New documents show that the United States Agency for International Development reportedly sent thousands of viral samples to a lab in Wuhan, China, during the course of a decade-long program, despite no formal deal with the laboratory.
The evidence was first reported on by the Daily Caller News Foundation, based on internal documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The documents show how the USAID funded the “exportation of 11,000 samples from Yunnan Province, where some of the closest relatives of the COVID-19 virus circulate, to Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic, with no apparent plan for ensuring the samples were not misdirected to bioweapons and remained accessible to the U.S. government,” the article read.
“A $210 million USAID public health program called PREDICT, steered by the University of California-Davis, collected viral samples in countries throughout the globe but lacked long-term storage when funding dried up, according to rudimentary plans in 2019,” the story continued.
The “lab” referenced in the documents refers to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, commonly alleged to be the origin point of COVID-19.
“One of the closest known relatives of the COVID virus is among the viruses sampled with USAID funding,” DCNF reported.
“Investigations involving USAID’s former funding of global health awards remain active and ongoing,” a senior State Department official said in a statement to the news outlet.
The official added, “The American people can rest assured knowing that under the Trump administration, we will not be funding these controversial programs.”
The news comes on the heels of President Donald Trump’s campaign to slash USAID funding and close the agency due to allegations of fraud, misuse, and potential nepotism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized the agency in a statement earlier this month.
Has USAID done more harm than good over the last decade?
“Beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War,” he wrote.
“Development objectives have rarely been met, instability has often worsened, and anti-American sentiment has only grown … countries that benefit the most from our generosity usually fail to reciprocate.”
The two supervising scientists in charge of the samples were Ben Hu, a virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Peter Daszak, who in January was barred from receiving federal funding by Health and Human Services for five years.
Daszak “lacks the present responsibility” to participate in government-funded programs, the letter from HHS read.
Sloppiness on the part of those in charge of the program placed the U.S. — and the the world — in an awkward and potentially dangerous situation. And it all could have been avoided if the terms of their contract had the proper safeguards built in.
“The USAID $210 million contract for PREDICT should have included contractual terms that required all samples, or at least copies of all samples, be transferred to and stored by a U.S. government facility,” Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright told the DCNF.
“The PREDICT grift did none of this.”
Despite the fact that many of the viruses stored at the lab in Wuhan were reportedly sampled with United States funding, they’re still not available to U.S. government agencies investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Did these mistakes — and omissions — lead to bad actors unleashing a bio-weapon upon the world stage? Why weren’t obvious precautions taken to avoid such a contingency? Would taxpayers approve of unregulated viral research programs, in China, of all places?
This is yet another example of USAID money being used for something that was not only a waste of resources, but could have a much deeper and nefarious level to it, given the content of these documents.
Either way, these types of mistakes can plunge the entire globe into darkness, and a catastrophic Pandora’s box will be opened — courtesy of our own tax dollars.
That is, unless we learn from our mistakes, continue investigating similar cases, and shut down any funding or projects that aren’t heavily regulated, and that prove — without question — the risks are well worth the rewards.
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