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Scientist searching for a coronavirus cure exposes right-wing “disinformation campaign” that led to Trump cutting his funding
60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley: “There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab”
Written by Eric Kleefeld
:{Published 05/11/20
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fox-Trump feedback loop has been a dangerous factor undermining the United States’ response to the crisis. Now, as CBS News’ *60 Minutes* documented on Sunday night, right-wing media misinformation about the coronavirus’s origins — the idea that it originated in an infectious disease research laboratory in Wuhan, China — has even resulted in the Trump administration shutting down funding for actual pandemic research.
CBS anchor Scott Pelley spotlighted infectious disease researcher Dr. Peter Daszak, head of the New York-based nonprofit medical organization EcoHealth Alliance, which just recently lost a $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As CBS noted, Daszak's “work is helping in the search for a COVID-19 cure.”
The broadcast traced the chain of events back to when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said during an April 14 appearance on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight: “The NIH gives this $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers. Following that, coronavirus erupts in Wuhan.”
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From the April 14, 2020, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
Newsmax correspondent Emerald Robinson then asked President Donald Trump about the supposed grant during a White House briefing on April 17 — attributing this grant to actions by the Obama administration — to which Trump said he would end it “very quickly.”
But these allegations were untrue.
“There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab,” Pelley explained. The grant was actually to EcoHealth, of which about $100,000 per year went toward working with the Wuhan facility — and even that could only take place after careful review by the NIH.
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From the May 10, 2020, edition of CBS News’ 60 Minutes
PELLEY: His funding from the NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, was killed, two weeks ago, by a political disinformation campaign targeting China's Wuhan Institute.
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PELLEY: On April 14, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz claimed China's Wuhan Institute had, quote, "birthed a monster." Gaetz is a vigorous defender of the president. He's been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly threatening a witness against Mr. Trump and he led a protest to delay impeachment testimony.
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PELLEY: There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab. But, the falsehood spread like a virus, in the White House, and without verification, in the briefing room.
The specific claim that $3.7 million was sent to the Wuhan lab has been spread by a variety of sources, such as when the U.K.-based Daily Mail on April 11 mentioned “documents” it obtained that it said showed scientists in Wuhan had “experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health”; the article featured comments from Gaetz regarding the Wuhan Institute.
And on April 26, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani tweeted:
PolitiFact rated the claim as “False,” noting, “The grant was made in 2014, and the amount that went to the lab was a bit under $600,000. The grant restriction did not apply to identifying naturally occurring viruses.”
In an interview on a New York talk radio show on April 26, Giuliani opened a new rhetorical front to pin the blame on another target: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and a target of right-wing ire since the crisis began. Outlets such as The Washington Times, RedState, and Gateway Pundit all picked up on Giuliani’s false allegations attempting to tie Fauci to this supposed large grant of money to the lab.
Fauci has repeatedly dismissed the right-wing media’s conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19, and in an article published last week in National Geographic, he reaffirmed not only that the virus was not manipulated artificially in a lab, but also dismissed the secondary conspiracy theory that it could have been discovered occurring naturally but then leaked from the facility in the course of other research work:
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci says. Based on the scientific evidence, he also doesn’t entertain an alternate theory‐that someone found the coronavirus in the wild, brought it to a lab, and then it accidentally escaped.
Fox News has played a key role in spreading these right-wing media conspiracy theories and other coronavirus misinformation throughout the pandemic.
Earlier in the crisis, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) actively pushed the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was released from the Wuhan research facility. They and other voices on Fox News repeatedly cited a study from the respected medical journal The Lancet to allege that the virus did not come from the city’s wet market — and therefore it must have come from a laboratory — even as The Lancet itself has disavowed the very notion that right-wing media are trying to spin.
More recently, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said, “I personally believe it's entirely possible that they engineered the Wuhan virus.” And just last week, Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed that a multinational intelligence dossier “confirms much of what we've suspected” about the virus coming from the Wuhan facility. Intelligence professionals have refuted the fringe theory and the claim that the dossier even supported the idea amid this latest push from Fox and other Murdoch media outlets, such as The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, Australia.
Other right-wing media voices from outside Fox News have also pushed this theory:
- The Washington Times ran an article in late January, titled “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program.” That article now contains a disclaimer at the top: *“Editor’s note (March 25, 2020): Since this story ran, scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab, though the exact origin remains murky and experts debate whether it may have leaked from a Chinese lab that was studying it.”
- Steve Bannon, Trump’s former Chief White House Strategist, has spread the idea and given interviews to one of his financial benefactors, Chinese billionaire-in-exile Guo Wengui. At one point, however, Bannon interviewed an actual virologist who told him that idea was “a load of crap.”
- Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who Trump recently awarded the Medal of Freedom, declared in February: “It probably is a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized. All superpower nations weaponize bioweapons. They experiment with them.”
- Sebastian Gorka, far-right political commentator and former deputy assistant to Trump, agreed on the April 27 edition of his radio show that “one of the most likely scenarios” is that China deliberately released the virus to the rest of the world in order to take down other countries’ economies.
