Let's be blunt: SARS2 leaked from a Wuhan lab but it's not Chinese junk
We didn't just fund the virus, we created it on US soil, using American lab animals.
The virus was an animal vaccine created in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; developed in Hamilton, Montana; and tested in Wuhan. This is where it leaked, accidently, but the creation and coverup was not an accident.
SARS-CoV-2 was not designed to infect us humans, but to inoculate our distant mammalian ancestors. Bats are the mother of the animal kingdom when it comes to potential human disease (e.g. Rabies, Marburg, Nipah) and the source of zoonotic disease spillover events like SARS1, described by Anthony Fauci in 2003.
In 2012, interest in bat viruses increased, and Fauci organized a coronavirus meeting to discuss one subject: foreign bats and American vaccines. Western men designed SARS2 to look natural to an Asian lab animal. This enabled the ‘virus’ to infect and inoculate the animal species SARS1 came from: Chinese horseshoe bats. It was amazing Western biotechnology (DURC) that was in the making for years, if not decades.
Covid could float through the air, for upwards of 60 feet, and infect you in less than 15 minutes. But Covid does not want to kill you; it does not even want you to know it’s there because good vaccines are designed to be asymptomatic. Contagious animal vaccine research, which spread like a regular virus, created an incentive to explore ways of engineering viral vectors to evade the immune response since any pre-existing immunity to the vaccine vector will slow vaccine spread.
It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder
SARS2 was an unintended consequence of good intentions. Most, if not all involved in the cover-up, assumed their creation would burn out but underestimated how far modern biotechnology had progressed. This was a Shakespearean tragedy, where the rich US biodefense world was their stage.
Modern virology was a borderless collaboration with an amazing division of labor. Researchers were trying to prevent animal diseases like SARS1 from reaching US shores. In the process, they accidentally created SARS2, which reached everyone's shore.
It started off as a US military idea to proactively prevent animal disease spillover into human populations (& US Military personnel overseas). But was co-opted into a US academic exercise of creating pre-pandemic vaccines and biodefense grant shopping.
In 2018, the US National Biodefense Strategy listed SARS1 as the first disease on the first page. That same year, DARPA referenced the directive to solicit bids to “suppress transmission among animal reservoirs through induced immunity (e.g., vaccinate the animal).”
DARPA’s relatively small $3B budget wanted a scalable delivery method, for example, “self-disseminating treatments or preventives like transmissible recombinant vaccines.” The team that won the DARPA grant used self-spreading animal vaccine technology developed in NIAID’s biodefense lab, Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana.
Major Joseph Murphy, a 2021 DARPA fellow in the SARS2 origin meetings, leaked the loser’s bid called Defuse. His letter to the Inspector General at the Department of Defense gets right to the point in the first sentence: “SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine.” Virologists who once claimed natural origins now claimed a Wuhan lab leak was a possibility:
“A possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”
Viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China. “The mail is filled with little envelopes with plasmid dried onto filter paper that scientists routinely send each other.”
An anonymous genetics expert working with the WHO uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail. The expert said that if SARS2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match has never been found in nature.
The DARPA proposal was “basically a road map to a SARS-CoV-2-like virus,” said French virologist Simon Wain-Hobson.
If I had known about (DARPA Defuse) I would have at least asked questions before signing (the Lancet letter),” said German virologist Kristian Drosten.
"It's like this: you don't have a smoking gun, but you have a letter from the gardener who wrote, I'll take the following pistol, load the following ammunition, and then shoot the master of the house. Then, the master of the house lies dead on the ground, shot with that exact caliber. And you say the killer wasn't the gardener."
Fauci had earlier testified that the R01 work subcontracted to the WIV was ‘molecularly impossible’ to create SARS2. This was true (e.g. hACE2 mice, Vero cells, no furin cleavage site)', but DARPA Defuse was molecularly possible (e.g. American bats, primary human airway cells, furin cleavage site).
In biological history’s biggest own goal, we know Dr Shi Zhengli and the WIV cannot engineer SARS2 because of their public record gain-of-function experiments, funded by NIAID. SARS2 doesn’t infect humanized mice. Shi’s Vero (primate) cells would kick out a furin cleavage site immediately. Her reverse genetic system could only shuffle spikes into an existing backbone (e.g. WIV1), not create a new backbone (e.g. SARS2). There are basically 0 papers in all of China showing interest in a furin cleavage site for 30,000kb bat coronaviruses.
But Fauci’s truthful testimony was before the DARPA Defuse bid leaked in September 2021. Dr. Ralph Baric, a NIAID-funded UNC virologist in 2018, proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into novel coronavirus backbones and testing live Chinese bats in WIV labs. DARPA rejected Baric’s Defuse proposal because of the “dual use” concerns, but Fauci and NIAID were very comfortable funding Baric’s research ($120M).
In Senate testimony in May 2021, Fauci played a word game, a half-truth, but repeated it many times as if it was his prepared statement: NIAID did not fund Gain of Function on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Senator Rand Paul was discussing the much debated (and public record) R01, so Fauci was technically correct. Paul then asked about UN,C and Fauci replied, “If (Baric) is, it is according to the (NIH) guidelines, and it is being conducted in North Carolina.”
Fauci later called the $600,000 R01 public grant to the WIV “pencil dust” because no one investigated his $82M CREID U01 to EcoHealth, UNC, and Duke-NUS. Again, the same contractors from the rejected DARPA Defuse bid are the same contractors on NIAID’s CREID, which was awarded in 2019. Major Murphy told us: “As is known, Dr Fauci with NIAID did not reject the (DARPA Defuse) proposal.
