After years of advocacy by White Coat Waste Project (WCW) and action from Congress, President Joe Biden has declassified intelligence related to COVID’s origins and what really happened at the Wuhan animal lab.

Mounting evidence indicates that dangerous taxpayer-funded gain-of-function (GOF) animal experiments in Wuhan—first exposed by WCW—sparked the pandemic. Indeed, records show that using taxpayers’ money and in violation of a federal ban, Wuhan white coats intentionally supercharged bat coronaviruses to make them infectious to humans and thousands of times deadlier. In their dangerous, cruel, and wasteful animal experiments, “humanized mice” became seriously ill and had a 75% death rate. Then, workers at the lab became sick with a mysterious pneumonia-like illness in mid-2019 and the lab soon disappeared its public database of viruses.

A WCW FOIA investigation proved NIH ignored gain-of-function animal testing that probably caused a lab leak and pandemic. This new bill will help ensure it never happens again.

Lawmakers, the Energy Department, the FBI, and two-thirds of Democrat and Republican taxpayers now believe that a lab leak caused COVID.

Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist and lab leak proponent who was the former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), recently issued a dire warning about the risks of GOF:

Fortunately, U.S. Senators recently introduced a bill to defund dangerous GOF experiments, and their colleagues in the House are doing the same.

Reps. Buddy Carter (R-GA), Henry Cuellar (D-TX) and Mike Gallagher (R-WI) have just re-introduced the WCW-backed Pausing Enhanced Pandemic Pathogen Research Act (HR 1827), which would halt taxpayer funding for GOF experiments for the next five years. WCW supported this important bill last Congress, too.

As we explained last year in Newsweek with Rep. Carter, cutting funding for these scary GOF studies—which are completely unnecessary to prevent and combat future pandemics—will save tax dollars, animals and civilization itself.

For years, WCW has been urging the Biden Administration and Congress to defund these kinds of risky GOF animal experiments. When Joe Biden was VP, the White House even paused funding for GOF experiments from 2014 to 2017 over concerns that they could a deadly outbreak (as virus labs have done before in the U.S. and China).

We’re making progress!  Following WCW advocacy and lobbying, the 2023 federal spending bill defunded dangerous virus experiments in “countries of concern” (like China).  But, we need to do the same here at home, or Wuhan will happen all over again, but this time on U.S. soil.