Questions are being asked about why it has taken three years to pull the plug on US funding to the Chinese laboratory at the center of a Covid lab leak cover-up.
Former President Donald Trump said as early as April 2020 that he had seen evidence the pandemic was borne out of dangerous experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and a slew of damning reports, leaks and indirect evidence since then has led the FBI and at least one other Government agency to support the ‘lab leak theory’ publicly.
Yet US taxpayer money continued to flow through the WIV during the pandemic to identify and study dangerous viruses. It wasn’t until this Monday that the Biden Administration finally announced it was suspending the WIV access to US research grants, saying it was necessary to ‘protect the public interest.’
Critics have suggested that the White House’s reluctance to scrap all funding and launch a full-throated condemnation of China during the pandemic is because of the US Government’s eerie ties to the Chinese research institute, which has enjoyed potentially millions in US funds over the years.
There is also a sense that the Biden Administration and political establishment have been slow to come around to the idea of a lab leak because of Trump’s early endorsement of the hypothesis. Biden described Trump as ‘nakedly xenophobic’ for claiming the lab was the likely source of the pandemic in 2020.
The Biden Administration finally announced on Monday it was suspending the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) access to government funding and proposed a longer-term ban after the lab could not provide sufficient documentation on its biosafety protocols and security measures
Exactly how much US funds have been sent to the WIV is unclear due to the fact the grants were funneled through a third-party research group.
Records indicate the National Institutes of Health (NIH), America’s public research-funding body, first struck an indirect relationship with the Wuhan lab in 2014.
In June of that year, the NIH and US Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded New York nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance $4.3 million, with $3.7 million coming from the NIH’s infectious disease arm, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which was headed by long-time public servant Dr Anthony Fauci at the time.
The project — titled Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence – was to span five years and one of its objectives was to ‘find out if any coronaviruses… in bat populations in China have the potential to infect people.’
‘The overall goal of this work is to help design vaccines and therapeutics against future potentially emerging viruses, work out which communities are on the frontline of a new potential outbreak, and reduce the risk of them being infected by analyzing their risk behavior,’ the grant adds.
The $4.3m was shared among various research facilities across Asia and Africa. At least $600,000 went directly to WIV between 2014 and May 2019.
The 2014 research grant was issued just months before then-President Barack Obama outlawed ‘gain of function’ (GOF) research in the US, a loosely-defined term for controversial experiments that involve making viruses more deadly or infectious.
The supposed purpose of gain of function is to get ahead of natural evolution to understand and develop knowledge, drugs and vaccines for future outbreaks of viruses.
But the danger is that experts create a virus that may not have emerged naturally or posed a threat to humans and accidentally unleash it.
Even though the terms and conditions of the NIH grant stated the funding could not be used for GOF research, records show scientists working in Wuhan under US Government contracts performed tests which many say constitutes GOF.
On two occasions, US-sponsored WIV scientists submitted research summaries that showed that when three altered bat coronaviruses were put in the lungs of genetically engineered mice, they multiplied much more quickly than the original virus they were based on.
The viruses also appeared to be more deadly, with one causing the mice to lose weight significantly.
The researchers wrote: ‘These results demonstrate varying pathogenicity of SARSr-CoVs with different spike proteins in humanized mice.’
Both the NIH and EcoHealth said that the results were reported to the agency, and the NIH said that the rules to limit gain-of-function research did not apply.
However, a report by the Government spending watchdog this year found the NIH EcoHealth failed to ‘understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action’.
‘With improved oversight, NIH may have been able to take more timely corrective actions to mitigate the inherent risks associated with this type of research,’ the report added.
EcoHealth Alliance, run by British zoologist Peter Daszak, funded studies in Wuhan – the Chinese city where the pandemic began – on manipulated coronaviruses. The boss of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, shown left, is known to be close to Dr Anthony Fauci (right)
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has long been suspected as the source of the COVID pandemic, but the CIA has been unable to confirm the reports. The FBI and Department of Energy have already concluded that the ‘lab leak’ theory is most likely
Virologist Shi Zheng-li, left, works with her colleague in the P4 lab of Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2017
The Wuhan Institute of Virology (pictured) launched a secret research initiative that saw them fuse coronaviruses in a series of risky experiments
Facing a funding shortfall when certain grants expired, EcoHealth in 2018 submitted an even more ambitious research proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
The plan, titled Project DEFUSE, involved partnering with WIV to engineer bat coronaviruses to be more deadly by inserting genetic features similar to those found in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid.
The research involved gathering bat coronaviruses in China and studying them at the WIV, as well as mixing components of SARS-like viruses from different species to create a novel chimera that was able to directly infect human cells.
The experiments described in grant documents that are publicly available so far used viruses not closely related enough to Covid to cause the pandemic, but key records have still not surfaced.
A lack of oversight, accountability and paper trail, as highlighted by the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services, has meant it is not clear exactly how much money went to the Wuhan lab for that particular project.
The WIV was due to continue receiving funding from the $4.3 million US government grant, but days after the Mail on Sunday revealed in April 2020 that the US government was paying for the lab’s research, Trump cut the funding.
The White Coat Waste Project, a taxpayer watchdog group, told DailyMail.com Biden’s decision to pull the funding was ‘long overdue’ – but noted that the Administration’s proposal is only a ten-year ban rather than a permanent suspension.
Dr Fauci is known to be close to Dr Peter Daszak, British zoologist and president of Eco Health Alliance, who once thanked the American Government’s departing chief medical adviser for downplaying theories that Covid may have been created in a lab.
In August 2022, the NIH stopped a sub-award to the WIV that had been part of an earlier grant to EcoHealth Alliance. The NIH informed the House Oversight Committee that Eco Health had refused to give over laboratory notebooks and other records.
The NIH wrote to the committee: ‘NIH has requested on two occasions that EHA provide NIH the laboratory notebooks and original electronic files from the research conducted at WIV. To date, WIV has not provided these records.’
It added: ‘Today, NIH has informed EHA that since WIV is unable to fulfill its duties for the subaward under grant R01AI110964, the WIV subaward is terminated for failure to meet award terms and conditions requiring provision of records to NIH upon request.’
The NIH wrote to EcoHealth to let it know the sub-award had been halted due to ‘material non-compliance with terms and conditions of award’, but said that the research group could renegotiate the involvement of the Wuhan lab.
In 2014, the Obama administration banned gain of function research in light of controversial research on H5N1 viruses in 2012.
But in 2017, the NIH lifted the ban on the research, and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released guidance for funding decisions.
Mounting evidence over the years has pointed back to the lab leak theory for Covid.
In November 2019, three researchers at WIV fell sick with a mystery virus, leading to suspicions they could have been the first people to contract Covid.
It was later reported that the researchers’ symptoms were ‘consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses.’
One of the researchers was Ben Hu, a US taxpayer-funded scientist.
In February 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray reiterated his agency’s initial findings from 2021 that the Covid pandemic was most likely the result of a lab leak in Wuhan.
The Energy Department also concluded that the Covid-19 virus most likely leaked from a Chinese research lab, having reversed its previous position.
EcoHealth was most recently given a renewed grant for its research into the risk of bat coronavirus spillover from the NIH and NIAID in May of this year.
The new award does not cover the criticized studies which mixed parts of bat viruses linked to SARS, and EcoHealth has to adhere to new accounting rules.
The research group announced the restarted grant on its website in the interests of better transparency moving forwards. It said salient questions remain on the ‘capacity to cause illness and risk of spillover of these viruses to people.’
The research group announced the restarted grant on its website in the interests of better transparency moving forwards. It said salient questions remain on the ‘capacity to cause illness and risk of spillover of these viruses to people.’
It said the grant reflects a ‘reversal of the previous termination and suspension’ of a grant awarded in 2019 for research including ‘focused sampling of bats in southern China to identify viral strains with high predicted risk of spillover.’
EcoHealth said the grant was halted in April 2020 due to ‘concerns about continuing collaborative laboratory research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’
EcoHealth’s president Dr Daszak said the project no longer includes collecting new bat samples or working with live viruses.
He added that the WIV’s role does not go beyond contributing more than 300 genome sequences of SARS-related bat coronaviruses from its collection.
Richard Ebright, a biologist at Rutgers University told DailyMail.com Biden’s decision to cut the funding was ‘both late – three years late – and insufficient.’
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