Trump Spreads Distorted Claim on Wuhan Lab Funding
The Wuhan Institute of Virology received $600,000 as part of a larger five-year U.S. government grant to a U.S.-based nonprofit studying emerging infectious diseases. But President Donald Trump put the figure at $7.5 million, saying he “ended it.”
We asked the White House where the $7.5 million figure may have come from, but we haven’t received a response.
False claims that the Wuhan lab had received $3.7 million in National Institutes of Health grant money have circulated online after an made that assertion and Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz it in a Fox News interview. The NIH didn’t award such a grant. Instead, it gave a grant totaling , beginning in 2014, to the U.S.-based to study the risk of the future emergence of coronaviruses from bats. And EcoHealth distributed $600,000 of that total to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a collaborator on the
