Did Daszak resubmit DARPA Defuse?

Weekly lab leaker

Fauci used Gmail

The Covid committee released a batch of Fauci’s assistant emails. Peter Daszak wrote in April 2021

Please feel free to share any docs that I've sent to you, with Tony. Hopefully, you can do that in a way that avoids FOIA, and if not possible, just show him stuff on screen share on Zoom.

Fauci’s assistant, David Morens replied

PS, I forgot to say there is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private Gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.

Morens described Fauci as overconfident in April 2021 email:

I just spent 40 minutes on Zoom with Tony. He said repeatedly in a low key jocular way, no one could mess with him or NIAID since we haven’t done anything wrong. He repeated a lot of macho man comments about how there is always a guy with an AR-15 right outside his door (true, and sometimes two other armed Secret Service guys), and everywhere he goes outside the office, there are at least two bodyguards.

Supposedly Fauci got Rochelle Walensky her job as CDC director.

(Fauci) was asking my opinion about what is wrong with the CDC, and in the process said, out of the blue, that it was HE who got her job as director of CDC by lobbying for her to Ron Klein (White House chief of staff). Well, she does wear a skirt…I poured a little cold water on her but she was undeterred in thinking she is the cat’s pajamas.

There is a “FOIA lady” at NIAID who helped Morens delete work emails. The Chief Scientific Officer of NE Biolabs (where UNC ordered the BsaI and BsmBI restriction sites for the SARS2 genome) joked that Daszak should join the CIA. Daszak claimed Jeff Sachs tried to “bully me” off the Lancet Origins committee, and Daszak called Fauci “The Fautch.” Senator Rand Paul calls NIAID a mob and wants to offer Morens immunity to get to Fauci.

KGA replies to the Baric shocker

“I had no idea. Neither did my colleagues and we're still all surprised to learn about that,” replied Kristian Andersen after learning Ralph Baric of UNC was secretly listening to his Feb 1st, 2020 teleconference.

Reader Robin Whittle has generated a readable version of Baric’s testimony. It went from 200 pages of scanned double-spaced headache to a clean 100 pages. It is the most amazing lab leak document so far. Why? It’s a glimpse into the man who wrote DARPA Defuse.

The grant was designed so that the discovery group (i.e. Shi & Daszak) would look for coronaviruses with the furin cleavage site. We would first study the pseudotypes (fake viruses). The second thing we would do is move it into the chimeras (combo of 2+ viruses) to see the effect on applicants. The third thing we would probably do is build virulent (live) viruses (in UNC) and study pathogenesis, and then we would knock out the furin cleavage site (or insert).

Baric proudly proclaimed he doesn’t collect bat samples. He harvested bat sequences uploaded by contractors like Shi in Wuhan, such as SHC014, WIV1, and RaTG13 (see Daszak’s testimony below). Baric modified those genomes (e.g., RBD, furin cleavage sites) to create countermeasures (e.g., remdesivir, vaccines, live bat treatments). Baric did not “forget” about DARPA Defuse; it was his lifetime work. Neither did Daszak because it was worth $14 million.

Daszak’s written testimony

The main event occurs at the end of the 268-page Daszak interview. The 9-hour interview was in late 2023. Like Baric, Daszak was evasive on the big question:

Committee: You said DARPA denied it. Have you ever submitted this proposal to any other funding agencies?

Daszak: Little was said about DARPA declining to fund this, including people who said they declined it because of biosecurity concerns. Absolutely not true. We had an interview with DARPA specifically so they could. inform us why it was rejected. I have the contemporaneous notes right here; never once did biosafety come up. It was too much money. They didn't have enough money. It was too ambitious, which is standard grant -- agency language for too ambitious. So just a little miff around that..I forgot the question, though.

Committee: Did you ever submit this proposal to any other funding agency?

