Lawmakers are concerned about why American tax money is funding a Chinese military lab to make bird flu viruses more harmful to humans. 18 Congress members are asking the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to explain this project, reported DailyMail.com.
Congress members concerned over US funding of Chinese bird flu research, highlight national security and public health risks
In a strongly worded letter to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack last week, the bipartisan group expressed their worries. They wrote: “This research, funded by American taxpayers, could potentially generate dangerous new lab-created virus strains that threaten our national security and public health.”
This collaboration is a $1 million venture between the USDA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This institution oversees the Wuhan lab, which has been at the center of theories regarding the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.
For the past two years, the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, also known as bird flu, has been spreading among wild migratory birds, often affecting poultry farms as well.
However, what’s particularly worrying for scientists and public health experts is the recent finding of the virus in dairy cows and the subsequent infection of a worker on a dairy farm. This marks only the second documented case of a person in the United States contracting H5N1, as mentioned in a report by the Johns Hopkins University.
According to the USDA, the virus has now been detected in 16 herds across six states. This development is raising concerns about the potential for further transmission to humans.
US government funds controversial Avian Influenza Research in China
In February, it came to light that the US government was providing $1 million to China for research to enhance the contagiousness of ‘highly pathogenic avian influenza’ to mammals using gain-of-function techniques. The collaboration, which began in April 2021, said to receive funding until March 2026. The USDA had previously stated that the project was applied for in 2019 and approved in 2020, Dailymail reported.
The research involves infecting ducks and geese with various virus strains to increase their infectivity and examining the viruses’ potential to transmit to mammalian hosts. This information was obtained from research documents by the watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, exclusively shared with this website.
The project is funded by the USDA, with key collaborators including the USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute, which has ties to the Wuhan lab.
