Ruskin’s work informed Paul’s questions about government transparency and this week will guide Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chair of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, as he questions Peter Daszak, head of the nonprofit research group EcoHealth Alliance, about whether research he proposed to the Defense Department in 2018 could be what led to Covid. Asked by POLITICO whether Ruskin’s efforts have helped his investigation, Wenstrup said “absolutely.”

U.S. Right to Know uncovered EcoHealth Alliance’s draft grant application in January, prompting Wenstrup’s interest, as well as that of Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who until his resignation on April 19 chaired the House Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. It’s a story of how, in the politicization of the pandemic, unlikely alliances formed to turn public opinion on what caused millions to die of a mysterious new disease.

Ruskin says he merely followed the evidence and then publicized it. And the overwhelming majority of Americans now believe what was once derided as a conspiracy theory: The coronavirus that sparked the pandemic came from a Chinese lab.

Paul highlighted Ruskin’s Nader ties to argue the pandemic’s origin shouldn’t be a partisan issue.

“You’re not part of the vast right-wing conspiracy?” Paul asked Ruskin during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.

“No, I am not,” Ruskin responded with a smile.

The alliance couldn’t be stranger: Paul, the libertarian, paired with Ruskin, who followed his mentor, Nader, the arch-proponent of government regulation, into activism a generation ago to fight unhealthy food, before turning to Covid’s origins.

There’s one problem with the Republican lawmakers’ hopes for this week’s hearing: The Pentagon turned down Daszak’s grant application. Daszak declined to comment for this article.

But whether the hearing proves definitive or not, it’s sure to be a spectacle. U.S. Right to Know says Daszak tried to mislead the Pentagon about EcoHealth Alliance’s intention to conduct the research at the Chinese lab at the center of the lab leak theory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where biosafety practices were laxer than in the U.S., to save money and the work could have gone ahead anyway.

“The documents call into question the credibility of these scientists’ assurances that the pandemic could not have sprung out of their collaboration on coronavirus engineering research with the lab in Wuhan,” wrote U.S. Right to Know investigator Emily Kopp.

In their invitation to Daszak to testify, House lawmakers suggested he might have lied to Congress in a closed-door interview with them last fall.

“We invite you to correct the record,” they wrote.

EcoHealth Alliance has dismissed the allegations, saying the research never happened and language in the application suggesting the work could take place in Wuhan instead of the United States was misunderstood.

Daszak is expected to highlight in his testimony Wednesday the danger the controversy has created for him and his family, including death threats and harassment.

U.S. Right to Know’s work extends beyond its discovery of the 2018 draft grant application. Kopp has also investigated the 2020 paper in Nature Medicine that mostly dismissed the possibility of a lab leak and argued an infected animal likely spread the disease to people. That prompted journalists and politicians to call the lab leak idea a conspiracy theory.

She has used social media aggressively to question the authors’ intentions, noting that messages among them showed more doubt. The messages also revealed that former top government health officials Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins discussed the paper with the authors before its publication.

That correspondence prompted a House investigative hearing last year at which Republicans accused Fauci, Collins and the authors of misleading the public to avoid scrutiny.

Fauci declined to comment. He will testify on June 3 before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. He told POLITICO last year that he wasn’t involved in drafting or editing the paper. Collins did not respond to a request for comment, but a National Institutes of Health spokesperson said: “A draft of the paper was shared with Dr. Collins, but he was not an author on it and did not weigh in on the content.”

Kristian Andersen, co-author of the Nature Medicine paper and a professor in the department of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, told lawmakers at the hearing that his initial hypothesis that the virus came from a lab didn’t hold up. The natural spillover from an animal theory “remains the only scientifically supported theory for how the virus emerged,” he said.

Some scientists who think the coronavirus spread from an animal say U.S. Right to Know has contributed to plummeting trust in scientists by attacking them and inflaming the origin debate.

“They used documents that they’ve obtained to further this narrative that there’s some cover-up and corruption and malfeasance on the part of U.S. researchers in both the start of the pandemic itself and the research around it,” said Stephen Goldstein, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah School of Medicine who has co-authored studies about Covid’s origin with Andersen and others.

