Feb. 14 may be a day for romantic gifts, but that’s not what Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) gave Secretary Xavier Becerra and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for failing to bar China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) from receiving any more federal funds.
The Iowa Republican gave Becerra and HHS her latest “Squeal Award”—a monthly recognition that singles out a Washington expense, program, or concept that has proven to be wasteful and must be cut—after they failed to act on the recommendation of the department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) that the Chinese lab where the Coronavirus is thought to have originated be permanently removed from eligibility for federal funds.
According to official figures, more than 6 million people worldwide have died from the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 since it first began spreading from Wuhan, China, in 2019 and in the United States beginning in January 2020. The WIV lab has received at least $1.7 million in federal funding from the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and U.S. Agency for International Development via the New York-based health non-profit EcoHealth Alliance.
“While NIH ultimately bears the blame for being unable to provide answers to questions about what was going on in the Wuhan Institute with U.S. taxpayers’ dollars, EcoHealth and especially WIV have blatantly refused to cooperate with the search for the truth,” Ernst told Becerra in a Feb. 13 letter made available to The Epoch Times. “Yet, to this day, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is still on the NIH’s list of approved institutions eligible to receive taxpayer dollars to conduct experiments on animals.”
Ernst urged that the department “immediately and permanently debar WIV from receiving U.S. funding to ensure that not another penny from taxpayers is ever sent to China’s state-run Wuhan Institute of Virology by NIH or any other component or grantee of HHS. This opinion is widely shared by my colleagues as the U.S. Senate approved a total prohibition on all U.S. federal funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in May 2021.”
“I would also urge you to act on the OIG’s recommendations that EcoHealth repay the tax dollars misspent on unallowable costs and provide a complete accounting of all of the federal funding it has received and for NIH to implement enhanced monitoring, documentation, and reporting requirements for all grant recipients with foreign sub-recipients,” Ernst told Becerra.
On the same day she announced the Squeal Award to HHS, Ernst also made public a draft of a bill she will be introducing in the Senate that stipulates “no funds authorized or appropriated by Federal law may be made available to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for any purpose.”
The Ernst bill will also mandate a study and report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) “regarding the amount of Federal funds that were awarded or indirectly provided (whether purposely or inadvertently) during the 15-year period immediately preceding such date of enactment.”
The GAO report would cover funds going to the WIV, the People’s Republic of China, or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or any agency or entity affiliated with any of the three.
A spokesman for HHS did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment. A spokesman for EcoHealth Alliance also did not respond to a request for comment.
In a Feb. 14 statement released by Ernst, an official with an advocacy group that was instrumental in exposing the role of the WIV in the COVID-19 crisis expressed support for the Iowa Republican’s legislative proposal.
“As the group that first exposed and ended the NIH’s reckless funding of the rogue Wuhan animal lab, we applaud Sen. Ernst for introducing commonsense legislation to defund this CCP-run animal lab whose dangerous coronavirus experiments on animals likely caused the pandemic,” said Tristan Daedalus, Government Affairs Director for the White Coat Waste Project.
“Our investigations since early 2020 have uncovered how the Wuhan lab wasted U.S. tax dollars on risky gain-of-function animal experiments in violation of a federal funding ban. The Wuhan lab has also refused to turn over records related to the animal experiments funded by U.S. tax dollars, deleted its public virus database, and otherwise obstructed investigations into COVID’s origins.
“Yet, we’ve discovered that the NIH has inexplicably allowed the Wuhan lab to remain eligible for even more tax money, specifically for animal experiments. Congress should swiftly pass Sen. Ernst’s bill and defund the Wuhan animal lab once and for all. Taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll white coats in Wuhan who waste money, break the law, abuse animals, and place public health in peril. Stop the money. Stop the madness!”