Exclusive — Sen. Joni Ernst: ‘Not Another Dime of Our Tax Dollars’ Should Go to Wuhan Lab

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told Breitbart News on Monday that the federal government should stop funding viral research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

“The world really does deserve some answers on the origins of COVID [Chinese coronavirus], but of course red China is absolutely refusing to cooperate with any sort of international efforts,” Ernst said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

She added, “What we do know, certainly, is that U.S. tax dollars were being funneled into China’s state-run Wuhan Institute of Virology, [where] they do research on dangerous coronaviruses, and so what I’m doing is fighting to ensure not another dime of our tax dollars is being spent in this Chinese lab, and of course we need to discover how COVID was unleashed so that we can prevent another pandemic in the future.”

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Ernst remarked, “On Sunday, of course the Wall Street Journal had reported that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November of 2019 that they went and sought hospital care, and of course, China is really waffling on this. They won’t provide any information that would help us discover, was this a leak, was it not?”

“We can draw conclusions out [and] we can make assumptions, but we need to know for certain where the virus came from,” she added. “We’ll continue pushing for that certainly not just the United States wants to know, but this is a global issue and many other countries are demanding answers, as well.”

Ernst told Breitbart News in March that the federal government provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for researching bat coronaviruses.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, testified under oath that no United States taxpayer funds went to bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan laboratory, despite evidence that a U.S. government-funded grant went to a contractor that did partner with the lab on that research.