Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., has announced "common sense amendments" to defund the efforts of a National Institutes of Health-backed Montana virus lab where 12 bats were infected with a SARS-like virus in 2018.
The move comes a week after the taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project uncovered that the bats were infected with a novel coronavirus obtained from the Wuhan lab one year before the COVID-19 pandemic. The NIH, overseen by Dr. Anthony Fauci, killed the bats and dissected them.
Rosendale wants to put an end to that.
"Taxpayers in Montana and across the nation shouldn't be funding unnecessarily dangerous animal research that can spark another pandemic. My commonsense amendments to the NIH's 2024 spending bill would undo some of the damage done by Anthony Fauci by defunding NIH programs he supported that put public health and national security at risk," Rosendale said in a statement.
The effort was a joint venture between Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborator Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina and the NIH's Rocky Mountain Lab.
WCW founder Anthony Bellotti characterized the discovery, beginning with bats shipped from Maryland, as a "real-life horror story of how a shady roadside zoo whose curator was an NIH animal experimenter shipped off bats to a deadly government virus lab overseen by Dr. Fauci to be infected with a coronavirus obtained directly from the Wuhan lab that experts believe caused COVID."
"Our government helped create the Wuhan flu, then shut the country down when it escaped from the lab! Fauci and his cohorts must be held accountable!" Rosendale said in a post last week.
Dr. Baric has said in a statement, the collaboration was minimal.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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