NIH oversight of EcoHealth grant rapped
成果类型：
News Item
署名作者：
Brainard, Jeffrey
刊物名称：
SCIENCE
ISSN/ISSBN：
0036-12957
发表日期：
2023-02-03
页码：
420-420
关键词：
摘要：
A federal watchdog has found the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not properly oversee a grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City-based nonprofit that funded work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. In 2020, then-President Donald Trump claimed SARS-CoV-2 could have come from the WIV lab, an idea that many scientists continue to say lacks evidence. Soon after, NIH terminated the EcoHealth grant, which had provided $600,000 to WIV. The 18-month-long audit by the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services says NIH did not provide a valid reason for the termination or provide EcoHealth with required information for appealing the decision. The report also finds that NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address problems with the project's compliance, such as a 2-year delay in a progress report from EcoHealth that de-scribed potentially risky virus experiments. And auditors concluded that EcoHealth's monitoring of WIV eroded once the pandemic started and that EcoHealth had overbilled $90,000 in expenses on NIH grants totaling $8 million from 2014 to 2021. EcoHealth responded that the audit did not find significant issues in its performance. NIH said it is improving its oversight.