My open letter to Senator Rand Paul
A one-year anniversary to the truth
Dr. Paul, I was introduced to your father two decades ago as “Dr. No.” I followed him closely for the next decade as he evolved into ‘Dr. Know.’ My journey began with Rand and ended with Rothbard, if you know what I mean. After reading your well-sourced book, I think you’re ready for more details, so consider this letter my Anatomy of the Virus.
International virology is like an “anarchical society,” where BSL4 labs have “daily interactions with other labs within China and across the world.” It is a division of labor where “the mail is filled with little envelopes with plasmid dried onto filter paper that scientists routinely send to each other.”1 Remember that if a virus was engineered, wherever it spilled over into the human population does not tell us where it was engineered.
Why Wuhan?
If you want to understand this biological puzzle, you must admit Dr Ralph Baric of UNC is a man of his word. In 2018, he proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into live coronaviruses and testing them on live bats, in Wuhan.2 He also never sent chimeras to China and kept his biotechnology from being stolen or shared.3 SARS2 does not infect his humanized mice, which are completely safe.4 But early in the outbreak, Baric lied to both Congress and the US Military, just weeks after meeting with Anthony Fauci.5
Technically Tony Fauci never lied to you because “we have not funded gain-of-function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”6 And only a simpleton believes Wuhan engineered SARS2, since it is not Chinese junk. Yes, Fauci was parsing words but also speaking in half-truths, so try to ask him five follow-up questions:
What was your $82M NIAID contractor doing inside the Wuhan BSL4?
Why did Linfa Wang resign as director of Duke’s EID program on Jan 10, 2020?
What was your Montana lab doing with both DARPA Preempt and Defuse projects in 2018-19?
Why are Egyptian fruit bats a reservoir species for SARS2?
Why was the RaTG13 Chinese bat sample uploaded to an NIH server in 2018?
The answers to these questions will eventually become self-evident, so I am writing this letter to save us some time. Two years ago, just before DARPA Defuse leaked, I thought SARS2 was a Chinese-made self-disseminating vaccine for PLA troops.7 One year ago, I told a prominent Rutgers professor that SARS2 was a contagious bat vaccine, developed in Fauci’s personal biodefense lab. This Montana lab was in the news lately for experimenting with a coronavirus strain called WIV1, back in 2018.8
The research paper came to my attention after DARPA Defuse leaked in September 2021. In late 2018, after Dr Baric lost DARPA Defuse, he joined forces with the winning DARPA Preempt team based in Montana. They wanted to infect live bats with the WIV1 strain, as outlined in the losing Defuse proposal.
The DARPA Defuse project was obviously moving along quickly, but in Montana.9 So notice prominent Western virologists, lab leak writers, and Rutgers scientists are not touching this batshit crazy story.10 The father of a popular lab leak scientist is the director of the Rocky Mountain Lab (RML). Fauci traveled to RML in October 2019, to visit his aerosol specialist, Dr Vincent Munster, who was now collaborating with Dr Baric of UNC.11
You brilliantly described the Feb 1, 2020, teleconference as a coup d’état in your well-sourced book.12 We were both suspicious of those 3 AM Fauci emails because Kristian Andersen wanted to call the FBI.13 That night, Fauci was told SARS2 looked “engineered,” but he already knew that, because his own biodefense lab in Montana created it. Fauci had a weekly teleconference with RML by the “second week of January,” which was the same week the SARS2 genome was published and Dr Linfa Wang of Duke University had resigned.14
Just weeks later, Linfa told Baric (via Daszak) there is “no need for you to sign the statement” and we will “put it out in a way that doesn't link it back to our collaboration.” That collaboration was a 2019 proposal for a NIAID grant called CREID.15
The ‘fact checkers’ admit the CREID grant (a.k.a. Defuse) was awarded in 2019! But don’t confuse Fauci’s new $82M U01 CREID project with the “pencil dust” R01 project ($120,000 per year for Shi’s BSL2 & dead mice).16 As you will see, the personnel and sample collection of the ongoing R01 grant in Wuhan, dovetailed very nicely with the DARPA Defuse proposal (i.e. Baric, Dani’s BSL4 & live bats).
“You don’t want to go to Hoboken, New Jersey, or Fairfax, Virginia, to be studying the bat-human interface that might lead to an outbreak, so you go to China!” And Fauci truthfully stated many times, the R01 work was ‘molecularly impossible’ to have created SARS2. However, funding something like DARPA Defuse via CREID was molecularly possible.17
We both know everything gets funded in Washington, D.C. but nothing moves fast. Fauci’s post-9/11 job description was written to fund “research programs in biodefense.” By 2018, SARS1 was still on his mind and he “busted the budget” of NIAID to nearly twice the size of DARPA. He then did what he was paid to: fund a revised version of the $14M Defuse proposal, but it was now called CREID.
We all thought Fauci’s $82M project was awarded in 2020, but it was awarded in 2019 since the D.C. bureaucracy takes its merry time. To be more specific, CREID was awarded in November 2019, so does this eerie date sound familiar?
The CREID grant even mentioned the mysterious deaths of the three dead Mojiang miners. Defuse and CREID documents reference the same virus tracker (FLIRT) and batified mice. Both projects have the same personnel, working in the same institutions and sharing the same bat samples. The only difference between CREID and Defuse was the inclusion of Montana.
