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The acting White House Budget Office chief declined to tell lawmakers on Wednesday whether President Biden’s proposed budget would include funding for research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Under questioning from Jason Smith (Republic-Mo.), a member of the House Budget Committee, Shalanda Young, Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has repeatedly deferred to the ongoing 90-day review of the origins of the coronavirus pandemic being carried out by the agencies intelligence.
“Over the past few weeks, it has become increasingly clear that COVID-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan, China,” Smith said at some point before asking Young, “what are you doing to get to the bottom of the obvious link between federal funding and a lab? Wuhan?”
After Young postponed the review again, Smith said, “So let me ask you this, can you commit not to use US dollars to fund such research in the future from this budget?”
The acting director of the Office of Management and Budget declined to say that President Biden’s budget would not fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Your tax dollars should not be used to fund the Chinese laboratory from which COVID-19 likely originated. pic.twitter.com/N8yJkGyuTO
House Republicans (HouseGOP) June 9, 2021
“Member of Congress, I started my career at the National Institutes of Health [the National Institutes of Health]Young replied. “I would never make that commitment, you know, as someone who thinks we need to be led by science, and we definitely need to wait [for] This review is before we move on to conclusions.”
There is a growing belief that the virus may have accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the 11 million people of Wuhan, causing the worst pandemic in a century. Congressional Republicans have focused their scrutiny on lab research into bat coronaviruses, some of which was funded by a National Institutes of Health grant transferred through the New York City-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.
Security personnel outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology monitor. President Biden has ordered the intelligence community to review all evidence relating to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The White House’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told the House Appropriations Subcommittee last month that the NIH funding commitment for the Wuhan lab was “about $600,000 over five years.”
However, internal National Institutes of Health emails obtained last week by a conservative judicial watchdog group indicate that the lab has already received approximately $750,000 in grant money over an initial five-year period, with $750,000 set aside. another dollar for the subsequent six years.
In total, EcoHealth was to receive about $7.4 million over more than a decade from the National Institutes of Health for a study called “Understanding the Risks of Emerging Bat Corona Viruses.” Emails from the National Institutes of Health indicate that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of several sites across Asia where research was conducted.
In April of last year, the National Institutes of Health pulled the plug on the remaining grant money earmarked for EcoHealth. It was not immediately clear if any of that funding would be recovered.
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