NIH Funding a Bat Lab in Colorado
What could go wrong? We’ve seen this movie before, and it yielded a pandemic.
Why is the National Institutes of Health spending $6.7 million to help construct a bat research lab in Colorado? Inquiring minds want to know.
The NIH has partnered with Colorado State University (CSU) and EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) — the same group NIH used to fund gain-of-function research in the biolab in Wuhan, China, that was the epicenter of the COVID pandemic — to build a new facility specifically purposed to study bat-borne diseases.
This “new center will be a one-of-a-kind facility dedicated to maintaining bat colonies for research,” says Greg Ebel, CSU professor in the school microbiology, immunology, and pathology department and director of the school’s Center for Vector-borne Infectious Diseases. He hopes to “dramatically increase our ability to study the role of bats in disease transmission and help us become even stronger in researching emerging zoonotic pathogens.”
The current plan is for a 14,000 square foot facility that will house bats from around the globe, as well as a Level 2 biosafety lab, which is classified as moderate hazard. A 2022 document from research associated with the project indicates a plan to “infect horseshoe bats with SARS-CoV2 and a SARSr-CoV detected in these bats.”
The Daily Mail reports that some of the proposals for the facility include storing and studying “some of the most transmissible pathogens on the planet — including Ebola, Nipah virus and Covid-19.”
The fact that this bat lab was first approved back in 2019 may figure into why Dr. Anthony Fauci was so adamant about promoting a natural origin explanation for COVID while dismissing and suppressing the lab leak as a legitimate origin possibility. The preponderance of evidence, of course, points to a leak from the Wuhan lab as the most plausible explanation, which is why it’s now the most widely accepted view for the origin of COVID.
Upon learning of this planned bat lab, Republican Senator Joni Ernst weighed in: “Americans have suffered enough from Fauci-funded risky research, which is why I am working to defund EcoHealth that funneled taxpayer dollars to the Chinese state-run Wuhan Lab. The world cannot afford another lab leak, especially one on U.S. soil or near our military bases.”
Ernst isn’t the only one objecting to the lab. Residents in Fort Collins, Colorado — a city of 168,000 just 60 miles north of Denver and the location of both the CSU campus and the planned lab site — are none too thrilled with the prospect and have been voicing their concerns.
White Coat Waste Project (WCW), an organization dedicated to stopping taxpayer-funded research using animals, was responsible for digging up much of this information via a Colorado Open Records request. And according to WCW senior vice president Justin Goodman, “The records outline years of coordination between EHA, CSU, Fauci’s NIAID, DOD, foreign collaborators, and even the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to set up the facility.”
“Together these actors put in a considerable effort to establish the CSU bat facility over many years and exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to receive funding for it,” Goodman adds.
EHA’s involvement is especially concerning. There has yet to be a full reconning with NIH’s partnering with EHA — apparently directed by Fauci — to get around gain-of-function bans in the U.S. and fund such research in Wuhan, China.
No one has answered for this apparent violation. That violation may have allowed for the development and subsequent leak of a novel virus that resulted in a global pandemic that killed millions of people. And now we find out that the same group is funding the construction of a new bat lab in the U.S.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t be funding EcoHealth Alliance or the construction of new US labs that import Asian bats for risky virus research that can cause a pandemic on US soil,” asserted Montana Republican Senator Matt Rosendale. “My common sense amendments to the NIH’s 2024 spending bill would undo some of the damage done by Anthony Fauci by defunding NIH research programs he supported that put public health and national security at risk.”
In order for Americans’ trust to be restored in federal government agencies and institutions, transparency and accountability must happen. So long as those are lacking, the distrust in these institutions will only grow. And so will the danger.
