After millions of deaths and mounting evidence of culpability, Biden admin finally cuts off flow of US taxpayer dollars to Wuhan lab

The Chinese communist-controlled Wuhan lab where dangerous experiments have long been conducted on coronaviruses with Dr. Anthony Fauci's knowledge and his agency's funding has finally been cut off by the U.S. government.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic revealed Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has moved to terminate the provision of taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, noting "This is an obvious decision."

The subcommittee also published an HHS memo detailing the lab's immediate suspension and proposed debarment.

The memo states that there is "adequate evidence to demonstrate that the immediate suspension of WIV is necessary to protect the public interest."

That evidence includes the lab's alterations to a virus resulting in substantially greater infectiousness (i.e., "greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain"), in violation of the terms of a grant.

"There is risk that WIV not only previously violated, but is currently violating, and will continue to violate, protocols of the [National Institutes of Health] on biosafety," said the memo, underscoring the fact that the lab has violated biosafety protocols is "undisputed."

Republicans have sought this outcome for years with the understanding that the WIV was the likely source of the COVID-19 virus, which has claimed the lives of millions of people worldwide.

The Senate GOP's "Muddy Waters: The Origins of COVID-19" January report underscored the untenability of the claim that COVID-19 had natural origins, concluding instead that the "COVID-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident."

The report also reaffirmed that the WIV was the likely "high-risk" source of the virus, stating that the "preponderance of information affirms the plausibility of a research-related incident that was likely unintentional resulting from failures of biosafety containment during vaccine-related research."

Among the various reasons to suspect the WIV were:

• the various biosafety issues at the lab, including flawed lab design, an absence of certain safety features, and documented biocontainment failures;
• a deficit in remedial biosafety training at the lab;
• the execution of gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses involving humanized mice;
• the lab's location at the epicenter of the initial outbreak.

Even more compelling was the recent revelation that the three "patients zero" infected with COVID-19 in November 2019 were all reportedly researchers at the lab, including EcoHealth Alliance subcontractor Ben Hu — a Chinese researcher who ran lead on the institute's deadly gain-of-function research on SARS-like coronaviruses, making them more infectious.

Part of the research Hu and others conducted at the lab involved making chimeric viruses that could replicate in human airway cells and possibly transmit to humans.

The Sunday Times published a damning report last month indicating that scientists at the lab had also used funds from British zoologist Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance to create "a highly infectious super-coronavirus with a terrifying kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature," roughly a year ahead of the initial outbreak of COVID-19.

The report also contained allegations that the Chinese military may also have been pursuing dual-use capabilities in "virological biological weapons and vaccines" at the lab.

The HHS' decision to end funding to the WIV comes several months after the HHS Office of Inspector General issued a report documenting how the NIH badly dropped the ball when it came to its oversight of the grants managed by EcoHealth Alliance and had known about potential risks associated with the corresponding research being performed at the Wuhan lab.

Despite this knowledge, the NIH "did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth's compliance with some requirements."

The New York Times indicated that the lab, which has allegedly not received federal money directly since 2020, has 30 days to respond to the notice pertaining to the cessation of U.S. funding.

Dr. Richard Ebright, a biologist at Rutgers University, responded to the news highlighting how EcoHealth Alliance, "the entity that channeled US-government funding to WIV, still receives more than $51 million in US-government grants and contracts. When will EcoHealth Alliance be debarred from receiving US-government funding?"

EcoHealth has poured millions of U.S. tax dollars into research at the Wuhan lab, but has resisted American attempts to figure out what went wrong.

British zoologist Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, previously called NIH requests that U.S. federal officials inspect the WIV "heinous" and derided suggestions that the virus might have leaked from the WIV as "conspiracy theories."

The recent HHS memo notes that EcoHealth, like the Chinese communist lab, has failed to produce requested materials to the NIH.

HHS claimed that the provision of these documents "was necessary to review allegations that WIV has not satisfied biosafety requirements under the grant, reflect that WIV is not compliant with federal regulations and is not presently responsible."

It is unclear if Daszak's outfit will be held to the same standard.

While the Trump administration cut off EcoHealth in 2020, in May, Biden's NIH renewed a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which subsequently announced it would once again be meddling with bat coronaviruses on the American taxpayer's dime.

In June, lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee introduced legislation that would bar EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development as well as from other financial streams leading back to the Department of State.

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