Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 22, 2024 3 tweets 6 min read Read on X
The idea that bioweapons research caused Covid was debunked, people say. But it wasn't. New documents show scientists sought to insert a furin cleavage site right where it exists on SARS-CoV-2, and they'd been funded in the past by Anthony Fauci, who oversaw bioweapons research. Image
US And Chinese Scientists Made Plans To Engineer Coronaviruses Like SARS-CoV-2, New Documents Show

Was EcoHealth Alliance’s 2018 DEFUSE proposal a blueprint for bioweapons-related experiments that led to the Covid-19 lab leak?
Shi Zhengli, “the bat woman of China,” who oversaw Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus research and engineering; Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, arriving at the U.S Capitol for the first of two days of interviews before of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on January 8, 2024 ; Dr. Ralph Baric, University of North Carolina (Getty Images)

Last year Public and Racket reported that sources in the US government were “100%” confident that Covid-19’s patients zero worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and conducted risky gain-of-function experiments there. This lab received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based nonprofit. In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance applied for a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a project called “DEFUSE” that would involve Shi Zhengli’s lab group at WIV and Ralph Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina (UNC).

Now, US Right to Know has obtained a full cache of notes and drafts from the DEFUSE grant proposal through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. These documents reveal that 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. What’s more, 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 planned to use six segments to make synthetic viruses and ordered BSmBI from New England Biolabs.

In response to the release, 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.”

Image from DEFUSE grant proposal.

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.

Proponents of the natural origin theory have argued that the DEFUSE grant is irrelevant to the origins debate because DARPA did not approve it, but it is often the case that scientists apply for grants to fund work they are already doing or projects that resemble experiments they have already started.

And the DEFUSE documents reveal specific work that one would expect, if not properly contained, could result in a biological accident. The group wanted to find receptor-binding domains (RBD) with the potential to infect human cells. Baric was going 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.

Notes suggest that Baric had already covertly engineered SARS-related spike proteins and chimeras, but this work is not published in scientific journals. Baric, the notes say, “has already generated SARS-like chimeras w/ RBD from group of bat viruses called 293 (for S1) which is 20% different than epidemic strains.”

The scientists knew this work was risky. As US Right to Know reported in December after releasing a limited set of DEFUSE documents, Baric left a comment on the grant proposal stating, “In the US, these recombinant SARS-CoV are studied under BSL3 [Biosafety Level 3], not BSL2 [Biosafety Level 2], especially important for those that are able to bind and replicate in primary human cells.” In China, he wrote, these experiments could be done under BSL2, but “US researchers will likely freak out.” Indeed, some of Shi’s NIH-funded work engineering viruses was carried out under BSL-2 conditions in Wuhan.

Despite this risk, the DARPA project manager reviewing the proposal was not initially concerned about the group’s work in China and indicated that DARPA did not view the research as too risky.

Although many virologists insist that this gain-of-function research is not connected to Covid-19, there is good reason to be skeptical of their claims. Last year Public and Racket released a trove of documents showing that a group of scientists who publicly promoted the natural origin theory of Covid-19 privately believed that a lab leak was the virus’ probable origin. These scientists wrote a highly influential paper in March 2020, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which purported to debunk the lab leak hypothesis, and they briefed intelligence agencies about their paper.

Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), held financial power over some of these scientists, and private communications show that Fauci and other “higher ups” in government pressured the papers’ authors. A whistleblower has alleged that Fauci influenced the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s origins investigation, and that CIA officials changed their own analysts’ conclusions to favor natural origin.

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?Image
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In parts 2 and 3 of this major new piece by @galexybrane learn how:

— Bioweapons research, including for ethnic targeting, has been a focus of intense interest by the US and Chinese militaries for decades;

— Fauci quietly oversaw bioweapons research since 2003;

— Research to make viruses more contagious continues today with grossly insufficient regulation and outsized arrogance by scientists.

"This historical evidence, as well as the scientific record, suggests that individuals involved in biodefense and pandemic preparedness may have been responsible for engineering the SARS-CoV-2 virus," writes @galexybrane.

"The defense and preparedness push that gained funding and momentum after 9/11 appears to have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In attempting to stop pathogens from transmitting to humans, scientists appear to have achieved the opposite."

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning reporting and to read the rest of this major piece!

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More from @shellenberger

Oct 28
In 2022, Obama gave a speech at Stanford Cyber Policy Center advocating sweeping censorship of the Internet. Now, Public has discovered the same Center last month hosted a secret meeting with EU, UK, Brazil, & Australia officials to plot global censorship — including of the US. Image
In the spring of 2022, former President Barack Obama gave a major policy addressat Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, where he laid out a sweeping proposal for government censorship of social media platforms through the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act. Six days later, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced that it had created a “Disinformation Governance Board” to serve as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth with the clear goal of controlling the information Americans could access online.

