Why on Earth are we AGAIN collaborating with China to manipulate viruses?
Bad: When Chinese scientists create a killer disease in a lab and allow it to wipe out millions.
Worse: When US taxpayers help pay for it.
Unconscionable: Doing it all again.
The US government hasn’t learned a thing: Disease-watchers are tracking the spread of H5N1 — bird or avian flu — across the globe, as it invades mammals for the first time, leaving beaches in South America littered with dead sea lions.
In the United States, 34 dairy cattle herds in nine states are infected.
Scientists are anxiously watching for any sign the virus is changing genetically to make human-to-human spread possible.
Against this backdrop, the US Department of Agriculture is collaborating with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the parent organization of the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the lab that likely concocted COVID.
The collaboration is manipulating strains of bird flu, making them deadlier to humans, and then infecting ducks and geese with them. What could go wrong?
