Donald Trump lashed out at CBS after its flagship news program, 60 Minutes, aired a segment detailing how a right-wing coronavirus conspiracy goaded the White House into defunding a vital research nonprofit. “@CBS and their show, @60Minutes, are doing everything within their power, which is far less today than it was in the past, to defend China and the horrible Virus pandemic that was inflicted on the USA and the rest of the World. I guess they want to do business in China!” the president wrote on Twitter, one of his more than 100 Mother’s Day tweets and retweets. Trump’s fit came shortly after CBS aired an interview with Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance. The organization, which has worked with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology to study bat-related viruses, lost its $3.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health last month.
This funding was pulled 10 days after Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Trump ally and Florida Republican, appeared on one of the president’s favorite Fox News programs and, without evidence, connected EcoHealth’s grant to China “birth[ing] a monster” virus. “The NIH gives this $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers. Following that, coronavirus erupts in Wuhan,” he told Tucker Carlson on April 14. Gaetz’s theory played into unfounded conspiracies promoted by the administration and Trump’s media allies that portray COVID-19 as a virus that was either manufactured in, or accidentally released from, a Chinese lab.
The timing and target of Trump’s grant axing could not be worse, as Daszak, whose organization is currently aiding in coronavirus research, essentially predicted its outbreak 17 years ago. “What worries me the most is that we are going to miss the next emerging disease, that we’re suddenly going to find a SARS virus that moves from one part of the planet to another, wiping out people as it moves along,” he said during a 2003 interview on 60 Minutes. During his most recent CBS appearance, Daszak noted that his nonprofit’s promising testing of “the breakthrough drug” remdesivir as a potential COVID-19 treatment would not have been possible without the NIH grant. EcoHealth, which, as CBS notes, has indexed hundreds of bat viruses during its 15 years collaborating with the Wuhan virology institute, had its NIH funding from the Obama years renewed in 2019. But it is now facing layoffs, due to the conservative mob that pushed the Trump administration to exact its penal measures. On April 17, Trump publicly alluded to EcoHealth after a reporter, formerly with the far-right network One America News—his favorite news channel, after Fox—posed a misnomer that claimed the Obama administration gave a $3.7 million grant “to China.” “I’ve been hearing about that,” Trump replied, days after the Gaetz segment on Tucker Carlson Tonight. “We will end that grant very quickly.”
Academic, institutional, and U.S. intelligence experts alike have pushed back against the Wuhan lab theories, including the World Health Organization and Trump’s own Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified,” the DNI office wrote in a statement at the end of April, while the WHO said the outbreak was likely caused by animal-to-human contact.