In Senate floor remarks on Tuesday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) spoke about EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the possible origins of COVID-19.
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NewsTranscript
00:00I want to talk briefly on another topic.
00:04Martin King famously said that the arc of the moral universe,
00:13the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
00:21Smart man, he was right.
00:25And if you believe in the fundamental goodness of humans,
00:30I'm not saying there's not some evil in all of us,
00:33but the fundamental goodness of humans, then you know he was right.
00:37The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
00:43This month, we finally got justice with respect to one of the individuals
00:50and one of the companies that, in my opinion, helped cause the coronavirus.
01:03Let me explain what I mean.
01:04I'm talking about a gentleman by the name of Dr. Peter Daszak.
01:12We've all heard that name.
01:15The name of his company is EcoHealth.
01:20COVID, as we know, killed 20 million people across the world.
01:27It caused $25 trillion of damage across the planet Earth.
01:38Where did COVID come from?
01:39COVID, of course, coronavirus is the virus.
01:43We call it the coronavirus.
01:45It had to come from one of two places.
01:49First, it could have occurred naturally.
01:54It started in a bat, we know.
01:56Our scientists tell us that.
01:58And then viruses, which are very aggressive and very interested in self-survival,
02:06the virus jumped from another animal into another animal,
02:12which was consumed by a human being,
02:17and that's how the coronavirus became a human virus.
02:24It occurs naturally.
02:25It jumps from one animal to another.
02:29But there's another way the coronavirus could have happened.
02:36It could have been engineered.
02:40We know that the FBI and we know that the Department of Energy
02:49and we know that the CIA and we know that the Germany's top intelligence service
02:56all think that the coronavirus was engineered.
02:59What do I mean by engineering a virus?
03:03That means they think that someone took that virus that came from a bat
03:10and genetically altered it so that it would expose humans to the disease that the bats would get.
03:21That's a coronavirus, and that's what happened.
03:24And many of our intelligence agencies think that that's how the coronavirus started,
03:28and they think it started in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, Canada,
03:37where the first folks who got ill first appeared.
03:42What does this have to do with Mr. Daszak, Dr. Daszak?
03:49The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese company or the Chinese lab
03:55that was conducting this research on engineering the virus,
04:03was funded in part with American taxpayer dollars.
04:07It was funded in part by Dr. Peter Daszak and his company, EcoHealth.
04:15Dr. Daszak was good friends and professional colleagues with Dr. Tony Fauci and with Dr. Francis Collins.
04:29Dr. Collins ran the National Institutes of Health.
04:34Under him was Dr. Anthony Fauci, which ran the NIAID, dealing with infectious diseases.
04:43Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci gave Dr. Peter Daszak, who ran EcoHealth and is a British zoologist,
04:55millions of dollars in grants, taxpayer money.
05:01And Dr. Daszak took some of that money, and he gave it to the Wuhan lab.
05:09And when he gave it to the Wuhan lab, the instructions to the Wuhan lab were to use the money to,
05:19quote, understand the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.
05:26What does that mean?
05:28The purpose of this project at the Wuhan lab, funded in part by American taxpayer dollars,
05:35was to take the bat virus, the virus in the bat, modify it, and make it 10,000 times more infectious for lab mice.
05:48And that's what they did.
05:50And many commentators and many news accounts say that what Dr. Daszak,
05:59with the money from American taxpayers that he got from Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins,
06:04what they were doing was conducting gain-of-function research.
06:07You've heard that term.
06:09Gain-of-function research just means taking, in this context, an animal virus, a bat virus,
06:16altering it genetically so it'll jump into a human.
06:24Pretty dangerous stuff.
06:27Now, Dr. Fauci has said that didn't happen.
06:32Dr. Collins says that didn't happen.
06:35And Dr. Daszak says that didn't happen.
06:39But everybody else says it did.
06:42The FBI says it did.
06:44The CIA says it did.
06:47The top spies you see in Germany says it did.
06:50The Department of Energy says it did.
