But, where's the bat?

Bombshell new evidence uncovers a 2018 US government funded gain-of-function proposal to engineer Coronaviruses at Wuhan Institute and includes a recipe for assembling synthetic SARS viruses

As circumstantial you may think the evidence supporting the lab leak theory is, once you overlap the things we objectively know, sans conjecture, the statistical odds these occurrences were a result of some massive magical “coincidence” seems highly improbable. Decide for yourself:

1. The seafood “wet market” that many claimed was the epicenter of the pandemic is literally a few miles away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and testing of the animals came up empty.

2. Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist, Dr. Zhou Yusen, filed for a patent for a COVID vaccine on February 24, 2020. The early timing of his filing raises concerns that the unnamed vaccine was in development months before the COVID-19 pandemic became public. Less than three months after filing his patent, Dr. Zhou Yusen died under mysterious circumstances and the Chinese media said he died from “falling off the roof” of the Wuhan lab.

3. We know that Wuhan lab workers were the first COVID patients. We’ve known about this for almost a year.

4. China destroyed all records from the lab. Keeping a lab book to record all experiments is a standard and universally adopted convention in science. But remarkably, there are no lab records for the key coronavirus experiments performed at the Wuhan lab. There are also no source samples.

   Researchers who experiment on viruses do, however, routinely report those genetic sequences to an international virus registry housed by the NIH. Wuhan lab researchers had reported virus sequences to the NIH registry but then called in June 2020 to ask for that information to be deleted.

   The NIH honored the Chinese request and promptly deleted the virus sequences in the NIH registry.

5. Wuhan lab conditions were abysmal. The Wuhan Institute of Virology claimed to be a Biosafety Level 4 lab — the highest standard. However in reality the conditions were abysmal and safety procedures were rarely followed.

   Plagued by defective air circulation systems, the Wuhan lab took its public virus database off the internet in September 2019, and announced a contract competition to renovate its air conditioning system for approximately $606 million. Then, just a few weeks later, cellphone data suggests there was a shutdown at Wuhan lab from Oct. 7 through Oct. 24, 2019. Is this when they had the lab leak? We don’t know. But the timeline sure suggests that something significant occurred and it fits neatly with the U.S. intelligence assessment that the first cases of COVID occurred in November 2019 and were in fact 3 Wuhan Institute scientists.

What you’re about to read in the following paragraphs is quite possibly the strongest piece of circumstantial evidence. This added to the list above makes the combined weight of what is already known pretty hard to ignore.

In May 2021, replying to a question from Sen. Rand Paul, Dr. Anthony Fauci, arguably the most famous public health official in US history proclaimed “Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology”

Now, if there existed evidence disproving the vigorous assertions repeated ad nauseum for the last 4 years by Dr. Fauci and other public health experts, you’d figure this new discovery would’ve become bombshell news plastered across all media pages accompanied by calls for an independent commission and a complete overhaul of the taxpayer funded scientific research apparatus. Instead, it puttered out with barely a whimper.

We now know that there existed a concrete plan to experiment on bat viruses with the specific aim of enhancing their ability to infect and spread between humans as far back as 2018.

New documents obtained from a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request reveal a 2018 grant proposal co-authored by American and Chinese scientists that asked for funding to perform this so-called “gain-of-function experiments” to engineer bat viruses uniquely capable of infecting and spreading between humans.

The 1417 page document disclosure unearthed by U.S. Right to Know, a health advocacy group, include drafts and planning materials for the DEFUSE proposal, a $14 million grant application submitted in 2018 to DARPA by American scientist Peter Daszak and Wuhan Institute of Virology in which they proposed engineering high-risk coronaviruses of the same species as SARS and SARS-CoV-2 by enhancing (aka gain of function) SARS like bat viruses.

Researchers would start with a bat virus template from specific caves in southern China, then endow it with human-specific features that allowed it become more infectious and teach it to infect human cells in the laboratory.

