The Wuhan Institute of Virology received hundreds of thousands more dollars in federal grants than the White House’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who told lawmakers last week, as newly published emails show.
News received from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch indicates that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) will provide $ 826,277 to the lab through New York City-based nonprofit EcoHealth over a six-year period through 2019 Provided by Allianz.
But Fauci, the longtime NIAID director, told a budget subcommittee on May 25 that the funding commitment was “about $ 600,000 over five years, a modest amount.”
U.S. funding for the lab has come under scrutiny amid the ongoing controversy over whether the coronavirus got from the research center to the 11-million city of Wuhan, causing the worst global pandemic in a century.
According to a table included in one of the emails, the Wuhan Institute of Virology received $ 133,595 in fiscal 2014 and $ 139,015 in fiscal 2015. The lab received $ 159,122 over the next three years before funding was reduced to $ 76,301 in fiscal 2019.
An email from NIAID officer Dr. Emily Erbelding on April 13, 2020 points out that the 2019 Wuhan Laboratory funding was the first installment under a new grant to EcoHealth that the facility received over a total of six years on top of nearly $ 750,000 between the 2014 and 2018 financial years.
Between fiscal years 2014 and 2019, EcoHealth received approximately $ 3.75 million in grants to conduct its study entitled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergency”.
While Fauci described funding for the work in the Wuhan lab as “a modest collaboration with highly respected Chinese scientists who were global experts on coronavirus,” the email from NIH Lawrence Tabak’s deputy director describes the EcoHealth study as “a large transnational study ”. Wuhan is a location. “
In addition to several EcoHealth research sites in China, Tobacco’s email addresses refer to websites in “Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar”.
Days after Tobacco’s email, NIH notified the EcoHealth Alliance that it was pulling the plug on the remaining grant money.
House Republicans recently sent a letter to the President of the EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, with questions about the federal grants that EcoHealth forwarded to the Wuhan lab, as well as the information the nonprofit was giving about the lab’s research on bat virus and the lab’s virus database had a report on Friday.
Daszak was given May 17 deadline to reply but allegedly never did.
