EXCLUSIVE: Joni Ernst Demands Biden Admin Confirm Halt Of Federal Funding To Org Linked To COVID Lab

Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst called on the Biden administration in a letter on Wednesday to confirm that federal funding has been cut for the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) organization, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the 🏢Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Biden administration in May suspendedfunding for EcoHealth, which collected grants from the U.S. government and funneled funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab suspected to be the origin point of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ernst sent the letter to various administration agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to verify that taxpayer funding to EcoHealth had been cut and demanded clarification on whether the NIH has access to data the organization collected using taxpayer dollars.

“Despite repeated requests from NIH, EHA never provided laboratory notebooks and files from the taxpayer-funded research conducted on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which could hold vital clues to understanding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Ernst wrote in the letter to NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli. “All information related to EHA’s current experiments not currently in your custody needs to be collected and every precaution should be taken to ensure the pathogens in the group’s possession are documented and prevented from leaking. What happened in Wuhan should never be allowed to happen anywhere else ever again.”