Timeline for the creation & cover-up of Covid
From HIV to H5N1 & how SARS1 led to SARS2
1983
The NYT warned ''nonsexual, non-blood-borne transmission is possible and the scope of the (HIV) syndrome may be enormous.” Another 1983 headline “Household contact may transmit AIDS,” quoted from a 43-year doctor at NIAID: Anthony Fauci.
1984
Fauci retracted his false claim and was named director of NIAID, but a decades-long obsession with aerosolized transmission studies would continue under his reign.
Fauci quickly learned how to work the hallways of Washington D.C. by “busting the budget” under his first of many Presidents: Ronald Reagan.
1986-89
Scientific rumors are circulating in the late 1980’s about the origins of AIDS.
Rocky Mountain Lab started experimenting with American mink.
Dr Linfa Wang received his PhD in biochemistry from University of California-Davis.
Dr Ralph Baric was a post-doc at the University of Southern California, studying under the ‘Father of the Coronavirus’ Michael Lai.
Fauci was asked to head the NIH, not just NIAID, but he wanted to run both so was turned down by President Bush. His soon-to-be wife described him as a “demanding boss.”
1992
The Origin of AIDS was published in Rolling Stone, speculating HIV was caused by a mass US lab vaccination program in the Congo during late 1950’s.
1995
Dr Fauci was profiled in the NYT as "running his NIAID institute with an iron fist."
Dr Baric, now at UNC, published his first coronavirus paper about the “species barrier.”
Dr Wang studied the Hendra virus outbreak in Australian horses, which he later traced to local bats.
Dr Shi Zhengli was a research scientist at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and about to start her PhD in France. She studied Chinese shrimps, crabs, prawns, crayfish, and diseases like white spot syndrome that affect them.
Both Danielle Anderson of Australia and Vincent Munster of the Netherlands, are still in high school.
1997
Too Radical for NIH? Try DARPA. The biodefense pendulum was under control of the US military.
2000
The River was published bringing attention to the origin of AIDS. ''The most compelling open-and-shut case of fact will be if the (vaccine) tissue is chimp,'' said Dr. Fauci. ''If there is chimp DNA in the vaccine, then, oops!''
The oral polio vaccine, called the CHAT strain, was supported by NIH grant E-1799.
Tulane virologist Bob Garry (a colorful Covid character) had a “security clearance to discuss the HIV outbreak.”
2001
Dani was a research technician at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Fauci was in New York City during 9/11 terrorist attacks.
One week before 9/11, there were Senate hearings on “The Threat of Bioterrorism and the Spread of Infectious Diseases.”
Three months before 9/11, a Dark Winter exercise simulated a smallpox attack.
One week after 9/11, the aerosolized Anthrax mailings occurred. The investigation was code-named Amerithrax by the FBI, which led to a US Army scientist named Bruce Ivan in Fort Detrick.
Fauci’s staff at NIH funded Ivins’s vaccine laboratory and gave $100 million for his VaxGen (patents) to accelerate vaccine production. (The NIH’s $878 million contract with VaxGen, however, was quietly canceled in 2006; Ivins, who was never charged, killed himself in 2008.)
Three months after 9/11, Fauci published Bioterrorism: A clear and present danger. He was worried about an upcoming wave of regulation, which needed a “correct balance between academic freedom and public safety.”
The first transmissible vaccine trials occurred in rabbits, by Spanish researchers on a Mediterranean island.
2002
Fauci wrote NIAID Strategic Plan for Biodefense Research which discussed a laundry list of needed vaccines and the need for more BSL4 labs.
The FDA established the “Animal Rule” for regulatory approval of vaccines and therapeutics.
Fauci received top-secret clearance and even discussed Saddam Hussein’s WMD
Fauci wrote Bioterrorism on the Home Front and consulted “home bioweaponers” at a follow-up presentation at Georgetown. He would later retire to Georgetown after two decades as the Czar of America’s biodefense.
