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April 29, 2020

TRUMP CANCELS FUNDING OF US/CHINA RESEARCH MAKING EPIDEMIC VIRUSES

 

By Peter R. Breggin MD and Ginger Breggin

Of all the technologies we have given to China, how to make highly infectious and lethal viruses from bat viruses may be the most dangerous. Yesterday the press made known that President Trump was cancelling all funding of these collaborations between the US and China in the creating of lethal epidemic viruses (see here and here). 

On April 15, 2020, we published a blog about this US/China collaboration in a blog describing how “In 2015, American researchers and Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers collaborated to transform an animal coronavirus into one that can attack humans.” We followed up immediately with a video describing how the US and China joined forces to create a SARS-CoV virus from bats with clinical effects indistinguishable from the current SARS-CoV-2 bat virus that has created the current pandemic. Both reports are available on our Coronavirus Research Center. We alerted authorities, the media and the public to these shocking security breaches. Stopping this research was a major project for us, and as we recently learned, for other groups as well.

Anthony Fauci, Director of NIH’s Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the key federal official in enabling and funding this horrendous research. In 2015, independent researchers expressed their concern about this federally funded research creating potent laboratory viruses, which broke the government’s own rules prohibiting the laboratory enhancement of viral virulence. Fauci’s institute- NIAID- reviewed the collaborative US/Chinese studies and allowed them to go on—until Trump stopped them.

The researchers justified their efforts as leading to better methods of fighting epidemic viruses. This self-defense motive might have been the purpose for the naïve US researchers, but Wuhan Institute researchers are part of China’s military establishment and it is absurd to think the Chinese did not have their eyes on developing biological weapons.

We do not know with certainty whether the pandemic virus leaked from Wuhan Institute, but it seems probable. We also do not know—there are contradictory reports—if it was artificially created by tweaking the bat virus. However, as we predicted, we have now found that the same Chinese Wuhan researchers with whom the US shared research efforts have, on their own, gone ahead to continue this research in creating dangerous viruses from bats. This research from 2016 and 2017 can also be found on our Coronavirus Research Center. The efforts of the Chinese to create epidemic virus makes the accidental release of SARS-CoV-2 highly likely and adds to concerns that it was manmade.

We thank President Trump for so quickly seeing the folly and dangers of helping Chinese researchers develop dangerous bat viruses, research which began under the previous administration.

 

Coronavirus Resource Center