The Biden administration suspended funding for the Wuhan lab

CNN
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The Biden administration suspended funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a month-long review determined that the Chinese research institute “did not comply with federal regulations and is not currently responsible,” according to a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services.

HHS, which conducted the review, also proposed barring the Wuhan Institute from doing business with the federal government going forward, according to the memo, which was dated Monday and first reported by Bloomberg.

The lab has not received any federal funding from the US National Institutes of Health since July 2020, according to an HHS spokesperson.

The determination came after the research institute failed to provide the National Institutes of Health with requested documents amid reported lab safety concerns.

“This action aims to ensure that WIV does not receive a single dollar of federal funding,” an HHS spokesperson said in a statement. “The move was made because of WIV’s failure to provide documentation of WIV research requested by NIH related to concerns that WIV violated NIH’s biosafety protocols.”

In Monday’s memorandum, HHS’s deputy assistant secretary for acquisition concluded that the Wuhan Institute was “ignorant of NIH’s requests” and that the NIH’s conclusion that the institute’s research likely violated biosafety protocols presented a risk that the institute “has not only previously violated, but is currently violating. , and will continue to violate, NIH biosafety protocols.

“Therefore, I have determined that the immediate suspension of WIV is necessary to mitigate any potential risk to public health,” the official, whose name has been redacted, wrote in the memo.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is at the center of a theory that Covid-19 escaped from the lab in late 2019, triggering the global pandemic.

The US intelligence community has not yet reached a conclusion on where the virus came from. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report last month that said the US intelligence community did not know whether lab researchers who fell ill in the fall of 2019 were infected with Covid-19, but aware of safety and security issues in the lab. Many other experts say the evidence suggests the coronavirus may have emerged naturally and spread among people at the seafood market in Wuhan.

The National Institutes of Health announced the EcoHealth Alliance – a US-based organization that received a 2014 grant from the NIH that was partly funneled to the Wuhan Institute – in April 2020 that it was investigating the allegations linking at the Wuhan Institute of the coronavirus pandemic. And in July of that year, the NIH told EcoHealth that it had received reports of “biosafety concerns” at the lab.