Free Republic

US taxpayer money was used to experiment with coronaviruses from the Chinese lab thought to be the source of the Covid pandemic more than a year before the global outbreak, an investigation has found. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), under Dr Anthony Fauci's leadership, infected 12 Egyptian fruit bats with a 'SARS-like' virus called WIV1 at a lab in Montana in 2018. The WIV1-coronavirus was shipped from the Wuhan lab the FBI believes caused the Covid pandemic and was tested on bats acquired from a 'roadside' Maryland zoo. ... Eight novel viruses, including one belonging to the same family...

Hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars went to recipients in China and Russia in recent years without being properly tracked by the federal government, including a grant that enabled a state-run Russian lab to test cats on treadmills, according to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). Ernst and her staff investigators, working with auditors at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Research Service, as well as two nonprofit Washington watchdogs—Open The Books (OTB) and the White Coat Waste Project (WCWP)—discovered dozens of other grants that weren’t counted on the federal government’s USASpending.gov internet database.While the total value of the...

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is seeking answers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Dr. Anthony Fauci about funding that was provided for experiments on beagle puppies. Twenty-four members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of NIH. The letter was prompted by the nonprofit group White Coat Waste which obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act that appear to show NIAID spent $1.68 million in taxpayer money for experiments on beagle puppies in a lab in Tunisia. Those...

The Chinese laboratory at the center of scrutiny over a potential coronavirus leak has been using U.S. government money to carry out research on bats from the caves which scientists believe are the original source of the deadly outbreak. The Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan which were funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government. Sequencing of the COVID-19 genome has traced it back to bats found in Yunnan caves but it was first thought to have transferred to humans at an animal market in Wuhan....