RML had already ‘won’ the DARPA Preempt project in 2018, so they took the lead with their cutting-edge biodefense. Munster’s Montana team beat Baric’s team because they had 25% cheaper self-spreading vaccine technology, but this was 100% more dangerous than Baric’s humanized mice technology.18
SARS2, the bat virus, was always about live bats
Baric and Munster used a specific bat species, which is considered the Western lab ‘rat’ for Western virologists. It was called the Egyptian fruit bat, and the Atlanta CDC kept a live colony that was the envy of the world. They are imported from Africa, where Fauci’s CREID team was recently featured in 60 Minutes.19
Egyptian fruit bats eat fruit, not insects like Chinese microbats, so they are easy for Westerners to feed and breed. When Western virologists (basically glorified veterinarians) wanted to test an American-made bat vaccine on Chinese bats, they had to go to Wuhan.20 It was the live Chinese horseshoe bat capital of the world.21 I call this idea ‘the needle in the Montana mail’ and it was the only hypothesis that made biological sense.22
Patient Zero?
The three sick Wuhan technicians had WMD levels of intelligence. It was based on an online rumor pushed by one man, but we both know 20-something-year-old postdocs aren’t hospitalized with Covid.23 Dr Shi previously uploaded sequences of RaTG13 in 2018 to the NIH database, but did not release those sequences until 2022. So when she (re)published RaTG13 on Jan 24, 2020, exactly one week before the Feb 1 teleconference, she brought attention to the PRRAR furin cleavage site and proudly said not my lab!24
The entire lab leak narrative was built on a lie. In Chapter One of Alina Chan and Matt Wridley's book Viral, they inferred Shi published RaTG13 after the February 1st, 2020 teleconference. But it was before. The Wuhan Institute of Virology kicked off the Fauci-led coverup. They brought attention to the peculiar furin cleavage site in SARS2.
The publication of RaTG13 on Jan 24 led Kristian Andersen to send Fauci the infamous Jan 31 email: “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”
Unlike Kristian, both Munster and Baric somehow missed the furin cleavage site in their initial papers. But Baric, in December 2020, noted “SARS-CoV-2 probably emerged from bats, and early strains identified in Wuhan, China, showed limited genetic diversity, which suggests that the virus may have been introduced from a single source.” He was 100% correct, because this bat vaccine, now called SARS2, had accidentally jumped species into Dr Danielle Anderson’s lungs.
Unlike Dr Shi in the BSL2, Dani was in the remote BSL4 and the only woman in Wuhan to have lied. Before DARPA Defuse leaked and the CREID FOIA, Dani told us she was working on Ebola while in Wuhan, but her CREID CV, which was submitted in June 2019, says “coronavirus replication.”25
Dani’s NIAID CV mentioned “extensive experience in designing animal experiments with…bats.” Fauci’s $82M CREID contractor was inside the Wuhan BSL4 and left for no apparent reason in November 2019, but NIAID knew about “her” presence in Wuhan.
In the Defuse proposal, Dani was responsible for testing American-made bat vaccines on Chinese horseshoe bats. Linfa once tried to keep a live Chinese microbat colony alive in an Australian BSL4 but said, “We will never do that again.” These two Duke employees only had an ABSL3 on their Singapore campus with fruit bats. So they had to travel to the Wuhan BSL4, to test the American-made bat vaccine on Chinese bats.
Again, Dani’s boss, Linfa, resigned on Jan 10, 2020, so it doesn’t take a virologist to figure out what happened. A fellow Duke Blue Devil was our patient zero, working 15 miles north of Shi’s BSL2. These two Duke employees referenced Baric’s ‘consensus’ sequence work on the infamous WIV1 strain in 2019.
Baric later told CNN: “But again, it's not the BSL4 (of Dani’s) that concerns (me) - it's coronavirus being worked on at lower biosafety level conditions, like BSL2.” Dani and Baric appear next to each other in both DARPA Defuse and CREID, but Baric didn’t bother to mention any of this? Baric also didn’t bother to mention the furin cleavage site in a one-hour technical presentation to your Congressional staffers?
Baric was obsessed with furin cleavage sites since it was key for unlocking a ‘jumping species’ event. It was also needed for vaccine transmission, so this was a design feature, not a bug. In the Montana paper, both Baric and Munster concluded they need a furin cleavage site for bat vaccination (i.e. intracellular proteases). The furin cleavage site was not human-specific; it was animal-specific, but unfortunately, bat cells have furin just like us humans.
SARS2 pathology = bat immunology
Did you know US universities, like Rutgers, are studying bat vaccines? They want to protect bats against white-nose syndrome, which is also referenced in the DARPA Defuse proposal. Local politicians hoped white-nose syndrome would wipe out the bats, while Australian politicians wanted to “bomb the bats” to control disease outbreaks.
Did you know the USGS airdrops a rabies vaccine every year? They want to inoculate Kentucky raccoons with tasty baits and protect Fido, the family dog! Baric proposed the same (safe) vaccine delivery method in DARPA Defuse, but again, he was 25% more expensive than the contagious vaccine concept in Montana.
Rabies comes from bats, just like SARS1, so the new idea was to vaccinate the animal reservoir, using a self-spreading vaccine. A NIAID employee floated the bat vaccine idea to the Singapore audience, in December 2019. Enter Munster and RML with their “cost-based argument” for a self-spreading vaccine (i.e. bat-to-bat transmission). Unfortunately, NIAID’s project to protect us from the bats turned us into bats. Does high transmissibility and low virulence sound familiar?