So far, no evidence proves whether an infected animal or a lab leak started the pandemic. The competing theories have split scientists across the globe and in agencies in the U.S. The National Intelligence Council favors the natural origin theory, while the FBI and Energy Department think the virus came from a lab.

A recent global survey of more than 150 virologists and other experts in the field shows most lean toward an animal origin. A Deseret News/HarrisX poll released in April found nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe a lab leak caused the pandemic. Last year, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 64 percent of Americans thought so.

Ruskin said he didn’t begin the investigation with a preconceived idea about how Covid started, but the documents his team has uncovered point toward a lab leak. On proving Covid’s origins, he said: “We’ve come closer to that than I ever would have guessed.”

A mentor and his mentee

A Carleton College religion graduate, Ruskin has spent his professional life working on environmental, public health and government accountability issues.

He ran Nader’s Congressional Accountability Project after getting a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard. For 14 years starting in 1993, the organization investigated corruption in Congress and advocated for tighter ethics rules and more transparency.

Nader, now 90, is a consumer activist and former presidential candidate who founded several nonprofits, including the Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen. His 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, led to the standardization of seat belts and airbags in cars, and his advocacy led to the creation of regulatory agencies like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.

But many Democrats blame him for helping to elect George W. Bush in 2000 after Nader ran as the Green Party candidate against Bush and the Democratic nominee, Al Gore, arguing that corporate America had captured both parties.

“Ralph is my mentor, and he taught me how to do what I know to do,” Ruskin said.

The two also founded Commercial Alert, which fought against the marketing of junk food, particularly to children.

In 2012, Ruskin managed an unsuccessful California ballot measure campaign that would have required the labeling of genetically modified food.

He founded U.S. Right to Know in 2014, with a focus on the risks of ultraprocessed food, pesticides and genetically modified organisms. The Organic Consumers Association, a Minnesota-based group advocating for the organic agriculture industry, was its only donor that year, with a $44,500 grant. Until 2022 — the last year the organic group donated to U.S. Right to Know — it had contributed just over $1 million, the most of all donors.

U.S. Right to Know had nearly $770,000 in revenue in 2022, the last year for which IRS data is available, most of it from donations.

Some other major contributors include Dr. Bronner’s Family Foundation, which uses a vegan soap maker’s fortune to advocate for immigrants, and Arnold Ventures, which funds criminal justice and health initiatives.

In the last few years, U.S. Right to Know has also reported tens of thousands of dollars in donations from so-called donor-advised funds, a type of charitable organization that people use to give money without disclosing their identities.

That prompted one of the group’s foes to accuse U.S. Right to Know of hypocrisy. While it campaigns for transparency in government and research, Ruskin’s group receives money from undisclosed sources, wrote David Zaruk, a former chemical industry lobbyist based in Brussels who blogs about activist bias.

Ruskin dismissed Zaruk’s criticism as a chemical industry effort to discredit his work.

The partner of a frontline health care worker, Ruskin said he felt early in the pandemic that not enough attention was paid to the disease’s origins.

“It’s probably around June of 2020 when I thought, ‘Well, we’ve never done anything like this before, and we’re a tiny staff, but at the same time, we were set up to do public interest and public health investigations,’” he said.

Even though it was an ambitious project, “and one where we could easily fail miserably,” Ruskin decided it was worth a try.

His colleague, Sainath Suryanarayanan, a researcher who wrote a 2017 book on environmental threats to bees and is also an associate director of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote the first Freedom of Information Act requests.

In 2022, Ruskin hired Kopp from the Washington news outlet CQ Roll Call, where she’d covered health care. “We needed a journalist to take the vast quantities of material that we were getting and try to turn it into standard written English,” he said.

Kopp, whose role at U.S. Right to Know is that of an “investigative reporter,” has tussled with scientists on X, formerly Twitter, who support the natural spillover theory.

