You might think that after a bioengineered virus, funded by the U.S. government, escaped from a Chinese lab and triggered a worldwide pandemic, the U.S. would have put a stop to any risky virus research in China.
But instead of shutting it down, the U.S. government is still, in 2024, funneling money to Chinese labs to fund the same type of research that led to COVID-19. And even worse, they are lying about it under oath, without facing any consequences so far.
In March, during a congressional hearing, Congressman Ben Cline asked U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack about research collaborations between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Specifically, he asked about $1 million in U.S. taxpayer money being used for dangerous gain-of-function research on bird flu in China.
Vilsack’s response was, “It’s really not a collaboration… To my knowledge, we’re not sharing data with China, and everything we’re doing stays with us.” In other words, Vilsack assured Congress that there was no collaboration and no sharing of information between the USDA and China.
But here’s the twist: just a few weeks later, documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the White Coat Waste Project revealed that Vilsack was not telling the truth. The USDA was working with Chinese labs on bird flu gain-of-function research and sharing data, despite Vilsack’s claims to the contrary. This collaboration was detailed in a 2021 USDA grant application titled “US-UK-China Collab: Predictive Phylogenetics for Evolutionary and Transmission Dynamics of Newly Emerging Avian Influenza Viruses.”
This document described a partnership between scientists in the U.S., the UK, and China. The U.S. researchers involved even made yearly visits to China to evaluate progress and share results. In one letter, USDA scientist Darrell Kapczynski confirmed the collaboration with both the UK and China.
So why is this such a big deal? Lying to Congress is a felony. Tom Vilsack, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, may have done just that. And even more concerning is that the same type of risky gain-of-function research that many believe led to the COVID-19 pandemic is still happening – with U.S. taxpayer dollars – and no one seems to be putting a stop to it.
The dangerous research that may have caused the last global health crisis is still going on, and the U.S. government is involved. And yet, they’ve managed to keep it largely hidden from the public – until now.
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