Seventy-five percent of Americans want EcoHealth Alliance, the non-profit group that funneled taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), subpoenaed by Congress, according to a new poll from Lincoln Park Strategies.
EcoHealth Alliance is responsible for transferring National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant money to the WIV, where Chinese scientists were conducting gain-of-function research on bat-based coronaviruses prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the poll of 1,000 Americans, 75% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats want EcoHealth to be subpoenaed to testify about that research before Congress.
“Wuhan scientists were planning to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into Chinese bat populations to inoculate them against diseases that could jump to humans, leaked grant proposals dating from 2018 show.”https://t.co/nXuNKU9aHt
— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) September 21, 2021
The poll found that 60% of independents also support a congressional subpoena for EcoHealth. The poll was conducted by interviewing 1,000 American adults between September 10-15, using an online survey. The margin of error is 3.1%. The poll was commissioned by government watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, which provided the crosstabs and methodology to the Daily Caller.
EcoHealth has received funding from the State Department, Defense Department and NIH over a period of several years, but Republicans in Congress have gradually been reining in the access the WIV and other gain-of-function labs will have to taxpayer dollars in the future. The potential use of American funds on gain-of-function research while a moratorium was in place on that kind of research, without going through proper review channels, has been the subject of scrutiny from Congress, members of the scientific research community and the NIH Inspector General’s office.
Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth, was on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) team investigating the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. Daszak’s presence on the team led some experts to disregard the investigation as lacking credibility, due to the blatant conflict of interest present with Daszak investigating his own financial partners. (RELATED: Fauci-Funded Wuhan Lab Viruses Exhibited Over 10,000 Times Higher Viral Load Than Natural Strain, Documents Show)
EcoHealth and the WIV have been at the center of the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 origin, which posits that the virus could have accidentally escaped from the WIV after being genetically altered for research purposes by Chinese scientists there.