Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRIFFITH. Mr. Chairman, Section 8131 of this bill states: None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to fund any work to be performed by EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. in China on research supported by the Government of China unless the Secretary of Defense determines that a waiver is in the best interests of the country.

My amendment simply strikes out ``in China on research supported by the Government of China.''

EcoHealth Alliance was the agency or the private company that got a grant from the NIH to do research on coronavirus, and they are the ones that gave the money as a subcontractor to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This was not research being done on behalf of China. It was being done on behalf of us.

The problem is, EcoHealth Alliance didn't fulfill their contract. They were supposed to get regular reports from Wuhan. They did not follow up on that. As a result, we are missing nearly a year of data prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 that the American taxpayers paid to have. Instead of just saying EcoHealth can't do things in China that are supported by the Chinese Government, my amendment makes it clear, we are not going to fund EcoHealth Alliance at this point in time.

To make matters worse--you think, how can it be worse?--as a part of our oversight, the Energy and Commerce Committee in February asked 41 questions trying to get information from EcoHealth Alliance. As of this date, we have answers to only seven of those questions, and they are the most general answers, like when did you get your contract with the NIH. It is not the tough information that we need to do proper oversight to make sure that we never have a situation again where a virus occurs where we are doing research, and we can't answer the questions of the American taxpayers as to whether or not it came out of a lab that we were funding and that we weren't getting the reports from. That is all it does.

It says, no, EcoHealth for right now, at least during this fiscal year, isn't going to receive money through the DOD.

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Mr. GRIFFITH. Mr. Chairman, here is the bottom line: We have EcoHealth that breaches their contract. While they may be working on some wildlife things--and having once been a pole holder on a mission with a team of British scientists to study bats in northern Burma, I am all for studying wildlife, but we have to make sure that those people who get American taxpayer dollars are living up to their contract, living up to their obligations to give us the information so that if something happens, we can make appropriate decisions.

Whether you believe it was a lab leak or whether you believe it came out of bats, we needed the information that we paid for, to try to make a better decision. They haven't followed through. As of this date, they haven't given us the information that we need for oversight. Hopefully, it will come forward, but until we establish that EcoHealth Alliance understands that if they are going to use taxpayer dollars to do research, we need to get the information we contracted to get, I think that we should not be granting them awards.

I did leave the waiver in, that was very important to me because if it is in the national security interest, I wanted to make sure we weren't taking that power away from the Secretary, but I don't think at this moment in history, we should be funding EcoHealth Alliance with any taxpayer dollars.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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