Watchdog group uncovers docs showing US govt. now funding more gain-of-function research in China for bird flu

The following is from The Vaccine Reaction.

The U.S government is again funding gain-of-function (GoF) research with Chinese scientists to make a dangerous virus even more potent. This time it is with birds not bats. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) gave $1 million to fund risky research on bird flu viruses to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China; the USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athena, Georgia and the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute in Scotland.

The plan is to infect ducks and geese with various strains of bird flu to render the virus more infectious and transmissible as scientists study the virus’s ability, “to jump into mammalian hosts.”

Documents outlining the research, which began in 2021 and will continue until 2026, were obtained by the White Coat Waste Project.

The White Coat Waste Project is a nonprofit “bipartisan taxpayer watchdog organization” with a mission to “unite animal-lovers and liberty-lovers to find, expose and defund wasteful and cruel taxpayer-funded animal experimentation.”

Bird Flu Research Tied to Wuhan Institute of Virology

It is worth noting that one of the research partners, the Roslin Institute, is connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) whose research is believed to have started the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

One of the researchers on the project, Wenju Liu, is affiliated with the WIV along with the “bat lady” herself, Zheng-Li Shi, well known for her long-time work on bat corona viruses.

The research is focusing on three strains of bird flu, H5NX, H7N9 and H9N2, all three of which are capable of infecting animals and humans. H5NX is considered, “highly pathogenic” and can lead to neurological problems while H7N9 has caused severe illness in humans in the past.

The experimental GoF research will use chickens, quails, geese and duck to predict the virus evolution in natural hosts and study their “potential to jump into mammalian hosts”.

Answers Demanded from U.S. Secretary of Agriculture

U.S. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa has demanded answers from U.S. Secretary Agriculture Tom Vilsack about the tax payer funded research. She asked whether this research was considered GoF research, what part of the research was being conducted in China and what, if any, safeguards were put in place.

The goal of GoF research is to increase the transmissibility or virulence of a pathogen for the purpose of trying to understand the likelihood of it causing a pandemic.

Sen. Ernst said:

The health and safety of Americans are too important to just wing it, and Biden’s USDA should have had more apprehension before sending any taxpayer dollars to collaborate with the CCP on risky avian flu research. They should know by now to suspect ‘fowl’ play when it comes to researchers who have ties to the dangerous Wuhan Lab, and simply switching from bats to birds causes concern that they are creating more pathogens of pandemic potential… We cannot allow what happened in Wuhan to happen again.

The discovery of this risky research comes on the heels of former U.S. intelligence officials, the FBI, the U.S. Department of Energy and scientists agreeing that the Covid pandemic likely began when the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from the WIV while engaging in GoF research which, according to Rutgers University molecular biologist, Richard Ebright, PhD, violated federal policies on GoF research and enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research. (Continued…)

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