The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Tuesday the agency’s watchdog would be launching an investigation into the grant program under the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after the NIH funded a research entity sending money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
From 2014 to 2019, the NIH approved a five-year annual grant of $600,000 to the New York-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance which in turn, went to study bat coronaviruses that could infect humans at the WIV, a suspected origin site of the novel Wuhan coronavirus.
According to the State Department, the WIV worked in collaboration with the Chinese military and engaged in high-risk “gain-of-function” research, wherein scientists extract viruses from the wild and engineer them to infect humans to study potential therapeutics such as vaccines. This form of research is so dangerous the U.S. government banned its funding in 2014 while HHS implemented processes to evaluate grant proposals before the moratorium was lifted three years later.
Earlier this month, House Republican Reps Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin launched the first congressional investigation into HHS itself for its failure to properly review the grant to EcoHealth Alliance under the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a sub-agency of NIH directed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Dr. Fauci has been a longtime defender of gain-of-function research, writing in a 2012 paper the study was worth the risk of a pandemic.
While Dr. Fauci conceded the existence…
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Original article posted by Tristan Justice at The Federalist. Title altered by Montana Daily Gazette.
