EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) is a US-based[1] non-governmental organization with a stated mission of protecting people, animals, and the environment from emerging infectious diseases.

"[11] In 2023, an audit by the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services found that "NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address" compliance problems with the EcoHealth Alliance.

[12] In December 2023, the EcoHealth Alliance denied allegations that it double-billed the NIH and United States Agency for International Development for research in China.

[20] Using epidemiological, social, and environmental data from the past 50 years, the map outlined regions of the globe most at risk for emergent disease threats.

[23] Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, EcoHealth Alliance has been the subject of controversy and increased scrutiny due to its ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—which has been at the center of speculation since early 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 may have escaped in a lab incident.

[32] EcoHealth president Peter Daszak co-authored a February 2020 letter in The Lancet condemning "conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin".

[40] In October 2021, the EHA submitted a progress report detailing the results of a past experiment where some laboratory mice lost more weight than expected after being infected with a modified bat coronavirus.

IDEEAL (Infectious Disease Emergence and Economics of Altered Landscapes Program)[46] attempts to investigate the impact of deforestation and land-use change on the risk of zoonoses in Sabah, Malaysia.

On an evolutionary scale, this host-virus interaction might have resulted in the large diversity of zoonotic viruses in bats, possibly through bat viruses adapting to be more tolerant of the fever response and less virulent to their natural hosts.” [47] According to the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), roughly 18 million acres of forest (roughly the size of Panama) are lost every year due to deforestation.

EcoHealth Alliance scientists are testing species for pathogens in areas with very little, moderate, and complete deforestation in order to track potential outbreaks.

Project DEFUSE was a rejected DARPA grant application, which proposed to sample bat coronaviruses from various locations in China and Southeast Asia.

[49] Co-investigators on the rejected proposal included Ralph Baric from UNC, Linfa Wang from Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore, and Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.