“Smoking gun” evidence has been revealed showing that American scientists came up with the blueprint for the manmade SARS-CoV-2 virus.
New documents link the gain-of-function virus research pioneered by U.S. scientists to a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese laboratory where the global Covid-19 pandemic with near-certainty had originated.
As reported today in The Daily Telegraph, “Previously unpublished notes accompanying a US-China joint research proposal revealed for the first time plans for University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric to collaborate with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to engineer novel coronaviruses with striking similarities to SARS-CoV-2 a year before the pandemic.”
The documents, obtained by watchdog group U.S. Right to Know, show that “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.”
U.S. Right to Know explains the significance of the new findings:
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.
The newly revealed documents confirm what was suspected as early as 2021, the furin cleavage sites are the key to showing that the virus is manmade.
As U.S. Right to Know highlights, “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.
These newly released documents are available below:
USGS DEFUSE 2021 006245 Com… by Justin Vallejo
As Ralph Baric’s notes show, the furin cleavage site is exactly where it turned out to be in the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus.
“Game over,” said Matt Ridley, co-author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.”
“The latest revelations provide precise confirmation that all the many suspicious features of sars-cov-2 which imply it was man-made were set out in exhaustive detail in the DEFUSE proposal to which Wuhan Institute of Virology was a partner,” Ridley said.
As noted by The Daily Telegraph, “The previously reported DEFUSE grant proposal, led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak in New York, was a 2018 application to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a USD $14 million grant to enhance SARS-like bat viruses.”
“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 in the grant notes.
“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,” he added.
The Telegraph adds that the Pentagon eventually denied the funding request, but the notes indicate that Dr. Baric may have produced spike proteins that were not part of the public record before being presented to DARPA.
As U.S. Right to Know points out, “The notes also show that Baric engineered spike proteins that do not appear in the public scientific literature, and that this work may have already been underway as the proposal was submitted to DARPA.”
“RB [Ralph Baric] has already generated SARS-like chimeras w/ RBD [receptor binding domain] from group of bat viruses called 293 (for S1) which is 20% different than epidemic strains, and S2 region from HK3 which is 20% diff,” the notes read, seeming to refer to spike proteins generated from two different strains of bat viruses.
“While HKU3 bat viruses are known, the reference to ‘bat viruses called 293’ is ambiguous, and does not appear to refer to any public group of viruses,” the report adds.
Richard Ebright, a highly respected Harvard-educated molecular biologist at Rutgers University, heralded the news of the “smoking gun” evidence.
Beyond the newly released Baric notes, there are more developments that have shed light on the cross-collaboration between the communist Chinese and the Americans regarding risky gain-of-function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Earlier in January, U.S. Right to Know uncovered further evidence that the United States and the Chinese were collaborating over the gain-of-function research that led to the Covid- pandemic.
Shortly before the disastrous Covid outbreak in Wuhan, the Chinese scientist who oversaw controversial virus research at the nearby laboratory attended a secret meeting with the US government to seek support for a project that would go on to supercharge coronaviruses.
Zhengli, known as ‘Batwoman’ for her work on virus sampling and sequencing in the animals, has become the missing link in understanding how the United States and China co-managed the Covid fallout. Shi Zhengli’s June 2017 meeting at America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now fueling fears of Western collusion with a Chinese communist cover-up after the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is widely believed to have been caused by a careless laboratory experiment at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A fresh batch of data acquired by Freedom of Information activists and examined by The Daily Mail on Sunday reveals the degree to which America backed, and frequently sponsored, the contentious work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
They indicate that in order to increase their chances of winning funds, US researchers seeking financing for studies to engineer ‘spike proteins,’ which make it easier for bat viruses to infect human cells, deceived the authorities about the hazards of the trials.
“Zhengli and I will do a double act, and we’ll cover the work we’re doing … as well as the broadscale surveillance of bats for novel viruses,” says Peter Daszak, the $460,000-a-year head of EcoHealth.
The documents obtained by US Right To Know, a non-profit public health research organization, include a directive issued by Chinese intelligence on January 3, 2020 – two days after the world first learned about Covid – requiring its scientists to either share their samples with the government or destroy them “on the spot.”
Dr. Baric acknowledged in an email that US researchers would ‘freak out’ if they discovered novel coronavirus engineering and testing was being done in low-security Chinese laboratories, but disguised it to make the US government more ‘comfortable’ with the plan, which the researchers claim was intended to aid in pandemic prevention.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), funded the risky gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through EcoHealth Alliance.
“On June 1, 2014, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID funded a grant to the EcoHealth Alliance for the five-year period June 1, 2014, to May 31, 2019. Fauci Ex. 2, at 2. The title of the project was ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.’ The project’s Abstract stated: “This project will examine the risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using indepth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China, molecular characterization of novel CoVs and host receptor binding domain genes, mathematical models of transmission and evolution, and in vitro and in vivo laboratory studies of host range.”
The Abstract noted that one of the project’s “three specific aims” would be to “[t]est predictions of CoV inter-species transmission” by engaging in two forms of research to enhance the bat coronaviruses’ transmissibility to humans: “reverse genetics,” i.e., genetic manipulation of the viruses to render them more transmissible; and “virus infection experiments” using “humanized mice,” i.e., repeatedly infecting humanized mice with bat coronaviruses to provoke mutations that render them more infectious to human cells (a process known as “serial passage”). Specifically, the Abstract stated: “Predictive models of host range (i.e.[,] emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”
Covid’s manmade origins were subsequently covered up through a combination of benefits and payoffs.
The Washington Examiner reported, “Leading virologists who initially raised concerns about the possibility of COVID-19 leaking from a lab in Wuhan, China, before later changing their tune on the issue oversaw projects that received tens of millions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health under Dr. Anthony Fauci, records show.”
In June 2023, after years of official denial, compelling new evidence emerged supporting the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
In an extensive investigation conducted by Public and Racket, multiple U.S. government officials revealed that among the first individuals infected by the virus were researchers from the WIV, including Ben Hu, who led the institute’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, known for enhancing virus infectivity.
U.S. government sources have confirmed that Ben Hu, along with Yu Ping and Yan Zhu, were among the earliest victims of SARS-CoV-2, and all three were associated with the Wuhan lab suspected of the virus leak.
“Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19. Shi is known as “the bat woman of China,” and led the gain-of-function research at the WIV. “He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him.”
These revelations indicate not only that WIV scientists developed COVID-19-like symptoms in November 2019, but also that they were conducting research on the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, incorporating unique gain-of-function features into the virus.
When asked about the certainty of identifying the three WIV scientists as the ones who fell ill with COVID-19-like symptoms in late 2019, a source stated unequivocally, “100%.”
How did these signs of a manmade Covid virus escape U.S. intelligence agencies? According to a CIA whistleblower, analysts who assessed the origins of SARS-CoV-2 as due to a likely lab leak were paid off.
The whistleblower, who presents as a highly credible senior-level CIA officer, alleges that of the seven members assigned to the CIA team tasked with analyzing COVID-19 origins, six officers concluded that the virus likely originated from a lab in Wuhan, China. The CIA, then however, allegedly offered financial incentives to six of the experts involved in the investigation to change their conclusion in favor of a zoonotic origin.
“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis. The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” wrote the Chairmen.
The inescapable conclusion is that SARS-CoV-2 is a manmade virus; American scientists’ research facilitated the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from the Wuhan laboratory; and the U.S. government covered it up.
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