THE DEBATE | OPINION

Why Would the US Have Funded the Controversial Wuhan Lab?
Reports about the connection between the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Wuhan Institute of Virology risk feeding conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19




Newsweek recently put out some surprising reports that the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) had funded the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The WIV is the level four research facility suspected by some of being a possible source for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has already been on record confirming and defending this funding, saying it was “to protect American people from labs that aren’t up to standard.”

According to Newsweek, funding for the WIV occurred in two phases. The first took place from 2014 to 2019, through a $3.7 million project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses. This work was largely led by Dr. Zhengli Shi, known to many as “batwoman” for her years investigating caves in search of new bat viruses. The second phase began shortly after, with another $3.7 million. Unlike the first, this project appears to have included work on “gain-of-function”: research that investigates how a virus can gain the ability to infect a new type of animal.

Anyone with a vague sense of current events would, understandably, be concerned that COVID-19 might have been produced through this research. The connections to the NIH would also be unsettling, offering the possibility that the U.S. government may be complicit, having unnecessarily “outsourced” dangerous research. Although strong denials by both Chinese and American officials and several pieces of scientific research have concluded COVID-19 is not man-made, the connection between the NIH and WIV still behooves critical examination. Why would the NIH want to fund the WIV to begin with?

The first, and perhaps most important reason, may be just as Pompeo said: to help bring Chinese labs up to higher safety standards. As a professor of cell biology at Dongseo University in South Korea and an ex-director of the Tan School of Genetics at Fudan University in China, I have had the opportunity to visit many science facilities across Asia. I can say with some authority that safety standards can, in many cases, fall short of what you would expect in the United States. Whether these shortcomings would necessarily apply to highly-sensitive environments like the WIV I cannot say, as my experiences are limited to academic contexts. Nevertheless, I must concede it is possible, especially in 2014, when the NIH funding began, that the WIV may have needed some help in establishing better safety protocols.

The need for outside help is by no means abnormal, as many countries in the process of establishing new science programs often need to invite outside experts to help build them. The department I am associated with at Dongseo University, for example, drew heavily on the expertise of German professors from the Technische Universität Berlin for building both curricula and research projects. No doubt the WIV would have needed similar assistance, especially early on in its development. A common method is to invite one’s old mentors and colleagues to help advise and monitor progress. With most Chinese scientists, including Dr. Shi, having received their degrees abroad, such invitations would, most likely, have focused on foreign experts, perhaps providing links to people associated with the NIH.







https://thediplomat.com/2020/05/why-would-the-us-have-funded-the-controversial-wuhan-lab/

US discovered coronavirus 2014, sent it to Wuhan lab in China further research with funds worth millions of dollars because the lab is well equipped and the under equipped US lab could enable the virus to escape and pose danger in the US