Two Republican lawmakers demanded Monday that the National Institutes of Health halt more than $3 million in taxpayer funding for “sketchy” research on live bats involving “experimental infection studies” with “SARS-related coronaviruses” like the one that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.  It looks and sounds very unsafe.

     Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) called on NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to “immediately … stop this batty research,” which was prompted by the since-debarred nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and spurred on by former NIH officials Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, per a letter exclusively obtained by The Post.  An as-now uncanceled grant of $2.2 million from NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to Colorado State University makes up the bulk of the funding. Another $1.3 million comes from a prior grant.

     Federal spending records show the money would be used for infectious disease research on “zoonotic viruses, including SARS, SARS2 and MERS coronaviruses, and ebola, Sudan and Marburg viruses,” and developing “breeding” colonies of Jamaican and Egyptian fruit bats on US soil. “We will perform experimental infection studies,” the researchers write. “Tissues, cells and sera from naïve and infected bats will be archived in a biobank that will be made available to the research community upon virus inactivation.”

     “The establishment of this resource will lead to a better understanding of how bats host highly pathogenic viruses without disease and may shed light on events that increase spillover risks to humans.”  An HHS spokesperson said in response: “The bats are pathogen free and we take this oversight seriously.”  Since 2016, taxpayers have forked over $12.9 million to the university to make the experimental “bat breeding facility, which also planned a holding room for up to 212 horseshoe bats that harbor SARS-like viruses,” the GOP lawmakers wrote.