FBI Launched Inquiry Into NIH Funding of Wuhan Lab, Emails Show

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched an inquiry into the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding of bat research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, newly released emails show.

The interest from the top U.S. intelligence agency adds to the international scrutiny on the Wuhan facility, which houses one of Chinaโ€™s highest-level biosecurity labs that has been considered a possible source of the COVID-19 pandemic.

โ€œIn preparation for our call on Tuesday, Erik [Stemmy] (ccโ€™d) has provided responses to your initial questions below (also attached),โ€ wrote Ashley Sanders, an investigation officer at the NIHโ€™s division of program integriy, in an email (pdf) dated May 22, 2020 with the subject โ€œGrant Questions โ€“ FBI Inquiry,โ€ and directed to FBI agent David Miller.

The email was obtained by government transparency watchdog Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, which asked for records of communications, contracts, and agreements with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The scope of the inquiry is unclear because the rest of the email correspondence, five pages in total, are entirely redacted. But the name of the email attachment โ€œSF 424 AI110964-06 (received date 11/05/2018),โ€ corresponds to the NIH grant โ€œUnderstanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.โ€

The project in question is headed by Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, which then funnels money to the lab in Wuhan. From 2014 to 2019, the New York nonprofit received six yearly grants totaling $3,748,715 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under the NIH to fund the project, which was expected to end in 2026.

The FBI inquiry had focused on at least two of the grants, in 2014 and 2019 respectively, the email subject line suggests.

The 2014 grant aimed to โ€œunderstand what factors increase the risk of the next CoV emerging in people by studying CoV diversity in a critical zoonotic reservoir (bats), at sites of high risk for emergence (wildlife markets) in an emerging disease hotspot (China),โ€ according to the project description. Specifically, the researchers would assess the coronavirus spillover potential, develop predictive models of bat coronavirus emergence risk, and use virus infection experiments as well as โ€œreverse geneticsโ€ to test the virusโ€™s transmission between species.

By Eva Fu

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