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Batty taxpayer-funded grant that bankrolled dangerous animal experiments in Wuhan is renewed!

May 9, 2023 | | Print Article

The faithful to The Scienceâ„¢ re-upped their devotion with renewed funding for an organization that “potentially shares culpability for…COVID-19” to resume their “dangerous animal experiments” where they left off.

In April 2020, as American livelihoods were cut off to facilitate “30 days to slow the spread,” the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance for coronavirus research was suspended. Monday, despite the mounting consensus that COVID was a result of a lab leak, the Peter Daszak-led organization announced that their grant had been renewed and continued to claim they were not doing gain-of-function research.

“EcoHealth Alliance recently received a renewal grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the U.S. National Institutes of Health,” they said in a statement regarding the expected over $2 million in funds. Prior to the suspension, they had collected roughly $4.3 million, of which $1.1 million had gone to the notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“This grant reflects a reversal of the previous termination and suspension of an R01 awarded in 2019, but halted in April 2020 due to concerns about continuing collaborative laboratory research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the statement continued.

The organization then went on to assure, “The specific aims have been revised in consultation with NIAID and NIH staff and respond to any ongoing concerns by removing all on-the-ground work in China and all recombinant virus culture or infection experiments.”

“We have also agreed to all additional oversight mechanisms applied by NIH,” the statement stipulated and noted EcoHealth will now collaborate with Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School,” and that the work “…does not involve recombinant virus technology, dual use research of concern, nor experiments intended to enhance the virulence or transmissibility of human pathogens (so-called ‘gain of function’ research).”

However, as previously reported, an audit conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General found that NIH had failed to “effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements,” and that those deficiencies meant NIH could not sufficiently “understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action.”

As White Coat Waste Project Senior Vice President Justin Goodman put it in a statement, EcoHealth had “violated a federal ban on gain-of-function research, repeatedly broke transparency law, and obstructed investigations into COVID’s origins.”

“The batty taxpayer-funded grant that bankrolled EcoHealth Alliance’s dangerous animal experiments in Wuhan that probably prompted the pandemic should be de-funded, not re-funded,” he added.

Supporting that position, Rutgers University biologist Dr. Richard Ebright and genetics professor Dr. Bryce Nickels conveyed their own concerns, as reported by the Daily Mail.

“It is an outrage that EcoHealth Alliance — an organization that potentially shares culpability for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic … continues to receive US-government grants and contracts,” Ebright said. “The violations were flagrant, were repeated, and damaged US health security and US national security, potentially being causal factors in the origin of Covid, and definitely being causal factors in the obstruction of investigation of the origin of Covid.”

Nickels expressed, “The US House Energy & Commerce Committee have documented multiple serious violations by EcoHealth Alliance of the contractual terms and conditions of the NIH grant that was just renewed.”

“This decision betrays the trust of US taxpayers and completely undermines the stated goals of the NIH to ‘exemplify and promote the highest level of scientific integrity, public accountability, and social responsibility in the conduct of science,” the professor went on.

Reactions from the public were in a similar vein.

Kevin Haggerty
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