- Sinclair Broadcasting host Eric Bolling, who was in regular communications with the White House about the pandemic back in March, has repeatedly asked about this theory in interviews with White House officials and members of Congress. In one example, he told the U.S. assistant secretary for health: “This virus feels to me that it was more engineered than simply someone eating a bat in China in a wet market and it jumping from animal to human.”
- One America News Network, a far-wing outlet repeatedly promoted by Trump himself, has been tying in the idea about the Wuhan lab together with other conspiracy theories about billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and George Soros, the “deep state,” and population control.
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7 25 US AID BODY CT WILL BE 14 MILLION BY 2023?
AI GGL 7 25
Based on a study published in the medical journal The Lancet in July 2025, cuts to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which was eliminated in early 2025, could lead to over 14 million additional deaths by 2030. This includes an estimated 4.5 million deaths among children younger than five.
The study, conducted by an international research team, estimated that USAID funding had prevented 91.8 million deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021. The researchers attributed these averted deaths to USAID-supported programs in various sectors, including healthcare, nutrition, education, water, sanitation, and humanitarian relief.
The elimination of USAID was initiated under the Trump administration with the support of Elon Musk, who served as a close advisor. Musk had previously stated his intention to drastically reduce government spending and headcount, targeting USAID as one of the first departments to be dismantled. This action has been criticized by medical experts and lawmakers who argue that it will have devastating consequences for global health.
MSNBC
Medical experts and lawmakers are denouncing Elon Musk as cruel after a new study predicted that the billionaire’s efforts to help the Trump administration dismantle theU.S. Agency for International Developmentcould lead to more than 14 million deaths over the next five years.
According to the analysis, published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet, programs funded by USAID prevented nearly 92 million deaths worldwide from 2001 through 2021. Researchers found that across 133 countries, the agency helped stop more than 25 million deaths from HIV/AIDS, about 11 million from diarrheal diseases, 8 million from malaria and nearly 5 million from tuberculosis.
Using that data, experts calculated that 14 million people around the globe could die over the next five years because of the USAID cuts, including about 4.5 million children younger than 5.
USAID became an agency of particular interest to Musk, as his so-called Department of Government Efficiency carried out President Donald Trump’s mission to slash the federal budget. In February, Musk bragged on Xthat he “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
A month later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the cancellationof 83% of USAID’s programs, saying they did not serve “the core national interests of the United States.” Rubio’s move had an immediate effect, as NBC News reported:
The action brought many overseas humanitarian efforts to a grinding halt, leading to the closings of food kitchens and health clinics in underserved countries and in some cases delaying or stopping the distribution of lifesaving medications, bed nets to ward off malaria, nutritional packets for starving children and chlorine tablets to disinfect dirty water.
Samantha Power, who led USAID during the Biden administration, told CNN that the effects that Musk’s cuts will have on global health are “not something that any American should tolerate.”
“Efficiency, we’re all for efficiency, but actually taking away programming that is saving lives … that’s just devastating,” Power said.
Timothy Caulfield, a professor of health law and science policy at the University of Alberta in Canada, called the prediction “Sickening. Heartbreaking. Evil.” Rachel Clarke, an English physician specializing in severe illness, seemingly singled out Musk, attributing the estimated death toll to “one man’s cruelty & venality.”
Congressional Democrats also shared their reactions to the study.
“Donald Trump’s legacy: As many as 14 MILLION more deaths over the next five years thanks to USAID cuts made by him, Elon Musk, and his DOGE bros,” Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois wrote on X.“Absolutely shameful.”
“This administration’s cruelty knows no bounds,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington wrote in her own post.
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Major medical journal retracts hydroxychloroquine study finding serious risks
An article in the respected medical journal The Lancet which found that hydroxychloroquine use increased the risk of death in COVID-19 patients was retracted on Thursday, with the authors admitting they could not “vouch” for…
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/joe-conason-has-a-prescription-for-a-sick-country
Before June 1, we will almost certainly have lost 100,000 Americans to the coronavirus, along with 25 million jobs. Without powerful government action, this national catastrophe, unlike anything seen here for a hundred years, will continue to ravage the United States. And there is every reason to fear that we will see yet more pandemic disease as this century unfolds.
Yet there is still no sign that the Trump administration is prepared to act with the determination, skill and urgency that the hour demands. Instead, the president consistently demonstrates his mental and moral unfitness to lead — as he did again this week when he idiotically declared that we have so many COVID-19 cases because we have done so many tests.
Which is why the world’s most respected medical journal has now prescribed a first step toward restoring America’s health.
Concluding a pithy editorial that indicts the decline of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the editors of The Lancet urged the administration to stop touting such “magic bullets” as hydroxychloroquine or an early vaccine — and instead empower the CDC to oversee the massive nationwide program of testing, tracing and isolation that ought to have been mounted months ago.
The Lancet editors are well aware that neither Trump nor his feckless minions can do that. They know the president will let thousands die rather than jeopardize his deceptive reelection campaign. So they offer a second prescription: “Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.”
