By Josh Christenson

WASHINGTON — Two Republican lawmakers demanded Monday that the National Institutes of Health halt more than $3 million in taxpayer funding for “sketchy” research on live bats involving “experimental infection studies” with “SARS-related coronaviruses” like the one that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) called on NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to “immediately … stop this batty research,” which was prompted by the since-debarred nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and spurred on by former NIH officials Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, per a letter exclusively obtained by The Post.

An as-now uncanceled grant of $2.2 million from NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to Colorado State University makes up the bulk of the funding. Another $1.3 million comes from a prior grant.
Construction of a bat vivarium at Colorado State University. 8
An as-now uncanceled grant of $2.2 million from NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to Colorado State University makes up the bulk of the funding.

Federal spending records show the money would be used for infectious disease research on “zoonotic viruses, including SARS, SARS2 and MERS coronaviruses, and ebola, Sudan and Marburg viruses,” and developing “breeding” colonies of Jamaican and Egyptian fruit bats on US soil.

“We will perform experimental infection studies,” the researchers write. “Tissues, cells and sera from naïve and infected bats will be archived in a biobank that will be made available to the research community upon virus inactivation.”
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“The establishment of this resource will lead to a better understanding of how bats host highly pathogenic viruses without disease and may shed light on events that increase spillover risks to humans.”

An HHS spokesperson said in response: “The bats are pathogen free and we take this oversight seriously.”

Since 2016, taxpayers have forked over $12.9 million to the university to make the experimental “bat breeding facility, which also planned a holding room for up to 212 horseshoe bats that harbor SARS-like viruses,” the GOP lawmakers wrote.

“It is quite possible that lab research on bats and the coronaviruses they carry may be behind the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the Republicans told Bhattacharya.

“Risky research with minimal benefit to the health of the American people, and with a great risk of causing another pandemic, should be done only after an extremely intensive safety review and only under strict oversight, if done at all,” they added.

Ernst and Gosar have both advocated for broader transparency about taxpayer funding of so-called “gain of function” research, which can genetically alter viruses to make them more infectious or transmissible, as well as transparency about the origins of COVID-

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