Over $2 Million Taxpayers Money Went to Wuhan Research Labs, Government Report Says

The P4 laboratory on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on May 13, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Three Chinese research centers, including the bat coronavirus-tinkering Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), had been awarded more than $2 million in U.S. taxpayers’ money in the years leading to the COVID-19 pandemic, a new government report found.

The report (pdf), released on June 14 by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO), focuses on federal funds disbursed to three Chinese entities—Wuhan University, the WIV, and the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS).

“The selected entities are government institutions or laboratories in China that conduct work on infectious diseases, including pandemic viruses, and have had actions taken by federal agencies to address safety or security concerns,” the report reads. “All three selected Chinese entities received funds.”

The funds, totaling $2,168,435, were provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2014 through 2021, either directly through a federal award or indirectly through U.S. universities and New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

Three Chinese institutions collectively received seven sub-awards, totaling more than $2 million, from federal award recipients or a first-tier sub-recipient. (Government Accountability Office)

A Breakdown of Receipts

Specifically, Wuhan University was given $201,221 by NIH via EcoHealth Alliance from June 2015 to May 2017. It was tasked to administer a questionnaire that includes questions on experiences with “unusual illness and a range of human-animal contacts” and to collect biological samples from study participants.

Wuhan University also got $39,275 through USAID’s grant to the University of California–Davis in September 2016 to collect biological samples from roughly 1,500 individuals in China’s Yunnan province with “exposure to bats, other wildlife, and domestic animals” in collaboration with WIV on viral detection.

The NIH also directly sent $200,000 to Wuhan University for a study about new therapeutics to treat malignancies associated with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare type of cancer caused by a virus that can affect the skin and internal organs. The study concluded in 2020.

The WIV was awarded three federal-funded grants to do research on “genetic engineering, pathogen detection, and the transmission of bat coronaviruses,” according to the report.

For a $598,611 NIH sub-award to EcoHealth Alliance, WIV performed “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized or chimeric coronavirus strains” between June 2014 and May 2019.

For another NIH-funded sub-award through the University of California–Irvine, the WIV was tasked to develop new viral tools for neuronal tracing and gene delivery but ended up getting zero dollars as the California school suspended the funding in May 2020 because of “biosafety concerns.”

The WIV also received $815,519 from USAID via UC–Davis between October 2014 and September 2019, during which Chinese researchers tested bat samples for viruses such as coronavirus and influenza viruses and conducted cloning and DNA sequencing of those biological samples, according to the report.

The AMMS, one of the latest additions to the Commerce Department’s export blacklist, is said to be developing “brain-control weaponry” for the Chinese communist regime. It received two NIH grants to study swine influenza transmission in confined animal feeding operations in China.

According to the report, $514,129 went from NIH through Duke University to AMMS to detect influenza in samples collected from Chinese swine workers from August 2014 to July 2019. Another NIH fund, which would have been sent via the University of California system, was terminated before any work was done.

Republicans Voice Concerns

The June 14 report was produced in response to a group of Republican members of Congress who demanded that the GAO conduct a “comprehensive accounting of all public funds the United States Government disbursed” to the Chinese entities from January 2014 through December 2021.”

Reps. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who chair the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, respectively, said the findings are “very concerning.”

“Today, the GAO confirmed that US taxpayer dollars awarded from the National Institutes of Health and USAID were ultimately used for research by entities in China, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was known to be doing coronavirus research,” the congressmen said in a joint statement.

“This revelation is very concerning due to the increased focus on the ‘lab leak’ theory, which suggests that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan laboratory rather than through natural means. We have long argued that the American people deserve the truth about COVID-19’s origin and continue to take concrete actions to declassify intelligence related to the pandemic.”

EcoHealth Alliance, which is primarily funded by government grants and contracts, has also come under intensifying scrutiny over the handling of taxpayer-funded awards.

Earlier this year, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) called on Congress to put an “immediate and permanent” end to taxpayer funding of EcoHealth Alliance, accusing the organization of “failing to tell the world what was really going on at China’s Wuhan Institute.”

“EcoHealth was paid millions, promising their hunt for bat viruses would protect the world from a pandemic,” the senator said. “Well, the world got a pandemic, and EcoHealth keeps getting millions.”