The Daszak files he hid from Congress
An email timeline of Fauci's funding for DARPA Defuse
For years, Fauci defended EcoHealth’s Wuhan subgrant with one line: the studied viruses were “molecularly impossible” to have created SARS-CoV-2.
Peter Daszak of EcoHealth echoed Fauci:
Ralph Baric of UNC was asked under oath: As far as you know, the research that was outlined in this [DARPA Defuse] proposal has not been conducted through funding of other means? Baric answered, “Certainly not by my group. I don’t know what China did, and I don’t know what their grant funding was subsequent to this [Defuse] grant.”
New emails reveal that the Congressional testimony of Tony Fauci, Peter Daszak, and Ralph Baric was misleading. In 2018-19, Daszak and Baric resubmitted the rejected DARPA Defuse grant to Fauci’s NIAID. While the Wuhan subgrant included genomes resembling SARS-CoV-1, Baric’s subgrant held genomes closer to SARS-CoV-2. Those sequences were proposed for testing in Wuhan just months before the outbreak.
Daszak’s hidden EcoHealth files were inadvertently revealed in a FOIA release. An internal email included a link to EcoHealth’s public Google Drive, which DRASTIC investigator BILLY BOSTICKSON accessed to download documents marked “not to be shared with Congress.”
No one inside the U.S. government retrieved them, so we review them at the courtesy of DRASTIC. Gilles Demaneuf organized the massive files into a nice report:
https://bit.ly/EHAPublicFolderFindings
This treasure trove of hidden files and emails bookends DRASTIC’s publication of the DARPA Defuse bid in September 2021. Virologists were shocked at the documents, but claimed the 2018 grant wasn’t funded. Fauci claimed, “We have never seen that grant, and we have never funded that grant.” But the following files prove otherwise.
The emails show that Fauci’s bat vaccine expert, Vincent Munster, and Ralph Baric have strong ties to Daszak and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Munster’s name appeared in a detailed draft of DARPA Defuse. Baric basically acts as EcoHealth’s technical ghostwriter for NIAID and DARPA grants.
In 2016, during the NIAID R01 grant research in Wuhan, Baric helped them bypass Gain-of-Function (GoF) concerns, as their team worked with bat viruses, not human ones.
Shi Zhengli of WIV developed the WIV1 molecular clone (closer to SARS1 than SARS2), but Baric provided the GoF guidance.
In 2017, Daszak, Shi Zhengli, and Peng Zhou of WIV were invited to the office of Jim Gimlett near the Pentagon for a pre-DARPA Defuse meeting.
What did they discuss? Jim Gimlett of DARPA wanted to vaccinate the Chinese bats in Chinese caves.
Daszak got the DARPA hint and responded 10 days later, “interesting idea.”
Daszak’s DARPA proposal aligned with Shi’s goals when they visited Gimlett in June 2017. Shi had traced the 2003 origins of SARS-CoV-1 to Chinese horseshoe bats, which disrupted U.S. military operations in Asia. The worldwide focus of bat research is coordinated with funding from Washington, D.C.
Daszak, Shi, and Zhou also visited NIAID’s campus after their trip to DARPA. They presented NIAID with a PowerPoint suited for the same purpose, which was released through USRTK FOIA (page 154). Later, Fauci and NIAID pushed the (bad) idea of vaccinating bats with a contagious vaccine.
Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountain Lab and EcoHealth were close partners by 2017.
In early 2018, after the DARPA Preempt bat project was announced, Shi and Daszak then invited Baric to join their team. This was a mutually beneficial relationship between different people or groups. What did the Pentagon and NIAID want from China? The same thing as Baric: access to their Chinese bat samples and live bats to test bat vaccines. Baric called it “a marvelous opportunity.”
Daszak needed Baric’s “proven expertise in manipulating coronaviruses in the lab.” Baric needed live bats, so Munster was an original member of the team.
Munster was later replaced by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), who monitor American bats in US caves. However, Daszak and Munster’s relationship dates back to 2012:
An early draft of the DARPA Defuse bid was particularly revealing, as it outlined the eventual flowchart for creating SARS-CoV-2: Baric > Munster > Linfa Wang > Wuhan Institute of Virology. Virologists refer to it as the cold chain or <1mL tubes in the mail.
