- Chinese-American collaboration on virus
- Documents suggest Covid blueprint
- Lab-leak theory gains support
Shocking new documents shed light on a dubious 2018 collaboration between Chinese and American scientists to develop a novel virus possessing the identical uncommon characteristics observed in Covid.
A year before the onset of the pandemic, the proposals outlined strategies for engineering bat coronaviruses with multiple properties that would render them human-pathogenic, using funds from the United States government.
Four characteristics of the documents — hundreds of emails, grant applications, and scientific papers — distinguished the new viruses as a “glaring… threat of a new SARS-like pandemic.”
The research proposal delineates four distinct attributes that correspond to features of SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, as confirmed by a watchdog and multiple experts who examined the files.
The DEFUSE grant-funded experiments were intended to be a collaborative effort between scientists from the United States and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the suspected source of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the FBI and numerous scientists.
Funding was ultimately withheld from the proposal, and no official records exist to verify the execution of the experiments. However, virology specialists have described the records as an unmistakable “blueprint” for developing Covid-19.
Jamie Metzl, a World Health Organisation adviser and the founder of One Shared World, an organization dedicated to averting future pandemics, stated on X that the documents refute the zoonotic origin theory of Covid, which posits that the virus originated in the environment and subsequently spread to humans.
He stated on Twitter, “The phylogenetic data and the specifics of the 2018 DEFUSE proposal make an extremely convincing case for a research-related origin of COVID19 in Wuhan.”
“There is virtually no evidence to suggest that zoonosis exists in the wild or on the Huanan market.”
Proposal Details: Constructing SARS-CoV-2 Virus
Chemical biologist Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University in New Jersey stated via Twitter that the proposal “described in detail how to construct a virus with the same sequence and properties as SARS-CoV-2.”
Furthermore, the correspondence between the evidence presented in the FOIA release and the evidence uncovered by the genome sequence is astounding and raises the significance of the evidence presented in the genome sequence from “notable” to “smoking gun.”
The documents originate from Project DEFUSE: Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses, a grant proposal submitted in March 2018.
The DEFUSE project proposal was put forth by the renowned EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization based in New York that handles the allocation of US government grants to finance initiatives of this nature overseas.
As evidenced by documents previously published in December 2023 that accompanied the proposal, the research team intended to synthesize spike proteins equipped with furin cleavage sites, which would facilitate their binding to human receptors.
Following this, the grant suggested attaching furin to coronavirus strains and infecting rodents to determine the severity of the illness it would induce.
The furin has been a subject of considerable controversy regarding the genesis of COVID-19, with certain authorities contending that its acquisition was confined to laboratory experiments.
It was the factor that “supercharged” Covid into an exceptionally contagious pathogen.
Safety Measures and Laboratory Design
The objective of the DEFUSE project was to proactively address impending pandemics by employing pharmaceuticals and vaccines to cure pathogens that had not yet emerged.
The 2023 documents also revealed that to secure funding, the grant applicants attempted to mislead the Pentagon regarding the dangers of the experiments.
They demonstrated that the proposed experiments would be conducted at the WIV, which has fewer safety precautions for working with specimens that have the potential to cause a pandemic than the United States, which was marketed as cost-effective to the Department of Defence.
The preliminary proposals for DEFUSE called for laboratory work to be conducted in a biosafety-level 2 facility, which researchers claimed would be “extremely cost-effective” in the eyes of federal grant-makers despite requiring fewer safety precautions than lower-level laboratories.
A subcontractor on DEFUSE and a renowned expert in producing recombinant coronaviruses, Dr. Ralph Baric, admitted in an edited version of the proposal that American researchers would “go into shock” if they discovered that a BSL-2 laboratory was conducting novel coronavirus engineering and testing.
BSL-3 laboratories in the United States conduct comparable experiments.
In a subsequent draft of the proposal, BSL-2 was upgraded to BSL-3.
EHA deemed the initial set of documents “incomplete” and stated in December refuting the allegations because they were “fabricated through misinterpretation of document edits and comments, misleading out-of-context quotations, and a failure to comprehend the federal grant-awarding process.”
Experts stated at the time that the initial trove of documents discovered in December, which detailed plans to create a Covid-like virus in China in 2018, rendered the “laboratory leak almost certain.”
Late in 2019, the COVID-19 virus emerged, possessing an exceptional capability to infect human beings, and proceeded to instigate a worldwide pandemic the following year.
Following the publication of the initial documents, Dr. Ebright stated, “These revelations are crucial because the experiments described in the grant proposal almost certainly — in fact, almost certainly — contributed to the development and release of SARS-CoV-2.”
According to additional authorities, the documents provided additional substantiation for the Covid lab breach theory, which posits that the virus originated from gain-of-function research funded by U.S. taxpayers via the former department of Dr. Anthony Fauci. This theory has since gained support from the FBI and other government agencies.
At this time, specialists are placing greater emphasis on those concerns.
The most recent collection of documents details several scientific proposals for a novel pathogen that bears a striking resemblance to the Covid virus, such as the following:
The following are objectives: incorporate a furin cleavage site into a spike protein; procure the restrictive enzyme BsmBI; identify a binding domain capable of infecting the identical receptor utilized by SARS-CoV-2; and identify a viral genome that shares a 25 percent similarity with the SARS virus.
The spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus incorporates a furin cleavage site, while the restrictive enzyme BsmBI is encoded within its genome. In addition, it possesses a receptor binding domain that has been “fine-tuned” to infect a particular human receptor, and the genome of Covid is within a 25 percent genetic difference range from that of SARS.
US Right to Know, which obtained both sets of documents through Freedom of Information Act requests, asserts that these are the first records demonstrating that Dr. Baric intended to engineer at least twenty chimeric SARS-related viral spike proteins annually throughout the grant’s duration.
Additionally, they demonstrate that he intended to create two to five complete SARS-related viruses.
The organization, which has been accused of propagating anti-vaccination sentiments, also asserts that the documents refute a National Institutes of Health argument that the partnership between China and the United States was limited to investigating viruses already the subject of public research and that these viruses were too dissimilar to have contributed to the Covid pandemic.
Nevertheless, the documents outline how the SARS-related viruses that researchers aimed to investigate throughout DEFUSE presented an imminent threat of a novel pandemic akin to SARS.
Documentary Gaps in Virus Creation
In addition, they demonstrate that the scientists intended to engineer novel live viruses using a reverse genetics system.
In conclusion, the documents lack comprehensive “step-by-step” guidelines for producing SARS-CoV-2 in a laboratory setting, and the genomes of certain SARS-associated viruses that researchers wished to examine remain undisclosed.
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The etiology of COVID-19 has been a subject of ongoing debate, with the prevailing consensus being that it originated in a laboratory setting or zoonotic conditions.
Once considered conspiracy theorists, proponents of lab leaks are now backed by accumulating evidence that suggests the lab-origin hypothesis is accurate; federal agencies have even begun to subscribe to the notion that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in and escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
Dozens of hours have been devoted to congressional committees interrogating Dr. Fauci concerning the origin of COVID and the funding of research that may have contributed to its development through his department.
Although Dr. Fauci has consistently and vehemently rejected the lab-leak theory and commissioned a study in 2020 to refute the possibility that Covid originated in a laboratory, he has recently started to retract his previous denial that he had ever rejected the possibility that Covid may have escaped inadvertently from a laboratory.
Furthermore, he admitted in his most recent round of questioning from last week that the lab leak hypothesis was no longer a conspiracy theory.
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