#3 Was a Fauci 'funded' bat conference the first superspreader event of 2019?
#3 Was a Fauci 'funded' bat conference the first superspreader event of 2019?
And the winning DARPA team in Montana was a lot more interesting than the losing team in Wuhan
The same disclaimer applies as in part 2: this is obviously a hypothetical Wuhan lab leak based on an accident, not an accusation. This is a series of posts, not so much to discuss the ‘lab’ leak but ‘what’ leaked.
This is written to answer the two most important questions:
Why did WIV publish RaTG13 on January 24, 2020, kickstarting engineering rumors by US virologists, leading to a February 1st teleconference drafting a natural origin paper, later edited, referenced, and distributed by Fauci in a major April press conference?
Why only North American (lab) animals (not Chinese bats), can become both infected and ‘efficiently’ transmit SARS2?
Bats are social mammals, just like us humans
Linfa and Dani left Wuhan in late November for an early December 2019 Singapore conference. They met up with Shi at their Duke Singapore campus, with its BSL3 bat lab, and all hopped in a cab for the quick 10-minute ride to the conference center.
By December 2019 a contagious bat vaccine, soon to be renamed SARS2, was already spreading outside of Wuhan. Since there was no PCR test, and they did not even know what it was, Dani, Linfa, and Shi carried on with their professional lives. This was a big international bat conference for a “small group” of specialized bat virologists.
Dani claimed “there was no chatter” but Singapore was probably ground zero for the spread of the Wuhan pneumonia. As the unnamed virus spread, “unbeknownst to the scientists attending,” a few of them started spreading rumors.
A 2019 NIH-funded transmissible vaccine research paper speculated about superspreader events like this one. The “individuals that are most likely to spread a disease (i.e., superspreaders)” within the small tight international virology community are Shi, Linfa, and Dani. They are “highly connected nodes” and would socialize, like mammalian bats, starting the “process of vaccinating ‘acquaintances’ of randomly chosen individuals.”
The Gain-of-Function Party of 2019
The virologists attending this December 2019 Singapore conference were excited. They have been back in the Gain-of-Function business for the past two years, so it is time to discuss their latest animal vaccine products.
Gain-of-Function (GoF) research actually never stopped, as an anonymous longtime NIH official said: “If you ban GoF research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the (2014) moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done GoF research anyway.” Fauci in early 2019 said it was a sound decision to let the research officially resume.
Fauci’s NIH lifted the GoF pause the week before Christmas 2017, when everyone was leaving Washington D.C. The 50-year bureaucrat knew how to exploit a Presidential administration change. This was a leaderless time period when the HHS secretary (head of NIH, FDA, CDC) resigned in September 2017, but before his replacement was confirmed and sworn in January 2018. Fauci even discussed the musical chairs of HHS (2:00). This occurred during a two year period without a White House OSTP director.
Remember the trouble we used to get in?
Fauci bragged about NIAID funding 1/2 of all global disease research (e.g. SARS).
Was NIAID interested in live bats and self-spreading vaccines in 2019?
Self-spreading vaccines were not on the regulatory radar, but they were on Fauci’s radar. Back in 2017, one regulatory sentence was changed: bats, unlike mice, are not considered a “mammalian” model in a GoF ban or regulation.
As established in October 2014, the policy had required NIH to forward for the committee’s review experiments expected to generate certain flu and coronaviruses that would be “transmissible among mammals” and that might accidentally cause human infections.
But in December 2017, the policy was narrowed to cover only altered pathogens “likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations.” The sweeping reference to mammals was eliminated. A review by the committee was not required, the policy said, unless the pathogen to be constructed is “reasonably judged” by NIH “to be a credible source of a potential future human pandemic.”
Bats have a negligible chance of directly infecting humans (outside of a lab) but they do have a super immune system. Western virologists used live bats as modern guinea pigs in high-containment labs to study the diseases they carry into wildlife populations. The added bonus affords a good ($7B USD) government-funded living while traveling the world in business class. You can’t save the world from coach!
Virus hunting leads to bat hunting?
The 2019 Singapore bat conference was focused on Nipah, a BSL4 lethal virus from Asian bats, that infected Asian pig farms. Like every virologist's favorite movie Contagion, “somewhere in the world the wrong pig met up with the wrong bat.” But Nipah was just an excuse to study what virologists love: live bats.
