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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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 😳
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The idea that our rights are natural is Christian Nationalist misinformation, say the media and Democrats. But it's not. It's right there in the Declaration of Independence. Behind the Left's dehumanization of conservatives is an ignorant denial of America's spiritual foundation.
To his credit, Senator @timkaine reversed his position on natural rights a few days after the hearing. “Of course, I embrace the view, expressed so clearly in the Declaration of Independence authored by Virginian Thomas Jefferson, that all people are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
I accept the Senator Kaine's change of mind, but he misrepresents the hearing by saying "Of course..."
Nobody who watches Kaine pedantically lecture State Department official Riley Barnes and walk away thinking Kaine agrees with the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.
Notably, Kaine placed his oped describing his change of mind on natural rights at Fox where no MSNBC viewer is at any risk of reading it.
@timkaine According to the New Atheists the New Atheists failed like all scientism fails. They couldn't explain reality or deliver a positive vision or affirmative program. Their entire project rests on really dumb assumptions about reality and nature.