IG Report Skewers EcoHealth Alliance and NIH for Using Taxpayer Money for Research Into Bat Viruses

AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Inspector General conducted an audit of three grants awarded to EcoHealth Alliance between 2014 and 2021, totaling $8 million, and subsequent sub-awards from EcoHealth to eight other labs, including the notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

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The IG found that EcoHealth Alliance and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) both failed to follow proper oversight and monitoring procedures, especially as it related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some researchers suspect the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus — the virus that causes CIVID-19 — leaked.

This wasn’t a case of EcoHealth Alliance or the NIH failing to oversee a construction project correctly. This was a failure of oversight so profound that it might have directly led to a worldwide pandemic that has already killed almost 7 million people.

Related: Department of Defense Awards More Taxpayer Money to Criminal EcoHealth Alliance

“Despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards, we found that NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements,” the audit report reads. “Although NIH and EcoHealth had established monitoring procedures, we found deficiencies in complying with those procedures limited NIH and EcoHealth’s ability to effectively monitor Federal grant awards and subawards to understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action.”

In short, the NIH — Dr. Antony Fauci’s parent organization — failed to understand the potential dangers of the research being conducted at the WIV and failed to monitor it.

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Then came COVID, and it got even worse at the Chinese lab.

“Although WIV cooperated with EcoHealth’s monitoring for several years, WIV’s lack of cooperation following the COVID 19 outbreak limited EcoHealth’s ability to monitor its subrecipient,” the report continues.

Daily Caller:

Among the areas where NIH and EcoHealth fell short were the improper termination of a grant by NIH, an inability for EcoHealth to obtain accurate and complete scientific data from the WIV, and improper use of grant funds by EcoHealth Alliance, the report found.

EcoHealth concurred with the IG’s recommendations for changes going forward, according to the report. The organization was also ordered to pay back nearly $90,000 in unallowable costs to the federal government.

And the funding continues. In September, EcoHealth Alliance was given a $650,000 grant by NIH to study bat viruses in Asia. That may have been the last straw for Congress.

A bill to ban any federal funding for EcoHealth Alliance was introduced by Pennsylvania Rep. Guy Reschenthaler. The legislation directs the Comptroller General of the United States “to review the amount of federal funds awarded to EcoHealth Alliance directly or indirectly in the past ten years that were provided purposely or inadvertently to the People’s Republic of China,” according to National Review.

“It is unconscionable that EcoHealth Alliance repeatedly funneled American taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab controlled by the Chinese Communist Party that conducts dangerous and potentially deadly research,” Reschenthaler said in a statement to National Review.

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EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak led a World Health Organization team to China in 2021 that was supposed to discover the origins of the coronavirus that caused the pandemic. Instead, he did his best to direct his WHO team’s efforts away from EcoHealth Alliance and any research done by them at the Wuhan lab, And he spearheaded an effort to pre-emptively debunk any lab-leak theory by getting 20 scientists to publish an open letter in the British medical journal The Lancet.

Daszak is either a Chinese Communist tool or someone who realizes his responsibility for unleashing a terrible pandemic on the world and is desperately trying to absolve himself of any blame.

At the very least, he and his group should be denied funding until he comes clean about everything researchers have been demanding of him since the investigation into COVID origins began.

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