Is SARS-COV-2 of Dutch origin?
Excerpts from a book review
A Dutch medical editor has written a great book review, highlighting the Erasmus University connection. Read the full review here, with an excerpt in English provided below:
https://deanderekrant.nl/is-sars-cov-2-van-nederlandse-makelij/
Virologist Vincent Munster, trained at Erasmus MC with Marion Koopmans and Ron Fouchier, helped cobble together the Covid virus, American researcher claims in explosive new book.
Where did the SARS-CoV-2 virus come from? Given the unimaginable damage of the corona policy, an important question, you would think. But you hear little about it in the Netherlands. Virologist Marion Koopmans recently stated in the House of Representatives that she did not know of any example of viruses that escaped from a lab. This while experts have long since established that SARS-CoV-2 most likely came from a lab. It was not so strange that Koopmans played dumb. In a new, explosive book, American researcher Jim Haslam shows that Dutch technology may have played a key role in creating the virus. He considers Dutch virologist Vincent Munster the scientific genius who made the virus super-transmissible — using techniques he learned in Koopmans' lab at the Erasmus MC. Our medical editor, Toine de Graaf, explains it in this newspaper.
American engineer/researcher Jim Haslam attributes a leading role in the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to Vincent Munster, a former Erasmus virologist who obtained his PhD under Ab Osterhaus. Munster is said to have made the virus airborne in an American lab using the 'serial passage' technique, a specialty of the Viroscience department of the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam.
Haslam, who recently published an in-depth book on the issue, said Munster and his colleagues had good intentions: they wanted to create a self-spreading vaccine for bats to protect US troops in Asia from new diseases. But he blames them for continuing to cover up the true nature of the COVID-19 disaster. He reportedly asked Munster for a response three times, to no avail.
In November 2023, I emailed Munster five questions about his joint 2018 paper with Ralph Baric of UNC:
At the end of the paper, you (Munster) clearly state: "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." So where and when was this work performed?
Why does SARS2 infect and transmit in the same Egyptian fruit bats?
With reference #12, why do you need a furin cleavage site for "intracellular proteases" in bat cells?
Please provide a 6th animal to the list that SARS2 (i.e. WA1) efficiently transmits: American deer, American deer mice, American mink, Egyptian fruit bats, and Syrian hamsters.
NIAID said the Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) work was in a BSL4, but the referenced paper clearly says, “Experiments with infectious WIV1-CoV under BSL3 conditions.”
The WIV1 genome (similar to SARS1) was heavily referenced in DARPA Defuse and was used to infect live bats.
No answer from Munster, so in July 2024, I asked the WA1 question from the back of the book and dropped a hint that the US CDC was talking to me:
Dr. Munster,
As part of a published survey, please provide a biological explanation for why American mink, deer mice, deer, and lab bats (i.e., Egyptian fruit bats) are reservoir hosts for WA1, which is the best-known ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2.
The US CDC confirmed to me their Egyptian fruit bat colony is a non-natural reservoir host for WA1. So please confirm (or deny) RML has unpublished SARS2 infection studies using deer, deer mice, and Egyptian fruit bats?
References:
Sharun et al., “SARS-CoV-2 in Animals: Potential for Unknown Reservoir Hosts and Public Health Implications,” May 2021.
Fagre et al., “SARS-CoV-2 Infection, Neuropathogenesis and Transmission Among Deer Mice: Implications for Spillback to New World Rodents,” August 2020.
Cool et al., “Infection and Transmission of Ancestral SARS-CoV-2 and Its Alpha Variant in Pregnant White-Tailed Deer,” August 2021.
Schlottau et al., “SARS-CoV-2 in Fruit Bats, Ferrets, Pigs, and Chickens: An Experimental Transmission Study,” September 2020.
van Doremalen et al., "SARS-Like Coronavirus WIV1-CoV Does Not Replicate in Egyptian Fruit Bats," November 2018.
Varrelman et al., “Transmissible Vaccines in Heterogeneous Populations: Implications for Vaccine Design,” February 2019.
Schreiner, et al., “When to Vaccinate a Fluctuating Wildlife Population: Is Timing Everything?” November 2019.
No answer from Munster, so my follow-up email was sent in October 2024:
Vinnie, just following up on this? Marjan Van Der Woude (his thesis advisor at UPenn) and Marion Koopmans (Erasmus) tried but failed to answer the WA1 question.
And please confirm (or deny) that Tony Schountz of Colorado State University performed a successful SARS2 challenge study on your EFB colony in April 2020?
This was the “smoking gun” April 2020 email from a recent USRTK FOIA. Schountz kept Munster’s Egyptian fruit bat (EFB) colony in Colorado, and DARPA paid him to ship bats to Montana.
