Better late than never.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the giant federal agency housing the National Institutes of Health, just suspended a New York-based organization from participating in government procurement programs over its role as a subcontractor for a Chinese research facility connected to the first outbreak of COVID-19.

HHS also notified Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, of his organization’s suspension from eligibility for government grant programs for at least three years.

Following Daszak’s sworn testimony, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, chaired by Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, published an extensive staff report May 1 on EcoHealth Alliance’s research activities.

That report recommended suspension and debarment proceedings against Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance, which had been a subcontractor for the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.

HHS, heeding the subcommittee’s recommendations, did just that.

The subcommittee on the COVID-19 pandemic held another hearing Wednesday in which Republicans and Democrats alike questioned Dr. David Morens, a former senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime chief of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about what a staff memorandum calls “overwhelming evidence” that Morens “engaged in serious misconduct and potentially illegal actions.”

Morens testified, in part, that he didn’t realize that deleting certain emails would constitute destroying or tampering with federal records when he wrote about doing so in correspondence related to COVID-19.

“I was not aware that anything I deleted like emails was a federal record,” Morens said at one point, as the New York Post reported.

The subcommittee’s staff memo cites previously unreleased emails, obtained by subpoena, that it says incriminate Morens in “undermining the operations of the U.S. government, unlawfully deleting federal COVID-19 records, using a personal email to avoid the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and repeatedly acting unbecoming of a federal employee.”

How did we get to this point?

Since 2014, EcoHealth Alliance has received approximately $8 million in federal government grants to study coronaviruses. In 2020, the Trump administration terminated grant funding for the organization. However, despite unresolved controversies, the Biden administration in 2022 approved $650,000 in renewed funding for EcoHealth.

In 2023, the HHS Office of Inspector General found that the National Institutes of Health had failed to effectively monitor its grants to EcoHealth for research that incurred “inherent risks.”

HHS’ recent Action Referral Memorandum was based on an accumulation of communications between 2014 and 2024 between EcoHealth and NIH that revealed lapses in reporting, absence of lab files and crucial records on viral experiments, regulatory noncompliance, and repeated failures in transmitting critical information to NIH, particularly in the final report.

In her May 15 memorandum to Daszak, Henrietta K. Brisbon, deputy assistant HHS secretary for acquisitions, declared:

As established in the record, the NIH review of the Year 5 I-RPPR [Research Performance Progress Report] submitted by EHA [EcoHealth........

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