Biden NIH resumes funding group tied to Wuhan coronavirus lab: ‘An outrage’

President Joe Biden’s National Institutes of Health has resumed a grant award suspended under former President Donald Trump for coronavirus bat research to a U.S. nonprofit group that has come under heightened scrutiny for partnering with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.

Trump’s NIH informed EcoHealth Alliance in April 2020 that it was axing the grant, which began in 2014 and included a subaward of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Wuhan lab. The grant was renewed on April 26, 2023. EcoHealth contended it will not be collaborating at all with the WIV anymore, the group announced in a press release on Monday.

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“It is an outrage that EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that potentially shares culpability for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, that has obstructed investigation of that disaster, and that has flagrantly and repeatedly breached US-government contracts, continues to receive U.S. government grants and contracts,” Richard Ebright, laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, told the Washington Examiner.

The grant to EcoHealth was suspended by the NIH in June 2020 due to “grant administrative non-compliance concerns.” EcoHealth was reprimanded by the NIH in October when the agency found that the organization delayed revealing that a U.S.-funded experiment conducted with the Wuhan lab determined that mice with implanted human cells became sicker with an engineered version of bat coronavirus. The NIH found more EcoHealth violations in January.

EcoHealth leader Peter Daszak was a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab and its “bat lady” leader, Shi Zhengli. Daszak steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in NIH funding to the Chinese institute and was also an integral World Health Organization-China joint study team member in early 2021 when it visited Wuhan. The NIH grants actually went to more than just looking at viruses and also included funding for Wuhan lab experiments on the viruses, which Republicans and some virology critics of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top federal infectious diseases expert, have said were gain of function.

Daszak dismissed the lab leak hypothesis in March 2021 when he admitted he took Wuhan lab workers at their word. Meeting minutes from discussions between lab scientists in Wuhan and the WHO-China team reveal lab leak concerns were referred to as “myths” and “conspiracy theories.”

NIH announced in August it was finally cutting off a sub-award through EcoHealth to the Wuhan institute after the lab continued to refuse to hand over lab notebooks and electronic files about the coronavirus research it conducted with U.S. funds, but NIH nevertheless gave EcoHealth further bat coronavirus funding the next month.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had rejected a $14.2 million proposal by EcoHealth in 2018 over concerns the bat virus experiments involved “gain-of-function” research and “could have put local communities at risk.”

In the last several years, lawmakers have demanded investigations into whether EcoHealth violated federal law in conducting bat coronavirus research. The Wuhan lab has notably conducted gain-of-function research, a process of altering viruses so they may be more deadly or infectious.

The resumed NIH grant, which Ecohealth will collaborate with Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School, will involve “identifying high-spillover risk bat SARSr-CoV sequences in southern China and assessing drivers of recombination,” among other matters, according to EcoHealth.

“NIH takes its stewardship over the Nation’s investment in biomedical research seriously,” Amanda Fine, a spokeswoman for the NIH, told the Washington Examiner. “This grant includes stringent stipulations that ensure it does not provide funding for research in China or with live animals.”

Fine added, “NIH supports research, such as this, to better understand the characteristics of animal viruses that have the potential to cause disease — research that made it possible for the U.S. government to move so quickly to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, NIH has never approved any research that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment last year stating that one U.S. intelligence agency assessed with “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a lab in Wuhan, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with just “low confidence” that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.

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The Energy Department has determined with “low confidence” that COVID-19 likely emerged from the Wuhan lab, with FBI Director Christopher Wray noting in March, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident.”

Numerous former Trump officials believe COVID-19 began at the Wuhan lab. House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans concluded in 2021 that “the preponderance of evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory” in 2019, and Senate Health Committee Republicans assessed last year that the coronavirus “more likely than not” came from the Chinese lab.

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