We cannot know where this virus came from if we do not know what it is. I know a bat vaccine sounds crazy, but once you see it, everything will make sense. Take a deep breath as the air rushes into your similar nasal cavity and past your “similar” ACE2 receptor. Stretch your long arms out, with opposable thumbs, and flap them like wings. But bats are not birds; they are furry mammals, just like you and me.26
Your brilliant book mentioned natural immunity nearly 30 times, but what if a SARS2 infection was designed for immunity? Now let’s test your Duke medical degree, since your book also referenced every weird pathology from SARS2: inflammation, Orf8, interferon, MHC-I, NLR3P, cytokine storm, and B & T cells. These odd terms were all described in Western bat vaccine literature.
Remember when T cells were politicized in 2020? They were studied in American bats (and deer mice) at RML in 2017. MHC class I? It was studied by Baric and Munster in the infamous Montana bat paper. Superspreader events? Vaccinologists were dreaming about “superspreader” events in 2019.
Even the weird asymptomatic nature of this ‘virus’ (i.e. immune evasion) was a design feature, not a bug. As DARPA fellow Major Joseph Murphy told us, a good vaccine does not generate symptoms. Self ‘disseminating’ vaccines even created a moral hazard for immune evasion and was first studied by RML in 2011.27
Since a bat virus can naturally jump species, so can a bat vaccine, which is made to spread like a disease. If you replace the word ‘virus’ with ‘vaccine’ in your well-written book, ‘infection’ with ‘inoculation,’ switch Shi with Dani, replace ‘humans’ with our distant ancestor ‘bats,’ everything will make sense. This animal vaccine was ‘pre-adapted’ for American (lab) animals but was being tested on Chinese lab bats.
Did you know the USGS discovered SARS2-infected American bats, also listed in DARPA Defuse? Have you read about the history of Laos Banal bat samples? Your human body has antibodies to that same bat sample, collected by the US military in 2017!
In 2018, Baric was writing “national security” LAV bat vaccine papers, Munster was working on DARPA Preempt, and Fauci was still discussing SARS. The big, biodefense money for Western virologists was to protect the ‘warfighter’ stationed abroad. As we both learned from your father, those warfighters think they are fighting for their country. The virologists involved in this fiasco thought they were protecting their country. SARS2 was a story of Bats and Men, specifically American bats and Western men.
SARS2 was designed by man to look natural (No See’m) to Chinese bats. This was an accident, a probable needlestick, an unintended consequence of decent intentions. SARS2 was an animal vaccine with a failed safety kill switch. They even told us a white lie, because SARS2 did come from bats, since this contagious bat vaccine ‘jumped species’ inside the Wuhan BSL4 (Duke didn’t use burner phones).
This was not written to send us down another rabbit hole, but to help us uncover the greatest cover-up of all time. So who did it? Linfa and Daszak have since pointed fingers at Baric, who went radio silent after Defuse leaked. Baric’s lab recently published a controversial CREID-funded paper (AI151797) about pangolins being a potential SARS2 intermediary host. Baric concluded, “Although the pangolin strain provides an optimal model to evaluate the impact of a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 border on replication, pathogenesis, and transmission, we urge constraint as such studies should require transparent, independent, and rigorous review.” That CREID review was ongoing in the winter of 2019.
Baric has recently pointed the finger at Munster’s “edgy” transmission studies, whose salary was recently debated in Congress. In late 2018, Baric and Munster combined forces. They infected live bats with (DARPA Defuse WIV1) strains. But the Egyptian fruit bat wasn’t just any species from a roadside zoo. It was now the SARS2 reservoir bat, along with four other Western lab animals.
If a vaccine was engineered, wherever it spilled over into the human population does not tell us where it was engineered. Outside of us humans, SARS2 transmits efficiently in only five animals on the planet. Those five mammals are only found (naturally or unnaturally) at RML in Montana. This, therefore, becomes biological proof of a Wuhan area lab leak and a Montana lab origin. I guarantee that if we obtain all the documents for the CREID project (RFA-AI-19-028 & 02928), we will read about the creation of SARS2…back in 2019…on US soil.
A Canadian scientist was fired for sending Chinese labs Ebola samples in 2019 because her paperwork for the shipment was “not done the right way.” Munster of RML imported bat samples from Bangladesh. EcoHealth sent their Chinese bat samples to Ian Lipkin’s lab at Columbia, where they forwarded the CoV samples to Baric. Material transfer agreements (MTA) “ensure the free exchange of reagents needed for research purposes only and fully supported by the NIH.” NIAID Letters of Support were signed by CREID contractors in SE Asia to “share technology, samples, reagents, data, and research results” with all coronavirus samples “shipped to UNC for further characterization.”
Other scientists contacted by The Intercept noted that there is published evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was already engaged in some of the genetic engineering work described in the proposal and that viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China. “The mail is filled with little envelopes with plasmid dried on to filter paper that scientists routinely send each other,” said Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center at the University of Montana.
The latest trend was “viral sovereignty” but Fauci thought the pendulum had moved too much.
From DARPA Defuse and per Peter Daszak, Baric “wrote that section of the DARPA grant.”
