US researchers who applied for grant money in 2018 for research in partnership with a lab in Wuhan, China, proposed making coronaviruses very much like what the one causing COVID-19 turned out to be.In 2023, Public and Racket reported sources in the US government were “100%” confident that one of the first people to be infected with COVID-19 conducted gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). This lab received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the US non-profit EcoHealth Alliance.In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance applied for a grant from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a project called “DEFUSE” that would involve Shi Zhengli’s lab group in Wuhan and Ralph Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina (UNC).US Right to Know recently obtained notes and drafts from the DEFUSE grant proposal through a Freedom of Information Act request. These documents reveal the features of SARS-CoV-2 closely resemble the work described in EcoHealth Alliance’s proposal. SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage site primed the virus for easy transmissibility among humans and is absent from the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2.The DEFUSE records show that UNC and WIV scientists wanted to insert a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein. A 2022 preprint analysis determined that SARS-CoV-2 was assembled in six fragments with the restriction enzyme BsmBI. The new documents show that the DEFUSE team previously planned to use six segments to make synthetic viruses and ordered BSmBI from New England Biolabs.In response, Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, wrote that his group “had the misfortune of predicting” that a SARS-like virus with features of SARS-CoV-2 “had the potential to emerge in China & become pandemic. It did. Rather than taking these prescient ideas seriously, we’ve had 4 years of attacks.”Journalist Alex Gutentag, who reported this story on Substack, acknowledged, “It’s true that the UNC-WIV collaboration was ‘predicting’ the emergence of a virus in their proposal, and it’s true that the proposal is not an explicit plan to engineer SARS-CoV-2.“But the purpose of the DEFUSE group’s work was to create chimeric viruses, which are viruses with genetic material from two or more different viruses, with the same ‘predicted’ features in order to develop protections against its ‘predictions.’ A specific proposal of the DEFUSE grant was to use its engineering research to make an inoculating aerosol that could be sprayed into bat caves in China.”In the DEFUSE grant proposal, the group wanted to find receptor-binding domains (RBD) with the potential to infect human cells. Baric wanted to engineer five full-length SARS-related viruses and 20 chimeric SARS-related viral spike proteins per year and test their ability to infect human cells.The notes acknowledged that Baric “has already generated SARS-like chimeras w/ RBD from a group of bat viruses called 293 (for S1) which is 20% different than epidemic strains.”After releasing a limited set of DEFUSE documents in December, US Right to Know reported Baric’s comment, “In the US, these recombinant SARS-CoV are studied under BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3), not BSL2, especially important for those that are able to bind and replicate in primary human cells.” In China, Baric wrote, these experiments could be done under BSL2, but “US researchers will likely freak out.” As it went, some of Shi’s NIH-funded work engineering viruses was carried out under BSL-2 conditions in Wuhan.Documents show that the DARPA project manager reviewing the proposal did not view the research in China as too risky.Last year Public and Racket released documents that showed that a group of scientists who publicly promoted the natural origin theory of COVID-19 privately believed that it probably started with a lab leak. In March 2020, five authors wrote, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” to refute the lab leak hypothesis. They also briefed intelligence agencies about their paper.Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, held financial power over some of these scientists. Private communications show that Fauci and other “higher ups” in government pressured the authors. A whistleblower alleged that Fauci influenced the Central Intelligence Agency’s investigation on the origin of the virus and that CIA officials changed their own analysts’ conclusions to favor natural origin.The revelations prompt more questions, said Gutentag, who had more to say in a paid-only portion of his post.“Why were Baric and Shi conducting risky experiments to engineer virus features that could infect humans? What was the purpose of this research? And why would federal government agencies potentially want to fund it?” wrote Gutentag.
US researchers who applied for grant money in 2018 for research in partnership with a lab in Wuhan, China, proposed making coronaviruses very much like what the one causing COVID-19 turned out to be.In 2023, Public and Racket reported sources in the US government were “100%” confident that one of the first people to be infected with COVID-19 conducted gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). This lab received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the US non-profit EcoHealth Alliance.In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance applied for a grant from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a project called “DEFUSE” that would involve Shi Zhengli’s lab group in Wuhan and Ralph Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina (UNC).US Right to Know recently obtained notes and drafts from the DEFUSE grant proposal through a Freedom of Information Act request. These documents reveal the features of SARS-CoV-2 closely resemble the work described in EcoHealth Alliance’s proposal. SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage site primed the virus for easy transmissibility among humans and is absent from the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2.The DEFUSE records show that UNC and WIV scientists wanted to insert a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein. A 2022 preprint analysis determined that SARS-CoV-2 was assembled in six fragments with the restriction enzyme BsmBI. The new documents show that the DEFUSE team previously planned to use six segments to make synthetic viruses and ordered BSmBI from New England Biolabs.In response, Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, wrote that his group “had the misfortune of predicting” that a SARS-like virus with features of SARS-CoV-2 “had the potential to emerge in China & become pandemic. It did. Rather than taking these prescient ideas seriously, we’ve had 4 years of attacks.”Journalist Alex Gutentag, who reported this story on Substack, acknowledged, “It’s true that the UNC-WIV collaboration was ‘predicting’ the emergence of a virus in their proposal, and it’s true that the proposal is not an explicit plan to engineer SARS-CoV-2.“But the purpose of the DEFUSE group’s work was to create chimeric viruses, which are viruses with genetic material from two or more different viruses, with the same ‘predicted’ features in order to develop protections against its ‘predictions.’ A specific proposal of the DEFUSE grant was to use its engineering research to make an inoculating aerosol that could be sprayed into bat caves in China.”In the DEFUSE grant proposal, the group wanted to find receptor-binding domains (RBD) with the potential to infect human cells. Baric wanted to engineer five full-length SARS-related viruses and 20 chimeric SARS-related viral spike proteins per year and test their ability to infect human cells.The notes acknowledged that Baric “has already generated SARS-like chimeras w/ RBD from a group of bat viruses called 293 (for S1) which is 20% different than epidemic strains.”After releasing a limited set of DEFUSE documents in December, US Right to Know reported Baric’s comment, “In the US, these recombinant SARS-CoV are studied under BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3), not BSL2, especially important for those that are able to bind and replicate in primary human cells.” In China, Baric wrote, these experiments could be done under BSL2, but “US researchers will likely freak out.” As it went, some of Shi’s NIH-funded work engineering viruses was carried out under BSL-2 conditions in Wuhan.Documents show that the DARPA project manager reviewing the proposal did not view the research in China as too risky.Last year Public and Racket released documents that showed that a group of scientists who publicly promoted the natural origin theory of COVID-19 privately believed that it probably started with a lab leak. In March 2020, five authors wrote, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” to refute the lab leak hypothesis. They also briefed intelligence agencies about their paper.Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, held financial power over some of these scientists. Private communications show that Fauci and other “higher ups” in government pressured the authors. A whistleblower alleged that Fauci influenced the Central Intelligence Agency’s investigation on the origin of the virus and that CIA officials changed their own analysts’ conclusions to favor natural origin.The revelations prompt more questions, said Gutentag, who had more to say in a paid-only portion of his post.“Why were Baric and Shi conducting risky experiments to engineer virus features that could infect humans? What was the purpose of this research? And why would federal government agencies potentially want to fund it?” wrote Gutentag.
