America’s taxpayers funded the purchase of cats from Chinese “wet markets” for medical research over the past 15 years, sustaining the very institutions that are now blamed for spreading the coronavirus in Wuhan.
Researchers at the U.S. Agriculture Department paid for dozens of animals, then had them killed and fed their tongues, brains and other parts to other cats as part of medical studies, according to the White Coat Waste Project, which exposed the controversial work in a report last year.
The Trump administration ended the cat projects in the wake of the report, and the 14 surviving kittens were adopted out.
But the prospect that American taxpayers helped boost the wet markets was horrifying at the time, and even more so given the outbreak, said Justin Goodman, vice president for advocacy at White Coat.
“This kind of reckless taxpayer-funded research involving disgusting wet markets — which even are known to sell experimental lab animals for consumption — put animal, human and global health in grave danger and has to be prevented in the future,” Mr. Goodman said.
On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Sen. Joni Ernst announced legislation to permanently ban that kind of spending.
“While previous administrations should have been working to shut down these dangerous, disease-prone markets, they were subsidizing them with taxpayer money,” the Iowa Republican said. “That’s why I’m working across the aisle to prevent any more American tax dollars from going to China’s unregulated ‘supermarkets of sickness.’”
China has blamed a wet market in Wuhan, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, for the outbreak. Chinese officials said the virus leapt from bats slaughtered at the market to people, then spread in human-to-human contact.
U.S. officials now question that version. The Trump administration is investigating whether the novel coronavirus may have escaped from a nearby government lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Yet even there, American taxpayers would shoulder some of the blame. The National Instituted of Health issued a $3.7 million grant to pay for coronavirus research at Wuhan, despite safety warnings from the State Department.
“Whether it’s the lab in Wuhan or these repulsive wet markets, Iowans shouldn’t be footing the bill for either,” Ms. Ernst said.
She joined in a letter by more than 50 lawmakers this week to congressional leaders demanding they make sure no American taxpayer money goes to the Wuhan lab ever again.
“We’re sure you agree that taxpayers’ money should not be sent to a dangerous Chinese state-run bio-agent laboratory that lacks any meaningful oversight from U.S. authorities and is run by adversaries with a history of lab leaks, including SARS, and deception about the causes and extent of deadly disease outbreaks, including COVID-19,” the lawmakers wrote.
It’s not clear how much federal money actually went to the animal purchases at the Chinese markets, though the overall research cost taxpayers $650,000 a year, White Coat says.
Ms. Ernst was joined by Sens. Mike Braun, Indiana Republican, and Joe Manchin and Jeff Merkley, Democrats from West Virginia and Oregon, in proposing a permanent ban on federal money being spent at wet markets.
Whatever the original source of the COVID-19 infections, the Wuhan wet market does appear to have been the site of spread for 55% of the initial cases, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
SARS, another coronavirus identified in 2003, is also believed to have sprung from a Chinese wet market, making the continued U.S.-funding for buying animals at those markets all the more troubling, American officials said.
Just a couple years after SARS, White Coat says, dozens of cats were purchased using U.S. taxpayer money from a pet market in the Guangzhou Province.
White Coat managed to obtain documents detailing a cat “menu” from 2006 detailing the “donor” cats that were purchased then reduced to “serum, heart, feces, brain” and other parts, which were brought to the Animal Parasitic Diseases Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, where they were fed to “recipient” cats. White Coat says the cat parts were shipped in carry-on luggage.
The goal of the research was to test food safety.
Another 34 cats were purchased at a pet market in China in 2014 then slaughtered and had their parts shipped to Beltsville. In both cases, the researchers who published reports on the results insisted the slaughters were done humanely according to Chinese law.
Federally funded research also paid for dogs, ducks and chickens purchased at Chinese slaughterhouses and markets in 2008 and 2013, according to papers documenting the research.
