Dr. Fauci Backed $7.4M Funding for Controversial Wuhan Lab Studying Coronavirus
Funding for the lab was shut down by The National Institutes of Health last week
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Dr. Anthony Fauci had previously backed funding for the Wuhan laboratory in China, which was studying the coronavirus in bats, according to reports.
The news comes a week after reports that Barack Obama's National Institutes of Health (NIH) sent a $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2015.
Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases gave $7.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab, which has now put into question the origin of COVID-19, Newsweek reported.
The funding for the lab was shut down by The National Institutes of Health last week.
In a letter obtained by Politico, a deputy director at the agency wrote:
“At this time, NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities."
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Officials in the Trump administration are now becoming increasingly confident that the original site of the virus is the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab.
In January 2018, embassy officials warned about inadequate safety in the lab, according to Fox News.
But the NIH defended its funding in a statement:
“Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these represent a significant threat to public health and biosecurity in the US and globally,” the statement read.
“Scientific research indicates that there is no evidence that suggests the virus was created in a laboratory.”
President Donald Trump's legal counsel, Rudy Giuliani, accused the Obama administration of funding China's Wuhan laboratory in 2014, the location where the deadly coronavirus outbreak allegedly originated.
Rudy Giuliani: ‘Fauci Gave $3.7 Million to Wuhan Laboratory’ in 2014
— Neon Nettle (@NeonNettle) April 27, 2020
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“You could say [China’s experimenting] … was for the purpose of weaponizing it,” Giuliani told host John Catsimatidis.
“Back in 2014, the Obama administration prohibited the U.S. from giving money to any laboratory, including in the U.S., that was fooling around with these viruses," he added.
"Prohibited! Despite that, Dr. Fauci gave $3.7 million to the Wuhan laboratory. And then even after the State Department issued reports about how unsafe that laboratory was, and how suspicious they were in the way they were developing a virus that could be transmitted to humans, we never pulled that money," he argued.
U.S. officials reportedly uncovered evidence the coronavirus originated in the same Wuhan lab, and China's ruling Communist Party blamed wet markets for covering it up.
The sequencing of the coronavirus genome has traced the virus back to bats found in Yunnan caves, according to PJ Media.
The Wuhan Institute was experimenting on bats from the area already known to be the source of COVID-19.