The degradation of public health did not begin with Trump, as The Lancet editorial acknowledges. Right-wing governments and their affiliated “thinkers” have spent decades undermining support for science, international institutions, universal health care and all the other elements of an effective response to the pandemic threat.
Campaigns to denigrate science and curtail effective policy have most often sprung from commercial interests that bankroll politicians, notably the tobacco and fossil fuel lobbies. But the trend toward public ignorance — and with it a growing hostility toward science and scientists — has accelerated sharply with the rise of Trump, who exploits paranoia and superstition every day.
Before Trump, it was unimaginable that a president of the United States would publicly cast doubt on the scientific data compiled by his own government, or publicly slur the scientists who devote their lives to protecting the public. But we have seen Trump do exactly those things, again and again, as he did this week when he attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading epidemiologist, and Dr. Rick Bright, its top vaccine specialist, a courageous dissenter Trump mocked as a “disgruntled” employee.
It was also unimaginable that any president — even one of the dimmer Oval Office lights — would say something as stupid as Trump’s various absurd remarks about coronavirus testing. But we know that this president takes his advice from obsequious television personalities as intellectually vacuous as himself. He hears Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity say that the rise in coronavirus cases is a result of increased testing and confidently repeats that moronic theory.
(Aside from the logical fallacy, data shows that the opposite is true: New Zealand, which is one of the few places to successfully control the disease, has the highest ratio of tests performed to cases found. The Kiwis have conducted over 182 tests for every confirmed case.)
When America was truly great, as The Lancet suggests, our government rejected “America First” bluster and implemented policies that built the CDC into a truly robust and globally admired agency. Our political and religious leaders understood that we, our allies and even our adversaries shared the same interest in improving and protecting the health of the world’s people. That bipartisan consensus endured even into the George W. Bush administration, which spent billions to stand up the president’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to hold back the AIDS pandemic.
We cannot rescue ourselves from the coronavirus, or protect our children and their children from future threats, without restoring the nation’s commitment to scientific truth, public health and government integrity. And we cannot restore those elements of sanity until we remove the disturbed regime responsible for this ruin.
The message of The Lancet editors is simple: This November, voting is a choice of life or death.
To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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denied that he threatened the editor. Lachmann was an author of the Royal Society’s 1998 highly favorable report on GMOs. A widely reported story line goes as follows: in 1999, Lachmann tried to persuade the editor of The Lancet not to publish A´ rpa´d Pusztai’s research on the adverse effects of GM potatoes on rats on the grounds that it was not sound science.
The Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, received what he described as an aggressive phone call from Lachmann. Dr. Horton said he was called at his office in central London on the morning of Wednesday October 13, two days before the Lancet published the paper by Pusztai. Dr. Horton, editor of The Lancet since 1995, said the phone call began in a ‘‘very aggressive manner.’’ He said he was called ‘‘immoral’’ and accused of publishing Dr. Pusztai’s paper, which he ‘‘knew to be untrue.’’ Toward the end of the call, Dr. Horton said the caller told him that if he published the Pusztai paper, it would ‘‘have implications for his personal position’’ as editor. The Lancet is owned by Reed Elsevier, one of Europe’s largest scientific publishing houses (Flynn and Gillard 1999). Lachmann’s own account of the Pusztai affair can be found in Panic Nation (2005). He categorically denies making the threat to Richard Horton. When The Lancet received the manuscript from Ewen and Pusztai, it was sent to six referees, whereas the usual peer review has two to three referees. Five of the six referees recommended the paper for publication, while one referee was strongly against publication. In addition, that referee transgressed a long-standing norm of the journal to keep reviews to the editor confidential by disclosing his negative review to the press. The Lancet published the article despite the pressures to do otherwise. The attacks against Pusztai were unrelenting. He and Ewen responded to a number of his critics in The Lancet (Ewen and Pusztai 1999b). Pusztai left Rowett and periodically has commented on the incident. To this date, no one has made an effort to replicate his study. The episode left Pusztai’s otherwise distinguished career in shambles. The Se´ralini Case The second most highly publicized study was led by Gilles-Eric Se´ralini, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Caen in Normandy, France. He is the founder and president of the scientific advisory board of the nonprofit Committee of Research and Independent Information on Genetic Engineering (CRIIGEN), an association that was in the public record. Funding from CRIIGEN was acknowledged in Se´ralini’s papers. In 2009, Se´ralini and eight other authors published a paper in the International Journal of Biological Sciences that discussed the relevant criteria Krimsky 19 Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at The New School on August 7, 2015 that should be used to evaluate GMOs. Their paper raised questions about what regulatory agencies use to undertake risk assessments involving mammalian feeding experiments of GMOs (Se´ralini et al. 2009). By that time Monsanto had been undertaking short-term tests (ninety days) on certain GMO food products. The authors considered the current criteria to be fostering false negative results because of sample size and statistical design. Referring to some experiments that found adverse effects from GMOs the authors stated, ‘‘These GM-linked effects are then considered as signs of toxicity in the ninety-days, not proofs of toxicity’’ (Se´ralini et al. 2009, 442). The authors proposed...
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