As Elon Musk moves to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development, the agency’s support for the discovery of novel viruses in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology has come under an intense new spotlight.

“Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people?” Musk asked in a Sunday night post on X. The post has garnered 38 million views.

Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people? https://t.co/YVwyKA7ifs

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 2, 2025

The claim has touched off a renewed debate about whether U.S.-sponsored research contributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and has amplified a long simmering argument among scientists about the difference between “biodefense” and “bioweapons” research. Musk’s claim was immediately decried by some experts as harmful to national security but endorsed by others.

Musk’s vendetta against USAID has been met with resistance from congressional Democrats, who raise questions about how this affects U.S. soft power and whether the law allows for its elimination without legislative action.

But Musk has leveraged USAID-sponsored research in Wuhan as evidence of the need for drastic action.

Mind-blowing 🤯 https://t.co/Vv7PnkaFYz

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2025

USAID’s Adventures In Wuhan

The USAID Emerging Pandemic Threat Program directed at least $210 million to a decade-long government program called “PREDICT,” in which scientists sampled for novel viruses and monitored the risk for epidemics in Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Egypt, Jordan, Cote D’Ivoire, Liberia and the Republic of Congo.

The project is the “single largest health security effort ever funded by the U.S.,” according to the University of California-Davis.

The program directed millions to organizations at the center of concerns about a possible lab accident in Wuhan, namely EcoHealth Alliance and its subcontracted lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

No definite link has been drawn between the USAID-underwritten PREDICT project and the COVID-19 pandemic, which might involve proving that USAID funded the discovery of the progenitor virus that sparked the pandemic.

However, it is clear that PREDICT collected viruses of the same species as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and that the sequences of some of the viruses collected by PREDICT have never been published.

PREDICT funded the discovery of at least 52 novel SARS-related coronaviruses, including one of the closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. That virus, RaTG13, shares 96 percent of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, and was discovered at an abandoned mineshaft in Moijiang, China, where the U.S.-China team frequently collected samples.

EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak said that certain sequences of samples taken in China and Southeast Asia should be withheld from a public database because it could bring “unwelcome attention” to PREDICT partners like USAID.

“It’s extremely important we don’t have these sequences as part of our PREDICT release to Genbank at this point,” Daszak wrote on April 28, 2020, soon after his collaboration with the Wuhan lab first came under scrutiny by the first Trump administration. “Having them as part of PREDICT will being [sic] very unwelcome attention to UC Davis, PREDICT and USAID.”

According to a congressional investigation, years of viral samples stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have never had their sequences published.

The password protected portal for PREDICT data has been taken offline, though a more public-facing website remains online.

Thousands of viral samples were left by PREDICT in Wuhan Institute of Virology freezers, including 6,380 bat samples.

The scientist charged with overseeing these viral samples was identified as Ben Hu. Hu was named in a report citing anonymous sources as the COVID-19 pandemic’s “Patient Zero.” Hu rejected the claim. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated in a congressionally mandated declassified report in June 2023 that several Wuhan lab scientists became ill in the fall of 2019, and that they showed some symptoms “consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19.” The wife of a Wuhan lab researcher working on coronaviruses died of what appeared to be COVID-19 in December 2019, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported in 2021.

It’s clear that the Wuhan lab lacked staff properly trained to perform research at a maximum-security lab, according to a State Department cable released in 2021. According to public scientific papers, the lab allowed for novel coronavirus experimentation to occur at a BSL-2 level, which offers few protections against airborne viruses like COVID-19. ODNI acknowledged in its 2023 declassified report that the lab suffered from “aging equipment, a need for additional disinfectant equipment, and improvements to ventilation systems.”

USAID’s American contractors on the PREDICT project have been criticized for issues with biosafety, too.

On Jan. 17, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services stripped EcoHealth and Daszak of federal grants and barred them from receiving government funding for five years after concluding the group had not adequately overseen its research in Wuhan. Requests from funders at the National Institutes of Health for EcoHealth to obtain lab notebooks and sequences underwritten by U.S. government agencies were not met. According to the HHS investigation, Daszak did not treat these concerns seriously until facing the prospect of debarment.

