The Democrats mocked Donald Trump for saying the 2020 pandemic came from a Chinese lab. But he’s the one with the last laugh.
Because President Biden can’t believe what he’s just discovered about the lab in Wuhan, China.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has had its federal funding suspended after failing to submit required documentation about the lab’s safety and security.
On Monday, HHS published a memo explaining the agency’s choice and warning that it may attempt to permanently bar the lab from accepting future public cash. Since July 2020, the lab has been operating without support from the National Institutes of Health.
The laboratory has the right to contest the suspension and subsequent debarment.
The government decided after beginning an investigation into the facility’s compliance with federal standards in September of last year.
Wuhan has been the focus of several of the inquiries regarding the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the United States Department of Energy’s investigation, the pandemic was probably caused by a laboratory leak. The Energy Department, which is in charge of a number of national laboratories in the United States, reportedly made its assessment with “low confidence.”
The FBI determined with “moderate confidence” that a “laboratory accident” was the source of the epidemic, according to a declassified intelligence assessment published in November 2021 at President Biden’s request.
The National Intelligence Council and four other organizations have “low confidence” that human-to-human or animal-to-animal transmission started the pandemic. The CIA is one of two other organizations that has yet to make a decision.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where bat coronaviruses were examined, is one of several virology labs in the city, which is considered the epicenter of the epidemic.
The lab has not cooperated with inquiries into its violations of safety and security protocols and has withheld information regarding its biosafety procedures.
A 2014 National Institutes of Health grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit in the United States working to combat infectious disease, included a sub-award to the Wuhan Institute. The funding was designated for assessing the potential for the spread of bat coronavirus. U.S. Agency for International Development funds were also given to the facility via EcoHealth Alliance.
During the pandemic, Republican lawmakers paid close attention to EcoHealth Alliance’s gain-of-function research, in which viruses are isolated from animals and then genetically engineered to make them more contagious or hazardous to humans. Gain-of-function and coronavirus pandemic research are the focus of two NIH funds awarded to EcoHealth.
In 2014, due to worries about biosafety and biosecurity, the U.S. government temporarily halted funding for gain-of-function research. EcoHealth’s executives and the employees at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases found ways around the ban on infecting genetically modified mice with hybrid viruses, and they kept working on the project until the ban was overturned in 2017.
Earlier this year, Pennsylvania Republican Representative Guy Reschenthaler introduced a bill to end federal funding for EcoHealth Alliance in response to a report from the HHS inspector general that stated the National Institutes of Health “did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements.”
The EcoHealth subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was part of a $1.8 million total audit of three NIH grants to EcoHealth spanning fiscal years 2014 and 2021.
“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 states.
The NIH “determined the research did not involve and was not reasonably anticipated to create, use, or transfer an ePPP,” thus it “did not refer the research to HHS for an outside review for enhanced potential pandemic pathogens,” the report said.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) did add a special term and condition to EcoHealth’s grants, but they didn’t say anything about how the company should meet that condition.
According to OIG’s findings, 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 states.
The takeaway in all of this is that this idea that there’s been “no wrong doing” or that the COVID-19 virus “obviously” came from natural causes is simply not believable anymore.
Those like Donald Trump who knew this all along have effectively been exonerated for being right from the beginning.
The Federalist Wire will keep you updated on any news in this ongoing story.
