Government watchdog urges oversight of Chinese research grants as Congress moves to ban funding

The Government Accountability Office, also known as the congressional watchdog, is warning about the additional risks of funding research in China by citing how the country's Wuhan Institute of Virology, in which the COVID-19 pandemic is suspected of having starting, failed to cooperate with the U.S.

The warning was released earlier this month and was followed Friday by Iowa GOP  Sen. Joni Ernst saying she's moving forward with efforts to ban Defense Department funding from going toward the virology lab and EcoHealth Alliance, a research non-profit that has awarded the lab funding and continues to finance virus research worldwide.

The accountability office report states that while federal funding of foreign research could be beneficial for the U.S., "at the same time, participation by entities from certain countries such as China can bring additional risks – as demonstrated by WIV’s failure to cooperate with [the National Institutes of Health] and EcoHealth Alliance’s requests to turn over documents and data on research involving potentially dangerous pathogens."

The NIH stopped directly funding the Wuhan lab in August 2022 for failing to provide records to the U.S., but the federal health agency renewed a grant to EcoHealth as recently as last month.

A large concern is so-called gain-of-function research that is helpful in learning how a virus will act next, but dangerous – and potentially deadly – if mishandled. 

EcoHealth via the NIH money has also given millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan lab to research dangerous coronaviruses, including by using genetic engineering, the government watchdog report also states.

This confirms earlier reporting from Just the News about taxpayer dollars going toward coronavirus research in China with little oversight ahead of the pandemic. 

The new report also showed that the trail of government funding can be difficult to track, which could make it easier for questionable organizations to obtain it.

For example, the report stated that the U.S. Agency for International Development gave funding to the University of California, Davis, which in turn gave that grant to EcoHealth, and the non-profit then split the funding between Wuhan University and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Ernst's proposed amendments to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act would prohibit Defense dollars for fiscal 2024 from being directly or indirectly given to the Wuhan lab or EcoHealth, White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog that works with Congress to fight against taxpayer-funded experiments on animals, told Just the News on Sunday.

"Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to fund the reckless white coats who caused COVID or other dangerous virus experiments on animals at home and abroad," said Justin Goodman, a senior vice president for the group. "The solution is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness."

The Pentagon is the largest funder of EcoHealth, having given the non-profit more than $46 million since 2008. Through the Defense Department, EcoHealth is currently spending millions to research wildlife diseases and high-risk viruses across the world, Ernst said.

"The tax dollars of hardworking Americans must never again be misspent underwriting risky research or subsidizing communist China’s state-run institutions," Ernst also said.

The Senate is expected to soon vote on the National Defense Authorization Act, including Ernst's amendment, because  the chamber's Armed Services Committee voted last week in favor of advancing the measure. 

Many U.S. government agencies, including the Energy Department and the FBI, have concluded that COVID likely originated in a Wuhan lab. However, Biden intelligence officials seem to be shying away from this theory.

A declassified report released Friday from the Director of National Intelligence said that the National Intelligence Council and four unidentified agencies assessed that COVID "most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor."

The CIA and another unidentified agency "remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting," the report also stated.

Madeleine Hubbard is an international correspondent for Just the News. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram.