by Frank Holmes, reporter
The coronavirus may have something in common with nearly everything else in the United States: It may have been funded by U.S. taxpayers and made in China.
New evidence shows that former President Barack Obama doled out millions of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars to the Wuhan lab many insiders blame for sparking the global pandemic—and the funding may have produced the deadly virus.
The National Institutes of Health handed the Chinese biomedical lab a total of $7.1 million to perform coronavirus experiments on animals.
That includes a $3.7 million NIH grant to test the coronavirus in bats.
That explosive revelation was buried in Obama-era grant papers uncovered by investigators with the White Coat Waste Project.
President Donald Trump blew the whistle on his predecessor at his daily briefing earlier this month.
“The Obama administration gave them a grant of $3.7 million,” Trump confirmed. Obama officials sent the Wuhan lab “quite a substantial amount of money.”
The grant dated back to 2015.
“Who was president, then, I wonder?” Trump asked, pinning the blame squarely on his predecessor.
Trump said that if the lab is still collecting on grants approved during the Obama presidency, “we will end that grant very quickly.”
Several officials have let it be known that the official Chinese cover story that the Wuhan virus originated in a wet market doesn’t hold water.
The Wuhan market doesn’t even sell the kind of bat allegedly eaten by patient zero.
And 13 of the first 41 cases in China had no dealings with the wet market at all.
Instead, U.S. officials say, the COVID-19 outbreak probably began when someone in the Wuhan lab got infected from an experiment, then spread the deadly condition on to others.
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WIV brags that it has 1,500 of the “most dangerous pathogens” in the world.
It published the results of the Obama-funded research in November 2017 under the title: “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.”
It admitted that during the experiment, “Bats were trapped and fecal swab samples were collected.”
U.S. whistleblowers at the highest levels say the WIV’s reckless safety procedures mean it’s been playing with fire.
The Chinese lab announced it had “level-4” security, the highest in the world.
But WIV performed the bat project at level-2, which gave “minimal protections against infections,” said biosecurity expert Richard Ebright of Rutgers University.
Biological experiments conducted under those conditions “would pose a substantial risk of infection of a lab worker, and from the lab worker then the public.”
U.S. diplomats who visited the Wuhan lab also sent two warnings to Washington about “inadequate safety” in the WIV’s lab, according to The Washington Post.
That’s exactly what happened, some U.S. officials believe — and U.S. taxpayers funded it.
“I’m disgusted to learn that for years the U.S. government has been funding dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute, which may have contributed to the global spread of coronavirus” with “virtually no oversight from U.S. authorities,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.
“It’s unnecessary and unacceptable for American taxpayers to fund these institutions, and it has to end now,” the congressman, who is one of President Trump’s closest allies in the House, added.
The Chinese government has tried to spread a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was an act of biological warfare—by the U.S. against China.
Others deflected the blame and said another lab, the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, performed the experiment that infected people.
WIV officials swear the virus had absolutely nothing to do with their lab.
The WIV’s deputy director told Scientific American that she’d gone through every record in the lab and not found any record that matched the current coronavirus.
“That really took a load off my mind,” said Shi Zhengli. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
But Americans aren’t buying it.
“There is zero doubt that the Chinese communist government has American blood on its hands,” said Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz. “The NIH must immediately stop deploying American tax dollars to China for this dangerous research.”
“The Chinese government must be held accountable for this crisis,” Sen. McSally said.
More than 56,000 Americans have already died from the Wuhan virus, and President Trump believes 70,000 U.S. citizens will lose their lives before it’s all said and done.
And it may all be thanks to a grant to a hazardous Chinese lab from Barack Obama, the most pro-China president in U.S. history.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”