U.S. Halts Funding to EcoHealth Alliance, the Organization Behind Infamous Wuhan Bat Virus Research

U.S. Halts Funding to EcoHealth Alliance, the Organization Behind Infamous Wuhan Bat Virus Research

The last time we reported on EcoHealth Alliance, the organization behind the infamous bat research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, its president was offering testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic. This indicated that the intelligence community was aware of the coronavirus experiments carried out at the facility in China years before the pandemic.

Peter Daszak’s statements included the troubling fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology freezers contain over 15,000 virus samples from the U.S. government.

The federal government decided to strip the group of its funding.

The Biden administration has suspended federal grants issued to EcoHealth Alliance, the infectious disease research group caught up in a controversy over its work in China, and plans to bar it from receiving future funding.

The Health and Human Services Department dispatched its decision in a letter Tuesday, two weeks after House lawmakers grilled EcoHealth President Peter Daszak on the nonprofit’s research, oversight, and safety measures, particularly its work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and contentious infectious disease studies known as gain-of-function research.

Daszak denied that the group ever conducted gain-of-function work, in which the risk posed by a pathogen is potentially increased by techniques such as adding or removing genes. However Republicans and Democrats alike criticized EcoHealth in separate reports for failing or delaying to report high-risk studies. In particular, documents show EcoHealth did not submit its 2019 annual report to federal officials for nearly two years; Daszak told the panel that the group had issues logging into the National Institutes of Health system.

Ecohealth Alliance may also be debarred, preventing it from ever receiving American taxpayer money again.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, EcoHealth failed to adequately monitor and report on risky virus experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, violating the terms of its federal grant and biosafety requirements.

EcoHealth is now suspended from federal funding and will be potentially debarred, HHS said in its letter to the organization. Suspended and debarred organizations are ineligible to receive new federal contracts, grants and other types of funding from the United States.

EcoHealth Alliance has been the target of investigations since the earliest days of the pandemic, with the New York nonprofit facing accusations that its experiments with bat coronaviruses could have contributed to the development and spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus linked to the deaths of millions of people around the globe.

President Donald Trump in April 2020 publicly questioned EcoHealth’s work in Wuhan — the city where the outbreak was first detected — and federal officials abruptly suspended a federal grant to the organization. That grant was restored last year over Republican objections.

Finally, the Biden Admin. agrees to ban Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance, who financed the gain-of-function research in Wuhan, from getting any more taxpayer $. https://t.co/ed5kgIWfOJ

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) May 15, 2024

The New York Times is in its true-to-form coverage on the subject. It blames Republicans for the move.

The Biden administration, under acute pressure from House lawmakers, moved on Wednesday to ban funding for a prominent virus-hunting nonprofit group whose work with Chinese scientists had put it at the heart of theories that Covid leaked from a lab.

The organization is also planning to challenge the ban.

“We disagree strongly with the decision and will present evidence to refute each of these allegations and to show that N.I.H.’s continued support of EcoHealth Alliance is in the public interest,” the nonprofit said in a statement.

EcoHealth has also faced suspicion over a federal grant proposal that it made in 2018 to team up with the same Wuhan virology lab on coronavirus experiments that Republicans believe could have led to the pandemic, despite that project’s never receiving funding.

But for all the scrutiny of EcoHealth, there remains no evidence linking it directly with the beginning of the pandemic.

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