EcoHealth Alliance is a US-based non-governmental organization with a stated mission of protecting people, animals, and the environment from emerging infectious diseases. The nonprofit is focused on research that aims to prevent pandemics and promote conservation in hotspot regions worldwide. The EcoHealth Alliance focuses on diseases caused by deforestation and increased interaction between humans and wildlife. The organization has researched the emergence of diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Nipah virus, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Rift Valley fever, the Ebola virus, and COVID-19. EcoHealth Alliance also advises the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the World Health Organization (WHO) on global wildlife trade, threats of disease and the environmental damage posed by these. Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, EcoHealth's ties with the Wuhan Institute of Virology were put into question in relation to investigations into the origin of COVID-19. Citing these concerns, the NIH withdrew funding to the organization in April 2020. Significant criticism followed this decision, including a joint letter signed by 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies. The NIH later reinstated funding to the organization as one of 11 institutions partnering in the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases or CREID initiative in August of 2020, but all activities funded by the grant remain suspended. In 2022, the NIH terminated EcoHealth Alliance grant, stating that "EcoHealth Alliance had not been able to hand over lab notebooks and other records from its Wuhan partner that relate to controversial experiments involving modified bat viruses, despite multiple requests." 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. History Founded under the name Wildlife Preservation Trust International in 1971 by British naturalist, author, and television personality, Gerald Durrell, it then became The Wildlife Trust in 1999. In the fall of 2010, the organization changed its name to EcoHealth Alliance. The rebrand reflected a change in the organization's focus, moving solely from a conservation nonprofit, which focused mainly on the captive breeding of endangered species, to an environmental health organization with its foundation in conservation. The organization held an early professional conservation medicine meeting in 1996. In 2002, they published an