Daszak: No. However, DARPA did come back to us when the pandemic began. And, I mean, with all rational reason, they were very early in the pandemic, and they said, we are interested in funding parts of your proposal that didn't get funded because now we have a coronavirus 20 percent different emerging in China from bats, just like your proposal was designed to help prevent. So we talked to them, and they suggested different avenues we could work with on this and different sections that could be done. And in the end, I didn't follow up. It was too much work, and it didn't involve us. It was more the lab work, all the (bat?) colony work to be done in a different country.

Daszak dodged the question because he recycled his Defuse bid for Fauci’s CREID in 2019. Even the “batified mice” were recycled.

Committee: Did you ever submit it to any private organizations for funding?

Daszak: No, no.

Committee: To your knowledge, did UNC or the WIV ever conduct any aspect of the proposal?

Daszak: You will have to ask UNC and the WIV. I don't know. I doubt it.

In 2022, Daszak said, “I don’t know what Ralph Baric has done. But I doubt that he would go ahead and do that (furin cleavage site) work without the funding.” Logic tells us that a genome 20% different from SARS emerged in the same town where Baric proposed to test his 20% novel genome, so someone funded Defuse. Daszak testified he knew about the 20% different SARS2 genome by Dec 30, 2019.

Well, early in the pandemic, Dr. Baric and I communicated over the phone and by email about what all this meant for our work.

Was the furin cleavage site work supposed to happen at UNC or the WIV?

Daszak: My understanding is that that work was going to be done at UNC. I think the proposal says it would be done in pseudotype, which is not even a live virus.

Daszak described Defuse:

It was a proposal written to DARPA, which had a new call for proposals to try and understand what emergencies could emerge, viruses in particular, and whether there are any ways to disrupt the emergence of new—to preempt it, which is why they call it PREEMPT. So we applied to work in China. We checked with them first so that would be okay. They said yes. We applied to work on coronaviruses. We believed there was a high chance of a novel coronavirus from bats emerging and causing a pandemic.

We believed that as part of those predictions, we should look for viruses 10 to 20 percent different from SARS-CoV-1 because those might escape vaccines and therapeutics. In one part of the proposal, we even suggested that proteolytic cleavage sites, like the Furin cleavage site, might become part of the virus that emerges and becomes able to infect people.

All of those predictions were correct. It caused the next pandemic. I think it was a simple proposal to DARPA to work on that. Unfortunately, it got rejected, becoming a failed grant in the filing system, and the work was never done.

When did Daszak first learn of Covid?

Daszak: So we managed to get hold of folks in China and ask what they knew what are these rumors. And we were told on the day before New Year's Eve, to my recollection, that there was a new coronavirus 20% different from SARS, which was strangely accurate information.

Now, of course, there were only -- we heard there were eight cases and four were positive. So, at that time, four out of eight could be a spurious finding; it could be a cat coronavirus or something that infected them. So you don't want to make that public. So I waited. I tried to find out more information. I spoke with ProMED, which is a place where you would release that information publicly, and they'd heard similar information. They released a message. I put out a message on social media.

Committee: Why was the 20% difference kind of oddly accurate?

Daszak: Well, because that's what SARS-CoV-2 is, it's 20% different to SARS. So what our contacts in China were telling us unofficially was correct.

Remember, in 2018, Baric proposed testing a novel genome that was 20% different from SARS. He would use this novel (HKU3 + BtCoV 279) genome for in vivo tests in Wuhan bats. The 10-25% number was in Daszak’s new NIAID R01 in 2019, which included Baric. He was asked about this:

Committee: So you did have an interest at 20%?

Daszak: We started later. I mean, the renewal grant came through in 2019. So at that point, going forward in the renewal work, our goal was different to the original goal. In the original grant for 5 years, we were focused on SARS, and where did SARS come from, and what other virus is out there. But we had a new hypothesis, and our hypothesis was, well, wait a minute, there were drugs and vaccines and monoclonals that seem to work against SARS -- and we now know, definitely not a great job, but it worked at the time -- we have monoclonals, you have molnupiravir.

So that would've been the focus of work going forward, but the outbreak happened. It was exactly as we predicted, unfortunately, the virus with 20% difference. So—and it, unfortunately—well, fortunately, some of the drugs worked to some extent, but unfortunately, it spread.

