The discovery of an illegally-run Chinese virus laboratory in California — carrying hundreds of genetically engineered mice with diseases ranging from COVID-19 and HIV to Malaria — shows they're "in our house," Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst told the Daily Mail on Wednesday in a call for more accountability.
On March 3, the code enforcement for Reedley, California, investigated a warehouse at 850 I Street in regard to an illegally attached garden hose. On March 16, according to court documents, "the City returned to the Property and inspected the warehouse pursuant to the City's first inspection warrant."
The court documents lay out that city and health officials discovered "blood, tissue, and other bodily fluid samples; serums; and thousands of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material. ... During this inspection a room was found housing hundreds of laboratory mice. A person associated with Prestige Biotech" — the company operating the lab — "who appeared to be in control of the Property, informed the investigators that these mice were genetically engineered to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus."
Following the revelation of this report from roughly a week ago, Ernst told the Mail, "China is not just in our backyard, they are in our house, illegally conducting risky research that poses a serious public health concern."
"The world has already witnessed the impact of Chinese state-run Wuhan Lab's experiments on coronaviruses in bats, and I have worked to put an end to the taxpayer funding of these dangerous projects," Ernst added.
"We cannot allow what happened at Wuhan on our own shores. There must be accountability."
The story posits a question for a number of federal agencies and China that have either denied or downplayed the likelihood that COVID-19 came from a lab, maintaining instead that it originated from nature.
The National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease, formerly headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued statments that say COVID-19 originated in nature.
Other federal agencies, such as the National Intelligence Council and the Department of Energy, insisted with "low confidence" that COVID-19 originated from a lab.
As part of efforts to block "taxpayer funding for animal experiments conducted by our foreign adversaries, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology," Ernst announced on Tuesday that she would be reintroducing the Accountability in Foreign Animal Research (AFAR) Act, which her office says "would put an end to this."
"We successfully pulled the plug on U.S. taxpayer funding to China's Wuhan Institute and Russia's labs — for now," Ernst said in a press release. "The AFAR Act will guarantee not another penny will be spent subsidizing crazy and dangerous experiments, like putting cats on a treadmill or enhancing bat coronaviruses in Russia and China ever again.
"I applaud Reps. Lisa McClain and Don Davis as well as the White Coat Waste Project for their efforts exposing and putting an end to this whacky Washington waste."
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