Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise to urge all of my colleagues to support this amendment, which would provide for additional funding reductions for NIH. If we have learned nothing else from the executive branch's involvement and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, at the very least, we learned just how corrupt and money hungry the NIH as an organization truly is. It has been over 3\1/2\ years since the initial COVID lockdowns and the NIH continues to cover up and downplay its gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Earlier this year, the Inspector General's report found that between 2014 and 2021, the NIH did not adequately follow its policies with respect to three grants totaling about $8 million to the EcoHealth Alliance. The EcoHealth Alliance had a relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in which it subawarded $600,000 to research coronaviruses in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. The NIH terminated the EcoHealth grant in April of 2020, then later reinstated it, only to suspend it again after setting conditions for resumption that EcoHealth claimed it could not meet. The NIH permanently terminated the award in August 2022 for compliance issues, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology's failure to provide NIH with laboratory notebooks related to the funded experiments. Then again, in May of this year, the NIH reinstated grants to renew its ``collaborative research to understand the risk of bat coronavirus spillover emergence.'' Seriously?…”