2003
After the events of 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax mailings, biodefense became an important element of the NIAID mission. In 2003, NIAID was assigned lead responsibility within HHS and NIH for civilian biodefense research with a focus on research and early development of medical countermeasures against terrorist threats from infectious diseases and radiation exposure.
Fauci wrote Biodefence on the research agenda and “with this ($1.75B NIAID) largesse come enormous responsibilities.” A Rutgers professors admitted “it's the easiest way to bring $100 million to your university, perhaps the only way.''
In 2003, a conference for nidovirales (the taxonomic order under which coronaviruses fall) was nearly cancelled, due to lack of interest. Then SARS emerged, leaping from bats to civets to people. The conference sold out.
SARS outbreak from China reached Toronto, within 500 miles of Washington D.C., before burning out by the summer.
In April, US Military bases in Asia were locked down and Fauci testified twice in-front of Congress regarding SARS outbreak (19:00). He noted the difficulty in growing SARS in Vero cells and marveled at reverse genetics (30:20). Fauci followed all that up with a C-SPAN TV appearance.
The Financial Times asked: Can this man cure SARS?
In June, Fauci held a one-hour presentation on SARS. That same month Baric’s mentor at USC, Michael Lai, moved back to Taiwan to combat SARS.
Baric, now at UNC, was without a BSL3 so he relocated to Fort Detrick creating the first infectious clone (lab created copy) of SARS.
Forty years of coronavirus research later, only Baric’s lab had created a full length (30,000 nucleotide) synthetic genome before 2020.
In August, NIAID wrote a progress report for building new BSL4 facilities in Montana and Fort Detrick, along with “immune-evasion strategies.”
Why Are Biodefense And Related Programs a Priority for NIAID?
In September, SARS escaped from a Singapore BSL3 lab.
In October, Baric published a paper on the “seamless ligation of sequence fragments” which hide the scars of an engineered virus. Back in Wuhan, Shi was still plucking prawn’s from the Yangtze river.
In December, NIAID started the $66.5M upgrade process of a new BSL4 facility on their satellite campus in Montana, called Rocky Mountain Lab.
In December, SARS leaked from a BSL4 lab in Taiwan.
The NSA (via “medical SIGINT”) started looking for “SARS in China.”
In 2021 after a contentious hearing, Fauci claimed it would have been “irresponsible” to not collaborate with China on SARS, saying “you gotta go where the action is!”
2004
In April, SARS escaped from a Beijing lab twice.
In July, President Bush signed Project Bioshield, with good friends Dick Cheney and Fauci looking on.
Cheney’s response was to transfer this research from the Department of Defense to the National Institutes of Health, specifically to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). By about 2004, this transfer was complete, and NIAID had been transformed into an arm of the defense sector. This made the NIAID Director Anthony Fauci a major player.
Fauci now had a virtual carte blanche to not merely approve but design and run the kind of research projects he sought — and could do so with no oversight structure above him.
In December, Fauci received a “permanent pay adjustment” for his biodefense research activities “such as SARS.”
60 Minutes news traveled to Malaysia, with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth, who was funded by NIAID.
2005
700 scientists signed a letter protesting the NIAID shift to "prioritize research of high biodefense but low public-health significance."
Duke University created Duke-NUS in Singapore, with a “huge contribution” and a new ABLS3 lab, but Duke may regret not building a BSL4 for Linfa’s future live bat research.
UNC built a new BSL3+ lab just for Baric and his coronavirus studies, but UNC may regret not building an animal lab for his future live bat research. UNC also developed primary human airway epithelial (HAE) cells from “organ donors” at their cystic fibrosis lung transplant department.
NC State (Baric’s alma mater) filed a patent for insertion of furin cleavage site.
Daszak said he was looking for Nipah in China but instead they found SARS. Linfa, Shi and Daszak published their first paper linking SARS to local Chinese horseshoe bats. Daszak discussed this 2005 paper in a 2020 TWiV podcast and went on to say:
There is a lot of talk about bats in the (Wuhan) lab but bats are not easy to work with. There are very few groups that have (a live) colony of bats to work on. And usually they are not the (Chinese horseshoe) bats that carry SARS related coronaviruses because they are really hard to keep in captivity.
