Republicans demand halt to grants for virus-hunting group
Senior Republicans have hit out at a decision by the Biden administration to award hundreds of thousands of dollars to a virus-hunting group that is already under fire for its previous work with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Three members of Congress have urged health officials to reverse a recent decision to give over $500,000 to the EcoHealth Alliance to fund its work hunting for new coronaviruses in the wild. The grant is one of four given to the organisation since the start of the pandemic, adding up to more than $7mn in total.
EcoHealth, which is based in the US and led by the British scientist Peter Daszak, has previously been criticised for coronavirus experiments it conducted on mice in 2015 with the lab in Wuhan, the city where Covid-19 was first discovered, and its subsequent failure to disclose the full details of the studies.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Kiran Stacey
