REVEALED: Tim Walz helped secure millions in US funds for research center tied to Wuhan lab

Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz helped to secure millions in funding for a research facility that has partnered with the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. He also promoted the research facility. The lab has been theorized to be a likely location of where the COVID-19 pandemic originated and has been a topic of controversy for its connections to US funding.

According to the Washington Examiner, a research facility affiliated with the University of Minnesota called the Hormel Institute, often collaborates with the Wuhan lab in China. For more than a decade, Walz has been holding meetings with the research facility in the state of Minnesota and has touted the center for its work. The Hormel Institute thanked Walz for secure it millions of dollars in funding, per the Examiner. Walz reportedly pushed for a $5 million federal earmark for the center in 2008 as well as helped it get $2 million as a congressman. 



This comes as Walz's ties to China have been brought under greater scrutiny since being selected to be Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate in the 2024 election. Walz is facing a congressional investigation about his ties to China, where he has reportedly traveled around 30 times. These trips included his honeymoon and he has said before that he does not think that "China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship” with the United States."

In April, Walz said of the Minnesota research center, “For 80+ years, the Hormel Institute has helped pave the way for Minnesota to lead in biomedical innovation." The Hormel Institute has been reportedly linked to the Chinese military-backed company called the Beijing Genomics Institute.

In recent years, the Hormel Institute has worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including on a study surrounding COVID-19 in 2020 and has worked withe Wuhan lab as recently as this year on a separate project. The COVID-19 study, “A dynamic regulatory interface on SARS-CoV-2 RNA polymerase,” was done by four Wuhan researchers, three Hormel Institute researchers, as well as a professor of Medicine from Yale.

In a statement, a spokesman for the University of Minnesota said that the Hormel Institute has no "formal affiliation" with the Wuhan lab in China.

“Our discoveries are peer-reviewed and published in the public domain with appropriate attribution to those who contributed to each study,” spokesman Jake Ricker said. “Research is conducted with the full commitment of the Hormel Institute and the university to compliance with federal disclosure, security, export controls, and sanctions rules.”