Shi traveled to Linfa’s lab in Australia where she met Dani.
Linfa, while in Australia, later echoed what Daszak said, about how hard it is to keep tiny Chinese horseshoe bats alive in BSL4 lab.
2006
Shi returned to Australia as a visiting scientist at CSIRO’s BSL4.
Baric filed a patent for coronavirus animal vaccines that can “improve or otherwise modulate an immune response in a subject without deleterious effect on the subject.”
The University of Montana inserted a furin cleavage site into a bovine coronavirus spike (not full 30,000 nucleotide genome) at the exact same spot (R667) as SARS2.
2007
Baric published a creepy paper called Synthetic Viral Genomics. It basically declared that he was the only person on the planet, who could create a full 30,000 nucleotide coronavirus genome, but would do it for altruistic purposes e.g. animal vaccines.
Linfa was named to Scientific Advisory Board at Wuhan Institute of Virology and received funding from NIAID for his bat disease research.
Shi’s career was transitioning from prawns to bats because of her collaboration with Linfa. She would become China’s Bat Woman and he was NIAID’s Batman.
Dani moved from Australia’s CSIRO to Canada for three years as research scientist.
2008
UNC created the first, and only, “consensus sequence” coronavirus.
NIAID showed interest in live attenuated vaccines for coronaviruses.
Baric discovered that K31 in the ACE2 receptor was critical for coronavirus binding. A UNC postdoc then published a bovine (e.g. deer) coronavirus paper. In 2020, K31 will become a “hot spot” for deer and human ACE2.
2009
The AIDS origin debate was put to down by a Fauci funded lieutenant, Michael Worobey, who later helped with SARS2. He allegedly called his own phylogenetic work a “dog’s dinner.”
American scientists inserted a furin cleavage site at the same spot as SARS2. The same scientist discovered that (Shi’s) Vero cells would delete the SARS2 furin cleavage site.
Furin was seen as cutting edge Western biotechnology, fascinating scientists for its ability to “measure once, cut twice.”
Vincent Munster left Erasmus in the Netherlands and moved to RML in Montana. He studied under the controversial Ron Fouchier and they had recently published an insertion of a furin cleavage site into an influenza virus. But Munster, in early 2020, somehow missed the furin cleavage site in SARS2?
Baric gave his “tinker toys” presentation in Hong Kong, basically bragging he was the only person on the planet who can assemble a fully synthetic 30,000 nucleotide bat coronavirus.
Baric’s idea was to “rewire” a “consensus sequence” from many different bat viruses in the Southeast Asian region. Baric later used this language in a 2018 DARPA Defuse proposal.
The WHO source added in 2021: "If SARS-CoV-2 comes from an artificial consensus sequence composed of genomes with more than 95 per cent 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.
Fauci said new video conferencing technology rendered the distance between Bethesda, Maryland, and RML almost immaterial. The digital age has made it seem as if RML is just around the corner from his Bethesda NIAID campus.
2010
Cambodian bat samples, RShSTT182 & 200 with 92.6% identity to SARS2, were collected by USAID Predict, but neither were published until 2021.
French scientists visited the WIV but were later replaced by the Americans; for scientific or intelligence purposes? "The United States knows how to do both very well."
Shi proved a Laboratory-Acquired Infection (LAI) at ‘College A’ in Southern China because of a lack of animal infections outside the facility; therefore, evidence that the virus origins had occurred within the lab. Shi tested 6 wild field rats outside the College A lab rat vendor; Center for Laboratory Animals (CLA) and all negative. Shi provided biological proof of lab leak (College A) and lab origin (CLA). Something similar would happen a decade later.
2011
Fauci was profiled in NYT as the “J. Edgar Hoover of biology.” He headlined a promo video for the new BSL4 animal facility at RML.
RML published its first paper on a ‘disseminating’ Ebola vaccine for monkeys in Africa. The main author continued his self spreading vaccine work (in deer mice) and would become a co-PI on the 2018 DARPA project awarded to RML.
