It's not about nature. It's about biological weapons. If Russians will create a new biological weapon (they do), then we must have a cure before they will use it in their fight with NATO. And they will use it even if millions of their own citizens will die.

> It's not about nature. It's about biological weapons. If Russians will create a new biological weapon (they do), then we must have a cure before they will use it in their fight with NATO.

And the best solution is to research this... in China?

Yep, another continent from the home is the best place for such kind of research.

If you want to research a cure from engineered virus from one hostile country, paying another hostile country to do virus engineering research for you is surely great logic.

China was not a hostile country in 2014, before Russians started the war.

I’m pretty sure there is funding on both sides; NIH vs DARPA for example. I suspect that NIH funds a lot more here and I’m skeptical that DARPA funds labs in China for this.

The experiments WIV were doing were specifically targeted at identifying wild-type viruses that could cross over. This is not where you would start for a bioweapon. (Unless, tinfoil hat, you want to start a pandemic that looks like a zoonotic event. But that’s not the threat model the US military is worried about in the research they fund.)