What US move to defund Chinese labs might mean for science and future pandemics

Name: Coronavirus: A look inside China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology
Uploaded: 2022-07-19T14:35:13.000Z
Duration: 2 min 24 s
Description: Coronavirus: A look inside China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology

Most funds for Chinese medical laboratories come from within the country, Beijing-based immunologist points out

‘Whenever politicians politicise science, everyone is worse off’, says expert warning of effect on scientific cooperation and readiness for future pandemics

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The campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province. Photo: TNS

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Published: 10:35pm, 19 Jul 2022Updated: 12:17am, 20 Jul 2022

A proposed US move to defund Chinese research labs would only have symbolic rather than actual impact on China, according to researchers in the country.

This comes after US House of Representatives appropriators backed a move to bar American public health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, from funding research labs in four nations including China – specifically a virology lab in Wuhan caught up in a lab-leak controversy.

“None of the funds … may be made available to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or any other laboratory located in a country determined by the secretary of state to be a foreign adversary, including China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran,” read an amendment to the 2023 fiscal budget approved by the House Committee on Appropriations on June 30.

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Coronavirus: A look inside China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology

If signed into law, the measure could cut off millions of dollars of US funding on collaborative research areas such as HIV, cancer, mental health and flu surveillance, Science magazine reported last week.

However, there will be no significant impact on medical research in China, according to a Beijing-based immunologist who declined to be named because he is not authorised to talk to the media.

“Most of the funds for our medical laboratories come from our country – from institutions such as the Ministry of Science and Technology or the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), so it won’t have a big impact on our researchers and institutions if the US cuts off funds,” he said.

The NSFC, a major funding source for scientific research in China, poured more than 31 billion yuan (US$4.6 billion) into the field in 2021 and has raised its budget to 33 billion yuan this year.