But Munster left the Defuse team with Ian Lipkin of Columbia to propose their own bid. It involved a self-spreading vaccine for Lassa in African rats, but was rejected by DARPA because it cost more than the Defuse $14 million bid. Munster and Rocky Mountain Lab eventually won two DARPA projects with Montana State University and UC Davis. Munster would later reunite with Baric in 2019.
Gilles Demaneuf of DRASTIC uploaded an early draft (March 12, 2018) of the Defuse bid for comparison with the previously released U.S. Right to Know FOIA (March 9, 2018). In three days, Baric added more details on the furin cleavage site and passaging. But what Daszak included in the final proposal was much more concise (due to space constraints).
https://draftable.com/compare/etsiSgBltbIi
In March 2018, Baric drafted the initial DARPA Defuse proposal, which was revealing. Baric’s draft was clear: we are adding a furin cleavage site, right at the S1/S2 border (R667) of a SARS-like virus.
Canonical means standard, so RXRR, not RRXR, but SARS-like viruses don’t have a furin cleavage site, so Baric had to research MERS-like sites. Baric later received approval to work on a non-canonical furin cleavage site (PRRVR in MERS-MA30).
Baric was clear: Shi would use safe pseudotypes (fake viruses), but he created unsafe chimeric viruses (a combination of two or more live viruses).
Baric’s pre SARS-CoV-2 genome is also evident in his first DARPA draft: HKU3-Smix. Baric said he would “provide” this novel chimera to Linfa Wang and Shi “for immune boosting of bats.”
Baric received his patent for HKU3-Smix in 2018. Daszak asked if Baric’s work would be considered proprietary or restricted.
Now we know why Baric uses the “proprietary” definition to hide his 2019 UNC documents from U.S.R.T.K. However, Shi Zhengli had little input in the Defuse bid.
Chinese input
When Daszak asked Shi for feedback, she replied in Mandarin, “You revise it first, and then we can send him the revised version together.” She only responded once to give a budget of personnel.
Linfa Wang’s protégé and fellow bat immunologist, Peng Zhou, did have insightful comments. Zhou wasn’t a fan of Baric’s spike immunization, foreshadowing that the “target might be humans but not bats.”
Peng Zhou ironically cited a Vincent Munster paper from the 2017 Colorado bat conference, which he attended with Dani Anderson, showing that bats have low antibody titers and delayed viral clearance. In other words, Baric’s bat vaccine wouldn’t work, but Linfa was optimistic:
Daszak changed dampening to “treatment” or “application” throughout, which appeared 20 times in the final Defuse document. It’s a fancy word for an expensive bat vaccine. Daszak bid $14.2 million.
Baric was impressed, but cross-reference his TLR and RLR bat vaccine research with COVID-19 symptoms.
Baric provided the GoF workaround: We are using bat viruses (SARSr-CoV), not human viruses (SARS-CoV).
The final DARPA Defuse proposal was submitted in March 2018:
(these use bat-SARSr-CoV backbones, not SARS-CoV, and are exempt from dual use and gain of function concerns)
These are BSL-3, not select agents nor subject to P3CO (they use bat SARSr-CoV backbones which are exempt)
DARPA required two parts in every bid: Technical Area 1, which involved bat sample collection led by Daszak, Shi, and others.
Technical Area 2 involved the development of countermeasures, including bat vaccines, by Baric, Linfa Wang, and Dani Anderson of Duke.
In June 2018, DARPA notified EcoHealth, UNC, WIV, and Duke that they lost the Defuse bid due to a lack of budget. EcoHealth told the group, “We will continue to look for other sources of funding to pursue this type of work.”
Gilles Demaneuf highlighted (and previously reported) that DARPA was not comfortable with Baric’s GoF language:
Linfa Wang and Dani Anderson of Duke were disappointed, but hoped to “work together in the future.”
Their bat vaccine delivery system, developed in collaboration with PARC and the USGS, was expensive, involving the spraying of bats in remote caves.
PARC (a Xerox company) was one of DARPA’s preferred vendors, outlined in #4 below.
Daszak noted that DARPA wanted to deliver a vaccine to the bats.
