The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has come under scrutiny for reportedly sending a substantial number of viral samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a facility with connections to the Chinese military.
Over a decade-long initiative, USAID is said to have dispatched 11,000 viral samples to this Chinese lab, despite lacking a formal agreement with the institution, as revealed by documents obtained by the Daily Caller.
According to Breitbart, these viral samples were transported from China's Yunnan province to Wuhan, the city that became synonymous with the outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. The exportation was funded by USAID, which seemingly neglected to establish measures to prevent the samples from being weaponized or to ensure their accessibility to the U.S. government.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, known for its inadequate biosafety practices, maintains links to the Chinese Communist Party's military arm, the People's Liberation Army.
The PREDICT program, a $210 million USAID initiative, was led by the University of California-Davis and aimed at collecting virus samples globally. However, it failed to secure a long-term storage solution for these samples once funding ended. Among the samples sent to Wuhan was one closely related to the coronavirus that caused the global pandemic in 2020, as noted by the Daily Caller.
A senior State Department official emphasized, "Investigations involving USAIDs former funding of global health awards remain active and ongoing. The American people can rest assured knowing that under the Trump Administration we will not be funding these controversial programs." This statement underscores the administration's commitment to scrutinizing and potentially halting such contentious initiatives.
Last week, USAID was finally closed after President Donald Trumps Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) identified numerous instances of waste, fraud, and misuse of taxpayer funds. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized the agency, stating, "Beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War. Development objectives have rarely been met, instability has often worsened, and anti-American sentiment has only grown."
Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright also weighed in, arguing that USAID's $210 million should have mandated that all samples, or at least copies, be stored in a U.S. government facility. "The PREDICT grift did none of this," Ebright asserted, highlighting a significant oversight in the program's execution.
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