NIH provides 'heavily redacted' docs on U.S. grant to Wuhan lab through EcoHealth: Report

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided "heavily redacted" documents to the organization Empower Oversight related to a U.S. grant that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China through the EcoHealth Alliance.

According to Empower Oversight's report, released on Monday, the documents that the NIH produced on the grant were in response to Jan. 5, 2022 and Feb. 6, 2023 Freedom of Information Act requests.

The documents "show communications regarding the EcoHealth Alliance grant and any communications between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance in the middle of 2019, around when an enhanced growth notification should have been made to the federal government from EcoHealth Alliance."

According to Empower Oversight, The Intercept had reported that NIH documents showed the Wuhan Institute of Virology "created dangerous chimeric MERS viruses" in year 5 of the EcoHealth Alliance grant called, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence."

The organization also said that the NIH had told Congress "these experiments were conducted during the 2018 – 2019 grant period."

"The documents received by Empower Oversight show a 2016 letter to the NIH in which Daszak proposed the same research for year 3 of the grant," read their report. "This means the research may have been conducted during a time in which the White House had placed a pause on such research, which was not lifted until 2017."