UPDATE (9/28/23): The House of Representatives passed the FY24 State Department funding bill containing WCW-backed language that defunds the Wuhan lab and other adversaries’ labs, EcoHealth Alliance, and gain-of-function experiments.
On the heels of White Coat Waste Project’s (WCW) blockbuster investigation proving that COVID’s likely Patient Zero, Ben Hu, was a Wuhan animal experimenter being directly funded with U.S. tax dollars via the disgraced EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), Congress is taking new action to crack down on this reckless spending.
Our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit revealed how Hu was personally funded with portions of $41 million in taxpayer-funded grants doled out by Dr. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the State Department’s US Agency for International Development (USAID) specifically to perform dangerous virus-hunting and gain-of-function experiments on humanized mice with bat coronaviruses that experts believe caused COVID.
What’s worse, we’ve documented how USAID has forked over another $11 million to EcoHealth just since the pandemic began.
Now, just days after our viral exposé hit, the House panel that funds the State Department and USAID has advanced its 2024 spending bill with WCW-backed provisions prohibiting funding for the Wuhan lab, EcoHealth Alliance, gain-of-function experiments, and all labs in China, Russia, and other adversarial nations. We’re grateful to committee members Reps. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), Chris Stewart (R-UT), Dave Joyce (R-OH) and Chairman Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) for leading the charge.
Additionally, yesterday the Senate Armed Services Committee adopted three key amendments to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (the annual defense spending bill) offered by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) to:
✂️🦠🧪🐁 Prohibit defense dollars from being shipped to the Wuhan animal lab
🛑🦇💸 Cut off Pentagon funding to EcoHealth, which funneled U.S. tax dollars to the Wuhan lab for gain-of-function experiments that likely caused COVID
🕵️💰 Investigate whether EcoHealth shipped U.S. defense funding to the Wuhan lab, any other Chinese labs, or wasted it on experiments to supercharge dangerous viruses
A WCW investigation found that EcoHealth has raked in over $50 million in taxpayer funds from agencies including USAID and the Pentagon just since the pandemic began for more virus-hunting and dangerous animal testing in foreign labs.
With so many different funding streams and transparency loopholes, following the money to Wuhan and cutting it off has been a challenge, but we’ve been attacking it head-on—and winning–since early 2020.
Last year, following years of WCW’s advocacy and lobbying, Congress blocked 2023 State Dept and Defense funding for the Wuhan lab, and the facility was recently disqualified from NIH funding, too. Lawmakers also enacted a WCW-backed measure last year to defund EcoHealth projects in China.
Enough is enough. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to fund the reckless white coats who likely caused COVID.
The solution is simple: