(LifeSiteNews) –– Minnesota governor and Democrat nominee for vice president Tim Walz has a decade-long relationship with a medical research center associated with China’s controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is accused of playing a key role in unleashing COVID-19 on the world.
The Washington Examiner reports that Walz, who honeymooned in China and has said the United States need not be in an “adversarial relationship” with the authoritarian regime, has long supported the University of Minnesota’s Hormel Institute, crediting it with helping “pave the way for Minnesota to lead in biomedical innovation.”
He has held meetings and tours with the outfit on numerous occasions over the years, and during his time in Congress arranged $2 million in taxpayer funding for technology acquisition as well as supporting a $5 million earmark in 2008. In April of this year, the group called the governor a “strong advocate for The Hormel Institute, including by supporting its major expansions.”
This relationship has become a cause for concern in light of Hormel’s history of research collaboration with WIV, with some collaborative papers published as recently as this year. Hormel acknowledged in 2020 that it received financial “help from the Core Facility and Technical Support” the WIV for “radioactive and fluorescent tests,” and Hormel professor Bin Liu attended Wuhan University.
“Our discoveries are peer-reviewed and published in the public domain with appropriate attribution to those who contributed to each study,” University of Minnesota spokesman Jake Ricker responded, insisting the two entities have no “formal affiliation” with one another. “Research is conducted with the full commitment of the Hormel Institute and the university to compliance with federal disclosure, security, export controls, and sanctions rules.”
Ex-White House National Security Council member Brian Cavanaugh finds that answer inadequate. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology has direct ties to China’s People’s Liberation Army,” he told the Examiner. “The Hormel Institute is helping a foreign adversary.”
Publicly, the theory that COVID escaped from WIV, as opposed to evolving in nature, was widely mocked and dismissed since U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) floated it in February 2020, and for months any suggestion of it was condemned as misinformation. It was not until mid-2021, well after Democrats had retaken the White House, that mainstream media outlets began to acknowledge it as a possibility. But leaked emails and other reports later revealed that top government officials were aware of the possibility from the beginning.
In May 2021, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a report finding “significant circumstantial evidence” that COVID spread from a leak at the Wuhan lab. Under former director and White House COVID adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) approved funding for medical non-government organization EcoHealth Alliance to explore gain-of-function (GOF) research, which entails intentionally strengthening viruses to better observe their effects, at several sites including WIV.
Fauci and his defenders insisted that the work NIAID approved was not gain-of-function and could not have lead to COVID, but the conservative investigators of Project Veritas released documents showing that, before going to NIAID, EcoHealth previously pitched its funding request to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which rejected it on the grounds that the project would violate a preexisting moratorium on GOF research and failed to account for its potential risks.
Former EcoHealth vice president Andrew Huff, who quit in 2016, has also attested that the organization “did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak,” and that as early as 2015, he voiced to EcoHealth officials his concerns that the company “did not have enough visibility or firsthand knowledge of what was happening at foreign laboratories [it] contracted and managed.”
As for Walz, he and sitting Vice President Kamala Harris narrowly lead Republican former President Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance according to polling aggregations by RealClearPolitics and RaceToTheWH, although margins remain extremely close in the swing states that will decide the Electoral College results.