Communist China is refusing to comply with further investigation into the Wuhan lab, located in the city the pandemic originated. While the Chinese Communist Party throws a fit about the “shocking” and “offensive” proposal by the World Health Organization to audit Chinese labs claiming it projects “arrogance towards science,” some U.S. legislators haven’t given up on finding where COVID-19 came from and who needs to be held responsible for unleashing the virus on the world.
Last week, the bipartisan House Appropriations Committee voted to ban funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology through designations in the National Institutes of Health funding bill for next year.
In addition to pulling dollars from gain-of-function experiments, the ban also takes into account experiments occurring in nations historically hostile and opposed to the U.S.
“Shipping tax dollars to a CCP-run animal lab with military ties to supercharge coronaviruses in gain-of-function experiments is a recipe for disaster,” said Anthon Bellotti, president of the taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project.
“Having first exposed secretive taxpayer funding for the Wuhan animal lab last year, we applaud Democrat and Republican lawmakers for coming together to protect taxpayers and public health by defunding this dangerous animal lab where there’s no transparency and accountability about how our money is spent, and that a growing majority of Americans believe caused the pandemic,” Bellotti said in a statement.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst is just one of the conservatives fighting to prevent labs such as the Wuhan Insitute of Virology from receiving funding that could lead to dangerous conditions and potential consequences for the world.
“COVID-19 appeared in the vicinity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a laboratory where research was conducted on bat coronaviruses, yet the Communist Party of China refuses to cooperate with efforts to learn how a virus found in bats made the cross-species jump to humans,” Ernst told The Federalist. “What’s even more troubling is that some of the research being done at WIV was subsidized by American taxpayers despite the fact the organization funneling the money, EcoHealth Alliance, was skirting federal law and refusing to disclose the amount of money going to the WIV.”
The murkiness around New York-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance and its relationship with Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Wuhan lab prompted Ernst to propose legislation that would keep taxpayers from “foot[ing] the bill for any organization that fails to comply with federal law.”
From 2014 to 2019, the NIH approved a five-year annual grant of $600,000 to EcoHealth Alliance which in turn, went to study bat coronaviruses that could infect humans at the WIV. Ernst said federal law requires NIH and other agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to publicly disclose every project being supported with federal funds, but that this law has been ignored by HHS.
The Stop the Outlay of Payments (STOP) Act would cut off all funding to any organization, like EcoHealth, that refuses to provide information about a project or fails to obey federal laws.
“Taxpayers have a legal right to know exactly what our government is funding and where and, most importantly, why so we can hold those making the decisions accountable,” she said.
Ernst also blasted NIH for their failure to address Ecohealth Alliance’s “stonewalling questions about what was happening at the Wuhan lab” and “rewarded the organization by providing a new grant.”
“Call it whatever you want, but it’s indisputable that the dangerous research was being conducted in a facility not up to safety standards and the organization that funneled taxpayer dollars into the state-run lab refuses to cooperate with the investigation to learn exactly what was occurring there prior to the outbreak,” Ernst said. “Sadly, public officials and many in the media dismissed this idea outright. The bottom line is, to find out the truth about COVID-19, we need to follow the science and the money.”
Cutting off the money, Ernst continued, is just one step in what needs to be a long and deep investigation into just how COVID-19 infected the entire world.
“The information EcoHealth possesses, which was paid for by U.S. tax dollars, could strengthen the case for or against the lab leak theory,” she added.
For months, the corporate media, Big Tech, and Democrats wrote off the lab leak theory as a conspiracy theory. They banded together to censor, downplay, and diss people such as Republican Sen. Tom Cotton who raised questions about the lab’s role in the pandemic. After new intelligence suggested that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology when researchers at the lab fell ill and required hospitalization in November 2019, shortly before the global outbreak that killed more than 3 million people, the media ignored their own malfeasance and social media sites reluctantly lifted some of their censorship.
Mary Katharine Ham, a conservative contributor for CNN, recently pinpointed the corporate media’s complicity and willingness to protect Fauci from simple yet tough questioning.
“Fauci is a very powerful public official who deserves and rarely gets tough questioning in almost any realm. He gets frankly a lot of fangirling…he doesn’t get a lot of pushback,” she explained. “…Tough questions for Dr. Anthony Fauci are not attacks on science itself.”
Any attempt to demand veneration for a powerful public official is unhealthy. That was done with Mueller and now Fauci: no questioning. Kudos to @mkhammer for bringing this very measured but unblinking critique of the media’s protection of Fauci to CNN:pic.twitter.com/g2I7InSxMG
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 22, 2021
Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.
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