THE FEDERALIST
A leaked document coauthored by American and Chinese scientists provides fresh and disturbing evidence supporting the Covid origin lab-leak theory.
Emily Kopp, an investigative journalist at U.S. Right to Know, an online publication about “Pursuing truth and transparency for public health,” reported recently that her organization has obtained a 2018 grant proposal called Project DEFUSE, coauthored by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and their counterparts in the United States, including EcoHealth Alliance.
According to Kopp, Project DEFUSE “proposed engineering high-risk coronaviruses of the same species as SARS and SARS-CoV-2.” The content of this proposal is concerning for several reasons. First, the proposal “involved synthesizing spike proteins with furin cleavage sites — the same feature that supercharged SARS-CoV-2 into the most infectious pandemic pathogen in a century.”
Second, the proposal publicly stated that such risky research would be done at American scientist Ralph Baric’s high-containment BSL-3 lab at the University of North Carolina. But Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth, revealed in his private comments that once the project is funded, he would let the WIV conduct some of the risky research, despite knowing the WIV is only a BSL-2 lab and has “fewer safety precautions than required in the U.S.” Baric responded that “U.S. researchers would ‘freak out’ if they knew the novel coronavirus engineering and testing work would be conducted in a BSL-2 lab.”
According to Kopp of U.S. Right to Know, “Biosafety levels range from one (BSL-1) to four (BSL-4), with BSL-4 being the most stringent. … Many scientists say viruses that may be transmitted through the air should at minimum be studied in BSL-3.”
Daszak and other Americans on the project team omitted to disclose the WIV’s involvement to Project DEFUSE’s intended funder, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “in order to evade any national security concerns about doing high-level biosecurity work in China.” Daszak didn’t provide Chinese scientists’ resumes to DARPA “to downplay the non-US focus of this proposal so that DARPA doesn’t see this as a negative.”
What’s even scarier is that these documents “also show the researchers intended to use less regulated SARS-related coronavirus research as proof of concept in order to extend their high-risk methods to more deadly viruses like Ebola, Marburg, Hendra and Nipah,” according to Kopp. Some scientists’ ongoing interest in experimenting with those contagious and lethal viruses is one of the many reasons why we must understand the origin of Covid-19 because such knowledge may help prevent the next pandemic…
