According to an exclusive obtained by The Post, the Pentagon continues to funnel money to suspended grantee EcoHealth Alliance. It is also unable to access all data regarding gain-of function research that it may fund overseas. This includes in China.

In a letter sent to Sen. Joni Ernest (R-Iowa), the Under Secretary for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante revealed shocking oversight lapses by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. This agency is responsible for countering the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

Laplante wrote to Ernst on August 1, “Data generated by these projects is the property of the country partner and used for periodic reporting.”

He added that “[the Department of Defense] doesn’t have direct access to these data but encourages all Cooperative Threat Reduction Grantees” to publish their results, so the data can be made available to the international community.

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In a letter dated May 29, Ernst demanded confirmation from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that all taxpayer funding had been cut to EcoHealth Alliance after the Manhattan-based non-profit was banned earlier in the month from receiving any federal grants. He also inquired as to access to data.

Exclusively to The Post, she said: “It’s deeply concerning that the Biden-Harris Administration will not stop funding EcoHealth and claim not to have even access to key information regarding the dangerous experiments they are paying for.”

The Department of Health and Human Services suspended EcoHealth and proposed that they be debarred for a minimum of three years based upon “adequate proof” that EcoHealth “likely violated protocol of the NIH concerning biosafety”, while funding bat coronavirus tests at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

EcoHealth received $4 million for this project from the National Institutes of Health. More than half a million of that amount went to the WIV. However, the group failed to prove that their experiments in China were gain-of function research, as requested by HHS.

NIH officials stated that viral sequences discovered in the project “Understanding Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” were “genetically extremely distant” from SARS-CoV-2, and could not lead to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

EcoHealth Alliance also denied that its experiments in Wuhan constituted “gain-of-function” research – despite testimony by NIH officials, scientists and others to the contrary – or that the viruses that resulted could have caused the pandemic which killed over 1.1 million Americans.

Some members of Congress, former officials, and scientists have flagged a second EcoHealth proposal that was submitted to a Pentagon agency, but never funded as “smoking-gun” evidence the virus may have been engineered at Wuhan.

HHS banned the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was founded in September last year, from receiving US funding for 10 years.

Ernst revealed in February that a researcher associated with the lab is still working on a grant from the US Department of Agriculture to study bird influenza transmissibility, and its “potential jump into mammalian host.”

In his letter to Iowa Senator LaPlante, LaPlante acknowledged in the same letter that two other subgrants from Defense Threat Reduction Agency to EcoHealth Alliance are also ongoing but will not be renewed.

Georgetown University will receive a $2.8 million grant for research in Guinea on “reducing the risks of pathogens that cause fever”. EcoHealth has received at least $150,00 as a subgrant. The project began in September of 2021.

The University of Pretoria will receive more than $4.2million between July 2020 and 2025. Subgrants are being made to EcoHealth to conduct biosurveillance of “viral zoonoses at bat-livestock/human interfaces” in Southern Africa.

Our defense dollars continue paying for EcoHealth Alliance’s crazy studies, despite having promised to suspend funding. The organization collaborated with China’s Wuhan Institute to conduct the potentially dangerous research that could have led to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

“I will do all I can to stop the EcoHealth mad scientists from stealing bats and taxpayer money ever again.”

According to an audit by the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General released in June, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency provided $46.7M to EcoHealth Alliance to fund 13 projects.

The 20-page audit report stated that “none” (zero) of the funds “were allocated to China or its affiliates for research involving the enhancement of pathogens”, also known as gain of function research. Instead, the money was used for “pathogen related biosurveillance and training studies.”

It also said that there were “significant limitations in the adequacy” of the data — and that “the Pentagon did not track funding with the level of details necessary to determine if the DoD funded Chinese research laboratories or foreign countries” for these dangerous experiments.

The Defense Department also informed auditors that this research did not “strengthen” any viruses. This included experiments with SARS-CoV-2 viruses, Dengue viruses, Ebola viruses, and Chikungunya virus.

The Pentagon has banned gain-of-function virus research, which they classify as “offensive bio work.” However, the audit concluded that it had not revealed the “full extent of” what experiments were funded.

National Review reported that the US Agency for International Development, which had provided EcoHealth with subgrants totaling more than $815,000. The National Science Foundation, who also funded the nonprofit’s research at WIV, confirmed this earlier in the month.

Justin Goodman is the senior vice president at the White Coat Waste Project. His group, which was the first to uncover the funding trail for the Wuhan experiments in early 2020, has said that they are “proud” of the progress made by their group with Senator Ernst, since the beginning of 2020, on exposing and defunding all of EcoHealth’s dangerous virus-hunting and animal experimentation.

Goodman said, “It is alarming that the Pentagon didn’t learn from what happened in Wuhan. They are still shipping tax dollars abroad for WMD programs without transparency or accountability.”

The Post has contacted the Pentagon and EcoHealth Alliance to get their comments.