President Joe Biden’s White House on Monday stopped the flow of money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), according to Bloomberg, which obtained a memo on the matter.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) notified the lab that if found in its review it ‘is not compliant with federal regulations and is not presently responsible’.
‘This action will ensure that (lab) does not receive another dollar of federal funding,’ an HHS spokesperson told the news outlet.
‘The move was undertaken due to WIV’s failure to provide documentation on WIV’s research requested by NIH related to concerns that WIV violated NIH’s biosafety protocols.’
Funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) was last provided to the lab in July 2020, according to the HHS spokesperson.
The lab was at the center of a the lab leak theory that suggests that Covid-19 came from a laboratory. The most widely accepted theory initially was that the virus that caused a global pandemic and killed nearly 7million people emerged from a Wuhan wet market.
Last month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified a report stating that they could not conclude if Wuhan lab researchers who got sick in fall 2019 were infected with the coronavirus. However, the report pointed to numerous safety and security problems at the lab.
The World Health Organization has called for more investigations on China and Covid-19, both into the Wuhan lab and a possible natural emergence.
Meanwhile, China has claimed it has been transparent surrounding Covid-19 and denied the lab leak theory.
On the campaign trail in May 2020, Biden called then-President Donald Trump ‘nakedly xenophobic’ for suggesting that Covid-19 may have leaked from the Wuhan lab. Biden criticized Trump for a slow response to the pandemic and accused him of only giving the public ‘denials, delays and distractions, many of which were nakedly xenophobic’.
‘The pandemic has unleashed familiar forces of hate, fear and xenophobia that he always flames… that have always existed in this society,’ said Biden at the time.
‘But this president brought it with him, has brought with it a new rash of racial messages, verbal and physical attacks and other acts of hate, some subtle, some overt, against the Asian American and Pacific Islanders.’
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