At the heart of Obama’s vision for Internet censorship was legislation that would have authorized the US government’s National Science Foundation to authorize and fund supposedly independent NGOs to censor the Internet. The DHS and Stanford Internet Observatory, which was part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, pioneered this censorship-by-proxy strategy as a way to get around the First Amendment in 2020 with posts raising concerns about the 2020 elections and in 2021 with “narratives” expressing concern about the Covid vaccine.

The 2024 election of President Donald Trump significantly reduced the threat of Obama, DHS, and NSF censoring the American people. Trump defunded much of the Censorship Industrial Complex. The Platform Accountability Act is going nowhere in Congress. Elon Musk fired most of the censorship staff at Twitter and has allowed a significantly wider range of speech on the platform. And even before Trump’s election, Stanford donor Frank McCourt stopped funding the Stanford Internet Observatory after Public, Racket News, and House Weaponization Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan exposed its central role in the DHS censorship-by-proxy scheme.

But now, foreign governments, including Europe, the UK, Brazil, Australia, and others are demanding censorship, including of the American people. The risk is that US tech companies will find it significantly less expensive to have a single global censorship regime and just go along with foreign censorship requests. Facebook complied with Biden administration demands to censor because it needed Biden’s help in dealing with European censorship officials. And the Brazilian government forced Elon Musk to continue censoring the Brazilian people after it froze Starlink’s assets.

And Public has discovered that the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, which is led by Obama’s former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is at the heart of a new, secretive, and possibly illegal censorship initiative that appears even more ambitious than the one Obama proposed in 2022.

On September 24, the Cyber Policy Center hosted a secret dinner between its leaders and top censorship officials from Europe, UK, Brazil, California and Australia. The meeting was titled “Compliance and Enforcement in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape.” Frank McCourt, the same person behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, financed the gathering through his “Project Liberty Institute,” (PLI), toward which he gave $500 million to “strengthen democracy” and “foster responsible technology.”

Public emailed all 21 participants and organizers and only heard from four, PLI, the Australian government, the UK government, and the European Union, which declined to comment because, even though Public gave it over 24 hours, a spokesperson said, “We would need several days.”

The UK government said, “The legal framework gives Ofcom power to enforce the duties in the Act which are related to securing protections for people in the UK; it does not give Ofcom powers to enforce under any other legal regimes…. Ofcom has always engaged with various international forums and networks across all of the sectors we regulate, including online safety, spectrum, telecommunications, post, and broadcast and media. Regulators around the world regularly exchange insights, experience, and best practice.”

A spokesperson for PLI said it “has made unrestricted gifts to several academic research programs, including Stanford University” and that “PLI does not receive funding from governments, intergovernmental organizations, or large technology companies.”

But PLI’s own policy “blueprint” reveals that it is demanding a single total global censorship regime and intends to use the EU’s market power, known as the “Brussels effect,” to force big tech companies to comply. The blueprint calls for governments to “Recommit to a Single, Global Internet,” with “regulatory interoperability and oversight, to achieve a single unified market” and use the large size of the EU market to “drive bilateral and multilateral agendas to formally enshrine reciprocal guarantees.”

A spokesperson for the Australian government said, “Whilst in attendance at Stanford for the 2-day conference, some attendees, including trust and safety researchers, industry, civil society, and government representatives, were also invited to attend an informal evening roundtable event organised by Stanford University entitled, ‘Compliance and Enforcement in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape.’ This roundtable did not involve any discussion of compliance coordination or regulatory information sharing.”

The Australian spokesperson claimed that “eSafety has no role in regulating hate speech or disinformation. eSafety has no remit or interest in regulating the affairs of other nations, nor does it have any role in diplomatic, trade or other government-to-government relations.”

But it also said, “As the internet is global and functions irrespective of national borders, by necessity eSafety collaborates with law enforcement, other government agencies, and non-government partners around the world, including in the United States.”

The leaked agenda’s stated purpose was to “discuss the state of compliance and enforcement” in order to “identify where data, research, and expertise can enable more effective compliance with and enforcement of existing policy.”

Much of the following two days of the public conference were focused on coordinating government censorship (“regulation”) of social media platforms, and the other nations that attended the meeting are all intensively involved in censoring their citizens and US tech companies.

And, the head of Australia’s eSafety, Julie Inman-Grant, who was a keynote speaker at Stanford’s foreign censorship meeting, is also the head of a global government censorship network that serves as forum, she told the World Economic Forum, “to help us coordinate, build capacity and do just that…. We use the tools that we have, and can be effective, but we know we’re going to be, go, much further, when we work together with other like-minded independent statutory authorities around the globe.”

