US President Joe Biden’s administration formally halted the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s access to US funding, citing unanswered safety and security questions for the facility at the center of the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Monday notified the institute about the suspension and told the lab it was seeking to cut it off permanently, a memo obtained by Bloomberg News showed.
An HHS review that started in September last year raised concern that the facility based in Wuhan, China, where COVID-19 first emerged, is violating biosafety protocols and is not complying with US regulations.
Photo: Reuters
The penalties are the most drastic action the US has taken over the lab’s failure to share information amid ongoing investigations into COVID-19’s origins.
They come as leaders in the US and China are trying to establish a better working relationship between the two countries as both continue to deal with the economic fallout of the pandemic that killed 7 million people.
The action guarantees that a once-lauded global research institute would not receive any more US federal funding, an HHS spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has received more than US$1.4 million in federal awards, including through subgrants from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2014.
It has not obtained new funding from the NIH since July 2020.
The Chinese institute has become a flashpoint in discussions of how the pandemic started, with some, including FBI Director Christopher Wray, suspecting it could have originated at the facility.
Although the US has not found any conclusive evidence that the virus emerged either through animal-to-human transmission or a lab accident, it has identified significant breaches in safety and security protocol at the Wuhan institute. The US has also accused China and the lab of stonewalling investigations into those shortcomings.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it understood the Wuhan institute has not applied for and is not conducting any US-funded research, and the country is dedicated to global cooperation on science, technology and public health.
“The virus is a common enemy of mankind,” a statement from the spokesperson’s office said. “We hope the US can work with China and jointly respond to global challenges.”
In 2014, the NIH awarded a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based organization focused on preventing infectious diseases, for “understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.”
The Wuhan institute received a subaward of that grant, which has faced scrutiny over concerns of it supporting so-called gain-of-function research, where a pathogen is altered to improve its ability to cause disease.
A US Government Accountability Office report found the Wuhan institute received the US$1.4 million between 2014 and 2020, distributed from the NIH and the US Agency for International Development through subawards.
Earlier this year, HHS’s Office of Inspector General conducted an audit that determined that the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance did not effectively monitor awards and subawards, limiting their ability to understand the nature of research conducted and identify problem areas.
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