President Donald Trump vowed last week to stop giving taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the place where American intelligence indicates the coronavirus outbreak may have originated.

The Obama administration granted the Wuhan laboratory $3.7 million for research in 2015 via the National Institutes of Health, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) revealed last week.

Gaetz told Fox News host Tucker Carlson:

I'm against funding Chinese research in our country, but I'm sure against funding it in China. The NIH gives a $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology [and] they then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers and following that, coronavirus erupts in Wuhan.



What's really troubling to me is either conspicuously or miraculously the Wuhan Institute of Virology is able to sequence the virus on January 2 but China doesn't admit to the virus existing until January 9 and then the Wuhan Institute of Virology doesn't release this important scientific information to the world until January 12.



So at best, Americans are funding people who are lying to us and at worst, we're funding people who we knew had problems handling pathogens, who then birthed a monster virus onto the world.

The grant was meant for the studying of bats that carry the viruses that have triggered the present pandemic as well as the SARS outbreak nearly two decades ago, according to the Daily Mail.

Any further funding will immediately end, Trump declared on Friday.

On Friday, a reporter asked the president, "U.S. intelligence is saying this week that the coronavirus likely came from a level 4 lab in Wuhan. There's also another report that the NIH, under the Obama administration, in 2015 gave that lab $3.7 million in a grant. Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?"

Trump responded, "The Obama administration gave them a grant of $3.7 million? I've been hearing about that. And we've instructed that if any grants are going to that area — we're looking at it, literally, about an hour ago, and also early in the morning. We will end that grant very quickly.

"But it was granted quite a while ago. They were granted a substantial amount of money," he continued. "We're going to look at it and take a look. But I understand it was a number of years ago, right?"

When Trump asked the reporter to again state when the Obama administration gave the Wuhan lab the taxpayer-funded grant, Trump quipped, "2015? Who was president then? I wonder."