In August 2018, Jim Gimlett of DARPA reconsidered funding portions of Daszak’s bid.
Shi is #1 below, Duke is #3, and USGS/PARC is #4. However, notice that Baric’s #2 still remains an option, so DARPA was not deterred by his “SARSr-CoV immunogens and targeted immune boosting strategies.” After all, bat-related viruses labeled with a lowercase “r” are exempt from GoF concerns.
This isn’t new news, since Daszak gave the same testimony in 2023:
Committee: You said DARPA denied it. Have you ever submitted this proposal to any other funding agencies?
Daszak: Little was said about DARPA declining to fund this, including people who said they declined it because of biosecurity concerns. Absolutely not true. We had an interview with DARPA specifically so they could. inform us why it was rejected. I have the contemporaneous notes right here; never once did biosafety come up. It was too much money. They didn’t have enough money. It was too ambitious, which is standard grant -- agency language for too ambitious. So just a little miff around that..I forgot the question, though.
Committee: Did you ever submit this proposal to any other funding agency?
Daszak: No. However, DARPA did come back to us when the pandemic began. And, I mean, with all rational reason, they were very early in the pandemic, and they said, we are interested in funding parts of your proposal that didn’t get funded because now we have a coronavirus 20 percent different emerging in China from bats, just like your proposal was designed to help prevent. So we talked to them, and they suggested different avenues we could work with on this and different sections that could be done. And in the end, I didn’t follow up. It was too much work, and it didn’t involve us. It was more the lab work, all the (bat?) colony work to be done in a different country.
Amazingly, DARPA wanted to revisit Daszak’s Defuse proposal after the COVID-19 pandemic began! The post-pandemic work would be led by Linfa Wang of Duke-NUS in Singapore.
By 2018, Daszak had already found a funder for his DARPA Defuse proposal, so he essentially lied during testimony. This came up during Daszak’s 2023 testimony:
Committee: Did you ever submit it to any private organizations for funding?
Daszak: No, no.
Committee: To your knowledge, did UNC or the WIV ever conduct any aspect of the proposal?
Daszak: You will have to ask UNC and the WIV. I don’t know. I doubt it.
In October 2018, Daszak added Baric to their 2R01 grant renewal with NIAID.
https://drive.proton.me/urls/PNYKJ7EQRW#J4zBfEFwPwU7
The above email was just days after this Wuhan meeting:
After the October 22, 2018, meeting in Wuhan, Baric emailed Daszak.
Notice the subject line: Baric has turned their old DARPA Preempt GoF email (below) into a NIAID 2R01 grant renewal (above).
Daszak’s Mandarin-speaking assistant, Hongying Li, was explicit in her English:
They are adding Baric to the 2R01 Wuhan grant and “unpublished results from WIV”
Why do they need Baric? Because he is good at winning NIAID grants. And NIAID is comfortable with his GoF research.
Daszak’s draft used Shi’s 2018 progress report, focusing on her WIV1 genome experiments, which are closer to SARS-CoV-1.
However, Baric added the highlighted 2018 text below, referring to HKU3r-CoVs (aka HKU3-Smix or SARS-CoV-2).
Remember, Baric’s GoF workaround was “bat SARSr-CoV backbones which are exempt.” In DARPA Defuse, Baric proposed his primary human airway epithelial cells (HAE).
So Baric added the HAE cells to their 2R01 grant.
In other words, Baric has recycled the Technical Area 1 (TA1) DARPA Defuse text into the NIAID 2R01 grant renewal.
This was the grant that President Trump cancelled early in the pandemic.
Daszak later struck a deal with NIAID to replace the cancelled 2R01AI110964 grant with the R01AI63118 grant for similar work in Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
The unusual aspect of the 2018 2R01AI110964 grant renewal was the inclusion of Baric, a high-dollar scientist associated with a relatively low-dollar subgrant to Wuhan. It was so bizarre that it came up in Baric’s congressional 2024 testimony:
Committee: Did you have any conversations with Dr. Daszak regarding the termination?
Baric: I hadn’t received any of the money to do anything on that grant yet when the termination notice hit. So he called and told me that the grant had been terminated and that the EcoHealth lawyers were looking into it. So I knew about it. But in terms of how that would impact my program, that was a very small component on that grant.
