Letter confirms Wuhan lab’s COVID-19 leak was funded by US taxpayers

The origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 remains unclear, but recent revelations reinforce the likelihood that the true source was a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A letter from Lawrence Tabak, the National Institutes of Health’s principal deputy director, to Rep. James Comer of Kentucky confirms that the NIH funded research at the WIV during 2018–2019 that manipulated a bat coronavirus called WIV1. Researchers at the institute grafted spike proteins from other coronaviruses onto WIV1 to see if the modified virus was capable of binding in a mouse that possessed the ACE2 receptors found in humans — the same receptor to which SARS-CoV-2 binds. The modified virus reproduced more rapidly and made infected humanized mice sicker than the unmodified virus.-- More...