An American news program, 60 Minutes, covered a 2004 expedition to a remote Malaysian island. This was all funded by Tony Fauci’s NIAID (of course!). The simple solution to the 1999 Nipah outbreak was educating farmers not to plant fruit trees, attracting Nipah-infected fruit bats next to their pig farms.
Occasionally, human outbreaks occurred, like when bats peed into a sap collection jar used for illicit alcohol consumption. The simple solution was bamboo covers for the jars. The 1999 Malaysian outbreak spread to Singapore via imported live pigs, which were later banned.
Fast-forward 20 years, and Fauci’s NIAID has now spent nearly $500M on Nipah. NIAID even co-sponsored the 2019 Nipah conference in Singapore. Why was a US Government agency funding research on Eastern hemisphere viruses? NIAID just wanted to go where the action was.
With substantial biodefence funding from U.S. Congress, (NIAID) has been able to support Nipah research since the early 2000s, contributing to important advances such as identification of the receptor used by Nipah for cellular entry and the development of animal models to be used in the evaluation of vaccines and therapeutics.
Batman asks why bats?
There was a “pre-genomic era” before the year 2000, which made tracing the origins of a virus nearly impossible.
Then came severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). After the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the epidemic over in July 2003, it put together a mission of eight scientists, including (Linfa) Wang, to investigate the origins of the virus in China. Linfa had a hunch bats could be the source, but the rest of the team was skeptical. At a meeting in Beijing, Linfa met the head of Wuhan Institute of Virology (probably the WIV’s Yuan Zhiming), who suggested he collaborate with a scientist at her institute: Shi Zhengli, who was then studying viruses in fish and shrimp. "She was the only virologist who believed me and was willing to collaborate with me," Linfa said.
Shi was still plucking prawns from the Yangtze River when collaborator Ralph Baric of UNC created and patented the first infectious clone (lab-created version) of SARS in 2003.
Shi did not have the necessary biological tool (infectious clone) to create SARS2.
In 2005, Linfa and Shi co-authored a paper that pinpointed Chinese horseshoe bats as a reservoir of SARS-like coronaviruses. Nearly a decade later, they finally traced the origins of the SARS1 outbreak to a Chinese bat, located in a Chinese cave 1,000 miles southwest of Wuhan. This led to an increased Western scientific interest in Chinese bat viruses and Asian bat immunology.
If Linfa’s 2019 Singapore presentation was like his 2022 presentation we know he asked: Why bats? Why are bats such a good reservoir for deadly human disease? When bats evolved flight, they acquired an advantage since bats are the only flying mammals on the planet. Bats can sustain a metabolic rate (1200 calories per hour), heartbeat (1000 bpm), and body temperature (100°F+) that would easily kill most mammals.
Beyond infectious diseases, bats are a good model for studying cancer, diabetes, aging, cardiology, and autoimmunity. Ironically the “parameters that enable the long lifespan of bats may be a double-edged sword, which may protect bats from severe viral disease…in their long-lived hosts.”
Linfa noted that a bat’s immune system is closer to humans than lab mice. This followed a trend of “fewer large animals being used in biomedical research in most programs. Scientists strongly prefer having the smaller research animals near the laboratory.”
Bats are the new lab rats that don’t have lawyers, randomized control trials, licensing, or PETA protection. FDA vaccine approval for humans takes 15-20 years but just 2-5 years for animals. Bats serve as the new mammalian frontier of virology, so bat immunologists ‘suit up’ in BSL4 space suits, to study their tank-like immune system.
Today, the U.S. military is again interested in bats not as front-line attackers but as defenders against a potentially devastating threat: Russian bioweapons.
Fruit bats have an almost supernatural ability to harbor some of the planet’s most deadly viruses without getting sick themselves. Inject an Egyptian fruit bat (the preferred bat colony of US biolabs) with the Marburg virus — a hemorrhagic relative of the infamous Ebola virus — and nothing happens. Do the same thing to a human, and within a week, the patient could be bleeding to death.
These bats’ extraordinary super-immunity has long fascinated virologists, and new research has shed light on how these flying frugivores achieve their supreme skill.
