Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (Democrat) has defended a group affiliated with China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is at the center of rumors of a coronavirus lab leak, and is calling for increased federal funding.
Waltz has long promoted the state-based group Hormel Laboratories, which has a history of affiliation with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Washington Examiner“Records show that Walz met with Hormel Institute and toured the research center for more than a decade, and the institute thanked Walz for securing millions of dollars in funding.” Additionally, the report said he helped the institute raise millions of dollars in funding while in Congress, and had already requested millions more in federal funding for the organization as early as 2008.
According to ExaminerThe organization was also linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In recent years, Hormel Lab researchers have collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on a variety of projects, including COVID-19 research in 2020 and more recently structural biology studies conducted this year.
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In the “Funding Information” section of another EMBO Journal study in 2020, the Hormel Institute also revealed that it received “assistance from core facilities and technical support” at the WIV for “testing for radioactive and fluorescent materials,” according to a Washington Examiner review.
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Similarly, in January 2024, researchers from the Hormel Institute, in collaboration with the WIV's Lina He, Wei Zhou and Yanbo Hu, published a study on genetic material. According to page 10 of the study, the WIV was used for “radioactivity testing.”
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But further evidence of Waltz's ties to China is not surprising given his long history of closeness to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“The concern is, you can like China, you can like the Chinese. The problem is, when you set up an exchange program, as he did, and bring students to China, you're not dealing with the Chinese people, you're dealing with the Chinese Communist Party. And in the case of his program, it's funded by the Chinese Communist Party. It was organized with the support of the Chinese Communist Party.” The New York Times Peter Schweitzer, bestselling author and senior contributor to Breitbart News, Breitbart News Daily He noted that in August, Walz urged students to be less “American” when they go to China.
Waltz, who has visited China more than 20 times, including on his honeymoon there, has other strange connections, including a speech he gave in 2019 at an organization that functioned as a front for the Chinese Communist Party.
“And yet here he is, giving a speech in 2019. … Whenever he talks about China, it's always with such warmth. And whenever the issue of China's human rights situation comes up, the response is always, oh, you know, we have the same thing, we have the same problems. You know, his most famous speech in 2010 was talking about the Tiananmen Square massacre, where 10,000 people were killed by the Chinese military. And he said, 'Yeah, you know, we had Wounded Knee.' You know, Wounded Knee was in the 19th century. The casualties, you know, were maybe 1 percent. It was a horrific situation. “I don't mean it to belittle it, but comparing Wounded Knee to Tiananmen is kind of a ridiculous comparison that he's trying to draw to normalize the actions of the Chinese Communist Party,” Schweitzer said, revealing that there is a “secret police station that China has set up in the United States” in Waltz's home state, the Twin Cities.
“And the organization that runs that secret police department has ties to Tim Walz's organization called Minnesota Global,” he added.
All of this comes as the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into Gov. Walz's numerous ties to China following a purported “report detailing the Governor's longstanding ties to Chinese Communist Party organizations and officials.”
