Top Republicans in Congress are asking the Department of Justice to investigate a global nonprofit that funneled U.S. taxpayer money to Chinese scientists but failed to abide by a grant agreement in doing so.
“EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant,” Lawrence Tabak, the NIH’s principal deputy director, informed lawmakers in letters.
The law in question bars people from trying or executing schemes with the intent to defraud the United States or to obtain money or property, including grants, by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises.
EcoHealth, based in New York, also did not file a report on the experiments until Aug. 3, nearly two years after it was required to do so.
That may have been intentional to ensure it received additional grant money, the lawmakers say. EcoHealth received over $21 million in grant funds between Sept. 30, 2019, and Aug. 3 of this year.
“The company had a clear financial incentive to violate the terms of its grant by failing to stop its experiments. In addition, EcoHealth’s failure to provide the required reporting to NIH for nearly two years—despite a requirement in the grant to do so annually—suggests that EcoHealth knowingly withheld information from NIH in an effort to misrepresent the project’s status,” they wrote.
Comer is the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee. Jordan is the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.
The Department of Justice did not return an inquiry.
EcoHealth has not responded to requests for comment.
The nonprofit was ordered by the NIH to produce missing documents by Oct. 25. The NIH has not responded to multiple queries concerning whether the deadline was met and, if it was not, what the next step will be.
In a statement last year after the suspension, an EcoHealth spokesperson said the agency was “inexplicably suspend[ing] a grant studying the very family of viruses responsible for COVID-19, and which has provided the best evidence yet on its origins.”
