EcoHealth Alliance is a left-of-center nonprofit organization that focuses on understanding the emergence and spread of infectious diseases around the world. Initially a nonprofit organization that focused on wildlife conservation, it re-branded in 2010 to study infectious disease. ¹

The organization receives substantial funding from government agencies, such as the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the United States Department of Defense (DOD), which has granted a total of just under $39 million to EcoHealth Alliance in the form of contracts, grants, and subcontracts between 2013 and 2020. ²

EcoHealth Alliance has been subject to controversy due to its associations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese laboratory at the center of a United States investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. ³

Background

EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) is a left-of-center nonprofit organization that focuses on preventing and understanding the spread of infectious diseases in humans, animals, and the environment. The organization was founded as the Wildlife Trust in 1971 and was initially an environmentalist organization that focused on wildlife conservation. After the organization moved into “conservation medicine” by studying the relationships between ecosystems and health, it re-branded as the EcoHealth Alliance in 2010. ⁴

EHA previously worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a government agency that supports international development through foreign aid, to create a “global emerging pandemic threat program.” The program, called PREDICT, involved a coalition of organizations that focused on researching emerging diseases in an attempt to prevent a global pandemic. ⁵

EcoHealth Alliance has many programs in the United States and 30 other countries around the world. These programs focus on issues including deforestation, wildlife conservation, pandemic prevention, bio-surveillance, and the notion of “one health” shared between human beings and the environment. ⁶

EHA has partnered with various corporate, governmental, and educational partners, including the American multinational medical devices, pharmaceutical, and consumer packaged goods manufacturing company Johnson and Johnson. EHA has also partnered with the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). ⁷

Funding

EcoHealth Alliance is primarily funded by government grants and contracts, but the organization also receives money through contributions and grants from other organizations and foundations.

EHA reported total revenues of $10.1 million in 2015, just under $12 million in 2016, slightly less than $14 million in 2017, $16.4 million in 2018, and just under $18 million in 2019. According to the organization’s 2019 tax filings, EHA received $15.5 million in government grants that year, over 85% of its total revenue. ⁸⁹

The organization had $9.4 million in total expenses in 2015, $11.3 million in 2016, $13.6 million in 2017, $16.2 million in 2018, and $16.5 million in 2019. ¹⁰

EcoHealth Alliance is heavily funded by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the United States Department of Defense (DOD), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and various other governmental agencies. ^{11 12 13}

National Institutes of Health (NIH)

EcoHealth Alliance received its first grant of $358,102 from NIH in 2002. Since then, EHA has received a total of $16,299,330 in grants from NIH, including over $2.1 million in 2020, and $1.5 million in 2021. ¹⁴

The NIH has provided EcoHealth Alliance with a grant focused on “understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence” every year between 2014 and 2019. The NIH continuous grant to EcoHealth Alliance is focused on “understanding risk of zoonotic virus emergence in EID hotspots of Southeast Asia.” NIH paid $1,546,744 in 2020 and has paid $1,505,568 in 2021. ¹⁵

Department of Defense (DOD)

The Department of Defense committed a five-year grant to EcoHealth Alliance in 2017. The grant, which will provide the organization with nearly $6.5 million, is to “support and stimulate basic, applied and advanced research” in academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and commercial organizations that support sciences with an emphasis on “exploring new and innovative research for combating or countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).” ¹⁶

Other grants from the DOD include a two-year grant of $1.36 million to be spent between 2020 and 2022, two separate three-year grants of nearly $3 million each to be used between 2020 and 2023, two separate five-year grants of nearly $5 million each for use between 2020 and 2025, and one five-year grant of nearly $5 million to be used between 2019 and 2024. The DOD also provided EHA with a two-year contract worth over $2.2 million between 2013 and 2015 and another $447 million two-year contract between 2015 and 2017. ¹⁷

In total, the DOD contributed just under $39 million to EcoHealth Alliance between 2013 and 2020 in the form of contracts, grants, and subcontracts. $34.6 million of this funding came from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is tasked with countering and deterring “weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.” ¹⁸

Other Government Funding

EcoHealth Alliance has also been under contract by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) including a three-year contract worth $1 million between 2016 and 2019, a two-year contract worth $700,583 between 2017 and 2019, and a two-year contract worth $566,274 between 2019 and 2021. Other governmental agencies that have funded EHA include the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and USAID. ¹⁹

Private Contributions

EHA has also received contributions and grants from left-of-center private foundations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation committed a $1,499,414 grant to EHA in 2020, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation provided a $100,000 grant in 2020, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation granted a total of $530,000 to EcoHealth Alliance between 2003 and 2007. ²⁰²¹²²

