A former federal investigator investigating US government contracts for high-risk research in China discovered that the US government may have paid twice for programs at the Wuhan facility in China. According to CBS News, the duplicate payments were made through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Diane Cutler, who was recruited by Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, combed through over 50,000 records before reaching her judgment.
“What I’ve found so far is evidence that points to double billing, potential theft of government funds. It is concerning, especially since it involves dangerous pathogens and risky research,” Diane said.
Marshall forwarded Diane’s report to USAID and the internal watchdog at USAID, resulting in a new investigation into the situation. According to Diane, the US government may have made duplicate payments for items like medical supplies, equipment, travel, and salary. According to CBS, the funds might total tens of millions of dollars.
A spokesman for the USAID inspector general refused to acknowledge that an investigation into the double billing was currently underway. The probe into duplicate billing, on the other hand, might take up to six months.
The alarming results, according to Marshall, present severe implications for everyone, especially American taxpayers. “I think there are 1.1 million reasons that American taxpayers should care,” he said.
COVID-19 got leaked from the Wuhan lab?
The COVID-19 lab leak scenario has gained traction once more in recent weeks, as new reports about its origins have emerged. First, the US Energy Department provided a report to US Congress and the White House saying that the COVID-19 virus developed from a lab leak.
Then Christopher Wray, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed that COVID-19 “most certainly” originated in a “China government-controlled lab”. It was the first public acknowledgment of the FBI’s confidential assessment of how the pandemic virus developed. According to Wray, “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
Early this month, the US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to declassify American intelligence about the origins of COVID-19.
Subsequently, the former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated that he was barred from all investigations and discussions concerning the virus’s origins because his views differed from those of other scientists. Dr. Robert Redfield stated that the most plausible reason was a lab leak, for which other scientists began to exclude him from all meetings.
Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci refuted Redfield’s allegations. On many calls with Fauci, WHO head scientist Jeremy Farrar, and WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Dr. Redfield “expressed as a clinical virologist that I felt it was not scientifically plausible that this virus went from a bat to humans and became one of the most infectious viruses that we have in humans.”
Fauci attempts to connect the Wuhan lab leak to a natural event
With the lab leak notion refusing to die, Fauci appears to be creating a case for himself and the theory while attempting to maintain his opinions. Fauci proposed a new definition of a lab leak earlier this week, linking it to a natural occurrence.
“A lab leak could be that someone was out in the wild may be looking for different types of viruses in bats, got infected, went into a lab, was being studied in a lab, and then came out of the lab. But if that’s the definition of lab leak, then that’s still a natural occurrence,” Fauci said.
Fauci has proposed an alternative definition for the same.
“The other possibility is someone takes a virus from the environment that doesn’t spread very well in humans, and manipulates it a bit, and accidentally it escapes or accidentally infects someone and then you get an outbreak.”
Differences over the origins of COVID-19
The US government has not agreed on what caused COVID-19 to be created. According to a 2021 report provided by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Intelligence Council, along with four other unspecified agencies, thought in a low-confidence assessment that the initial COVID-19 infection ” was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus.”
However, now that numerous parties have begun to support the lab leak scenario, things have become murkier for top officials participating in the investigation. The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is unlikely to end anytime soon, and further disclosures, such as the double billing, are likely to emerge. Therefore, we may have to accept that the true origins of the coronavirus may never be discovered.