Questions are being asked about why it has taken three years to pull the plug on US funding to the Chinese laboratory at the center of a Covid lab leak cover-up.
Former President Donald Trump said as early as April 2020 that he had seen evidence the pandemic was borne out of dangerous experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and a slew of damning reports, leaks and indirect evidence since then has led the FBI and at least one other Government agency to support the ‘lab leak theory’ publicly.
Yet US taxpayer money continued to flow through the WIV during the pandemic to identify and study dangerous viruses. It wasn’t until this Monday that the Biden Administration finally announced it was suspending the WIV access to US research grants, saying it was necessary to ‘protect the public interest.’
Critics have suggested that the White House’s reluctance to scrap all funding and launch a full-throated condemnation of China during the pandemic is because of the US Government’s eerie ties to the Chinese research institute, which has enjoyed potentially millions in US funds over the years.
There is also a sense that the Biden Administration and political establishment have been slow to come around to the idea of a lab leak because of Trump’s early endorsement of the hypothesis. Biden described Trump as ‘nakedly xenophobic’ for claiming the lab was the likely source of the pandemic in 2020.
The Biden Administration finally announced on Monday it was suspending the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) access to government funding and proposed a longer-term ban after the lab could not provide sufficient documentation on its biosafety protocols and security measures
The White Coat Waste Project, a taxpayer watchdog group, told DailyMail.com Biden’s decision to pull the funding was ‘long overdue’ — but noted that the Administration’s proposal is only a ten-year ban rather than a permanent suspension.
Dr Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and lab leak supporter, told DailyMail.com: ‘This step was both late — three years late — and insufficient.
‘The answers are inattention and indifference at the White House, incompetence at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and obstruction by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).’
Exactly how much US funds have been sent to the WIV is unclear due to the fact the grants were funneled through a third-party research group.
Records indicate the NIH, America’s public research-funding body, first struck an indirect relationship with the Wuhan lab in 2014.
In June of that year, the NIH and US Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded New York nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance $4.3 million, with $3.7 million coming from the NIH’s infectious disease arm, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which was headed by long-time public servant Dr Anthony Fauci at the time.
The project — titled Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence – was to span five years and one of its objectives was to ‘find out if any coronaviruses… in bat populations in China have the potential to infect people.’
‘The overall goal of this work is to help design vaccines and therapeutics against future potentially emerging viruses, work out which communities are on the frontline of a new potential outbreak, and reduce the risk of them being infected by analyzing their risk behavior,’ the grant adds.
The $4.3m was shared among various research facilities across Asia and Africa. At least $600,000 went directly to WIV between 2014 and May 2019.
The 2014 research grant was issued just months before then-President Barack Obama outlawed ‘gain of function’ (GOF) research in the US, a loosely-defined term for controversial experiments that involve making viruses more deadly or infectious.
The supposed purpose of gain of function is to get ahead of natural evolution to understand and develop knowledge, drugs and vaccines for future outbreaks of viruses.
But the danger is that experts create a virus that may not have emerged naturally or posed a threat to humans and accidentally unleash it.
Even though the terms and conditions of the NIH grant stated the funding could not be used for GOF research, records show scientists working in Wuhan under US Government contracts performed tests which many say constitutes GOF.
On two occasions, US-sponsored WIV scientists submitted research summaries that showed that when three altered bat coronaviruses were put in the lungs of genetically engineered mice, they multiplied much more quickly than the original virus they were based on.
The viruses also appeared to be more deadly, with one causing the mice to lose weight significantly.
The researchers wrote: ‘These results demonstrate varying pathogenicity of SARSr-CoVs with different spike proteins in humanized mice.’
Both the NIH and EcoHealth said that the results were reported to the agency, and the NIH said that the rules to limit gain-of-function research did not apply.
However, a report by the Government spending watchdog this year found the NIH EcoHealth failed to ‘understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action’.
‘With improved oversight, NIH may have been able to take more timely corrective actions to mitigate the inherent risks associated with this type of research,’ the report added.
EcoHealth Alliance, run by British zoologist Peter Daszak, funded studies in Wuhan – the Chinese city where the pandemic began – on manipulated coronaviruses. The boss of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, shown left, is known to be close to Dr Anthony Fauci (right)
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has long been suspected as the source of the COVID pandemic, but the CIA has been unable to confirm the reports. The FBI and Department of Energy have already concluded that the ‘lab leak’ theory is most likely
Virologist Shi Zheng-li, left, works with her colleague in the P4 lab of Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2017
The Wuhan Institute of Virology (pictured) launched a secret research initiative that saw them fuse coronaviruses in a series of risky experiments
President Joe Biden ordered an intelligence review into whether Covid leaked from the Wuhan laboratory in March 2021, reports the Associated Press.
This concluded there were ‘two likely scenarios’ that had sparked the pandemic: Either an animal-to-human transmission or a lab leak.
Presented with the findings that May, the President ordered the agencies to ‘redouble’ their efforts and report back within 90 days — or by the end of July.
In August, it was revealed that US agencies remained divided over the origins of the coronavirus in their report.
A summary released at the time said four agencies believed with ‘low confidence’ that the virus was initially transmitted from animals to humans.
A fifth believed with ‘moderate confidence’ that the first human infection was linked to a lab.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) noted at the time that China ‘continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries, including the United States’.
In June this year, a four-page intelligence report into the origins of Covid was declassified which stated that the lab leak theory could not be ruled out.
They also added that there had been ‘extensive work’ on coronaviruses at the WIV.
FBI director Christopher Wray revealed in February that his agency was the one backing the lab leak theory.
In his first public comments on the origin of the virus in an interview with Fox News, he said that ‘the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan’.
Just a few days earlier the Energy Department had also reported with ‘low confidence’ that it believed Covid had originated in a Chinese lab.
Yesterday the Biden administration suspended all funding for the WIV after the lab failed to provide documentation related to concerns over biosafety protocol violations. At the same time, the HHS also said it wants to bar the Chinese research body from participating in Government programs going forward.
The HHS said a review into the WIV had been going on for months which found that the lab was ‘not compliant with federal regulations and is not presently responsible’. They added that it had not received any US public money since July 2020.
Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented, while medium confidence means that the intel is credibly sourced and plausible but further work is still needed.
Reports into the origins of Covid are being declassified after Biden signed a bill in March this year requiring all research on Covid origins to be released. He said that this was to help efforts to identify the source of the Covid pandemic.
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