A BIO-TECH firm at the centre of the storm over the origins of Covid is still receiving US taxpayer cash for virus experiments that could spark another pandemic, a senator has warned.
The US government has dished out some $60million (£47.8million) of public money to EcoHealth Alliance since the start of the pandemic, The Sun can reveal.
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And now, as the company’s boss faces being quizzed before Congress, new documents show the non-profit received $4.1million in fresh funding for a project in Africa just two weeks ago.
And nearly $26million has been handed to the firm for projects to “combat or counter Weapons of Mass Destruction”, new data analysis shows.
They have also continued to collect and test hundreds of samples of bat coronaviruses since 2020 with US government funding.
It comes despite questions still raging over its role in the alleged lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China during risky experiments on bat coronaviruses.
EcoHealth Alliance scientists had studied bat coronaviruses with researchers at the Wuhan lab for more than ten years – funded by grants from the US.
Just a year before the pandemic, EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology proposed to create a “Frankenstein” virus with striking similarities to Covid under a proposal called DEFUSE.
EcoHealth Alliance – whose mission is to prevent pandemics – have repeatedly denied that their research in China has any link to the pandemic.
Despite concerns from lawmakers over its close ties to the Wuhan lab, EcoHealth Alliance has continued to receive millions from US government agencies since 2020.
New documents about their latest grants have been released to The Sun by anti-animal testing lobby group White Coat Waste.
Justin Goodman, a Senior Vice President at the group, blasted the continued funding of “treacherous virus hunting and risky animal experiments”.
And US Senator Joni Ernst has called for US government agencies to immediately stop dishing out grants for risky virus experiments over fears it could spark another pandemic.
She told The Sun: “The dangerous experiments on bat coronaviruses that may have caused the Covid pandemic were paid for with tax dollars and funnelled into China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology by EcoHealth Alliance.
“Even though the shady group refuses to come clean about what really happened in Wuhan, USAID keeps writing the checks to continue their risky research.
“What are taxpayers getting in return for the millions being paid to EcoHealth, other than the possibility of another pandemic?”
Although funding was stopped for EcoHealth Alliance’s work on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, its researchers are now hunting for bat coronaviruses over the border in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, grant documents reveal.
Current projects also include experiments with bats and hamsters on the deadly brain-swelling Nipah virus in Bangladesh.
Nipah is listed as a potential threat to mankind by the World Health Organisation.
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In other tests, the US researchers are infecting humanised mice with zoonotic viruses in Southeast Asia to “understand risk of zoonotic virus emergence”, according to the documents.
The researchers are also collecting and testing hundreds of samples of bat coronaviruses under a US government-funded project.
EcoHealth Alliance has also received millions for projects “combating or countering Weapons of Mass Destruction” from the Defence Threat Reduction Agency.
Dr Bryce Nickels, co-founder of the non-profit Biosafety Now, has called for the US government to “defund, debar, and dismantle EcoHealth Alliance before it contributes to another catastrophic laboratory-generated pandemic”.
He told The Sun: “It is now widely acknowledged that federal funds provided to EcoHealth Alliance have been used for research that makes the world less safe, including research that may have caused the Covid pandemic.
“Despite this, EcoHealth Alliance has received nearly $60 million from the US government since the Covid pandemic began.
What are taxpayers getting in return for the millions being paid to EcoHealth, other than the possibility of another pandemic?
Senator Joni Ernst
“Instead of protecting US citizens against biothreats, EcoHealth Alliance increases the risk.”
The new grant documents come a day before Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, is due to appear for a public hearing in Congress.
He is expected to face questions over the non-profit’s work at the Wuhan lab.
The FBI and the US Department of Energy believe Covid most likely leaked from a lab in China.
Dozens of experts, including the World Health Organisation, have also suggested Covid could have escaped from the Wuhan lab – and linked the outbreak to the project by EcoHealth Alliance.
Experts claim the Wuhan Institute of Virology endangered the world by carrying out so-called “gain of function” experiments to engineer chimeric viruses.
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This “souping up” involves extracting viruses from animals to engineer in a lab to make them more transmissible and deadly to humans.
According to the US Government Accountability Office, EcoHealth Alliance used government funds for genetic experiments at the Wuhan lab where they combined bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in chimeric coronavirus strains.
EcoHealth Alliance has denied any wrongdoing over its experiments – and categorically denied any link to the origins of Covid.
But Senator Ernst said EcoHealth Alliance is guilty of either “complacency or a cover-up” after a Department of Health and Human Services investigation found it “mismanaged” grants in Wuhan.
She previously told The Sun: “EcoHealth Alliance is ultimately at fault for failing to tell the world what was really going on at China’s Wuhan Institute.
