(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) The Biden Defense Department’s Threat Reduction Agency, charged with “combating weapons of mass destruction,” last month awarded a $3-million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, disregarding multiple warnings that linked the company to the controversial Wuhan lab in China that many think was responsible for the origin of COVID.
The DOD grant was the latest largesse for EcoHealth, which has previously received copious funding funneled through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, formerly headed by Anthony Fauci.
Last year, GOP leaders demanded answers from the former COVID czar after NIAID had again funded the EcoHealth Alliance to study bat coronaviruses in Asia and dodged any accountability for how the money was being spent.
“We have grave concerns that one of your last acts at NIAID is to send even more taxpayer dollars to an organization whose prior involvement in the very same subject may have contributed to a global pandemic,” Republican House members Steve Scalise, James Comer and Jim Jordan wrote in an October 2022 letter to Fauci.
“Based on the totality of circumstances surrounding EcoHealth and the WIV that have transpired over the past two and a half years, your decision to continue funding this entity is downright shocking,” the lawmakers wrote.
Shocking or not, EcoHealth Alliance, “despite possibly having caused the pandemic and definitely having repeatedly and gravely violated terms of a US-government grant, currently has 12 active US-government grants and contracts, totaling more than $34 million,” wrote Richard H. Ebright, a board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University.
I don’t know if EcoHealth Alliance (indirectly) caused the pandemic by funding scientists in Wuhan who did, but it’s obviously possible. It truly is remarkable the organization would continue to get millions before we know. U.S. officials are not even asking the question. https://t.co/yBBu9hrUfb
— @mbalter — investigations and commentary (@mbalter) January 21, 2023
Add another $3 million to the COVID kitty for the EcoHealth Alliance, which it received from the DOD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, under the auspice of “scientific research” for “combating weapons of mass destruction,” according to USAspending.gov.
The grant money will be used for “reducing the threat of viral spillover from wildlife in the Philippines.”
EcoHealth’s latest windfall will likely be subject to Congressional inquiry, part of an overall investigation that Republicans plan to launch with their newly-won majority control of the U.S. House.
“The origins of COVID is something we’ve talked about a lot, and looking into whether or not taxpayer money was used by companies like EcoHealth Alliance to promote gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab, where many scientists have said that’s where COVID started, not at some wet market,” Scalise told Breitbart News.
