In a House hearing on Wednesday, the acting head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) wouldn’t commit to saying that President Biden’s budget request would not include funding for research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — the lab that allegedly conducted research on the coronavirus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
Acting OMB Director Shalanda Young was asked about the budget by House Budget Committee Ranking Member Jason Smith (R-Mo.) about the link between U.S. dollars and the Wuhan lab, from where it is suspected the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated. Smith outlined China’s negligence regarding COVID-19 and the economic harm done to America, including a $2 trillion drop in GDP and massive unemployment, as well as lives tragically lost to the disease.
“What was noticeably absent from your budget was any plans to hold China accountable for its role in spreading COVID-19,” Smith observed. He asked Young about the administration’s plans to seek retribution and recoup American taxpayer dollars.
In response, Young only reminded Smith that the president ordered the intelligence community to undertake a 90-day review of COVID-19 origins.
Smith went on to note that over the past few weeks, it has become increasingly evident that COVID-19 came from a lab in Wuhan, China.
“What concerns me … is that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recently publicized emails show a clear link between American taxpayer dollars and labs that outsourced research outside of the United States,” Smith said, before asking Young what she, as an acting director of OMB, was doing to get to the bottom of the this clear link.
Young pointed Smith back to the ongoing intelligence investigation, saying that was an appropriate place to look.
Smith then asked, “Can you commit that Americans’ dollars will never be used to fund such research going forward from this budget?” Young answered, “I started my career at NIH [National Institute of Health]. I would never make that commitment as someone who believes we need to be led by science and we certainly need to wait for that review before we jump to conclusions.”
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U.S. funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has come under close scrutiny in recent weeks as a growing faction of experts, a newly-seen intelligence reports and leaked e-mails among top doctors, all suggest the lab could have engineered the virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci told a House Appropriations subcommittee last month that the NIH “modest” funding commitment to the Wuhan lab was “about $600,000 over a period of five years.”
However, internal NIH e-mails obtained last week by the conservative group Judicial Watch indicate that the lab actually received approximately $750,000 in grant money over an initial five-year period, with another $750,000 allocated for a subsequent six-year period.
The money was funneled to the lab via the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance before funding was abruptly cut in April 2020.
In total, EcoHealth was to receive about $7.4 million over more than a decade from NIH. The NIH e-mails indicate the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of many sites across Asia where research was carried out.
Fauci vehemently denied that the funds went to gain-of-function (GoF) research, which can be used to find ways to weaponize a virus to make it more lethal and transmissible, even though he previously advocated for such research himself.
Fauci admitted, however, that he can’t “guarantee” that the funds didn’t go to gain-of-function research. He noted that Chinese scientists he knew were “trustworthy,” and that he would expect that “they would abide by the conditions of the grant.”
Investigative journalist Ben Swann found the NIH/NIAID has funded GoF research to the tune of at least $41.7 million. Up until 2014, this research was conducted by Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina. In 2014, the U.S. government issued a moratorium on federal GoF research funding due to safety, ethical, and moral concerns raised within the scientific community.
It was at this point that funding for GoF research started being funneled through the EcoHealth Alliance to the WIV. Swann says there are documents proving that Fauci lied to Congress, including a paper titled “SARS-Like WIV1-CoV Poised for Human Emergence,” that specifies that the research was supported by the NIAID under the grant awards U19AI109761 and U19AI107810, which together total $41.7 million. The paper was described as “gain-of-function” by 200 scientists who raised ethical concerns about it.
Now, the OMB acting director won’t rule out that Americans’ money won’t be sent to Wuahn or any other lab that may be weaponizing another virus “in the name of science” and “for the common good.”