Linfa Wang said UNC was responsible for the DARPA Defuse virology (i.e. inserting the furin cleavage site), the WIV was responsible for field work (i.e. Shi’s bat sample collection like WIV1 and RaTG13), and Duke performed the bat immunology (i.e. test American bat vaccines on live Chinese bats).
Baric, ‘The Coronavirus Hunter,’ gladly spoke to the media before DAPRA Defuse leaked in September 2021, but has since remained silent. The only virologist to testify under oath said the Defuse proposal was “to be conducted in the United States, not in China.”
In 2015, Baric first discussed cleavage sites in coronaviruses. In 2017, Baric published a type of restriction site (BsaXI) that would be “retained” in the genome. It was probably used for Quality Assurance since the furin cleavage site (FCS) was deleted in Vero cells. Natural origin scientists claim the out-of-frame insertion (PRRA) and the proline (P) are pieces of evidence, but this BsaXI restriction site can explain both.
In 2018, Baric was busy publishing a “national security” LAV bat vaccine paper, infected Chinese bat cells with furin cleavage sites, and wanted to infect live Egyptian fruit bats with an FCS. In late 2019, Baric published an RxxR furin cleavage site (SARS2 = RRAR). NIAID, by the way, funded all of this UNC furin cleavage work via R01AI110700 starting in 2015. In 2020, Baric was explicitly asked in the Red Dawn emails if there were any restriction sites in the genome.
Both Shi and Baric have clarified that there was no engineering collaboration between the WIV and UNC. A few months before DARPA Defuse leaked in 2021, Baric emphatically denied sending anything to China: “Let me make it clear that we never sent any of our molecular clones or any chimeric viruses to China.” (At this time, I became suspicious of an intermediary lab involved in this international fiasco).
Biosecurity hawks, like Rutger’s Richard Ebright, succeeded in keeping Fauci from publishing the gain-of-function papers from the 2010s. Both Baric and Ron Fouchier (mentor to Fauci’s aerosol specialist Vincent Munster at RML) admit their method was never published and no “lone wolf” could reproduce their specialized work. Baric never taught the Chinese how to engineer SARS2, because he never uploaded his sequences, keeping his No See’m method “obscure.”
Chapter 28 in your book refers to a Kristian Andersen email about a WIV reverse genetic system. Baric later clarified (before Defuse leaked) that the WIV could only shuffle spikes (~10% of 30kb backbone) into an existing backbone (i.e. the molecular clone called WIV1). Chinese scientists cannot create a new backbone (e.g. SARS2). Ebright claimed the WIV could engineer a new CoV backbone, referencing the 2017 paper that Fauci held up during your hearing. If you look closely at that WIV research, it is genuinely Chinese junk! If you look closely at Fauci’s notes on that research paper, it says NIAID funded “only in vitro work” (Dani’s work in the BSL4 was in vivo). James LeDuc of UTMB confirmed Shi didn’t have an infectious clone of SARS2, but Ebright also called him a liar.
This reverse genetic system debate led Jeffrey Sach to notice the peculiar #20 footnote in the Proximal Origins paper. That footnote referenced an irrelevant 2014 paper, but Baric had published a reverse genetic system in 2017 that could “seamlessly assemble full-length cDNA genomes of CoVs.” At this level of debate, we truth seekers can learn more from professional virologists than Wumao keyboard warriors.
Your book mentioned the former NYT science writer Nicholas Wade, who brought you into the complex lab leak debate. His Medium piece aged well, but SARS2 doesn’t infect ‘humanized’ mice, which are safe. (I also erroneously tweeted the same at you before your initial Fauci ‘duel’ in May 2021, but that paper was based on a calculation, not an in vivo experiment).
We humans have more in common with bats than humanized mice. Even the latest version of humanized mice does not have a ‘human lung’ since it’s a chunk of baby tissue (“not ventilated”) stitched onto the back of the BLT-L mice. Wade also claimed Baric “taught” Shi how to engineer SARS2, referencing the infamous 2015 Nature paper. But Baric said Shi had zero to do with that paper, and they didn’t share lab personnel. Finally, the CGG-CGG double codon was found in animal vaccine patents and used to attenuate (weaken) viruses.
To summarize, everything Baric did and proposed from 2003 through 2019 was safe, even DARPA Defuse. Everything Baric did with WIV was safe since Shi works with a pseudotype, and Baric plays with live viruses in a mouse-adapted backbone (i.e. not transmissible or airborne like SARS2).
In 2021, Linfa told us UNC was responsible for the Defuse virology, and Duke was responsible for the bat immunology (i.e. Dani). In 2022, Daszak said Baric wrote the furin cleavage site paragraph of the Defuse proposal, but UNC wouldn’t proceed without funding. In early 2020, Baric lied (by omission) to Congress and the US Military when he failed to mention the obvious furin cleavage site in the SARS2 genome.
Both of these (noble?) lies were preceded by a Feb 11 meeting with Fauci in D.C., when they discussed “the outbreak and chimeras.” One week later, Fauci bragged that “I easily can do” Baric’s virology presentation. That happened in March when both Fauci and Baric gave a joint presentation. Fauci discussed Baric’s work, but Baric once again ‘missed’ the furin cleavage site.
Fauci later claimed under oath not to know Baric, but as you mention in your book, both of them kicked off the 2013 bat meeting in D.C.
If Fauci funded DARPA Defuse, Baric would have performed the risky GoF in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Remember when Fauci told you that if Baric was doing GoF, “it is according to the guidelines and being conducted in North Carolina, not China!”
