A bill from the House Appropriations Committee would ban EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving funds from U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other sources leading to the State Department.
The bill follows the report from White Coat Waste Project that EcoHealth Alliance gave $38 million USAID funds to a Wuhan lab “patient zero.”
The 2024 State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Bill from Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) will place financial limitations on EcoHealth Alliance.
The bill states that “none of the funds made available by this Act may be made available to support, directly or indirectly,” the Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth Alliance, any lab controlled by the government of China, Cuba, Iran, Korea, Russia, Venezuela, or “any other country determined by the Secretary of State to be a foreign adversary.”
The bill also prohibits funds for gain-of-function research.
Senior Vice President of White Coat Wate Justin Goodman told The Blaze, “Our blockbuster investigations prove that the disgraced EcoHealth Alliance secretively shipped US taxpayer dollars from USAID to COVID’s likely Patient Zero Ben Hu at the CCP-run Wuhan lab for dangerous gain-of-function experiments on humanized mice that violated federal policy and that the FBI and other experts believe caused COVID.”
“But, despite EHA’s calamitous collaboration with the Wuhan animal lab and its well-documented waste, fraud, and abuse, EHA has raked in over $11 million in new taxpayer funds from USAID just since the pandemic began. Enough is enough,” Goodman continued, adding, “The solution is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness.”
Reporting from The Blaze:
Extra to this latest effort to preclude EHA from taking more taxpayer money, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst (R) stated Wednesday that she will offer amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act to: "Ensure no defense dollars ever go to China's Wuhan Institute of Virology"; "Cut off further payments from the Pentagon to EcoHealth, which collaborated with the Chinese, but refuses to cooperate with our investigations into what they were doing with our dollars"; and "Conduct an independent investigation to determine if EcoHealth diverted any U.S. Defense dollars into the Wuhan Institute, or any other Chinese lab, or spent it to create enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential."
