Why Are Feds Still Funding EcoHealth Alliance When Its COVID-19 Role Remains Unresolved?

 The world is trying to recover from COVID-19, the worst pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu, and a lot of questions remain concerning the origins of the virus and the role of U.S. taxpayer-funded research in China. Nonetheless, the National Institutes of Health recently awarded $650,000 to EcoHealth Alliance, a nongovernmental organization that's at the center of a major and unresolved international controversy.

EcoHealth Alliance is an NGO that funded coronavirus research at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research facility known to have been engaged in "gain of function" research designed to replicate a virus to increase its virulence and transmissibility to humans.

• Dr. Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who has emerged as a central figure in the gain-of-function controversy and the origins of COVID-19, has been a target of recent congressional inquiries.
• Yet, the NIH awarded the NGO another grant to be administered by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH).

EcoHealth should not receive a penny of American taxpayer dollars for their gross mismanagement of Americans' hard-earned money

• In 2014, NIH awarded EcoHealth a $3.7 million grant to study bat coronaviruses. In 2016, EcoHealth and Dr. Daszak fell out of compliance with the grant terms when they failed to timely file an annual report. When they did file the report, it was clear that EcoHealth in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology had engaged in gain-of-function research in violation of the federal moratorium.
• The NIH had previously defined gain of function as "a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent."

Circumstantially, the grant funding from EcoHealth Alliance may have contributed to the gain-of-function research that was ongoing at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

• According to an unclassified April 2020 State Department memorandum, **** Zheng Li, the key wuhan researcher on bat coronaviruses, was paid from the grant money.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/10/26/why-are-feds-still-funding-ecohealth-alliance-when-its-covid-19-role-remains-unresolved/