On the top 10 list of things to do is stop funding research in the People’s Republic of China. I don’t think NIH research had anything to do with the pandemic, but it’s beyond insane that American taxpayers were providing funding to research being carried out in an enemy country whose facilities very likely intersected with a bioweapons program. We’re literally funding China’s plans to kill Americans.

It has to stop.

The laboratory at the centre of scrutiny over the pandemic has been carrying out research on bats from the cave which scientists believe is the original source of the devastating outbreak.

Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday show the Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan – funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government.

It comes after this newspaper revealed last week that Ministers here now fear that the pandemic could have been caused by a virus leaking from the institute.

Senior Government sources said that while ‘the balance of scientific advice’ was still that the deadly virus was first transmitted to humans from a live animal market in Wuhan, an accident at the laboratory in the Chinese city was ‘no longer being discounted’.

Now The Mail on Sunday has learned that scientists there experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which continues to licence the Wuhan laboratory to receive American money for experiments.

Results of the research were published in November 2017 under the heading: ‘Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.’

The exercise was summarised as: ‘Bats in a cave in Yunnan, China were captured and sampled for coronaviruses used for lab experiments. 

Some of this research was carried out a while ago. But the practice of funding research in China is fundamentally toxic.

As the PRC has proven, it can’t be trusted to cooperate in fighting diseases that come from its own soil. It’s not trustworthy and we should not be funding any research that takes place in China.

Meanwhile though, it’s all but inevitable that the virus did come out of a lab. The only question now is whether it was released intentionally or unintentionalyl.