'What about COVID-20? What about COVID-21? Who is going to go out and find those? Our grant was specifically designed to locate where these viruses are and to stop them from harming Americans,' said Peter Daszak, director of EcoHealth Alliance.
The State Department, which is obliged to conduct background checks on any foreign organization that is a recipient of U.S. government funds for research, did not respond to a request for comment addressing the reasons for the grant's termination.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has become a focus for Trump and some in his inner circle partly because it houses a lab equipped to study coronaviruses and other dangerous pathogens, and partly because of its relative proximity to a seafood market in Wuhan where some, but not all, of China's coronaviruses were first detected last year.
have also accused it of concealing the extent of its coronavirus outbreak by under-reporting both total cases and the deaths it has suffered from the disease.Adding to the maelstrom, Pompeo insisted Wednesday there was no obvious contradiction in his competing assertions that"we don't have certainty" about where the virus originated, yet"there is significant evidence that this came from the laboratory.
"Fifty years ago nobody was even looking at bats. It was all about mosquitoes and rodents," he said, noting that over time bats have evolved to be particularly effective"reservoirs" of viruses deadly to humans, but not necessarily themselves, because of their unique physiologies that undergo extreme stress in order to be able to fly.
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