions on Burma.
  (3) Contemplated and actual payment schemes possibly in violation of PREDICT-2 regulations.
• Myanmar: DMR Laboratory
  (1) Payments possibly in violation of US special sanctions on Burma.
  (2) Payments possibly in violation of PREDICT-2 regulations.
• Laos: FY 2018 payments:
  Possible avoidance of US sanctions by transferring supposedly exempt carry-over of FY 2017 funds from different programs (GVP) and different entities (Metabiota) towards PREDICT activities in Laos.

Last, there is some intriguing UC Davis/USAID discussion, in response to concerns expressed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DoD), as to whether samples should be kept or destroyed in those foreign labs that may not be able to maintain acceptable biosafety standards after the planned end of the cooperation under the PREDICT-2 program in 2019/20. That discussion includes a recommendation to ‘destroy name or identifying information’. The exact meaning of that recommendation should also be clarified.

Part #2: Misrepresentations about in-country partners activities in the reporting for EHA R01 grant AI110964 (‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence’, 2014–2019)

Potential Irregularities in EHA R01 grants (NIH)

Findings:

• In 2016, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance asked for a change of geographical focus of NIH grant R01 AI110964 (‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence’, 2014–2019), for which he is Principal Investigator (P.I.). That requested change was for the last two years of the grant (June 2017 to end May 2019).
• The grant documentation was soon modified with the addition of ‘partnering entities’ in Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and a few more countries bordering southern China. The addition of these new partners was repeated in the official R01 grant updates for 2017 and 2018, with unchanged wording.
• To be able to easily include such new countries and local partners within the existing grant budget, Peter Daszak proposed that no payment would be involved, with sampling to be done by local partners and/or Chinese teams, and the samples would be directly sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for testing (with no additional expense).
• As such, the scheme contemplated seems to display very little common sense: How would EcoHealth Alliance, and eventually the NIH, know what the Chinese teams were sampling in these countries and directly sending back to the WIV?
• That scheme is nevertheless entirely in line with the leading role that Daszak was advocating for China under the Global Virome Project, an ambitious $1.2bln successor to PREDICT that Daszak was pushing aggressively at the time, as a way to get that ambitious project off the ground.
• An NIH email of April 2020 confirms that the ‘partnering entities’ listed in the grant did send their samples to the WIV in China, except for Laos.
• However, the designated ‘partnering entities’ in Myanmar (San Pya clinic, non-governmental) and Cambodia (Institut Pasteur du Cambodge) are on record denying any involvement. For instance, the Cambodia partner listed in the grant is on record as stating that they don’t understand why they are showing up in that grant documentation.

As a result, the documentation of the R01 AI110964 grant is possibly misleading from 2017 right up to 2020, when it gave repeated statement of activities (intended then effected) within the ‘partnering entities’ in Myanmar and Cambodia.

The likely loss of control of the sampling activities, directly or indirectly partly funded by the NIH through EHA, and the testing of samples directly by the WIV, with at best a limited oversight by EHA, raises major issues and seem to have been motivated by very poor logic and badly aligned interests.

Part #3: High-stakes sampling in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, and the way EHA resorted to private foundations to keep working on these countries after R01 grant AI110964 was interrupted in April 2020

Key South East Asia Grants — Part 3: High-stakes sampling in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam

Findings:

• The countries bordering Yunnan top the south, namely Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, are considered as an essential hotspot of bat coronaviruses. Western teams have been active there since around 2011, while Chinese teams started sampling there a bit earlier, in 2008 at the latest.
• Building on these Western and Chinese experiences, and following a reduction of the local wildlife trade in Yunnan in parallel with of an increase in transborder trade, Peter Daszak arranged for an extension of sampling activities of his NIH grant 1R01 AI110964 (‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus emergence’) to Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and a few more countries further south, for the period June 2017 — May 2019.
• On 24 Apr 2020, as the pandemic was spreading through the world, the NIH terminated 2R01 AI110964, the five-year extension of the original 1R01 AI110964. That extension had a focus on China, but would have included work with the WIV on the exploitation and analysis of the samples collected in these additional countries in 2017–19 under the 1R01 grant, and sent directly to the WIV.
• Immediately following that termination, in order to pursue its activities in these South East Asian countries, EHA used money from various private foundations (Wallace Research Foundation, Freeman Charitable Trust, Whitehead Foundation) and from some private donors (Pamela Thye, on the Board of Directors of EcoHealth Alliance and an anonymous donor via Schwab Charitable).
• Being private foundations or private individuals, there is no public record on how the money what spent. For instance, starting in July 2020, EcoHealth Alliance got a new 2-year grant from the Wallace Research Foundation grant, ‘Mitigating the risk of coronavirus emergence via human-wildlife interactions in South-East Asia’, with a geographical focus over Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, with Peter Daszak as Principal Investigator (P.I.). All we know is that EHA received $250,000 each year under that grant, thanks to the tax returns of the foundation.
• In other words, despite the very public cancellation of the NIH 2R01 AI110964 grant in April 2020, following the COVID-19 outbreak, Peter Daszak and EHA in fact never stopped at any time their focus on Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, using a variety of funding, most of it private funding without any public reporting obligation.
• In fact, Daszak had stated just as much in an email to his NIH program manager and a host of other scientists just after his April 2020 grant cancellation.
• Very soon after the expiration of the Wallace Research Foundation 2-year grant, in July 2022, EHA benefited from a new 5-year NIH grant AI163118: ‘Analyzing the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam’, with again Peter Daszak as P.I.
• That grant was issued with funds for foreign Components in Myanmar (including LBVD) and Laos, but with a specific interdiction to expend or draw down the funds ‘pending the resolution of internal administrative issues’. The grant ‘administrative issues’ are not detailed, but may be understood by considering the creative methods used by PREDICT-2 in paying for testing at the LBVD laboratory in Myanmar, or the open questions about the actual contributions of the designated local partners under the geographical extension of 1RO1 AI110964.

[1] See for instance the interview with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci on August 9, 2002, about NIAID and NIH work in biodefense, conducted with Victoria Harden, the NIH historian.

For some reason, the whole NIH history website went down within 48 hours of me highlighting it, before eventually coming back after a few days. So if you ever need an archived version, please use https://bit.ly/Fauci_History_2002.

[2] A good illustration of this dilemma is included in the congressional transcript of Clifford Lane, Deputy Director for clinical research and special project at the NIAID. See page 23: