Fauci's lab in Montana was part of DARPA Defuse

Weekly lab leaker

Fauci’s world tour

Fauci gave a presentation to the Royal Society in London last week. A slide reads, “Enhance biosecurity in animal husbandry.” The Royal Society published a Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) paper in 2019 discussing coronaviruses and “proteases” (aka furin cleavage sites). The Vincent Munster RML paper on “onward transmission” was partially funded by DARPA.

Fauci traveled to Ireland to collect an award.

Fauci blames SARS2 on “clearing and degradation of tropical and subtropical forests.” However, NASA published Asian satellite images in 2019 that showed the contrary.

RML was a vendor in an early DARPA Defuse doc

US Senator Rand Paul brought attention to the DARPA PREEMPT Proposers Day. He claimed insider knowledge regarding Munster and Montana, so here it is. On January 30, 2018, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth submitted a one-page slide outlining his initial DARPA Defuse proposal. Daszak listed “NIH Rocky Mountain Lab” as a partner.

via @mentju4

Vincent Munster’s name appears on the above slide during Daszak’s presentation. RML is an internal NIH lab that works full-time for NIAID and DARPA. RML appears next to the usual suspects: UNC, WIV, and Duke.

Fauci’s testified he never saw “that” DARPA Defuse grant. Munster is Fauci’s aerosol specialist based in Montana, where Fauci last visited in October 2019. It’s unclear why Munster’s name was removed from the final EcoHealth bid in March 2018. EcoHealth replaced Munster with the more expensive (but safe) USGS spray technology. Daszak lost the DARPA bid to high cost, but the Defuse team was back together under Fauci’s $82M CREID umbrella in 2019.

via @mentju4

Munster partnered with two of the five winning DARPA teams using his self-spreading vaccine technology. USRTK released Munster’s DARPA work a few years ago. Longtime EcoHealth collaborator Ian Lipkin of Columbia was also listed in January 2018 but removed by March 2018.

Dr Steven Quay is suspicious of Montana

On January 22, 2020, Dr. Vincent Munster’s laboratory at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory (RML) published a pre-print manuscript containing a set of highly complex experiments using synthetic spike proteins from SARS-CoV-2. This is, to my knowledge, the first publication of synthetic biology work being done using the genome sequence of the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2. An analysis of the timeline and workflow from this first manuscript, starting from the publicly stated date when the first genome was available, concludes that the experiments could not have been done that quickly. The alternative hypothesis is that RML had the sequences before their publication from China. The implications of this conclusion are immense.

In 2020, Kristian Andersen said, “It’s unbelievably fast, almost too fast to imagine.” TWiV was also suspicious of Munster’s January 2020 publication speed. Munster also missed the SARS2 furin cleavage site in January 2020. But the bigger story is that RML had a copy of many Wuhan sequences in 2019 since they collaborated on DARPA Defuse type work. RML even had RaTG15 (cousin of RaTG13). Below is Dr Michael Letko, who was Munster’s postdoc from 2016-20.

Letko is now at the University of Washington but still collaborating with Shi Zhengli of the WIV. They worked on interchanging receptor binding domains in several coronaviruses. In Feb 2020, Wired wrote a feature on Letko’s 2018-20 work. Letko’s pre-pandemic research in Montana reads much like the 2018 DARPA Defuse documents. Baric wrote, “We will synthesize novel combinations of mutations to determine the…jump potential of future and unknown recombinants. Small deletions at specific sites in the SARS-CoV RBD alter the risk of human infection. We will analyze the functional consequences of these RBD deletions.”

Daszak fights back

Richard Ebright and Rand Paul made a big deal out of Daszak’s recently released emails. Daszak mentioned over "700 coronavirus sequences" were available in Wuhan. But Daszak reposted the 700 coronavirus sequence paper from June 2020, so there is nothing to hide. Once you understand the WIV publishing RaTG13, nothing else matters.

Eddie Holmes from Australia on American deer

“Of all SARS-CoV-2 infections in animals, that of white-tailed deer in the United States is the most notable because of the high prevalence and the number of human-to-deer transmissions, with cases reported in more than 25 US states.”

Eddie listed virus lab leak scenarios: “Engineered at the University of North Carolina and shipped to the WIV.” Eddie wrote the Proximal Origins paper but asked, “Why did Shi publish RaTG13 that would only help point the finger at them? It makes no sense.”

Interesting Linfa Wang quote

“The Furin cleavage site gave me the strongest hint that the progenitor virus of SARS-CoV-2 is not in bats”, Prof. Linfa Wang told Philipp Markolin, PhD “It’s in pangolins, raccoon dogs, civets, badgers, or whatever, maybe another small mammal we don’t know.”

In 2022, Linfa was in Utah to give a joint keynote address with Fauci. Linfa helped organize the conference and took note of his audience. He reminded everyone of the “widespread SARS‐CoV‐2 infection in white‐tailed deer throughout the United States.”