Fauci waited until the week before Christmas of 2017 to restart GoF while there was turmoil at HHS. In 2017, there was one change to one regulatory sentence: bats, unlike mice, are not considered a “mammalian” model in a GoF ban or regulation. The NIH and Fauci were also caught resuming GoF in early 2019.
The dead PLA scientist, Zhou Yusen, who allegedly made a quick vaccine but fell (thrown?) from the WIV roof, was based in Beijing and had nothing to do with Wuhan. The alleged Patient Zero from the PLA hospital was later in the outbreak. Most of the PLA rumors were based on a University of Minnesota paper. Co-authorship is a confusing subject but the first and last names listed on the paper are where the lab experiment took place. Don’t judge Chinese scientists’ capability on a French-built BSL4, that Dani herself occupied “for the past two years.”
Before the outbreak, the NIH, Moderna, and Baric worked on a human coronavirus vaccine in May 2019. There is a 2016 Moderna patent inside the SARS2 furin cleavage site, but the Moderna CEO never answered the question. The Moderna CEO was even involved in the building of the Wuhan BSL4.
“Visitors called (the BSL4) state-of-the-art, in contrast to other, aging WIV buildings, where scientists (like Shi) wore coats indoors in winter because of scant heating.” The WIV was a backwater that couldn’t afford a $1M Illumina sequencing until 2017-18, but it was 2013 technology. By the way, Illumina has been called the most interesting company you’ve ever heard of!
NIAID recently released a statement to a Montana newspaper:
“Recent online coverage has erroneously characterized a research study conducted in December 2016 at Rocky Mountain Laboratories and published in 2018 in the journal Viruses. In the study, RML researchers studied WIV-1, a coronavirus, in Egyptian fruit bats.
WIV-1 is a different virus than the SARS-CoV-2 virus involved with the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus used in these experiments was not shipped from China. Rather, it was generated using common laboratory techniques, based on genetic information that was publicly shared by Chinese scientists.
The research was conducted at the highest level of biosafety, BSL-4. As noted in the published manuscript, the virus did not replicate well in the bats.
Scientists at RML have research expertise in coronaviruses, beginning with the original SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2002-03 to MERS-CoV in 2012 and most recently SARS-CoV-2, generating information that is critical to understanding these viruses and developing appropriate interventions.”
The fact-checkers pounced on this false claim but solidified our point. Baric highlighted the 25% genomic difference between WIV1 (i.e. SARS1) and SARS2, but this was a design feature. Reference footnote #11 below.
“Throughout 2018,” Munster of Montana, and his innocent RML postdoc Michael Letko, were building a system to quickly test which bat viruses (RBD) could infect human cells. “In January 2019,” they started testing their system using “Chinese horseshoe bats,” and “by the end of 2019” they could produce results in a week. “In December” 2019, they were ready to submit results but SARS2 leaked. Munster, Shi, and/or Letko have since published four pre-pandemic papers (barely mention SARS2) and this type of pseudotype bat work was detailed in DARPA Defuse. In 2019, RML also had a copy of RaTG13’s kissing cousin called RaTG15. This leads to Fauci’s follow-up question: Why was the RaTG13 bat sample uploaded to an NIH server in 2018?
On a biological side note: Does Covid transmission in American deer (mice), which are abundantly found in the Rocky Mountains and the subject of transmissible vaccine research, now make sense?
Most lab leak proponents believe DARPA Defuse was written in Mandarin. They searched the coronavirus literature (in Holland and Minnesota) for a Chinese name on a Western paper. After nearly four years, they could not produce one piece of evidence showing the WIV could engineer SARS2. Wuhan was just a biological playground for Western virologists.
The WIV1 bat sample ‘shipped’ from China was collected with NIAID funds in 2012. The WIV1 sample is prominently featured in both DARPA Defuse and UNC research.
In both the R01 documents (above) and DARPA Defuse (below), Baric wanted a novel strain less than 25% different from SARS1 (i.e. WIV1).
Baric’s idea was to box in (i.e. bookend) the future evolution of a “pandemic potential” pathogen with a novel strain up to 25% different (SARS2 is 22% different). He has been looking for this novel 25% strain since 2015, so mission accomplished with SARS2!
A coronavirus expert, Baric said if the viruses were too distantly related to SARS — more than 25% different — they would not be able to make a hybrid that would infect human cells. “Not all SARS-like coronaviruses have the inherent potential to replicate in mammalian cells and replicate in human cells.”
Also, the RaTG13 spike, collected with NIAID funds in 2013, was exactly 24.6% different from SARS1. Baric obviously started playing with RaTG13 in 2018 (UGGUCGC and R/SVAS). If you think of RaTG13 sample logistics as similar to SHC014, where Shi shared the sample before publication, adding Shi to the upcoming author list, much more will make sense.
Fauci was not up until 3 AM covering for China, since we both objectively knew that everyone acted in their own self-interest. But we don’t need classified intel to solve this riddle, because it was an R&D accident involving only six people. Basically, both sides of the lab leak debate are now suffering from a conflict of interest. It was groupthink, that devolved into sunk costs.
By Jan 2020, the RaTG13 connection to the Mojiang mine was public knowledge. Ironically, it was published in the same Science article that Fauci was passing around to Robert Kadlec at 3 AM. If KGA wanted Fauci’s attention, he should have sent the 2018 Montana bat paper instead of the 2015 Nature paper!
