US suspends funding to Wuhan institute linked with Covid-19 outbreak: Report

The Joe Biden administration has halted funding for the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology, after the facility failed to provide documents about safety and security measures, according to a report.

The institute, for long has been scrutinised, with many suspecting that the Covid-19 pandemic could have originated from the facility.

According to a Bloomberg report, citing a memo, the Department of Health and Human Services notified the Wuhan institute about the suspension on Monday and told the lab it’s seeking to cut it off permanently.

The facility, based in Wuhan, isn’t compliant with federal regulations and with this action, it won’t receive any more federal funding, the report highlighted. It may also be noted that the institute has not received money from the National Institutes of Health since July 2020.

The deadly virus has killed about 7 million people across the globe so far.

Earlier, a report by the United States intelligence agencies stated they found no direct evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic started in China's Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, the four-page report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said the US intelligence community still could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory and said that they had not been able to discover the origins of the pandemic.

The ODNI report stated, “The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both (natural and lab) hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.”

The report added that while "extensive work" had been conducted on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute (WIV), the US agencies had not found evidence of the origin of the pandemic.

As of March 20, four other US agencies still judged that Covid-19 was likely the result of natural transmission, while two were undecided.      

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