Thread by @TheSeeker268

🧵Thread on a project undertaken by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in collaboration with Chinese military researchers and other institutes. You've probably never read it before, in detail.

This thread requires patience and time, from those who are really interested.

So, the ‘major project’ as it was called, was launched in 2012, and funded by China’s state-run NSFC.

It was named: ‘’Discovery of animal-derived pathogens and their pathogenicity to humans” (Grant no. 81290340). archive.is/9c4Z8

The project had 5 subject leaders: Shi Zhengli, Guodong Liang, Zhang Yongzhen, Cao Wuchun, and Xu Jianguo, with Xu Jianguo leading the charge.

This plan involved collecting samples from bats, rats, ticks, and mosquitoes over five years (2013-2017) .... archive.is/Q8Bb4

...isolating them, and evaluating their potential to infect humans.

Interestingly, 2012, the year the project was launched, also saw a mysterious SARS-like illness emerge in Mojiang. Some samples from the Mojiang miners were sent to the Chengdu Military Center for analysis ...

... indicating that the Chinese military was involved in the Mojiang cases from the get-go (in addition to WIV and China CDC). documentcloud.org/documents/2069…

Coming back to the project:

Cao Wuchun is with PLA's Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) and holds numerous influential positions, including on National Biosafety Expert Committee and National Public Health Emergencies Expert Advisory Committee. archive.is/vjqRt

Cao Wuchun also serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. institute.wuhanvirology.org/About_Us2016/C…

He also co-authored the controversial Nature paper "Identifying SARS-CoV-2-related Coronaviruses in Malayan Pangolins" (Lam et al., 2020), which has since become mired in issues.

Xu Jianguo was the perfect candidate to lead this project. He heads the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease Prevention and Control (SKLID), which has Wuchun Cao and Gao Fu as members. Importantly, this lab operates under the direct authority of CCP. archive.is/s3vt8

“Xu and his team have been on the front line for a long time, engaged in the pathogenetic research of new, sudden and unexplained infectious disease outbreaks,” according to his profile. en.chinacdc.cn/about/academic…

In mid-2019, Xu Jianguo would also go on to pioneer China’s early outbreak warning system. Ironically, this is the same system that failed during the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan, for reasons still unclear.

The project’s 5 leaders got their own grants, in sequential order:

81290341: Shi Zhengli on🦇 archive.is/ZGD6g
81290342: Guodong Liang on🦟 archive.is/R5hW3
81290343: Zhang Yongzhen on🐀 archive.is/JrgM9
81290344: Cao Wuchun on🕷 ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=%228…

81290345: Xu Jianguo on pathogens in Yunnan and Tibet 🏔 archive.is/lTgpb

Among other things, Shi Zhengli's project aimed to "establish a database of pathogens carried by bats" — the same database taken down before COVID. archive.is/ZGD6g

In this extensive project, WIV collected “more than 16,000 bat feces, swabs, tissues, and other samples from 22 provinces”.
web.archive.org/web/2021091220…

Of note: During their first year of sampling, they discovered Ra4991 in Mojiang, a new strain of the SARS-virus lineage, which prompted WIV and China CDC to investigate further.

Shi Zhengli’s funded papers under the project include the only paper on the Mojiang mineshaft – Ge et al. (2016); and WIV’s two reverse genetics papers – Menachery et al. (2015) and Ben Hu et al. (2017), among others.

Publications: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=%228…

EcoHealth Alliance not only assisted WIV in collecting samples for this project, a project conducted in collaboration with the PLA researchers, but also helped fund the experiments, with several papers being jointly funded by both NIH and NSFC grants.

Isn't that something?

In January 2018, the project was “finalized and accepted,” having discovered numerous new pathogens and technologies.
archive.is/vMd5D

So just to recap: From Jan 2013 to Jan 2018, WIV conducted a project aimed at identifying the next SARS-like pandemic pathogen. This project operated under an overarching umbrella that had direct involvement from the Chinese military researchers.

