A controversial Manhattan nonprofit — which was suspended in May from receiving any more federal funds after funneling more than half a million in taxpayer dollars to the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID-19 pandemic — was asking for millions more in July to study dangerous viruses, The Post can exclusively reveal.
EcoHealth Alliance had “pending” grants for potentially risky viral research from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) that totaled nearly $4 million and were slated to start in July 2024, according to records obtained by the taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste and shared with The Post.
Those projects included a $3,450,622.08 grant for research to “[d]etermine the frequency of exposure to filoviruses and henipaviruses among people in rural Liberia, identify bat reservoirs for those viruses, and characterize risk factors for human exposure” until June 2029.
Another $360,916.37 grant was to “[c]onduct a serosurvey of humans and domestic animals in a rural community in Ghana where an outbreak of Marburg virus originated to determine the extent of filovirus exposure and associated risk factors” until June 2026.
Both grants listed the place of performance as the nonprofit’s New York City location, but neither was funded, according to a review of federal grant databases, before the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) suspended EcoHealth Alliance in May and proposed it for a three-year debarment.
“All federal funding to EcoHealth Alliance has been halted,” a spokesperson told The Post. “EcoHealth Alliance is not conducting research on Marburg virus and does not conduct laboratory research in New York City.”
Justin Goodman, a senior vice president at White Coat Waste, told The Post it got the records after filing a Colorado Public Records Act request pursuant to another multimillion-dollar grant to import bats to a state university and conduct experiments with SARS-CoV-2 and the Nipah and Ebola viruses.
That project at Colorado State University was first reported last year by the Daily Mail.
“EcoHealth continued to rake in NIH funding until the bitter end, even after what we exposed in Wuhan and the tens of millions of tax dollars it wasted on dead-end virus hunting and animal testing that never prevented a pandemic and probably caused one,” Goodman said in a statement.
“It’s almost as if the NIH was rewarding EcoHealth for its role in the COVID cover-up and falling on the sword for [ex-NIAID director Dr. Anthony] Fauci,” he added.
Meanwhile, White Coat Waste is lobbying lawmakers to terminate funding for the $13 million project, citing “an alarming pattern of recent animal lab accidents at CSU.”
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) told The Post in August she was “going to do everything I can to clip the wings of the mad scientists at EcoHealth so they never get their hands on bats or taxpayer dollars ever again.”
CSU has since ended its research collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance but continued work on the bat project. The university did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A rep previously told the Daily Mail in response to reports of dozens of accidents at the lab: “Colorado State University is one of the nation’s leading research institutions in a host of vital areas to find cures and improve the human condition. In instances when we have something that occurs outside of normal protocols, we immediately self-report and take immediate actions to address it.”
The status of EcoHealth’s debarment proceedings for having “likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety” for its bat coronavirus experiments in Wuhan, China, remains unclear, but at least one of its grants remains ongoing.
A $4.2 million grant from the Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency to the University of Pretoria is providing subgrants to EcoHealth for biosurveillance on “viral zoonoses in bat-livestock-human interfaces in Southern Africa” — but will conclude in July 2025.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Science Foundation confirmed that other funding from their agencies for EcoHealth had also been terminated in August, National Review reported.
“Following action taken by Health and Human Services to suspend EcoHealth Alliance on May 15, 2024, USAID fully complied with the suspension, terminated the existing award, and did not make any new funding obligations to EcoHealth Alliance,” a development agency spokesperson told The Post on Tuesday.
NIH and USAID gave more than $1.4 million to EcoHealth that was eventually used at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains” between 2014 and 2019, according to a June 2023 Government Accountability Office report.
While the experiments constituted gain-of-function research, then-NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak said in an October 2021 letter to congressional investigators that the resulting strains were deemed “genetically very distant” from SARS-CoV-2.
EcoHealth has claimed the research could not have led to the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in Wuhan, China, and went on to kill more than 1.1 million Americans.
Some members of Congress and scientific experts have flagged still another EcoHealth proposal — submitted to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency but never funded — as “smoking gun” evidence that the virus could have been engineered in Wuhan.
The FBI and Department of Energy determined last year that a lab accident was the most likely explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told lawmakers in April 2023 that it was the “only” plausible theory.
National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett said Monday that the Biden-Harris administration was working to end an outbreak of the Marburg virus in Rwanda “as quickly as possible.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent three senior scientists to support the effort, along with “hundreds of investigational vaccine doses and a small number of investigational therapeutics doses,” according to Savett.
“To keep Americans safe, we are implementing additional precautions for a small, select group of travelers arriving in the United States from Rwanda, including additional public health entry screenings,” he added.
“To facilitate these precautions, the United States will finalize plans in the coming week to redirect passengers who were recently in Rwanda to certain U.S. airports for public health entry screening and follow up measures.”
Twelve Rwandans have died and 56 have become ill with the Marburg virus as of Tuesday, per the CDC.
Reps for HHS and NIH did not respond to requests for comment.
