Stop funding China’s pathogen research

Despite COVID-19 inflicting over a million deaths, we nonetheless have no idea how the pandemic started. Thanks to the systematic destruction of proof by the Chinese Communist Party, we might by no means know for certain.

What we do know is that the People’s Liberation Army has made “achieving biological dominance” a excessive precedence and that a part of that dominance contains the flexibility to create pathogens which can be “more toxic, more contagious, and more resistant.” We additionally know the Wuhan lab from which COVID-19 might need escaped “has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military,” the U.S. State Department says.

We additionally know that Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance funneled federal taxpayer {dollars} to the Wuhan lab for research on coronaviruses. We know that our personal Defense Department funneled cash to pathogen research organizations in China. What we have no idea is how a lot cash the Pentagon gave to our adversary, China, for research on lethal pathogens, or who it went to. This is just unacceptable.

As a part of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) secured an modification directing the DoD Office of Inspector General to determine and report back to Congress all funds despatched to Chinese research organizations. Last week the inspector normal launched findings, figuring out seven grants to Chinese organizations for “research related to potential enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential.”

More troubling even than the findings was the inspector normal’s admission that “due to limitations in the DoD’s systems used to track grants,” the “full extent of DoD funds provided to Chinese research laboratories” for pathogen research “is unknown.”

Unknown! The Pentagon, charged with guaranteeing our nationwide safety, can’t even say how a lot of our cash it has given to our most harmful adversary for research that might finish all human life. The incompetence is astonishing, or can be if it weren’t so predictable.

“There is zero reason for taxpayers to be funding risky Chinese research that could be used against Americans,” Ernst mentioned in response to the inspector normal report. She is proposing laws that might require each penny despatched to Chinese organizations to be accounted for and publicly posted. This won’t go far sufficient. The case for a flat-out ban is robust.

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The Pentagon ought to research pathogens to guard us towards bioweapons created by our enemies. But that’s all of the extra motive we must always not conduct such research with adversaries, particularly China, which has a acknowledged objective of growing bioweapons to make use of towards us. It additionally has a report of by chance letting lethal viruses escape its laboratories. It has been confirmed that the lethal 2002 SARS outbreak (extreme acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus) additionally got here from a Chinese lab. 

We might by no means have the proof essential to show that COVID-19 originated within the Wuhan lab. But we do have sufficient to point out that taxpayers shouldn’t be funding the actions of that lab.