https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2 ... u/#sources
- A virology lab in Wuhan received about $600,000 over five years from the U.S. government. Some of the money came while Trump was president. The grant was part of an effort to spot viruses in wildlife that might jump and infect humans.
- The best genetic analysis to date says the virus that causes COVID-19 was not created in a lab.
A Facebook post alerted readers to this "breaking news":
"President Trump just announced that the ‘biological’ lab in Wuhan where the COVID-19 virus was created was ‘funded’ by President Barak (sp) Hussein Obama in 2015 to the tune of $3,800,000 American dollars! This fact directly links Obama to all 150,000 deaths around the world!"
A different post makes a similar point: "Well well well, in 2015 Obama gave the Chinese lab in Wuhan 3.7M grant to study the corona virus what a coincidence."
The first post builds on the conspiracy theory that the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China created the virus.
It was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
There’s nothing correct in this post, although President Donald Trump does play a supporting role in spreading some of the inaccurate information at the heart of the claim.
The lab was funded by Obama "in 2015 to the tune of $3,800,000 American dollars!"
The correct amount sent to the Wuhan virology lab is $598,500, and that was spread over five years, according to the American research group running the project.
Here’s what we know about the lab, that work and the U.S. funding.
In 2014, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease backed a project by the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that aims to protect the people, land and animals in areas where viruses can jump from one species to another, as coronaviruses are known to do. The alliance has projects across 30 countries, including many in Asia, such as Thailand, Vietnam and China.
The 2014 project focused on bats in Yunnan province, about 800 miles southwest from Wuhan, on the border with Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar. In 2018, alliance researchers reported they had found a virus in bats very similar to SARS.
"If we know what viruses are out there in wildlife, and which people are getting infected, we have a chance to stop pandemics dead in their tracks," the group’s president Peter Daszak said in a press release at the time.
The group contracted the virology lab in Wuhan to conduct the genetic analyses of the viruses that were being collected in the field. The lab was selected after it was approved by the U.S. State Department and NIH.
The National Institutes of Health website shows a total award of about $3.4 million over six years to EcoHealth Alliance. The group’s spokesman Robert Kessler told us that, of that, the Wuhan lab received just under $600,000.
That’s about 85% less than the Facebook post asserted.
That NIH spending included about $265,000 for the lab under the Trump administration. In 2019, NIH renewed the grant to EcoHealth Alliance for another five years. That decision came on Trump’s watch and he said "we will end that grant very quickly."
