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楼主 / cicokew3
- 时间: 2025-2-12 00:23#
- Covid 19 is political drama
Elon Musk’s Claim Linking USAID To Bioweapons Isn’t AsFar-Fetched As The Deep State Wants You To Think
As Elon Musk moves to shutter the U.S. Agency for InternationalDevelopment, the agency’s support for the discovery of novel viruses in collaborationwith the Wuhan Institute of Virology has come under an intense new spotlight.
“Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweaponresearch, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people?” Musk asked in aSunday night post on X. The post has garnered 38 million views.
The claim has touched off a renewed debate about whether U.S.-sponsoredresearch contributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and has amplified a longsimmering argument among scientists about the difference between “biodefense”and “bioweapons” research. Musk’s claim was immediately decried by some expertsas harmful to national security but endorsed by others.
Musk’s vendetta against USAID has been met with resistance fromcongressional Democrats, who raise questions about how this affects U.S. softpower and whether the law allows for its elimination without legislativeaction.
But Musk has leveraged USAID-sponsored research in Wuhan as evidence of theneed for drastic action.
USAID’s Adventures In Wuhan
The USAID Emerging Pandemic Threat Program directed at least $210 millionto a decade-long government program called “PREDICT,” in which scientistssampled for novel viruses and monitored the risk for epidemics in Bangladesh,China, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Egypt, Jordan, Cote D’Ivoire,Liberia and the Republic of Congo.
The project is the “single largest health security effort ever funded bythe U.S.,” according to the University of California-Davis.
The program directed millions to organizations at the center of concernsabout a possible lab accident in Wuhan, namely EcoHealth Alliance and itssubcontracted lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
No definite link has been drawn between the USAID-underwritten PREDICTproject and the COVID-19 pandemic, which might involve proving that USAIDfunded the discovery of the progenitor virus that sparked the pandemic.
However, it is clear that PREDICT collected viruses of the same species asSARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and that the sequences of some ofthe viruses collected by PREDICT have never been published.
PREDICT funded the discovery of at least 52 novel SARS-relatedcoronaviruses, including one of the closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2, thevirus that causes COVID-19. That virus, RaTG13, shares 96 percent of its genomewith SARS-CoV-2, and was discovered at an abandoned mineshaft in Moijiang,China, where the U.S.-China team frequently collected samples.
EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak said that certain sequences ofsamples taken in China and Southeast Asia should be withheld from a publicdatabase because it could bring “unwelcome attention” to PREDICT partners likeUSAID.
“It’s extremely important we don’t have these sequences as part of ourPREDICT release to Genbank at this point,” Daszak wrote on April 28, 2020, soonafter his collaboration with the Wuhan lab first came under scrutiny by thefirst Trump administration. “Having them as part of PREDICT will being [sic]very unwelcome attention to UC Davis, PREDICT and USAID.”
According to a congressional investigation, years of viral samples storedat the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have never had their sequencespublished.
The password protected portal for PREDICT data has been taken offline,though a more public-facing website remains online.
Thousands of viral samples were left by PREDICT in Wuhan Institute ofVirology freezers, including 6,380 bat samples.
The scientist charged with overseeing these viral samples was identified asBen Hu. Hu was named in a report citing anonymous sources as the COVID-19pandemic’s “Patient Zero.” Hu rejected the claim. The Office of the Director ofNational Intelligence stated in a congressionally mandated declassified reportin June 2023 that several Wuhan lab scientists became ill in the fall of 2019,and that they showed some symptoms “consistent with but not diagnostic ofCOVID-19.” The wife of a Wuhan lab researcher working on coronaviruses died ofwhat appeared to be COVID-19 in December 2019, the Daily Caller News Foundationreported in 2021.
It’s clear that the Wuhan lab lacked staff properly trained to performresearch at a maximum-security lab, according to a State Department cablereleased in 2021. According to public scientific papers, the lab allowed fornovel coronavirus experimentation to occur at a BSL-2 level, which offers fewprotections against airborne viruses like COVID-19. ODNI acknowledged in its2023 declassified report that the lab suffered from “aging equipment, a needfor additional disinfectant equipment, and improvements to ventilationsystems.”
USAID’s American contractors on the PREDICT project have been criticizedfor issues with biosafety, too.
On Jan. 17, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services strippedEcoHealth and Daszak of federal grants and barred them from receivinggovernment funding for five years after concluding the group had not adequatelyoverseen its research in Wuhan. Requests from funders at the NationalInstitutes of Health for EcoHealth to obtain lab notebooks and sequencesunderwritten by U.S. government agencies were not met. According to the HHSinvestigation, Daszak did not treat these concerns seriously until facing theprospect of debarment.
