About a month ago, U.S. officials began warning American pharmaceutical companies frantically searching for a COVID-19 vaccine to be on alert that China may try to steal their research. And U.S. authorities weren’t just engaging in bad PR against the country that had unleashed the coronavirus pandemic on the world. In fact, they seem to have been aware of a sort of biomedical espionage on the part of China for some time, culminating this month in the resignation or firing of over 50 scientists who had taken grant money for their work from China — and failed to disclose that funding.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) lead investigator began disclosing information about the probe in the summer of 2019, and its scope was broad: beginning in August 2018, “Bethesda, Maryland–based NIH has sent roughly 180 letters to more than 60 U.S. institutions about individual scientists it believes have broken NIH rules requiring full disclosure of all sources of research funding. To date, the investigation has led to the well-publicized dismissals of five researchers, all Asian Americans, at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, and Emory University in Atlanta.”--
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