POTATUS totally cuts off Wuhan funding we totally weren't funding to begin with

(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Now, I AM blonde and well known to be a tad on the daffy side, but this “announcement” was truly confusing, because…

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…I thought we sorta weren’t and hadn’t been anyway. Government mouthpieces told us over and over “Nuh uh, never, no, NYET” didn’t they?

Well, knock me over with a feather – it turns out we were.

The Biden administration formally halted the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s access to US funding, citing unanswered safety and security questions for the facility at the center of the Covid lab leak theory.

The Department of Health and Human Services notified the institute about the suspension on Monday and told the lab it’s seeking to cut it off permanently, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg News. An HHS review that started in September raised concern that the facility based in Wuhan, where Covid first emerged, is violating biosafety protocols and isn’t complying with US regulations.

The penalties are the most drastic action the US has taken over the lab’s failure to share information amid ongoing investigations into Covid’s origins. They come as leaders in the US and China are trying to establish a better working relationship between the two countries as both continue to deal with the economic fallout of the pandemic that killed 7 million people.

Wasn’t the Wuhan lab’s continued “violations of safety protocols” a problem from the get-go? Like, for years now?!

Lemme check that again…2004, yup

.Breaches of safety regulations are probable cause of recent SARS outbreak, WHO says

…Dr Hall said, “Clearly there was a link to the Institute of Virology, and our investigations are still ongoing, but we haven’t found a single incident that links the two cases of laboratory workers at the institute, so it appears to be two separate breaches of bio-safety, and we can’t find any single incident or accident that explains either case. It has raised real concerns about bio-safety in general, how bio-safety guidelines are implemented, and how that is supervised and monitored.”

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2017-8’s breaches were so egregious, even diplomats were concerned enough to throw a flag.

Screencap Politico

…In the spring of 2020, inside the U.S. government, some officials began to see and collect evidence of a different, perhaps more troubling theory—that the outbreak had a connection to one of the laboratories in Wuhan, among them the WIV, a world leading center of research on bat coronaviruses.

To some inside the government, the name of the laboratory was familiar. Its research on bat viruses had already drawn the attention of U.S. diplomats and officials at the Beijing Embassy in late 2017, prompting them to alert Washington that the lab’s own scientists had reported “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

But their cables to Washington were ignored.

Supposedly, all NIH funding had already ceased in 2020. But there was some havey cavey fund shuffling and word parsing going on behind the scenes, with some truly creepy individuals involved. The story of the audit from the Inspector General of Health and Human Services is intriguing, as well as providing insight into the secretive world of “grants.” It’s a labyrinth of obfuscations.

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…The report from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) finds “NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address” compliance problems involving the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit that held the NIH grant. EcoHealth had sent some of those funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to study bat coronaviruses collected in the wild and examine their potential to jump to humans.

In April 2020, after then-President Donald Trump claimed the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have come from the WIV lab, NIH terminated the EcoHealth grant with little explanation. That step was widely condemned by scientists, and OIG’s report now says NIH improperly executed the termination because it did not provide a valid reason or provide EcoHealth with required information for appealing the decision.

A few months later, NIH reinstated the award but immediately suspended it, setting conditions for resumption that EcoHealth said it could not meet. NIH permanently terminated the WIV subaward as of August 2022 for compliance issues, including WIV’s failure to provide NIH with laboratory notebooks related to the funded experiments.

Conveniently, NIH had decided that the bat-virus research didn’t qualify as “gain of function” so it was still eligible for the funding. However, they’d apparently warned EcoHealth that if any “unexpected growth” occurred, the firm was to immediately notify the NIH. See how they’re covering their sixes with verbiage here?

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Well, it turns out, trusty old EcoHealth unexpectedly had some growth on their hands, but did NOT alert the NIH, blaming a computer glitch for the 2 years it took to finally do so.

Quelle surprise.

Strangely enough, even the federal audit was treading carefully. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it… still could be a chicken? Or a bat.

…However, the audit refrains from commenting on whether the results of the WIV hybrid virus experiments constituted “enhanced growth” that should have potentially triggered the special HHS review. OIG “did not assess scientific results for any of the experiments or make any determination regarding the accuracy of NIH’s or EcoHealth’s interpretations of … research results,” the report says.

Please note the firm at the center of the gain of function firestorm – EcoHealth – escaped pretty scot-free, where Wuhan was recommended to have their eligibility to receive funding stripped.

OIG recommends that WIV—but not EcoHealth—be debarred from receiving NIH funding in the future, a step NIH supports but noted must be made by an HHS debarment official. A recent congressional spending bill bars any 2023 funding to WIV.

The NIH funding for Wuhan we were all tersely and repeatedly assured wasn’t happening – fast forward to yesterday – finally, was officially lost.

What a steaming pile of Fauci.

Meanwhile, EcoHealth continues with the handouts and goes on their merry, deadly, bat Schlitz collecting way.

EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. nonprofit that used National Institute of Health funds to conduct dangerous coronavirus research in partnership with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the global Covid-19 pandemic, has been approved for yet another five-year federal grant, despite a history of violating the terms of its contracts.

On September 21, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by the soon-to-be-stepping down Anthony Fauci, approved a new five-year grant for EcoHealth. The nonprofit will receive $653,392 this year, and is in line to receive more than $3.25 million over the next five years. The grant is to analyze “the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam,” according to a description on the NIH RePORTER website.

This newest grant is one of four concurrent NIH grants that EcoHealth has. Three of the four grants were awarded after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Feel fuzzy yet?

I’m not a little pissed off.

AN ATTACK ON ME IS BASICALLY AN ATTACK ON SCIENCE™ ~ Steaming Pile

Bigly pissed off.

Screencap St. Louis Post Dispatch

Dr. Anthony Fauci urged a class of graduating medical students to adopt the hard-won lessons of the U.S. response to the COVID pandemic and warned against the “dangerous undercurrent” of anti-science sentiment that has grown stronger over the past three years.

DIS guy.

Screencap @MaxUtilitarian

I hope something comes of Rand Paul’s efforts, especially if we can somehow, some way take the Senate back.

I would dearly love to see a legal and fiscal shovel taken to that steaming pile of bat guano.

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