The Wuhan Institute of Virology was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars more in federal grant money than chief White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci indicated to lawmakers last week, newly released emails show.
The messages, obtained by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, show that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) allocated $826,277 to the lab over a six-year period ending in 2019 via the New York City-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance.
But Fauci, the longtime NIAID director, told a House Appropriations subcommittee on May 25 that the funding commitment “was about $600,000 over a period of five years, so it was a modest amount.”
US funding of the lab has come under scrutiny amid the ongoing controversy over whether the coronavirus leaked from the research hub into the 11 million-strong city of Wuhan, triggering the worst global pandemic in a century.
Source: Wuhan lab was to get $1.5M in federal grant money for bat study: emails
