A Tuesday night memo from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a proposal to suspend and debar the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) from participating in U.S. government programs.
A House oversight committee made a memo from the suspension and debarment official at HHS public instructing the federal government to suspend the access of government programs to the WIV, cutting off any access to funding, according to the HHS memo. The memo gives a timeline outlining the points of contact between the National Institute of Health (NIH) and its sub-agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with U.S. grant recipient EcoHealth, doing gain-of-function research at the WIV, despite an order by the White House to put the research on pause since October 2014.
“I find that the information in the record constitutes adequate evidence to demonstrate that the immediate suspension of WIV is necessary to protect the public interest,” according to the memo. “NIH has given WIV several opportunities to disprove this funding, but WIV has failed to do so. Due to WIV’s disregard of the NIH’s requests that WIV provide the required materials to support its research reported in the grant RPPPRs and I-RPPRs, the NIH’s conclusion that WIV research likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety is undisputed.”
Top health officials have repeatedly denied the claims that COVID-19 originated in a lab and that the NIH funded gain-of-function research. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), vehemently denied the claims that the NIAID funded WIV gain-of-function research on bat-based coronaviruses in an exchange with Sen. Rand Paul in May 2021.
Later texts from February 2020 show that Fauci knew of gain-of-function research, with him sending an email to U.S. public health officials saying that “scientists in the Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments… associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection,” according to a document from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus.
Scientists who wrote a prominent paper on the origins of COVID-19 and said that the virus likely did not escape from a laboratory were found to have exchanged private messages from February 2020 expressing support for the theory, finding a lab leak “highly likely.”
The first three patients to have come down with COVID-19 have been identified as lab researchers at WIV, according to a report from June 2023. The report recognizes WIV lab researchers Ben Hu, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu as original patients of the virus. Hu is considered a protégé of Shi Zhengli, an infamous scientist known for her gain-of-function research on bat-based viruses.
HHS did not immediately respond to a request to comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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