Committee: When did you get added to the grant?
Baric: After the first round. So it would have been the second round, I don’t know exactly. I can’t remember.
Committee: So going into year 6?
Baric: It would have been going in -- if year 6 was around 2019 or 2020, that’s when I would have been a part of it. My role was to study a couple of the viruses that the Wuhan Institute of Virology found that they were willing to share with me. So I always viewed that as not number one or number two on the list, maybe number five or number six on the list.
The “shared” bat sample was likely RaTG13 since it fits Baric’s 25% profile. When the Covid committee asked Baric what was in his freezer, he sidestepped the question but added, “I usually look for sequences, and if I find something interesting, then I’ll pursue it.”
Did Daszak send RaTG13 from Shi to Baric for the new 2R01 grant?
Daszak testified to a “data dump” from the WIV in November 2018.
Below, Daszak wrote in his December 2018 call notes:
Just got the data (drip feeding of sequences as they become available, starting with the ones Ralph’s interested in first). Four sent to Ralph already, he is working with two of them (the other two might not insert properly into the reverse genetic approach).
During the DARPA Defuse bid in March 2018, Daszak’s assistant had asked Shi for unpublished coronavirus samples from her WIV database.
Shi replied yes, but her WIV database release would become part of a “big plan for our next paper.”
That paper was Latinne et al, as Daszak mentioned in the above testimony, or summarized by Gilles Demaneuf from DRASTIC below:
The so-called WIV “database dump” of 700 samples only contained Chinese sequences tied to EcoHealth, not the whole archive. There are still missing USAID/NIH-linked data, including the Laos sequences that forced Latinne et al. to retract and republish.
In 2016, EcoHealth and WIV held a meeting about the database. Shi wanted a “high-impact journal” for her treasure of bat samples. It worked because Latinne et al was published in Nature, but ironically during the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://drive.proton.me/urls/E5WC62NN10#oPailjOOh5lO
One of those 700 sequences was RaTG13, collected with NIAID’s R01AI110964 funding in 2013. Back then, it was called 4991, but Shi renamed it RaTG13 and partially uploaded the sequence to the NCBI database in 2018.
Why wait so long to sequence RaTG13? Shi couldn’t afford a $1 million Illumina sequencing system until 2018. Shi said, “I would like to emphasize that we have only the [RaTG13] genome sequence and didn’t isolate this virus.” Baric was the team member who could resurrect a virus like RaTG13, using his reverse genetic system.
In 2013, something similar happened with the SHC014 bat sample. Shi couldn’t isolate it, so she sent it to Baric, who testified:
We had access to the spike proteins of this virus, called SHC014, that was provided by Zhengli Shi before she published it, which was generous. Most scientists would not do that. Later, she sent the plasmid on filter paper and coding the spike sequence of that virus as well.
Risky research at UNC
Regarding the 2019 2R01 NIAID grant, Baric testified:
My role was to study a couple of the viruses that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had found that they were willing to share with me. So I always viewed that as not number one or number two on the list, maybe number five or number six on the list.
And Baric ensured that all high-risk research would be conducted in North Carolina, rather than in Wuhan.
Daszak responded:
Baric added his select agent workaround; we are using bat viruses (SARSr-CoV), not human viruses (SARS-CoV).
HKU3r-CoV, with 25% spike divergence from SARS-CoV-1, will become SARS-CoV-2, with a 24.7% spike divergence.
RML and EcoHealth
Vincent Munster and Daszak remain close comrades throughout this timeline.
Munster used Daszak as a reference for seeking NIAID tenure (Senior Scientist RML position).
During Daszak’s 2023 testimony, he claimed not to have resubmitted the DARPA Defuse bid, but he split it up and resubmitted the bid to Fauci’s NIAID.
Technical Area 1 focused on bat sample collection, which later became NIAID 2R01. Additionally, Technical Area 2 of Defuse developed a bat vaccine, which became a NIAID U01 grant.
In June 2019, Daszak and Baric recycled the Technical Area 2 (TA2) DARPA Defuse text into the U01 NIAID grant:
Baric then removed Munster’s Rocky Mountain Lab and replaced it with Boston’s BSL4 lab called the NEIDL.
