Steve Hilton dropped another aspect of the shocking story around the funding of the gain-of-function virus experiments during an interview on Fox News.

Calling it one of the “biggest scandals” in “a hundred years,” Hilton highlighted reports of funding of Peter Daszak’s virus research from Google and USAID.

We reported on the USAID connection in great detail. USAID funding is supposed to go to supporting U.S. interests abroad.

As our Scott Hounsell reported:

We found that not only were NIH/NIAID-funded studies used to conduct GoF research at the WIV, but so were studies funded by the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security through USAID and PREDICT. PREDICT, as we have previously discussed, is the cooperative group used to study and “predict” future viral threats, between USAID and EcoHealth Alliance.

We also reported on how the evidence grant funding through PREDICT had in part come from the Defense Department, specifically through the DOD “Defense Threat Reduction Agency,” which is supposed to deal with potential threats like bioweapons.

Now Hilton is also raising greater attention to the Google aspect of the story as well and calling it a cover-up.

From Fox News:

“It’s a really shocking story, and it just adds to this increasingly big mountain of evidence that we have got a massive establishment cover-up going on because the people at the heart of this know what they did,” Hilton said.

“People like Peter Daszak, people like [Dr. Anthony] Fauci himself who, of course, initiated the work that Daszak then sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to make bat coronaviruses more airborne and more transmissible and more infectious to the human respiratory system – [a theory] we now know as the most likely origin of the pandemic,” he continued. “They’re covering it up because they know they’ve got a guilty conscience.”

Hilton claimed that they’d been working to “squash that explanation” and steer people to the natural origin theory.

“They have been looking for evidence all over the world for the last year…and have found no evidence of that. That’s what Google has been pushing, especially YouTube, a division of Google,” he said, “and now we know why, because they are implicated.”

“They have a massive conflict of interest,” Hilton continued, “and the way that the establishment has circled the wagons to protect themselves and what they have been doing, it’s honestly one of the biggest scandals for, I don’t know, a hundred years. I can’t think of a bigger one if you think about the consequences of this pandemic and the idea that it was actually created by scientists who were arrogantly operating outside the bounds of the regulation that was in place and then covering their tracks. It is so scandalous.”

Google disputed the claims, calling them “baseless,” and downplaying the grants, saying they weren’t related to the virus.

“The one-off philanthropic grants referenced are years old and had nothing to do with COVID. We have engaged precisely zero times with this organization on any work related to COVID or the Wuhan lab,” the spokesperson said.

However, at least one grant from Google was referenced in a paper in 2018 involving Daszak dealing with “Serologic and behavioral risk survey of workers with wildlife contact in China.” The paper also notes “the wildlife trade has played a role in the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).”

Stay tuned as more surely develops in this story, from Hilton, from our friends at Human Events, and from our own RedState investigative reporters.