Schountz naively tested Munster’s EFB colony using the WA1 isolate. Even the negative control bats in a separate cage were infected by aerosol transmission. A 21-day positive PCR test without symptoms indicates a reservoir host. In other words, Covid was “serial passaged” in this species of bats before emerging in Wuhan.
Munster tried to gaslight Schountz from running the EFB test by referencing his joint 2018 paper with Baric! These bats were even referenced in Baric’s DARPA Defuse:
Back to the extra spice book review and the corona pope Fauci:
Independent researcher Jim Haslam’s new book — Covid-19: Mystery Solved — published in late 2024 sheds a different light on the matter. Yes, Haslam also concludes that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan lab. But according to him, it was originally cobbled together in the US. What makes his book extra spicy is that one of the handful of virologists responsible for the virus is from the Netherlands. He is Vincent Munster, who received his PhD in 2006 under the supervision of another well-known virologist, Ab Osterhaus, and has been working at the Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) in Hamilton, Montana since 2009. This lab is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), where the American ‘corona pope’ Anthony Fauci held sway for years…
Haslam and other researchers suspect that the furin cleavage site was cobbled together by the American coronavirus specialist Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC). This unique item, which had never before been found in this type of coronavirus, is precisely described in a project proposal, called Defuse, in which Baric was involved.
The Defuse project proposal, which many experts say reads like a detailed recipe for SARS-CoV-2, was submitted to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) in 2018 by virologist Peter Daszak, director of the Ecohealth Alliance. The research group was blacklisted by the U.S. government late last year for various violations, including a lack of transparency. The other intended partners in Defuse, besides Baric’s lab, were the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Duke-Nus lab — a joint venture between Duke University and the National University of Singapore — and the Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana.
Book reviewer Toine de Graaf understands that Covid’s origins consist of two elements: the genome (in vitro) and aerosolization (in vivo).
Toine continues on the geopolitical element, which foreign press have an easier time understanding:
The official goal of Defuse would have been to preventively contribute to the protection of the (approximately 100,000) American military personnel in Asia by anticipating the emergence among Asian bats of a possible new coronavirus of the type SARS-CoV-1 (2003), but then more contagious and even more deadly. By genetically modifying a later variant of SARS-CoV-1 in the lab and providing it with, among other things, a furin cleavage site, they wanted to develop a vaccine for Asian bats. If they develop immunity as a result, this could indirectly protect military personnel against infection with a new viral pathogen via a bat.
The formation of the furin cleavage site was described in the Defuse proposal and has been known since the summer of 2021 thanks to a whistleblower in the US Navy, Major Joseph Murphy. In a letter to the US Department of Defense, he described SARS-COV-2 as an “American-made recombinant bat vaccine”.
Murphy’s full letter can be read in Chapter 7 or the
post. Toine continues on what I called a bio-bomb in Chapters 1 and 29:Haslam suspects that Munster made SARS-CoV-2 airborne at the Rocky Mountain Lab. This is a specialty of Rotterdam virologists, in particular Ron Fouchier, deputy director of the Viroscience lab, who was co-supervisor of Munster when he was still working at Erasmus MC. The lab product or vaccine virus was then allegedly shipped to Wuhan for testing with Chinese horseshoe bats. That is where things went wrong with the 'bio-bomb' manufactured by Baric and Munster.
Munster’s postdoc, Michael Letko, gave a recent presentation on his 2018-20 RML research, which mirrors DARPA Defuse.
Letko said he sequenced 199 spike sequences, whereas Defuse noted more than 180.
Letko mentioned pseudotyping SARS-like Receptor Binding Domains (RBDs) for Chinese bat ACE2, just like Defuse. Unfortunately, human ACE2 and Chinese bat ACE2 are “similar.”
Letko also co-published pre-pandemic research with Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (e.g., RaTG15). Like Baric, Munster and Letko also missed the furin cleavage site in their early pandemic paper.
Toine continues the book review:
Although no one has ever denied that SARS-COV-2 has a furin cleavage site, among other features as described in the Defuse research proposal, there is one problem: Defuse was never implemented, according to Daszak. It was rejected by DARPA. Haslam, however, has an explanation. He states that Daszak cut the original research proposal (14.2 million dollars) into three pieces (under the name CREID, 14.1 million) and that it was indeed initiated, with money from Fauci's NIAID. Adjustments were made, however. For example, the original idea of spraying the entrances of bat caves with a non-transmissible vaccine was abandoned. Instead, the bat vaccine would be transmitted between the bats via aerosols. Such an airborne vaccine was feasible thanks to the special expertise, acquired in Rotterdam, of 'aerosol specialist' Munster. Haslam therefore concludes that Covid-19 “has more to do with Erasmus University than with the University of North Carolina”.
