Why US outsourced bat virus research to Wuhan

by CHRISTINA LIN

The US funded research into bat coronaviruses in a lab in Wuhan, China, that is now under scrutiny for possibly being behind the Covid-19 pandemic. PHOTO/Facebook

US-funded $3.7 million project approved by Trump’s Covid-19 guru Dr Anthony Fauci in 2015 after US ban imposed on ‘monster-germ’ research

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded bat-coronavirus research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to the tune of US$3.7 million, a recent article in the British newspaper Daily Mail revealed.

Back in October 2014, the US government had placed a federal moratorium on gain-of-function (GOF) research – altering natural pathogens to make them more deadly and infectious – as a result of rising fears about a possible pandemic caused by an accidental or deliberate release of these genetically engineered monster germs.

This was in part due to lab accidents at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in July 2014 that raised questions about biosafety at US high-containment labs. 

At that time, the CDC had closed two labs and halted some biological shipments in the wake of several incidents in which highly pathogenic microbes were mishandled by US government laboratories: an accidental shipment of live anthrax, the discovery of forgotten live smallpox samples and a newly revealed incident in which a dangerous influenza strain was accidentally shipped from the CDC to another lab.

Asia Times for more

Comments are closed.