NIH Approves Millions in New Grants to Organization That Funded Wuhan Lab

Millions of federal dollars have continued flowing into EcoHealth Alliance, the New York-based nonprofit under heavy scrutiny for its role in funneling public money to a key laboratory in China for bat coronavirus research that many believe may have caused the pandemic.

On Sept. 21, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued three grants to EcoHealth to fund its Asia-based research into viruses that have the potential to infect humans and spark an outbreak, government records show. At a total of $2.76 million, the funding marks an increase of nearly $700,000 from the amount awarded in 2021, and is the largest sum the organization has received from the NIH in a single year.

The grants—two of which have received NIH funding for three years straight—came amid mounting congressional scrutiny over EcoHealth’s yearslong partnership with the Wuhan lab that has been at the center of lab leak theory of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two of the grant projects are headed by the organization’s president Peter Daszak, who has repeatedly dismissed the lab leak hypothesis and has labeled it a conspiracy theory.

That EcoHealth has funded risky research by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) means that U.S. authorities should cease funding the New York nonprofit altogether, some critics argue.

“Giving taxpayer money to EcoHealth to study pandemic prevention is like paying a suspected arsonist to conduct fire safety inspections. You would think we would have learned a lesson the first time, but here we are again with the same plot but a bigger budget!” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) told The Epoch Times in an email.

Controversial Grant to WIV

The NIH in July 2020 suspended a multi-year grant worth $3.7 million to EcoHealth to study bat coronaviruses in China in collaboration with WIV, over concerns the grantees were not complying

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