by John Solomon
As President Joe Biden weighs whether to sign a law passed unanimously by Congress to declassify U.S. intelligence on the origins of the COVID-19 virus, new evidence has emerged that the State Department and National Institutes of Health routed at least $1.7 million in tax dollars to a Wuhan virology lab despite evidence it was tied to the Chinese military — and possibly the communist nation’s bioweapons program — according to government documents reviewed by Just the News.
The United States first declared in a 2005 State Department document that communist China maintained an offensive biological weapons program in violation of its treaty commitments and that it was run in part by an arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS). That report specifically cited the AMMS’ Fifth Institute as the epicenter of the country’s bioweapons program.
You can read that document here:
File  compliance2005.pdf
A decade later, multiple medical publications emerged from China that linked the AMMS to research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the very lab that the FBI, the Energy Department and other U.S. intelligence agencies believe was the source of a leak that started the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019.
It’s also the same lab that received grants from a contractor working for Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the foreign aid arm of the Stpostedate Department.
The ties between AMMS and the Wuhan lab sat in plain view for years before the pandemic started, federal documents show.
For instance, a 2015 study posted on the NIH’s National Library of Medicine site shows collaboration between the Wuhan lab and AAMS on anthrax spores. Several other studies between 2015 and 2019 also listed both Chinese science organizations as collaborators.
One of the most troubling links — cited in an unclassified report released in December by the House Intelligence Committee — was a 2015 book in which China scientists tied to both AMMS and the Wuhan lab declared that coronaviruses were the leading edge of a new era of genetic weapons warfare.
“In 2015, the official publishing house of the AMMS released a book titled The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Artificial Humanized Viruses as Genetic Weapons,” the committee reported. “The book was produced and edited using 18 experts, 16 of whom were officers at AMMS or other PLA research centers. Indeed, one of the editors not only works for the Fifth Institute but also has a long history of collaboration with the WIV, having coauthored 12 scientific papers with personnel from it.
“The central premise of the AMMS book is that SARS-CoV-1, the strain of coronavirus that caused the 2002 SARS outbreak, did not emerge naturally but was a chimeric virus artificially engineered as a genetic weapon to infect humans. The book described the PLA researchers’ broader belief that other nations are developing chimeric coronaviruses to use as genetic weapons. The authors described how to create weaponized chimeric SARS coronaviruses, the potentially broader scope for their use compared to traditional bioweapons, and the benefits of being able to plausibly deny that such chimeric coronaviruses were artificially created rather than naturally occurring.”
You can read the full House Intelligence Committee report here:
File  final_unclass_summary_-_covid_origins_report_-_dec._2022.pdf
While tantalizing, the declassified information about China’s military ties to bioweapons research and the Wuhan lab “understates the problem” compared to what is known in secret, said Sen. Roger “Doc” Marshall (R-Kan.), a medical doctor and one of the first members of Congress to dispute claims that COVID-19 could have evolved naturally from the wild.
He said that a lab-created COVID virus may be scary but far less lethal than what an engineered bird flu virus might one day unleash on humanity and there’s far too little oversight of how U.S. agencies are funding such research.
“There’s gross abuse of our grant research dollars and so much commingling,” he told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Thursday. “USAID is doing research on viral gain of function in Wuhan, China. USAID was for international development. They are way outside of their lane.
“But ultimately, what China’s goal here is to get the DNA of every person, of every animal, of every plant. And you can just imagine what you could do with that. There’s some incredibly good things you can do about it. … But then you could also have a COVID virus, a Frankenstein virus that came from a lab in Wuhan, China, and everything in between. So what we’re dealing with here is really something a million times more powerful than a nuclear weapon.”
Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told Just the News on Thursday night that the vast open-source intelligence that highlighted the risks of the Wuhan lab and its ties to China’s military should have been a red flag for Fauci at NIH and the intelligence community.
Fauci’s subsequent effort to downplay the possibility COVID-19 leaked from a lab and instead came from nature had long-ranging consequences, Meadows added, including stifling intelligence community efforts to alert the public on the lab leak theory.
The animals were at least occasionally sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where many virologists suspect that the Covid-19 pandemic may have started.
Scientists had previously announced that swabs from the market had tested positive for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. The new data revealed that some of these same swabs also contained substantial genetic material from raccoon dogs. Or bats or the pangolin or guided virus evolution.