Fauci funded DARPA Defuse for $14.1M
SARS2 genome was also in 2019 NIAID documents
The last post was months ago, but one question remained: Did Peter Daszak of EcoHealth resubmit his $14.2 million DARPA Defuse bid? Daszak dodged the question in his congressional interview, but like Fauci said, Daszak never resubmitted “that” March 2018 proposal. That proposal included plans to test novel coronaviruses with furin cleavage sites on live bats in Wuhan.
Yes, Daszak did resubmit Defuse, starting in October 2018, to NIAID, which eventually awarded EcoHealth $14.1 million. Daszak divided the large DARPA bid across three NIAID grants. They even referenced the SARS-CoV-2 genome in their 2019 NIAID documents.
The evidence came together while I was finishing a book. The book predates this Substack, which started in 2022. This blog was me giving up on the book. But the story came alive with the recent rounds of congressional interviews and brilliant USRTK FOIAs. There is even a “smoking gun” email using a smoke stick, but like anything in life, it needs context.
The book is now available on Amazon—get it while supplies last. It covers a contentious subject and is thoroughly fact-checked with a scientific survey of 100+ virologists, veterinarians, doctors, etc. Please let me know of any typos, factual errors, or corrections needed; these will be updated in future Kindle editions. The paperback, however, remains the ideal format for displaying the evidence in its best layout.
The book includes tables comparing the 2018 DARPA Defuse bid with 2019 NIAID grants, showing how Technical Area 1 (TA1) in Defuse corresponds to NIAID’s R01, and TA2 is U01. Chapter-ending tables highlight Daszak’s skill in repurposing the rejected DARPA proposal into three successful NIAID grants.
The book’s timeline allows you to trace events as they unfolded. Remember Trump’s April 2020 press conference when he canceled the 2015 NIAID grant to Wuhan? That grant was quietly renewed in July 2019 during his administration—a $3.2 million investment by Fauci in Daszak’s DARPA Defuse project.
The odd part of the 2019 R01 grant renewal was the inclusion of Ralph Baric of UNC—a high-dollar scientist attached to a relatively low-dollar subgrant to Wuhan. It was so odd it came up in Baric’s congressional testimony:
Committee: Did you have any conversations with Dr. Daszak regarding the termination?
Baric: I hadn't received any of the money to do anything on that grant yet when the termination notice hit. So he called and told me that the grant had been terminated and that the EcoHealth lawyers were looking into it. So I knew about it. But in terms of how that would impact my program, that was a very small component on that grant.
Committee: When did you get added to the grant?
Baric: After the first round. So it would have been the second round, I don’t know exactly. I can't remember.
Committee: So going into year 6?
Baric: It would have been going in -- if year 6 was around 2019 or 2020, that's when I would have been a part of it. My role was to study a couple of the viruses that the Wuhan Institute of Virology found that they were willing to share with me. So I always viewed that as not number one or number two on the list, maybe number five or number six on the list.
The “shared” bat sample was RaTG13 since it fits Baric’s 25% profile (discussed below). When the Covid committee asked Baric what was in his freezer, he sidestepped the question but added, “I usually look for sequences, and if I find something interesting, then I’ll pursue it.”
Baric also pursued Daszak’s second round of Defuse funding. It came from the $7.5 million NIAID grant called CREID in 2019. In this unredacted FOIA, you can see Daszak and Baric resubmitted the “text from DARPA” into Fauci’s CREID project. Search “DARPA” to read them work their magic during June 2019.
In 2018-19, EcoHealth split the DARPA Defuse grant into two pieces: TA1 for field sampling and TA2 for lab experimentation. The TA1 field team (left) became NIAID’s R01 grant (Daszak, Baric, Shi, Ben Hu). The TA2 lab team (right) became NIAID’s U01 grant (Baric, Dani Anderson, Linfa Wang).
Daszak’s DARPA Defuse virology bid (TA2) scored a 32 and was personally approved by Fauci in November 2019. Fauci’s NIAID just called it EIDRC or CREID. For reference, Kristian Andersen and Bob Garry scored a better/lower 27, so Daszak’s 32 would “put us right on the edge of being funded,” but Fauci “will be making this decision.”
