The Biden administration, under acute pressure from House lawmakers, moved on Wednesday to ban funding for a prominent virus-hunting nonprofit group whose work with Chinese scientists had put it at the heart of theories that Covid leaked from a lab.
Republicans went further, demanding that Peter Daszak, the president of the nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, be criminally investigated.
For EcoHealth, which relied on federal funding to study the threat of wild animal viruses, the loss of funding is another twist in a saga that has long dominated discussions of how the pandemic began.
In April 2020, under orders from the Trump administration, the National Institutes of Health terminated a grant to EcoHealth amid President Donald J. Trump’s feud with China over the origin of the coronavirus.
had failed to give a proper cause for ending the grant, which supplied an average of roughly $625,000 per year.
Persons:
Peter Daszak, Trump, Donald J, Trump’s
Organizations:
Biden, Department of Health, Human Services, Republicans, EcoHealth Alliance, National Institutes of Health
Locations:
Wuhan, China