The Other Stream

I. Two streams, one lab

A recurring line in the argument over Wuhan goes like this: U.S. taxpayer money, funneled through USAID and NIH, funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The NIH half of that sentence we have examined at length, in What the Grant Actually Funded. This piece is about the other half — the agency named first and explained least: the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The honest starting point is that the premise is not invented. USAID money did reach the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The question this article answers, from the government’s own auditor, is the one the slogan skips: what did the USAID money actually pay for?

II. The auditor’s ledger

In June 2023 the Government Accountability Office — Congress’s nonpartisan investigative arm — published a report, GAO-23-106119, that did something none of the cable-news segments had. It went to the awarding agencies, “collected and reviewed award and subaward agreements, payment authorizations, budget proposals,” and laid out exactly which federal dollars reached which Chinese laboratory, and for what.¹

Its bottom line on the WIV is a single, citable figure. The Institute received, the GAO found, “three subawards totaling $1,413,720 disbursed.”¹ That is the whole of the documented federal money to the WIV across the years in question — and it arrived through more than one agency, on more than one errand.

III. What each dollar bought

Here is where the report earns its keep, because it does not lump the money together. It separates the streams by what they funded.

The chimera-building — the “genetic experiments to combine” coronaviruses into “hybridized… chimeric coronavirus strains” — is the work at the center of the gain-of-function dispute. The GAO attributes it to the NIH-funded award to EcoHealth Alliance.¹ That is the grant our companion piece dissected, the one whose own progress report recorded a lab-made chimera leaving most of its mice dead.

The USAID money traveled a different road to a different task. It flowed through a federal award to the University of California, Davis — the American recipient of USAID’s pandemic-surveillance work — and reached the WIV as a second-tier subaward. The GAO’s summary of USAID’s role is flat and unambiguous: “USAID’s funding to the selected entities, through second-tier subawards to Wuhan University and WIV, supported pathogen detection and disease surveillance activities.”¹ At the WIV specifically, that meant researchers “tested bat samples for five priority viral families such as influenza and conducted DNA sequencing.”¹ Upstream, the same USAID program had Wuhan University “collecting biological samples from roughly 1,500 individuals in the Yunnan province” who had been exposed to bats and wildlife.¹

Sampling bats and people, testing for known viral families, sequencing what turns up: that is surveillance. It is the work of cataloguing what is already circulating in nature. It is not the work of building a new virus in a dish — and the auditor, which had every award document in front of it, files the two under different awards.

IV. Why the distinction is not a technicality

It would be easy to read all this as hair-splitting — money is money, and it all went to the same building. But the distinction is the entire substance of the claim. “USAID funded surveillance at a lab that also did riskier work on someone else’s grant” is a true and serious sentence. “USAID funded gain-of-function research at the WIV” is a different sentence, and the document trail does not support it. The first invites scrutiny of how Washington underwrites work in labs it cannot inspect. The second asserts a specific thing about a specific agency’s money that the GAO’s line-by-line accounting places under a different agency’s award.

None of which makes the USAID money comfortable. The GAO wrote its report precisely because this funding raised questions, and it noted the obvious unease elsewhere in the same record: at one point “the National Institutes of Health directed a grant recipient to suspend its subaward to WIV, because of reports that work at WIV posed serious biosafety concerns.”¹ A government that was wiring money to a laboratory it had separately flagged for biosafety problems is a fair subject for hard questions. The questions are simply not improved by misnaming which program paid for what.

V. What the record establishes — and what it does not

The record establishes that USAID money reached the Wuhan Institute of Virology; that the WIV’s documented federal subawards totaled $1,413,720 across NIH- and USAID-funded awards; that the USAID portion, routed through UC Davis, funded pathogen detection, bat-sample testing, and DNA sequencing — surveillance work; and that the chimeric-virus experiments at the heart of the gain-of-function argument were funded under the NIH award, not USAID’s.

The record does not establish that USAID funded gain-of-function research at the WIV — the GAO assigns the genetic-engineering work to a different award. It does not establish that the surveillance work caused any harm, or that it was useless; the report does not adjudicate that. And it does not resolve the larger origins question, which our reporting has shown the intelligence agencies themselves could not settle.

What it leaves is the more modest, more durable point this series keeps arriving at: the documents are more specific than the slogans. Two federal agencies sent money to one Chinese lab for two different purposes, and a government auditor wrote down which was which. The accusation that gets repeated keeps the part that is alarming and drops the part that is precise.