During a Washington D.C. conference, Daszak commented on the “huge amount of NIH money that goes to diseases that don’t kill many people.”
Fauci wrote a pro gain-of-function op-ed in Washington Post titled: A flu virus risk worth taking. He recently defended the risk-benefit WP article since “understanding the biology of virus transmission has implication for outbreak prevention.”
2012
In January, a NYT headlined: An Engineered Doomsday. It referenced the aerosolized H5N1 flu paper that Munster and Fouchier worked on in the Netherlands. Fauci defended the aerosolized ferret paper, which he funded, in a March conference.
Ironically US biosecurity hawks kept Fauci from publishing Fouchier’s ferret aerosol procedures, therefore keeping Fouchier and Munster’s method ‘obscure.’
SARS was added to the select agent list, which cost $500,000, giving UNC a de facto monopoly on its research.
Fauci defended Dual-Use Research of concern in Congress and admitted only “a very small amount” of DURC research is funded by Department of Defense, but “most goes through NIH.”
In April, six Chinese men in the Mojiang mine became sick and three eventually died. The incident was discussed in Western news and linked to rats, not bats. A USAID Predict bat collection project with EcoHealth was working in the rural Chinese area at the same time and location. In 2019, Fauci’s upcoming CREID project referenced the “death of three mineworkers.”
MERS outbreak from camels in the Middle East reached Indiana, Korea and China. Around that same time interest in bat viruses increased due to the decreasing cost of next generation sequencing (NGS) technology and increased bat cave sampling. Virologists rightly or wrongly (even comically) eventually blamed all these global events on bats.
Linfa joined Duke in Singapore and Dani was a visiting scientist at Duke’s biolab in Durham, North Carolina.
Two campers at Yosemite National Park in California die from Hantavirus, which was transmitted via aerosol from American deer mice. BSL-4 transmission studies followed.
2013
A Chinese pig coronavirus was blamed on local bats, and spread to America via pig feed. From Dani’s favorite movie called Contagion: “somewhere in the world the wrong pig met up with the wrong bat.”
A research paper was published about ‘Aerosol Transmission of Chronic Wasting Disease in White-Tailed Deer’
Shi and Linfa find SARS1 virus in rural Chinese horseshoe bats. Shi’s lab aligned the WIV1 genome using MS-DOS software called GenDoc.
Two teams visited Mojiang; one from Hong Kong and another from Wuhan. Shi’s lab collected RaTG13 (hence the name in 2013) with NIAID funding. Shi originally called the sample 4991 but renamed it to RaTG13 in 2018. “Ra” stood for the Chinese horseshoe bat species, Rhinolophus affinis and “TG” stood for the place, Tongguan.
But one sample - from a single fecal sample labeled “4991”- had a very distinct genomic signature. “Why are you so different?” Shi wondered, but eventually she put the sample back in the freezer. Her work was to look for bat viruses that could potentially cause SARS-like epidemics, and none of the Mojiang sequences appeared to be “directly relevant to our inquiry,” she told me. “So they were not the focus of our research.”
In June, Fauci hosted a five hour coronavirus meeting in Washington D.C. involving Baric, Daszak, Munster and others. They debated how to infect American lab bats with a foreign disease like SARS and MERS (3:31:45). Munster was trying to “start a bat colony at RML” for three years (4:22:00) “but it is really not moving fast.”
Baric traveled to Wuhan to meet with Shi, who shared the unpublished SHC014 sequence with Baric (something similar probably happened in 2018 with RaTG13).
2014
The US Government biodefense budget was now $7B with most of it controlled by Fauci.
In July, the NSABB Gain-of-Function review board was purged of any dissent. Among them was Paul Keim, who identified the US Army scientist behind Anthrax attacks. The current NIH director joked about the ‘purge’ with Francis Collins and Fauci (pg 33).
An Ebola outbreak in Liberia killed a traveling man in Dallas which caught the attention of Fauci. There were Senate hearings (58:00) about NIAID’s “dual mandate” (1:05:00). Fauci invoked his experience from 9/11 and Anthrax (30:00) and later celebrated himself treating “Nurse Number One.”
