The United States has stopped funding the Institute of Virology in the Chinese city of Wuhan. According to the United States, safety rules were not followed at the facility and the institute did not provide the required documents in this regard. Bloomberg reports this.
The US Department of Health and Human Services also wants to bar the Chinese research foundation from participating in government tenders in the future.
The Chinese institute has not received any funding since July 2020, according to a statement from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the medical research agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The move came after a months-long review that the US department said showed the Chinese institute was “not complying with federal regulations,” according to a department memo. “This action was motivated by the failure of the Chinese institute to provide documentation requested by the National Institutes of Health regarding concerns that NIH safety protocols were violated,” a department spokesperson said in a statement.
In June, US intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), reported that they had found no direct evidence that the coronavirus pandemic arose from an incident at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan. The services said at the time that although “extensive work” was being carried out on coronaviruses at the Institute of Virology, they had found no evidence of a specific incident that could have caused the outbreak.
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