In 2022, the USGS reported Mexican free-tailed bats can be infected with SARS2. In 2018, the Defuse bid referenced the same bats (T brasiliensis) in its bat vaccine paper, so obviously, someone funded a similar grant. Fauci’s perfectly prepared denial used the phrase “that grant.”
In 2019, Fauci’s relatively large budget of $6B funded a revised version of the losing Wuhan team’s DARPA Defuse bid (i.e. more expensive $14M vs $10M) and it’s now called CREID ($82M). It was Fauci’s pinnacle achievement that he oddly never talked about, except while defending himself on Fox News:
“The (CREID) grant was reviewed by a peer review and put before an independent council and approved before the meeting even took place,” Fauci said during the Fox News interview, referring to the Feb. 1 (2020) phone meeting.
CREID was a global project designed to coordinate and prevent zoonotic spillover events but ironically coordinated the international creation of a global pandemic.
In the summer of 2019, there was a surge of DARPA defuse-related research
Shi and the WIV were missing from the CREID grant, but Duke and Dani replaced them. She claimed to be working on her “lifelong career goal” of Ebola but published 0 papers as lead author. So, what was Dani doing in Wuhan? Per her CV, which was submitted in June 2019 to NIAID, she was working on coronavirus replication in bats at the Wuhan BSL4.
To be specific, she was testing “immune boosting agents” developed by UNC on “wild caught captive” Chinese bats at the WIV BSL4.
In 2019, Dani and Linfa referenced Baric’s ‘consensus sequence.’ Baric also proposed a consensus sequence in DARPA Defuse. He wanted an average of Chinese bat strains (RaTG13, Banal-52, RmYN02 RShSTT182, etc.) along the Mekong River delta in Southeast Asia. An anonymous WHO collaborator best described the academic idea behind a ‘consensus’ sequence:
"This means that they (Baric “wrote that section”) would take various sequences from similar coronaviruses and create a new sequence that is essentially the average of them. It would be a new virus sequence, not a 100% match to anything.”
The anonymous source said it was noteworthy that the cut-off for generating such an average sequence was viruses that only had 5% genetic divergence from each other.
In 2020, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology said they had found a strain named RaTG13 in bat droppings in a cave in Yunnan province in 2013 which was a 96.1 per cent match to SARS-CoV-2. It means RaTG13 (and Banal-52 collected by US military in 2017) could have been included in a set of viral genomes to help create an average sequence.
The WHO source added: "If SARS-CoV-2 comes from an artificial consensus sequence composed of genomes with more than 95% (i.e. <5% nucleotide variation) similarity to each other… I would predict that we will never find a really good match in nature and just a bunch of close matches across parts of the sequence, which so far is what we are seeing.
In 2008, Baric published the first (and only) consensus sequence of a full 30,000kb nucleotide coronavirus, and his co-author made clear only Baric could do it. Ten years later, Baric wrote to NIAID that “several coronavirus infectious cDNA clones are available in UNC lab, including SARS, MERS, CoVs, and bat CoVs with pandemic potential.” All those bat samples that the WIV and other SE Asian contractors collected were shared (via MTA) with the Western collaborators/funders.
In 2018, Baric published a “fascinating” and “unique” piece of Laos Banal-52 and RaTG13 (UGGUCGC) in a live attenuated vaccine paper “for reservoir species, such as bats.” That same year, UNC also published the unique R/SVAS sequence of Banal-52 and RaTG13, which later showed up in SARS2 as the infamous furin cleavage site.
In 2019, Linfa and Dani called Baric’s work a consensus “virus,” which showed how little interest they had in his wizardly genome sequencing. They were bat immunologists; Baric was the bat virologist. Dani played with live bats; Baric played with sequences. They both appear next to each other in DARPA Defuse.
Dani was also listed on NIAID’s renewed 2019 CREID project, and her Asian bat immunology expertise would have nicely complemented NIAID’s growing Asian bat vaccine portfolio. This amazing division of labor was an Adam Smith nightmare.
It’s always the cover-up, never the crime
Fauci later claimed after the “big scare of SARS1 back in 2002-03” that “we had a modest collaboration with our Chinese colleagues” and “we did that through a subgrant via EcoHealth.” He claimed, “It would have almost been a dereliction of duty if we did not study this. You gotta go where the action is. You do not want to study bats in Fairfax County, Virginia, to find out the animal-human interface that might lead to a jumping of species.” The animal-human interface is a line he often repeats:
“You don’t want to go to Hoboken, N.J., or to Fairfax, Va., to be studying the bat-human interface that may lead to an outbreak, so you go to China,” Fauci said. Or what should be called the live (Chinese horseshoe) bat capital of the world: Wuhan.
So Fauci was not up until 3 AM covering up for China; he was covering up for his $82M CREID contractors: Dani, Linfa, Baric, and most importantly, his personal biodefense lab in Montana.
In 2018, Baric started collaborating with the winner of the DARPA project, Dr Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountain Lab. They were trying to infect Egyptian fruit bats (a standard Western lab bat) with Chinese pathogens (i.e. WIV1), but they failed, so they concluded:
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.
Surprisingly, SARS2 infects and transmits in Egyptian fruit bats, which confused the German scientists who uncovered this fact. They wrote, “although this species is certainly not the original reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 because these bats are not present in China, the epicenter of the pandemic.” It’s now obvious why SARS2, an Old World virus, has found a new reservoir in New World (lab) animals.
Let me guess, the Rocky Mountain Lab in Idaho?
"Linfa and Dani actually called Baric’s work a consensus “virus”.....
I don't quite understand the distinction here , except that they use different language to describe what , in the end , is the same thing. Consensus virus = consensus sequence from Baric's standpoint. Give him a sequence and he can generate the corresponding virus , as he did in 2008. There's no need to send him plasmids or culture vials by courier or snail mail , email will do just fine.