Munster traveled to Liberia and the idea for Fauci’s 2019 CREID project was born:
This $82 million grant was in the works years before Predict was eliminated, and it was created in response to the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak and the 2016 Zika epidemic, said Dr. Fauci. “Yes, it’s like (USAID) Predict, but it wasn’t the cancellation of Predict (in 2020) that inspired it.”
CREID and Munster harvested bat samples from around the globe:
Instead of sending viral samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was not a partner on this project, the scientists will sent the collected samples, including relatives of the Hendra virus and the Nipah virus, to Boston and UNC at Chapel Hill, both of which operate the highest-level biosafety labs.
CBS news later profiled the UC Davis team working on Fauci’s CREID project as they were catching Egyptian Fruit bats in Africa bat caves.
The Real Batman: Linfa Wang and Vincent Munster met at a Fort Collins, Colorado bat conference. Linfa then shared Old World bat cells with Munster in Montana and both are on the editorial board of ‘One Health Outlook’
In October, there was a “pause” on Gain-of-Function research in a “mammalian model” because of the H5N1 ferret controversy. Baric explained his safe mice were considered a “mammalian” model in a Gain of Function (GoF) ban or regulation.
When it comes to SARS and MERS, there are key differences between people and mice. "No. 1, mice don't sneeze," says Baric, so they don't transmit these diseases through the air. And he says the process of adapting these viruses to mice actually makes the germs less able to infect human cells. "They're safer," says Baric.
Baric wrote “no one has reported or attempted to develop a SARS transmission model.” Baric later called the mammalian transmission model (of Fouchier & Munster that used ferrets) “too edgy for him.”
2015
In October, Baric and Shi traveled to Beijing to give a presentation on MERS.
In November, Baric published a very controversial paper showing he was able to recreate (using reverse genetics) SHC014 in his UNC lab and it could infect human cells. The UNC press release: New SARS-like virus can jump directly from bats to humans, no treatment available! Baric deleted 2,000 words from the controversial 2015 paper and never published a genome sequence until May 2020, keeping UNC’s method “obscure.” Baric later explained why Shi was co-author on that controversial paper, because she shared the SCH014 sequence before publication, other that that she contributed 0 to the research.
Baric and TWiV followed up with “it’s not SARS 2.0” podcast, but Baric was already on to new things: furin cleavage sites (13:30).
Baric said he was looking for a Chinese bat sample no “more than 25 percent different” to SARS1. The 4991 sample, collected by Shi in 2013, had a spike that was exactly 24.6% off SARS1. SARS2 will be 22% different that SARS1.
Six accidents are reported from 2015-20 at Ralph Baric’s UNC lab from humanized mice but no researchers were “sickened.”
2016
In January, Fauci and Munster gave a joint presentation on transmission studies of Ebola (monkeys) and MERS (camels). Munster purchased three camels using Fauci’s (NIAID) credit card. Munster and Fauci were vaccinating camels in Colorado, so never doubt their resolve to vaccinate bats in Wuhan.
In March, Shi partially uploaded RaTG13 (aka 4991) to NIH database.
Baric re-published Shi’s WIV1 sequence and claimed it was “poised for human emergence.” For this 2016 paper, Shi was not listed as a co-author (unlike 2015 paper) because it was a previously published sequence.
In March, Fauci headlined a Washington D.C. cocktail event for EcoHealth.
In July, an NIH scientist based in Beijing, visited Shi in Wuhan and emailed to D.C. that “we are talking about animal human close contact in densely populated city." At the same time, Zhiming the director of the WIV emailed NIAID asking for advice on disinfectants.
NIH started a renewed interest in transmissible vaccines with the first of many articles.
Dani moved to Wuhan off and on until November 2019, where she became known as the last-and only-foreign scientist in Wuhan.
January 2017
An NIH contractor gave a presentation on transmissible vaccines using Egyptian fruit bats (source of Ebola) and deer mice (hantavirus) as transmission model. SARS2 transmits efficiently in Egyptian fruit bats and deer mice.
