Kanas Senator Roger Marshall said this week the US should discontinue gain-of-function research and stop funding similar Chinese research.
“I think number one is we have to have a moratorium on gain of function research. I don’t see the benefits outweigh the risks at this point in time,” Marshall, a Republican and physician, said on Thursday.
“What Americans don’t understand is the scientific community in China works hand in hand with the Chinese military and with the [Chinese Communist Party],” Marshall said.
Gain of function studies are when scientists examine techniques to increase virus or pathogen transmissibility and lethality. U.S. lawmakers say the communist state could utilize those pathogens against their adversaries.
“Maybe they‘ll use it to attack our food sources; maybe they’ll use it to attack our soldiers. I don’t know. But this is way more scary than a nuclear bomb in so many ways,” Marshall told NTD’s Capital Report..
This week, a congressional committee report revealed that a Chinese virologist mapped COVID-19’s genomic sequence two weeks before China’s communist dictatorship disclosed it to the world.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee found that Ren Lili uploaded COVID-19 sequencing data to a U.S. genetic database on Dec. 28, 2019. That means that the research using the pathogen was likely taking place long before then.
Chinese authorities still called the disease an unknown “pneumonia” and urged its health personnel not to distribute information under penalty. After two weeks, Beijing shared genetic makeup with the World Health Organization on Jan. 12. Two days later, the Trump administration recognized the virus might travel between humans.
We have to suspend gain of function research and stop helping Chinese research, says @RogerMarshallMD (R-Kan.).
Sen. Marshall discusses the new information about the timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic and the CCP’s role. pic.twitter.com/AigwFuZeL8
— Steve Lance (@SteveLanceNTD) January 19, 2024
Marshall believes those two weeks when China was silent could have helped the world understand and prevent the spread of COVID-19.
“But the fact that they hid what was going on there, that they continue to say over and over again, that this was not transmitted person to person, it kept us from responding in the fashion we could have,” Marshall said.
In closed-door congressional testimony, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH until late 2021, acknowledged the possibility that COVID-19 could have emerged from a Wuhan lab “is not a conspiracy theory.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, former chairman of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made identical comments days earlier to the same House panel investigating the COVID epidemic.
–Metro Voice and wire services