Kopp declined to be interviewed for this story.

In February, she joined a group that included Alina Chan, a researcher at Harvard and MIT’s Broad Institute, in delivering a petition to Nature Medicine’s office asking it to retract the paper mostly dismissing the lab leak possibility, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.

Nature Medicine did not respond to a request for comment on the petition.

University of Utah researcher Goldstein criticized Kopp’s claim to be a reporter and characterized her participation as activism.

But Ruskin sees his group’s work as filling a gap in American media since news organizations have cut back on investigative reporting.

“We’ve had to file 25 FOIA lawsuits covering 38 separate FOIA requests,” he told the Senate committee in March, noting those lawsuits involved 14 government agencies that didn’t comply with deadlines to release documents or with public record laws.

Out of all of them, NIH was the worst, Ruskin told POLITICO.

The HHS agency didn’t produce almost any documents in response to nine FOIA requests submitted between Oct. 2020 and May 2021. After U.S. Right to Know sued in Sept. 2021, NIH then took another 16 months to produce any document. The lawsuit is still pending.

NIH funded an EcoHealth Alliance project researching coronaviruses involving the Wuhan lab, which the Trump administration abruptly cut in 2020.

The HHS inspector general said in a January 2023 report that the NIH didn’t effectively monitor or enforce the terms of its grants to EcoHealth Alliance. A few months later, NIH restarted the grant, excluding any work with the Wuhan lab, while imposing new accounting rules on EcoHealth.

In response to POLITICO’s questions about Ruskin’s criticism of NIH, a spokesperson said the agency “takes its obligation to implement a robust FOIA program seriously and remains committed to FOIA’s key principle of transparency in government.”

Ruskin called for “a well-funded investigative body” to tackle the questions his group is asking. “We owe it to the dead and their grieving families,” he said.

In March, Paul, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, announced a bipartisan investigation with Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who chairs the committee, into the virus’ origin, the high-risk research that Paul believes caused the pandemic, as well as broader “national security threats posed by high-risk biological research and technology.”

Weighing the evidence

U.S. Right to Know is among a group of niche media outlets, independent journalists and anti-establishment organizations that have focused intensively on a potential lab leak.

Republicans have been receptive. Most Democrats have not embraced the hypothesis, but they have also not dismissed it.

In her story about the draft EcoHealth Alliance grant application, which involved the University of North Carolina and the Wuhan lab, Kopp argued the virus the organizations were planning to create to study coronaviruses matches the structure of the virus that caused the pandemic.

The similarity is striking, said Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist unaffiliated with U.S. Right to Know who teaches chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and is a longtime advocate of tougher biosecurity rules.

But the University of Utah’s Goldstein argued the portrayal of the research in the unfunded grant proposal was dishonest. “It’s an example of speculation without any foundation in fact, of just taking a proposal from the University of North Carolina and saying: ‘Well, maybe Wuhan did it.’”

There’s also been no evidence that the Wuhan lab was studying any virus similar to the one that caused the pandemic, he argued. “The U.S. intelligence report says the same thing,” Goldstein added, referring to a declassified report released last year.

Goldstein has worked with Andersen and other authors of the Proximal Origin paper on studies backing a natural spillover of the virus. Those studies acknowledge it’s unclear what animal carried the virus and how it first infected people but have focused on a seafood market in Wuhan that sold live wild animals and is thought to have been the early epicenter of the outbreak.

The virus that caused Covid-19 also bears similarities with another coronavirus that emerged in 2002 and caused an outbreak of SARS two decades ago, Goldstein and other experts argue in a study. That virus was also associated with markets selling live animals, according to the study.

Goldstein said there’s “very good, although for sure not perfect, evidence” of a natural origin of the Covid pandemic. But with its focus on a lab leak, U.S. Right to Know has played “a hugely destructive role in people’s lives and certainly in the public understanding of how the pandemic started,” he said.

“It’s hard to know exactly what combination there is of deliberate malice mixed with scientific ignorance, but it’s been incredibly harmful.”