On Jan 6, 2020, Daszak told NIAID program officer Erik Stemmy:

I told him what I knew. Of course, the reason it's off the record is because we don't know if it's true. You know, these are rumors and hearsay about a 20% different coronavirus that's bat-related. So I told him what I knew. I pointed out that I already put it out on Twitter. And ProMED had a story on it, too.

In the last week of January 2020, Daszak was notified by Sara Woodson he had won CREID. She was the Team Lead and Program Officer, at the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID).

Commitee: The next line down, Sara Woodson at NIH, NIAID, Do you recall what that call was about?

Daszak: I'm not sure, but I would assume it's related to the proposal we had for the EID, for the CREID Network grant that we were then funded.

Daszak was not on the Feb 1, 2020, teleconference but on the Feb 3rd NASEM call.

I'd heard that there was a problem, because I took part in a follow-up call run by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. And in that call, I think there was a mention that Dr. Holmes and Dr. Andersen had contacted Dr. Farrar, who then contacted Dr. Fauci, who then spoke to the White House, and the Deputy Secretary for Pandemic Preparedness set up this call. So there was a link back to an earlier call. I didn't know the details.

Jeremy Farrar helped Daszak move their lab leak conspiracy letter to the Lancet

Committee: Did Dr. Farrar facilitate the publication in The Lancet?

Daszak: I think he suggested Lancet, but, you know, I'd already thought Lancet would be a good place. I think he offered to speak with the editor of the Lancet, me, and the WHO, which is normal. He's a very senior scientist, and he's -- I know -- I knew the editor of The Lancet. I'd written a -- I'd edited a section for their journal a few years earlier. But he was -- obviously knew him a lot better, and -- yeah, so I think he spoke to the editor of Lancet, who then agreed to look at it to see if it was good enough, which he did, and in fairly short order, published it.

But Baric didn’t want to be on it: No need for you to sign the ‘Statement’ Ralph!!

I know Ralph Baric didn't want to be on it. He was very hesitant. He has a personality that's risk-averse on these things, and probably, it was a good move. Linfa Wang, who was from China, who lived through the cultural revolution, had a terrible time, didn't want to be involved. So I tried to persuade people who were willing to. But, yeah, I was hesitant at one point when Linfa spoke to me and said, this is going to cause political problems for you.

Any Daszak and Fauci meetings?

Committee: Have you ever, in any conversation, ever spoken with Dr. Fauci about the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

Daszak: Yes. When I returned from the World Health Organization work in China, I gave a PowerPoint presentation to NIAID about the results of that work. It would have been around March or April 2021. I think Dr. Clifford Lane was on that Zoom call. I think it was just the three of us.

Actually, I remember on the in-person Zoom call Fauci didn't ask many questions, which I thought was interesting. And I think he had his own experience with Dr. Lane, who'd been to China. And I think that a lot of what I said about the difficulties of getting hold of evidence, information, and the diplomatic, scientific difficulties of working in China rang true to him. So I think those were the only comments he made.

Daszak basically admitted that Dani had live bats in the BSL4:

Committee: This is a little bit different from the virus issue -- but is your belief that there are no live bat colonies at the WIV?

Daszak: Yeah. That's a complicated and convoluted story that's been taken out of context. It was in response to a journalist who published in a magazine called The Independent and made a comment that EcoHealth's work involves capturing bats and taking them back to WIV. So I wrote a public statement saying we do not do that work. That work does not happen. The WIV doesn't have live bats. And I meant in the context of with our funding.

Actually, the reporter changed the story online, which I thought was fair. Now, later on I got a chance to ask people at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and also I spoke with a person called Danielle Anderson, who was the last person to work in the BSL-4 lab, and she told me as part of our Lancet COVID Commission work that, yes, they did have a plan to have live bats and they were trying to get a colony set up, but it wasn't working.

So, yeah, I mean I was wrong. But you make mistakes; you don't know the full facts. But certainly, our work didn't involve live bats. That was factually correct.

EcoHealth suspended?

