Multiple agencies under the U.S. National Institutes of Health have funded more than 250 studies authored by researchers with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), according to a new report.
The story, broken by National Pulse on Sept. 20, found 265 studies authored by PLA researchers and funded by NIH grants since 2005. The investigation discovered the most frequent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entity in the package is the PLA General Hospital in Beijing.
The research also found at least 11 other PLA controlled hospitals in the NIH’s database that have received U.S. funding, in addition to a researcher from the Wuhan General Hospital of Guangzhou Military Command.
The discovery comes after NIH Director Francis Collins admitted during a radio interview in June that the U.S. government had no control over how grant money it awarded to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) through Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance was used.
Collins said, “When we give a grant… it has terms attached to it of what it is that the grantee is supposed to be doing with those funds… And we trust the grantee to be honest and not deceptive.”
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“The grant funds that went to Wuhan, which were a subcontract from EcoHealth, were very specifically aimed to try to categorize viruses that they could isolate from bats in Chinese caves, we had a good reason to want to know more about, given SARS and MERS that had come out of there.”
In July, National Pulse reported that Collins also serves on the Advisory Board for the International Conference on Genomics, an event organized by the notorious Chinese genetic data collection company BGI Genomics and the China National GeneBank.
BGI’s Chairman, Yang Huanming, who Collins referred to as a “friend” during his speech at the conference, is also connected to the PLA via research papers, according to a Jan. 30 Reuters article, while BGI Genomics itself also has extensive ties to the PLA.
In 2010, Collins signed the NIH into a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSCF), a state-run organization controlled by the CCP’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
The NSCF similarly has extensive ties to the PLA. In June, National Pulse likewise found 75 studies funded by the NSCF and performed by researchers from the PLA General Hospital.
The U.S. government has had several concerning conflicts of interest between itself and the Chinese regime emerge in recent weeks. In one such case, Joe Biden’s nominee for the Export-Import Bank of the United States, Reta Jo Lewis, a career bureaucrat with long standing ties to the Washington swamp, serves as an advisor and a board member to two U.S.-China influence organizations, a fact glossed over in the White House’s nomination announcement.
In another case, Melanie Hart, who currently serves as China Policy Coordinator for the Office of the Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and Environment co-authored a paper in 2015 during her time at the Center for American Progress with the China-United States Exchange Foundation, one of the most prolific branches of Beijing’s United Front campaign, that advocated for Washington to use its clout to help the CCP install its Belt and Road hegemony and infrastructure system in Afghanistan.
While last week, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, was discovered to have made two phone calls on the sly to his PLA counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng, during the dying hours of the Trump administration.
Milley assured the Communist Party the U.S. would take no military action at Donald Trump’s bequest.
In Canada, its biosecurity level 4 virology laboratory, the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, has likewise had at least two conflicts of interest with PLA researchers made public after scandals emerged when the country’s federal police escorted two Chinese nationals who were employed at the NML from the premises in mid-2019 after they shipped 30 vials of pathogens, including Ebola and Nipah, to the WIV.
