More than three years after the U.S. stopped sending taxpayer dollars to fund coronavirus experiments on bats in China, 27 Chinese laboratories – including some run by the Chinese Communist Party – are still eligible for U.S. government funding for research on animals, according to a new review of Congressional Research Service data provided to Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst.
The ongoing debate over COVID’s origins, including U.S. intelligence agencies’ belief that the virus likely or could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has spurred far more Washington scrutiny of U.S. funding of various research programs in China and Russia. Over the last year, Congress has broadened the effort, working to limit or altogether end U.S. financial support for research projects in all countries regarded as foreign adversaries.
In late May, an analysis by Ernst and the watchdog group Open the Books found that the American research institutes had sent Chinese and Russian entities at least $1.3 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars over five years for various programs, including several at the Wuhan lab, as well as experiments forcing cats to run on treadmills in Russia and a gender-equality New Yorker cartoon exhibition in Beijing.
The CRS data showed that $490 million in U.S. grants and contracts were paid to Chinese entities, while another $780 million went to Russian entities. Before Ernst’s efforts, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the U.S. sent just $48 million to Chinese entities over the five-year period examined, from 2017 to 2021.
Another outside group, the White Coat Waste Project, which seeks to end government-funded animal experiments and first exposed the U.S. financing of the coronavirus research in Wuhan, has since reviewed all the U.S.-funded research programs over that five-year period.
A White Coat Waste review of the CRS data, released to RealClearPolitics this week, found that the University of Illinois spent $123,552 of a $1.6 million NIH grant on a Kremlin-linked project at a Russian fur farm that killed foxes, and that the University of Southern California channeled $576,453 of a $1.9 million NIH grant to China’s Peking University for deadly experiments on mice.
It also showed that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Seattle-based Allen Institute sent $993,000 of a $64.7 million NIH grant to Wuhan’s Huazhong University of Science and Technology for a deadly experiment on baby mice. In addition, Emory University shipped $515,418 of a $38.6 million Health and Human Services contract to the CCP-linked Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, which houses one of China’s dangerous high-containment bio-agent labs.
