a tax-exempt 501©(3) nonprofit charitable organization

Founded in 1971 as the Wildlife Preservation Trust International by British naturalist, author, and television personality Gerald Durrell. It was rebranded as The Wildlife Trust in 1999 and again as EcoHealth Alliance in 2010 after merging with the Consortium for Conservation Medicine.

Employs 33 scientists and 17 support staff.
Contributes to research in 41 countries.
EcoHealth does not have its own lab
EcoHealth has detected more than 1000 viruses.

EcoHealth Alliance’s funding from the U.S. government, which Daszak has said makes up some 80 percent of its budget, has also grown in recent years. Since 2002, according to an Intercept analysis of public records, the organization has received more than $118 million in grants and contracts from federal agencies, $42 million of which comes from the Department of Defense. Much of that money has been awarded through programs focused not on health or ecology, however, but on the prevention of biowarfare, bioterrorism, and other misuses of pathogens. ¹⁾

Support for the Establishment of National One Health Platform Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF)

Prediction and Prevention of Emerging Zoonotic Diseases in Wildlife

International Development Research Centre (IDRC) - Canada

Training the Government to Detect and Respond to Emerging Disease Outbreaks The Conservation, Food & Health Foundation

Provision of Services To Help Leverage Health Concerns to Combat Unsustainable Land Conversion David and Lucile Packard Foundation^{2) 3)}

On April 24, 2020 an NIH grant, ⁴⁾ was cancelled due to concerns it may have lead to the Sars-CoV2 pandemic. The grant was later resumed.

Peter Daszak Project Grant R01AI079231. Funded by the National Institutes of Health (HHS). Awarded to Ecohealth Alliance Inc.. Awarded on Sep 18, 2008. CFDA 93.855 - Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research RISK OF VIRAL EMERGENCE FROM BATS ⁵⁾

EcoHealth Alliance Inc funded work by Shi Zheng-Li at the Wuhan Institute of Virology leading to a 2013 paper in Nature which describes the collection and isolation of a SARS-like coronavirus (SL-CoV) named WIV1. This was the first SL-CoV isolated directly from Chinese horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus sinicus)which was able to use ACE2 of different origins as an entry receptor and replicated efficiently in the ACE2-expressing cells.

In late October, House Republican investigators released details about the National Institutes of Health inadequate oversight of grants that NIH provided to the EcoHealth Alliance. These details arose from a bipartisan “in camera” review of documents conducted at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that was monitored by HHS staff. (For science writers, in camera review means the documents were examined in chambers. In this case, because the NIH refuses to make the documents public.)

The review⁶⁾ found;

• NIH terminated an EcoHealth Alliance grant in April 2020, reinstated the grant and then suspended the grant in July 2020 because of EcoHealth’s inadequate oversight of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology;

• EcoHealth Alliance refused to provide information to the NIH related to its subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology;

• NIH failed to report EcoHealth’s noncompliance and grant suspension into the www.SAM.gov database that alerts other U.S. Government agencies to risky grant recipients;

• NIH allowed EcoHealth Alliance to determine that their research with chimeric viruses was not “gain-of-function” because they were using a WIV1 virus backbone which EcoHealth alleged to the NIH had “never been demonstrated to infect humans or cause human disease.” As reported by The New Yorker, WIV1 is “known to be potentially dangerous to humans.”

“EcoHealth Alliance received the majority of its funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a State Department subsidiary that serves as a frequent cover for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Their second largest source of funding was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the Department of Defense (DOD) which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”” ⁷⁾

Dr. Andrew Huff received his Ph.D. in Environmental Health specializing in emerging diseases before becoming an Associate Vice President at EcoHealth Alliance, where he developed novel methods of bio-surveillance, data analytics, and visualization for disease detection. On January 12, 2022, he issued a public statement claiming Peter Daszak, the President of EcoHealth Alliance, told him that he was working for the CIA.⁸⁾

Full thread screeshot⁹⁾¹⁰⁾

Launched in 2009 and funded by USAID, PREDICT was an early warning system for new and emerging diseases in 21 countries. It was led by the University of California’s (“UC”) Davis One Health Institute and core partners included EcoHealth Alliance (“EHA”), Metabiota, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Smithsonian Institution. PREDICT was a forerunner of the more ambitious Global Virome Project.

PREDICT partnered with the non-profit EHA to carry out its 9-year effort to catalogue hundreds of thousands of biological samples, “including over 10,000 bats.” A PREDICT-funded 2015 study on “diversity of coronavirus in bats” also included Peter Daszak, president of EHA, among its participants.¹¹⁾¹²⁾

Ge XY, Li JL, Yang XL, et al. Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor. Nature. 2013;503(7477):535-538. doi:10.1038/nature12711