‘I am cutting off the money for this madness,’ said Sen. Joni Ernst
L: Sen. Joni Ernst (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) R: The Wuhan Institute of Virology (Getty Images)
American taxpayers will no longer be forced to finance brutal animal experiments in Chinese labs if Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) gets her way.
Ernst on Tuesday introduced the Accountability in Foreign Animal Research Act, which would bar the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health from using taxpayer funds to finance animal research in labs controlled by the governments of China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. The bill comes as a growing number of intelligence agencies and scientific experts say the department’s funding of risky gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology likely played a direct role in the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019.