Duke employees have given various reasons for Linfa’s Jan 10th resignation as director of Duke-s Emerging Infectious Disease program (he’s still a Duke professor). Still, it is a very well-known date in SARS2 history.
Duke-NUS in Singapore is a satellite campus of Durham, North Carolina. Linfa traveled to Durham twice a year, and the head of Duke-NUS renewed the charter in Durham every five years. In 2014, Linfa said he was “headhunted” into Duke’s Emerging Infectious Disease program, and Duke’s EID started with a “huge contribution” from Duke (the same program he resigned from on Jan 10, 2020).
Linfa’s latest bat adventure is a $100M project with an NSC contact, Phil Ferro, who appeared in Fauci’s 2020 calendar. In 2022, Linfa helped organize a conference in Utah and gave a joint keynote address with Fauci. Linfa was the spokesperson for Singapore for emerging infectious diseases. It was, therefore, safe to assume that Fauci, a longtime funder, colleague, and sponsor of Linfa’s December 2019 Singapore bat conference, would have known of this high-profile resignation on this high-profile date.
Most of us, including yourself, thought this $82M CREID project was awarded post-2020 outbreak (Ebright’s clever CREID pro quo). It could silence skeptics like Bob Garry of Tulane and Kristian Andersen of Scripps, who were bribed (Fauci’s word). But those two were probably added to the ongoing 2019 project and explained the odd 11 grants for the 10 coordinating CREID centers. Eddie Holmes of Australia and Yoshi Kawaoka of Wisconsin were also bidding on the same CREID project, just like everyone in 2019.
Again, the same contractors from the rejected DARPA Defuse bid showed up in the CREID grant, that NIAID awarded in 2019. If you pay close attention. Fauci claimed his $82M CREID grant started “about 1.5 years before” the 2020 pandemic. The CREID documents list Dani, but not Shi.
Fauci called the much debated R01 grant “pencil dust” because no one investigated the $82M CREID U01 to EcoHealth, UNC, and Duke-NUS. Just follow the money: out of the $3.7M NIAID grant to EcoHealth, only $120,000 per year was allocated to the WIV. The R01 grant was recently renewed with Duke, but without the WIV, because they were always irrelevant to the SARS2 origin story. The $82M CREID project was more than the DoD, DTRA, and DHS gave EcoHealth, but oddly, Fauci hardly talks about it. When Project Veritas (re)leaked the DARPA Defuse grant, Fauci was ready with a prepared denial.
The phrase “that grant” was doing the heavy lifting. Again, NIAID had already funded Baric’s furin cleavage site research and bat infection studies. Fauci’s aerosol specialist, Vincent Munster, was a “DARPA researcher,” and NIAID keeps an Integrated Research Facility in both Fort Detrick and RML.
Fauci and Munster were already vaccinating camels in Colorado, so never doubt their resolve to vaccinate bats in Wuhan. The infamous 070 NIAID vaccine patent lists every living “multi-cellular vertebrate organism” like “bats and camels.”
The controversial 2018-19 R01 test, no matter who or where it was performed, would have been a great justification for NIAID to fund a revised version of DARPA Defuse? Regarding the public record R01 grant (before Defuse leaked), Fauci technically did not lie about GoF in Wuhan because the risky R01 work was at UNC. Ebright testified the WIV wanted “to replicate (SHC014) in human airway cells and to exhibit 10,000-fold higher viral growth and higher lethality than the parental natural coronavirus in infection studies in mice engineered to display human receptors on airway cells.” Ebright referenced a 10,000 times higher viral load in mice lungs (again safe models per Baric) shown below in figure 6b “viral load in lung tissues.”
Yes, the safe mice were in Wuhan, but the “human airway cells” are called Primary human airway epithelial (HAE) cells. They are exclusive to UNC, and based on their select agent status, this work was performed in Chapel Hill.
What is HAE? Think of your human throat living in a UNC petri dish. It’s called in vitro work instead of in vivo for mice/bats. To my knowledge, only one other lab in London, UCL, has HAE and access to a lung department like UNC. A coronavirus lab needs a human lung transplant department “derived from lung donors with no preexisting chronic disease” (think young suicide victims). Baric has openly discussed HAE but privately admitted he didn’t know if the WIV had HAE (via a conversation with a journalist who interviewed Baric).
The R01 grant between EcoHealth, WIV, and UNC was confusing about who exactly does what. Not even Daszak or Christian Drosten knew: “I don't understand the details of this (WIV & UNC) scientific cooperation either.” Basically, Baric can download the sequences that Shi has publicly uploaded (WIV1, 4991, RaTG13) or share them via private email. He then used his exclusive reverse genetic system to create the virus in his UNC lab. For example: “We (UNC) thank Dr. Shi Zhengli of the WIV for access to bat CoV sequences and plasmid of WIV1-CoV spike protein.” In the contributions section from the infamous 2015 Nature paper, UNC “designed the infectious clone and recovered chimeric viruses,” but Shi only “provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids.”
And (UNC) has developed a reverse-genetics technique that allows you to synthesize those viruses from the genetic sequence alone?
Baric: Yes
Baric, leads one of the few labs in the world that can re-create coronaviruses just from their sequences.