In Daszak’s June 2019 email, everyone included was part of the original DARPA Defuse team—everyone except Shi. Interestingly, Baric referenced the abandoned Mojiang mineshaft where Shi collected RaTG13 back in 2013. The notable paper by Latinne et al., which includes RaTG13, was already “in prep” by June 2019.
Daszak testified:
We had all available SARS coronavirus-related, bat coronavirus sequences. Prior to the outbreak, I had requested from WIV that they send us all their data, so we publish a (Latinne et al) paper together, summarizing the whole of the work that they do and we do. They included, in the data they sent us, sequences that weren’t collected with our US funding. So we had access to all their information of any relevance to COVID. That was before the outbreak.
It came up again:
Daszak: WIV also shared data work they had done themselves without our involvement. So, I think that was very important. If they had any of the sequences at the time, surely they would have been in that data dump.
Committee: And that data dump is what was published in the Latinne paper?
Daszak: Correct, yes.
Committee: So, that only went to 2015.
RaTG13 was collected with R01AI110964 funding in 2013. Back then, it was called 4991, but Shi renamed it RaTG13 and partially uploaded the sequence to the US GenBank database in 2018. Daszak testified that because of Fauci’s decade-old R01 grant, we already had the WIV sequences from a November 2018 “data dump.”
How China and Laos samples evolved into SARS2
Baric testified that this risky research responded to the White House Biodefense Strategy because “they wanted to know down to the nucleotide level, down to the nucleotide level how the viruses jumped.” SARS was the first virus listed on the initial page of the 2018 strategy.
Baric claimed to have forgotten about the 2018 DARPA Defuse bid (above), but he referenced furin cleavage site research in their CREID U01 bid (below). Due to space constraints, it was cut from the final draft submitted in June 2019.
In 2018-19, Baric’s exclusive human airway epithelial (HAE) cells were included in the renewed R01 grant, which is needed to grow the SARS2 furin cleavage site in vitro. According to a recent UNC FOIA, Baric experimented with RaTG13, Laos BANAL-52, and SARS2 sequences in February 2019.
Daszak’s third round of Defuse funding was post-pandemic since it came with this $3.4 million Laos grant. This funding rounded out the six Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam), plus China, as outlined in the original DARPA Defuse proposal:
To extend the geographic scope of predictive models, we will include data from >1800 viral detections (CoVs and others) from >10,000 individual bat samples in 6 Asian countries (NIAID and USAID PREDICT funded).
It’s an old salesman trick to split a large proposal across multiple grants and regions to stay within individual spending caps. The SARS2 genome referenced in DARPA Defuse appeared in these three NIAID grants.
SARS-CoV-2 = HKU3r-CoVs
What was called “HKU3-Smix” in Baric’s patent and DARPA Defuse, then renamed “HKU3r-CoVs” in NIAID’s documents, is now called SARS-CoV-2. If you search HKU3r-CoVs, you will find it listed in only these three NIAID grants totaling $14.1 million. Notice the “~25% divergent” language since SARS2 (spike) is 22% different from SARS1, and the entire SARS2 genome is 20% different (similar to HKU3-1).
Several professional researchers have noted a SARS2 connection to HKU3. It’s a group 2b bat sample similar to RaTG13, but collected by Hong Kong University. One researcher found an exact match in Baric’s patent; another connected HKU3 and the NIAID R01 grant. Someone even identified similar restriction sites between Baric’s 2018 HKU3 patent and the 2019 SARS2 genome.
Baric used the HKU3 name as a placeholder for 2018 patents and 2019 NIAID grants, which left a paper trail back to his UNC lab. He then omitted the SARS2 furin cleavage site in communications with the US military and congressional staff. UNC recently won a USRTK lawsuit based on their “proprietary” definition of Baric’s 2019 documents, which they refuse to release.
According to the 2019 CREID grant, Baric’s former DARPA Defuse teammate, Dani Anderson, was testing his “HKU3r-CoVs” genome in Wuhan’s BSL4 lab before leaving in November 2019. As her Duke supervisor, Linfa, explained three years ago, “We each had a part” in creating this mess.
Linfa resigned on January 10, 2020, the same day the SARS2 genome was published, but everyone else moved quickly to cover this up. That day, Vincent Munster from RML emailed Baric, saying, “Perfect! Right between your favorite viruses :-).”
Baric’s favorite viruses were SHC014 and HKU3, 10-25% different from SARS1. This language was referenced ten times in NIAID’s three grants funding DARPA Defuse.
