US President Joe Biden’s administration formally halted the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s access to US funding, citing unanswered safety and security questions for the facility at the center of the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Monday notified the institute about the suspension and told the lab it was seeking to cut it off permanently, a memo obtained by Bloomberg News showed.
An HHS review that started in September last year raised concern that the facility based in Wuhan, China, where COVID-19 first emerged, is violating biosafety protocols and is not complying with US regulations.
Photo: Reuters
The penalties are the most drastic action the US has taken over the lab’s failure to share information amid ongoing investigations into COVID-19’s origins.
They come as leaders in the US and China are trying to establish a better working relationship between the two countries as both continue to deal with the economic fallout of the pandemic that killed 7 million people.
The action guarantees that a once-lauded global research institute would not receive any more US federal funding, an HHS spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has received more than US$1.4 million in federal awards, including through subgrants from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2014.
It has not obtained new funding from the NIH since July 2020.
The Chinese institute has become a flashpoint in discussions of how the pandemic started, with some, including FBI Director Christopher Wray, suspecting it could have originated at the facility.
Although the US has not found any conclusive evidence that the virus emerged either through animal-to-human transmission or a lab accident, it has identified significant breaches in safety and security protocol at the Wuhan institute. The US has also accused China and the lab of stonewalling investigations into those shortcomings.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it understood the Wuhan institute has not applied for and is not conducting any US-funded research, and the country is dedicated to global cooperation on science, technology and public health.
“The virus is a common enemy of mankind,” a statement from the spokesperson’s office said. “We hope the US can work with China and jointly respond to global challenges.”
In 2014, the NIH awarded a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based organization focused on preventing infectious diseases, for “understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.”
The Wuhan institute received a subaward of that grant, which has faced scrutiny over concerns of it supporting so-called gain-of-function research, where a pathogen is altered to improve its ability to cause disease.
A US Government Accountability Office report found the Wuhan institute received the US$1.4 million between 2014 and 2020, distributed from the NIH and the US Agency for International Development through subawards.
Earlier this year, HHS’s Office of Inspector General conducted an audit that determined that the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance did not effectively monitor awards and subawards, limiting their ability to understand the nature of research conducted and identify problem areas.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS