Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s charity handed almost $450,000 to a U.S. university known to collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Wuhan Institute of Virology to purchase lab equipment and fund research on SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus which causes the disease the CCP-betrothed World Health Organization dubbed Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), according to reports.
Reporting by National Pulse revealed the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and lead virologist Ralph Baric were granted $433,000 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) as early as July of 2020. The Initiative is a charity organization founded by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
The funds were earmarked for purchasing cutting edge laboratory equipment intended to hasten testing speeds and development of “a global solution to the pandemic,” read a press release according to National Pulse.
A press release on the UNC website went into more detail on what the funds were to be used for, “The grant covers the purchase of a ‘liquid handler’ — a robotic arm that can pipette fluids much more quickly and accurately than humans can — and supporting instruments, including another robot that detects active virus particles in samples and a machine to sequence RNA. Together, these tools increase the rate of testing compounds by 20-fold.”
In the Release, CZI Head of Science Cori Bargmann said, “The Baric Lab’s expertise in coronaviruses, coupled with the team’s progress in antiviral testing, made this an important grant to help speed the development of COVID-19 treatments.”
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Baric and the UNC are long-time collaborators with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s notorious “batwoman,” Shi Zengli.
It was uncovered by National Pulse that in a speech given to the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza’s 2020 Conference, Shi gave a shoutout to Baric and disgraced EcoHealth head Peter Daszak, “I would like to thank all the collaborators, particularly my longtime collaborators Linfa Wang, Peter Daszak, and Ralph Baric,” read an “Acknowledgements” slide.
The logo of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) appears next to the Chinese Academy of Science and the National Natural Science Foundation of China at the bottom of the slide.
National Pulse also said the CZI funds paid for a study on SARS-COV-2 submitted as a pre-print for peer review on June 1.
Fooling with Mother Nature
Following the conference and in a May 11 hearing, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) questioned NIAID head Anthony Fauci in a heated debate about NIH funding of research in China.
“For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create super viruses. This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH. Dr. Fauci, do you still support the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?” asked Paul.
Fauci’s reply was rather bold in light of June revelations to the content of Fauci’s emails, “Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not never and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
In early January, the outgoing Trump administration repeatedly called for a transparent and thorough investigation into the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Beijing had kept silent for months, although the WIV always presented itself as a “civilian institution,” it was underhandedly conducting research projects with the People’s Liberation Army.
The State Department alleged a cover-up by the Chinese regime, saying “Beijing continues today to withhold vital information that scientists need to protect the world from this deadly virus, and the next one.”
Baric denied his research was connected to SARS-CoV-2 in a statement to the Washington Post’s “The Fact Checker,” “We never introduced mutations into the SHC014 [horseshoe bat coronavirus] spike to enhance growth in human cells, though the work demonstrated that bat SARS-like viruses were intrinsically poised to emerge in the future.”
“These recombinant clones and viruses were never sent to China. Importantly, independent studies carried out by Italian scientists and others from around the world have confirmed that none of the bat SARS-like viruses studied at UNC were related to SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
