Biden suspends U.S. funding for COVID-19 research at Wuhan lab

The Biden administration has suspended federal funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) after the lab failed to provide documents about safety and security measures, according to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The funding cut follows reports of leaked emails and Slack conversations in which Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the WIV, though he had previously denied this in Senate testimony.

The leaked correspondence also revealed that Fauci colluded with the authors of “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” (“Proximal Origin”), a scientific article that concluded SARS-CoV-2 was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

An HHS spokesperson told CNN the suspension of funding “aims to ensure that WIV does not receive another dollar of federal funding. … The move was undertaken due to WIV’s failure to provide documentation on WIV’s research requested by NIH related to concerns that WIV violated NIH’s biosafety protocols.”

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Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender, “The Biden administration appears to be grandstanding and is not sincere about shutting down dangerous bat coronavirus research.”

Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a longtime critic of gain-of-function research, said the Biden administration’s decision “is a step forward toward acknowledging that COVID-19 likely originated from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research at WIV and toward taking steps toward preventing a future lab-generated pandemic.”

However, he said, the step is still “insufficient.”

Ebright also criticized the Biden administration for failing to hold Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins accountable for funding gain-of-function research at WIV in violation of a federal moratorium (2014-2106) and in violation of the requirement for HHS-level risk-benefit assessment in 2017-2019 — and then “lying about it.”

According to Bloomberg News, the WIV received more than $1.4 million in federal awards, including through subgrants from the NIH, since 2014. This included $826,277 to the WIV for controversial bat coronavirus research by the NIAID, which until December 2022, was led by Fauci.

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NIAID gave nine China-related grants to EcoHealth Alliance to research coronavirus emergence in bats and was the NIH’s top issuer of grants to the Wuhan lab.

“This is a classic Nixonian limited hangout by the Biden administration. COVID-19 is an offensive biological warfare weapon with gain-of-function properties that leaked out of the Wuhan BSL4 that was developed in cooperation with the University of North Carolina BSL3.”

“That project should have never been funded by NIAID, NIH, and USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] in the first place,” Boyle said, adding that “there should be no cooperation” between U.S. government agencies, scientific and educational institutions, companies and nationals with “Chinese biowarriors at the Wuhan BSL4.”

Such alliances would only serve to provide China “with even more deadly instruments of biological warfare than COVID-19,” such as a “gain-of-function/MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome] bioweapon with an over 33% lethality rate.”