The Biden administration, under intense pressure from House lawmakers, moved on Wednesday to ban funding for a prominent virus-hunting nonprofit whose work with Chinese scientists had put it at the center of theories that Covid leaked from a lab .
The decision, announced in a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services, came after a heated congressional hearing this month in which lawmakers grilled the group’s chairman on suggestions he had misrepresented work with virologists in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic started. Republicans went further, demanding that Peter Daszak, the president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, be criminally investigated.
For EcoHealth, which relied on federal funding to study the threat of wildlife viruses, the loss of funding is another twist in a saga that has long dominated discussions of how the pandemic began.
In April 2020, at the behest of the Trump administration, the National Institutes of Health suspended a grant to EcoHealth amid controversy over President Donald J. Trump with China on the origin of the coronavirus. Three years later, an internal federal watchdog found that NIH had failed to provide adequate reason for terminating the grant, which provided an average of about $625,000 a year. NIH has relaunched a revamped version of the award.
Now, with Republicans stepping up their campaign against EcoHealth and Democrats ramping up outrage, the Biden administration has again cut off funding for EcoHealth.
Health officials said they suspended three active NIH grants to EcoHealth that totaled $2.6 million for last year. And they recommended that the group be barred from receiving future federal research funding. Such bans, they said, usually last no longer than three years, but can be longer or shorter.
In explaining the decision, health officials cited a series of errors first reported by the NIH nearly three years ago. Chief among them was EcoHealth’s failure to timely report findings from studies on how well bat coronaviruses grow in mice, health officials said.
“I have determined that the immediate suspension of the EHA is necessary to protect the public interest,” wrote Henrietta K. Brisbon, a health department official, referring to the EcoHealth Alliance.
He reported problems monitoring EcoHealth’s work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some of the EcoHealth grant money was allocated. the late submission of a progress report; and the possibility that a dangerous experiment had violated the terms of the grant.
EcoHealth said it will challenge the proposal to be excluded from federal funding.
“We strongly disagree with the decision and will present evidence to rebut each of these allegations and show that NIH’s continued support of the EcoHealth Alliance is in the public interest,” the nonprofit said in a statement.
EcoHealth also faced suspicion over a federal grant proposal it made in 2018 to work with the same Wuhan virology lab on coronavirus experiments that Republicans believe could lead to the pandemic, though the project never received funding.
However, despite EcoHealth’s scrutiny, there is no evidence directly linking it to the start of the pandemic.
Federal health officials have repeatedly said that the viruses being studied with taxpayer funding at the Wuhan lab do not resemble the one that sparked the coronavirus outbreak, making it impossible for them to be responsible for the public health crisis.
Many scientists, including some whose criticisms of EcoHealth have been cited by House lawmakers in recent weeks, say early cases and viral genomes point to a different origin for the pandemic: an illegal wildlife market in Wuhan. Samples collected from the market were revealed last year to contain genetic material from the coronavirus and from animals such as raccoon dogs, a scenario scientists said was consistent with the market’s origins.
Representative Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, a Republican who serves as chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which held the hearing this month, celebrated the suspension of EcoHealth funding. He called it “not only a victory for US taxpayers, but also for American national security and the safety of citizens around the world.”
Representative Raul Ruiz of California, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, also welcomed the decision, describing EcoHealth’s behavior as a “departure from the long legacy of good faith partnerships between NIH and federal grantees.”
Last year, the Biden administration barred the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving federal funding for a period of 10 years.
The Department of Health said in a statement that EcoHealth failed to comply with federal regulations, necessitating the ban. However, the health ministry did not respond to questions about the timing of that decision, nearly three years after most of the evidence cited in its assessment was made public by health officials.