Baric probably tried to appeal to a broader group of reviewers, but Rocky Mountain Lab remained in the final U01 CREID grant.
Daszak divied up the U01 NIAID bid tasks. Linfa Wang, Dani Anderson, Amy Sims, and Ralph Baric were the primary scientists from TA2 in DARPA Defuse:
During the U01 CREID grant bid, Daszak informed Dani that he was ill due to his trip to Africa.
Dani jokingly replied:
Dani alludes to their recycling of the DARPA Defuse bid in June 2019.
Dani edits for Linfa Wang, and alongside Baric, just days before entering the Wuhan BSL-4:
Dani enters the Wuhan BSL4 in July 2019:
Daszak later informed us what Dani was working on:
Which was a continuation of her DARPA Defuse duties:
In September 2019, Baric celebrated the official announcement of the 2R01 grant (aka TA1 from DARPA Defuse).
Unlike the U01 grant, which includes Dani’s BSL4, this 2R01 grant does include Shi’s BSL2.
Previously released emails from Baric show a 2R01 meeting (aka TA1 DARPA Defuse) with Wuhan in October 2019:
Daszak’s December 2019 calendar shows a NIAID coronavirus call with Baric, Shi, Linfa Wang, etc.
Linfa Wang visited the Wuhan BSL4 in the last week of November 2019:
COVID-19 emerges
On New Year’s Eve, Daszak sends an email to Baric, Dani, and Linfa:
On January 23, 2020, Shi published RaTG13, exposing the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site (PRRAR).
That same day, Munster emails Daszak about their SARS-CoV-2 paper, which omitted the furin cleavage site.
Daszak listed Munster as a potential co-signer of the Lancet letter, but he doesn’t sign, nor do Baric or Linfa Wang.
Baric approves of the “powerful statement” in the Lancet letter condemning lab leak conspiracy theories:
Baric also requested an update on their U01 CREID grant; previously known as EIDRC. Daszak said the award was imminent.
Ironically, Baric’s coronavirus colleague at Ohio State University, Linda Saif, notices Baric didn’t sign the Lancet letter.
Daszak doesn’t tell her why:
Daszak previously told Baric via Linfa Wang, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration.”
That collaboration involved resubmitting the DARPA Defuse bid under two NIAID grants.
DARPA Defuse leaks
On September 6, 2021, The Intercept sued NIAID for the release of the NIAID 2R01 and U01 grants, totaling $10.2 million for EcoHealth, WIV, UNC, and Duke. Major Joseph Murphy read the NIAID documents and then leaked the DARPA Defuse bid to DRASTIC.
On September 15, 2021, a reporter tipped off Daszak that DARPA Defuse was about to be published. Daszak appeared caught off guard by Baric’s furin cleavage site plans. He forwarded the paragraph below to Baric, who replied that their bid “allows direct linkage of looking for furin cleavage sites to manipulating cleavage sites with intervening stuff on other cleavage sites missing.”
Due to NIAID space constraints, the furin cleavage site reference from DARPA Defuse (above) was cut from the final U01AI151797 CREID bid drafted by Baric in June 2019 (below). Otherwise, Linfa Wang, Dani Anderson, Daszak, and Baric have recycled text from the TA2 DARPA Defuse text into the NIAID U01 grant (e.g., batified mice, FLIRT, Mojiang mineshaft, UNC as a sample hub, live bats, etc).
After DRASTIC exposed the DARPA Defuse proposal, Linfa Wang identified Baric as the author and outlined the division of labor:
We each had a part. The WIV was the field research. I was to do the bat immunology, and UNC is doing the virology, so that it’s pretty obvious, right?
Linfa Wang resigned as Duke’s EID director on January 10, 2020—the very day the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published. Meanwhile, Baric, Daszak, and Fauci continued to deny their role. In reality, Baric and Daszak had recycled their Defuse bid through Fauci’s NIAID, proposing genomes that were “molecularly possible” to create SARS-CoV-2.
Thank you for your tireless hard work digging into this horror show.
This was an astonishing document dump, both in terms of the contents and how it become public.