EcoHealth Got $400k Grant o Research “Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction”

EcoHealth Alliance has been revealed to have received a grant from the US Department of Defense relating to “combating weapons of mass destruction.” 

The American non-profit, which has come under fire in recent years over its work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on coronaviruses, received $115,000 on September 30 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).

The DTRA is under the control of the Department of Defense, with the recent grant coming as part of a larger, nearly $400,000 project first launched in July of 2021 regarding research on “combating weapons of mass destruction.” The project is set to conclude in September 2024.

The grant’s page states that the objective of the research is to “support and stimulate basic, applied and advanced research at educational or research institutions, non-profit organizations, and commercial firms, which support the advancement of fundamental knowledge and understanding of the sciences with an emphasis on exploring new and innovative research for combating or countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).” 

The program seeks to have EcoHealth Alliance “predict biothreat impacts from early-stage data via transfer learning.”

EcoHealth alliance came under fire following the outbreak of the pandemic for reportedly conducting “gain of function” research on coronaviruses.

The NIH had given a grant to EcoHealth for a limited experiment conducted using bat coronavirus genome sequences that already existed in nature. Results from these experiments were unexpected, and the NIH said that EcoHealth Alliance had “failed to report” these findings to the NIH.

Senator Rand Paul has grilled NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci on numerous occasions regarding the NIH’s funding of this research, with some of the grant money going to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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