The Pentagon gave USD 39 million to Dr Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO that funded coronavirus research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The federal data revealed that the EcoHealth Alliance had also partly funded “gain of function” experiments.

Under these experiments, dangerous viruses are made more infectious artificially to study their effect on human cells.

Trump cancelled USD 3.7 million funding last year

Last year, the USD 3.7 million funding was cancelled by Donald Trump after reports surfaced claiming that COVID-19 was either created in Wuhan lab funded by the EHA or leaked from there.

According to a report by Daily Mail, federal grant data accessed by independent researchers shows that the charity received more than USD 123 million from the government from 2017 to 2020 with the Department of Defense (DoD) being one of its biggest funders.

A majority of DoD funding came from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a combat support agency with the goal to reduce the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.

It provided almost USD 39 million to the organization since 2013.

However, the report says that the exact amount of money that was given to WIV remains unknown.

Anthony Fauci under fire over leaked emails 

Earlier this week, a trove of emails to White House health adviser Anthony Fauci released to the media under a freedom of information request showed that Daszak had thanked him for publicly saying that scientific evidence does not support the Wuhan lab-leak theory.

Shi Zhengli, the head of China’s Wuhan virology lab, in a 2015 paper flagged the dangers of their gain-of-function experiment of a novel coronavirus that could infect human cells.

The paper also acknowledged funding from the US National Institutes of Health and from Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.