The civilian applications of dual-use research
At the 2019 Singapore conference, Linfa said he once received bat virus antibodies “within 48 hours” from NIAID, sent to his old “Bat Pack” lab in Australia. Linfa and Dani were experienced with this type of high containment, exotic animal vaccine work. He developed the first BSL4 bat pathogen vaccine for Australian horses.
In 2012, NIAID funded this Australian horse vaccine (of course!), which euthanized 10 healthy horses for a Hendra bat virus that killed 3 humans in Australia’s huge BSL4. This was the only BSL4 on the planet big enough to house horses. Does this sound familiar?
This brings new meaning to the racehorse named after Dr Fauci! Ironically the horses had lawyers represent them in a $53M class action lawsuit in 2018 for bad vaccine side effects. So, a NIAID representative at this 2019 conference floated the (bad) idea if “a bat vaccine be considered to control (disease) transmission?”
Why was all this manpower and NIAID funding dedicated to creating animal vaccines? It was the modern pathway to a human vaccine.
Linfa explained how ferrets were used as a gain-of-function animal model. In just a few months, there will be 17M euthanized Danish mink, infected with SARS2, which Fauci said would not die in 2012.
US virologists followed Linfa’s lead
American scientists wanted to go where the action is, live bats, to learn more about “coronavirus docking and entry.” In 2013, Fauci and his virologists discussed the complexity of setting up a “high containment” live bat colony in his Rocky Mountain Lab (4:20:30). His virologists even debated how to infect American bats with a Middle East disease (3:31:45).
SARS2 does not infect Chinese bats but it does infect North American bats.
This bat was used as a ‘bat bomb’ by the US Military in WW2 and became the first (of many) bats to die in service to their country.
In early 2018, American virologists infected Chinese bat cells (in vitro) with a furin cleavage site, something also mysteriously found in SARS2. But the cutting edge research was in vivo, which is live bats under BSL3-4 conditions.
In late 2018, NIAID virologists procured live bats, donated from a local zoo just one hour north of NIAID. They used a bat sample collected by Shi in China to test “entry and infection” for bats housed in Montana, but the results failed. They concluded the in vivo bat experiment may need “intracellular proteases (e.g. a furin cleavage site), which have been shown to be important host restriction factors during coronavirus entry.”
In early 2020, SARS2 infects and transmits in the same NIAID bats, using the same ACE2 receptor, for “docking and entry” into humans. SARS2 has a “peculiar” furin cleavage site, which US researchers at UNC proposed inserting into live coronaviruses for experiments in live bats at the WIV.
The first step in a bat vaccine project is a bat infection test.
The same NIAID grant funded both the in vitro and in vivo Chinese bat studies. This is how Fauci initially funded bits and pieces of DARPA Defuse.
Humans and bats share furin and the same ACE2 receptor, which is why SARS2 infects so many mammalian organs (lungs, heart, blood vessels, kidneys, liver, and gastrointestinal tract). Linfa even used bats and cardiologists to study heart disease.
Mr Biodefense Salesman (& lab leak investigator!)
Biodefense salesman of the decade Peter Daszak from New York City’s EcoHealth was also in Singapore. Daszak was fresh off the business class plane ride from a German conference. He attended with fellow bat-loving colleague Vincent Munster. They discussed “global health challenges at the nexus of human, animal, and ecosystem health.” ‘One Health’ is the buzzword thrown around at all these conferences.
Daszak is part of the ‘field team’ (Munster’s description 3:50:00) and has been digging around Chinese bat caves for the past two decades. He was originally looking for Nipah but failed. Then he teamed up with Shi and Linfa and they found natural coronaviruses in Chinese bats starting in 2005. Most of these Chinese bat samples were sent to North Carolina or Montana labs.
Daszak brought nearly $65M in ‘field team’ funding from USAID Predict but wanted more. USAID Predict contentiously ended in September 2019 but was renewed in 2021. Basically, US Government virologists are trying to ‘predict’ the next natural disease spillover event from bats. Why? Why not! There was a $1B carrot.
