WASHINGTON — Two Republican lawmakers demanded Monday that the National Institutes of Health halt more than $3 million in taxpayer funding for “sketchy” research on live bats involving “experimental infection studies” with “SARS-related coronaviruses” like the one that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) called on NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to “immediately … stop this batty research,” which was prompted by the since-debarred nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and spurred on by former NIH officials Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, per a letter exclusively obtained by The Post.
An as-now uncanceled grant of $2.2 million from NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to Colorado State University makes up the bulk of the funding. Another $1.3 million comes from a prior grant.
Federal spending records show the money would be used for infectious disease research on “zoonotic viruses, including SARS, SARS2 and MERS coronaviruses, and ebola, Sudan and Marburg viruses,” and developing “breeding” colonies of Jamaican and Egyptian fruit bats on US soil.
“We will perform experimental infection studies,” the researchers write. “Tissues, cells and sera from naïve and infected bats will be archived in a biobank that will be made available to the research community upon virus inactivation.”
“The establishment of this resource will lead to a better understanding of how bats host highly pathogenic viruses without disease and may she dlight on events that increase spillover risks to humans.”
Since 2016, taxpayers have forked over $12.9 million to the university to make the experimental “bat breeding facility, which also planned a holding room for up to 212 horseshoe bats that harbor SARS-like viruses,” the GOP lawmakers wrote.
“It is quite possible that lab research on bats and the coronaviruses they carry may be behind the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the Republicans told Bhattacharya.
“Risky research with minimal benefit to the health of the American people, and with a great risk of causing another pandemic, should be done only after an extremely intensive safety review and only under strict oversight, if done at all,” they added.
Ernst and Gosar have both advocated for broader transparency about taxpayer funding of so-called “gain of function” research, which can genetically alter viruses to make them more infectious or transmissible, as well as transparency about the origins of COVID-19.
The FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy — as well as other lawmakers and non-government scientists — have all concluded that SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, most likely resulted from a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
The CSU bat research funding was distributed roughly evenly between NIH’s Office of the Director, where Collins served until December 2021, and the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci ran until December 2022.
Collins and Fauci have maintained in testimony during and after their time at NIH that COVID was caused by natural spillover from animals to humans.
CSU microbiology professor Tony Schountz and EcoHealth vice president for science and outreach Jonathan Epstein first proposed the creation of the bat colony in a 2016 paper, later made public via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the watchdog US Right To Know.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, barred EcoHealth in January 2025 from receiving federal funding for the next five years. CSU is also no longer collaborating on the research with EcoHealth Alliance.
Still, Ernst and Gosar expressed concern in their letter about EcoHealth having prompted the CSU project, while the taxpayer watchdog White Coat Waste has noted in the past “an alarming pattern of recent animal lab accidents at CSU” to call for a funding cut.
“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,” a rep previously told the Daily Mail in response to reports of dozens of accidents at the lab. “In instances when we have something that occurs outside of normal protocols, we immediately self-report and take immediate actions to address it.”
“Forking over millions more taxpayer dollars to Wuhan-linked mad scientists in the U.S. for dangerous bat virus experiments is a recipe for disaster straight out of Dr. Fauci’s cookbook,” said White Coat Waste founder and president Anthony Bellotti in a statement.
NIH and the US Agency for International Development gave more than $1.4 million to EcoHealth 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.
That funding went to the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the COVID-19 pandemic began.
“It is absolutely bonkers to spend tax dollars recreating the same sketchy Wuhan research in America,” Ernst said. “While we still do not know the true origins of the pandemic, the absolute last thing we should be doing is potentially funding the next one.”
“The Trump administration can save taxpayers more than $3 million by cancelling this batty research today and revealing the full truth about what Dr. Fauci and his colleagues were funding in the lead up to COVID-19,” the Iowa Republican added.
Former NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak testified to Congress in 2024 that the experiments constituted gain-of-function research, but had previously claimed in an October 2021 letter to lawmakers that the resulting strains were “genetically very distant” from SARS-CoV-2.
EcoHealth has also claimed the research couldn’t have prompted the pandemic that killed more than 1.1 million Americans, though its former president, Dr. Peter Daszak, previously testified to Congress that his nonprofit did not have access to all of the Wuhan lab’s genomic data — and there may still be unpublished coronavirus samples at the lab.
Proponents of the so-called “lab leak theory” have alleged that a 2018 EcoHealth proposal — submitted to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency but never funded — is “smoking gun” evidence, or a “blueprint,” of how the virus was engineered.
Ex-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Robert Redfield, for example, has suggested that even unfunded projects can be tested under other research grants.
Gosar said, “Taxpayers deserve answers — and accountability — for why NIH has poured nearly $13 million into risky live bat research, with millions more still pending, despite serious biosafety concerns and unanswered questions about COVID-19’s origins.”
“Given EcoHealth Alliance’s history and NIH-funded experiments involving SARS-like viruses, Nipah, and Ebola, Congress must rigorously scrutinize every live bat grant and facility operating in the United States,” he added.
An HHS spokesperson said in a statement: “NIH is in receipt of the letter and will respond directly to the Congressional members.”
Schountz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
