EXCLUSIVE — House Republicans are launching an investigation into research conducted in China funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health for violations of ethical and national security protocols.
The majority for the Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter on Tuesday to the Government Accountability Office requesting a detailed report regarding NIH funding of research projects that either utilize ill-gotten data from Chinese minority populations or partner closely with the Chinese military.
“Americans should be able to know that their tax dollars aren’t used inadvertently to prop-up military research in adversarial nations or to conduct research on religious minorities like the Uyghurs,” Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) told the Washington Examiner.
The 10-page letter, exclusively provided to the Washington Examiner, provides several examples of concerning research projects conducted by Chinese researchers from various universities and research firms in China with financial ties to the NIH.
For this letter, Rodgers, along with Health Subcommittee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Morgan Griffith (R-VA), only referenced publicly available data on NIH grants and research results from projects in China.
The leadership stressed that they are “troubled that there may be ongoing violations” and that the “dimensions of these concerns are much broader” than the publicly available data indicate.
Republican staffers report finding NIH-funded studies “that are highly suspected of involving unethical use of Chinese ethnic minority data.”
The majority highlights as examples three papers published between 2018 and 2021 that study exclusively the Uyghur population in the Xinjiang province of northwestern China.
The Chinese Communist Party abuse of the majority-Muslim Uyghur population came to the fore in the early fall of 2022 in the lead-up to the release of a detailed report from the United Nations outlining a series of human rights violations, including torture and forced medical treatment.
Documentation presented by the Republicans also links the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to a 2016 study on liver transplants using organs “sourced from executed prisoners in China.”
The paper was retracted in 2017 by publishing journal Liver International despite the fact that two of the lead authors denied the allegations of ethics violations.
Majority committee staff identified “dozens if not hundreds” of NIH-funded studies from 2001 to 2023 that included researchers affiliated with universities that are part of the so-called Seven Sons of National Defense.
For several years, the CCP has been strengthening ties between civilian and security institutions, a process called “military-civilian fusion.”
Seven Sons universities often publicly identify themselves as part of the Chinese national defense system and devote significant resources to dual-use research that is capable of civilian and military advancement, according to the committee Republicans’ research.
They are also concerned about NIH funds going to research conducted by pharmaceutical and biomedical research firms in China with strong ties to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, including WuXi Biologics and BGI Genomics.
Both WuXi and BGI have been implicated in sharing sensitive data with the Chinese government, which Republicans identify as a potentially severe security risk, especially on projects involving large stores of human DNA.
“This collaboration, while potentially enriching scientific understanding and innovation, necessitates careful consideration of data privacy, bioethical standards, and the broader implications of such international scientific partnerships,” wrote Rodgers, Guthrie, and Griffith.
Committee majority leadership asked the GAO to draft a report examining the “extent of these vulnerabilities and the NIH’s ability to safeguard federal funds.”
Specifically, Rodgers, Guthrie, and Griffith asked if the NIH has any internal vetting process for principal investigators on their grants or keeps tabs on whether particular researchers are on other US government lists, such as those kept by the Department of Energy or Department of Defense.
They also inquired as to whether the NIH has internal policies regarding monitoring projects for severe ethical violations, such as partnering with international watchdog organizations, or if there are policies governing retractions of studies.
This investigation comes on the heels of the committee’s work to uncover information on the genetic sequencing of COVID-19. An Energy and Commerce investigation in January found that Chinese researchers knew about the existence of a SARS-CoV-2 variant several weeks before the Chinese government informed the international community.
House Republicans have faced significant barriers to investigations involving the Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Xavier Becerra.
In November, Energy and Commerce and the House Oversight Committee issued a joint subpoena for the HHS Assistant Secretary for Legislation, Melanie Egorin, following statements from HHS staff saying that the department’s capacity to comply with congressional investigations had been gutted.
HHS staff told Republican committee staff that office capabilities for reviewing and retrieving requested documents had been significantly curtailed and that the department’s Office of General Counsel no longer assisted with oversight investigations, as was custom prior to the beginning of the Biden administration.
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Energy and Commerce committee staff informed the Washington Examiner that no deadline was given to the GAO for the publication of their report.
Staff for the Democratic members of the committee did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.