A House appropriations panel has approved an amendment to a major spending bill working its way through Congress that would ban funding for work in China by a New York-based group linked to suspect virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The fiscal 2023 appropriations bill for the State Department includes language to restrict any spending in China for the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, a group whose president worked closely on gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan institute. The institute’s work is at the heart of a raging global scientific debate over whether the COVID-19 passed naturally to humans from animals or was the result of an accidental leak from the Chinese research facility located near the heart of the original 2019 outbreak.