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France Warned US in 2015 About Wuhan Lab It Helped Build


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2021 Jul 26, 2:11pm   263 views  7 comments

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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/france-warned-the-us-in-2015-about-the-wuhan-lab-it-helped-build-former-covid-19-investigator-claims_3918684.html?utm_source=patrick.net&utm_medium=patrick.net&utm_campaign=patrick.net

The U.S. federal government should have stopped funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2015 when China reduced its cooperation with the French in building and operating the lab, according to the leader of an investigation into COVID-19’s origins by the State Department under the Trump administration.

In 2015, French intelligence officials warned the U.S. State Department and their own foreign ministry that China was cutting back on agreed collaboration at the lab, former State official David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

By 2017, the French “were kicked out” of the lab and cooperation ceased, leading French officials to warn the State Department that they had grave concerns as to Chinese motivations, according to Asher.

The State Department alleged in January 2021, at the end of the Trump administration, that the Wuhan lab had engaged in classified research on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.

The State Department did not respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

On Thursday, China said it would not allow the World Health Organization (WHO) to inspect the lab further. China has blocked the WHO from accessing important records at the lab.

“The Chinese basically sucked State into its honey pot operation to gain access to U.S. technology, knowledge, and material support. Classic. Just as they have done in every sector,” Asher said.

Between October 2009 and May 2019, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provided $1.1 million to the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance for a sub-agreement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to USAID. EcoHealth Alliance also received funding from the Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency that was subcontracted to the Wuhan lab, New York magazine reported. National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to EcoHealth Alliance totaling $600,000 between 2014 and 2019 were subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The NIH, Defense Department, and USAID should have stopped sending U.S. federal funding to the Wuhan lab back when the French warned the State Department in 2015, Asher said.

State Department officials “in charge of nonproliferation should have shut down all cooperation,” he added.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is at the center of speculation that COVID-19 may have originated from a lab accident, was initiated in 2004 as a joint project between France and China.

France provided the lab’s design, biosafety training, and much of its technology.

The French envisioned the Wuhan institute as an open and transparent lab that would serve the global scientific community in studying potential pandemics, according to a State Department cable in April 2018, citing a Wuhan-based French consulate official who worked on science and technology cooperation with China.

While top French politicians supported the collaboration, French security and defense experts did not, the French newspaper Le Figaro reported.

National security officials did not want to share sensitive technology with an oppressive country that was not an ally and they feared the lab could one day be transformed into a “biological arsenal,” according to Le Figaro.

As early as 2009, the U.S. State Department, then under former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, expressed concerns about the Wuhan lab, asking what France knew of how China planned to “vet incoming foreign researchers” and avoid technology transfer to countries of biological weapons proliferation concern, according to emails released by WikiLeaks.

The project took more than a decade to complete, and in February 2017, high-level French and Chinese officials held a ceremony to mark the lab’s accreditation.

Then-French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said at the time that it was a celebration of Franco-Chinese scientific cooperation.

To support the China-French project, France would make its technical expertise available to China to support the continuous improvement of the laboratory’s quality and safety, Cazeneuve added.

It would also budget 1 million euros per year for five years, he said.

That would fund about 50 French scientists to help train the Chinese lab workers, the director of Inserm, a French public research organization that helped set up the Wuhan lab, told the French magazine Science & Sante in May 2017.

However, little by little, the laboratory completely escaped the control of the French scientists who were, according to an agreement between Paris and Beijing, to supervise the work of the Chinese researchers in Wuhan, according to Le Figaro. The fifty French researchers who were to work in the lab for five years never left, the newspaper reported.

In January 2018, a State Department cable warned of a lack of highly trained technicians to operate the lab in a cable first reported by The Washington Post.

The U.S. officials who had visited the lab and made the warning via the cable were not permitted to return, because they were asking “too many questions,” according to Asher.

Comments 1 - 7 of 7        Search these comments

1   SumatraBosch   2021 Jul 26, 2:14pm  

THIS PROVES THAT TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING INCLUDING THE BLEACH AND A VOTE FOR EVERYONE ELSE IS EXACTLY LIKE JOINING ISIS AND THE NAZIS AND FORCING YOUR PETS TO BE GAY.

WRITE IN TRUMP FOR ALL OFFICES, EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME, BECAUSE ONLY TRUMP CAN FIX THE WORLD.
2   Hircus   2021 Jul 26, 2:35pm  

Sounds like they tricked the west into handing over technology and training, then gave us the boot once they felt they no longer needed training wheels.

Must be a national chinese strategy - trick the stupid greedy roundeye into giving you their technology by making them think they will get something good out of it.
3   Patrick   2021 Jul 26, 7:00pm  

SumatraBosch says
THIS PROVES THAT TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING INCLUDING THE BLEACH


Did you actually read the transcript of the bleach hoax? Or watch the video?

Do you think Trump is wrong about everything? Doesn't that seem improbable?
4   WookieMan   2021 Jul 26, 7:09pm  

Hircus says
Sounds like they tricked the west into handing over technology and training, then gave us the boot once they felt they no longer needed training wheels.

Rinse and repeat. Been close to 3 decades now. If you're not making money off it, fuck you. That's where we're at.

Fuck China.
5   Patrick   2021 Jul 26, 7:37pm  

I worked with another guy named Patrick who had a side job importing backpacks from China for $5 and selling them here for $100. Not a typo.

But then the costs to produce in China went up so he started sourcing them from Vietnam, lol.
6   SumatraBosch   2021 Jul 26, 10:59pm  

Patrick says

Do you think Trump is wrong about everything? Doesn't that seem improbable?


No. Anyone who built out that many rooms in Atlantic City in the mid-1980s is a suicidal dolt who could not ever be right about anything, ever.

None of the numbers made sense for his casino developments, no matter how you played them.

The room night capacity of Atlantic City was so overwhelmed already that the things turned into losers for Trump in a couple of years after the freak show novelty war off. One of them on the boardwalk was completely abandoned. Room capacity 30 years on still was overbuilt. The city could not get a bid on the place for scrap.

DUH! DAD! MORE! MONIES!
7   Patrick   2021 Jul 27, 10:29am  

So you believe Trump is wrong about everything, no matter what he says.

OK, just wanted to clarify your position.

Good to know that the half-trillion in annual Chinese imports is no problem at all for American jobs. Thanks for clearing that up.

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