Inside the live bat research of COVID-19
How a Senator's letter to the NIH shed light on the origins
In early 2021, the lab leak debate focused almost entirely on Wuhan, while ignoring what was happening inside America’s own bat labs in Atlanta, Colorado, and Montana.
At that time, no DARPA Defuse documents had yet been leaked. Instead, we relied on lab leak researchers like Billy Bostickson to dig up evidence about Chinese scientists and Wuhan labs. He started a Twitter thread on Wuhan Institute of Virology patents for bat cages. It led to Atlanta, Georgia, and the U.S. CDC bat lab.
In 2007, the CDC investigated a Marburg outbreak among four miners in Uganda, one of whom died.
Ironically, Marburg from Africa was named after a German town, where it leaked from a lab. The CDC set up a mobile lab near the Uganda bat caves to collect Egyptian fruit bats and Marburg samples.
The Python and Kitaka Cave in Uganda was a biological gold mine. CDC scientists captured and tagged hundreds of Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus). But field work is expensive and difficult, so the idea was to bring the research subjects home.
The CDC created a breeding colony to produce disease-free Egyptian fruit bats. These were captive-born, first-generation American lab bats raised in Atlanta, making them easier to handle under BSL4 conditions. Researchers even hand-fed them bananas and watermelons!
These Egyptian fruit bats, often called EFB, Rousettus, or ERB, were born and bred in America. As one CDC paper put it:
The captive-born bats used in this study originated from the ERB breeding colony at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, Atlanta, GA, USA). This MARV-free colony was established from wild-caught ERBs imported from Uganda.
The CDC virologists deliberately infected these Egyptian fruit bats with Marburg virus to test whether they were truly the reservoir host. The experiment confirmed their hypothesis. A “reservoir host” means the animal can transmit the virus without becoming sick itself.
This established a model: US scientists deliberately infected captive-bred Egyptian fruit bats with lethal viruses to study reservoir status, and later applied to SARS2.
In 2021, Major Joseph Murphy leaked the DARPA Defuse proposal. He called COVID-19 a “bat vaccine.” Critics dismissed Murphy because SARS2 does not infect Chinese horseshoe bats. But US labs were not primarily working with Chinese bats. They were working with Egyptian fruit bats, as referenced in DARPA Defuse.
Because Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus) are easy to feed and breed, they became the workhorse for American research. Linfa Wang was envious of the CDC colony and wanted to start his own bat colony.
Why Wuhan?
Linfa detailed the difficulties of feeding tiny Chinese bats in a BSL4. Linfa called it the “puppet show,” and it’s why he gave up trying to keep a Chinese horseshoe bat colony alive in an Australian BSL4.
In 2005, Linfa had infected Chinese bats with SARS1 in Australia’s BSL4. It was unpublished work, but Danielle Anderson was at the same lab from 2006-08.
In 2009, Shi Zhengli’s Wuhan research team captured a few Chinese horseshoe bats from the wild. Their worm feeding cages could keep the fragile bats alive in captivity for a few weeks.
A decade later, Dani Anderson was doing something similar in the Wuhan BSL4.
Post-pandemic results
In 2020, a German lab published perplexing data:
Our data suggest that intranasal infection of (Egyptian fruit bats) could reflect reservoir host status and therefore represent a useful model, although this species is certainly not the original reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 because these bats are not present in China, the epicentre of the pandemic.
No one understood the relevance of Egyptian fruit bats as a reservoir host for SARS2. Unlike Chinese horseshoe bats, they can be infected and transmit SARS2 without showing disease, just like they do with Marburg. That is the virologist’s definition of a reservoir host.
If this species can carry and transmit SARS2 without disease, then experiments pre-2020 become central to understanding how the virus might have been generated, adapted, or tested.
That is why the CDC’s Egyptian fruit bat colony in Atlanta suddenly matters to the lab leak debate. I drafted an open letter accusing the CDC bat lab of sitting on unpublished data. Instead, I sent a private email. In their reply, the CDC effectively acknowledged that their Egyptian fruit bats function as a non-natural reservoir host for SARS2.
This same CDC bat colony was later referenced in a recent letter to NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, which called for a pause on a new NIH bat-breeding facility.
The story does not end in Atlanta. There is only one other BSL4 Egyptian fruit bat colony in the United States: Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) in Montana. The details are difficult to footnote because much of this work sits outside formal public records, but we can piece it together from several emails and interviews.
In 2019, RML did not have sufficient space to breed the bats on-site, so the breeding was outsourced to Colorado State University (CSU). This week, two members of Congress sent a letter to the NIH director, demanding a halt to Fauci’s $3 million CSU bat facilities.
The odd arrangement of CSU raising the bats for RML led to our smoking gun email. Because the bats were housed at CSU rather than RML, the experiment left a paper trail, including an email that later surfaced through FOIA.
Out of curiosity, Tony Schountz of CSU 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, which are characteristic of a reservoir host. For context, infecting humanized 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.
In plain terms: the bats behaved like a classic reservoir host for SARS2. But it was unclear which bats Schountz was testing. The subject line of the April 2020 email says Artibeus or Jamaican fruit bats, but SARS2 does not infect those bats.
Schountz was breeding Munster’s Egyptian fruit bats in a 10 x 10 ft CSU room. Basically, Munster had an off-the-books breeding lab at CSU, until his $100 million facility was finished in 2025 (Michael Letko was Munster’s DARPA postdoc from 2017-20).
In 2018, DARPA even paid Schountz $1,000 per bat shipment to Montana. In September 2019, Munster gave DARPA a bat vaccine presentation, using Roussettus, or Egyptian fruit bats.
In other words, this April 2020 Colorado test was on the exact same bats that Munster used to develop SARS2 in 2019. Two months earlier, 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.”
In 2013, Munster and Ralph Baric discussed using their New World lab bats to test Old World virus.
Munster and Baric started using Egyptian fruit bats in 2016. By 2020, the CDC and CSU confirmed that work continued on creating SARS2. In 2021, they started plans for a Chinese horseshoe bat breeding facility.
By 2023, Munster acknowledged that his Egyptian fruit bat colony remained at CSU but would eventually move to RML, once a new $100 million NIH Chinese bat facility was completed.
In effect, NIH is now building the infrastructure to conduct in the United States the kind of live bat research that previously required collaboration with China. That is why Congress has struggled to stop the new facility.
Baric and bats
Baric was once asked about SARS2 spillback into American bats, but he paused and dodged the question.
UNC student newspaper on lost USRTK records
https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/university-covid-starting-lawsuit-files-update-20260113
Baric did not respond to The Daily Tar Heel’s request for comment by the time of publication.
In a statement to The DTH, UNC Media Relations wrote that the University has already produced more than 130,000 pages of records in response to USRTK’s requests.
“We are gratified that the NC Court of Appeals has affirmed the trial court’s ruling confirming the University’s adherence to the law,” they wrote.
Ruskin of USRTK added that because professors employed at public universities are considered state employees, taxpayers have a right to know what their money may be funding.
Beth Soja, a senior staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said that the question about how the public’s tax dollars are funding UNC is less applicable since Baric is not an elected official.