Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy is demanding answers from the acting director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) about payments to employees from foreign entities, including some connected to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Roy led a letter with 14 of his House GOP colleagues to acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak on Wednesday about government watchdog Open The Books' report that said agency employees took $325 million in payments from 31 private companies worldwide.
Citing Open The Books, the lawmakers wrote that some of the payments between 2008 and 2021 came from companies "affiliated" with the CCP.
"These payments raise not only national security concerns but deepen concerns regarding the potential undue influence massive healthcare companies may have over public health agencies engaged in developing and regulating products and responding to public health threats – like COVID-19," the Republicans wrote.
"Of particular concern, companies that were intimately involved with – and stood to financially gain from – the federal government’s COVID-19 response, such as Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech US, and Johnson & Johnson, provided a number of payments to NIH scientists," the letter continues.
"Naturally, providing payments to NIH scientists, even if the product was unrelated to COVID-19, raises concerns about the role these companies play in NIH decision making."
The lawmakers also highlighted that "the Open The Books report found that at least 59 payments originated from the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, a CCP controlled subsidiary associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology," the lab from which "multiple federal agencies" believe COVID-19 leaked.The Republicans wrote that "at the beginning of the pandemic, then-NIH Director Francis Collins and then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci dismissed the so-called ‘lab leak theory.' Director Collins went as far as calling it ‘outrageous.’"
"While the report does not indicate that Dr. Collins or Dr. Fauci received payments from the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, the NIH’s close financial ties to the entity, and its early dismissal of the lab leak theory, cannot be ignored and warrant further examination," the letter states.The investigation did not assess the scientific results of EcoHealth Alliance's experiments or evaluate if those results posed a risk or qualified as gain-of-function research, an area of study in which viruses are manipulated to become more contagious, or even deadly, so that scientists can prepare vaccines and prevent the next pandemic. Critics say such research risks accidentally causing a pandemic, and the NIH has guidelines meant to apply strict oversight to any federally funded gain-of-function projects.
However, the inspector general's report found that the NIH did not adequately follow its policies and procedures with respect to three grants to EcoHealth Alliance between 2014 and 2021, totaling about $8 million.