Baric then grows that live Chinese virus in his HAE cells to see which samples to create ‘countermeasures’ against. Just four months later, after pointing this biological fact out to Ebright, he went on to lie in your hearing, but he now claims HAE can be ordered online. The WIV only had Vero cells, which immediately deleted the furin cleavage site.
All the R01 work that occurred in the WIV, using Baric’s hACE2 mice, was utterly safe since “SARS2 doesn’t grow in a mouse model.” Once you understand Baric’s dry humor, it is great!
So, is he making it more dangerous? "If you're a mouse, the answer is probably yes, or at least I was trying to," says Baric.
Baric says his hACE2 mice are safe because they do not sneeze, so the pathogens are never airborne (unlike bats or deer). The hACE2 mice did bite UNC technicians, but the pathogen never spread human-to-human and has never “sickened” a lab technician. UNC/WIV ‘humanized’ lab mice are not a transmission model for SARS2, which does not even infect lab mice, without Baric’s patented genetic modifications. For clarity, just replace Baric’s hACE2 mice with Munster’s deer mice. These little rocky mountain killers are a well-known transmission model for American virologists and have been kept at RML since 2016.
NIAID’s Oct 2021 letter to Congress (like Baric) emphasized the 1200 nucleotide (4%) difference between RaTG13 and SARS2, but this was a design feature in the DARPA Defuse documents. Baric wanted a bat sample like RaTG13 and Banal-52 to be less than 5% different than a consensus sequence like SARS2.
"This means that they 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. "They would then synthesize the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature but looks natural as it is the average of natural viruses.
"Then they put that RNA in a cell and recover the virus from it. This creates a virus that has never existed in nature, with a new 'backbone' that didn't exist in nature but is very, very similar as it's the average of natural backbones."
The 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.
Last year, 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 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% 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.
According to Baric’s colleagues, only UNC can create a live virus from a shared genome.
Everything Baric did with the WIV and proposed from 2000 to 2019 was safe. That furin cleavage site inside his humanized model was perfectly safe and not infectious.
Ask Kevin Esvelt to explain the difference between Baric’s DARPA Defuse proposal (safe but expensive transferrable vaccine technology) and Munster’s DARPA Preempt proposal (dangerous but cheap transmissible vaccine technology).
If you thought GoF was bad, study the self-spreading vaccine. A concerned German scientist has provided a great reference.
Why foreign bats? They are the new domestic lab rats that don’t have lawyers, randomized control trials, licensing, PETA protection, or FDA approvals like us humans. It takes 15-20 years for vaccine approval, but 2-5 years for animal vaccines. As you know, the NIH and Fauci were also obsessed with the animal model.
There’s an unwritten rule that in order to win a NIAID grant, you have to test on animals. “Almost all investigators are trained using animal research. If you don’t use that model you don’t get funding.”
“People like Fauci and Collins really believe in that animal model. It’s a huge impact having those two at the helm.” The two directors’ unquestioning commitment to animal testing sets the tone for science as a whole: thanks to them, it’s industry standard. “Careers are based on it,” said NYT whistleblower Jim Keen.
Flashback to part one:
Dani’s experiment is called targeted immune boosting using a synthesized bat virus. The initial concept had worked well in the New World ‘bats’ in the New World labs. Now, there was another in vivo experiment (Latin for “within the living”) for the Old World bats in this Old World lab.
The graphic above is the division of SARS2 labor. On the left are Shi and Daszak, who collect bat samples from Asia and ship them to the US. The middle section is Baric (in vitro HAE) and Munster (in vivo using Egyptian fruit bats). On the right, Dani and Linfa test the resulting bat vaccine in Wuhan (in vivo on wild-caught Chinese horseshoe bats).
The WIV (and other Chinese labs) have previously tried to keep a colony of live Chinese horseshoe bats. This means formal breeding and hand-raising of the fragile, tiny bats in captivity. The WIV even had patents for this concept based on the Atlanta CDC Egyptian fruit bat (EFB) colony. The weird idea was to raise virus-free bats, acclimated to human handling, for easier experimentation (i.e. vaccination).
But most scientists like Linfa claimed this tiny fragile Chinese bat was impossible to colonize. In a 2014 TWIV interview Linfa recalled his difficult experience trying to set up a Chinese horseshoe bat colony in an Australian BSL4 and called the feeding procedure a “puppet show.”
From the Defuse proposal, it is notable that Linfa and Dani of Duke were to “test targeted immune boosting” on “wild-caught captive” Rhinolophus (Chinese horseshoe) bats. This means that the WIV caught a wild bat in rural China and would bring it to the WIV in Wuhan. They can keep the live bats in captivity until euthanized for science (i.e. no need for a colony).
In 2017, EcoHealth, CSU, RML, and NIH wanted to import this type of Chinese bat, but the US CDC wouldn’t allow it. Therefore, the team (and vaccine) had to travel to Wuhan. The Atlanta CDC was studying EFB bats since they are the source of Marburg and Ebola. The WIV and Baric were studying Rhinolophus Sinicus since they are the source of SARS1. Baric’s scope of work in Defuse was to lead the “targeted immune boosting” (i.e. vaccination) on “wild-caught captive” bats in Wuhan.
DARPA Defuse was a beautiful division of labor led by Baric in 2013: “Sample sharing is critical for transfer between labs, because it allows groups with very different technologies and expertise to work together in a complimentary fashion, also allowing the research to move forward very fast. The NIH has put a lot of money behind the concept of U19 (CREID was a U01) to allow for collaboration and expertise to come together.”
