“We the people” learned a lot of lessons during the COVID-19 pandemic that kicked off in 2020. The government doesn’t appear to have learned anything. One takeaway was that we probably should stop tinkering with viruses through gain-of-function research to make them more dangerous. Everyone was rightly angry when we learned that Dr. Tony Fauci was funding gain-of-function research at the lab in Wuhan, China, with our tax dollars. But what if we told you that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was funding gain-of-function experiments at research labs across the United States?
This week, the group White Coat Waste revealed that Colorado State University in Fort Collins is running a bat virus lab, with funding from EcoHealth Alliance and the division at NIH where Tony Fauci used to work. The Bat Research Center at CSU will be importing and breeding exotic bats from China, Africa, and other places to experiment on them with dangerous viruses, including Ebola and COVID-19.
To date, the Bat Research Center has collected $13 million in taxpayer money from the NIH. Thus far, the bat laboratory has created three new strains of bat coronavirus in its experiments. They’ve infected 162 bats with these new versions of genetically modified COVID, according to White Coat Waste’s investigation.
In September 2025, just a few months ago, the NIH, under new Director Jay Bhattacharya, gave CSU another $2.3 million in funding to continue the bat experiments.
And if your skin isn’t already crawling, you should know that this laboratory at CSU has a terrible safety track record.
One researcher was bitten by a bat that was infected with a human isolate of MERS-CoV. Another researcher jabbed her own thumb with a needle as she was drawing blood from a mouse that had been infected with genetically modified tuberculosis. There are multiple safety reports of scientists handling mice without wearing gloves, including one guy who was bitten by a mouse infected with Mycobacterium abscessus.
When Sen. Joni Ernst (R-NE) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) learned about the bat research at CSU this week, they sent a letter to Dr. Bhattacharya at NIH. They demanded that taxpayer money should be cut off from funding this dangerous gain-of-function research.
Taxpayers deserve answers and accountability for why NIH has poured nearly $13 million into risky live bat research, with millions more still pending, despite serious biosafety concerns and unanswered questions about COVID-19’s origins. @WhiteCoatWaste @SenJoniErnst…
— Rep. Paul Gosar, DDS (@RepGosar) January 13, 2026
It doesn’t look like Colorado State is the only research university that is carrying out these types of experiments.
The USDA announced that it discovered a dairy cow in Wisconsin in December that had been infected with a genetically modified version of bird flu (H5N1). The virus was detected during a routine milk testing inspection at a dairy farm. This is the first time that a cow has been infected with bird flu in Wisconsin. The USDA characterizes the outbreak as a “spillover” event, meaning the cow contracted the genetically modified virus from a wild animal.
This particular dairy farm is 40 miles away from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. The university has a laboratory called the Influenza Research Center. The lab is run by two scientists named Keith Poulsen, DVM, Ph.D., and Yoshihiro Kawaoka, DVM, Ph.D.
These two scientists have co-authored a number of studies on gain-of-function research on bird flu. Poulsen and Kawaoka deny that the lab is conducting gain-of-function research currently. But it seems highly suspicious, didn’t it?
To reiterate: The only cow in Wisconsin to ever catch bird flu, just so happens to catch a genetically modified strain of bird flu, on a dairy farm that’s 40 miles away from the laboratory where the two most well-known bird flu gain-of-function scientists are working.
That’s almost as shaky as the claim that someone caught COVID-19 from eating bat soup at a wet market two blocks away from the Wuhan lab.
If you do even a cursory search on how many American universities are currently conducting gain-of-function research, you’ll find that there are quite a few. In addition to Colorado and Wisconsin, there are gain-of-function viral tampering programs operating at Harvard, UNC-Chapel Hill, MIT, Emory, Stanford, and many of the University of California campuses.
We don’t know yet whether Dr. Bhattacharya will pull the funding for Colorado’s Bat Research Center. Senate Bill 738, proposed by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), would ban gain-of-function research on dangerous viruses in the United States. Unfortunately, the bill has been languishing in the Senate Health Committee since last February.
