U.S. Suspends Funding to EcoHealth Alliance Over Gain-of-Function Research

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The U.S. government has halted funding to the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) following confirmation of their involvement in gain-of-function viral research, a fact previously denied during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During a Congressional hearing, Dr. Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH), confirmed that the NIH did fund such research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through EcoHealth. This supports the theory that COVID-19 may have accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute, which received U.S. taxpayer funds via EcoHealth.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suspended EHA’s funding due to their failure to adequately monitor virus growth in the Wuhan Institute’s experiments and notify the NIH when the viruses appeared to grow beyond permissible thresholds.

For years, Republicans in Congress questioned federal health officials about this issue, only to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Despite Dr. Anthony Fauci’s previous denial of NIH funding for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute, EcoHealth expressed disappointment at the funding suspension and plans to contest the decision.

While some experts believe COVID-19 emerged naturally in a Wuhan Seafood Market, the U.S. Intelligence Community maintains that it’s plausible the virus originated in a lab or in the wild. However, U.S.-funded research at the lab has not been linked to the pandemic.