EcoHealth Alliance fights against US government funding suspension | News

The New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) is fighting back against the U.S. government’s decision in May to end its research funding. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, the organization used a government grant to fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, the starting point of the controversial theory that a laboratory leak was responsible for the global pandemic.

The EHA’s problems were sparked by a $3.7 million (£2.9 million) grant it received from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2014, which was renewed in 2019. WIV was a consortium participant in that study. The study looked at coronaviruses in bats and their potential to jump to humans. WIV reportedly received more than half a million dollars for it. In 2020, that work became a major issue for President Trump and some Republicans in Congress.

The renewed suspension of grants by the NIH and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in mid-May was a response to EHA’s apparent lack of compliance with the terms and conditions of NIH grants.

According to HHS, the EHA review of the grant in question was submitted more than two years late and concluded that one of WIV’s experiments may have resulted in a greater increase in viral activity than allowed, in violation of the terms of the grant. According to HHS, these and other issues led the NIH to conclude that the WIV research in question “likely violated” the agency’s biosafety protocols.

President threatens expulsion

“EHA has failed to adequately monitor WIV’s compliance with the terms and conditions of its grant awards and, consequently, its own compliance,” Henrietta Brisbon, an HHS official in charge of suspensions and debarments, wrote in a May 15 action memorandum. “Given the problems in the administration of EHA’s grant awards and subcontracts, I have concluded that the immediate suspension of EHA is necessary to protect the public interest.”

In her memo, Brisbon noted that exclusion generally does not last longer than three years but is at her discretion.

EcoHealth, which conducts field research and develops tools to predict and prevent pandemics, plans to appeal the suspension. Grants from the NIH and other U.S. federal agencies accounted for nearly 85% of EcoHealth’s $16.4 million budget this year. EHA’s president, British zoologist and ecologist Peter Daszak, has also been suspended from accepting NIH grants, and HHS reportedly began formal debarment proceedings against him on May 22.

Faced with political pressure and concerns about continuing joint laboratory research with WIV during the Covid-19 pandemic, the NIH suddenly terminated the EcoHealth grant in question in May 2020. Shortly thereafter, 77 U.S. Nobel laureates in science sent a letter to the heads of the NIH and HHS expressing serious concerns about the abrupt termination of the grant. The laureates called for a “thorough” and public review of the actions that led to the grant’s cancellation.

At about the same time, more than 30 scientific societies also wrote to the NIH director raising similar concerns.

Lack of adequate monitoring

In early 2023, the HHS Office of the Inspector General concluded that the NIH had improperly terminated the grant and failed to effectively monitor EcoHealth’s compliance with some NIH grant requirements, despite identifying potential risks associated with research conducted between 2014 and 2021 under three NIH grants totaling approximately $8 million.

The NIH had reinstated EcoHealth’s canceled grant in May 2023, but it has now been suspended again, along with all other NIH and HHS research funding for the organization.

Then, in July 2023, HHS barred WIV from receiving U.S. federal funding after concluding that the NIH-funded study in question, in which the institute was involved, likely violated biosafety protocols.

Now, EHA looks forward to presenting formal evidence that debarment is not warranted in this case and that Daszak is prepared to defend himself. “EcoHealth Alliance is currently suspended and we will be filing materials with the HHS Suspension and Debarment Officer to refute all allegations in the HHS suspension letter and to demonstrate with substantial documentary evidence that EcoHealth Alliance is currently and has been for the past 25 years a good steward of federal funds and is performing extremely productive work for several U.S. government agencies, leading to great advances in understanding how diseases develop and how they can be prevented,” EHA explains.

On June 3, Anthony Fauci, who headed the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly 40 years, including during the pandemic, and later became President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, – made it clear in testimony before the House Oversight Committee’s Special Subcommittee on the Pandemic that the EcoHealth Alliance grant in question could not possibly have led to the creation of the Sar-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19.

As part of that grant, the WIV received a subcontract worth about $120,000 a year to conduct scientific monitoring of human serology and bat viruses in the environment in China, Fauci explained. “Any qualified evolutionary virologist would confirm that the bat viruses studied at the WIV under the NIH-funded grant were so phylogenetically distant from Sars-CoV-2 that it would be molecularly impossible to convert those viruses into Sars-CoV-2,” he testified. “Any suggestion that the virus studied under the NIH subcontract to the WIV led to the emergence of Sars-CoV-2 is completely unproven and baseless.”

Fauci added that he has been proactive in ensuring that any possible theory of a “lab leak” of the virus is actively investigated. “We don’t know where the virus originated,” he explained. “I have remained open-minded.”