Sometime in 2015, most likely:
Someone at the NIH approved money to be used for research at the Wuhan lab. The timing would suggest that this was done to skirt the 2014 congressional moratorium on gain of function research.
For the last year and a half, questions have been raised about how and why EcoHealth Alliance provided the WIV with U.S. taxpayer dollars. Those funds were provided to EcoHealth Alliance in the form of grants from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
— “The Origins of COVID-19: An Investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Source:
- August 2021. “The Origins of COVID-19: An Investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” House Foreign Affairs Committee Report Minority Staff.
https://gop-foreignaffairs.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/ORIGINS-OF-COVID-19-REPORT.pdf.
Government, PDF.