Florida Senator Rick Scott on Friday demanded solutions from the Biden administration on a watchdog report that mentioned grant funding from the Nationwide Institutes of Well being (NIH) was directed to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, and pressed the administration to clarify whether it is barring future funding to the lab that some suppose is the supply of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a letter despatched to Well being and Human Providers Secretary Xavier Becerra, Scott famous that an HHS report from the Workplace of the Inspector Common (OIG) discovered that NIH did not correctly monitor their grant awards, together with one to the Wuhan lab. The OIG report discovered that HHS grants to the non-profit group EcoHealth Alliance weren’t correctly monitored as they made their technique to the lab.
“NIH allowed EcoHealth Alliance to sub-award the grant to the Communist Chinese language authorities and did not conduct correct oversight,” Scott wrote. “American tax {dollars} ought to at all times be shielded from waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s critical that NIH present oversight of how these funds are spent on grants.”
The report additionally really helpful that NIH think about barring the Wuhan lab from future grants, and Scott requested NIH the way it was going to deal with that suggestion.
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“OIG recommends that the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] needs to be debarred from future federal contracts,” he wrote. “What’s NIH doing about this matter?”
Scott mentioned that due to the general failure to correctly oversee the grant funding to the Wuhan lab, EcoHealth Allliance did not report in on how the cash was being spent. He argued that a number of the info that was lacking associated to the Wuhan grant might have make clear the supply of COVID-19, a query that’s nonetheless being debated throughout the U.S. authorities. Some federal companies consider the almost certainly supply of COVID was the Wuhan lab.
“A number of the lacking info included information from the [Wuhan lab],” Scott wrote. “This info, which might present additional readability on the origin of COVID-19, has been misplaced.” He added that neither the lab nor China’s authorities have proven any curiosity in “being clear and offering info to NIH.”
Scott additionally famous that federal requirements require oversight earlier than grants are despatched to establishments which may carry out gain-of-function analysis. However he mentioned the federal system of oversight did not evaluation the grant to the Wuhan lab.
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“The primary precedence of the NIH needs to be to guard taxpayer {dollars} and make sure that all funds are correctly accounted for with acceptable oversight of each the funding and the analysis,” Scott’s letter learn. “This failure by NIH is unacceptable.”
Scott listed greater than a dozen different questions for Becerra to reply, together with how NIH displays and determines the place its grant cash goes and whether or not EcoHealth goes to obtain any extra federal funding.
He referred to as for grants which are going to overseas governments specifically to obtain “a better degree of scrutiny.”
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“Permitting awardees to do sub-awards to overseas authorities ought to require NIH to supply a better degree of scrutiny. Regardless of realizing that the Communist Chinese language authorities was receiving NIH funds on the [Wuhan lab], NIH saved a hands-off strategy—utterly ignoring the oversight course of,” Scott wrote.
This text was initially printed by foxnews.com. Learn the original article here.
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