The origins of the coronavirus have become an increasingly hot-button issue, allowing conspiracy theories to gain traction online and among high-profile officials.
“It's hard to do this work in other countries. Very complicated. It requires a lot of traveling. It would be so convenient if we could do it in our own backyards,” Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, told USA TODAY.
“The viruses that are a high risk to public health are not in the U.S., they are in China. If we want to know anything about the next pandemic, we need to be working in the countries where these viruses are.”On April 23, the National Institutes of Health informed EcoHealth Alliance that it would no longer receive funding from the agency and that the remainder of its grant had been rescinded.
“NIH can confirm that the grant to EcoHealth Alliance Inc. has been terminated. The grant was for $3.4 million over 6 years distributed across all sites: the primary awardee, EcoHealth Health Alliance Inc. , and sub-awardees, Wuhan Institute of Virology , East China Normal University , the Institute of Pathogen Biology , and Duke-NUS Medical School ,” the NIH said in a statement to USA TODAY. “NIH does not discuss details of the decision-making process regarding specific grant awards.
“The U.S. federal government checks whether it is OK to work with places like the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We never work with any lab or organization unless it has been preapproved by the U.S. government and/or its agencies,” Daszak told USA TODAY. It is not uncommon for the United States to fund research projects in other countries. The NIH annually grants over
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