Daszak noticed a decade earlier that Fauci’s NIAID spent “a huge amount of money that goes to diseases which don’t kill many people” so he started to get close to him (off camera deferring to FBI WMD special agent). He finally got Fauci to headline a D.C. cocktail event in 2016.
In 2019, Daszak also gave an infamous interview in Singapore but was apparently oblivious to what was brewing back in Wuhan. Daszak was the talker with time on his hands because he was the only team member with an incriminating Twitter account.
Global death to disease was dropping dramatically pre-Covid.
Asian deforestation is a myth, perpetuated by this group of virologists seeking public funding.
Fauci and company would blame SARS2 emergence on “human behavior.”
Fauci’s aerosol specialists from Holland
Linfa, Dani, and Shi presented their papers with fellow Dutch team member Emmie de Wit. She claimed Nipah is scarier than Ebola, but both diseases are so lethal they kill the host before they can spread, unlike SARS2. NIAID only listed avian influenzas and bat coronaviruses, from Asia as having pandemic potential.
Emmie’s Dutch husband and co-author Vincent Munster was also present in Singapore but he almost never presents. Most of his work is unpublished, cutting-edge, vaccine research. He is a DARPA researcher. He is Fauci’s aerosol specialist. He has a BSL4 with primates, bats, mink, Chinese camels, and 250,000 deer in his Montana biolab backyard. He does not even need a pubic record R01 grant for research, unlike everyone else in NIAID’s biodefense network.
"The Netherlands still has enough brains, but no longer has the infrastructure to be a real player in coronaviruses," noted Munster. He just wanted to go where the action is, in Montana.
After 9/11 Fauci outlined a “research agenda” for the billions of biodefense tax dollars that would flow from Congress to NIAID, which started a building spree of biolabs. The $66.5M Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) was the mothership built in rural Hamilton, Montana, where both Emmie and Vincent work in relative obscurity. They moved into NIAID’s growing biodefense network in 2009 and are “supported by the ($800M) Intramural Research Program of NIAID.” Fauci “has paid multiple visits” to RML and last visited in October 2019.
The winners are always more interesting than the losers
After the German and Singapore conferences, Munster, the batman flew back home to Montana. He was working as the technical lead on a “novel animal vaccine” for a $10M US Military project. Just two years earlier, Munster’s team beat Daszak’s team for the coveted DARPA PREEMPT project.
Munster at the German One Health conference with Daszak in October 2019.
Daszak of EcoHealth in 2018 proposed a transferable vaccine method that is “restricted to a single round of transmission.” It is deployed on the bat fur and spread via licking. This much “safer and more predictable transferable vaccine approach” (i.e. not contagious or airborne) was proposed by Daszak, Linfa, Shi, and Ralph Baric of UNC to DARPA in a bid called Defuse. Again, they lost because because DARPA said they “couldn’t afford it.”
The losing DARPA Defuse team would later ‘merge’ with the winning DARPA Preempt team in Fauci’s $82M CREID Network. Fauci’s NIAID budget is twice the size of DARPA.
In Febuary 2020, Daszak invited Munster to sign the Lancet letter that “strongly condemned conspiracy theories” of a lab leak. But Munster did not sign, just like Linfa and Ralph Baric of UNC, “otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”
A Montana State University (MSU) based team, using Munster’s method, was 25% cheaper: $10M versus $14M. Munster’s technical approach did not require Daszak’s expensive field equipment, medicine, or tracking for the deployment of an animal vaccine in remote locations.
This unclassified project was in the public domain, but it involved proprietary information, with a degree of “ambiguity” from reading the press releases. This vaccine was “intended to protect US military service members and the local communities where they operate” in Africa. But this “novel vaccine” was not for US troops, it was for African bats. Munster was “creating the world’s first prototype of a self-disseminating vaccine designed to induce a high level of (wildlife) herd immunity.”
Per a USTRK Freedom of Information request, RML has developed a “scalable vectored vaccine” to spread through bat populations “to prevent emergence and spillover” of potential pandemic viruses from bats to human populations.
“This vaccine tool would effectively protect people from spillover of (bat diseases) without the need for human vaccination or for inoculation of individual animals and with minimal health impact on wildlife hosts.”
RML virologists attended self-spreading vaccine conferences and studied live bats.
