Two new lies about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, based on an addendum to a report created by the GOP members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, have been making the rounds recently:
An Aug. 15 Wall Street Journal op-ed by former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield and Dr. Marc Siegel recounts what the authors purport to be a review of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including this question: “It put out requests for more than $600 million for a new ventilation system. What prompted this new need?”
And an Aug. 2 Washington Post column by John Rogin reported: “The [GOP] committee staff also unearthed an archived version of a contract competition for a new $1.3 million ‘Security Service Procurement Project’ that was issued by the Wuhan Institute of Virology on Sept. 12, the same day the virus database went mysteriously offline. Four days later, the Wuhan Institute of Virology announced a new contract competition to completely renovate its air conditioning system for an estimated $606 million. Both contract announcements were later scrubbed from the Chinese Ministry of Finance website.”
The claims about both the air conditioning system and the security service appear on page 20 of the 84-page GOP report.
Zichen Wang, writing on his blog Pekingology, investigates these claims by following the links in the footnotes of the report and finds that they are enormously mistaken.