AP on lab leak

Toxic: How the search for the origins of COVID-19 turned politically poisonous

Reader Q&A

Your Sars2 origins narrative claims Baric's lab sent the chimeric virus on filter paper to Rocky Mountain Lab for passage in a susceptible animal model. Is there any evidence of such a transfer? Have any FOIA/records requests been made of Baric's lab for copies of transmittal records or materials-transfer agreements (MTA)?

Good question, but the short answer is no. No email or evidence, and I've directly asked Baric when he sent Munster the SARS2-like genome. SARS2 last days on filter paper. USRTK is suing UNC for its 2018-19 records. However, the supply chain was part of their previous research. In 2018, Baric provided Munster with the WIV1 genome or "resources." NIAID released a 2023 statement defending Rocky Mountain Lab: "The virus used in these experiments was not shipped from China. Rather, it was generated using common laboratory techniques, based on genetic information publicly shared by Chinese scientists."

Baric discussed his MTAs with Wuhan regarding hACE2 mice. The MTAs appear in the NIAID documents. My favorite example is Shi sharing the MERS-422 bat sample with Baric in 2018. Baric published it five years later. Bat samples were shipped everywhere, and NIAID budgeted $5,000 for Wuhan. Another example is that “samples taken from the bats at the study locations will be sent to Rocky Mountain Labs, the National Institutes of Health facility in Hamilton, Montana, that is specially equipped to study emerging pathogens.”

Reader comment

Robin Whittle

has entered the self-spreading vaccine rabbit hole, which makes the origins of SARS-CoV-2 so interesting. Lab leaks occur daily, so what leaked?

The plan was to use such a virus in automated spray stations to spray bats as they emerged from or entered their caves. This was to be self-spreading and supposedly reduce the risk that such bat populations would host the evolution of current coronaviruses to become something that threatens humans. Never mind the difficulty of maintaining, 24 hours a day, battery-operated spray stations at bat caves worldwide, often in tropical areas, with refrigeration for the vaccine fluid until it is sprayed. Never mind the bats getting wise to this and moving elsewhere or avoiding the spray. Never mind the chance that this artificial coronavirus would evolve into a form that threatens humans.

Robin outlined the expensive USGS spray proposed in the $14M DARPA Defuse bid. But Munster’s technology was much cheaper ($8M) than sprays; it involved one injection into one bat, and the vaccine spread like a contagious virus. The WHO has provided the self-spreading vaccine example and acronym for what are known as circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses (cVDPVs).

Best pandemic quote?

Drew Holden

“Don’t panic unless you’re paid to panic.”

$1.2B for SARS-3?

“Global health security is national security,” said US CDC director Mandy Cohen. Pandemic prevention is like US foreign aid: a domestic jobs program for PhDs.

Interesting German timing

Germany’s Angela Merkel visited a German-founded hospital in Wuhan in September 2019. It was 5 kilometers from the Wuhan wet market.

US health secretary says COVID lab leak theory is still ‘speculation’

The U.S. will “never” know the true origin of COVID-19 “unless China opens up some more,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said Thursday.

More reader Q&A

How does the virus transfer occur? When Baric shipped samples to Munster or when Munster shipped to WIV, how would that have happened? On filter paper?

https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/lab-personnel/specimen-collection/pack-transport.html

Your research suggests that the virus was created in Baric's lab and shipped to RML so that it could be transmitted through the air. Why would anyone want to do that? It is just to protect humans from future spillover diseases?

Munster aerosolized Baric's genome to turn it into a contagious animal vaccine.

http://web.evolbio.mpg.de/HEVIMAs/

It's what he does and how he wins DARPA projects.

https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/colorado-state-university-documents-on-bat-pathogen-research/

If RML passaged Baric's virus through the susceptible animals housed at that lab, and the virus became adapted to those lab animals, how is it that the virus was seen to be pre-adapted to human cells? According to Nikolai Petrovsky, the virus had higher affinity to human ACE2 than to the receptors of any other animal investigated in his study. Petrovsky showed that the virus did not exhibit extensive adaptions to humans (mutations) early in the outbreak, as would have been expected if it originated in an animal. So did serial passage of the virus through the animals at RML enable the virus to infect the RML animals through aerosol and humans? How does that work when Baric has stated that passage of coronaviruses in animals makes the virus more adapted to the animal (mice for example) and less adapted to humans.

The Petrovsky paper was a computer calculation. Ideally, we need 'onward transmission' in vivo outside of a lab. Covid wasn’t preadapted for humans; it was preadapted for bats. Unfortunately, bats have ACE2 and furin similar to us. Baric’s comment about animals means mice, which he doesn’t consider a mammalian model for transmission, unlike Munster’s deer, deer mice, mink, bats, and hamsters.

Fauci’s risk worth taking

Virologist

Simon Wain-Hobson

discussed Fauci’s Washington Post gain-of-function piece from 2011: A risk worth taking.