US suspends funding for group at the centre of Covid-19 lab-leak theory

WASHINGTON - The Biden administration, under acute pressure from House lawmakers, moved on May 15 to ban funding for a prominent virus-hunting non-profit group whose work with Chinese scientists had put it at the heart of theories that Covid-19 leaked from a lab.

The decision, announced in a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services, came on the heels of a scorching congressional hearing in May at which lawmakers barraged the group’s president with suggestions that he had misrepresented work with virologists in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began.

Republicans went further, demanding that Mr Peter Daszak, the president of the non-profit, EcoHealth Alliance, be criminally investigated.

For EcoHealth, which relied on federal funding to study the threat of wild animal viruses, the loss of funding is another twist in a saga that has long dominated discussions of how the pandemic began.

In April 2020, under orders from the Trump administration, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated a grant to EcoHealth amid then

president Donald Trump’s feud with China

over the origin of the coronavirus.

Three years later, an internal federal watchdog agency determined that the NIH had failed to give a proper cause for ending the grant, which supplied an average of roughly US$625,000 (S$840,000) per year. The NIH restarted a pared-back version of the award.

Now, with Republicans stepping up their campaign against EcoHealth, and Democrats joining in the anger, the Biden administration has cut off funding for EcoHealth again.

Health officials said they were suspending three active NIH grants to EcoHealth that totalled US$2.6 million for 2023.

And they proposed barring the group from receiving future federal research funding. Such bans, they said, usually last no more than three years, but could be longer or shorter.

In explaining the decision, health officials cited a series of lapses that the NIH had first reported nearly three years ago.

Chief among them was EcoHealth’s failure to promptly report findings from studies on how well bat coronaviruses grow in mice, health officials said.

“I have determined that the immediate suspension of EHA is necessary to protect the public interest,” wrote Ms Henrietta Brisbon, a health department official, referring to EcoHealth Alliance.

She cited problems in EcoHealth’s monitoring of work done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology where some of EcoHealth’s grant money was apportioned, the late submission of a progress report and the possibility that a risky experiment had violated the terms of a grant.

EcoHealth said it would contest the proposal to bar it from federal funding.

“We disagree strongly with the decision and will present evidence to refute each of these allegations and to show that NIH’s continued support of EcoHealth Alliance is in the public interest,” the non-profit said in a statement.

EcoHealth has also faced suspicion over a federal grant proposal that it made in 2018 to team up with the same Wuhan virology lab on coronavirus experiments that Republicans believe could have led to the pandemic, despite that project’s never receiving funding.

But for all the scrutiny of EcoHealth, there remains no evidence linking it directly to the beginning of the pandemic.

Federal health officials have said repeatedly that the

viruses being studied with taxpayer funding at the Wuhan lab

bore no resemblance to the one that set off the coronavirus outbreak, making it impossible that they had been responsible for the public health crisis.

Many scientists, including some whose criticisms of EcoHealth have been cited by House lawmakers in recent weeks, say that early cases and viral genomes point to a different origin for the pandemic: an illegal wild-animal market in Wuhan.

Samples collected from the market were revealed in 2023 to contain genetic material from the coronavirus and from animals including raccoon dogs, a scenario that scientists have said is consistent with a market origin. NYTIMES