The United States gave over $800,000 to the top-level laboratory in China from which some believe the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus escaped, according to newly released documents.
Internal emails from officials with the National Institutes of Health and an office inside the agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), show they discussed in 2020 a question from Republican members of Congress regarding how much the agencies sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The total amount sent between Fiscal Years 2014 and 2019 was $826,777, according to the officials.
The funding went to EcoHealth Alliance, which channeled money to the lab for the purpose of “understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.”
The total amount is different from the amount that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, told members of Congress the Wuhan lab received from the U.S. government.
“We had a modest collaboration with respectable Chinese scientists who are world experts on coronavirus and we did that through a subgrant from a larger grant to EcoHealth. The subgrant was about $600,000 over a period of five years,” Fauci told members of the House Appropriations Committee during a hearing last month.
NIAID did not respond to a request for information. The agency has not returned repeated requests for comment.
The newly released emails show one chain involving Fauci in April 2020. In it, a top NIAID official, Dr. Emily Erbelding, informed Fauci and others that a new grant to EcoHealth was for $3.6 million. Of that, about $750,000 would go to the Wuhan lab. About $75,000 had already been sent to the lab during year 1 of the grant, she said.
“This is higher but not extraordinarily higher than I originally indicated which was for some earlier work,” Hugh Auchincloss, another agency official, wrote to Fauci, who responded, “Thanks.”
