Facebook funded Wuhan lab collaborator

FPI / June 24, 2021

Not only has Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and other grants funded irregular election initiatives nationwide (see here, here, here, here, here), new revelations show the philanthropy also backed the controversial Wuhan lab that conducted viral gain-of-function research.

Records show CZI donated nearly a half a million dollars to one of the lead individuals connected with funding bat coronavirus manipulation in Wuhan.

Ralph Baric, a University of North Carolina professor, received the grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic group in July 2020 on behalf of the university. Baric has attended conferences at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and is described by the lab’s “bat lady,” Shi Zhengli, as her “longtime collaborator.”

“The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative recently awarded a $433,000 grant to UNC for laboratory equipment that will accelerate research to address the COVID-19 pandemic,” a press release notes, as reported by Raheem Kassam and Natalie Winters of the National Pulse.

“This grant represents a new collaboration between the West Coast philanthropic organization CZI and UNC in search of a global solution to the pandemic,” a summary adds, then details how the grant was used:

The grant covers the purchase of a “liquid handler” — a robotic arm that can pipette fluids much more quickly and accurately than humans can — and supporting instruments, including another robot that detects active virus particles in samples and a machine to sequence RNA. Together, these tools increase the rate of testing compounds by 20-fold.

The grant allegedly helped produce a study, currently awaiting peer review, entitled "SARS-CoV-2 infectious virus, viral RNA in nasopharyngeal swabs, and serostatus of symptomatic COVID-19 outpatients in the United States," Kassam and Winters report.

The goal is to “provide a comprehensive analysis of demographic, immunologic, virologic, and clinical disease factors... in the largest study of symptomatic outpatient adults with COVID-19 to date,” the summary states.

Authors of the Baric Lab study write that they aimed to gain a “deeper understanding” of COVID-19 in order to “accurately identify and quarantine contagious individuals.”

As WorldTribune reported on April 15, the National Institutes for Health and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease also funded both Baric’s lab and the Wuhan lab.

Fauci recently attempted to cover up his relationship with Zuckerberg by telling MSNBC host Chuck Todd he had “no idea” what Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) was getting at when discussing the pair’s leaked e-mails, Kassam and Winters note.

Fauci also attempted to conceal his sponsorship of gain-of-function research at Wuhan, his leaked emails indicate, as WorldTribune reported on June 2.

The creation of financial ties between Baric and the Facebook-linked charity follows on the social media platform’s practice of heavily censoring users and news stories that suggested COVID-19 may have originated at the Wuhan lab.

Facebook contracts with the exclusively Democrat-run “Lead Stories” group to censor inconvenient information, the National Pulse has reported. Lead Stories is also contracted by TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, a firm used by the Chinese Communist Party and its People’s Liberation Army to further its propaganda.

Baric defended controversial gain-of-function research as a “crucial tool” and was involved with a newly discredited letter published in the Lancet. That statement, penned by fellow gain of function researcher Peter Daszak, misleadingly asserted as fact the theory that the virus had natural origins and dismissed the possibility of an origin in a gain-of-function research or an escape from the Wuhan laboratory as outlandish conspiracy theories.

Daszak was later fired from the United Nations commission investigating the origin of COVID-19 due to the letter.

We now know that experts such as the former CDC director at the time of the outbreak, Robert Redfield, have believed all along that COVID-19 most likely originated as an accidental escape of a viral gain-of-function experiment at the Wuhan lab.

This scrutiny is only the latest for CZI after it came under sharp criticism for its role in the 2020 presidential election. The organization funneled millions of dollars into Democratic districts to turn out the vote for Joe Biden.

It was also discovered that CZI poured $69.5 million into the leftist non-profit Center for Election Innovation and Research, founded by attorney David Becker, with which Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has ties. Becker also founded the Electronic Registration Information Center, to which Raffensperger appointed Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs as a member of the board of directors.

WorldTribune reported in March that Fuchs was the anonymous source responsible for misleading the press about President Trump’s call with Raffensperger about evidence of election fraud in Georgia.

Free Press International