Opinion: Batting 1,000

By Joni Ernst

We are batting a thousand, folks!

First, we defunded China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Then we clipped the wings of EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), the shady group that was paying for risky research on bat viruses there with U.S. tax dollars.

Now, the mad scientist at the center of COVID’s creation and cover-up is being banned from receiving any more financial support for his batty research. This is the guy who orchestrated the campaign to label anyone who even suggested there could be link between his work in Wuhan and the COVID-19 pandemic a conspiracy theorist.

But, you’d have to be blind as a bat not to see a connection.

EcoHealth and China stonewalled requests for information from the Wuhan Institute while National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials stuck to their script that the virus didn’t leak from a lab, while being privately alerted early on that the “unusual features of the virus … look engineered.”

Right off the bat, starting in April 2020, I called for the Wuhan lab to be defunded. I also demanded an investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) that found EcoHealth violated numerous reporting requirements, including not immediately alerting NIH when they enhanced viruses in the Wuhan lab.

Rather than holding EcoHealth accountable, government agencies kept cutting checks to continue the group’s risky research all around the world, including support to set up a new bat lab like the one in Wuhan right here in the U.S.! In total, EcoHealth amassed $60 million of taxpayer money from NIH and other federal agencies since March 2020.

When the Trump Administration canceled funding to EcoHealth in 2020, NIH assisted the group get a new grant. Senior NIH officials tried to fly under the radar by using an illegal “‘secret’ back channel” for communicating with and about EcoHealth. In a message to EcoHealth’s president, a senior NIH advisor seemingly joked the group was getting “too much [expletive] money,” asking “do I get a kickback????”

Meanwhile, the media fawningly fell for Fauci’s dismissal of a lab leak and even helped police those suggesting otherwise. Undeterred, we stayed focused on uncovering the truth. There really was no way of hiding the facts—EcoHealth funneled more than $1 million of taxpayer money into China’s Wuhan Institute to engineer bat viruses and the agencies funding the project knew it.

Now, after years of denials by Dr. Fauci, NIH is finally confessing to funding gain of function research in Wuhan.

And the federal government is finally getting out of the EcoHealth business. The federal health department warns “the immediate suspension of EHA is necessary to protect the public interest and due to a cause of so serious or compelling a nature that it affects EHA’s present responsibility,” specifically the group’s mishandling of its risky research in Wuhan.

The head of EcoHealth defends his group’s actions by issuing a “reminder — it was NIH that funded China, not EcoHealth.”

Finally, HHS and EcoHealth are both telling the truth!

NIH failed to follow the science and the law and that is why I am giving my May 2024 Squeal Award to NIH.

And because the government’s scientific agencies have demonstrated they aren’t capable of policing themselves, I am demanding proof all funding to EcoHealth has been canceled and the documentation about the dangerous pathogens EHA collected or created has all been collected.

What happened in Wuhan should never be allowed to happen anywhere else, which is why EcoHealth Alliance should never be allowed to put their hands on bats or taxpayer dollars ever again.

Joni Ernst, a native of Red Oak and a combat veteran, represents Iowa in the United States Senate.