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Letter from NIH Official Admits to Funding Gain-of-Function Research at Wuhan

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A letter was sent to Republican Representative James Comer from Lawrence A. Tabak of the National Institute of Health (NIH) confirming what many Republicans have concluded about the novel coronavirus pandemic, but have been denied by Fauci and others in the Biden administration.

The letter, sent Wednesday by the top NIH official, admits U.S. taxpayers did indeed fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. “In keeping with Fauci’s refusal to use ‘gain-of-function,’ Tabak avoids the term, though the work he described matches its commonplace definition precisely,” writes National Review.

Additionally, the letter confirmed the U.S. non-profit EcoHealth Alliance that funneled money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not transparent about its work. Tabak writes about a “limited experiment” that was conducted to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” The lab mice infected “became sicker” than those infected with the unmodified bat virus.

EcoHealth had filed a “previously unpublished” grant proposal with the NIAID. The proposal was obtained by The Intercept and exposed that $599,000 of the total grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was for research figuring out how to make viruses more dangerous and/or infectious.

Additionally, Tabak reveals EcoHealth failed to comply with its reporting responsibilities under the grant, therefore now has five days to submit to NIH “any and all unpublished data” relating to the project for compliance purposes.

National Review writes “Dr. Richard Ebright, biosafety expert and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, had previously rebutted Fauci’s claim that the NIH ‘has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV]’ as ‘demonstrably false.”

“Ebright told National Review that the NIH-financed work at the WIV ‘epitomizes’ the definition of gain-of-function research, which deals with ‘enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (PPP)’ or those pathogens ‘resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen.”

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Biden to lift sanctions on China in exchange for third promise to combat fentanyl

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Reportedly President Joe Biden is making deals with Chinese President Xi Jinping to help improve anti-drug trafficking measures. China is one of the top fentanyl producers and distributors, culminating in a pandemic of fentanyl overdoses and deaths in the United States.

The Biden administration will be lifting sanctions on a Chinese government ministry, in exchange for bolstering anti-drug trafficking measures, Bloomberg reported. “We’re hoping to see some progress on that issue this coming week,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Monday, according to the New York Post. “That could then open the door to further cooperation on other issues where we aren’t just managing things, but we’re actually delivering tangible results.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation noted that should a deal materialize, it will be at least the third time that China has promised to get tough on fentanyl. In 2016, China agreed to increase counter-narcotics operations, and Xi again agreed to launch a crackdown in 2018. Nonetheless, China and Mexico are “the primary source countries for fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked directly into the United States,” according to a 2020 DEA intelligence report.

“China remains the primary source of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked through international mail and express consignment operations environment, as well as the main source for all fentanyl-related substances trafficked into the United States.”

President Joe Biden and Xi are meeting for the first time in over a year during this week’s Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco. Sources familiar with the situation told Bloomberg that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will crack down on Chinese companies manufacturing chemical precursors for fentanyl in exchange for the U.S. lifting sanctions on the Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science, which the Commerce Department added to the Entity List in 2020 for “engaging in human rights violations and abuses” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

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