In Chapter 30, I blame Erasmus because Baric’s humanized mice were safe. SARS2 doesn't infect UNC mice. Because in 2014, Baric said,
"The one thing that I would feel most concerned about doing is to give [SARS or MERS] that one missing trait, their means of easily transmitting between humans." Baric says that kind of experiment is not happening in his lab. He's not trying to change the way SARS or MERS gets transmitted. In fact, he doesn't know of any lab trying to do that.
There was always one lab, and it was Erasmus in the Netherlands with Fouchier and Munster aerosolizing agents using ferrets. Notice Fouchier can’t tell you exactly how they did it because it was always a secret. Fauci echoed the same in their 2012 GoF conference:
Fouchier famously said no “lone wolf” could do it. But Munster was his longtime protégé.
Toine liked Chapter 29:
Open Letter to Fauci
Haslam's book contains an open letter from the author in the back, addressed to Fauci. The first paragraph contains this sentence: "Your institute at Rocky Mountain Lab has made SARS-CoV-2 airborne and has unpublished data." This sentence will undoubtedly send shivers down the spine of Vincent Munster and his colleagues at Erasmus MC. They may soon be held partly responsible for one of the greatest catastrophes that has ever struck humanity.
Toine tried to reach Munster and Erasmus but remained silent:
We sent Vincent Munster questions by email, but did not receive a response. We also approached the press department of the Erasmus MC with the question whether the Viroscience department was familiar with Haslam's book and what their view is on his hypothesis. We wrote, among other things: "Munster is said to have made SARS-CoV-2, which according to Haslam was intended as a self-spreading bat vaccine, airborne with a technique (serial passage) that he mastered at Erasmus under the mentorship of Prof. Fouchier." We promised to include any response in the newspaper. A spokesperson emailed the next morning: "Thanks for the offer, we will not accept it."
One consolation: we are not the only ones who were turned down. Independent researcher Cees van den Bos appealed to the Open Government Act (Woo) last November and requested Erasmus MC to provide the communication between the Viroscience department and Peter Daszak (Ecohealth Alliance) and the authors of the 'Proximal origin' study. After much hesitation, his request was answered earlier this month with a stack of black-painted pages.
Munster’s CV finally showed up in a recent FOIA, reiterating his obsession with vaccinating bats using aerosol transmission. Toine continues:
Jim Haslam is an independent researcher, not a virologist, but someone who has been publishing on the subject for several years on his Substack, Reverse Engineering the Origins of SARS-CoV-2. His hypothesis was picked up before, among others by Will Jones, editor of the British website The Daily Sceptic, who published an article about Vincent Munster in January 2024, with the headline: “Is this the man who created Covid-19 in Fauci's US lab?”
Haslam’s book relies heavily on circumstantial evidence. No documents or emails have been made public (yet) that show exactly what Munster did in 2019 within the Creid study of Peter Daszak of the Ecohealth Alliance, in the context of which all the experiments took place. The most compelling evidence Haslam provides is that SARS-CoV-2 is efficiently transmitted in just five known mammals: American deer, American deer mice, Syrian hamsters, American minks, and Egyptian bats. All of these animals are found at the Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana where Munster works. In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 does not infect laboratory animals that are common in Chinese laboratories or present at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, such as Chinese horseshoe bats. This suggests that SARS-CoV-2 acquired its transmissibility in a US laboratory context, not in a Chinese or other lab. Haslam writes in his book that he will withdraw his hypothesis if a sixth mammal unrelated to the Rocky Mountain Lab can be added to the list. That would give Munster a kind of alibi. “But the silence is telling,” says Haslam. He now considers the self-spreading SARS-COV-2 a “whistleblower” because, as it traveled around the world, it found the species that helped create it back in the US.
According to Jim Haslam, virologist Ron Fouchier knew about the outbreak in Wuhan as early as December 9, 2019. Concerns grew in early 2020, especially after the “SARS2 sequence” was officially published on January 10. Fauci began weekly one-on-one teleconferences with Munster from NIAID as early as January 13, 2020, Haslam said. On January 23, NIAID scheduled a teleconference with virologists Ralph Baric, Daszak, Munster and Fouchier.
Fouchier later claimed “confusion” about his early December 2019 claim, but no Dutchman forgets Sinterklaas during the first week of December.
