House Republican Introduces Bill to Ban Federal Funding for EcoHealth Alliance
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Representative Guy Reschenthaler (R., PA) on Wednesday introduced legislation that would ban federal funding for EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit that used National Institute of Health funds to conduct dangerous coronavirus research in partnership with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act would prevent any federal funds from being “made available for any purpose” to EcoHealth Alliance, including subgrant or subcontract organizations or individuals.
It would also require the Comptroller General of the United States to review the amount of federal funds awarded to EcoHealth Alliance directly or indirectly in the past ten years that were provided purposely or inadvertently to the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The study would also focus on any funds awarded to any other lab, agency or organization that is located in any foreign nation or is owned or controlled by the CCP or WIV.
“It is unconscionable that EcoHealth Alliance repeatedly funneled American taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab controlled by the Chinese Communist Party that conducts dangerous and potentially deadly research,” Reschenthaler said in a statement to National Review.
“As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, which is tasked with ensuring our nation’s fiscal responsibility, I urge my colleagues to support this bill banning funding from this negligent organization,” he added. “Congress must ensure Americans are never footing the bill for risky experiments in foreign labs run by our adversaries.”
EcoHealth Alliance attracted significant attention from Republican lawmakers during the pandemic because of its gain-of-function research, which involves extracting viruses from animals and engineering them in a lab to make them more transmissible or dangerous to humans. Two of EcoHealth’s NIH grants involve gain-of-function research and enhanced potential pandemic research on coronaviruses.
The U.S government temporarily paused funding for gain-of-function research in 2014 due to concerns over biosafety and biosecurity. However, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staff and EcoHealth leaders found loopholes to allow the nonprofit to continue its work infecting genetically-engineered mice with hybrid viruses until the pause was lifted in 2017.
The introduction of the Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act comes hours after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services inspector general released a report that found the NIH “did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements.”
The office of the inspector general (OIG) said it launched the audit in response to “concerns regarding the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) grant awards to EcoHealth Alliance (EcoHealth), NIH’s monitoring of EcoHealth, and EcoHealth’s use of grant funds, including its monitoring of subawards to a foreign entity.”
The audit focused on three NIH awards to EcoHealth between fiscal years 2014 and 2021 totaling roughly $8 million, including $1.8 million in subawards to EcoHealth’s eight subrecipients, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“Although NIH and EcoHealth had established monitoring procedures, we found deficiencies in complying with those procedures limited NIH and EcoHealth’s ability to effectively monitor Federal grant awards and subawards to understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action,” the report found.
“Using its discretion, NIH did not refer the research to HHS for an outside review for enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs) because it determined the research did not involve and was not reasonably anticipated to create, use, or transfer an ePPP,” the report added. “However, NIH added a special term and condition in EcoHealth’s awards and provided limited guidance on how EcoHealth should comply with that requirement.”
The report found that NIH “was only able to conclude that research resulted in virus growth that met specified benchmarks based on a late progress report from EcoHealth that NIH failed to follow up on until nearly 2 years after its due date.”
The OIG concludes that NIH “missed opportunities to more effectively monitor research.”
“With improved oversight, NIH may have been able to take more timely corrective actions to mitigate the inherent risks associated with this type of research,” the report said.
The report also found EcoHealth improperly used some grant funds, totaling $89,171 in unallowable costs.
While WIV cooperated with EcoHealth’s monitoring for several years preceding the pandemic, its lack of cooperation after the outbreak limited EcoHealth’s ability to monitor its subrecipient, the report said.
The OIG issued a series of recommendations, including that NIH consider whether it is appropriate to refer WIV to HHS for debarment. It also called on NIH to ensure that EcoHealth “accurately and in a timely manner” reports award and subaward information and that it implements enhanced monitoring and documentation.
The introduction of the Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act and the OIG report’s release came the same day that a group of Republican senators, led by Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, reintroduced legislation that would ban the federal government from funding gain-of-function research.
