Chinese lab linked to COVID-19 banned from receiving US funding through 2033
In apparent recognition of what was once regarded as a “conspiracy theory,” United States health officials have debarred a Chinese laboratory suspected of leaking the COVID-19 virus from procuring taxpayer funding for at least the next decade.
A formal determination of debarment from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent to Director General Dr. Yanyi Wang of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) stated that HHS had “suspended and proposed WIV for debarment from participating in [U.S. government] procurement and nonprocurement programs” through July 16, 2033.
The announcement came after HHS reviewed documents showing WIV scientists inserted new spike proteins into four bat coronavirus strains in experiments conducted between 2018 and 2019.
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“The [National Institutes of Health] determined that the WIV may have conducted an experiment yielding a level of viral activity which was greater than permitted under the terms of the grant … which possibly did lead or could lead to health issues or other unacceptable outcomes," the letter stated.
According to HHS, the experiments violated U.S. grant guidelines after they were shown to increase viral activity by more than tenfold, including in one strain which showed a 75% fatality rate within two weeks of infecting “humanized mice.”
Officials also say due to a lack of response from WIV to communications from the NIH, which first admitted in 2021 to funding the research in Wuhan, there remains a “risk that WIV not only previously violated, but is currently violating, and will continue to violate, protocols of the NIH on biosafety,” especially after WIV failed to respond to an initial notice in July.
“WIV has not acknowledged the violations, has not cooperated with the Government to address the violations, has not accepted responsibility for the violations, and, therefore, presumably has taken no action to eliminate the risk to the Government in conducting business transactions with WIV presently or into the future,” the letter stated.
In response to the HHS announcement, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, chair of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, issued a statement urging that “The Wuhan Institute of Virology should not receive another cent of U.S. taxpayer funding."
"After years of conducting dangerous gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels, cutting off all American taxpayer dollars from the WIV is an essential and obvious step in the right direction," he said.
Between 2014 and 2020, WIV received federal funding through a grant project between NIH and the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance totaling more than $3.7 million, a total from which over $600,000 went to WIV.
In January, an HHS watchdog report found NIH “did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth's compliance with some requirements.”
Much of the initial speculation about COVID being the result of a “lab leak” was met with ridicule and often incuriosity from some of the world’s biggest media outlets, with headlines from The New York Times and The Washington Post calling it a “fringe” or “conspiracy theory."
In June 2020, The Washington Post blamed “conservative media misinformation” for increasing the “severity of the pandemic,” with reporter Christopher Ingram going so far as to accuse Fox News and other conservative-leaning outlets of fueling “a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others.”
Broadcast and cable media also pushed back against any suggestion of a “lab leak” theory, including CNN, where reporter Drew Griffin once accused late conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh of having “zero proof” when he suggested COVID came from a lab.
“But to find the real source of this pandemic, it's best to leave it to science,” investigative correspondent Griffin reported in April 2020. “CNN has spoken to a half-dozen virus hunters, who right now say anyone who claims they know the exact source of the novel coronavirus is guessing."
“Did it come from bats? Most likely,” Griffin added.
Within days of that report, CNN reported that U.S. “intelligence and national security officials say the United States government is looking into the possibility that the novel coronavirus spread from a Chinese laboratory.”
The following month, Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, told reporters that current evidence “is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.
“Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [COVID-19] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci said in May 2020.
Since then, a House committee investigating the origins of COVID-19 has received thousands of pages of internal communications between Fauci and other government scientists, including details on Fauci’s alleged role in the drafting of “Proximal Origin,” a research paper used to discredit the lab leak theory.
Investigators now say Fauci later “cited Proximal Origin from the White House podium when asked if COVID-19 leaked from a lab."
Last month, Republican Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called for the U.S. Attorney’s Office to consider charging Fauci for making false statements in his May 2021 Senate testimony about government grants for gain-of-function research in Wuhan labs.
On Wednesday, the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic also alleged Fauci may have used his influence with leadership at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to “influence” its COVID-19 origins investigation.
This latest development comes days after a whistleblower alleged the CIA may have bribed its own analysts to discredit the lab leak theory.
According to ABC News, a CIA whistleblower stated all but one member of a “COVID discovery team” leaned toward the lab leak theory but were “given a significant monetary incentive to change their position.”
A CIA spokesperson told ABC News the agency does “not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions,” and that they “take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them.”
In an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in August, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said it wasn’t just WIV performing so-called “gain of function” research.
According to Kennedy, several labs were set up across the U.S. to work on similar research when, in 2014, “three bugs escaped from three different labs and they were high-profile breaks and they were very dangerous, they had smallpox and ... a couple of other bad, bad, bad microbes.”
Kennedy said in response to the leaks, 300 scientists wrote to President Barack Obama and said, “'You’ve got to shut down Anthony Fauci because he’s going to create a microbe that will cause a global pandemic.’"
While Obama ultimately shut down what Kennedy described as 18 of the "worst of Anthony Fauci’s experiments,” Kennedy added that “instead of obeying that law, Anthony Fauci shifted a lot of his operations off-shore and those operations ended up, most of them, in the Wuhan lab.”
Ian M. Giatti is a reporter for The Christian Post and the author of BACKWARDS DAD: a children's book for grownups. He can be reached at: [email protected].
