Sen. Roger Marshall demands Pentagon probe all tax-funded gain-of-function research in China
Sen. Roger Marshall pushed the Pentagon’s inspector general in a Friday letter to probe all US taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research in China — as well as “undisclosed, unpublished pathogen and biospecimen collections” potentially critical to uncovering the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Marshall (R-Kan.) wrote to Department of Defense Inspector General Robert Storch to request the expansion of a current investigation into more than $50 million in Pentagon grants that Chinese institutions received for pandemic pathogen research between 2014 and 2023.
In his letter, the Kansas Republican said his office’s investigation into COVID origins unearthed thousands of lab samples that the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases bought “secretly” from Chinese entities between October 2014 and March 2020.
The samples — including potentially fatal pathogens such as Ebola and the Marburg virus — initially came to the US through an agreement with the University of California, Davis, which along with the disgraced Manhattan nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance used millions of taxpayer dollars to aid China’s “risky pandemic pathogen collection and research.”
That research took place at the now-debarred Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan University and the Chinese Academies of Science Institute of Microbiology, among other places.
Any data about the biospecimens purchased from China could contain “forensic clues to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak,” Marshall noted.
“The federal government has not been forthcoming in revealing information related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the dangerous pathogen research it offshored to China,” he wrote.
“I hope your efforts to unmask all [Department of Defense] funding of gain of function research, can remedy those errors.”
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and now-former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) initially requested the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General to conduct a comprehensive audit of Chinese pandemic pathogen research grants in January, The Post exclusively reported.
That requirement had been approved as part of a provision tucked into the annual National Defense Authorization Act, and Storch informed the lawmakers last month that his office had formally launched an investigation.
After more than four years of denials by himself and other public health officials, National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted in sworn congressional testimony on Thursday that US taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak also revealed the week before in a separate hearing that he was unaware of how many and which viral sequences were housed at the Wuhan lab — despite approving more than half a million dollars of US funding for experiments on novel bat coronaviruses there.
EcoHealth had all of its federal grant funding pulled on Tuesday for turning in one of its reviews of the Wuhan experiments “more than two years late” and conducting research with the SARS and MERS viruses that “likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety,” according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.
It remains unclear whether SARS-CoV-2 leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the COVID-19 pandemic began in fall 2019, but many scientists, ex-public health officials and federal agencies have determined that to be the most likely explanation.
