The Government Accountability Office uncovered that U.S. taxpayer funds went to Chinese entities conducting coronavirus research before the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the watchdog's findings, taxpayer dollars from the National Institutes of Health and the Agency for International Development went toward labs including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wuhan University and the Academy of Military Medical Sciences were also listed as entities to which U.S. taxpayer funds were sent, the report first obtained by Fox News disclosed.
Ohio Republican Reps. Mike Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Brad Wenstrup led the charge in demanding the GAO review the funds from January 2014 to December 2021.
The pair issued a joint statement Wednesday highlighting the results of the report, which was motivated by increasing acceptance from the U.S. intelligence community that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab.
"This revelation is very concerning due to the increased focus on the 'lab leak' theory, which suggests that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan laboratory rather than through natural means," Turner and Wenstrup told Fox.
"We have long argued that the American people deserve the truth about COVID-19's origin and continue to take concrete actions to declassify intelligence related to the pandemic," they added.
The NIH reportedly gave $200,000 directly to Wuhan University from March 2018 to February 2020, with the other two entities and the university also receiving "first-tier subawards."
Adding up the money from subawards, the Wuhan Institute received over $1.4 million in U.S. taxpayer funds between June 2014 and May 2020, the GAO report alleged.
NIH also appears to have aided EcoHealth Alliance, which then provided $598,611 to the Wuhan Institute from June 2014 to May 2019 for the purpose of assessing the transmission of bat coronaviruses to humans.
Part of USAID's grants to the University of California, Davis, went to the Wuhan Institute as well — approximately $815,000 between October 2014 to September 2019 — with thousands also flowing to Wuhan University in 2016.
An NIH spokesperson defended the agency's funding in an April statement to Fox, arguing that the research "ought to understand the behavior of coronaviruses circulating in bats that have the potential to cause widespread disease."
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