Free Republic

The U.S government is again funding gain-of-function (GoF) research with Chinese scientists to make a dangerous virus even more potent. This time it is with birds not bats. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) gave $1 million to fund risky research on bird flu viruses to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China; the USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athena, Georgia and the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute in Scotland.1

“Since the earliest days of the pandemic there were a small number of leading scientists who took it upon themselves to enforce this kind of orthodoxy,” said Jamie Metzl, adviser to the World Health Organisation (WHO) on human genome editing and senior fellow with the Atlantic Council think tank. “We were ostracised and called conspiracy theorists,” he added. Metzl said that a statement in The Lancet in February 2020, signed by 27 prominent scientists, was “a form of scientific thuggery”. It strongly condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was organised by Peter Daszak,...

A report in Vanity Fair details actions by some members of the U.S. State Department to block efforts to investigate the origins of the coronavirus because the inquiry could open “a can of worms.” An internal memo sent to department heads by Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, warned “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19.” The “can of worms” in question was the extensive funding by the U.S. government into the Wuhan Virology Lab’s “gain-of-function” virus research. It’s unclear whether DiNanno was concerned that an...