USAID sent 11,000 viral samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) over the course of a ten-year program, despite not having any formal agreement with the laboratory, according to documents obtained by Daily Caller.
The viruses were reportedly sent from China’s Yunnan province to Wuhan — the infamous epicenter of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic — with the exportation being funded by the USAID, which seemingly failed to devise a strategy that would prevent the samples from becoming bioweapons and staying accessible to the U.S. government.
Notably, the Wuhan Institute of Virology lacks adequate biosafety practices and has ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s military, People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The $210 million USAID program, dubbed PREDICT — which failed to implement a long-term storage plan when funding ceased — was spearheaded by the University of California-Davis and involved gathering virus samples from countries around the world.
Among the thousands of viral samples sent via USAID funding to the Wuhan lab is one of the closest known relatives of the Chinese coronavirus that ravaged the world in 2020, Daily Caller noted.
“Investigations involving USAID’s former funding of global health awards remain active and ongoing,” a senior State Department official told the outlet. “The American people can rest assured knowing that under the Trump Administration we will not be funding these controversial programs.”
Last week, USAID was finally shuttered after President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered a slew of examples of waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars.
“Beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
“Development objectives have rarely been met, instability has often worsened, and anti-American sentiment has only grown,” Rubio added.
Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, meanwhile, told Daily Caller that USAID’s $210 million “should have included contractual terms that required all samples, or at least copies of all samples, be transferred to and stored by a U.S. government facility.”
“The PREDICT grift did none of this,” Ebright asserted.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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