The US government could have paid twice for grants it doled out to fund research at labs in Wuhan, China, in response to a newly launched federal probe that found tens of tens of millions of dollars in potentially fraudulent payments.
The “dangerous” projects bankrolled by the National Institutes of Health and the US Agency for International Development would have helped pay for medical supplies, equipment, travel expenses and salaries on the Wuhan labs, in response to CBS News, which broke the story Monday.
Amongst them was the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where taxpayers funded controversial gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses that federal officials now admit could have led to the COVID-19 pandemic.
An investigator hired by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) first discovered the allegedly fraudulent funding from NIH and USAID, CBS News reported, and her findings prompted an internal probe by an inspector general.
“What I’ve found thus far is evidence that points to double billing, potential theft of presidency funds,” Diane Cutler, who said she reviewed 50,000 documents on the matter, told “CBS News Mornings.”
“It’s concerning, especially because it involves dangerous pathogens and dangerous research.”
The outlet cited anonymous sources who didn’t dispute the report and said “tens of tens of millions of dollars could possibly be involved.”
Neither USAID nor an acting general counsel for its inspector general’s office responded to a request for comment. Marshall’s office also didn’t reply to a request for comment.
“I believe there’s 1.1 million reasons that American taxpayers should care” concerning the funding, the 62-year-old Marshall, who wants a 9/11-style commission on the findings, also told CBS.
“You’ll have a plane crashes. We wish to search out out why the plane crashes. We go to any lengths to try this. And the hope is we don’t have one other plane crash for a similar reason.”
The probe comes as two federal agencies — the FBI and Energy Department — have found the coronavirus pandemic almost definitely originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, where SARS-CoV-2 emerged.
The House on Friday unanimously passed a bill, already approved with unanimous consent within the Senate, to force the White House to declassify intelligence reports on the origins of COVID-19. President Biden has yet to sign it.
“I haven’t made that call yet,” Biden, who cannot bock the measure with a veto given the unanimous bipartisan support for it, told reporters before leaving for his Delaware home last weekend.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the previous director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has firmly resisted theories that NIH funding may need contributed to COVID-19. He insisted on Sunday that the virus was brought on by a “natural occurrence” — even when it got here from a lab.
“A lab leak could possibly be that somebody was out within the wild, perhaps on the lookout for several types of viruses in bats, got infected, went right into a lab and was being studied within the lab after which got here out of the lab,” Fauci, 82, told CNN anchor Jim Acosta.
“But when that’s the definition of a lab leak Jim, then that’s still a natural occurrence,” he insisted.
Fauci and then-NIH director Francis Collins, 72, also “prompted” a scientific study within the early months of the pandemic to debunk the lab leak theory, in response to newly released emails.
Robert Redfield, 71, who directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the course of the Trump administration, told Congress last week that Fauci “sidelined” him for suggesting COVID-19 got here from a lab.
“This was an a priori decision that there’s one viewpoint that we’re going to place on the market, and anyone who doesn’t agree with it will be sidelined,” Redfield, 71, told members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. “And as I say, I used to be only the CDC director, and I used to be sidelined.”
But Biden’s former chief medical adviser dismissed Redfield’s claims as well the next day.
“He is completely and unequivocally incorrect in what he’s saying, that I excluded him,” Fauci told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto. “It’s really unlucky that in a public setting, just like the hearing, that Dr. Redfield made that absolutely incorrect statement.”
