THE US government has suspended funding to an organisation at the centre of the storm over the origins of Covid.
EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based non-profit, has been under fire since the early days of the pandemic over its bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The group has faced scrutiny over whether Covid may have emerged from the research at the lab that was funded by the US government.
In a letter, the US Department of Health and Human Services told EcoHealth Alliance that it has now been suspended from receiving government funds.
The department is also proposing to formally ban the organisation from receiving any funding, the letter said.
Grants from US agencies, including National Institutes of Heath, make up most of EcoHealth Alliance's budget - which was about $14million in 2022.
But last year, a government investigation found the organisation had "mismanaged" grants in Wuhan.
It revealed a failure to monitor a risky coronavirus experiment, failure to obtain lab notebooks from the Wuhan lab and a delayed report describing research in the months before the pandemic.
The funding suspension comes after The Sun revealed the US government has dished out some $60million of public money to the organisation since the start of the pandemic - despite questions still raging over its work at the Wuhan lab.
And they have continued to collect and test hundreds of samples of bat coronaviruses since 2020 with US government funding.
Earlier this month, Dr Peter Daszak, the company's boss, was grilled before Congress for allegedly mismanaging grants and making misleading statements about the work at Wuhan lab.
The suspension of funding for the non-profit has been welcomed by lawmakers investigating the origins of Covid.
It marks a significant development in the investigation that The Sun has been covering for the last four years.
Congressman Brad Wenstrup - who chairs the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic - said: "EcoHealth Alliance and Dr Peter Daszak should never again receive a single penny from the US taxpayer.
"EcoHealth facilitated gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without proper oversight, willingly violated multiple requirements of its multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health grant, and apparently made false statements to the NIH.
"These actions are wholly abhorrent, indefensible, and must be addressed with swift action.
"EcoHealth’s immediate funding suspension and future debarment is not only a victory for the US taxpayer, but also for American national security and the safety of citizens worldwide."
The subcommittee's ranking member, Raul Ruiz, also welcomed the move - pointing to EcoHealth Alliance's "failure" to "meet the utmost standards of transparency and accountability to the American public".
In a joint statement, lawmakers Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Brett Guthrie and Morgan Griffith said the announcement "is welcomed but long overdue".
"Not only did EcoHealth Alliance intend to mislead the federal government through research proposals, but EcoHealth’s President Peter Daszak also lied to Congress.
"This deception and obstruction alone are enough to merit debarment and come in addition to EcoHealth’s mishandling of taxpayer-funded grant money and failure to conduct meaningful oversight of the now-debarred Wuhan Institute of Virology."
While some welcomed the move, others slammed the suspension of funding - calling it "performative political posturing" and would harm biosecurity.
EcoHealth’s immediate funding suspension and future debarment is not only a victory for the US taxpayer, but also for American national security and the safety of citizens worldwide
Rep Brad Wenstrup
Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine, told Science: "EcoHealth Alliance is one of the few organisations we have to track the emergence of new and dangerous virus pathogens.
"If they disappear, our national security suffers."
Virologist Stuart Neil, from King’s College London, claims the alleged grant offences are not "crimes, nor are they evidence of misuse of public money".
The FBI and the US Department of Energy believe Covid most likely leaked from a lab in China.
Dozens of experts, including the World Health Organisation, have also suggested Covid could have escaped from the Wuhan lab - and linked the outbreak to the project by EcoHealth Alliance.
Experts claim the Wuhan Institute of Virology endangered the world by carrying out so-called "gain of function" experiments to engineer chimeric viruses.
This "souping up" involves extracting viruses from animals to engineer in a lab to make them more transmissible and deadly to humans.
According to the US Government Accountability Office, EcoHealth Alliance used government funds for genetic experiments at the Wuhan lab where they combined bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in chimeric coronavirus strains.
Lawmakers and biosafety campaigners have long called for funding to EcoHealth Alliance to be axed.
Justin Goodman, Senior Vice President at White Coat Waste Project, told The Sun said continuing to fund EcoHealth Alliance is "a slap in the face of all Americans and people everywhere".
He said: "Our investigations have documented how EcoHealth has raked in nearly $60million of new taxpayers’ cash since early 2020.
"We’re calling on Congress to defund this rogue organisation once and for all."
EcoHealth Alliance has denied any wrongdoing over its experiments - and categorically denied any link to the origins of Covid.
The organisation said it was "disappointed" by the government's decision to suspend funding and "will be contesting the proposed debarment".
It added: "We disagree strongly with the decision and will present evidence to refute each of these allegations and to show that NIH’s continued support of EcoHealth Alliance is in the public interest."
The suspension comes one day before a top official from the National Institutes of Health - which funded EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan lab - is scheduled to testify before Congress.
As we enter the fifth year of the pandemic, the world still has no definitive answers on where the virus came from.
Many scientists and intelligence officials suspect bungling researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology - which was partly funded by US government agencies - accidentally spread Covid during experiments on bat coronaviruses.
Meanwhile, the natural origins theory contends that Covid jumped from bats into humans through an "intermediate host".
But an animal host has not been found after four years of searching.
China has refused to cooperate with a full-scale probe into the origins and experts claim a "cover up" is continuing today.
