Saturday, May 17, 2025

Lab leak: accidental and deliberate

 

By the way: The Dept of Defense funded a grant to Ecohealth to put up labs to investigate germs in wild animals. A sharp eyed leftist in the government saw this was funded by the DoD not the HHS, and got it stopped, but the money was still waiting there on the website as of last week. But the good news is that today it was no longer there, and it said the grand was finished: I presume it reached it's terminal time but maybe it was because it was used?

Even Grok doesn't know:

The EcoHealth Alliance grant from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for work in the Philippines, specifically aimed at "reducing the threat of viral spillover from wildlife," was awarded in December 2022 with a value of $3 million. According to information from USAspending.gov, this grant was set to run through 2025. However, there is no definitive evidence in the provided references confirming whether this specific grant remains active or has been terminated as of May 18, 2025.

last week the site was still up and the funds unused. Today the site says 

Project Grant

FAIN

HDTRA12310006

Completed

 Lots of stuff at that site but it's written in legalese and I am too senile to understand... but it looks like the programs are still going on.

Well, anyway, back to the Grok Answer: And they do note that Ecohealth was canceled by HHS/NIH in 2024, but note about the Dept of Defense also funds them.

Separately, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) suspended all federal funding to EcoHealth Alliance in May 2024, citing the organization’s failure to adequately monitor and report on risky virus experiments, particularly related to its work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 

This suspension includes three active National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants and proposes debarment, which would prevent EcoHealth from receiving future federal funding.

 

While the HHS suspension primarily references NIH grants, it raises questions about the status of other federal funding, including DoD grants, given the broad scope of the suspension.

well, as I noted above the DoD funding to Ecohealth was still alive and well until last week but is now no longer on line. 

Grok continues:


Additionally, a post on X from January 2024 claimed the DoD grant to EcoHealth was active until 2025, but this is not conclusive evidence, as X posts can be unreliable. There is no direct confirmation in the provided sources that the DoD grant for the Philippine biolab was terminated, but the HHS action could potentially affect all federal grants, including those from the DoD.

 

Conclusion: As of the latest available information, the DoD grant to EcoHealth Alliance for work in the Philippines was active as of early 2024, with an intended duration until 2025. However, the HHS suspension of all EcoHealth federal funding in May 2024 may have impacted this grant’s status. Without specific confirmation of termination or continuation, the status remains unclear. For precise details, checking official records on USAspending.gov or contacting the DoD directly would be necessary.


here is an article from 2022 telling the Phil Government to beware:


More importantly, the EcoHealth Alliance has also been receiving funding from the US Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which raises further questions on the full nature of its operations.
To recall, the US DTRA has funded an Animal Biosecurity Laboratory in Tarlac, including six other Regional Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratories (RADDLs) in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao amounting around $23 million. Concerns have previously been raised on the real objectives of the biosecurity project itself, as the US DTRA is an agency under the DoD, which may have unstated military objectives in pursuing the biosecurity project to completion. With the EcoHealth Alliance’s links with parties which may have objectives other than purely scientific research, the PH government should breadth of EcoHealth Alliance activities in the Philippines. In its website, the NGO lists three projects currently being undertaken in the Philippines. This includes PREDICT, bat conservation and EIDR (Emerging Infectious Disease Repository). The PREDICT project seeks to “identify new emerging infectious diseases that could become a threat to human health” while EIDR seeks to “unravel the origins of Emerging Infectious Disease (EID) events.”

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