Although grant applicants told the Department of Defense they would conduct the research in the U.S., they privately wrote that most of it would be outsourced to the Wuhan Institute of Virology after funding was secured. (This is the very lab that proponents of the lab leak theory believe SARS COV-2 originated from)

The scientists who wrote the grant were Ralph Baric from the University of North Carolina; Peter Daszak, president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance; Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology; and Linfa Wang from the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. Daszak leads EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that discovers novel viruses. Baric helms a University of North Carolina lab with a focus on coronaviruses. Both Daszak and Baric have worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on gain-of-function research.

These documents also confirm the long-standing existence of a recipe for assembling SARS-type viruses from six synthetic pieces of DNA. Prior evidence points to SARS COV-2 (the COVID-19 virus) having just such a six-section structure. To construct synthetic variants of natural coronaviruses in the lab, researchers often use a method called in vitro genome assembly. This method utilizes special enzymes called restriction enzymes to generate DNA building blocks that then can be “stitched” together in the correct order of the viral genome. To make a virus in the lab, researchers usually engineer the viral genome to add and remove stitching sites, called restriction sites. The ways researchers modify these sites can then be used as fingerprints pointing to evidence of in vitro genome assembly of a “Frankenstein monster” virus.

This newly discovered recipe fits perfectly with a theoretical paper published in 2022 that predicted SARS COV-2 had been generated synthetically in exactly this way. In this paper, researchers—Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen noted that the virus could be cut into six sections if treated with restriction enzymes and this provided clues that it had been synthesized and assembled in this way.

Bruttel and his colleagues guessed that a commonly used pair of restriction enzymes, known as BsaI and BsmBI, might have been used to assemble the SARS2 virus’s genome. When they examined the structure of SARS2, they found that the recognition sites used by these enzymes were indeed evenly spaced across the genome, marking it into six sections. “Our findings strongly suggest a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2,” they wrote.

These experiments were to occur in part in Wuhan with fewer safety precautions than required in the U.S. — ostensibly to save on costs. American scientists concealed this from their desired funder — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — to evade any national security concerns about doing high-level biosecurity work in China.

In a comment on an early draft of the proposal, Daszak clarifies that the Wuhan Institute of Virology will in fact do much of this work, but that this is excluded from the formal proposal to make DARPA “comfortable.”

“Ralph, Zhengli. If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team,” Daszak wrote. “Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well…”

Daszak said he wanted to “downplay” the Chinese involvement in the research in hopes of being granted funding by DARPA.

“I’m planning to use my resume and Ralph’s,” Daszak wrote. “Linfa/Zhengli, I realize your resumes are also very impressive, but I’m trying to downplay the non-US focus of this proposal so that DARPA doesn’t see this as a negative.

When SARS COV-2 first appeared, it had all the unique properties expected of a virus made according to the DEFUSE recipe. Instead of slowly evolving abilities to attack human cells, as occurs when natural viruses jump from animals to humans, SARS COV-2 seemed completely at home inside human cells and spread remarkably easily from human to human (something animal viruses infecting humans struggle with), possibly because it had already been adapted in humanized laboratory mice to the human cell receptor.

SARS COV-2 possesses a furin cleavage site, found in none of the other 871 known members of its viral family, which makes it highly unlikely that it gained such a site through the ordinary evolutionary swaps of genetic material within a family. The DEFUSE proposal called for inserting one.

The DEFUSE proposal was to assemble the viral genome from six DNA sections, which would account for the even spacing of the restriction enzyme recognition sites in SARS2, exactly as predicted by Bruttel and Washburne in their 2022 paper

“…as six contiguous cDNA pieces linked by unique restriction endonuclease sites that do not disturb the coding sequence, but allow for full length genome assembly. Full length genomes will be transcribed into RNA and electoration is used to recovery full length recombinant viruses…”

The DEFUSE proposal documents even include a form for ordering the BsmBI restriction enzyme.

