The Biden administration has suspended funding to the laboratory in China that’s located in the same city where COVID-19 cases were first identified, according to a new document.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is cutting off the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s access to U.S. grants, an HHS official said in a memorandum dated July 17.
In 2014, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) awarded a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit based in the United States that is focused on research into emerging infectious diseases, to fund a project called “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
The institute (WIV) received more than $1.4 million in U.S. government funds for testing under the project, which included experiments that made a bat coronavirus more harmful. Mice infected with a modified version of the virus became sicker than those infected with the original virus, according to documents made public in 2021.
That violated the terms of the grant, the HHS official said.
U.S. officials have given WIV opportunities to contest that conclusion, the official said, but the institute “has failed to do so.”
“As such, there is risk that WIV not only previously violated, but is currently violating, and will continue to violate,” protocols of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which provided the grant money and is part of the HHS, the official added. “Therefore, I have determined that the immediate suspension of WIV is necessary to mitigate any potential public health risk.”
Reasons for suspensions and debarments include fraud and violations of a contract.
Suspensions are temporary. Officials are taking steps to debar WIV, or cut off its access to U.S. funding for a period of time. Debarment has a higher evidentiary requirement of wrongdoing, including that officials must determine that WIV is not “responsible.”
Multiple bills, including one from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), would permanently bar U.S. funding to the WIV, but they have not yet cleared Congress. Lawmakers have pointed out that risky research has been conducted at the institute and that some intelligence officials believe that the virus that causes COVID-19 originated at the lab.
