The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) quietly funneled thousands of viral samples — including potential ancestors of COVID-19 — to the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) without a formal agreement, documentation, or even a contingency for U.S. access, The Daily Caller reported.
The shocking details, buried in documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, show USAID shipped 11,000 virus samples from China’s Yunnan Province — home to some of the closest known relatives of the COVID-19 virus — directly to the WIV, the epicenter of the global pandemic.
According to internal sample disposition records obtained by Daily Caller, USAID’s PREDICT program—run by EcoHealth Alliance and University of California-Davis—facilitated the storage and long-term custody of over 11,000 virus-laden samples in Chinese laboratories.
Shockingly, there was no formal partnership agreement with the Chinese labs and no clearly defined safeguards to prevent misuse or diversion of these high-risk biological materials.
Among the documented locations was the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, where:
- 3,000 human samples, including blood serum and viral transport medium, were being held.
- 6,380 bat samples and 1,671 rodent samples were stored under lock and key.
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Many of the viruses stored at the lab in Wuhan may have been sampled with U.S. funding yet remain out of reach for U.S. government entities investigating the origins of COVID.
The samples were set to be preserved for testing – with human samples preserved for 10 years – the documents show. But the documents suggest that requirement was never incorporated into a formal contract with USAID.
The two scientists supervising the samples were: Ben Hu, a virologist at the WIV, who reportedly became sick with COVID-like symptoms in 2019; and Peter Daszak, a scientist who was debarred from federal funding after the U.S. government deemed him a threat to public safety for inadequate oversight of the research in Wuhan.
Hu and Daszak did not reply to requests for comment.
The documents show PREDICT contractors discussing viral samples taken from wildlife and stored in India, Liberia, Malaysia, the Republic of Congo and China. Some of the samples were stored in virus-transport media (VTM), which allows researchers to store live viruses for later use in the lab.
“It’s not rocket science to require a contract and supporting paperwork which establishes a relationship, testing protocol, and chain of custody, when one is sending out lab samples,” said Reuben Guttman, a partner at Guttman, Buschner & Brooks PLLC who specializes in ensuring the integrity of government programs, in an interview with the DCNF. “In any scientific endeavor, you need confidence in your results. That requires paperwork to prove your methodology is sound.”
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