"You don't write such applications out of the blue," says Martin Wikelski, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Biology in Radolfzell.
"It really worries me for the future that the experiments conducted were not classified as gain-of-function trials by the researchers," said Karin Moelling, Professor of Virology at the University of Zurich.
A big mistake was, for example, the declaration of solidarity by well-known scientists with their Chinese colleagues, which was published in the renowned scientific journal "Lancet" in February 2020 - and which, as is now known, was initiated by Peter Daszak of the EHA.
"If we as scientists start to stop thinking scientifically and questioning ourselves, but instead blindly protect each other, then we are digging our own grave," Wikelski said.
For anybody who has any trust left in EchoHealth Alliance and their supposed professionalism, may I remind you of that quote about Aleksei Chmura - EcoHealth Alliance Chief of Staff and the person who sent the DEFUSE proposal to DARPA? npr.org/transcripts/80…
That quote above was about an EcoHealth Alliance sampling trip to Guilin, Guangxi province (not Guangdong as the NPR piece wrongly states), where Chmura and his Chinese colleagues went looking for SARS-like viruses in bat caves.
And obviously the 4 pages WIV section of the WHO report annexes, most likely redacted by Peter Daszak with its multiples 'Conspiracy Theories' headers, tells us that all work is done with PPE:
While the authors did some good work checking the authenticity of the DEFUSE documents, they seem to have a few blind spots.
".. nor does it come close to changing the consensus view that the pandemic started from a natural source.:
Which consensus?
- The one of the majority of the press which has been strangely blind to any finding and has happily reprinted the manufactured consensus of Daszak & co?
- The one of the very scientists, spearheaded by Daszak, who perfectly knew about DEFUSE but kept quiet?
@RepGallagher makes a great point: the sweet irony of the IC review just saying: "well we don't really know, and we won't know until China cooperates".
Well, what about until EcoHealth Alliance cooperates instead?
EHA was funded with many millions of US taxpayers dollars. So is it asking too much?
One can subpoena them. One can sue them. They are not in China, in case the IC review did not notice.
Or did the IC review just sit on this DEFUSE proposal? If so why?
I aslo wonder how the sleepy Wildlife Preservation Trust suddenly became EcoHealth Alliance under Peter Daszak - and turned overnight into the darling of the US grant machine, working as a kind of fixer providing essentially access. bit.ly/3ufMr3m
[except for the story about the Sky News Documentary - I checked by watching it and did not see a mention of DEFUSE. The documentary must have been in the can long before anyway]. @maiahibbett@fastlerner
The paradigm has now shifted - and once scientists have digested it they shall start coming together to express their concerns. That's what responsible science should be.
Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany: @animaltracking
“The work describes generating full-length bat SARS-related coronaviruses that are thought to pose a risk of human spillover. And that’s the type of work that people could plausibly postulate could have led to a lab-associated origin of SARS-CoV-2,” said Jesse Bloom, @jbloom_lab
- In accordance with US. Fed. Acquisition Regulations we are not at liberty to divulge who may or may not have submitted a proposal in response to any of the agency's solicitations.
- Since EcoHealth Alliance was not **ULTIMATELY ** selected to work on the DARPA PREEMPT program..
The ULTIMATELY gives the game away. DARPA is actually telling that EcoHealth Alliance did bid.
"Papers, ***confirmed as genuine by a former member of the Trump administration***, show they were hoping to introduce “human-specific cleavage sites” to bat coronaviruses which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells. "
Darpa refused to fund the work:
“It is clear that the proposed project led by Peter Daszak could have put local communities at risk”, and warned that the team had not properly considered the dangers of enhancing the virus (gain of function research) or releasing a vaccine by air"