After an 18-month audit, a federal watchdog says that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) failed to adequately monitor and address problems involving EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City-based nonprofit that was used to offshore risky gain-of-function research to Wuhan, China after the Obama administration banned the practice in 2014.

According to the report from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the “NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address” compliance issues with EcoHealth.

In April 2020, after then-President Donald Trump claimed the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have come from the WIV lab, NIH terminated the EcoHealth grant with little explanation. That step was widely condemned by scientists, and OIG’s report now says NIH improperly executed the termination because it did not provide a valid reason or provide EcoHealth with required information for appealing the decision.

A few months later, NIH reinstated the award but immediately suspended it, setting conditions for resumption that EcoHealth said it could not meet. NIH permanently terminated the WIV subaward as of August 2022 for compliance issues, including WIV’s failure to provide NIH with laboratory notebooks related to the funded experiments. –Science

The audit examined the above grant, as well as two others from 2014 to 2021 which totaled $8 million, but largely focused on $600,000 of it which went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The NIH faulted EcoHealth for failing to promptly report gain-of-function results in some experiments, however the company has blamed a computer glitch at NIH for the 2-year delay.

Digging into the report is US Right to Know’s Emily Kopp, who has broken down various aspects of the OIG report.

EcoHealth would like you to believe it had technical issues for four years straight

HHS OIG: 🙄 pic.twitter.com/H0gZjzCWh7

— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) January 26, 2023

The 2018 report lists scientific publications including 2019 and 2020 papers

The 2019 report lists zero papers pic.twitter.com/CzwHlbqAVu

— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) January 26, 2023

How does EcoHealth get away with this?

Oversight from Fauci’s NIAID was non-existent.

NIAID awarded new funds to EcoHealth in 2020 before they received either of these overdue progress reports.

The only reason EcoHealth filed the 1st report was because @fastlerner FOIA’d it. pic.twitter.com/Er2fQTLkCV

— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) January 26, 2023

The line we often hear from NIH is that EcoHealth’s reported gain-of-function research could not have sparked the pandemic.

But given (1) the sloppiness of the reports (2) the lateness of their submission to NIH, I do not believe we have a complete picture of EcoHealth’s work.

— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) January 26, 2023

Meanwhile, the audit also found that the nonprofit billed NIH for $89,171 in disallowed costs, including expenses such as alcohol, and a staffer’s $3,285 trip to a conference that was miscoded, and should have instead been billed to a non-NIH grant. 

The OIG recommends that the WIV (but not EcoHealth) be banned from receiving future NIH funds.

Meanwhile, EcoHealth just scored a fresh $3 million grant from the Department of Defense.

EcoHealth Alliance currently has federal contracts and grants from USAID, DoD-DTRA, DoD-USU, DHS, NIAID, and NSF.

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) January 21, 2023

This post was originally published at Zero Hedge

GOP Senator Rand Paul has joined others in promoting an updated bill to reinstate military service members who were previously fired for refusing to comply with the Biden Administration’s COVID vaccine mandate.

The legislation, named the Allowing Military Exemptions, Recognizing Individual Concerns About New Shots (AMERICANS) Act of 2023, includes a requirement that the Secretary of Defense offer reinstatement to active members who were removed from duty for not taking the shots.

Senator Paul noted “The COVID-19 vaccine mandate has ruined the livelihoods of men and women who have honorably served our country. This inept bureaucratic policy should have never been imposed, and while it has since been rolled back, we still have service members who have not been rehired, promoted, or received back pay and benefits.”

He continued, “The AMERICANS Act will address these issues and others that the Biden administration has failed to consider at the expense of service members’ lives and our nation’s national security interests.”

Senator Ted Cruz, who is also co-sponsoring the bill added “Our military continues to feel the effects of the Biden administration’s reckless, misguided, and now-prohibited vaccine mandates.”

“I’m glad that we were able to remove the COVID-19 vaccine mandate last Congress, but there is more work to do,” Cruz urged, adding “The AMERICANS Act would correct the wrongs done to unvaccinated service members who were discharged for exercising their conscience.”

As they noted in their statements, the Senators were previously successful in getting the mandate scrapped by threatening to block the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act.

