If the debate over the coronavirus’s origins has proven anything, it’s that there is far too little oversight of the scientific community, especially when it comes to risky experimental research. It says a lot about Dr. Anthony Fauci that he seems to disagree.
During a recent interview, Fauci insisted that the experiments Wuhan scientists performed on various coronavirus strains were “good and proper” and that the United States’s decision to support research in the region was necessary. Fauci has denied that this research qualified as gain-of-function, though there’s a strong argument to be made that it does.
Regardless, even if Fauci is correct and the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not intentionally making virus strains more transmissible, and even if the WIV had nothing to do with the coronavirus outbreak, Fauci is still wrong: It was a horrible decision to allow the WIV to conduct risky research of this kind with next to no supervision.
Fauci told Fox News on Friday:
“So, it was research that was done by qualified people. Right now, when there’s all of this thing about China, that’s a different situation now back then when you’re dealing with qualified, highly respected Chinese scientists. So it isn’t what was made out to be about dealing with really, really bad people. Because those scientists were very well-respected in the scientific community internationally.”
It is not going to matter to many outside the scientific community that Wuhan’s coronavirus research was recommended by peer review. What does matter is that the National Institutes of Health funded the WIV through a third-party organization knowing that Wuhan’s lab was funded in part by the Chinese military, that its researchers answered to the Chinese Communist Party, and that the lab had a long-running history of questionable safety practices.
Here’s what we know: A 2017 scientific paper cited by Sen. Rand Paul during a congressional hearing last week proves the WIV received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The U.S. State Department also reported the Wuhan lab worked on classified projects with China’s military since at least 2017. In other words, no matter how many international sponsors it had, the WIV was ultimately funded and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. So, it does not matter how well-respected Wuhan’s scientists were; they were still in the pocket of the Chinese government, and that alone should have been a red flag for U.S. scientists.
Moreover, the U.S. was also aware of serious safety hazards within the Wuhan lab. In 2018, U.S. science diplomats warned the State Department that the WIV’s poor lab practices were extremely concerning given the dangerous research it was conducting. Other reports confirm the lab was operating at a lower safety grade than was required. The result, in late 2019, was that three Wuhan researchers fell seriously ill and were hospitalized just months before the pandemic began.
The bottom line is this: U.S. scientists should have been much more cautious about sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to a CCP-controlled lab that could not guarantee its experiments would be conducted safely. In the future, there needs to be much more oversight over where we’re sending our money. And at this point, Fauci shouldn’t get a say.
