Trump USDA Secretary Commits to Terminate CCP Gain-of-Function Partnership

May 23, 2025 | Benjamin Bartee

As reported exclusively at PJ Media in September of last year, Joe Biden's USDA Secretary explicitly denied under oath that his department had "collaborated" with the CCP-controlled Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to modify bird flu viruses to make them infectious to humans - i.e., gain-of-function.

Later, through diligent investigative work by White Coat Waste Project, FOIA-ed documents revealed this to be a brazen lie, as the USDA had an active grant at the time with the CAS literally titled "US-UK-China Collab: Predictive Phylogenetics For Evolutionary and Transmission Dynamics of Newly Emerging Avian Influenza Viruses."

During a recent United States Department of Agriculture budget hearing, Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.) revisited the under-reported backstory on the Biden regime's collusion with the CCP to further weaponize viruses, even after this exact type of research birthed a global pandemic: Your predecessor [former USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack] was… had quite a track record, and it's not a pretty one. I questioned him last year about the Biden-Harris USDA's $1 million ongoing collaboration with Wuhan, the Wuhan lab's parent organization, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In the project, the USDA's ag research service and the communist party-controlled CAS were conducting dangerous experiments to manipulate bird flu viruses using gain-of-function research techniques to see if they could create new strains that might infect humans… It may not surprise you that Secretary Vilsack defended and distorted this risky project. He denied 'collaboration' even though that word is literally in the project title.

Vilsack also denied under oath there was any data-sharing going on between the USDA and the CAS, which also was proven to be untrue per the same FOIA batch.

(Side note: given that Vilsack clearly perjured himself before Congress, why is he not currently in prison or even seemingly under investigation? Why do we allow these public servants to blatantly lie to the American public with no accountability?)

"Will you commit to discontinuing funding for this project and other research with Chinese lab while we continue to fight this epidemic, this avian flu?" Rep. Cline pressed USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins.

"Yes, it is my understanding that those have been discontinued just in the last few months, but we will double-check that today," Rollins responded.

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