Pentagon still funneling money to suspended EcoHealth Alliance, unable to access potential gain-of-function research data abroad
The Pentagon is still funneling money to the suspended grantee EcoHealth Alliance and is unable to fully access data on gain-of-function research it may be funding overseas — including in China, according to a letter exclusively obtained by The Post.
Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante in a letter to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) revealed the shocking lapses in oversight from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is tasked with countering threats from weapons of mass destruction.
“Data generated through these projects are the property of the partner country and are used to generate periodic reporting,” Laplante told Ernst in the Aug. 1 missive.
“While [the Department of Defense] does not have direct access to this data, DoD encourages all Cooperative Threat Reduction grantees to publish results so that the data is accessible to the international community,” he added.
Ernst in a May 29 letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin demanded confirmation that all taxpayer funding to EcoHealth Alliance had been cut off after the Manhattan-based nonprofit was suspended from receiving any future federal grants earlier that month – and inquired about access to the data.
“It is deeply disturbing the Biden-Harris administration will not pull the plug on EcoHealth and claims not to even have access to key information about the dangerous experiments it’s paying for,” she exclusively told The Post.
The Department of Health and Human Services initiated the suspension and proposed EcoHealth for debarment for at least three years based on “adequate evidence” that it “likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety” while funding bat coronavirus experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
EcoHealth received more than $4 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for that project, more than half-a-million of which went to the WIV, but the group “failed” to provide evidence disproving that its experiments in China constituted gain-of-function research when requested by HHS.
NIH officials said viral sequences that emerged from the research project, which was titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” were “genetically very distant” from SARS-CoV-2 and could not have led to the COVID-19 pandemic.
EcoHealth Alliance has also denied that any of its experiments in Wuhan constituted gain-of-function research — despite testimony from NIH officials and scientists to the contrary — or that resulting viruses could have produced the pandemic that killed more than 1.1 million Americans.
But some members of Congress, former federal officials and scientific experts have flagged another EcoHealth proposal, which was submitted to another Pentagon agency but never funded, as “smoking gun” evidence that the virus could have been engineered in Wuhan.
Last September, HHS also barred the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving any US funding for the next 10 years.
Ernst in February, however, revealed that a researcher linked to the lab was still collaborating on a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant to study bird flu transmissibility and “potential to jump into mammalian hosts.”
In his letter to the Iowa senator, LaPlante acknowledged that at least two more Defense Threat Reduction Agency subgrants to EcoHealth Alliance were also still ongoing but would not be renewed.
One project that concludes in September 2024 is providing Georgetown University with a primary grant of $2.8 million for research on “reducing the risk of pathogens causing fever” in Guinea, at least $150,000 has been given as a subgrant to EcoHealth. It began in September 2021.
The other is giving more than $4.2 million to the University of Pretoria between July 2020 and July 2025, with subgrants to EcoHealth for biosurveillance on “viral zoonoses in bat-livestock-human interfaces in Southern Africa.”
“Despite promising to suspend funding to EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with China’s Wuhan Institute on the risky research that may have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic, our defense dollars continue to pay for the shady organization’s batty studies,” Ernst told The Post.
“I am going to do everything I can to clip the wings of the mad scientists at EcoHealth so they never get their hands on bats or taxpayer dollars ever again.”
In total, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency has provided $46.7 million to EcoHealth Alliance for 13 projects, according to a Department of Defense Office of Inspector General audit released in June.
The 20-page report of the audit’s findings claimed “none” of the funding “was allocated to China, its affiliates, or for research involving enhancement of pathogens,” also known as gain-of-function research, but, rather, for “pathogen‑related biosurveillance studies and training.”
But it also stated there were “significant limitations with the adequacy of data” — and that the Pentagon “did not track funding at the level of detail necessary to determine whether the DoD provided funding to Chinese research laboratories or other foreign countries” for the dangerous experiments.
Defense officials also told auditors that the research did not involve “strengthening” any viruses, which included experiments with the SARS-CoV-2, Dengue, Ebola, and Chikungunya viruses.
The Pentagon officially prohibits gain-of-function research on viruses, which it classifies as “offensive biological work,” but concluded that the audit had not uncovered the “full extent” of what experiments had been funded.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID), which provided more than $815,000 in subgrants to EcoHealth for its research at the WIV, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) confirmed earlier this month that other funding for the public health nonprofit had also been terminated, National Review reported.
Justin Goodman, who serves as senior vice president of the taxpayer watchdog White Coat Waste Project, which first uncovered the trail of funding for the Wuhan experiments, said his group was “proud of the progress we’ve made with Senator Ernst since early 2020 to expose and defund all of EcoHealth’s dangerous virus hunting and animal experimentation.”
“It’s alarming that the Pentagon hasn’t learned its lesson after what happened in Wuhan and is still recklessly shipping tax dollars overseas for WMD programs with little transparency and accountability,” Goodman added.
“The Department of Defense responds to requests for information from Congress directly to the members or the relevant committees,” a defense official told The Post. “We have no further details to provide at this time.”
EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to a request for comment.
