The anti-animal testing group that hounded Dr. Anthony Fauci for years about experiments that it claimed were wasteful, declared a major victory on Wednesday, as Fauci’s former employer cut the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology from the roster of facilities eligible for U.S. taxpayer funding.
“Wuhan has fallen!” the White Coat Waste Project, or WCW, crowed following a Washington Times report about the Wuhan lab that many conservatives believe was ground zero of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the Times reported, the National Institutes of Health “quietly erased” the Wuhan facility from its list of labs that can conduct animal testing with U.S. taxpayers’ money.
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Wuhan remained part of the lineup as recently as late April. But now the Biden administration, which has largely dismissed the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins, deleted the facility in a move described by the Times as “striking back against the lab that some U.S. agencies have concluded spawned the COVID-19 pandemic, which upended the global economy and killed millions of people.”
The NIH also erased all Russian labs from its list.
“It’s official: Following a three-year-plus White Coat Waste Project (WCW) campaign to defund the Wuhan lab that tortures animals and probably prompted the pandemic, we have discovered and confirmed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has finally disqualified it from receiving any taxpayer funding for animal tests!” WCW said on its website.
“This is a major win in the war on waste.”
The WCW trumpeted its own work in exposing the issues at the Wuhan lab. The group pointed to its April 2020 announcement that EcoHealth Alliance, a group close to and defended by Fauci, received $3.7 million “to fund dangerous bat and animal experiments in Wuhan — the probable cause of a lab leak and COVID.”
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The WCW also noted at the time that it was working with Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz to ensure no more taxpayer money went to the Wuhan facility.
The group also noted that former President Donald Trump cut the grant to EcoHealth Alliance, calling it a “tremendous waste.” Yet, “the Wuhan lab has remained eligible for more tax money from the NIH” — including through next year — “despite growing concerns about how the lab recklessly wasted tax dollars to collect coronaviruses from wild bats, engineered those viruses to be more deadly and contagious to humans and injected the supercharged viruses into “humanized” mice who became very sick and died.”
The pressure applied by the WCW led the Pentagon and the State Department to cut ties with the Wuhan lab. Then, in January 2023, the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general released a report calling for an end to federal funding for the facility.
The report cited China’s unwillingness to cooperate with investigations into gain-of-function research involving animal testing. Four months later, the WCW prevailed.
“We’re proud of this historic victory in the War on Waste!” the WCW said.
“With our Worldwide Waste campaign, we will continue to find, expose and defund animal experiments in the U.S. and abroad!”
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