President Trump has announced that he will stop funding to the Wuhan lab that is currently being investigated for spawning the coronavirus.
While the Chinese government has claimed that the novel coronavirus began from a meat market, many are questioning the communist government’s official account.
The U.S. National Institutione of Health (NIH) provided the Chinese lab $3.7 million in funding to do research on coronavirus, performing experiments on bats.
It is reported that the Chinese lab was experimenting on bats.
However, sequencing of the COVID-19 genome has revealed that the bats that spawned the novel coronavirus come from Yunnan, China, not Wuhan, China.
Yunnan is 1,000 miles away, which has led many to believe that scientists may have transported the bats to the lab for the experiments.
Regardless, the situation is currently under investigation, and President Trump has pledged to stop NIH funding to the Chinese lab.
The funding began under the Obama administration.
More details on this developing story below:
Though scientists and researchers continue to learn more about the novel coronavirus, there is still a lot of information that we do not know.
Learning about the virus has been challenging from the getgo, especially since China banned researchers and journalists from entering the country.
China's early claims were later proven wrong, such as the initial claim that human-to-human transmission was impossible.
Now, there are some U.S. intelligence officials who are investigation claims that the virus leaked out of the Wuhan lab.
Whether or not those investigations are resolved anytime soon, President Trump has said he will stop the Obama-era funding to the lab.
The Daily Caller has more details on Trump's promise to end the grant:
“The Obama administration gave them a grant of $3.7 million. I’ve been hearing about that. We’ve instructed that if any grants are going to that area, we are looking at it literally about an hour ago and also early in the morning,” Trump said. (RELATED: Tucker Carlson: ‘China Continues To Threaten The Rest Of Us With Wet Markets’)
“We will end the grant very quickly. It was granted quite a while ago. They were granted a substantial amount of money. We are going to look at it and take a look. But I understand it was a number of years ago. When did you hear the grant was made?”
The reporter informed the president that the funding was from 2015.
Trump noted the date and asked, “2015. Who was president then? I wonder.”
President Trump isn't the only leader questioning the decision to provide a taxpayer grant to research labs in Wuhan.
Representative Matt Gaetz appeared on Fox News to raise concerns over the $3.7 million grant sent to China:
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., called on Health & Human Services Secretary Alex Azar Tuesday to cease funding a research grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, telling "Tucker Carlson Tonight" the action could be accomplished "with the stroke of a pen."
"I'm against funding Chinese research in our country, but I'm sure against funding it in China," Gaetz said. "The NIH [National Institutes of Health] gives a $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology [and] they then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers and following that, coronavirus erupts in Wuhan."
The Mail on Sunday newspaper in the U.K. reported over the weekend that the Wuhan institute "undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away ... funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US [sic] government."
The paper also reported that the research results were published in November 2017, but the NIH "continues to license the laboratory to receive American money for experiments."
The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a massive toll on human life around the world.
The shutdowns to prevent even more deaths has created an equally devastating economic toll.
If the COVID-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, then the world deserves to know and the funding deserves to come under scrutiny.
The sequencing of the virus genome first raised speculation, but government officials are now investigating whether or not the virus escaped from a Chinese lab.
It was revealed that 13 of the first 41 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 had no contact with the animal market whatsover.
This indicates that the market was not the only source or origin of the virus.
According to the Daily Mail, many U.S. biosecurity experts such as Professor Richard Ebright don't believe that the virus was created in a lab, but think it's possible it escaped from a lab where it was being analyzed:
American biosecurity expert Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University's Waksman Institute of Microbiology, New Jersey, said that while the evidence suggests COVID-19 was not created in one of the Wuhan laboratories, it could easily have escaped from there while it was being analyzed.
Prof Ebright said he has seen evidence that scientists at the Centre for Disease Control and the Institute of Virology studied the viruses with only 'level 2' security – rather than the recommended level 4 – which 'provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers'.
He added: 'Virus collection, culture, isolation, or animal infection would pose a substantial risk of infection of a lab worker, and from the lab worker then the public.'
He concluded that the evidence left 'a basis to rule out [that coronavirus is] a lab construct, but no basis to rule out a lab accident'.
Results of the U.S-funded research at the Wuhan Institute were published in November 2017 under the heading: 'Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.'
The exercise was summarized as: 'Bats in a cave in Yunnan, China were captured and sampled for coronaviruses used for lab experiments.
'All sampling procedures were performed by veterinarians with approval from the Animal Ethics Committee of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
'Bat samplings were conducted ten times from April 2011 to October 2015 at different seasons in their natural habitat at a single location (cave) in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China. Bats were trapped and faecal swab samples were collected.'
Another study, published in April 2018, was titled 'fatal swine acute diarrhoea syndrome caused by an HKU2-related coronavirus of bat origin' and described the research as such: 'Following a 2016 bat-related coronavirus outbreak on Chinese pig farms, bats were captured in a cave and samples were taken.
Experimenters grew the virus in a lab and injected it into three-day-old piglets.
Intestinal samples from sick piglets were ground up and fed to other piglets as well.
The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 108,000 people and infected over 1.7 million worldwide.'
If the COVID-19 pandemic truly was the result of leaking out of a Chinese lab, then the world deserves to know.
Countless human lives have been lost and economic foundations have been thrown into jeopardy.
Some U.S. Representatives have even suggested that China should forgive U.S. debt if this is the case.
Time and honest investigations will reveal the truth.
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