The House Appropriations Committee voted Thursday to approve an amendment prohibiting funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), after Dr. Anthony Fauci had approved nearly $1 million to be allocated to the lab located in Communist China.
The amendment to prohibit the funds, introduced by Rep. Guy Reschenthaler’s (R-PA), is now a part of a nearly $10 billion global health measure for the “prevention of future pandemics by improving the surveillance, detection, and response capabilities of countries around the world.”
Reschenthaler said:
It is deeply disturbing that American taxpayers footed the bill for over $1 million to support dangerous and potentially deadly research at the WIV, a laboratory run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and tied to military biological research. I thank my colleagues for including my amendment to end the flow of federal dollars to the WIV. We must ensure Americans’ hard-earned money never again funds risky experiments in labs operated by our adversaries.
According to New York Magazine, the WIV received nearly $600,000 of funding from EcoHealth Alliance through grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
Judicial Watch obtained records proving the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under Fauci provided via EcoHealth the Wuhan lab at least $826,000 for coronavirus bat research from 2014 to 2019, beginning in former President Obama’s term.
Federal government data indicates EcoHealth also received tens of millions in federal research dollars since 2004.
The National Institutes of Health’s NIH website shows, “Approximately 80% of NIH funding goes to support research grants, including grants to foreign organizations.”
In February 2020, EcoHealth President Peter Daszak led an unsubstantiated letter denying the possibility of coronavirus originating in a lab. Daszak went so far as to condemn any alternative explanation to his natural origins narrative, such as a lab accident at nearby WIV, as “conspiracy theory.”
Federal government investigators launched an investigation June 15 into how the NIH “manages and monitors” its ongoing grant program to foreign labs, such as the one in Wuhan.
The investigation is likely to include Daszak, who thanked Fauci in April 2020 for publicly dismissing the theory that the coronavirus may have leaked from the lab, emails revealed.
Fauci defended himself against the “misconstrued” June 3 email by saying, “That email was from a person to me saying ‘thank you’ for whatever it is he thought I said, and I said that I think the most likely origin is a jumping of species.”
Meanwhile, three researchers from the Wuhan lab became sick in November of 2019, “according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report,” the Wall Street Journal reported May 23. Then the NIH said new evidence showed Americans were presumably infected with coronavirus in December 2019, Axios reported June 15.
The Wuhan lab’s so-called “bat woman,” Director Shi Zhengli, denied June 14 the Wuhan Institute of Virology kept live bats on the premises, a video released Sunday allegedly shows, countering NIAID’s records obtained by Judicial Watch.
Director Shi’s denial came as Sky News Australia unveiled June 13 an alleged Chinese Academy of Sciences’ video that confirms the Wuhan Institute of Virology did keep live bats on its premises, opposing the World Health Organization, which has always claimed such suggestions are a baseless conspiracy.
Fauci admitted on May 25 the NIH funded the Wuhan lab but still denies “gain of function” funding of bat or other species experiments.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) disagreed with Fauci’s contention, stating he lied and committed perjury over his gain of function comments.
“Absolutely, he lied to the America people. There was gain of function research going on with Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute,” Paul said.
“It’s listed at the end of the paper,” Paul said. “This paper was fined by NIAID research and it lists a ten digit number that identifies the research money she got from from the United States. Was it gain of function?”
“Well it took a SARS virus, which is a coronavirus, that’s 15 times more deadly than COVID, and it added to it S protein, which is something in the surface of it, to make it more easily infectious to epithelial cells for the respiratory tract. That to me is gain of function,” he explained.
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