A leaked document coauthored by American and Chinese scientists provides fresh and disturbing evidence supporting the Covid origin lab-leak theory.
Emily Kopp, an investigative journalist at U.S. Right to Know, an online publication about “Pursuing truth and transparency for public health,” reported recently that her organization has obtained a 2018 grant proposal called Project DEFUSE, coauthored by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and their counterparts in the United States, including EcoHealth Alliance.
According to Kopp, Project DEFUSE “proposed engineering high-risk coronaviruses of the same species as SARS and SARS-CoV-2.” The content of this proposal is concerning for several reasons. First, the proposal “involved synthesizing spike proteins with furin cleavage sites — the same feature that supercharged SARS-CoV-2 into the most infectious pandemic pathogen in a century.”
Second, the proposal publicly stated that such risky research would be done at American scientist Ralph Baric’s high-containment BSL-3 lab at the University of North Carolina. But Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth, revealed in his private comments that once the project is funded, he would let the WIV conduct some of the risky research, despite knowing the WIV is only a BSL-2 lab and has “fewer safety precautions than required in the U.S.” Baric responded that “U.S. researchers would ‘freak out’ if they knew the novel coronavirus engineering and testing work would be conducted in a BSL-2 lab.”
According to Kopp of U.S. Right to Know, “Biosafety levels range from one (BSL-1) to four (BSL-4), with BSL-4 being the most stringent. … Many scientists say viruses that may be transmitted through the air should at minimum be studied in BSL-3.”
Daszak and other Americans on the project team omitted to disclose the WIV’s involvement to Project DEFUSE’s intended funder, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “in order to evade any national security concerns about doing high-level biosecurity work in China.” Daszak didn’t provide Chinese scientists’ resumes to DARPA “to downplay the non-US focus of this proposal so that DARPA doesn’t see this as a negative.”
What’s even scarier is that these documents “also show the researchers intended to use less regulated SARS-related coronavirus research as proof of concept in order to extend their high-risk methods to more deadly viruses like Ebola, Marburg, Hendra and Nipah,” according to Kopp. Some scientists’ ongoing interest in experimenting with those contagious and lethal viruses is one of the many reasons why we must understand the origin of Covid-19 because such knowledge may help prevent the next pandemic.
Matt Ridley, a British member of Parliament and coauthor of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, writes at Spiked:
It was shocking enough that he [Peter Daszak] failed to tell the world about this proposal, which was leaked instead. It was still more shocking to find that it contained a specific proposal for inserting ‘human-specific cleavage sites’ into sarbecoviruses for the first time, because exactly such a feature is found in the virus that causes Covid, and in none of the other 1,500 known sarbecoviruses. That cleavage site is the reason we had a pandemic because it makes the virus more infectious in human airways and it seems uniquely suited to the human system.
Although DARPA eventually declined to fund Project DEFUSE, Daszak, who has a reputation for not taking no for an answer, likely completed the proposed work with the WIV anyway with other funding sources. Daszak’s EcoHealth has received at least $8 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 2014 and 2021. In 2021, after congressional Republicans’ repeated requests, the NIH finally admitted that it had funded the WIV “to study the risk to humans of coronaviruses circulating in bats in China” through EcoHealth.
NIH’s admission came after the Intercept made public two grant proposals submitted by EcoHealth Alliance to the NIH on gain-of-function research on coronavirus and a progress report covering June 2018 to May 2019.
These documents revealed that EcoHealth’s experiments “involv[ed] infectious clones of MERS-CoV, the virus that caused a deadly outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012.” EcoHealth’s data also demonstrates that “chimeric SARS-like viruses caused more severe disease in a humanized animal model than the original virus,” according to Alina Chan, a Boston-based molecular biologist and coauthor of the book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. All this information contradicts EcoHealth’s previous repeated denials that no such high-risk experiment ever took place.
Given what we know now, a coronavirus pandemic that emerged out of Wuhan more than three years ago seems less like a coincidence. Yet Daszak of EcoHealth has been the most vocal lab-leak theory denier. Among his efforts to shut down any public discussion of the lab-leak theory, the most infamous one was that he organized a group of scientists to co-sign a letter published by Lancet, denouncing the lab-leak theory without disclosing his conflict of interest (his intimate collaboration with the WIV).
Last week, The Wall Street Journal dropped another bombshell, that Daszak’s EcoHealth is under federal investigation (civil, not criminal) about whether it double-billed U.S. taxpayers for hundreds of thousands of dollars for the dangerous gain-of-function coronavirus research in China. Daszak denied any wrongdoing.
The leaked Project DEFUSE documents are a reminder, according to Chan, who commented on X, “This is a pattern of dishonesty. Clearly, we cannot take the word of conflicted parties. It is urgently important that the public and investigators gain full access to all EcoHealth documents relating to WIV research.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that at least 3 million people worldwide died of Covid in 2020. Not to mention that millions more people’s lives, mental health, and economic well-being have been negatively affected by government policies. Many of us still feel the effects of those policies today. The pandemic was a life-changing event for many. Therefore, we all deserve to know how the pandemic started and be better prepared for the next one.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has suppressed any discussion of the lab-leak theory for one apparent reason — to avoid accountability. Yet it is disappointing that the Biden administration, congressional Democrats, and their corporate media allies have shown little interest in uncovering Covid’s origin. They have suppressed the lab-leak theory as shamelessly as the CCP has done, despite that “the evidence that this virus probably came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is now voluminous, detailed and strong,” said Matt Ridley, and their collective silence “speaks volumes.”
Democrats and corporate media’s collective silence and the lack of curiosity about the virus’s origin are likely driven by two reasons. First, they cannot blame the origin of Covid on Trump because the NIH funding occurred under former President Obama. Any investigation of Covid’s origin will inevitably lead to the questionable conduct of Anthony Fauci, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, and his allies at the NIH, from underwriting the WIV’s gain-of-function research to suppressing the lab-leak theory since the beginning of the pandemic.
Second, the Democrats and corporate media’ conduct during the pandemic has shown that they were only interested in taking advantage of a crisis to grab more power and expand their control over the country and the American people. Public health prevention is their last concern. Therefore, it is up to concerned citizens and independent media to keep searching for truth and demanding accountability.
