The White House budget calls for slashing $17 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), citing the agency’s failure to properly monitor risky gain-of-function research it funded at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—where the COVID-19 pandemic plausibly originated.
“While evidence of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic leaking from a laboratory is now confirmed by several intelligence agencies, the NIH’s inability to prove that its grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology were not complicit in such a possible leak, or get data and hold recipients of Federal funding accountable is evidence that NIH has grown too big and unfocused,” reads the budget summary released on Friday.
Shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the CIA produced a new assessment saying that the agency now favors a lab leak explanation of the pandemic’s origins.
The FBI and the Energy Department have also said they favor the lab leak theory, as does Germany’s intelligence agency.
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In its last days in office, the Biden administration formally debarred EcoHealth and Daszak from receiving federal funds for the next five years.
Gain-of-function research on pandemic pathogens is a tiny portion of NIH’s budget. EcoHealth’s grant was just $3 million, and only a portion of that was spent on its controversial work at WIV.