The Office of the Inspector General dropped a new report about the relationship between the National Institutes of Health, the EcoHealth Alliance, and the facilities that received grants from the organization.

The contents do not reflect well on either the NIH or the EcoHealth Alliance. They were playing with fire, knew it, and failed to ensure that safety was front and center when messing with microbes.

The report is entitled quite sexily: THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH AND ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE DID NOT EFFECTIVELY MONITOR AWARDS AND SUBAWARDS, RESULTING IN MISSED OPPORTUNITIES TO OVERSEE RESEARCH AND OTHER DEFICIENCIES.

Catchy title, as you would expect from the Inspector General’s office. They have a flair for the dramatic.

Well, the findings themselves are dramatic. As explained by Hannah Cox of The White Coat Waste Project, the NIH at the very least dropped a very important ball. And perhaps, given Dr. Fauci’s fondness for gain-of-function research, intentionally so. We may never know that one way or another.

The Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) just released a new bombshell report that specifically examined three grants the NIH made to the notorious nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance that they were using as a pass-through organization to cover their tracks. EcoHealth was given $8 million between 2014 and 2021, some of which went to the Wuhan lab.

The IG’s audit found a lack of oversight by the NIH and EcoHealth not only at the Chinese facility, but also in other labs that received these government grants.

“Although NIH and EcoHealth had established monitoring procedures, we found deficiencies in complying with those procedures limited NIH and EcoHealth’s ability to effectively monitor federal grant awards and subawards to understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action,” the report said.

Senator Rand Paul and others have been sounding alarms about this problem for while now, but officials in the government have been circling the wagons around the public health establishment and Dr. Anthony Fauci in particular. So much has been staked on their credibility–everything done over the past 2+ years surrounding COVID policies and the fiscal stimulus packages that are harming our economy–that almost no evidence can penetrate the stubborn insistence that everything done by these people is above board.

Senator Rand Paul, who has been at the forefront of bringing these matters to light and exposing Dr. Fauci’s lies, released a statement following the report that said, “The Inspector General confirms what we already knew—NIH failed to conduct oversight of EcoHealth Alliance’s grant awards. The continued funding of EcoHeath Alliance despite its repeated noncompliance with federal regulations and policies further demonstrates the need to reform oversight of risky research paid for the American taxpayers.”

As we recently reported, the Department of Defense just awarded another $3 million to EcoHealth Alliance.

It’s high past time that Congress fully investigates the origins of COVID, defunds EcoHealth Alliance, and reinstates a ban on gain-of-function research (one that we actively enforce this time around).

This was not a minor glitch in the system. The very first sentence of the report makes clear that the NIH knew they were playing with fire, yet did nothing to reduce the likelihood of an inferno resulting: “Despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards, we found that NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements.”

That is the first sentence of the report. They knew and did nothing.

Did they even want to? Or was this a wink and a nod to go ahead with dangerous research, at arm’s length from the NIH? I have my suspicions.

All this begs another question: why are we funding these efforts at all? It’s not like our scientists are actively working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the NIH apparently didn’t check in on some of the work for 2 years. Why spend the money if they aren’t interested in the results?

At the very least, the procedures at the NIH are broken. At worst, they are actively trying to circumvent the restrictions put on American researchers.

Either way, it’s bad.