Meanwhile, Metabiota’s role in responding to an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 was criticized by Doctors Without Borders and privately by the World Health Organization due to a lack of appropriate sanitization and personal protective equipment, as well as misdiagnosed cases and inaccurate predictions about the pandemic’s trajectory. That same year, the U.S. granted millions to Metabiota, including for lab work in Ukraine. Former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s firm invested $500,000 that same year. In 2022, Moscow authorities exploited this information in propaganda to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In 2019, USAID and the State Department also supported an expansion of EcoHealth called the Global Virome Project, which included a China-led Virome Project involving work with several institutions with ties to the Chinese military, including Beijing Genomics Institute or BGI, which has seen five of its affiliate companies blacklisted by the Commerce Department.

What if I told you…. pic.twitter.com/lWOYc0ql3O

— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) February 4, 2025

A State Department cable heartily endorsing the project acknowledged the considerable national security risks, including uncertainty over whether Chinese partners would be transparent with data sharing.

American institutions were told by USAID and the State Department that if China undertook novel virus research without U.S. participation, it could pose a national security risk, according to a “draft pitch” from May 20, 2019, outlining the project. Chinese officials were told the same.

“Limited access to the information gained through these efforts may have serious national security implications,” it reads. A comment on the draft states that “an equivalent statement will be inserted into the China doc” – the pitch translated and sent to Chinese institutions.

Approximately $270,969 from USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats Division laid the groundwork for the project before it had formally received a government grant, possibly running afoul of ethics laws.

The Global Virome Project website was scrubbed from the internet sometime in the last eight days. The last time the WayBack Machine captured the webpage, on Jan. 26, the site remained up.

Sometime after the emergence of COVID-19, U.S. government support for the Global Virome Project dried up.

Yet USAID allocated another $124 million to a project with different contractors but the same goal: Prospecting for novel viruses in the wild and testing which pose the greatest risks to humans in the lab. The project, called DEEP VZN, was shuttered in 2023 after concerns were raised by the White House National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Biodefense vs. Bioweapons

In addition to Musk’s claims about potential connections between USAID and COVID-19, his claim that USAID “funded bioweapon research” also stoked controversy.

virologists over on BlueSkyIsFalling are freaking out because i said it was naive to assume the US doesn’t do bioweapons reaserch….

— Michael Eisen (@mbeisen) February 3, 2025

The distinction between offensive bioweapons work and defense biosciences comes down to intent, experts told the DCNF.

The USAID PREDICT program’s stated mission was to “strengthen global capacity for detection of viruses with pandemic potential that can move between animals and people.”

“I do not think anything USAID has been doing would constitute a BWC violation – not even close,” said Jamie Yassif, vice president on global biological policy at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, in an interview with the DCNF. “It’s important to draw a clear distinction between well intended efforts around naturally emerging and national occurring disease risk and bioweapons work, and conflating the two runs counter to U.S. national security interest.”

Yet even experts critical of Musk’s claim acknowledge that the Biological Weapons Convention, the 1972 treaty that prohibits biological weapons, makes no technical distinction between altering a novel virus for the purposes of creating an offensive weapon and altering a virus for the purposes of creating vaccines and therapeutics.

In order to test which viruses sampled in nature have the potential to drive pandemics, researchers sometimes employ gain-of-function research — experiments that make viruses more deadly or transmissible.

This may make research on viruses with unknown properties “dual use” — capable of serving civilian research purposes or being misapplied for military aims.

“Initially, I thought that investigating the Earth’s virome is a good idea – kind of like searching for new species of animals,” said Laura Kahn, a physician and expert in pandemic policy, in an email to DCNF. “Where it went wrong is when the virologists got the idea to manipulate the viruses to see how to make them deadlier or more contagious.”

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the “defense” premise behind discovering novel viruses and engineering them in the lab was criticized as far-fetched by some experts.

The failure of the USAID PREDICT project to live up to its ostensible premise — to predict and prevent pandemics — has led some scientists to characterize it as bioweapons work by another name.

“The research had no — zero — civilian applications. The results did not help predict pandemics, prevent pandemics, or respond to pandemics,” Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said in an email to DCNF. “The sole applications of the research were discovery of new bioweapons agents and characterization of new bioweapons agents.”

Ebright and other scientists say the benefits of gain-of-function research remain theoretical. Even a virologist who led the charge for gain-of-function research struggled to come up with an example of a civilian benefit of enhancing a pathogen when pressed by a reporter.

While strongly rejecting the claim that USAID funded bioweapon work, Yassif said that more transparency could be helpful in avoiding a viral “arms race.”

“It is in the U.S. national security interest and in the interest of global security more broadly to have greater transparency,” she said. “It could reduce the risk of misconceptions that might otherwise lead to arms race dynamics that could be destabilizing.”

AUTHOR

Emily Kopp

Contributor.

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