Trump’s Budget Calls for $17 Billion Cut to NIH, Citing Lax Oversight of Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan
The White House budget calls for slashing $17 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), citing the agency’s failure to properly monitor risky gain-of-function research it funded at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—where the COVID-19 pandemic plausibly originated.
“While evidence of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic leaking from a laboratory is now confirmed by several intelligence agencies, the NIH’s inability to prove that its grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology were not complicit in such a possible leak, or get data and hold recipients of Federal funding accountable is evidence that NIH has grown too big and unfocused,” reads the budget summary released on Friday.
Shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the CIA produced a new assessment saying that the agency now favors a lab leak explanation of the pandemic’s origins.
The FBI and the Energy Department have also said they favor the lab leak theory, as does Germany’s intelligence agency.
NIH has come under intense scrutiny for lax oversight of gain-of-function research it funded at the WIV via its grantee, the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.
In the years preceding the pandemic, NIH continued funding EcoHealth’s gain-of-funct
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