In an unbelievably bold and irrational move, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reactivated a federal grant to EcoHealth Alliance. That’s the NGO that has been at the center of the Covid lab-leak debate, for siphoning taxpayer-funded grant money to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Trump terminated the more-than $2 million federal grant in 2020 because of concerns about collaborations with the Chinese Communist Party’s research lab.
Now, the unused funds — which total $576,290 — are at the disposal of EcoHealth, to further investigate the “Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
This news comes less than four months after The New York Times ran this headline: “The National Health Institute Did Not Properly Track a Group Studying Coronaviruses, a Report Finds.”
EcoHealth Alliance is the “group” that NIH failed to vet, and the 64-page report tattling on its reckless funding is authored by the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
It details significant errors on the part of NIH, including missed deadlines, patchy protocols, and misspent funds. And it concludes that NIH failed miserably in its monitoring of research into potential pandemic-causing pathogens. Specifically, NIH officials chose not to apply scrutiny to EcoHealth grants for research on bat coronaviruses.
Then, in March, FBI Director Christopher Wray announced that his bureau believes Covid-19 most likely originated in the Wuhan lab. The U.S. Energy Department reached the same conclusion.
Nevertheless, the Biden administration is restarting the grant to EcoHealth, with new strings attached. Along with more stringent accounting procedures, EcoHealth cannot sub-grant with the Wuhan Institute. This time, their research will be based in Singapore.
That’s according to a statement EcoHealth broadcast Tuesday, explaining that they plan to partner with the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School to analyze the risky features of bat coronavirus genomes and test whether they can infect humans.
As one podcaster asked: “What could go wrong?”
Utah’s Republican U.S. Representative Chris Stewart told John Solomon of Just the News that he doesn’t think it’s okay for our government to be funding an agency of the Chinese Communist Party that is tied to what Solomon called “an illicit bioweapons program.”
It takes a 7-year-old to think, “Yeah, that’s probably not a good idea.” Which is why, once again, you have federal officials who are involved with the funding of these organizations denying that we did. But of course we should stop. And by the way, John, going back a little further in extension to this question, that same 7-year-old could look at the evidence and go, “You know what? The virus probably came from the lab.” Now, we’ll never know that because the very first thing that China did was destroy all of their samples of Covid so that we couldn’t compare them. And if that could prove their innocence like Dr. Fauci and others have claimed, why in the world would they have destroyed those samples? Why would they not want to preserve those and said, “Look, WTO and others, compare them and you can prove genetically that this is not the same virus.” But instead they destroyed them. But, once again, the circumstantial evidence is nearly overwhelming that that virus came from the lab.
