The Galveston National Laboratory (GNL), part of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), the Epoch Times reports, now concedes that officials signed “poorly drafted” agreements with three Chinese labs, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The agreements gave China the power to destroy “secret files, materials, and equipment, without any backups.” The agreements applied to “all cooperation and exchange documents, data, details and materials,” were renewable every five years, and the confidentiality terms remain in force even after termination.
The UTMB claims that no documents or confidential information had been destroyed, and denies there was ever any request that documents be destroyed. That claim troubled biosafety activist Edward Hammond.
“Is it sloppiness, as UTMB suggests?” Hammond asked the Epoch Times, “or is something else going on?” The answer requires a review of matters neglected by Congress and establishment media alike.
The Galveston National Lab is a 2008 creation of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the division of the National Institutes of Health headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci since 1984. Fauci funded dangerous gain-of-function research, which makes viruses more lethal and transmissible, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, controlled by Communist China and not accountable to American officials.
In addition to some $4 million in U.S. funding, which Fauci laundered through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV received a cargo of deadly pathogens courtesy of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu. As Israeli molecular biologist Dr. Dany Shoham documented in China and Viruses: The Case of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Chinese scientist came to head the special pathogens program at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg.
The viruses surreptitiously shipped from the NML to China included Machupo, Junin, Rift Valley Fever, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, and Hendra. In 2017-2018 alone, Qiu made at least five trips to the Wuhan lab, and Shoham wonders what other dangerous pathogens she transferred there.
One of Qiu’s staunchest defenders is former NML colleague Gary Kobinger, who happens to be the new director of the Galveston National Laboratory. The GNL focuses on “understanding transmission and pathogenesis of emerging viruses and developing medical countermeasures for dangerous pathogens that can be weaponized.” The NIAID boss, a non-practicing physician, doesn’t see that going on.
Fauci, whose bio shows no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology, promotes the theory that the COVID-19 virus arose naturally in the wild. This is pure speculation, not science, which involves observation, testing, and replication. More recently, evidence for a lab origin has been mounting.
In June, World Health Organization (WHO) Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, once totally compliant with China, confided to a politician that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from China’s Wuhan lab. The previous month, economist Jeffrey Sachs of the Lancet COVID 19 Commission, and Neil Harrison, professor of molecular pharmacology at Columbia University, called for an independent investigation of COVID-19 and cited data pointing to a laboratory origin.
The three Chinese institutions collaborating with the Galveston National Laboratory are the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, the Institute of Medical Biology, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. With its funding for gain-of-function research, and supply of deadly pathogens, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the most likely source of the COVID-19 virus.
As the Epoch Times reported in May, previous GNL director James LeDuc helped WIV scientists avoid scrutiny over China’s role in the pandemic. It was LeDuc who signed the three agreements to destroy files, materials, and equipment, even after the deals had expired.
“It is mystifying to me that this could have happened at all,” Edward Hammond told the Epoch Times. The biosafety activist might cast a glance at Anthony Fauci, who commands a budget of more than $6 billion. The NIAID boss pressures those on his gravy train to back the natural origin theory, so it’s not out of the question that he could leverage GNL officials into signing the deals with China.
The memoranda came to light through a request from U.S Right to Know, not from open disclosure by the GNL, UTMB, James LeDuc et al. That suggests they did not want their collaboration with the WIV to be known.
Embattled Americans might think this would attract the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, given its role in countering espionage. Director Christopher Wray recently said the Chinese government “poses the biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.”
The FBI did launch an inquiry into National Institutes of Health funding of bat research at the WIV but the emails were highly redacted. So far, no reports of sudden FBI raids on GNL or UTMB officials looking for evidence of files, materials, and equipment that had been destroyed, with no backup, at the demand of China.
On the other hand, the FBI readily arrests Trump advisors such as Peter Navarro, clamped in leg irons for defying a congressional subpoena. The FBI also raids the Florida residence of former President Donald Trump, ransacking the place right down to Melania Trump’s closet.
In practice, Wray’s FBI reflects Biden’s view that the Chinese are “not bad folks” and not even competition for the United States. For the Delaware Democrat, 79, the bad folks are any Americans less than worshipful of himself, members of his Junta, and his disastrous policies.
These Americans become targets for the FBI, which looks the other way at hard evidence that China has been calling the shots at America’s premier biological laboratory. That’s what’s now going on, with no serious investigation in sight.