American deer mice (no relation to American deer) were housed in Fauci’s RML lab, served as a self-spreading vaccine model, and efficiently transmitted SARS2.
The African bat disease (Lassa) has killed 5,000 Africans with a 1% mortality rate, similar to the first SARS in 2003. This novel wildlife vaccine was not about saving local lives; it was a cool US Government-funded science fair experiment. You read that right, the US Government was experimenting with vaccinating African bats and rats with a contagious vaccine that spreads like a virus. It was all being developed in Fauci’s personal biodefense lab: RML.
Munster also imported pregnant Bangladesh bats into RML for a Nipah bat vaccine study, but oddly he was testing on Egyptian fruit bats. Even more oddly, those exact same fruit bats can be infected with SARS2, and it spreads bat-to-bat! But SARS2 does not even infect Chinese bats?
As Munster’s Canadian colleagues have noted “bat species produce aerosols while echolocating, which would potentially allow for the dissemination of viruses that replicate within the respiratory tract.” The US CDC has recently studied bat-to-bat transmission via shedding in experimentally infected Egyptian fruit bats (EFB) from the “CDC EFB breeding colony.”
Why does SARS2 transmit orally via shedding in superspreaders?
A German author from the 2020 paper, stated this Egyptian fruit bat species was often used as a proxy for (Chinese) horseshoe bats, which are much harder to keep in captivity. Egyptian fruit bats were easier to care for than insectivorous (Chinese) species bats and had better conservation status/fewer legal constraints. The same German author gave a presentation in Singapore about immunizing Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) so this crazy idea was on the virology agenda.
Munster is currently hiring postdocs for “transmission fieldwork in Africa” like most Western NIH-funded labs. Raina Plowright (the female version of Daszak) won a $4M extension to her DARPA project and moved on to Cornell from MSU. This cutting-edge vaccine research is the new frontier of virology and the path to professional success.
Did Fauci fund the losing team operating in Wuhan?
Raina Plowright was quick to understand the full gravity of…a mysterious viral pneumonia in Wuhan, China. Soon after, her MSU team pivoted to analyzing bat fecal samples, collected by her team in the months and years leading up to the pandemic, in search of clues about the virus’s origins. She works closely with the (Munster’s) Rocky Mountain Lab in (Montana), which has highly specialized equipment and protocols for handling dangerous pathogens.
American news recently profiled this virus hunting group on 60 Minutes while searching for “pathogen X” in Egyptian fruit bat caves. But they did not tell us who was funding the global expedition? It was Fauci’s new $82M CREID Network.
This $82 million grant was in the works years before Predict was eliminated (in September 2019), and it was created in response to the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak and the 2016 Zika epidemic, said Dr. Fauci, the N.I.A.I.D.’s director (in the summer of 2020).
“Yes, it’s like (USAID) Predict, but it wasn’t the cancellation of Predict that inspired it.”
The same scientists from the same US Universities using the same “novel animal vaccine,” worked together within the CREID Network. Leading up to 2020, the CREID network published papers with Shi and crawled around Asian bat caves, while Dani tested bat vaccines in Wuhan. In early 2020 the same CREID group covered up the lab leak origins.
In 2022, Fauci was asked if he funded DARPA Defuse but claimed: “We have never funded that grant.” The work proposed in ‘that’ coronavirus grant was molecularly possible to have created SARS2.
Most of us thought the $82M CREID 2020 project was to cover up a lab leak, but what if it created a 2019 lab leak? Bureaucracy moves very slowly so an August 2020 announce date started months, if not “years before” 2020, per a NYT interview of Fauci.
Fauci’s CREID Network lists Dani and Linfa’s Duke, Baric’s UNC, and Daszak’s EcoHealth. The “tight Emerging Infectious Disease” team in Wuhan was listed alongside the transmissible vaccine group of Munster’s RML and UC Davis. Shi’s WIV published (via UC Davis) a “Synergistic China–US” ecology paper with an “eerie timing of a publication” on February 5th, 2020. (The Dr Evans tweet was recently deleted but archived.)
Fauci probably deleted the WIV from CREID and added Scripps Institute and Tulane after their virologists told him SARS2 “looks engineered” on Jan 31, 2020.
