Here is one more piece of "smoking gun" evidence that something very suspicious was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the time of the supposed origin of Covid-19. Evidence has been uncovered by the U.S. Right to Know organisation that American virologists were planning to conduct research with communist Chinese scientists on coronaviruses with the features of SARS-CoV-2, the Covid-19 virus.
The uncovered material relates to the DEFUSE grant proposal was led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak. The research proposal set out the ways of making what is essentially the Covid-19 virus, with genetic modifications to make it more transmissible to humans. The proposal was submitted for funding to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which rejected the project. The big question is, did the DEFUSE project then get taken up by the communist Chinese giving us the Covid-19 virus, and the death of millions and destruction of businesses? Other evidence indicates that this may have happened.
Again, while this is not conclusive proof of a lab origin of Covid-19, it is one more piece of evidence pointing in that direction. The dealings between US scientists and the communist Chinese scientists requires national security investigation at the highest level.
"American scientists planned to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to engineer novel coronaviruses with the features of SARS-CoV-2 the year before the virus emerged from that city, according to documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know.
While rare in nature, these features were central to the esoteric research interests of the scientists working with the Wuhan lab, those documents show.
Scientists divided over the so-called "lab leak" and natural origin hypotheses have for years pored over the arcane language of a U.S.-China research proposal called "DEFUSE" describing coronavirus engineering experiments.
The DEFUSE grant proposal was led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak.
Now, drafts and notes uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act reveal fresh details about the intended research.
Specifically, the scientists sought to insert furin cleavage sites at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein; to assemble synthetic viruses in six segments; to identify coronaviruses up to 25 percent different from SARS; and to select for receptor binding domains adept at infecting human receptors.
The genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, matches the viruses described in the research proposal:
- SARS-CoV-2 has a furin cleavage site positioned in the spike protein at the S1/S2 junction. The furin cleavage site supercharged the virus into the worst pandemic pathogen in a century. Virologists have yet to identify one in any other related coronavirus.
- SARS-CoV-2 can be divided into six contiguous genomic pieces by the restriction enzymes Bsal and BsmBI. These restriction enzymes occur in nature but can also be used in the lab to splice viruses. A trio of scientists estimated in a 2022 analysis that the likelihood of seeing the pattern found in SARS-CoV-2 in nature would be remote. Orders for one of these restriction enzymes, BsmBI, can be found in the documents.
- SARS-CoV-2 emerged highly infectious without evolving much in humans. The virus "came out of the box ready to infect." The receptor binding domain appeared "finely tuned" for the human ACE2 receptor, yet had little genetic variation when first spilling over into humans, presenting a difficult "paradox" to virologists who sought to prove it emerged naturally. The documents confirm the scientists working with the Wuhan lab sought to select for receptor binding domains that bind well to human ACE2 in their research.
- The genome of SARS-CoV-2 falls within the range of a 25 percent genetic difference from SARS.
The documents reveal for the first time that a virologist working with the Wuhan lab planned to engineer new spike proteins – in contrast with the collaboration's public work to insert whole spike proteins into viral backbones. Language in the proposal indicates this work may have involved unpublished viruses, generating unpublished engineered spike proteins.
This American virologist, University of North Carolina Prof. Ralph Baric, was set to engineer twenty or more "chimeric" SARS-related viral spike proteins per year of the proposal, and two to five full-length engineered SARS-related viruses. Documents previously reported by U.S. Right to Know show that some of the experimentation could secretly occur in Wuhan at a lower biosafety level than specified in the grant, apparently to save costs.
The documents challenge an argument made by the National Institutes of Health and some virologists against the relevance of the research proposal to the origins of the pandemic. They have argued that this U.S.-China scientific collaboration only planned to engineer viruses starting with viral backbones already in the public literature, and that these viral backbones are too dissimilar to have played a role in the pandemic.
The new documents however reveal that the scientists planned to use new reverse genetics systems and test viruses in vivo — in other words, to engineer live viruses with novel backbones.
The documents describe the SARS-related viruses to be studied in the grant as posing "a clear-and-present danger of a new SARS-like pandemic."
The documents do not prove a precise step-by-step instruction manual for how SARS-CoV-2 was generated in the lab. The genomes of some of the SARS-related viruses the scientists planned to work with remain unknown. But they do describe experiments that could have generated the virus' rare properties. They detail the scientists' interest in working with viruses precisely like SARS-CoV-2.
The grant proposal was submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which rejected the project. Whether the research was funded through other means remains unknown. Baric had engineered unknown spike proteins by the time the proposal was submitted.
Nonetheless, the documents suggest that some of the data central to the worst pandemic in a century may be found not only in China, but also in the U.S.
"When the Wuhan Institute of Virology published their first paper on the pandemic virus, they made no mention of the unique furin cleavage site despite having recently authored DEFUSE, declaring that they were on the lookout for these concerning features in novel SARS-like viruses," Broad Institute molecular biologist Alina Chan said. "We need to get all of the exchanges between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its US collaborators in 2018 and especially 2019 – the year of the pandemic."