edited volume on the field through Oxford University Press: Conservation Medicine: Ecological Health in Practice. In February 2008, they published a paper in Nature entitled “Global trends in emerging infectious diseases” which featured an early rendition of a global disease hotspot map. 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. EcoHealth Alliance's funding comes mostly from U.S. federal agencies such as the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Agency for International Development. Between 2011 and 2020, its annual budget has fluctuated between US$9 and US$15 million per year. COVID-19 pandemic 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. Prior to the pandemic, EcoHealth Alliance was the only U.S.-based organization researching coronavirus evolution and transmission in China, where they partnered with the WIV, among others. 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". However, Daszak failed to disclose EcoHealth's ties to the WIV, which some observers noted as an apparent conflict of interest. In June 2021, The Lancet published an addendum in which Daszak disclosed his cooperation with researchers in China. In April 2020, the NIH ordered EcoHealth Alliance to cease spending the remaining $369,819 from its current NIH grant at the request of the Trump administration, pressuring them by stating "it must hand over information and materials from Chinese research facility to resume funding for suspended grant" in reference to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The cancelled grant was supposed to run through 2024. Funding from NIH resumed in August 2020 after uproar from "77 U.S. Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies". Work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology under an NIH grant to the EHA has been at the center of political controversies during the pandemic. One such controversy centered on whether any experiments conducted under the grant could be accurately described as "gain-of-function" (GoF) research. NIH officials (including Anthony Fauci) unequivocally denied during 2020 congressional hearings that the EHA had conducted GoF research with NIH funding. In October 2021, the EHA