We’re calling on Congress to defund this rogue organisation once and for all
Justin Goodman
“EcoHealth was paid millions, promising their hunt for bat viruses would protect the world from a pandemic… well, the world got a pandemic, and EcoHealth keeps getting millions.”
The Department of Health and Human Services banned the Wuhan Institute from Virology from receiving any further government funding to “to mitigate any potential public health risk”.
According to a nine-page memo, it largely based the decision on the grants to EcoHealth Alliance.
And in 2022, the National Institutes of Health terminated EcoHealth Alliance’s grant for its work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology over its “non-compliance with grant terms and conditions”.
Despite these decisions, EcoHealth has continued to receive just over $56million from the US government for other virus-hunting projects.
This includes new funding for existing grants.
According to public data, 16 grants and 2 sub-grants to the non-profit are currently active.
Instead of protecting US citizens against biothreats, EcoHealth Alliance increases the risk
Dr Bryce Nickels
It has received $25.9million from America’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency – all under the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” account.
This makes up nearly 50 per cent of all the non-profit’s funding since the start of the pandemic.
Another $18.1million has been dished out to the organisation from USAID, and another $11.7million from National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Most recently, earlier this month, EcoHealth Alliance was handed $4.1million in new funding for a “conservation” project in Liberia in West Africa.
In September last year, it received $577,000 for its bat coronavirus hunting project near China, $535,000 for its Nipah virus experiments in Bangladesh and $1.4million for its zoonotic virus research in Southeast Asia.
And in November, White Coat Waste revealed EcoHealth Alliance had received more than $8million to build a new US bat colony and experimentation lab on US soil.
EcoHealth Alliance: Factfile
ECOHEALTH Alliance is a New York-based NGO with a mission to protect people, animals, and the environment from emerging infectious diseases.
Founded in 1971 as Wildlife Preservation Trust International before changing its name in 2010, it focuses on preventing pandemics by carrying out research in disease hotspots around the world.
After the outbreak of Covid, EcoHealth Alliance’s ties with the Wuhan Institute of Virology faced scrutiny in relation to the origins of the virus.
Before the pandemic, EcoHealth Alliance was the only US-based organisation researching coronaviruses in China – where they partnered with the Wuhan lab.
In April 2020, the National Institutes of Health, a US government agency, withdrew funding to the organisation. It was later reinstated.
In 2022, the National Institutes of Health – a US government agency – terminated EcoHealth Alliance’s grant for its bat coronavirus work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It said “EcoHealth Alliance had not been able to hand over lab notebooks and other records from its Wuhan partner that relate to controversial experiments involving modified bat viruses, despite multiple requests”.
EcoHealth Alliance’s funding comes mostly from US federal agencies – including the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and US Agency for International Development.
For the project, EcoHealth Alliance will import hundreds of bats from Asia to establish a new breeding colony at Colorado State University and infect them with deadly viruses including Ebola, Nipah, and strains of Covid.
Justin Goodman, Senior Vice President at White Coat Waste Project, told The Sun said continuing to fund EcoHealth Alliance is “a slap in the face of all Americans and people everywhere”.
He said: “Our investigations have documented how EcoHealth has raked in nearly $60million of new taxpayers’ cash since early 2020 when we first exposed how it recklessly funnelled our funds to the Wuhan lab for dangerous gain-of-function experiments on animals that probably infected ‘Patient Zero’ and prompted the pandemic.
“The same government bureaucrats… are now funding even more of EcoHealth’s treacherous virus hunting and risky animal experiments, as is the Pentagon with ‘weapons of mass destruction’ money.
“We’re calling on Congress to defund this rogue organisation once and for all.”
Earlier this month, Senator Rand Paul grilled Samantha Power, the administrator of government agency USAID, over its alleged funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Paul showed a 2015 paper from the lab.
It said it had received funding from USAID for experiments that involved splicing two viruses together to create a “novel” virus.
Even the authors of the paper admitted their work was “risky”.
EcoHealth Alliance is ultimately at fault for failing to tell the world what was really going on at China’s Wuhan Institute
Senator Joni Ernst
Power denied USAID had “authorised” gain-of-function research.
Paul told the hearing: “The reason this is important is that people want to collect all these viruses from around the world.
“They don’t just want to collect them and have a library of viruses.
“They take the virus and they take a protein from another virus and they create a virus that doesn’t exist in nature that often has ramifications that could be quite serious.”
As we enter the fifth year of the coronavirus pandemic, the world still has no definitive answers on where the virus came from.
Many scientists and intelligence officials suspect bungling researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – which was partly funded by US government agencies – accidentally spread Covid during experiments on bat coronaviruses.
Meanwhile, the natural origins theory contends that Covid jumped from bats into humans through an “intermediate host”.
But an animal host has not been found after four years of searching.
China has refused to cooperate with a full-scale probe into the origins and experts claim a “cover up” is continuing today.