The (Republican) Covid Committee said EcoHealth will “face an immediate, government-wide suspension of taxpayer funds — including a hold on all active grants.” They also individually debarred Daszak. The (Democrat) Covid Committee said, “EcoHealth did not cause the pandemic but did engage in questionable conduct.” Debarment needs to be voted on, and most of EcoHealth’s grants are with DoD, so this probably doesn’t affect them.

Fauci renewed their NIAID grants in 2022 and claimed EcoHealth would “sue us and win in a microsecond.” Fauci also knows he funded Daszak’s DARPA Defuse bid. Daszak is guilty of sloppy paperwork. That’s it. He’s a salesman, not a virologist. He’s so naive he sings like a canary. He didn’t even understand Baric’s virology in Defuse. But he does connect the main suspects: Baric, Munster, Fauci, Linfa, Dani.

GoF in Wuhan?

The current head of NIH, Lawrence Tabak, testified last week. He admitted NIAID funded GoF in Wuhan, but it was harmless because it involved mice.

Tabak participated in the Feb 1st, 2020 teleconference because he recognized the O-linked glycans near the odd furin cleavage site, which Baric proposed using in DARPA Defuse.

Baric’s brilliant but dry humor from a 2014 NPR interview showed in Daszak’s 2023 exchange with the Congressional Committee. So, is Baric making SARS more dangerous? "If you're a mouse, the answer is probably yes, or at least I was trying to," said Baric.

Committee: So there's an extent to which it feels a little bit like not a fair fight. In other words, it seems like, of course, SHC014-MA15 was more dangerous to the mice, but is there a limit to what that

Daszak: No, it's mouse-adapted. It doesn't mean it's lethal to mice. It means it's adapted for transmission in mice.

Committee: Well, it is lethal to mice, right? My understanding is, when they got to round 15, all the mice died?

Daszak: Eventually, yeah.

The committee was trying to get Daszak (and Fauci) for previously funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan. But Daszak (and NIAID) used Baric’s definition of gain-of-function to police themselves:

Committee: So that 1 log increase standard, we'll just call that sort of the excessive growth policy for shorthand, that came from Ralph Baric?

Daszak: Yeah.

Committee: And that was based on your discussions with him where he said NIAID had accepted this standard?

Daszak: I think it was -- it was something he had written in previous responses to NIH that they had accepted, yes.

Committee: So, dealing with this issue of NIH's information and its gain of function - did you have any further conversations, or did anybody from your staff have any further conversations with Dr. Baric as to how to implement the 1 log growth policy?

Daszak: Not to my recollection, no. Not with Dr. Baric.

Did Shi share RaTG13 with Daszak & Baric in 2019?

Baric called himself a sequence hunter during his testimony, and Daszak added:

First of all, the work that EcoHealth Alliance did in China was—mainly focused on genetic sequences, not on live viruses. I think for SARS-related viruses over the 20-year period they isolated something like three or four SARS-related coronaviruses. So we have hundreds of genetic sequences from the work we funded.

They also included sequences from the work they've done. And I know that for a fact because what was then named later RaTG13, the (4991) RdRp sequence, the short fragment of that sequence was in our database that we were using to write that paper. So they were giving us information from work that we didn't even fund.

Committee: And then how do they get from sequenced in their lab over to your database?

Daszak: Email.

Will Jones latest

The Smoking Gun in America: COVID-19 Virus Transmits in American Lab Animals But Not Chinese Lab Animals

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.”

And the smokiest gun of all: the fact that the virus transmits readily in a range of American lab animals but not in Chinese laboratory bats.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/05/16/the-smoking-gun-in-america-covid-19-virus-transmits-in-american-lab-animals-but-not-chinese-lab-animals/

$4.5M to find something other than deer?