Daszak and Baric were painfully aware that the gain of function research they proposed could mushroom cloud to a full-blown pandemic. In fact they wrote about downplaying exactly such a possibility in one of their memos.

“Also, we MUST make it clear in proposal that our approach won’t drive evolution the wrong way (e.g. drive evolution of more virulent strain that then becomes pandemic,”

On Dec. 28, 2019, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) repository for genetic sequences received its first COVID-19 virus genome. The sequence was uploaded at a People’s Liberation Army-affiliated institute by a Chinese scientist who also received U.S. government funding through the EcoHealth Alliance. None of the authors of the DEFUSE grant proposal bothered to alert public health agencies to the possibility that this new virus bore uncanny similarity to the Frankenvirus experiments they had proposed a little over a year ago.

We know from Baric’s sworn testimony that he not once mentioned that SARS COV-2 looked suspiciously like the chimeric virus that he, Daszak, and Shi had sought a grant to create. In fact, in February 2020, when Baric met with Dr. Anthony Fauci, their sworn testimony indicates that the similarity between the proposed chimeric virus creation and COVID-19 was never discussed.

What are the odds that a bat virus (or a pangolin virus, or any other animal virus) could perfect the ability to consistently infect humans on first try? You see, animal to human transmission of viruses happens. But human to human transmission of animal viruses remains uncommon, and certainly not a pandemic level event because the virus machinery needs time to adapt to a human host and this process takes months or even years. For example, another COVID-19-like virus called MERS first jumped from camels to humans about a decade ago but still hasn’t perfected human-to-human spread.

On the other hand, if there was even the slightest inkling that the virus was created in the lab, that it had been endowed with design features allowing it to infect humans at the get-go, the most effective immediate next step would be to target all flights into the U.S. from Wuhan for on-board fever and symptom testing.

But it gets worse. Peter Daszak drafted a March, 2020 letter published in the prestigious medical journal “The Lancet” condemning as “conspiracy theories” any concerns that the COVID-19 virus may have originated in a research lab. This statement signed by 27 prominent scientists was used as expert evidence that not only did the lab leak not happen but that any suggestion it may have occurred was direct evidence of prejudice, fear mongering and misinformation.

We now know that Daszak and two other DEFUSE scientists, Ralph Baric and Linfa Wang, thought they should not sign the statement so as to mask their involvement in it. Daszak drafted the statement and circulated it to other scientists to sign. Leaving their names off the statement would give it “some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Daszak wrote.

Daszak noted that he could “send it round” to other scientists to sign. “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice,” he wrote. The emails are part of a tranche of documents obtained by US Right to Know.

To Recap: The people who wrote the DEFUSE proposal also wrote the Lancet article which called anyone entertaining the possibility COVID came from the very lab they proposed doing gain of function experiments, almost exactly two years prior, a fearmongering, misinformation spreading racist, and then tried to cover up the blatant incestuousness of it all. Daszak did ultimately sign the statement himself, but he was not identified as its lead author or coordinator of the effort.

To be completely clear, there is no evidence that DARPA eventually funded the DEFUSE proposal. But Nicholas Wade, writing in the City Journal astutely points out that Baric and Shi were collaborators but also rivals. With Baric blocked for lack of DARPA funds, Shi may have seen the chance to race ahead if she could acquire funds from Chinese sources.

It could also explain why Chinese authorities—knowing that attracting world spotlight would bring unwanted scrutiny and open Pandora’s box— underplayed the possibility of human-to-human transmission as evidenced by this marvelously tone-deaf Jan, 2020 WHO tweet.

As I stated at the onset, the evidence is admittedly circumstantial. But once you combine the space-time overlap of the cluster of events and add to it the fact that the people who told us it wasn’t a frankenvirus were the ones trying to engineer frankenviruses, the weight of all evidence taken together becomes unbearably crushing.

Our so-called “experts” keep telling that following the science means accepting without question their refrain that it came from a bat. Well then, where are the sick bats?