E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

Why US outsourced bat virus research to Wuhan
Full story on Asia Times (at link) has active links and references all through the story. Go there if you want to dig deeper. David Goldman (major owner in Asia Times) told an ex-Slashdot moderator he stands by the author on this. (yes the author does have a history of supporting the CCP).
[AsiaTimes] US-funded $3.7 million project approved by Trump's Covid-19 guru Dr Anthony Fauci in 2015 after US ban imposed on 'monster-germ' research.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded bat-coronavirus (aka COVID19 or Chinese Plague)
...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men...
 research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to the tune of US$3.7 million, a recent article in the British newspaper Daily Mail revealed.

Back in October 2014, the US government had placed a federal moratorium on gain-of-function (GOF) research — altering natural pathogens to make them more deadly and infectious — as a result of rising fears about a possible pandemic caused by an accidental or deliberate release of these genetically engineered monster germs.

This was in part due to lab accidents at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in July 2014 that raised questions about biosafety at US high-containment labs.

At that time, the CDC had closed two labs and halted some biological shipments in the wake of several incidents in which highly pathogenic microbes were mishandled by US government laboratories: an accidental shipment of live anthrax, the discovery of forgotten live smallpox samples and a newly revealed incident in which a dangerous influenza strain was accidentally shipped from the CDC to another lab.

A CDC internal report described how scientists failed to follow proper procedures to ensure samples were inactivated before they left the lab, and also found "multiple other problems" with operating procedures in the anthrax lab.

As such in October 2014, because of public health concerns, the US government banned all federal funding on efforts to weaponize three viruses — influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

In the face of a moratorium in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci — the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and currently the leading doctor in the US Coronavirus Task Force — outsourced in 2015 the GOF research to China’s Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to continue receiving US government funding.

The Wuhan lab is now at the center of scrutiny for possibly releasing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and causing the global Covid-19 pandemic.

It is understandable that the Chinese lab likely struggled with safety issues given the fact US labs share similar problems, and indeed in January 2018 the US Embassy in Beijing sent cables warning about the safety of the Wuhan lab and asked for help.

Additionally, the embassy warned that researchers "showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus," meaning bat coronaviruses can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases.
Posted by: trailing wife 2020-04-23
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=569548