GOP Senators Say They Will Block Military Funding Unless Vaccine Mandate Scrapped

Representative Dan Bishop, who has introduced a companion bill in the House, also noted that “While last year’s NDAA directed that SECDEF rescind the DOD’s authoritarian COVID vaccine mandate, it didn’t prohibit the DOD from issuing a similar mandate in the future.”

He continued, “The bill also didn’t provide any meaningful remedies for service members who were kicked out due to the mandate. This is completely unacceptable. Sen. Cruz and my bill, the AMERICANS Act, will close these glaring loopholes and bring justice to military members who were purged by Secretary Austin’s egregious vaccine mandate.”

Specifically, the legislation will require the Department of Defense to:

• Reinstate any service member separated solely for COVID-19 vaccine status who wants to return to service, crediting the service member with the time of involuntary separation for retirement pay calculations;
• Restore the rank of any service member demoted solely for COVID-19 vaccine status, compensating the service member for any pay and benefits lost due to that demotion;
• Adjust to “honorable” any “general” discharge given to a service member solely due to COVID-19 vaccine status;
• Expunge from a service members’ record any adverse action based solely on COVID-19 vaccine status, regardless of whether the service member previously sought an accommodation;
• Make every effort to retain service members not vaccinated against COVID-19, providing them with professional development, promotion, and leadership opportunities equal to that of their peers; and
• Provide a COVID-19 vaccine exemption process for service members with natural immunity, a relevant underlying health condition, or a sincerely held religious belief inconsistent with being vaccinated.

The Military Times estimates that more than 3,400 troops were “involuntarily separated from the service” due to non-compliance with the vaccine mandate.

Despite Republican attempts to stop mandatory vaccines for active duty personnel, and to uphold exemption rights, the Biden administration has continually pushed for dishonourable discharges and even court martialing for troops who disobey orders to get the shots.

Biden Pushing For Dishonourable Discharges, Court Martials For Troops Who Refuse Vaccines

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Australians who tried to sell surgical face masks on the back of claims they worked against viruses were once threatened with prosecution and massive fines by the government.

Yes, really.

An article titled ‘Farce mask: it’s safe for only 20 minutes’ published by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2003 explained how, “Retailers who cash in on community fears about SARS by exaggerating the health benefits of surgical masks could face fines of up to $110,000.”

The article quotes a public health experts who said that face masks are largely useless at stopping the spread of viruses and could even worsen the situation.

“Those masks are only effective so long as they are dry,” said Professor Yvonne Cossart of the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University of Sydney.

“As soon as they become saturated with the moisture in your breath they stop doing their job and pass on the droplets.”

Twenty years ago Australians were prosecuted for saying masks work against viruses. Now they get arrested for not wearing masks during viral outbreaks.

As Mencken said, our governments are dishonest, insane and intolerable. @smh https://t.co/wIGcvbW2OH https://t.co/XWVIEoNlpy pic.twitter.com/coaGDxa1SZ

— Tony Heller (@TonyClimate) January 23, 2023

Professor Cossart said that the masks would need to be changed every 15-20 minutes to be in any way effective.

Her sentiments were echoed by John Bell from the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, who said that masks only offered “marginal benefit” and were largely psychological in their level of protection.

The story is noteworthy because during the COVID pandemic, the Australian government imposed one of the strictest lockdowns in the world and used face mask mandates as a brutal tool of population control.

As we previously highlighted, authorities in Melbourne used high-tech surveillance drones to catch people outside not wearing masks.

At the height of the hysteria, there were numerous instances of police in Australia physically attacking people for not adhering to mask wearing rules, including one incident when a woman was placed in a chokehold by a male police officer.

Another video showed an elderly woman being arrested for not wearing a mask while sitting on a park bench.

Yet another clip showed police pepper spraying pre-teen children for not wearing face masks.

Another clip showed an elderly man suffering a suspected heart attack after he was arrested by police for not wearing a mask outside while exercising.

During the early months of the COVID pandemic, health authorities advised against wearing masks, only to subsequently do a 180 once face coverings became a convenient psychological tool of population control.

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