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Why on Earth are we AGAIN collaborating with China to manipulate viruses?
Bad: When Chinese scientists create a killer disease in a lab and allow it to wipe out millions.
Worse: When US taxpayers help pay for it.
Unconscionable: Doing it all again.
The US government hasn’t learned a thing: Disease-watchers are tracking the spread of H5N1 — bird or avian flu — across the globe, as it invades mammals for the first time, leaving beaches in South America littered with dead sea lions.
In the United States, 34 dairy cattle herds in nine states are infected.
Scientists are anxiously watching for any sign the virus is changing genetically to make human-to-human spread possible.
Against this backdrop, the US Department of Agriculture is collaborating with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the parent organization of the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the lab that likely concocted COVID.
The collaboration is manipulating strains of bird flu, making them deadlier to humans, and then infecting ducks and geese with them. What could go wrong?
In March, the Biden administration also stealthily extended the US-China Science and Technology Agreement for another six months, despite mounting opposition.
Two centuries ago, the scientist Louis Pasteur said, “Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity.”
A noble idea but too naïve for today’s world.
The United States must be guarded about supporting and sharing research with scientists controlled by enemy nations.
Unfortunately, we too often leave decisions about funding international collaborations to the scientists, who generally have a global mindset, making them more loyal to their colleagues than to their country.
Congress needs to take charge. --->READ MORE HERE
A House subcommittee investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic urged a criminal investigation of EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak ahead of a Wednesday hearing, releasing a trove of documents about the Manhattan-based nonprofit’s controversial virus experiments in Wuhan, China.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, released a 59-page report and interview transcripts with half a dozen National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials and scientists linked to EcoHealth’s research — including Daszak himself.
EcoHealth has received millions in federal grants to conduct research around the globe — including more than $4 million for an NIH project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
Beginning in 2014, the project conducted experiments on mice at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that modified novel bat coronaviruses and made them 10,000 times more infectious — but “failed to report” that fact to the NIH.
NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak — who was interviewed by the House COVID subcommittee — disclosed to Congress in 2021 that EcoHealth had violated the terms of its grant in the Wuhan lab, leading to the grant’s suspension.
The same day that Tabak made the disclosure, the NIH scrubbed its website of the agency’s longstanding definition of gain-of-function research, which enhances the transmissibility of viruses.
“We have found that EcoHealth was nearly two years late in submitting a routine progress report to NIH, that EcoHealth failed to report, as required, a potentially dangerous experiment conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that EcoHealth used taxpayer dollars to facilitate risky gain-of-function research, and that Dr. Daszak omitted a material fact regarding his access to unanalyzed virus samples and sequences at the WIV in his successful effort to have his grant reinstated by NIH,” Wenstrup said in his opening statement.
“Dr. Daszak has been less-than-cooperative with the select subcommittee, he has been slow to produce requested documents, and has regularly played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function research, even in his previous testimony,” he added. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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