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US President Donald Trump’s top health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said the White House has abruptly cut off funding to the National Institutes of Health’s coronavirus research. Fauci made the announcement when speaking to Congress on Tuesday about the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Representative Marc Veasey first asked Fauci why the funding was cut in April during a House Energy & Commerce Hearing. Fauci said, “Why was it canceled? It was canceled because the NIH was told to cancel it. I don’t know the reason, but we were told to cancel it”. It is noteworthy that the Trump administration abruptly slashed funding in April 2020 for a research grant to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, with more than $350,000 still in the group’s 2020 grant.

Dr. Fauci informed a news outlet that it was the White House that told the NIH to cancel this grant. The White House said it encouraged the defunding of the program, but ultimately it was up to the HHS (Department of Health and Human Services) to make the final decision. A spokesperson for the department said, “The grantee was not in compliance with NIH’s grant policy”. The cancellation of the grant came after reports surfaced about EcoHealth Alliances’ research with a virologist at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, who works with bat coronaviruses. This lab became the center of a conspiracy theory with the US federal government speculating that Covid-19 didn’t originate at a Wuhan wet market but instead in WIV.

President Trump responded and said, ”We will end that grant very quickly”. The grant was then terminated on 24 April, with the NIH writing to EcoHealth Alliance. A former director of NIH’s Fogarty International Centre, Gerald Keusch said, “At this time, NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities”. The EcoHealth President Peter Daszak tweeted that it was an obvious case of political interference on Tuesday following Dr. Fauci’s testimony in front of Congress. He wrote, “Eventually, we’ll all know the shoddy truth of how a conspiracy theory pushed by this administration led @NIHDirector to block the only US research group still working in China to analyze COVID origins. Thanks to this China can now do the research, we can’t”!