A recent audit of the Defense Department’s funding of gain-of-function research outside the United States “may have concealed” collaborations with Chinese biotechnology companies, at least one of which has ties to Beijing’s military, a Republican senator claimed Tuesday.
In a letter obtained exclusively by The Washington Post, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) asked Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to explain edits in the audit that hid Wuxi AppTec, Pharmaron Beijing and GenScript from public scrutiny.
“American taxpayers are entitled to transparency about the programs they fund, and we are disappointed that this OIG report falls short of that accountability,” Marshall wrote.
The Kansas congressman accused the Defense Department of being unable or unwilling to be transparent about its work with biotechnology companies, “work that has been flagged as problematic by Congress.”
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), former chairman of the House Select Committee on China, introduced the BioSecure Act in January, which would blacklist companies doing business in the United States.
The bill has not yet been voted on.
The following month, Gallagher and the ranking members of the China Select Committee, Sens. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), Gary Peters (D-MI) and Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Urged Treasury Secretary Austin, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will investigate WuXi AppTec.
Lawmakers said the company has “close ties” to China’s People’s Liberation Army and may have stolen U.S. intellectual property.
Last month, the new chairman of the China Committee, Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), also demanded a national security briefing on GenScript from FBI Director Christopher Wray and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who forced the audit by including a provision in the annual defense spending bill, noted that a separate edited WuXi AppTec grant “may have influenced the audit.” [Chinese] In a separate Tuesday letter to Austin obtained by The Washington Post, he condemned the “Obama Administration’s genocide of minorities.”
“Taxpayers shouldn’t have to play hide-and-seek about where and how their hard-earned money is spent,” Ernst told Austin.
Between 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command awarded WuXi AppTec $6.5 million to “test antiviral drugs in cells and animals” infected with SARS-CoV-2, dengue, Ebola, and chikungunya viruses.
according to Department of Defense Office of Inspector General AuditMore than $15.5 million in grant funding between 2014 and 2023 flowed through subrecipients to “contract research organizations.”[s] “Conducting research in China or other foreign countries for research into the potential enhancement of pathogens that could cause a pandemic.”
But the 20-page audit cited “significant limitations in the validity of the data” and said the Pentagon “did not track funding at the level of detail necessary to determine whether the Department of Defense provided funds to Chinese research institutions or other foreign countries for capability acquisition experiments.”
Such research has been classified as “offensive biology research” by the Department of Defense, and Marshall said it “raises doubts” that National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials acknowledged this year that they had funded gain-of-function experiments at the now-disbarred Wuhan Institute of Virology through a now-suspended grantee, EcoHealth Alliance.
Manhattan-based EcoHealth has denied that its experiments constituted gain-of-function research on the SARS virus in bats, despite NIH officials and scientists testifying before Congress to the contrary, and has rejected the hypothesis that this could have led to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told The Washington Post last week that the watchdog report was evidence of “gross negligence” and that “the Pentagon would have been much better off burning taxpayer money.”
“The Department of Defense used American taxpayer dollars to fund programs to discover and enhance biological warfare materials in China and other foreign countries,” Ebright said.
“They do not attach conditions to how the funds are used, monitor how the funds are used, or keep records of the outcomes or products of the funds.”
In his letter, Marshall again called on the Defense Department to complete a government-wide audit of acquisition of capabilities research.
Pentagon officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
