Under intense pressure from members of Congress, the Biden administration on Wednesday announced that a prominent virus-hunting nonprofit at the center of a theory that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab in collaboration with Chinese scientists moved to ban funding.
The decision, announced in a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services, comes after lawmakers during a congressional hearing this month suggested the group's president had lied about its collaboration with virologists in Wuhan, China. The announcement was made immediately after intense criticism. The pandemic has begun. Republicans went further, calling for a criminal investigation into Peter Daszak, president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.
For EcoHealth, which relied on federal funding to study the threat of wildlife viruses, the loss of funding is another development in a story that has long dominated discussions about how the pandemic started. .
In April 2020, amid a feud between President Donald J. Trump and China over the origins of the coronavirus, the National Institutes of Health cut off funding to EcoHealth at the behest of the Trump administration. Three years later, an internal federal watchdog determined that NIH had failed to provide a good reason to terminate the grants, which averaged about $625,000 a year. NIH has reinstated a simplified version of this award.
Now, as Republicans step up their crusade against EcoHealth and Democrats join in the outrage, the Biden administration has once again cut off funding for EcoHealth.
Health officials announced they are suspending three NIH grants to EcoHealth that totaled $2.6 million last year. And they proposed barring the group from receiving any future federal research funding. Such bans typically last no more than three years, but could be longer or shorter, they said.
In explaining the decision, health officials cited a series of blunders that the NIH first reported about three years ago. Health officials said the main reason for this was EcoHealth's failure to promptly report the results of a study on how well bat coronaviruses reproduce in mice.
“We have determined that protecting the public interest requires an immediate suspension of the EHA,” wrote Department of Health official Henrietta K. Brisbon, referring to the EcoHealth Alliance.
She pointed to the problem with EcoHealth's oversight of research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is partly funded by EcoHealth's subsidies. If the submission of progress reports is delayed. The risky experiment may have violated the terms of the grant.
EcoHealth said it would object to the proposal to bar federal funding.
“We strongly disagree with this decision and intend to refute each of these allegations and present evidence showing that NIH's continued support of EcoHealth Alliance is in the public interest.” the nonprofit said in a statement.
EcoHealth also faces allegations over a 2018 federal grant proposal to collaborate with the same Wuhan Institute of Virology on experiments on the coronavirus that Republicans believe may have caused the pandemic. This is despite the project not receiving any funding.
But despite all the scrutiny on ecohealth, there is still no evidence directly linking it to the start of the pandemic.
Federal health officials say the virus being studied with taxpayer funds in a Wuhan lab bears no resemblance to the virus that caused the coronavirus outbreak and that the virus is not the cause of the public health crisis. I have repeatedly said that it is impossible.
Many scientists, including some cited in criticism of EcoHealth by members of the House of Representatives in recent weeks, believe that the early cases and the virus genome are linked to another origin of the pandemic: illegal wildlife in Wuhan. It says that it shows the market. Samples collected from the market were revealed last year to contain the coronavirus and genetic material from animals such as raccoon dogs, but scientists say this scenario is consistent with a market origin. There is.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, who chairs the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which held a hearing this month, celebrated the defunding of EcoHealth. He said this is “not only a victory for the American taxpayer, but also a victory for the national security of the United States and the safety of citizens around the world.”
The subcommittee's top Democrat, Rep. Raul Ruiz of California, also welcomed the decision, calling EcoHealth's actions “a departure from the long-standing tradition of honest partnership between NIH and federal grant recipients.” said.
Last year, the Biden administration banned the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving federal funding for 10 years.
The Department of Health said in a statement that EcoHealth must now be barred from the site because it did not comply with federal regulations. However, the Ministry of Health did not respond to questions about the timing of its decision, nearly three years after most of the facts cited in its assessment were published by health authorities.
