Did you know that the United States government is still funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

I sure didn’t see that coming. And I bet most Americans didn’t either.

The argument for funding biolabs around the world has always struck me as weak. Countries we can have some level of trust in are easily able to afford to fund their own biological research, and countries that can’t afford it certainly can’t be trusted to do the work safely.

The funding of these labs sure looks like a way to pour research dollars into projects that are forbidden by US law. What other purpose could they serve? If the US government should be doing the research, then we should do it. Simple enough.

I have little doubt that the reason is pretty simple: the US government isn’t supposed to do gain-of-function research, yet we know that our tax dollars have funded it in labs outside the US, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But a report in the Washington Free Beacon revealed (to me, at least) that the US is still pouring tax dollars into bio-research abroad, and that should stop right now. Not that it will, as it remains in the current spending bill that will likely pass Congress this week.

Watchdog groups are pressuring Congress to stop awarding taxpayer funds to foreign labs, including the controversial Chinese institute at the center of the coronavirus pandemic.

With Congress approving a temporary spending package to keep the federal government operating throughout the end of the year, several watchdog groups are concerned that taxpayer funds will be allocated to a range of foreign labs via the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The most notable U.S.-funded lab is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese Communist Party-controlled entity that is suspected of conducting research that led to the coronavirus outbreak.

“Foreign government-controlled laboratories should not be eligible to receive U.S. taxpayer dollars while they disregard our policies, dodge congressional oversight, or act against our national interest,” seven watchdog organizations led by the White Coat Waste Project wrote in a letter sent Friday to lawmakers on the House and Senate appropriations committees.

“The National Institutes of Health, with little accountability to Congress or the [Biden] administration, continues to authorize funding for animal experimentation laboratories directly controlled by foreign adversaries that act contrary to the national interest of the United States,” the groups wrote.

Huh? What?

The public evidence is sketchy, but it seems likely to me that COVID originated in the WIV lab and escaped somehow. The idea that we are still funding that lab is not only surprising, but truly scandalous. Even if the virus is of natural origin we have lots of evidence that China hid the outbreak and hid evidence about the virus structure itself, its effects on humans, and its origins. China has been utterly opaque about COVID and definitely should get no funds from the US.

NIH officials, the groups write, “are actively monitoring and pushing back against congressional efforts to defund risky gain-of-function experiments in China, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” This type of research, which boosts a virus’s lethality for research purposes, is believed to have laid the foundation for the coronavirus that eventually spilled into the general population. A Republican investigative body determined in October that the most likely cause of the pandemic was a lab leak, potentially from the Wuhan institute.

Currently, NIH is permitted to fund labs operating in “foreign adversary nations” like Russia and China, according to the watchdog groups. U.S.-funded labs in Russia, for instance, are under congressional scrutiny for conducting “horrific and barbaric” experiments on animals that include cutting out portions of their brains.

Though the war in Ukraine has increased pressure on NIH to end its partnerships with these labs, the federal agency has leeway in how taxpayer funds are spent. The Biden administration said in June that it wants to cut U.S. funding for Russian labs, but NIH will not say if it will comply with this request.

None of this should be in the least controversial, but of course it is. The public health establishment is totally out of control, yet we are pouring billions more into it. The departure of Anthony Fauci from the agency will do nothing to actually reform the agencies, which have grown ever powerful at the same moment that their utter corruption has been revealed.

This is yet another reason to get behind Governor Ron DeSantis’ project to investigate COVID origins and all matters COVID related. Somebody has to do it, and while a governor is not the most obvious choice DeSantis has stepped to do it.

Good on him.