Motivated by growing evidence that the pandemic virus is entrenched in North America’s deer and and others aim to collect and analyze more than 24,000 samples from 58 wildlife species over the next 2 years…It’s really critical to distinguish between dead-end hosts and amplifying hosts…Adding to the mystery, no one knows why the virus transmits so well between deer, which, unlike humans, don’t gather in restaurants and movie theaters…Strangely, Bowman says, there hasn’t been a single report of wild deer with SARS‐CoV‑2 outside North America.

https://www.science.org/content/article/which-wild-animals-carry-covid-19-virus-ambitious-us-project-aims-find-out

Reader Q&A

What is the deer link to the Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana? Nothing online seems to show they experimented on them or kept them?

RML never explicitly declared deer, but a recent FOIA showed "smaller livestock such as pigs, goats, and sheep." Dailymail had a good picture of the BSL4 livestock cages. RML was studying CWD, aka mad cow disease, for NA wt deer. This paper by Munster's DARPA colleague, Scott Nuismer, mentioned deer as a self-spreading vaccine model for TB. The big ag facility in Iowa raised deer in captivity, which makes them easier to handle. That facility ran the SARS2 transmission test, which, ironically, Munster edited! Deer are even mentioned in a 2003 NIAID biodefense agenda.

Lab leak debate

Susan Weiss, Baric’s coronavirus colleague at UPenn, downplays the DARPA Defuse proposal. Surprisingly, so does pro-lab leak scientist Jesse Bloom, whose dad is the director of Rocky Mountain Lab.

Retract Proximal Origin paper

Four professors have signed a letter wanting a retraction of the Jeremy Farrar-edited paper. Baric was the primary ghostwriter on that paper. He also edited another natural origin paper that few talk about. It was written by Susan Weiss: No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2.

Young Daszak

A drunken student stole a statue’s head by zoology student Peter Daszak, who broke off the head of a statue of the Madonna at Our Lady’s Primary School Bangor and took it home after a drinking session. Daszak kept it in his flat along with road signs, shop and office signs, and a road works flashing beacon. His collection was found after police had followed a trail of blood from a broken window in a building at the University College of North Wales. But that was only the police's first visit to Daszak’s flat. On a second visit, they went into a shed, and there they found a TV set, hi-fi, and other items, all of which had been stolen. Daszak also had a newspaper cutting on the wall of his flat about a headless statue in Norwich. He told the police it reminded him of one of his friends. The court also heard that Daszak had painted the lips on the head of the Madonna. He thought this made it look funny. Daszak’s mother told the court that he had had an impressive academic record at school but had gotten into trouble because of drinking.

h/t @SomeBitchIIKnow

Lab leakers spin

Yuri Deigin revisited an old theory on SARS2 and cats, but SARS2 doesn’t infect cats. He tripled down on his lab leak narrative, which Baric said was nonsense because the Chinese couldn’t copy his engineering methods.

Although we published the approaches for how to build molecular clones of coronaviruses, we never had anyone from Dr. Shi's lab or any of the WIV come to our lab and train. We never taught them. In fact, if you look at their cloning technology, they use baculoviruses. They may assemble some of the full-length molecule using some of the enzymes that we have, but they implant it directly into an insect virus to maintain it as a baculovirus, which was a technology developed in Europe, not my technology.

Wuhan’s technology is extremely different from that of UNC. It involves ligating 6 cDNA fragments and in vitro transcribing and electroplating. It is the difference between a Ferrari and a used Yugo. Baric even tried to hide his Ferrari when he recovered the SARS2 genome in early 2020. So Baric rejected the wet market but entertained a lab leak from Shi’s BSL2. When pressed he believes in a convoluted theory about a rural Chinese animal meeting an immunocompromised person who traveled to Wuhan.

Wuhan West in Colorado

“Nipah is very interesting in the sense that to study it here in Colorado, they are developing a bat colony,” Dr. Nickels said. “We don’t have that bat in the U.S. We’re bringing the bats that harbor Nipah into the U.S. to infect them with Nipah here. Why would you support that if you’re in Colorado?”

https://thehighwire.com/news/investigation-reveals-dangerous-bat-studies-at-csu/

Fauci’s London presentation

The Royal Society nominated Fauci to a fellowship. Fauci said he’s been vaccinated six times but infected twice. He referenced Eddie Holmes et al. regarding the Covid coverup.