Hu Haitao, a former associate professor of microbiology at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), revealed in an interview with the South China Morning Post published on Monday he is leaving the United States to return to his native China, where he will work for the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
Hu was largely educated in the United States and is an expert in mRNA technology, working in particular to seek vaccine solutions to the spread of HIV, according to his UTMB page. He studied under Drew Weissman, one of two scientists who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for research into the use of mRNA technology to develop vaccine-like products. The scientist, originally from Anhui, China, arrived in America in 2004 and indicated that he had no plans to leave until President Trump returned to the White House.
He told the Morning Post that the situation in the United States for scientists in the mRNA field was more “uncertain” under President Donald Trump and indicated he felt more comfortable taking his efforts back to the Communist Party’s research institutes. Hu also suggested that there was “no need to explain” why he would prefer working in China to America under Trump.
“Academic prospects in the US had become more ‘uncertain and unpredictable’ in the past year and ‘you don’t have to explain too much because people would say it’s a good choice,’ he said,” according to the Morning Post, which described its conversation with the scientist as having taken place on December 11, shortly after his arrival to Beijing. The scientist’s UTMB page at press time does not indicate a departure and retains contact information for his office.
The Hong Kong newspaper emphasized that Hu had abandoned a tenured position, blaming “anti-science policies” allegedly held by the Trump administration for creating a climate that pushed scientists away. The scientist reportedly “observed there was widespread sentiment among scientists in his field that the US was less supportive of biomedical research and was cutting funding in related fields, including mRNA development.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, canceled nearly $500 million in American taxpayers’ funding meant for mRNA vaccine development in August, a move that alarmed that academic community losing that money. The Trump administration has also, according to various reports this year, increased actions to monitor American academic institutions in the face of growing espionage and intellectual property theft activities by the Chinese Communist Party.
The Department of Justice has kept an operation known as the “China Initiative” open for years, intended to target Chinese espionage throughout various American institutions. The initiative responded in part to two major Chinese government actions identified as potential sources of espionage: the “Thousand Talents Initiative,” intended to attract foreign scientists to work with the Chinese government, and Confucius Institutes, Chinese government centers established in foreign universities to promote the Communist Party’s agenda.
“There is mounting concern about the Chinese government’s increasingly aggressive attempts to use ‘Confucius Institutes’ and other means to influence foreign academic institutions and critical analysis of China’s past history and present policies,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, at the time a U.S. senator, wrote in 2018. “Additionally, the PRC [China] continues its efforts to interfere in multilateral institutions, threaten and intimidate rights defenders and their families, and impose censorship mechanisms on foreign publishers and social media companies.”
No public evidence exists connecting Hu to the Thousand Talents Program or to any nefarious activity in the United States. His return to China will likely benefit the CAS’s attempts to develop mRNA research, however, which Chinese scientists have admitted in the past has fallen behind American research.
“Everyone should consider the benefits mRNA vaccines can bring for humanity,” the former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control (Chinese CDC), Gao Fu, noted in April 2021. “We must follow it carefully and not ignore it just because we already have several types of vaccines already,” Gao said in April 2021, adding that Chinese vaccine’s “don’t have very high protection rates.”
In those same comments, Gao revealed that the vaccine products developed in China to stop the Wuhan coronavirus “don’t have very high protection rates.” A year later, Gao “retired.”
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), where Hu will work on microbiology research, is one of the world’s largest scientific development institutions. Its scientists have published a wide array of research developing innovative uses of technology. In 2021, CAS scientists announced that they had developed an artificial intelligence “justice” system that can rapidly examine evidence in a case and charge people with crimes – allegedly beneficial to address the large backlog of criminal cases in China. A year later, CAS scientists announced they had developed a “more efficient and safer” technology to edit genes than the more widespread CRISPR tool.
In 2023, CAS scientists revealed experiences seeking to spread vaccines through mosquitos, using genetically modified insects to bite unsuspecting victims and spread immunization products. The research was used in relation to the Zika virus, which spreads in South America and was the original target of Weissman’s immunization research into mRNA.
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