Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health, said the news was “shocking and disappointing.”
“EcoHealth Alliance not only has documented negligence, ignorance, and failures in following the rules of a taxpayer-funded grant but also is the subject of a congressional investigation on its research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,“ he told The Epoch Times. ”We’re going to get answers on behalf of the American people why their money is being awarded to EcoHealth Alliance.”
EcoHealth is currently the recipient of 17 active U.S. government grants that total more than $50 million.
“Zoonotic coronaviruses (CoV) represent a significant threat to global health, as demonstrated by the emergence of SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2,” the statement reads.
The nonprofit went on to state that its prior work has demonstrated that “bats in this region harbor an extraordinary diversity of SARSr-CoVs, some of which can use human ACE2 for cell entry, and can infect humanized mouse models to cause SARS-like illness and evade available therapies or vaccines.
“Yet salient questions remain on the origin, diversity, capacity to cause illness, and risk of spillover of these viruses to people,” EcoHealth stated, noting that the renewed grant—amounting to roughly $2.3 million in taxpayer funding—will help address those questions.
The nonprofit, which is expressly forbidden from conducting any research in China, is also barred from collecting any new samples of bats or humans and must implement additional oversight measures.
‘Unforced Error’
Several U.S. agencies and independent scientists have concluded that a Wuhan lab leak most likely caused the COVID-19 pandemic. A new Senate report in April arrived at the same conclusion, saying that the “preponderance of information supports the plausibility of an unintentional research-related incident that likely resulted from failures of biosafety containment during SARS-CoV-2 vaccine-related research.”Amid concerns over the reinstated grant, EcoHealth’s Daszak, who has dismissed the lab leak theory, praised the move in a lengthy Twitter thread. He said the funding will help the nonprofit conduct work that will “benefit public health” and suggested that the previous grant termination “seemed to have been hastily prepared and ignored appropriate norms.”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and Board of Governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, disagrees.
“Termination of the grant was an appropriate response to EcoHealth Alliance’s possible role in the origin of COVID-19 and to EcoHealth Alliance’s definite violations of grant terms and conditions,” he told The Epoch Times.
The grant’s reinstatement is a “show of contempt” from NIH officials toward Congress and the public, he said.
“It is an unforced error that will damage congressional and public support for the NIH.”
The NIH has agreed to bolster oversight to mitigate risks in its future research into potential pandemic-causing pathogens and use appropriate biosafety precautions. EcoHealth has made modifications to the program, such as using computer modeling and amino acid sequence analysis to conduct analyses of the viruses. It noted that it wouldn’t use “recombinant virus technology,” which involves modifying viral genomes.
The changes haven’t strengthened Ebright’s confidence in the organization.
“They promise their future research will be less reckless than their previous research, promising they will stop constructing enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and will start using appropriate rate biosafety precautions,” he said of EcoHealth. “But these promises do not erase their previous recklessness, obstruction, and violations.”
Elsewhere, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) also expressed alarm at seeing the suspension lifted on the EcoHealth grant.
“From funneling taxpayer dollars into China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology for risky experiments on bat coronaviruses to enhancing dangerous pathogens, EcoHealth has hidden what was really happening with this project, violating federal laws in the process,” she said.
“NIH even acknowledges we may never get answers. Giving EcoHealth another penny of taxpayer money, particularly for this notorious project which could have caused the COVID-19 pandemic, is absolutely batty.”
‘Calamitous Collaboration’
NIAID awarded a number of grants to EcoHealth Alliance between 2014 and 2019 amounting to more than $3 million to study bat coronaviruses in China in collaboration with the Wuhan lab; the agency put the grants on pause over compliance concerns in April 2020 following the COVID-19 pandemic.“The batty taxpayer-funded grant that bankrolled EcoHealth Alliance’s dangerous animal experiments in Wuhan that probably prompted the pandemic should be defunded, not refunded,” Justin Goodman, senior vice president of advocacy and public policy at the taxpayer watchdog group, told The Epoch Times.
The report confirmed that “EcoHealth misspent tax dollars on this grant and grossly mismanaged its oversight of the Wuhan animal lab,” he said.
“No one should believe anything that comes out of the mouth of this government-funded grifter who never prevented a pandemic and probably caused one,” Goodman said, describing EcoHealth as a “reckless, rogue lab contractor that wastes money, breaks the law, abuses animals, and places public health in peril.”
He told Fox News that the agency is still investigating the origins of the virus.
“Here you’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans,” Wray said.
The NIH and Daszak didn’t respond by press time to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.
