Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) said on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow that the Biden administration is still providing funding to EcoHealth Alliance, which served as an intermediary of funding for viral gain-of-function research in China with research grants it received from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Ernst noted that the U.S. Department of Defense provided EcoHealth Alliance with $3 million as a “project grant” ostensibly for the purposes of “scientific research” towards “combating weapons of mass destruction.”
United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in Warsaw, Poland on March 18, 2022. (Mateusz Wlodarczyk/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“We keep finding expenditures that are going out to EcoHealth,” Ernst said, who is calling for an end of federal funding for EcoHealth Alliance. “It is the organization that was able to gain money through the National Institutes of Health. They had a grant. They were doing coronavirus experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Does that sound familiar?”
Ernst continued, “We have additional dollars that just went out last month from the Biden administration, once again, to EcoHealth in the amount of $3 million, and that was funded through the Department of Defense.”
The Iowa senator emphasized how EcoHealth Alliance was implicated in “doing dangerous experimentation in China” while “not being transparent” in its public disclosures of its dispensation of NIH grant monies.
“We did find through an inspector general’s report that they were misusing those funds, and yet we keep sending them money [via the] federal government,” she concluded. “So we are trying to bar them from ever receiving federal government funds. Those taxpayer dollars can’t keep flowing to organizations that do very bad experiments on our taxpayer dime, and then don’t even bother to have the transparency which is required by law with that type of experimentation.”
According to EcoHealth Alliance, the organization received approximately $8 million in federal government funding via the NIH between fiscal years 2014 and 2021.
The organization acknowledges the enhancement of viral pathogenicity as a function of its own research. It stated that it “is fully committed to responsible research with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and follows all applicable U.S. policy frameworks and rules regarding such research.”
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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