Meanwhile, Metabiota’s role in responding to an Ebola outbreak in WestAfrica in 2014 was criticized by Doctors Without Borders and privately by theWorld Health Organization due to a lack of appropriate sanitization andpersonal protective equipment, as well as misdiagnosed cases and inaccuratepredictions about the pandemic’s trajectory. That same year, the U.S. grantedmillions to Metabiota, including for lab work in Ukraine. Former President JoeBiden’s son Hunter Biden’s firm invested $500,000 that same year. In 2022,Moscow authorities exploited this information in propaganda to justify Russia’sinvasion of Ukraine.
In 2019, USAID and the State Department also supported an expansion ofEcoHealth called the Global Virome Project, which included a China-led ViromeProject involving work with several institutions with ties to the Chinesemilitary, including Beijing Genomics Institute or BGI, which has seen five ofits affiliate companies blacklisted by the Commerce Department.
A State Department cable heartily endorsing the project acknowledged theconsiderable national security risks, including uncertainty over whetherChinese partners would be transparent with data sharing.
American institutions were told by USAID and the State Department that ifChina undertook novel virus research without U.S. participation, it could posea national security risk, according to a “draft pitch” from May 20, 2019,outlining the project. Chinese officials were told the same.
“Limited access to the information gained through these efforts may haveserious national security implications,” it reads. A comment on the draftstates that “an equivalent statement will be inserted into the China doc” – thepitch translated and sent to Chinese institutions.
Approximately $270,969 from USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats Division laidthe groundwork for the project before it had formally received a governmentgrant, possibly running afoul of ethics laws.
The Global Virome Project website was scrubbed from the internet sometimein the last eight days. The last time the WayBack Machine captured the webpage,on Jan. 26, the site remained up.
Sometime after the emergence of COVID-19, U.S. government support for theGlobal Virome Project dried up.
Yet USAID allocated another $124 million to a project with differentcontractors but the same goal: Prospecting for novel viruses in the wild andtesting which pose the greatest risks to humans in the lab. The project, calledDEEP VZN, was shuttered in 2023 after concerns were raised by the White HouseNational Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Biodefense vs. Bioweapons
In addition to Musk’s claims about potential connections between USAID andCOVID-19, his claim that USAID “funded bioweapon research” also stokedcontroversy.
The distinction between offensive bioweapons work and defense biosciencescomes down to intent, experts told the DCNF.
The USAID PREDICT program’s stated mission was to “strengthen globalcapacity for detection of viruses with pandemic potential that can move betweenanimals and people.”
“I do not think anything USAID has been doing would constitute a BWCviolation – not even close,” said Jamie Yassif, vice president on globalbiological policy at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, in an interview with theDCNF. “It’s important to draw a clear distinction between well intended effortsaround naturally emerging and national occurring disease risk and bioweaponswork, and conflating the two runs counter to U.S. national security interest.”
Yet even experts critical of Musk’s claim acknowledge that the BiologicalWeapons Convention, the 1972 treaty that prohibits biological weapons, makes notechnical distinction between altering a novel virus for the purposes ofcreating an offensive weapon and altering a virus for the purposes of creatingvaccines and therapeutics.
In order to test which viruses sampled in nature have the potential todrive pandemics, researchers sometimes employ gain-of-function research —experiments that make viruses more deadly or transmissible.
This may make research on viruses with unknown properties “dual use” —capable of serving civilian research purposes or being misapplied for militaryaims.
“Initially, I thought that investigating the Earth’s virome is a good idea– kind of like searching for new species of animals,” said Laura Kahn, aphysician and expert in pandemic policy, in an email to DCNF. “Where it wentwrong is when the virologists got the idea to manipulate the viruses to see howto make them deadlier or more contagious.”
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the “defense” premise behind discoveringnovel viruses and engineering them in the lab was criticized as far-fetched bysome experts.
The failure of the USAID PREDICT project to live up to its ostensiblepremise — to predict and prevent pandemics — has led some scientists tocharacterize it as bioweapons work by another name.
“The research had no — zero — civilian applications. The results did nothelp predict pandemics, prevent pandemics, or respond to pandemics,” RichardEbright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University,said in an email to DCNF. “The sole applications of the research were discoveryof new bioweapons agents and characterization of new bioweapons agents.”
Ebright and other scientists say the benefits of gain-of-function researchremain theoretical. Even a virologist who led the charge for gain-of-functionresearch struggled to come up with an example of a civilian benefit ofenhancing a pathogen when pressed by a reporter.
While strongly rejecting the claim that USAID funded bioweapon work, Yassifsaid that more transparency could be helpful in avoiding a viral “arms race.”
“It is in the U.S. national security interest and in the interest of globalsecurity more broadly to have greater transparency,” she said. “It could reducethe risk of misconceptions that might otherwise lead to arms race dynamics thatcould be destabilizing.”
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Covid 19 is political drama
