Research from the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know has undergirded New York Times reporting on the food system, and outlets ranging from Vanity Fair to the National Review to the Washington Examiner to The Intercept have cited the group’s inquiries into the origins of COVID-19.

But the Oakland-based “truth and transparency” organization’s own provenance has gone largely unexamined, even as public interest and political furor over the controversial lab-leak theory—and the even more broadly disputed notion that the novel coronavirus was the result of engineering—have steadily escalated. However, The Daily Beast found that public documents, including USRTK’s own disclosures, show even as the group does not advocate against vaccines, its roots run into a vitriolically anti-vaccine organization that has promoted conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks and “The Great Reset.” That theory posits that pandemic-safety protocols are a prelude to a new global regime of government and corporate control.

Filings with the Internal Revenue Service and the state of California show that USRTK launched in 2014 on a $44,500 grant from the Organic Consumers Association (OCA). For the first two years of USRTK’s existence, the Minnesota-based OCA was its lone funder.

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Like USRTK, the 23-year-old Organic Consumers Association began as a group preoccupied with pesticides and genetically modified organisms. But as it gained financial backing from ultra-rich backers in the wellness sector—most notably supplement kingpin Joseph Mercola—it adopted their conspiratorial anti-vaccine views, as The Daily Beast previously reported.

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Public records show the organization has also received considerable financial contributions from the Westreich Foundation. That group, in turn, has bankrolled multiple anti-inoculation groups, including the National Vaccine Information Center, which experts have long called “the most powerful anti-vaccine organization in America.”

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