by Alex Gutentag, Public:
Was EcoHealth Alliance’s 2018 DEFUSE proposal a blueprint for bioweapons-related experiments that led to the Covid-19 lab leak?
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).
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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.”
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.
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