USAID-Funded Pandemic Research Failed To Spot COVID or Ensure Chinese Transparency
President Donald Trump’s effort to unilaterally wind down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has sparked a heated debate about the agency’s role in pandemic response.
USAID’s defenders cite its important role in researching viruses and responding to disease outbreaks. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk, on the other hand, accused it of “[funding] bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people.”
Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people? https://t.co/YVwyKA7ifs
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 2, 2025
What is the truth?
In the case of the most recent pandemic at least, it’s fair to say that USAID’s pandemic prevention efforts were a failure. The agency’s programs for predicting and stopping a global virus outbreak in the human population missed COVID-19.
Those same programs also directed millions of dollars in grant funding to the New York-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance and its subgrantee, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—two organizations that feature prominently in investigations into the possibility that COVID-19 was an engineered virus that escaped from a lab.
EcoHealth Alliance, its now-former president Peter Daszak, and WIV were all debarred from receiving federal funding during the Biden administration for failing to abide by restrictions and transparency requirements related to virological experiments they were conducting in Wuhan—where the COVID-19 outbreak started.
Those experiments involved collecting SARS-like coronavirus viruses in the field, from both animal and human sources, and then manipulating them in at WIV.
As I detailed in a story for Reason last year, some of those experiments resulted in the creation of hybrid viruses that were more transmissible and deadly in humans than their natural variants.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded those experiments in likely violation of the then-extant federal government pause on so-called “gain-of-function” research.
NIAID was not the only agency funding EcoHealth’s work with WIV.
The organization was also a subgrantee on USAID’s PREDICT program.
Between 2009 and 2019, USAID spent $210 million on the PREDICT program—which collected virus samples in numerous countries and shipped them off to dozens of labs for further research.
That includes WIV, which as of 2019 had over 11,000 virus samples from the PREDICT program in storage and under the supervision of Chinese scientists, according to public records obtained by news non-prof
Article from Reason.com
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