The secret teleconference of February 1, 2020, which Fauci initiated and in which Koopmans also participated, was therefore not the first. The direct reason for that conference was that the Danish virologist Kristian Andersen, together with three fellow virologists, had found unnatural elements in the new coronavirus. Andersen suggested calling the FBI, but Fauci called Baric. Fouchier undermined Andersen's view during and immediately after the teleconference, especially in his minutes that he had already completed on Sunday morning, February 2. On February 3, Andersen was fiercely attacked by Baric during another meeting. Andersen and the other critical virologists then changed course like a leaf on a tree, and three of them co-wrote the proximal origin study, which emphasized that the virus would have a natural origin.
Haslam’s accusations will have been received with mixed feelings in the US. The subtitle of his book is: It leaked from a Wuhan Lab, but it is not Chinese junk. He makes a distinction between the place where SARS-CoV-2 escaped (Wuhan) and the places where it was made (the University of North Carolina and the Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana). Haslam seems sure of himself, and talks about the subject as fluently as he writes. For example, watch the first part of the interview he did with German journalist Aya Velazquez, who became famous for publishing the so-called ‘RKI files’ in Germany. These are the minutes of the German OMT, which show that German policy was not based on science at all. In the interview, Haslam names in one breath the five virologists who, in his opinion, made the pandemic possible: Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Vincent Munster and the relatively unknown Linfa Wang from China and Danielle ('Dani') Anderson from Australia.
The latter two are affiliated with Duke-NUS, a joint venture in Singapore between the American Duke University and the local National University (NUS). Wang, nicknamed the batman, is said to have been responsible for testing the self-spreading vaccine virus in Asian horseshoe bats. This test was explicitly planned in the Bio Safety Level-4 lab (BSL-4, the highest security level) of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Wang, as head of the WIV scientific advisory committee for emerging infectious diseases, managed to arrange for Anderson to perform the test in the BSL-4 lab alone, without the intervention of WIV staff. According to Haslam, the highly experienced Anderson, who had been conducting research in the Wuhan lab on occasion for many years, started her Creid assignment in June 2019.
If you reach the back of my book, it becomes clearer that Dani Anderson is patient 0. Or, as I called it, “A needle from Montana has punctured her positive pressure spacesuit in Wuhan. A vaccine designed to prevent the jumping of species had jumped species in the BSL4.”
Dani’s boss Linfa Wang and Munster always used a BSL4 for their live bat experiments. Daszak later admitted there were live Chinese bats in Dani’s BSL4. Toine picked up that intel:
Intelligence agencies have obtained her phone records, which according to Haslam show that Anderson suddenly left the BSL-4 lab in October and did not return for weeks. Haslam suspects that she went into quarantine in her apartment in Wuhan after a possible needle stick injury, but he has no hard evidence for this. At the end of November, she is said to have returned, together with Wang, and cleaned everything. On November 29, Anderson left Wuhan, never to return. When the “Sars2 sequence” was published on January 10, 2020, Wang resigned that same day, after years of loyal service, as director of the Emerging Infectious Diseases Programme (EID) at Duke-NUS. According to Haslam, because he must have recognized the virus as the Creid bat vaccine.
Toine astutely noticed what typical lab leakers hate; Shi went from villain to hero.
Anyone who agrees with Haslam's hypothesis will have to conclude that Shi Zhengli, the well-known 'batwoman' of the WIV, goes free. In fact, Haslam considers her a whistleblower because on January 24, 2020, she revealed the natural precursor (RaTG13) of the unnatural SARS-CoV-2. In doing so, she drew attention to her lab, but at the same time to the furin cleavage site that hardly anyone had noticed until then. A few days later, Kristian Andersen sounded the alarm with Fauci. According to Haslam, Zhengli was unable to engineer a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus. In the interview with
, the second part of which will be online soon, he states that no Chinese studies from before 2020 can be found on placing such an item in this type of coronavirus. It was Western virologists who became fascinated by the furin cleavage site, with Haslam citing a 2010 Dutch study by Munster, Osterhaus and Fouchier, among others.
Fouchier discussed three phenotypes that he and Munster focused on: a significant quantity of the virus in the upper respiratory tract of a mammal at a specific temperature. Unfortunately, humans share all three with EFB bats and Covid.
In a print version of Toine’s article, he discussed my admiration of Munster in Chapter 5:
Munster led the ferret research that led to The New York Times article “An Engineered Doomsday.” Through forced serial passaging, he can transform a harmless pathogen into an airborne agent. Something that takes Mother Nature eons takes him weeks. While his methods are obscure, they involve generating large amounts of virus in the upper respiratory tract of a mammal with a targeted temperature. He transfers infected mucus from one animal to another and induces sneezing to make the pathogen airborne.
