The Department of Agriculture has ended nearly $2.5 million in contracts.
Multiple federal agencies have ended contracts with Springer Nature, publisher of the journal Nature, according to spokespersons and a government database.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) terminated contracts worth nearly $2.5 million, although the funds are all marked as outlaid, according to USA.Spending.gov.
The largest contract, worth $2.3 million, was for a subscription to Springer Nature journals, backfiles, electronic books, and other resources published by the company.
“USDA has cancelled all contracts and subscriptions to Springer Nature. The journal is exorbitantly expensive and is not a good use of taxpayer funds,” a spokesperson for the USDA told The Epoch Times in an email on July 1.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told news outlets in a statement that “all contracts with Springer Nature are terminated or no longer active” and that “precious taxpayer dollars should be [sic] not be used on unused subscriptions to junk science.”
Federal law enables agencies to terminate contracts “if the Contracting Officer determines that a termination is in the Government’s interest.”
The spokesperson did not provide details, but Nature has been criticized for publishing an article in 2020 called “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” that purported to “clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” SARS-CoV-2 is one of the names of the virus that causes COVID-19.
A House of Representatives select subcommittee in 2024 concluded that COVID-19 likely originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and noted that emails indicate Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top U.S. official during the COVID-19 pandemic, helped draft the Nature article but was not credited by its co-authors.
The White House also updated its website in April to say COVID-19 likely came from the high-level lab in Wuhan, and highlighted how media outlets and officials promoted the “Proximal Origin” paper to support the idea that COVID-19 originated in nature.
Springer Nature recently signed a five-year contract with a new organization called Nature Health Global to manage a scientific journal called EcoHealth. The new group was started by Dr. Peter Daszak after the nonprofit he headed, EcoHealth Alliance, closed its doors.
Both Daszak and EcoHealth earlier in the year were banned from receiving U.S. taxpayer money because of how they funneled U.S. money to the lab in China to carry out risky research.
