Lawmakers are demanding answers after it was revealed the US is sending taxpayer dollars to a Chinese army lab to make bird flu viruses more dangerous to people.
Eighteen members of Congress are demanding answers from the Department of Agriculture (USDA) about the project, which was first revealed by DailyMail.com.
It is part of a $1million collaboration between the USDA and the CCP-run Chinese Academy of Sciences - the institution that oversees the Wuhan lab at the center of the Covid lab-leak theory.
In a scathing letter to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack last week, the bipartisan group said: 'This research, funded by American taxpayers, could potentially generate dangerous new lab-created virus strains that threaten our national security and public health.'
Tests revealed that an unknown number of cows have tested positive for bird flu Type A H5N1 in Texas, Kansas and New Mexico. Iowa is currently 'monitoring the situation' as it is also a dairy-heavy state. It comes after a goat in Minnesota tested positive last week. Bird flu has also been found in foxes, bobcats, striped skunks, raccoons and coyotes since the 2022 outbreak
The research comes as fears about bird flu rise. A farm worker in Texas caught the H5N1 strain that is racing through cattle across the US earlier this month, becoming only the second ever American to be diagnosed - and experts are bracing for more cases.
In February, it was revealed the United States government was funneling $1million to China to see if scientists could make 'highly pathogenic avian influenza' more contagious to mammals using gain-of-function research.
Government records showed the collaboration began in April 2021 and is scheduled to be funded through March 2026. The USDA previously told this website the project was applied for in 2019 and approved in 2020.
The research involves infecting ducks and geese with different strains of viruses to make them more infectious, and studying the viruses' potential to 'jump into mammalian hosts,' according to research documents obtained by the watchdog group White Coat Waste Project and shared exclusively with this website.
It is being funded through the USDA and the main collaborators on the project are USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute - a Wuhan lab partner.
And it has been ongoing despite similar research being restricted in 2022 and growing concerns that dubious Chinese studies may have started the Covid pandemic.
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