Sen. Joni Ernst is demanding information about President Biden’s Department of Agriculture spending $1 million in US taxpayer funds on “dangerous bird flu experiments” in cooperation with the Chinese government — and a researcher connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a letter exclusively obtained by The Post.
Ernst (R-Iowa) wrote to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack on Wednesday for details about the project, which involves “a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus” and is being conducted “in collaboration” with the UK, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wenjun Liu, a researcher “affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Center for Biosafety Mega-Science Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens.”
The Biden administration awarded the $1 million grant from April 2021 to March 2026 for “wet-lab virology” experiments involving “strains of avian influenza virus” that “pose the greatest risk to avian or human populations.”
The Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing will help with tests to infect vaccinated chickens, mallard ducks, species of Chinese geese and Japanese quail to evaluate the virus’s transmissibility and “potential to jump into mammalian hosts.”
Ernst told Vilsack to hand over any departmental information about whether there are any safeguards in place, if the experiments constitute risky gain-of-function research, and what portion is being done in China.
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Gain-of-function research involves experimentation that aims to increase the transmissibility or virulence of pathogens in order to understand their potential to cause pandemics.
“The health and safety of Americans are too important to just wing it, and Biden’s USDA should have had more apprehension before sending any taxpayer dollars to collaborate with the CCP on risky avian flu research,” Ernst told The Post in a statement.
“They should know by now to suspect ‘fowl’ play when it comes to researchers who have ties to the dangerous Wuhan Lab, and simply switching from bats to birds causes concern that they are creating more pathogens of pandemic potential,” she added, referring to risky experiments that may have led to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Here’s my warning: The Biden administration should be walking on eggshells until they cut off every cent going to our adversaries. We cannot allow what happened in Wuhan to happen again.”
Such viral experiments have “already caused outbreaks and killed humans,” Ernst also wrote to Vilsack, noting that “China’s labs have notoriously lax safety standards.”
Other bird flu testing will take place at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Athens, Ga., while the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute will complete statistical modeling for the experiments.
Federal grant data portals show the award date was Jan. 26, 2021, and $632,813.50 has been doled out so far.
Performance dates for the 60-month project stretch from April 1, 2021, to March 31, 2026.
USDA spokesperson Allan Rodriguez accused Ernst of spreading “misinformation” by not reaching out to the department directly about the research and said the “project was applied for in 2019 and was approved in 2020.”
“USDA’s funding is only being committed to the specific components carried out by our own team located in Athens, Georgia, and is not [in] any way contributing to research taking place in the UK or China,” Rodriguez said.
“Because animal diseases present a global threat, it is common for international researchers to conduct independent research that’s connected to the same end goal — but what Senator Ernst lays out in her letter is far off base from what’s actually transpiring, and on top of that is based on approval decisions that predate this Administration.”
Diane Cutler, a former grant fraud investigator for the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, told The Post it was “disingenuous for USDA to insinuate that its research is separate and is not contributing to the research in China when clearly an official collaboration to conduct this research has been established within USDA’s system of records.”
Ernst said the nonprofit taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project alerted her to the alarming experiments.
The group’s senior vice president, Justin Goodman, said Congress should use the upcoming farm bill to cut off funding to “unaccountable animal labs” in China and Russia for good.
Last year, a federal government report on National Institutes of Health and US Agency for International Development subgrants found more than $2 million in taxpayer funds flowed to Chinese research institutions in Wuhan.
That included more than $1.4 million to the Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance, which went on to fund “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Former US intelligence officials, the FBI, Energy Department, and scientific experts believe the pandemic most likely began when the virus leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, where research institutions were known to have conducted gain-of-function experiments.
Rutgers University molecular biologist Dr. Richard Ebright previously told The Post that those experiments violated federal policies governing research on both gain-of-function and enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research.
EcoHealth has maintained it never conducted gain-of-function research and that its work in Wuhan has been misrepresented.
Ernst and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, last month demanded a separate investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general into more than $50 million in defense grants that funded Chinese pandemic research labs.
The NIH in October 2021 admitted that EcoHealth had not complied with the terms of its grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the Department of Health and Human Services two years later barred the lab from US funding for the next 10 years.
The White House told The Post on Wednesday that it is being “vigilant” about potentially dangerous scientific research conducted in China after a study from Beijing resulted in a coronavirus variant that killed 100% of “humanized” mice.
“We’ve documented in the past over many years concerns about biosafety, biosecurity practices of a number of countries, China being one of them,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in response to The Post’s question about the study during the daily press briefing.
“That’s something we continue to be vigilant about because biosafety and biosecurity, particularly of hazardous bio-substances anywhere in the world, can ultimately come back and harm Americans.”
According to Ernst and Gallagher, however, the US is still funding tens of millions of dollars’ worth in viral research abroad.
The Department of Defense is currently providing $11 million in grants to EcoHealth to study “viral spillover from wildlife in the Philippines,” “viral spillover biosurveillance in India,” and “high-risk pathogens” in Liberia, among other research.
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