New Delhi. The deadly novel coronavirus also called COVID-19 originated in China in 2019. Over a period of time, it has affected over almost all countries in the world, including India, which detected its first case on 30.01.2020. With the exponential rise in cases, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 pandemic. With the outbreak of this deadly disease across the world, several theories have been postulated construing and blaming China for the spread of the virus throughout the entire world. Amongst many such alleged theories, the one that is recently in news is about the funding of around $3.7 million to China's Wuhan laboratory that conducted coronavirus tests on bats.
As per the reports, the Institute of Virology which is situated in Wuhan has conducted coronavirus experiments on mammals captured from the caves of Yunnan, China, with the grants given by United States National Institutes of Health. Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is an agency which is a government subsidiary to Department of Health and Human Services of the United States and the same is responsible for biomedical and public health research. Due to this new revelation about the grants that has been provided by the US to the Wuhan Institute for experimenting on bats have further sparked fears that the lab is the original epicentre for the outbreak of this pandemic.
Several pressure groups and lawmakers have criticized the U.S for the act of funding being provided to the Wuhan Institute for the dangerous and cruel experiments on animas. One of the U.S Congressman Mr. Matt Gaetz in his statement said:
'I'm disgusted to learn that for years the US government has been funding dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute, which may have contributed to the global spread of coronavirus, and research at other labs in China that have virtually no oversight from US authorities.'
As per the documents obtained by British media outlet ‘Daily Mail’, it has been reported that
‘scientists there experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which continues to licence the Wuhan laboratory to receive American money for experiments.’
Interestingly, several lawsuits have also been filed against the China by many lawyers not just from the U.S but from several other countries including India. Fuelling to the conspiracy theories that has been sparking since the inception of outbreak of COVID-19 has become a great hurdle for the governments of different nations across the globe to catch hold of miscreants and to tackle the situation in this sorry state of affairs. Let’s see how these theories be taken and what impact will it create in the international fraternity which may further affect the international relations amongst the U.S and China including several other nations.