POLS CUT OFF WU-HAN(D)$
GOPers vow no enemy-lab grants
Congressional Republicans are trying to ensure a repeat of the mistakes at the Wuhan Institute of Virology never happens again as one senator said Dr. Anthony Fauci should be criminally investigated.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) and Rep. Don Davis (D-NC) introduced legislation last week to prohibit US taxpayer dollars from funding research in nations that are considered adversaries, including Russia and China.
The Department of Health and Human Services has already suspended funding to the WIV, but the bill titled “Accountability in Foreign Animal Research” would make the halt permanent and go even further.
“We successfully pulled the plug on US taxpayer funding to China’s state-run Wuhan Institute — for now,” Ernst exclusively told The Post.
End to ‘pet projects’
“The truth is, the Wuhan Lab should never have received a penny from the US in support of the [Chinese Communist Party]’s malign influence in the first place, and something must change so Washington does not fund the pet projects of our adversaries again.”
There are at least 27 facilities in China that are still eligible to receive government funds for potential animal experimentation, according to the National Institutes of Health.
The Wuhan Institute, located in the city where the world-shuttering virus was first detected, is home to researchers known to have performed gain-of-function studies on bat coronaviruses.
Transparency, or the lack thereof, surrounding US funding of gain-of-function studies at Wuhan appears to have spurred Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to announce Saturday an “official criminal referral” to the Department of Justice regarding Fauci.
Citing reporting of a newly unredacted 2020 email by Fauci shared by RealClearPolitics White House reporter Philip Wegmann, Paul wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the email “directly contradicts everything he said in committee hearing to me, denying absolutely that they funded any gain of function, and it’s absolutely a lie. That’s why I sent an official criminal referral to the DOJ,” Fox News reported.
In the email, Fauci detailed a call with British medical researcher Jeremy Farrar, during which Fauci noted scientists’ concern “mutations” in the COVID-19 virus “that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally” in bats.
Moreover, a US intelligence report suggested that at least three researchers from the Wuhan lab fell ill in the fall of 2019 with symptoms eerily similar to COVID-19, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Scientists are split over whether COVID originated from a lab leak or natural transmission spillover.
Government agencies are also at loggerheads on the issue. But despite being initially spurned, the socalled lab leak theory has gained traction over recent months.
Earlier this year, the Department of Energy, which is in charge of a network of national labs, shifted its assessment to a “low confidence” belief that the virus stemmed from a lab. The FBI has expressed a similar view.
Nations defined as adversarial in the new bill include China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.
“No American tax dollars should ever go to funding research on animals in foreign countries, especially adversarial countries,” McClain said in a statement.
No American tax dollars should ever go to funding research on animals in foreign countries, especially adversarial countries.
— Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa)