Exclusive — Sen. Joni Ernst: U.S. Funded Wuhan Institute of Virology Coronavirus Research with NIH Grants

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told Breitbart News on Wednesday that the federal government provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for researching bat coronaviruses.

“Through our research and some great researchers out there working in various levels of the press, they have discovered that through the NIH, we did have grant dollars that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Ernst said in an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.

She continued, “This project that they had at Wuhan was being subsidized by U.S. taxpayers … I am going to the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General to investigate and get to the bottom of this. I also have a bill which would require every project from all of our federal agencies that are supported with federal funds to include a price tag with the cost so that it is easily found by taxpayers.”

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“So yes, we have actually subsidized research at the Wuhan lab — how scary — and for a number of years we actually had U.S. diplomats that were warning us about the dangers associated with this lab, and yet we were subsidizing it,” Ernst stated.

Marlow identified the Wuhan virology lab as a possible origin of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

“We don’t really know whether or not the the lab is [connected] to the virus, because China destroyed all this evidence,” Marlow remarked.

Ernst replied, “We can’t connect the dots. We haven’t been able to do that for certain, but the implication is out there, and regardless of the coronavirus, we do know that our dollars were pouring into communist China to support [this] research being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. How disappointing that we are sending our dollars to communist China when we should be using those dollars right here in our own country to do our own research with our own resources. … It is truly an outrage. I don’t care if it’s ten cents; it’s still an outrage whatever the number.”

The National Institute of Health (NIH) sent at least $600,000 to China’s state-run virology laboratory in Wuhan via EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), a left-wing nonprofit based in New York City that alleges a link between “climate change” and pandemics. EcoHealth Alliance failed to disclose the money it sent to the Chinese government’s Wuhan laboratory came from an NIH grant, the Daily Caller reported.

Virtually all of EcoHealth’s revenue comes from government contracts and grants.