Senate Defunding Wuhan Research Already Defunded in 2020

Be aware, this post is choppy. My first point is when was the the Wuhan project defunded. The second point asks why are four Senators then passing bills to defund a project already defunded? And finally I am giving some history such as this research not being gain-of-function. This is Republicans being bad actors and deceiving the public.

I am not sure if you remember my post called the Wuhan Readings from the Fauci Files? In it you will see a series of articles taken from March/April 2020 time frame. Several senators are attempting to pass bills to defund research being done in China which White Coast Waste Project is claiming to have discovered in 2021. Except it was defunded in 2020. It appears to be another Republican led attempt to confuse voters into thinking the Research still going on.

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In the beginning of this post you will find articles talking about the Wuhan labs, stopping the research, and defunding its activities in 2020.

• The Newsweek article was written in April 2020. It discusses the stopping of the project and suspension of funding in 2014 and its restart in 2019.

• Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, reported that a visiting U.S. delegation warned about safety issues at the institute in 2018. April 19 NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research Mike Lauer directed EcoHealth Alliance to stop all payments to WIV.

• NPR Trump continued that erroneous depiction, answering, “I understand it was a number of years ago, right?”

Then he added, “2015? Who was president then, I wonder.”I

n fact, while the first grant for the project was indeed given in 2015 (for $3.25 million over five years, of which nearly $3.1 million was ultimately disbursed), the $3.7 million was approved last year (2019) as a five-year renewal.

Also, only about 10% of the grant — about $76,000 per year — was slated for the Wuhan Institute.

Hmmmm, I wonder who was the Pres then?

• A grant to a New York nonprofit aimed at detecting and preventing future outbreaks of coronaviruses from bats has been canceled by the National Institutes of Health, Politico reports, apparently at the direction of President Donald Trump because the research involved the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The virology institute has become a focal point for the idea that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the laboratory and caused the current COVID-19 pandemic, a scenario experts say is not supported by evidence. Instead, virologists The Scientist has spoken to say the virus most likely jumped from infected animals to humans.

• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended U.S. funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a program “to protect American people from labs that aren’t up to standard” in a Fox and Friends interview on Wednesday.

• The National Institutes of Health, which oversees the NIAID, shut down all funding to the lab last week. April 29, 2020

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Fast forward to May 26, 2021.

Senate Votes to Defund Wuhan, Changing America, Christian Spencer, May 26. 2021

White Coat Waste Project claims it was the first to point out that U.S. taxpayers fund were being used to fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology.,

There are any number of articles (above) on this post as well as another which detail the shutdown (taxpayer funding) in 2020 a year earlier than White Coat reports.

Two amendments which were passed by the Senate defund the Wuhan Institute and gain-of-function experimentation. Tis is all show and no substance. The project was defunded in 2020.

What we have here are three of the more nuttier Senators [Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)]stirring the pot with bills 1507 and 2003 on something which was already defunded in 2020.

A bit of pot stirring here in an attempt to mislead the public.

I am not sure why the two amendments were needed as all work in Wuhan was shut down a year earlier as note. It was also specified and declared this was not “Gain of Function” research.

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Some Other History

One of the US scientists who collaborated on the 2015 research on bat viruses with the Wuhan institute, Dr Ralph Baric from the University of North Carolina, gave a detailed statement to the Washington Post.

He said the work they did was reviewed by both the NIH and the university’s own biosafety committee “for potential of gain-of-function research and were deemed not to be gain-of-function”.

Coronavirus: Was US money used to fund risky research in China? – BBC News

Coming out of the Ebola Epidemic, a task force was created under the Obama administration to be the lead in the reaction to a pandemic such as Covid.

An anti-science administration

On the morning of Jan. 22, 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration, the PCAST website was taken down and all of its reports vanished from the White House website (though they can be found in the Obama White House archives).

For two years, the directorship of OSTP was vacant, the longest in its history. The staff was reduced by two-thirds. The current director, Kelvin Droegemeier, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma whose appointment was confirmed by the Senate on Jan. 2, 2019, isn’t an assistant to the president and is unable to directly communicate with the president.

The art of the pandemic: How Trump walked the U.S. into the Covid-19 era (statnews.com)

Under Obama

Global PCAST staffing created and directorship created under after Obama and his administration created a plan on how to react to Ebola or other pandemics.

In June 2009, the recently inaugurated Obama had given his PCAST advisors their first assignment: What does the president need to do to prepare for an influenza pandemic? Five weeks later, on Aug. 7, they gave him their answers at a meeting in the White House’s State Dining Room.

The art of the pandemic: How Trump walked the U.S. into the Covid-19 era (statnews.com)

The difference? A take down by the Trump administration from 47 people to 14 with Bolton piloting the dismantling of the plan put in place by Obama, a Black President. Trump dismantled much of what Obama put in place. A number of those people were based in Wuhan. The last person left Wuhan months before the pandemic broke out in Wuhan.

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According to the White Coat Waste Project, 77 percent of U.S. taxpayers want an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

I would like to see the investigation also and along the lines of what I have pointed out in my detail above. What is the last thing many people remember? Whatever is told to them whether true or not. Republican are investing in this hoping people remember just this and not what I have explained.