USAID Shipped 11,000 Viral Samples to Wuhan Lab Without Oversight

[noumoe]

Over a decade, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) shipped 11,051 viral samples—3,000 from humans, 6,380 from bats, and 1,671 from rodents, some carrying bat coronaviruses—from Yunnan Province to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) without any agreements to keep them accessible to the U.S. This came to light thanks to FOIA documents from U.S. Right to Know. The $210 million PREDICT program, run by UC Davis, gathered these samples but didn’t have a plan to store them after funding ran out in 2019.

WIV, connected to China’s People’s Liberation Army through lab building and staff ties, held the samples despite safety worries. USAID’s own note said, “No need [sic] information from Yunnan. All samples they helped collected [sic] are sent to, tested, and stored in Wuhan.” U.S. intelligence says WIV researcher Ben Hu got sick with COVID-like symptoms in 2019, though he denies it. A close COVID-19 relative was among the samples.

...Those samples are still at WIV, out of reach for U.S. investigators tracking COVID-19’s origins, pointing to big oversight problems.

https://thedailydots.substack.com/p/usa ... irect=true

[noumoe]

https://dailycaller.com/2025/07/08/excl ... ed-biolab/

https://www.marshall.senate.gov/newsroo ... ive-cases/