.@ianbirrell was the first, and the only one, to report this, back in April 2021.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9…

@ianbirrell But what happened after Jan 2018 is where things get really interesting.

In February 2018, EHA-WIV-UNC began collaborating on the DEFUSE proposal. Notably, this was around the same time that Trump initiated his trade war with China.

@ianbirrell The planned experiments and the involvement of DARPA in DEFUSE project almost certainly would have raised eyebrows in China. It would have spurred the WIV-AMMS-CCDC-SKLID team to increase to come up with a comparable project, aligned with their national interests and objectives.

@ianbirrell Previously, I had outlined the post-2017 plans pursued by Shi Zhengli, who secured CAS funding for a 'Special Project' titled 'Research on Virus Traceability, Cross-Species Transmission & Pathogenic Mechanism’.

@ianbirrell Cao Wuchun and Xu Jianguo also proceeded with their own projects.

In 2018, a report from the National Health Commission (NHC) noted that Cao Wuchun was leading an NSFC project titled "Natural Epidemic Disease Discovery and Traceability."
archive.is/9mAb2

@ianbirrell In July 2019, Cao Wuchun's project received the 2nd prize of the 2019 National Natural Science Award.

The project involved five researchers from AMMS: Cao Wuchun, Jiang Jiafu, Jia Na, Fang Liqun, and Hao Li.
archive.is/AT5vk

@ianbirrell Around the same time, in July 2019, Xu Jianguo proposed the "Reverse Etiology" theory.

@ianbirrell The project aimed to not only isolate and conduct lab experiments on pathogens capable of jumping species and spread h2h, but also examine their genomes for “putative virulence gene sequences”. That may imply a focus on screening for cleavage sites.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

@ianbirrell In July 2019, under the same project, 50 strains were to be isolated, with over 5 slated for testing in cell lines and lab animals.
archive.is/HA9ql#selectio…

On January 02, 2020, Xu Jianguo delivered an academic report on "Reverse Etiology".

The press release notes that it is a new academic perspective...on the basis of leading the NSFC project "Animal-derived Pathogens and Their Pathogenicity to Humans." archive.is/gdqmd

As luck would have it, just days after Xu Jianguo delivered his report, reports of the pandemic started to emerge in Wuhan, and he was appointed as the "leader of the expert group for the preliminary evaluation of pathogen detection results".
web.archive.org/web/2020010908…

So we have what appears like:

- WIV (and EHA) was deeply entrenched in a project with ties to the PLA.
- China likely went ahead with their own version of DEFUSE.
- Xu Jianguo's "Reverse Etiology" project mirrors what DEFUSE collaboration would have looked like in China.

Why would they not do this? There was no scientific reason not to.

Steve quite rightly puts it:

Moreover, a significant portion of the work described in the DEFUSE proposal had already been completed.

Published US intelligence assessments also lends credence to the theory.

“The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been conducting classified research, including laboratory animal testing, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-act…

The evidence, collectively, paints a coherent and compelling picture.

That the emergence of a novel SARS-like coronavirus - with a furin cleavage site (FCS), and a spike exhibiting 10–25% differences from SARS1 - in Wuhan of all places, appears less and less like a coincidence.

The following @thetimes report is a worthwhile read on this topic:

"According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.” archive.ph/CzLoM

Missed a key detail: Jin Qi is also affiliated to the same lab, SKLID. For the uninitiated, he was among the first to survey the mine following the Mojiang outbreak. He sampled the rats and authored the MojV paper. He also published one of the few existing photos of that mine.

Gao Fu, the vice president of SKLID, supervised a 2016 thesis by H. Canping, which detailed the Mojiang mineshaft cases and revealed that 4 miners had SARS like antibodies. The author of that paper recommended long-term sampling of the mine.

This is to highlight that the lab was a leading candidate for further investigation into the SARS-like cases in Mojiang.

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