The "progenitor” SARS2 strain from Wuhan was called WA1 (i.e. Lineage A), and it transmits efficiently in American mink, American deer, American deer mice, Syrian hamsters, and Egyptian fruit bats. That exclusive list of American lab animals is only found at RML before the 2019 outbreak in Wuhan.
I’ve approached a few virologists online and offline about this exclusive list of five unique animals, but few have responded, and most have remained silent. I've directly asked Dr Munster for the sixth animal (basically an alibi). If a virologist produced a sixth animal, I would happily retract everything. The beautiful thing about a transmission study is that we really don’t need labs to run them, since transmission occurs naturally.
Remember the sneezing Syrian hamsters in Hong Kong? It was a shipment from the Netherlands. The same peculiar species was discussed in a 2013 Montana newspaper.
The three sick ‘intel’ was an online rumor (“virtual walk-in”) reported by the same Iraq War WMD journalist. It was pushed by a lone China hawk seeking $50M, so no medical records exist. They couldn’t get the Oct or Nov 2019 date straight and one of the Chinese names was backward. Can we agree a Chinese intern didn’t engineer a ‘virus’ as contagious as “measles” that floats 60 feet through the air and seems to have found a new “wildlife reservoir” in American deer?
Please ask the authors of Viral, who wrote a book about RaTG13, why Shi even published RaTG13 on Jan 24, 2020? They will not answer, but let’s give Ebright credit for answering the question, who claimed Shi needed $20,000 for a lifetime of headaches. Well, Shi was only making $25.56 an hour!
To put it another way, do you honestly believe one of Shi’s postdocs, like Ben Hu at $10.95 an hour, inserted the furin cleavage site into a coronavirus, got sick, and then Shi’s next move was to publish the unknown RaTG13 sample, kickstarting the “engineering rumors” leading to the Feb 1 teleconference?
Dani claimed to be working on Ebola while in Wuhan, but out of her 100+ published papers, there are zero on Ebola. The latest Vanity Fair article about Ebola and Wuhan was obviously sourced by an NIH employee who visited the Wuhan BSL4 in the fall of 2017.
Nowhere in DARPA Defuse does it mention a BSL2 lab, just BSL3-4. Live bats and live viruses required a BSL4, but this was a false sense of security. Both Munster and Linfa always used a BSL4 for their live bat challenge studies. And do you honestly believe a ‘virus’ that floats 60 feet through air, leaked from a BSL2?
From 2013-19, both Baric (a bat virologist studying mice) and Munster (a flu virologist studying birds) evolved into bat immunologists studying live bats (e.g. Linfa and Dani). A “bat’s super-immunity may hold the answer to preventing the spread” of disease. Bats have a tank-like immune system which intrigued the US military.
Beyond infectious diseases, bats are a good model for studying cancer, diabetes, aging, cardiology, and autoimmunity. Linfa said, “A seven-gram bat can live for up to 43 years—that would be roughly equivalent to a human living 1,000 years.” Bats seem less prone to cancer, a possible fringe benefit of their finely-tuned ‘innate defense system’ since “modern medicine can learn a lot from bats.” He even involved cardiologists in the study of heart disease using bats!
If you study Linfa Wang, you will learn a lot about SARS2. There is a good reason why he didn’t hug his own daughter for two months after returning home from Wuhan. He often asked why bats? The idea of studying bats, a mammal like us humans, was his original idea. He was the original Batman and remains the preeminent bat immunologist.
Live bat colonies were needed to study ‘bat immunology’ and are now a popular accessory to a Western lab. RML is now building a $125M bat vivarium, and CSU is building a $7M bat facility with Chinese horseshoe breeding rooms (recent explanation here). In the future, the NIH won’t have to test their bat vaccines on foreign bats in foreign countries!
Oddly, both UNC’s BSL3 and Boston’s BSL4 are listed above in CREID, as having live bat colonies.
“Transmissible vaccine research will create an incentive to explore ways of engineering viral vectors to evade the immune response, as any pre-existing immunity to the vaccine vector will slow vaccine spread. While the authors propose that choosing a vector with a propensity for superinfection or little pre-existing immunity might be sufficient to circumvent this issue, the efficacy of these vectors could also be improved through immune evasion.”
What happens if you vaccinate against a vaccine? Did you suffer a reinfection? That was a design feature, not a bug, called superinfection a.k.a. “boosters.”
We have the NIAID grant to EcoHeath but don’t have the subgrants to UNC & Duke or the original proposal (like DARPA Defuse in 2018) to NIAID in 2019. Again, the CREID documents came to light via an Intercept FOIA but got lost in the GoF and DARPA Defuse news in the Fall of 2021. It’s an EcoHealth/UNC/Duke grant proposal written in 2019 that “seems prescient.” From 2018-19, there was a surge of interest in coronaviruses and furin cleavage sites, since US Academia was bidding on creating SARS2 via CREID. Baric’s lab recently published a monoclonal antibody paper, funded by CREID. It used a MERS sample (422) shared by Shi just one month before DARPA Defuse was due.
My 28 versus your book’s 971 footnotes
As you noted during your book tour, we do not need to search for “a needle in a haystack” or “classified research” since everything above was harvested from publicly available evidence. We were just looking in the wrong hemisphere.