(Washington, DC) -- A government watchdog says the National Institutes of Health failed to provide adequate oversight of an American organization that funded controversial research at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A report released Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General doesn't say anything about the origins of the coronavirus.
For the most part, it covers research that went on well before the first cases of the virus that set off the global pandemic were discovered in China late in 2019.
But it says the American organization known as the EcoHealth Alliance should have been more closely scrutinized by federal officials for assurances that the lab in Wuhan wasn't using U.S. funds for research that boosts viruses to study how they might evolve in nature.