(REPORT) Federal funds set up the Global Virome Project, but China might be its champion

The following is an excerpt from the DisInformation Chronicle written by Paul D. Thacker.

New documents further detail the hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds diverted to set up the Global Virome Project, an organization now headed by Dennis Carroll, a former official with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) pandemic program.

While at USAID, Carroll used his federal position to funnel several hundred thousand dollars in government funds to create the Global Virome Project. Carroll later left his USAID job to run this new organization.

In a statement last week to the DisInformation Chronicle, Public Citizen’s Craig Holman said, “The Inspector General’s office should investigate whether the law was broken and, upon finding probable cause, refer the case to the Department of Justice for prosecution.”

Shortly after the DisInformation Chronicle published an investigation of internal documents on Dennis Carroll, US Right to Know released further details of Carroll’s misuse of USAID resources and quoted a USAID spokesperson stating that Carroll never sought a waiver of conflicts of interest laws.

The date that the Global Virome Project formed remains unclear. In late 2018, USAID members of the PREDICT project proposed board members for the GVP as well as a scientific advisory board.

The proposed names include many well-known virologists such as George Gao with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Marion Koopmans, who heads the department of viroscience at Erasmus MC.

To this day, the financial supporters of the Global Virome Project are unknown.

In early 2019, Edward “Eddy” Rubin of Metabiota emailed fellow GVP board member Jonna Mazet of UC Davis, as well as Dennis Carroll at USAID, to complain that the GVP was not finding backers.

“USAID while supportive may not going forward be our champion,” Rubin with Metabiota wrote. “Maybe we need to keep on searching for a champion as the project clearly has not found one. Maybe China.”

Read full article here.

Website for Global Virome Project

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