06:54So what happened?
06:56What happened?
06:57Well, we do know that the first two people that we know of in the world who got the coronavirus,
07:04the first two humans, were not people in the city of Wuhan.
07:09They were workers in the Wuhan lab.
07:14Remember, the coronavirus supposedly hit, what, January, February?
07:20These two people worked in the lab, got it in November.
07:24We also know that when the virus became really contagious,
07:30it, other than these two people who were working in the Wuhan lab,
07:35it became contagious in Wuhan, China, a few miles away from the Wuhan lab.
07:40Hmm.
07:42Pretty curious.
07:47We also know that when word first broke of the coronavirus, Dr. Fauci learned about it.
07:57You know who one of the first person he called was?
08:01Dr. Peter Daszak.
08:04And said, what's going on?
08:07We also know that Dr. Daszak was trying to convince the American people
08:14and the people of the world that the virus started naturally,
08:19that it didn't start from his gain-of-function research.
08:23We know that he rounded up a bunch of epidemiologists to write a fake article
08:30and start publishing it and others in a lot of scientific, professional scientific magazines
08:37to try to convince the world that the virus occurred, jumped to human beings naturally.
08:42We know that.
08:44That's all come out.
08:47We also know that after the coronavirus happened,
08:54that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins, instead of taking money away from Dr. Daszak,
09:02gave him extra money.
09:05We're not sure why, but he did.
09:08Now, as a result of this,
09:13and let me say, you say, how did it escape the Wuhan lab?
09:17I just want to make this point.
09:19A molecular biologist at Rutgers University, Dr. Richard Ebright,
09:25he studied the Wuhan lab.
09:28He said that its safety standards were about the same level of a typical dentist's office.
09:34I mean, you would think if you're going to do this gain-of-function research,
09:38you'd do it in an environment so that once you take the bat virus
09:42and make it a human virus, 10,000 times more contagious,
09:46you would try to keep it within the lab.
09:49Wuhan didn't do a very good job of that, we know now.
09:52Well, there were denials back and forth,
09:56so we asked, we meaning the Congress,
09:59asked the Department of Health and Human Services to study this.
10:03And they did.
10:05And they announced their decision this month.
10:09The Department of Health and Human Services has cut off all funding
10:15and formally debarred Dr. Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance,
10:25of which he was the former president for five years,
10:29based on evidence uncovered by a congressional committee.
10:39This is what the Department of Health and Human Services found,
10:48according to Professor Ebright, who's read the report.
10:51He says that, quote,
10:52EcoHealth Alliance provably defrauded the United States government,
10:58provably breached contractual terms of U.S. government grants,
11:03and through the reckless gain-of-function research it conducted in Wuhan,
11:07probably caused the COVID-19 pandemic,
11:10killing 20 million people and costing $25 trillion.
11:15Wow.
11:17That's what the professor said.
11:23The Department of Health and Human Services,
11:25in its official debarment letter of Dr. Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance,
11:32said that EcoHealth and Dr. Daszak routinely ignored government oversight requests,
11:40failed to report dangerous gain-of-function experiments
11:44conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
11:48and produced a required research report two years late.
11:55It took a while.
11:58And this sum will call this only partial justice.
12:05But we now have justice.
12:07And at least for five years, and I hope forever,
12:11Dr. Peter Daszak and any company with which he is affiliated
12:17will no longer receive taxpayer dollars from the National Institutes of Health.
12:27Because he was doing, according to many people smarter than me in many news reports,
12:33he was funding gain-of-research in Wuhan.
12:39And he also was given money by Dr. Fauci and by Dr. Collins
12:44to study viruses in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam,
12:53and other Southeast Asian nations.
12:57Pretty scary stuff.
13:00And we know how it all turned out.
13:04The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
13:09Dr. Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance received at least partial justice this month
13:18thanks to President Trump's Department of Health and Human Services.
13:23And as one taxpayer, I am grateful.
13:27I suggest the absence of a quorum.