Duke-NUS of Singapore is listed as a CREID subcontractor in the State Department FOIA.
Basically, Fauci’s $82M CREID Network (EcoHealth, WIV, Duke & UNC) equals funding the $14M Defuse grant (UC Davis & WIV, RML & WIV, Scripps & Tulane).
A camel vaccine leading to a human vaccine?
In 2014 MERS from Middle Eastern camels found its way to both the US and China. Fauci and Munster followed Linfa’s horse vaccine method and developed a camel vaccine for Middle East and Far East camels. Fauci explained that NIAID developed a human vaccine for almost every outbreak like MERS, but pharmaceutical companies did not have a viable market, so the concept was to vaccinate the camels to protect the people. In 2016 both Fauci and Munster gave a NIAID presentation on the development of animal vaccines.
Based on the spike protein, the NIAID camel vaccine was an example of a modern pathway to a human vaccine. In 2016 NIAID filed the infamous ‘070’ mRNA vaccine patent with Moderna. The patent was for the engineered spike protein, which made a good target for human and animal vaccines. The mRNA vaccine patent, now used for humans, lists a particular example of a “camel or a bat.” Located inside the SARS2 spike protein is a Moderna cancer patent, also filed in 2016.
In a 2017 TWiV podcast, Munster said his next project was to “start some bat coronavirus infections” with the new bat colony in the RML lab. During the RML-led kickoff meeting in 2018 on the DARPA-funded transmissible bat vaccine research, a big milestone was reached.
Work with the (US Universities on) technology transfer infrastructure and personnel, and with the CEPI program (a co-sponsor of the Singapore conference) to develop partnerships with vaccine manufacturers (2.5 years).
Develop an inter-institutional agreement to enable the transfer of our discoveries to industry for commercialization (3 years).
CEPI was basically the US Government, Jeremy Farrar’s Wellcome Trust (Fauci of the UK), and Bill Gates. All three were funding self-spreading vaccine research. All three were funding research in Wuhan. And all three have helped cover up the lab leak.
Linfa was a member of CEPI and they gave an interview while in Singapore. They did not discuss or publish this cutting-edge research in public. It was a “develop first explain later” approach, but all involved wanted a vaccine before the pandemic. A self-spreading vaccine was a ‘proactive’ countermeasure for this proactive group of ‘do-gooders’.
The rumors were spreading faster than Covid
By December 2019, the Wuhan pneumonia rumors were growing in the tight virology community. Emmie and Vincent’s PhD advisor in Holland, Ron Fouchier, claimed to know of “an outbreak of an unknown disease in Wuhan” by the “first week of December,” during a Dutch national holiday.
Emmie and Munster started their career a decade earlier in Holland under Fouchier, who is an airborne ferret specialist and the father of Gain of Function. Fauci was even caught secretly funding Fouchier's experiments in 2018. Fouchier later walked back the December statement, but no 6ft., 10in. tall Dutchman forgets Sinterklaas.
Their Dutch colleague and W.H.O. Wuhan lab leak investigator, Marion Koopman, later confirmed that “maybe one or two” WIV technicians got sick in October 2019, so this was a tight-knit, gossipy group. Also, by mid-December, many US professors knew of a Wuhan outbreak. Most of us would not learn of a city named Wuhan until late January.
RIP Dutch & American Mink/Deer Farms
Remember the ferrets that Fauci said would not die in 2012? The dead Danish ferrets were actually American mink called Neovison vison. They were found with bloody noses in Michigan (same species) but American mink are not found in China.
A decade earlier, Fouchier discussed the ferret model that Fauci funded and defended. This 2012 issue caused such an uproar (Engineered Doomsday) that Fouchier and Fauci had to revise and redact his manuscript to keep the gain of function methods secret. Fauci even discussed confidentiality agreements and export controls.
This method was even kept secret from other Western scientists. Ironically US biosecurity hawks in 2012 kept Fauci from publishing Fouchier’s ferret aerosol procedures. Both Munster and Emmie were on the original aerosol ferret Gain of Function paper. Emmie later claimed to leave the Netherlands for Montana before the H5N1 flu virus got airborne in July 2011 inside the Dutch lab. Emmie on TWiV said they aimed to “get as much virus in the upper respiratory tract as possible.”
