WASHINGTON – Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) today urged Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to give Congress a comprehensive list of NIH grants awarded to Dr. Peter Daszak. Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, which funneled U.S. tax dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

“Dr. Peter Daszak was the only American citizen involved in the WHO investigation. Reports show that, at the instruction of Dr. Daszak himself, the WHO investigation did not look into information about at least 16,000 previously studied virus samples from a deleted WIV database,” wrote Kennedy.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an NIH subsidiary, gave a $3.4 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a non-governmental organization. EcoHealth Alliance then sent $600,000 from this grant to the WIV. Previously, Daszak had strongly condemned the idea that the pandemic originated in a lab as a “conspiracy theory.” 

“In light of this troubling constellation of facts, I am requesting the NIH issue a report to Congress with a detailed listing of all of the grants that the NIH or any subsidiary agency, including the NIAID, has given to Dr. Daszak at any point, including details regarding how each grant intended to use that funding. . . . Americans deserve substantive, transparent answers to where the virus originated, what sparked the pandemic, and who may be responsible,” Kennedy concluded.

The letter is available here.