Fresh Off Its Triumph of Creating Covid-19, the NIH Tries to Top Itself by Re-Starting Bat Virus Research

And Peter Daszak of EcoHealth, who ran a disinformation campaign against America claiming the lab leak theory was a racist conspiracy theory -- because he, of course, funded the lab where covid-19 was created and escaped from -- will be receiving taxpayer money again.

Three years after then-President Donald Trump pressured the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to suspend a research grant to a U.S. group studying bat coronaviruses with partners in China, the agency has restarted the award.

The new 4-year grant is a stripped-down version of the original grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization in New York City, providing $576,000 per year. That 2014 award included funding for controversial experiments that mixed parts of different bat viruses related to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the coronavirus that sparked a global outbreak in 2002--04, and included a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The new award omits those studies, and also imposes extensive new accounting rules on EcoHealth, which drew criticism from government auditors for its bookkeeping practices.

But EcoHealth's embattled director, Peter Daszak, says his group is pleased: "Now we have the ability to finally get back to work," he [threatens].

The idea of NIH and EcoHealth "getting back to work" feels to me like Dennis Miller's thoughts about East and West Germany re-uniting: I wasn't a fan of their previous work, and I'm not sure I'll like the new stuff much better.

After NIH halted the grant in April 2020, many scientists protested the move as political interference with scientific peer review. Now, they are welcoming the grant's resumption. "It is long overdue. Unfortunately, the original cancellation reflects the ongoing partisan politics where first Trump and now many Republicans are attacking science unfairly," says Nobel Prize winner Richard Roberts of New England Biolabs. In May 2020, he helped organize a letter from 77 Nobel laureates protesting the grant's suspension.

The absolute entitlement and arrogance. They believe they have a right to extract money from us.

I guess that's why they're Democrats.

posted by Ace at 01:19 PM

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