GOP senator investigates EcoHealth over possible taxpayer ‘double-billing’ for work in China
Jerry Dunleavy
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A Republican senator is investigating whether EcoHealth Alliance double-billed two federal agencies while doing work in China.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) argued this week that an inquiry led by his office into the origins of COVID-19 unearthed evidence that EcoHealth had double-billed the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Agency for International Development for the exact same work in China.
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“Our ongoing investigation follows the money, including U.S. research grants passed through EcoHealth Alliance,” Marshall said this week. “The evidence indicates that Peter Daszak may have simultaneously charged NIH and USAID for the same work, which would be fraud.”
“The money trail reveals that EcoHealth Alliance paid for unsupervised gain-of-function research involving dangerous bat coronaviruses at the WIV which could have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Diane Cutler, a former criminal investigator in the Department of Health and Human Services watchdog office and currently the chief investigator for health policy for Marshall, told CBS News this week that “what I have found so far is evidence that points to double billing — potential theft of government funds.”
EcoHealth released a lengthy statement this week in response to the news segment, denying that it had double-billed U.S. taxpayers.
“This is simply not true. USAID and NIH supported two different projects that are complementary, but distinct, and do not involve duplication of effort,” EcoHealth said, adding, “We were told by agency staff that these reviews had occurred for these two lines of funding and that they concluded there was no duplication of effort.”
EcoHealth claimed that its NIH funding “was specifically focused on the discovery and lab characterization of SARS-related coronaviruses in China,” while its USAID funding “was for One Health development and capacity building work to help strengthen China’s capacity to prevent outbreaks and pandemics (and therefore protect the USA from outbreaks that spread).” The group also said an upcoming Government Accountability Office report “will show” that “the total amount of grant funding from NIH and USAID to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for the projects in question from 2014 to 2021 amounted to less than $1.3 million.” The GAO did not provide a comment.
USAID’s inspector general launched an investigation related to EcoHealth and the double-billing allegations, according to CBS News.
A spokesperson for the USAID watchdog told the Washington Examiner that “we don’t comment on the existence of a specific ongoing investigation.” The HHS inspector general’s office said, “We can neither confirm nor deny ongoing investigations.”
“Americans deserve the truth, especially if our government had a hand in funding the creation of the coronavirus,” Marshall told the Washington Examiner. “I am demanding transparency and accountability for the misuse of taxpayer funds. This probe is a step in the right direction. We must follow the money.”
HHS and NIH did not respond to requests for comment.
Marshall added this week that, in light of the alleged USAID inspector general investigation, “we will ask the FBI to add their extensive investigative resources to the USAID OIG investigative cadre and prioritize this investigation.” The senator said USAID should suspend all of its funding for EcoHealth and that USAID “must be examined to determine if their infrastructure can adequately assess and oversee dangerous pathogen collection activities in foreign countries, particularly in China.”
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EcoHealth’s Daszak was a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab and its “bat lady” leader Shi Zhengli. Daszak steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in NIH bat coronavirus funding to the Chinese institute.
Daszak dismissed the lab leak hypothesis in March 2021 when he admitted he took Wuhan lab workers at their word. Despite EcoHealth breaking NIH rules and the Wuhan lab refusing to hand over relevant information on its coronavirus research, NIH has continued to fund EcoHealth’s viral work to the tune of millions of dollars.