The National Institutes of Health has quietly erased the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the lab facility at the center of speculation about the origin of COVID-19 — from its list of labs that can conduct animal testing with U.S. money.
Wuhan was missing from a new update to the list. NIH also erased all Russian labs from the list, meaning that no taxpayer money from U.S. public health service agencies can be used for animal testing in that country.
In deleting the Wuhan Institute, NIH was striking back against the lab that some U.S. agencies have concluded spawned the coronavirus pandemic that upended the global economy and killed millions of people.
“China’s state-run Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was known to be unsafe, should never have received U.S. support for its dangerous experiments on bat coronaviruses,” said Sen. Joni Ernst, Iowa Republican.
She said that she was “cautiously optimistic” about the delisting, but said the fact that Wuhan got taxpayer money in the first place was disturbing.
“What other batty studies are we paying for that are flying under the radar? I soon plan to introduce legislation requiring every penny sent to an institution in China or any other adversarial country be publicly disclosed,” she said.
Justin Goodman, senior vice president for advocacy at the White Coat Waste Project, which pushed to expose the U.S. money that funded Wuhan, called the delisting “a decisive victory in the War on Waste.”
He pointed out that as recently as last year, a senior NIH official pushed back against attempts to strip Wuhan and other foreign labs from doing risky gain-of-function research that enhances the danger from pathogens.
And the Wuhan lab had survived several iterations of NIH’s approved animal testing list before finally being ousted.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to fund a foreign lab run by an adversarial nation that wasted money, tortured animals, and engineered superviruses in dangerous gain-of-function experiments that violated the law and likely caused COVID,” Mr. Cooper told The Washington Times.
The Times has reached out to NIH for this story.
The NIH list of approved animal testing labs lists 1,115 domestic facilities and 342 foreign ones. The previous list had 1,119 domestic and 346 foreign labs.
That includes some new additions and deletions.
Among the deletions were three Russian labs: the Institute of Cytology and the Pavlov Institute of Physiology, both part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the academy’s Siberian Branch.
The Times reported last month that NIH had officially cut off all funding to labs in Russia to comply with an executive order President Biden issued in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
One of those labs, the Pavlov Institute, had done research that involved debilitating cats and then making them walk on a treadmill in order to study spinal cord injuries and body motion.
The White Coat Waste Project had said that research constituted animal torture.
The list of approved animal testing labs is maintained by NIH’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare. That office oversees animal testing done on behalf of public health service agencies, including NIH, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Being on the list means that a lab follows certain standards for the care of the animals it uses for testing.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology got roughly $600,000 in NIH money as a subgrantee to EcoHealth, a New York-based firm. NIH paid EcoHealth to conduct research on bat coronaviruses. Ms. Ernst and the White Coat Waste Project exposed the money in 2020, and Ms. Ernst pressed for an inspector general’s review in 2021.
That report was released earlier this year, finding that NIH and EcoHealth were lax in their monitoring of Wuhan and other recipients and how they spent the money.
Wuhan’s research involved “enhanced growth” of the viruses, which should have triggered alerts to NIH. But EcoHealth failed to raise the alarm properly, the inspector general concluded.
The audit did not tie the U.S. money specifically to the emergence of the coronavirus, nor did it comment on the theory that the virus leaked from the lab. It did say the government was aware of the risks but sent money over anyway without imposing adequate controls.
The inspector general also said Wuhan had stonewalled inquiries about its use of the money. The audit recommended the lab be barred from receiving U.S. taxpayer money.
Under President Trump, NIH suspended the grant to EcoHealth. NIH restored the grant late last month, EcoHealth said, on condition that it submit itself to new oversight and that it not fund any research in China.
COVID-19’s origins center on two theories. One is the natural origin hypothesis, which posits that the virus jumped from an animal host to humans. The other is that it leaked from the Wuhan lab.
Some scientists say genetic sampling strongly backs the animal theory, suggesting that the virus was present in animals at a market in Wuhan. But some key U.S. agencies, including the FBI, believe the virus came from the lab, probably from an accidental leak.
In addition to the institute, run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan University was also delisted from NIH’s animal-testing approval list.
Some 27 other Chinese labs remain on the approved list.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.