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pbmus

(12,422 posts) Sat May 29, 2021, 01:11 AM May 2021

Guess who stopped COVID research....when it could have been very important.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trump-spreads-distorted-claim-on-wuhan-lab-funding/

Trump Spreads Distorted Claim on Wuhan Lab Funding
By Lori Robertson

Posted on May 15, 2020 | Updated on May 21, 2021

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The Wuhan Institute of Virology received $600,000 as part of a larger five-year U.S. government grant to a U.S.-based nonprofit studying emerging infectious diseases. But President Donald Trump put the figure at $7.5 million, saying he “ended it.”

We asked the White House where the $7.5 million figure may have come from, but we haven’t received a response.

False claims that the Wuhan lab had received $3.7 million in National Institutes of Health grant money have circulated online after an April 11 Daily Mail story made that assertion and Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz repeated it in a Fox News interview. The NIH didn’t award such a grant. Instead, it gave a grant totaling $3.4 million, beginning in 2014, to the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance to study the risk of the future emergence of coronaviruses from bats. And EcoHealth distributed $600,000 of that total to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a collaborator on the project, pre-approved by NIH.

We wrote about this distortion of the EcoHealth grant after the claim appeared in the conspiracy theory video “Plandemic.”

Trump echoed the claim in an interview that aired May 14 on Fox Business News. Host Maria Bartiromo asked of the Wuhan institute, “Didn’t we as a country give money to that lab?” Trump responded:

Trump, May 14: Yeah. As I understand it, before I got here, $7.5 million in 2014. And look, they said they were studying different things and you know, things like that happen. But, you know, money was given by the Obama administration early on. … I ended it. … I took a lot of heat too. They said, “Oh, we’re studying all sorts of stuff.” You saw what happened. I ended it.