Controversy

Wuhan Institute of Virology

EcoHealth Alliance had a five-year, $3.7 million NIH grant prematurely cancelled in 2020 after the Trump administration noted that EHA had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to research coronaviruses in bats. Then-President Donald Trump and multiple high-level officials within the Trump administration accused WIV of being the source of the COVID-19 outbreak. ²³²⁴

NIH contacted EHA in a letter on July 8, 2020, stating that if the organization wanted to receive the remaining funding, it would have to provide a sample of the coronavirus strain that researchers at WIV used to determine the genetic sequence of the coronavirus pandemic. NIH also requested that EHA organize a third-party inspection of WIV to examine its laboratory and records “with specific attention to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019.” The president of EHA, Peter Daszak, called the demands from NIH “heinous.” ²⁵²⁶

The termination of the grant was reversed in August 2020, and the total amount of the grant was increased to $7.5 million. ²⁷ Although the Trump administration reversed its decision to cut funding to EHA, WIV is the subject of a 2021 investigation by the United States under the Biden administration, which has ordered the investigators to “redouble” efforts to find the source of the pandemic. ²⁸

Peter Daszak has consistently claimed that the pandemic did not start at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. During an interaction via email with U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci, who initially ruled out the possibility that COVID-19 came from a lab, Daszak gave a “personal thank you,” to Director Fauci for “publicly standing up and stating the scientific evidence supports a natural origin.” Daszak added that Director Fauci was brave and that his “trusted voice” would assist in dispelling “myths” about the origin of COVID-19. ²⁹

Daszak was appointed chair of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, which was launched in July 2020 to assist governments and United Nations institutions in fighting the pandemic. Daszak was also appointed to the World Health Organization (WHO) committee to investigate the origins of the pandemic. ³⁰

A statement in The Lancet that was co-signed by 27 prominent public health scientists condemned accusations and theories that pointed to anything but natural origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The statement, which claimed that only “conspiracy theories” suggested that “COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” was organized by EHA and drafted by Peter Dasnak. Four others who co-signed the statement also work for EHA, including two members of the organization’s board of directors. ³¹

Daszak was also one of the WHO-affiliated scientists that investigated the origins of COVID-19 outbreak. The left-of-center AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) called for the team of investigators to be disbanded in February 2021, citing Daszak as having a conflict of interest. AHF president Michael Weinstein noted that for the investigation to be successful “neutrality is a must,” and that Daszak had a “clear-cut conflict of interest that should’ve disqualified him from participation on the WHO team.” ³²

Daszak and the other members of the investigation team concluded that animal markets that sold meat, dead or alive, were the most probable cause of the pandemic. Daszak claimed after the investigation’s conclusion that the “only evidence that people have for a lab leak is that there is a lab in Wuhan.” The United States investigation into WIV is ongoing as of June 2021. ³³

In December 2022, former Vice President of EcoHealth Alliance Dr. Andrew Huff was interviewed by The Sun author Imogen Braddick about his book The Truth About Wuhan in which he makes claims that during his time at the company he was involved with the Wuhan Institute as a “US government scientist” and that the US government had supposedly covered up providing “dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese.” ³⁴ He even made claims that the US government had been monitoring him, or how “military-grade drones would often appear at his home, [that] he was stalked at the supermarket, and he was followed by unknown vehicles.” ³⁵ In a statement, EcoHealth Alliance denied Dr. Huff’s claims by saying “Mr Huff makes a number of other speculations and allegations about the nature of the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology…given that he never worked at or with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, his assertions along these lines cannot be trusted.”³⁶

Gain-of-Function Research

EcoHealth Alliance has also been heavily criticized for providing the Wuhan Institute of Virology with funding that EHA received from NIH grants. According to Fauci, EHA sent nearly $600,000 to WIV to fund “a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who were world experts on coronavirus.” This funding is now being scrutinized due to reports that it contributed to gain-of-function research, which involves designing microorganisms like viruses to be more transmissible, resilient, and potentially lethal. ³⁷

Shi Zhengli, a lead researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who has been working with EHA for more than 15 years, is known to have conducted gain-of-function research involving genetically-modified viruses that were created to be more infectious and severe. WIV has conducted gain-of-function research since 2015. ³⁸³⁹⁴⁰

Daszak, who coordinated with Zhengli between 2014 and 2019, stated during an interview that he had observed coronaviruses which can “get into human cells in the lab,” and that such viruses were “untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals [antibodies] and you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine.” Daszak also admitted to conducting the gain-of-function research, explaining that coronaviruses could be manipulated in laboratories “pretty easily” and admitting to inserting the spike protein of a virus “into a backbone of another virus” and then doing “some work in the lab.” ⁴¹

NIH Director Francis Collins noted that federal officials could not confirm what the WIV or EHA did anything with the funding “outside of what our approved grant allowed.” Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have criticized the statement as coming “amongst a litany of mounting evidence” against WIV and claimed that it raises “concerns regarding the safety and security of federally funded research to the WIV.” ⁴²

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