The SARS2 “viral load is highest in the upper respiratory tract” and is transmitted via the “nasal cavity.”
They were studying R0 – the number of individuals who catch the virus for everyone who is infected. But can anyone breed ferrets in a lab and create an airborne pathogen? That’s a myth not grounded in tacit knowledge best summarized as “we can know more than we can tell.” Daszak, in 2012, discussed how journals only “partially published the sequence data” for controversial GoF work.
UNC deleted 2,000 words from their controversial 2015 paper and never published a genome sequence until May 2020, keeping their GoF method “obscure.”
After a decade in Montana, Vincent refined his aerosol transmission model to include a local (lab) species; North American white-tailed deer. Deer have been extensively studied for Group 2b coronaviruses (e.g. SARS). They make a great “large animal model” for “aerosolization” transmission studies (on chronic wasting disease).
In 2006, the nearby University of Montana researchers inserted a furin cleavage site into a bovine (deer) coronavirus in the exact same location (R667) as SARS2 of 2020! The furin cleavage site was a biological mechanism required for the self-dissemination of an animal vaccine. American deer were used by American scientists as a model for self-spreading vaccines.
Munster oddly missed the furin cleavage site in his SARS2 January 2020 paper.
Munster and Emmie inserted a furin cleavage site in their Fouchier postdoc work.
American deer are the only ‘wild’ SARS2 reservoir on planet Earth.
Why were traces of Nipah later found in Wuhan?
In a bit of foreshadowing, Emmie's December 9th Singapore presentation was about her Nipah countermeasures. Back in Wuhan, the initial January 2020 SARS2 sequences tested at the WIV were contaminated with Nipah. Daszak said he failed to find Nipah in China, so what was Nipah doing on the WIV BSL4 campus?
On January 5th, 2020, the WIV isolated the first SARS2 samples from a Wuhan hospital patient at the BSL4 south campus, called “cell culture room 3.” This newly opened BSL3 is next door to Dani’s BSL4.
In 2017 Shi mentioned infecting bats with Nipah, but that probably occurred in Australia’s BSL4, where Dani, Shi, and Linfa all met 15 years ago.
French virologists studying Nipah were also courting Shi in September 2019 and advertising bat immunology postdoc positions.
Nipah has a 75% mortality rate, so thankfully SARS2 won the “survival of the fittest approach” at the WIV BSL4 meltdown back in October 2019.
Oddly Emmie’s Nipah presentation notes are the only ones missing from the long conference proceedings. If her presentation were anything like the one a month earlier in Montana, she would have warned the next big outbreak would be a coronavirus.
Dani did not present in Singapore but later gave a 2022 presentation in Australia. “The last-and-only foreign scientist in Wuhan,” told Bloomberg News she was studying Ebola while in Wuhan, but she has zero out of 100+ publications on Ebola. Dani actually studied Nipah in the Wuhan BSL4 and had recently isolated a sample in the Australia BSL4. She planned on continuing Nipah work in Wuhan but then SARS2 got in the way.
Dani, the Asian bat immunologist, was studying live Asian bats. And Dani used Duke’s novel Next Generation Sequencing technology for detecting bat shedding of “Nipah virus and coronaviruses.” These are the biological tools for a live bat vaccine “efficacy” trial, measuring “viral shedding” while Dani was inside the Wuhan BSL4.
Munster was developing a Nipah bat vaccine. He used the same Egyptian fruit bat animal model that SARS2 both infects and transmits.
RML will develop and test a scalable vector vaccine for target henipaviruses (e.g. Nipah) in bats.
ChAd/VSV vaccine was used for bats and later tested in RML primates by Munster.
For SARS2, Munster used an LAV bat vaccine developed at UNC, but it was attenuated (weakened) for a bat’s tough immune system.
You gotta go where the action is
In 2016 a NIAID employee, Dr. Ping Chen based in Beijing, visited Shi in Wuhan. Her visit report back to Washington D.C. noted “close animal-human contact” which may have meant live bats inside the WIV.
Daszak at first denied live bats were kept at the WIV labs, but later deleted the tweet.
DRASTIC found a video of live bats, inside a WIV lab. The bats in the video are Myotis which are used for longevity studies. The focus of the WIV patents is on bat cages and bat breeding.
