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The federal government missed warning signs from the lab at the center of the coronavirus controversy, allowing U.S. money to flow to the Wuhan Institute of Virology without adequate oversight of what the Chinese scientists were doing, an inspector general reported Wednesday.
The National Institutes of Health funded the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit, which in turn sent money to Wuhan for research on emerging viruses. NIH ordered EcoHealth to keep a close eye on the research and to report back if there were signs that the research was producing “enhanced growth” of deadly viruses.
Wuhan crossed that line but EcoHealth failed to raise the alarm, the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general said.
The new report does not conclude that the coronavirus emerged from the Wuhan lab and does not tie U.S. funding to the virus. But the audit does say the federal government was sending money over without adequate controls on how it was being spent.
“Despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards, NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some research requirements,” the inspector general concluded.
Even now, the National Institutes of Health still can’t say exactly what Wuhan was doing with American taxpayers’ money in 2019, just before the coronavirus pandemic struck. That’s because the lab has stopped responding to U.S. requests.
The report said EcoHealth should clean up its monitoring and reporting before the U.
