The U.S. government might have been double billed tens of millions of dollars in grants to labs in Wuhan, China, according to a former federal investigator specializing in healthcare fraud.
"What I've found so far is evidence that points to double billing, potential theft of government funds," Diane Cutler, hired by Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told CBS News.
The payments, not previously reported and made through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), were found in her investigation of U.S. government grants that funded risky research in China before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the report.
Tens of millions might have been paid, including duplicate payments for medical supplies, equipment, travel, and salaries, sources told CBS.
The investigation of the payments might take at least six months to conclude and Marshall is calling on a 9/11-style commission to pick up the oversight.
"I think there's 1.1 million reasons that American taxpayers should care," Marshall told CBS. "You'll have a plane crashes. We want to find out why the plane crashes. We go to any lengths to do that. And the hope is we don't have another plane crash for the same reason."
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting research of coronaviruses and thus far the FBI and Energy Department have concluded a lab leak is a likely explanation of the origin of COVID-19. Six other intelligence agencies involved in the study of the origins have not backed the lab-leak theory as most likely source.
Earlier this month, the House voted unanimously to declassify intelligence on the origins of COVID-19, while former Trump administration Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield denounced Dr. Anthony Fauci and others for leaving him out of 2020 meetings because of his science-based information and expertise pointing to a Wuhan lab leak as the origin over COVID-19 over a Fauci narrative of a natural origin.
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