An interview with physicist Steve
He asked the big questions & we discussed the smoking gun email
Prof Steve Hsu Steve Hsu wanted a blunt conversation about the evidence:
Virologist Angela Rasmussen politely engaged with the Egyptian fruit bat evidence, but bacteriologist Richard Ebright called me “shit-for-brains.” Civilian opinions of the interview have been positive, but most don’t understand they are 65,000,000-year-old lab bats.
A couple of years ago, Steve interviewed Jeff Sachs, who controversially claimed that the Defuse research being turned down by DARPA was meaningless, so someone else could have funded it.
It turns out that someone was Tony Fauci. The irony is that if Fauci had funded Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak’s Defuse proposal as originally submitted to DARPA, there likely wouldn’t have been a pandemic.
However, Fauci made a critical change: He added Munster to their 2019 CREID team, replacing Baric's safer, transferrable technology with Munster’s riskier approach, which focused on transmissible technology.
Will Jones summarized the difference:
The key difference between Baric’s DEFUSE and Munster’s PREEMPT proposal – aside from Munster’s proposal coming in around $4m cheaper at $10m – is that rather than relying on spraying bat caves with a non-transmissible virus-vaccine, Munster’s plan involved making the virus-vaccine transmit between the bats via aerosols. This made it a self-spreading vaccine, able (in theory) to reach all the bats without humans having to go and find all their caves and spray them. The risks of such a plan should have been obvious. Indeed, Baric himself, who went awfully quiet after his DEFUSE project leaked in mid-2021, resurfaced in mid-2023 to say that such work involving engineering transmissible virus-vaccines was “too edgy” for him.
Starting around Feb 2019, Baric’s “edgy” transmission work was now in Rocky Mountain Lab. In other words, COVID-19 was being developed in Fauci’s biodefense lab in 2018-19.
The joint Baric/Munster Egyptian fruit bat paper was published in late 2018. At the same time, Baric also published an LAV bat vaccine paper referencing the Mojiang “mineshaft.” Therefore, after Baric lost the DARPA Defuse project, he teamed up with the winning DARPA team in Montana and Colorado to develop a transmissible bat vaccine.
https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/colorado-state-university-documents-on-bat-pathogen-research/
Baric and Munster concluded that SARS1 (i.e., WIV1) didn’t infect Egyptian fruit bats, so they wanted “intracellular proteases” or a furin cleavage site to get the “virus vaccine” inside mammalian bat cells.
Fox News summary of that 2018 Montana paper. And yes, Fauci (i.e., his aerosol specialist Munster) bought Egyptian fruit bats from a Washington, D.C., area zoo and bred them in Colorado for testing in Montana.
Justin Goodman of the White Coat Waste project referenced the new $125M bat lab in Montana. This was Fauci’s lesson learned from Covid: breed the Chinese horseshoe bats on US soil (i.e., Colorado) so NIAID doesn’t have to test them on Chinese soil.
Munster and Baric developed a Chinese bat vaccine in Egyptian fruit bats. They wrote in late 2018, “Therefore, it would be interesting to perform an experimental inoculation study using Chinese horseshoe bats, from which WIV1-CoV was originally isolated, to investigate if more efficient virus replication and shedding can be observed in these animals.”
The US CDC had blocked the importation of the Chinese “horseshoe” bat, so they had to test the bat vaccine in Wuhan. Daszak even admitted Dani Anderson had access to live Chinese horseshoe bats in her BSL4 lab.
Out of curiosity, Tony Schountz of Colorado State University tested SARS2 (i.e., WA1 ancestral strain) on the Egyptian fruit bat colony he kept for Munster in Montana.
Schountz was “quite nervous” about the results. The bats tested PCR positive for 3 weeks, with viral loads reaching 10,000 infectious particles. Yet, the bats exhibited no symptoms—characteristic of a reservoir host. For context, infecting hACE2 mice or raccoon dogs requires 100,000 infectious particles, and no transmission was observed in those cages. Remarkably, SARS2 was transmitted to 3 negative control bats housed in a separate cage positioned above the inoculated bats.
It was unclear which bats Schountz was testing. The subject line of the April 2020 email says Artibeus or Jamaican fruit bats. But Schountz received IBC approval (pages 393, 392 & 353) two months earlier to test Rousettus or Munster’s Egyptian fruit bats. DARPA even paid Schountz $1,000 yearly to ship those bats to Montana.
In other words, this April 2020 Colorado test was on the exact same bats that Munster used to develop SARS2 in 2019. Munster tried to gaslight Schountz from running the test on his Egyptian fruit bat colony, which was kept at CSU for their DARPA Preempt project. Munster even referenced the joint 2018 Baric paper and emailed Schountz, “We couldn’t get Rousettus [Egyptian fruit bats] infected with WIV1 which also use ACE2.”
Baric and Munster used the furin cleavage site to overcome the ACE2 barrier, but they missed it in their early pandemic papers. Baric was obsessed with an FCS from 2015-19, but even TWIV thought it was weird Munster also missed it.
Munster’s DARPA teammate, Raina Plowright, thought Tony Schountz's “experiment was terrifying to throw a bunch of animals and a bunch of viruses in a room and see what happens.”
One of the other lab animals Schountz tested was American deer mice, which were used for transmissible vaccine research and housed at both RML and CSU.
Will Jones also had a good summary of Munster’s other transmission models, which used a similar ACE2 receptor as Chinese horseshoe bats (i.e., K31 hotspot):
Perhaps the most compelling reason to suspect an American origin, though, is the telling fact that SARS-CoV-2 transmits efficiently in only five known mammals, and four of those five – American deer mice, Syrian hamsters, American mink and Egyptian fruit bats – are commonly found in U.S. labs, including Anthony Fauci’s high security Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) in Montana. (The fifth animal, American white-tailed deer, is prevalent across the United States.) On the other hand, SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t infect lab animals common in Chinese labs or present in the WIV, such as Chinese horseshoe bats.
Here’s chapter and verse on that:
“North American deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) are susceptible and can transmit SARS-CoV-2 to naïve conspecifics, indicating [the species’] potential to serve as a wildlife reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 in North America.” Deer mice are experimented on at RML.
“Syrian hamsters are highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and one of several animal hosts that have been naturally infected by this virus. Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from pet Syrian hamsters to humans has also been reported. Currently, Syrian hamsters are the only rodent model in which airborne transmission can easily be tested.” Syrian hamsters are experimented on at RML.
“American mink (Neovison vison) have gained notoriety due to their unfortunate susceptibility to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2)… Whole‐genome sequencing of the virus isolated from mink on farms in the Netherlands has provided evidence of both human‐to‐mink and mink‐to‐human transmission of the virus.” American mink are experimented on at RML.
“Fruit bats showed characteristics of a reservoir host.” Egyptian fruit bats are experimented on at RML.
But not Chinese bats: “Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS-CoV-2] did not replicate efficiently in 13 [of 13] bat cell lines… SARS-CoV but not SARS-CoV-2 can replicate efficiently in R. sinicus [Chinese horseshoe bat] kidney cells.”
Sublinks are provided to various scientific papers because Will fact-checked me:
Munster used a small army of American lab animals as a surrogate for Chinese bats. And those same lab animals (and Colorado colleagues) ratted him out as the creator of Covid.
What a great interview! Prof Hsu is careful and thorough.
Thanks so much for your work on this. Your thesis is by far the most compelling.
Brilliant stuff !
Note there are only 5 animals that can efficiently contract SARS CoV 2 , and all are present in the Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana, USA.
Some coincidence. ...