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  • 2020-05-20 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Giuliani Correctly Tweet That Wuhan Lab Got $3.7M from US in 2017? (en)
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  • On April 26, 2020, Rudy Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and a staunch ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, purportedly tweeted to criticize the Obama administration for supposedly having given $3.7 million to the Wuhab lab in China in 2017 — the site where the COVID-19 coronavirus originated, according to unfounded rumor, or was created, according to conspiracy theory. Some critics were quick to point out that former President Barack Obama was only president for less than three weeks in 2017, as Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States on Jan. 20, 2017, so Giuliani was effectively criticizing Trump himself: The above screenshot did reproduce a real tweet from Giuliani. And given that U.S. government funding is typically proposed, approved, budgeted, and appropriated long before it is actually disbursed, Giuliani's reference to the year 2017 wasn't necessarily as much of a gaffe as it might have superficially appeared. The former mayor still managed to get plenty wrong in a single tweet, however. As we noted in a previous article here on Snopes.com, the referenced $3.7 million comprised a series of multiple grants for coronavirus research issued by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases over the course of several years to different entities, of which the Wuhan Institute of Virology was just one: Furthermore, such grants were not prohibited in 2014. As noted above, the grants questioned by Giuliani were to study the risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife. Back in October 2014, the U.S. had placed a funding moratorium on one specific type of research, gain-of-function (GOF) studies that have the potential to enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens and had raised biosafety and biosecurity concerns, including the potential dual use risks associated with the misuse of the information or products resulting from such research: The coronavirus research funded between 2014 and 2019 via the grants referenced by Giuliani did not encompass gain-of-function studies and was therefore not prohibited. (The gain-of-function funding moratorium was finally lifted in December 2017.) New York's former mayor was correct in noting that the Wuhan Institute of Virology did receive some research funding via grants from the NIH, but he erred in all the other details stated or implied in his tweet. (en)
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