The Biden administration has permanently cut off all funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a review found the lab to be “non-compliant with federal regulations.” The administration also cited the lab’s failure to document its practices adequately.
The Wuhan lab previously received funding from the National Institutes of Health for what turned out to be “gain of function research” in all but name only. Distinctions in the definition of that phrase may be the difference between some people going to jail or not.
“This action will ensure the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] does not receive another dollar of federal funding,” an HHS spokesperson said, according to Bloomberg.
Related: The Latest COVID ‘Conspiracy Theory’ That Proved True
Why did it take so long? The lid has been blown off the entire coverup in the last few months, and even the Chinese government is having a hard time keeping the lid on. In the U.S., the unconscionable actions of Dr. Antomny Fauci and his colleague at EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Peter Daszak, in playing around with bat coronaviruses by funding research at Wuhan, deliberately trying to make them more infectious, may have killed six million people if the virus actually escaped the lab. That much is still unknown. But it’s looking increasingly like the lax safety protocols and outright incompetence of workers at Wuhan may have led to the worst pandemic since the flu pandemic in 1918.
Last month, it was revealed that Chinese scientist Ben Hu, one of the three researchers who caught a mysterious illness just before the coronavirus pandemic, was partially funded by American grants.
The revelation potentially lends credibility to the lab leak theory of COVID-19, as opposed to the theory that the virus began in a wild animal market.
One of Hu’s U.S.-funded projects studied whether animal viruses could infect humans and cause a pandemic. Another project researched coronaviruses in bats.
Chinese officials previously maintained that a Wuhan man who became sick on December 8 was the first official case of COVID-19, but the three Wuhan scientists had become sick with the mysterious illness that November.
While the evidence for a lab leak is compelling and suggestive, it’s only circumstantial. There still is no hard link between the coronavirus that caused the pandemic and the work done at the Wuhan Virology Lab. And the sad fact is that without the cooperation of the Chinese Communist government, we aren’t likely to find that hard link.
Other sources are illuminating some of the activities at Wuhan, including the stunning revelations that three scientists who were doing gain-of-function research on Sars-Cov-2 at Wuhan all fell ill in November of 2019 with COVID-like symptoms, and the Chinese military’s deep ties to the lab.
As the hunt for an infected animal that could have passed the virus on to humans continues to come up empty, the lab leak theory continues to gain credibility despite efforts to this day to squelch it. The problem is that there are so many reputable scientists who are heavily invested in the “natural origin” theory that getting them to admit they were wrong will be next to impossible. Public science today does not allow scientists to be wrong without them taking a hit to their careers and public credibility.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member