A former official under the U.S. administration under Donald Trump claims that France had warned the U.S. about biological weapons at the Wuhan Laboratory four years ago, before the COVID-19 outbreak hit the world.
According to David Asher, a senior at the Hudson Institute, to the Daily Caller News Foundations, French government spies have warned the United States that China has begun to deviate from its original agreement.
So, initially, after the 2003 SARS outbreak, France and China signed an agreement in 2004 to set up a new biosafety laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to ‘fight and prevent new diseases’.
As reported by The Sun, seen on Saturday (31/7/2021), France was instrumental in providing laboratory design, biosafety training, and most of its technology before the BSL-4 level lab (which is now in the middle of a storm over allegations laboratory leaks) officially opened in 2018. Under an agreement between Paris and Beijing, about 50 French scientists were sent to help train Chinese laboratory workers and oversee the work of researchers.
But this French scientist was ‘kicked’ out of the Wuhan lab. Asher says that the incident made them worried about what China was actually planning and what were the reasons behind it.
Later, other information showed that national security officials did not want to share sensitive technology with China because they feared the lab would one day turn into a ‘biological weapon’, according to French media Le Figaro.
The U.S. State Department has claimed that the Wuhan Institute has been involved in secret research on behalf of the Chinese military since 2017. Asher said that U.S. federal funding for the lab should be stopped when France warned the U.S. State Department in 2015. He said department officials should shut down all US cooperation with China.
Indeed, between October 2009 and May 2019, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded U.S.-based EcoHealthAlliance USD 1.1 million for a sub-agreement with the laboratory. A federal watchdog is also investigating the National Institutes of Health after it emerged that the organization donated more than $ 800,000 to Chinese laboratories.
The idea that COVID-19 might emerge from a laboratory leak is nothing new, but China has repeatedly insisted such a leak is highly unlikely. Recently, the Wuhan lab also claimed that there have been no pathogen leaks or staff infection accidents that have occurred since the lab opened in 2018.
Tags
SCIENCES
