WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st August, 2023) � A group of US senators has introduced a bill that would end funding for animal experiments at the Wuhan lab and 27 other labs eligible to receive taxpayer funding for research, Fox news reported on Monday.
The bill, which is called the Accountability in Foreign Animal Research (AFAR) Act of 2023, was put forth by Republican senators Joni Ernst and Lisa McClain and Democratic senator Don Davis. It aims to prevent the use of Federal funds for research involving vertebrate animals in nations the government considers to be foreign adversaries, the report said.
"We successfully pulled the plug on U.S. taxpayer funding to China's Wuhan Institute and Russia's labs�for now. 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," Ernst is quoted as saying in the report.
The senators argue that this "reckless spending" is against the best interest of taxpayers, said the report. The bill stems from an investigation Ernst started in January that revealed over 40 million US Dollars was given to a non-government pandemic research group that provided at least 2 million dollars to the Wuhan lab to conduct coronavirus experiments.
According to the report, which uses numbers provided by Ernst, 1.3 billion US tax dollars have been used to fund projects in testing labs in Russia and China since 2017.