Toine continues:
Haslam gave an interview to the well-known cardiologist and critic of the corona policy, Peter McCullough, at the end of 2024.
is impressed by Haslam's book and calls it "very convincing." Haslam says, among other things, that the five virologists had good intentions, namely to protect military personnel against new infectious diseases by vaccinating bats. But it turned out dramatically and Haslam has little understanding for the cover-up that followed. He is said to have asked Munster for an explanation three times, but has received nothing of that nature. In his open letter to Fauci, Haslam calls for openness, also towards Munster, whom he urges to release unpublished data. "People will forgive and forget if you tell them it was an animal vaccine," Haslam tells Fauci. "Otherwise your silence could be interpreted as an admission of guilt."
Read the remainder of Toine’s book review here. He wraps up by questioning what RFK Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya will do about this, a point you won’t find in US media.
https://deanderekrant.nl/is-sars-cov-2-van-nederlandse-makelij/
Even virologist Angela Rasmussen enjoyed the Dutch article, “lol and also congratulations on your publication!”
Boring British lab leak article
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14503159/Labour-Wuhan-lab-leak-pandemic-Boris-johnson.html
A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: 'It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology'.
This is old news since the lab leak document was reported in May 2021. The ex-head of MI5 (Buller on domestic intel) recommended burner phones to Jeremy Farrar, while the ex-head of MI6 (Dearlove on foreign intel) screamed about a lab leak and claimed a cover-up. These two have Iraq War 2 history.
Good German lab leak article
Further evidence of a US origin for the virus comes from "lab leak researcher" Jim Haslam, interviewed by freelance journalist Aya Velázquez. Velázquez begins by providing information about Haslam's background and explains how the engineer, who is not actually an expert in virology, acquired his knowledge:
"Since the debate on the origins of COVID-19 was largely dismissed as a 'conspiracy theory' by major media outlets over the past few years, a discursive vacuum emerged that was filled by grassroots actors. In recent years, a veritable 'lab leak scene' has emerged on social media platforms like X, consisting of independent media outlets, NGOs, freelance journalists, and citizen journalists who conduct independent, investigative research on the topic."
Haslam's focus is on a funding proposal for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The project, called DEFUSE, submitted by the NGO EcoHealth Alliance, purports to be a "blueprint" for the production of SARS-CoV-2. The proposal was leaked in 2021 by DARPA Major Joseph Murphy.
US biological weapons program, partly carried out in China
Although DARPA's DEFUSE application was rejected, the project was partially funded by Anthony Fauci's NIAID. Haslam cites numerous sources for this on his blog, including a funding application that was released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
Jim Haslam, even though his book is titled "Mystery Solved," cannot definitively solve the mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2. However, his research contains clear evidence of a lab-created virus as part of a US bioweapons program.
It's a good summary, but the origin question is solved at the end of the book, which Toine obviously read.
The only surprise from the WA1 survey? Every scientist knew of Baric’s involvement, but not even Munster’s closest colleagues knew what he was researching. I even spent hours on the phone with his DARPA colleague, who didn’t know who Munster was. He was the creator of Covid, and his own lab animals ratted him out.
One government scientist, who had been debating the role of American mink in a FOIA exchange, said he was no longer working on the question. A professor simply replied, “This is one of many open scientific puzzles.” Another professor stated that he would publish an answer in a scientific journal. Until then, I consider the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to be solved.
Niels Bohr wrote, "Your theory is crazy, but not crazy enough to be true..." Jim Haslam has effective disproved Professor Bohr in his Substack and book outlining his theory for the origin of COVID-19. I have challenged every aspect of Jim's theory--including in an 3-hour interview--and I cannot falsify his theory. Best open-sourced collection on COVID-19 origins in one place. In my opinion, this is the working theory for the origin of COVID-19 until we get Munster's, Baric's, Dani Andersen's, Zhengli Shi's, and Linfa Wang's lab notebooks. Great work, Jim.
"Until then, I consider the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to be solved."
I agree, but I don't have to wait for any expert to provide evidence.
To me as a clinician, it makes perfect sense.
Baric constructs the new virus that is transported to Munster, who makes it airborne and capable of infecting only 5 animals that are corralled in the Rocky Mountain Lab; subsequently, the virus/vaccine (self-spreading) jets to a BSL4 lab in Wuhan to be tested in Chinese horseshoe bats. This is where the leak occurred.
RFK Jr may not be enthralled with your book because he also wrote a book about a lab leak, but he completely overlooked the geographical location of the virus/vaccine's origin and the science involved.
Importantly, the avian flu H5N1 virus was made airborne in Erasmus University, Rotterdam, more than a decade ago; Munster trained there.