This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
There’s more bad news about the Wuhan, China, lab where scientists were working on bat coronaviruses, including some experiments intended to make them worse, called gain-of-function work.
It’s already now routinely accepted as the source, whether by deliberate move or accident, of the COVID-19 virus that went around the globe and killed millions.
It’s also where, reports have revealed, American tax money was used for that gain-of-function work even though it was not supposed to be used for that.
Now a new report reveals that American taxpayers may have paid twice for some of those billings.
It is a report by Catherine Herridge and Analisa Novak at CBS that said, “The U.S. government may have made duplicate payments for projects at labs in Wuhan, China, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).”
The report cited records the news outlet has reviewed.
Diane Cutler, who formerly was an investigator of white-collar crime and fraud, said, “What I’ve found so far is evidence that points to double billing, potential theft of government funds. It is concerning, especially since it involves dangerous pathogens and risky research.”
The report said Cutler saw evidence of possible double payments as she reviewed U.S. grants that support “high-risk research” that was going on in China just before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report said she had been hired by Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, who took her discoveries to USAID and others to be used in a new investigation.
The double payments may have involved medical supplies, equipment, travel, and salaries, the CBS report said, and involved up to “tens of millions of dollars.”
A USAID official declined to comment, and Marshall said what would be correct now is a 9/11-style commission to investigate.
“I think there are 1.1 million reasons that American taxpayers should care,” he explained to CBS. “You’ll have a plane crash. We want to find out why the plane crashed. We go to any lengths to do that. And the hope is we don’t have another plane crash for the same reason.”
While Joe Biden’s COVID-19 adviser, Anthony Fauci, still claims it’s likely that COVID made an animal-to-human jump in nature, other experts at the FBI, the Energy Department, and more say they consider the Chinese lab a likely source of the scourge.
