So NOW we're trusting China.
This is hilarious.
We would never do that...
Cliff Notes
That’s because these disease-control labs, located in former fiefs of the Soviet empire, are a legacy of one of the most successful and benevolent foreign-policy programs the United States has ever undertaken.
Back in an era of U.S. global leadership—before Washington turned its back on international cooperation—the
Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction initiative in 1991 created a series of U.S. taxpayer-funded laboratories in former Soviet republics including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The purpose of these labs, most of which started out as Soviet-era facilities, was to help scientists in former Soviet republics secure and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons stocks and biowarfare capabilities.
Most of the labs were part of the Soviet
anti-plague system, created in the
mid-20th century as a network of
research institutes and field stations across the Soviet Union to study and prevent the spread of pathogens. Some of these facilities were pulled into the Soviet bioweapons program in the
1960s and 1970s. When the Soviet Union collapsed, all were left unsecured, underfunded, and in poor states of repair. It was feared they would no longer be able to monitor and control disease outbreaks—and that someone might get their hands on a stock of killer pathogens.
The Nunn-Lugar program, named after its authors in the U.S. Senate, Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, remedied that.
One of the greatest achievements of U.S. foreign policy has been targeted by a vicious disinformation campaign.
carnegieendowment.org