Dani later got upset about reporting of a ‘secret’ bat colony inside WIV, and claimed there are many labs that worked with live bats. Dani is probably referring to the BSL4 Egyptian fruit bat colony inside RML. “There are scientific meetings dedicated specifically to bat virus research and the last such meeting that I attended was in Colorado.”
That 2017 Colorado bat conference included Dani, Shi, and Vincent Munster. Linfa shared Old World bat cells with Munster’s New World bat lab in Montana, and both bat lovers appear to have a history. Munster would echo the idea that “vaccine efficacy in animals…may even enable proactive measures to reduce cross-species transmission of bat viruses to humans.”
After the US Military bid DARPA Defuse leaked it was obvious the WIV could keep “wild-caught” Chinese horseshoe bats (R. sinicus) alive inside the WIV. This particular bat species (R. sinicus) was the source of SARS1 and the focus of Shi’s bat sample collection, publicly funded by Fauci’s NIAID.
Fauci later claimed after the “big scare of SARS1 back in 2002-03” that “we had a modest collaboration with our Chinese colleagues” and “we did that through a subgrant via EcoHealth.” He claimed, “It would have almost been a dereliction of duty if we did not study this.”
You gotta go where the action is. You do not want to study bats in Fairfax County, Virginia to find out the animal-human interface that might lead to a jumping of species.
Fauci described the public record bat sample project (in vitro) at Shi’s BSL2, not the R&D live bat vaccine project (in vivo) at Dani’s remote BSL4. Dani was listed on NIAID’s renewed 2020 Wuhan project, but she was not listed on the 2014-19 Wuhan project. Her Asian bat immunology expertise would have dovetailed very nicely with NIAID’s growing Asian bat vaccine portfolio, all funded by Fauci’s new $82M CREID Network.
In the biggest ‘own goal’ in biological history, we know Shi cannot engineer SARS2 because of her public-record GoF experiments, funded by NIAID. Fauci’s NIAID is now ‘formally’ in the bat immunology business (in vivo) after a few years of ‘off the books’ R&D at ”my institute” called RML.
Was a transmissible bat vaccine being tested by NIAID in Wuhan?
Emmie’s colleague, and Daszak’s former NIAID Program Officer in China, Dr. Eun-Chung Park, gave a presentation on “The Progress and Challenges in Vaccine Development.” She ended it with a question for the Singapore audience:
Should a bat vaccine be considered to control Nipah transmission? Bats constitute the reservoir, not only of Nipah but also other viruses causing disease in humans. Preventing viral shedding from bats could prevent human disease.
Fauci’s NIAID planted the seed in Singapore about vaccinating the animal reservoir: bats. This was both the beginning and the end of a terrible idea to test a bat vaccine on live bats in Wuhan, which was probably already spreading to humans at this Singapore conference.
The final session at this early December conference was “dedicated to collaboration and synergy” with Shi. She had an “annual call around April for external organizations wanting access to the facility to test their own samples or use samples from the in-house repositories.”
This was really the origins story of SARS2. A bunch of western virologists showed off their latest and greatest animal vaccines. The word “vaccine” was used 41 times in their Singapore conference report. They thanked Shi for sharing bat samples and testing them. Shi herself did not show interest or ability in creating vaccines.
Daszak later deleted the Singapore December 2019 tweets, but he actually deleted very few tweets, so why was this incriminating?
Shi in her presentation offered an open house invite to the Wuhan BSL4 describing a ‘international scientific collaboration.’ This was obviously a reference to Fauci’s virologists at UNC and RML, collaborating with Duke bat immunologists like Linfa and Dani, all funded by Fauci’s international CREID network.
Shi, in a few weeks, would be embroiled in one of the biggest stories of our time. In her own deleted WeChat post on January 2020, Shi said, “I promise with my life that the virus has nothing to do with (my BSL2) lab”.
“(The West has) lost the moral high ground as far as I’m concerned,” Shi recently said. And if politics overpowers science, “then there will be no basis for any cooperation.”
Disclaimer: again, this is hypothetical, as most names used so far are blameless for something potentially funded and created by others, which are discussed in part 4.