Linfa and Dani referenced Baric’s “consensus” sequence in 2019. Notice that RaTG13 and BANAL-52 are 25% different from SARS1, and less than 5% different from SARS2, just as Baric predicted in 2018.
That consensus sequence, then named HKU3r-CoVs, was approximately 20% different from SARS1, the same as SARS2. The “r” meant related bat virus, not a human virus, so this TA1/R01 work at UNC was exempt from gain-of-function regulation.
Or, as Fauci truthfully testified, “We have not funded gain-of-function on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Because SARS2 was developed on US soil, in American lab animals, and shipped to Wuhan for testing.
Linfa denied via email that any US lab sent him the “HKU3r” sample, but who knows what the prototype was called after Munster aerosolized the SARS2 agent. And the smoking gun email proved he did in Chapters 2, 8, and 28. Virologists call it the “cold chain,” and you can trace its movement around the globe throughout the book:
Preface (Based on recent testimony)
Chapter 1: Identifying Patient 0 (revisiting the BSL4 but with updated info)
Chapter 2: Why Did the Batman Fly into Wuhan? (referenced smoking gun email)
Chapter 3: East vs. West Propaganda (for humanized mice enthusiasts)
Chapter 4: East vs. West Biowarfare (for bioweapon enthusiasts)
Chapter 5: Meet the Creators of Covid (only need to follow six people)
Chapter 6: The First Superspreader Event of 2019 (Nipah bat conference)
Chapter 7: An American Hero (Major Murphy and breakdown of Defuse bid)
Chapter 8: An American-created Bat Vaccine (and general Q&A)
Chapter 9: Technical Q&A (from 2 years of online comments)
Chapter 10: When the Batshit Hit the Fan (based on mobile phone report)
Chapter 11: The Batman Resigns (first 10 chapters show Linfa’s importance)
Chapter 12: Of Bats and Men (the biological proof via figure 8 in Defuse)
Chapter 13: Meet the Wuhan Whistleblower (in wrestling it’s called a “face turn”)
Chapter 14: He Said, She Said (Baric vs Shi’s reverse genetic system)
Chapter 15: Believing WIV Engineered SARS2 & Published RaTG13 is Foolish
Chapter 16: Am I Supposed to Call the FBI? (Baric’s “heel turn”)
Chapter 17: The Perfect Brit for the American Job (tracing Daszak’s 2018-19 moves)
Chapter 18: From DARPA to NIAID (breaks down TA1 = R01 & TA2 = U01)
Chapter 19: The Bethesda Boys (Fauci’s unauthorized biography)
Chapter 20: October Couriers and Burner Phones (after Defuse leaked)
Chapter 21: American Secrets in Laos (2017 DoD bat samples)
Chapter 22: The Chimera from America (based on USGS FOIA)
Chapter 23: Of Mice and Men (first chapter I wrote in 2022 so skip around)
Chapter 24: A ‘Consensus’ Sequence of Events (based on patent)
Chapter 25: An Open Letter to Ralph Baric (controversial)
Chapter 26: The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 (RML)
Chapter 27: America’s Patient Zero (WA1 isolate & biological proof of lab leak)
Chapter 28: The Mammalian Suspects (smoking gun email)
Chapter 29: An Open Letter to Fauci (RML has unpublished data)
Chapter 30: Was SARS2 a Planned Mistake or an Honest Academic Crime? (Both)
Postscript (Fauci’s congressional hearing from June 2024 was a dud, but I make it interesting)
A survey of 100 scientists (one self-spreading vaccine scientist called me, who couldn’t believe they tried it but removed his name from the list)
You might want to contact Cmdr. Charles Rixey https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/ who was the guy who published the DEFUSE proposal 'leak' or 'find' to review this work. The more eyes on this story the better we can vet it.
This is some of the most important journalistic and criminal investigative work being done on the planet right now and Jim gets high praise from me at least.
I've finished your excellent book. I've been following the origins debate off and on for a couple of years now and keeping an eye on Emily Kopp's work, but I was nowhere near having any complete narrative in my head. I believe you have solved it. Chapeau!
I trust you sent a copy to Ridley & Chan and RFK Jr, as you have gone beyond their books in this area. With RFK Jr, you may be able to get it in front of people who can change things in the hope that this will never happen again.