As such, the people who are demanding censorship are once again spreading disinformation about what they are doing.

All of this is happening in a context of global censorship intensifying. The UK government arrests 30 people per day for “offensive” social media posts, is attempting to censor 4Chan, which has no servers in the UK, and will mandate digital IDs for employment, which may give unprecedented control to politicians and bureaucrats to censor. The Brazilian government has, for year,s been censoring journalists and policymakers, incarcerating people for legal social media content, and threatening prosecution of journalists, including this author. And several European nations are censoring and arresting their citizens, preventing opposition political candidates from running for office, and preparing to implement digital IDs.

Why did Stanford Cyber Policy Center hold this meeting, what is its strategy for global censorship? Who leaked the agenda to Public and why? And what can be done to stop Stanford, Brazil, Australia, the EU and others from realizing their totalitarian censorial vision?

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigatie journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video!
Here is the leaked agenda from the Stanford Cyber Policy Center's secret foreign censorship meeting on September 24, 2025:Image
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Read 4 tweets
Oct 8
Fifty-five percent of people on the Left justify the murder of Trump, five times more liberals than conservatives defend political violence, and not a single high-profile Democrat has called for @jonesjay to drop out. The Left truly can not make its intentions any clearer. Image
The person whose legacy is most being destroyed by this is @BarackObama . He must demand that @jonesjay step down. Now. And he should take extraordinary efforts to demand the Left back down from its utterly crazed support for violence. This building should not open until he does that.Image
Read 5 tweets
Oct 8
Mind-blowing. In 2014, VP Biden attacked corrupt developer in Romania who owned land around US embassy. In 2015, Hunter goes to work for the corrupt developer, lobbies US ambassador to pressure Romanians to drop case, then proposes to settle case by cutting in his China client 😳 Image
This appears to have been a straight-up mob-style shakedown by the Biden family done under the auspices of Obama foreign policy and in a way the directly jeopardized US national security.
The lawyers for Hunter’s corrupt developer client first threatened to jeopardize the land upon which the embassy sat, and then proposed a deal whereby prosecutors dropped the case in exchange for the corrupt developer selling nearly half his stake to a state-owned Chinese energy company, that was also Hunter’s client.Image
Read 9 tweets
Sep 28
Good god. The Swiss people just approved digital IDs. Australia implemented them in Dec. UK last week. In all 3 nations, deep state-allied politicians are behind them. This is a digital ID/censorship emergency. Please share and reply below with info about other nations. Image
The deep state swamp creatures know that digital IDs are unpopular and so they are trying to rush them through before anyone realizes what they are doing. The good news is that the more people learn about them the more alarmed they become.

Polling in Switzerland showed 60% backed digital IDs which both houses in parliament had already approved. The final vote was just 50.4%. It almost lost. I hope the Swiss people are carefully scrutinizing the vote count.

Same dynamic in UK. Opposition to digital IDs is low and will rise. Digital IDs can and must be killed.

x.com/shellenberger/…
From a Swiss source: "Palantir and Mercator sponsored the Yes Campaign. Palantir is a member of Digital Switzerland, alongside other tech companies. Digital Switzerland lobbied for the E-ID/digital ID in Switzerland in this vote.Image
Read 10 tweets
Sep 27
The man behind the digital ID push is Larry Ellison, owner of Oracle, CBS, CNN, and, soon, TikTok. He wants data centralization and total surveillance. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching & recording everything that's going on." Terrifying.
This article in the left-wing UK magazine @NewStatesman details how Ellison bankrolled Starmer's Digital ID push.

This is not a partisan issue. Freedom lovers on the Left and Right should both aggressivley oppose digital totalitarianism.

Ellison: We need to unify all of the national data. Put it into a database where it's easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like.

Blair: So you're really through the use of this, you're revolutionizing the way government works, right? The services it provides, the way that it operates.

Why bother having democracy at all? Why not just let Ellison and WEF and AI run things? What could possibly go wrong?
Read 7 tweets
Sep 27
And after the government combines your personal, banking, and voting data under a single digital ID, it will add social media and vaccine information. Same with Real ID in the US. The Censorship Industrial Complex was dress rehearsal for digital ID.
Stop your creepy totalitarianism @sundarpichai @Google Image
@sundarpichai @Google UK opposition vs support of digital IDs is 45 to 42.

Opponents should be able to drive that opposition number up significantly.

It is absolutely essential that the UK kill two-tier @Keir_Starmer plan for digital IDs before they metastasize across the West. Image
Read 18 tweets

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