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According to a leader in the State Department’s investigation into the origin of COVID-19, the U.S. federal government funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virginology in 2015, when China reduced its cooperation with France in building and operating the lab. Should have stopped. Trump administration.
In 2015, French intelligence officials warned the U.S. Department of State and its foreign ministry that China was reducing the cooperation agreed at the institute, and of the former State Department, now a senior researcher at the Hudson Institute think tank. David Asher told Daily Caller News the Foundation.
By 2017, French had been “kicked out” of the lab, stopped working, and French officials warned the State Department that they were seriously concerned about China’s motives, Asher said.
The State Department claimed in January 2021 at the end of the Trump administration that the Wuhan Institute of Veterans Affairs had been engaged in confidential investigations on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.
The Department of State did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Caller News Foundation.
China said Thursday that it would not allow the World Health Organization (WHO) to further inspect the lab. China has blocked WHO from accessing important records of the institute.
“The Chinese basically pulled the state into the honeypot business to gain access to US technology, knowledge, and material support. Classic. Like they did in all sectors.” Asher said.
According to USAID, between October 2009 and May 2019, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) provided $ 1.1 million to the US-based EcoHealth Alliance for a sub-contract with the Wuhan Institute of Virginology. did. According to New York Magazine, the Ecohealth Alliance was also funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense, which was commissioned by the Wuhan Institute of Veterans Affairs. A total of $ 600,000 in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the EcoHealth Alliance between 2014 and 2019 was entrusted to the Wuhan Institute of Virginology.
When France warned the State Department in 2015, NIH, the Pentagon, and USAID should have stopped sending US federal funds to the Wuhan Institute, Asher said.
“The State Department officials responsible for non-proliferation should have stopped all cooperation,” he added.
The Wuhan Institute of Virginology, which is at the center of speculation that COVID-19 may have originated from a laboratory accident, was launched in 2004 as a joint project between France and China.
France provided much of the lab design, biosafety training, and its technology.
According to the State Department’s Cable in April 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Veterans Affairs was envisioned as an open and transparent laboratory that would serve the global scientific community in potential pandemic research. China.
Top French politicians supported cooperation, but French security and defense experts did not, the French newspaper Le Figaro reported.
According to Le Figaro, national security officials do not want to share confidential technology with oppressive nations that are not allies, and the institute may one day turn into a “biological arsenal.” I was afraid of it.
As early as 2009, the U.S. Department of State, under former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, expressed concern about the Wuhan Institute of Veterans Affairs, and China “scrutinized the next foreign researcher” to become a biological weapons nation. Asked what France knows about plans to avoid technology transfer. Concerns about spreading, according to an email released by WikiLeaks.
The project took more than a decade to complete, and in February 2017, senior French and Chinese officials held a ceremony to commemorate the lab’s certification.
French Prime Minister Bernard Kazneuve at the time said he was celebrating the scientific cooperation between France and China at the time.
To support projects in China and France, France will provide China with its technical expertise to help continuously improve the quality and safety of the institute, Kazneuve added.
He also said he would budget € 1 million a year over five years.
It will fund about 50 French scientists to help train Chinese lab workers, director of Inserm, a French public research organization that helped establish the Wuhan Institute Told the French magazine Science & Sante in May 2017.
However, according to Le Figaro, the institute gradually took full control of French scientists who were to oversee the work of Chinese researchers in Wuhan, in accordance with the agreement between Paris and Beijing. I escaped. The newspaper reported that 50 French researchers who had been working in the lab for five years never left.
In January 2018, State Department Cable warned that there was a shortage of highly trained technicians to operate the lab with cables originally reported by The Washington Post.
According to Asher, US officials who visited the institute and issued a warning via cable were not allowed to return because they had “too many questions.”
Eleanor Bertow
from Daily Caller News Foundation
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