February 2017
During a TWiV podcast, Munster said his next project was to “start some bat coronavirus infections” with the new bat colony in the RML lab.
Munster later traveled to Congo to collect Ebola bat samples and ship to Montana.
April 2017
Fauci and Daszak appeared onstage together at a virus conference. Fauci gave a presentation on the threat of SARS1 and briefing the incoming administration.
May 2017
Baric published his latest cDNA reverse genetic system for “seamless assembly” of 30,000 nucleotide bat coronaviruses. It referenced a restriction site (BsaXI) that was later found in SARS2.
June 2017
An obscure US Navy department, based in Singapore, collected what will become the closest known progenitor to SARS2, called Laos Banal.
July 2017
Contagious vaccines are in the news, asking “How do you go out there and vaccinate a bunch of deer mice against Hantavirus by hand?” Rocky Mountain Lab started an “in-house deer mouse colony.”
August 2017
EcoHealth, Schountz and Vincent Munster proposed to NIAID the establishment of a live bat colony in the US. “We will import 36 pregnant female bats, and 4 males - all seronegative for Nipah virus.”
October 2017
Daszak, Shi and Linfa flew into Washington D.C. for a virus conference with Fauci as keynote speaker.
A newly identified coronavirus killed 25,000 Chinese piglets. Daszak and Fauci corresponded via email about their new SADS pig paper, which sourced the SADS outbreak to the same Chinese bats that caused SARS1. Ralph Baric later claimed humans were at risk.
November 2017
Shi published a bat paper that was later referenced as evidence for WIV creating SARS2, but it used Vero cells and humanized mice, which SARS2 does not infect.
December 2017
One week before Christmas, while everyone was leaving Washington D.C., Fauci and NIH lifted the “pause” on Gain of Function research. The head of HHS had recently resigned and his replacement was not sworn until January 2018.
As established in October 2014, the policy had required NIH to forward for the committee’s review experiments expected to generate certain flu and coronaviruses that would be “transmissible among mammals” and that might accidentally cause human infections. But in December 2017, the policy was narrowed to cover only altered pathogens “likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations.”
The sweeping reference to mammals was eliminated. A review by the committee was not required, the policy said, unless the pathogen to be constructed is “reasonably judged” by NIH “to be a credible source of a potential future human pandemic.”
In written responses to The Post, NIH and HHS media representatives said the policy changes were based on an extensive process that took into account comments from government experts and others.
As to why the reference to mammals was deleted, NIH said the revised policy identified “the subset of research” that could pose the greatest pandemic risk for humans. Francis Collins, pressed on why the change was made, said that he was “not able to fully reconstruct” the details but added that agency staffers evaluate the research proposals “from the most sophisticated perspective.”
February 2018
Baric asked Shi (via a colleague) for Chinese bat samples, and she complied.
Wuhan Institute of Virology couldn’t afford a used 2013 Illumina sequencing machine until 2017-18. The $1M Illumina units are the most important technology in a Western virology lab. For comparison, Baric’s lab used the top of line NovaSeq 6000 system.
March 2018
Fauci’s subcontractors (EcoHealth, Duke, UNC, WIV) are bidding on a DARPA project to prevent zoonotic disease spillover via animal vaccines.
April 2018
A high level NIAID vaccine meeting in Wuhan included scientists from RML. The extravagant guy wearing shorts, just one month earlier, complained about the Gain-of-Function moratorium. “Tony (Fauci) did a really good job absorbing the blows and in the end prevailing.” Two Gain-of-Function projects were renewed without public debate.
May 2018
DARPA decided they “couldn’t afford” Daszak, Linfa and Baric’s $14M proposal, so they chose the 25% cheaper self spreading vaccine technology, developed by Vincent Munster at RML.
Samples taken from the bats at the study locations will be sent to Rocky Mountain Labs, the National Institutes of Health facility in Hamilton, Montana, that is specially equipped to study emerging pathogens. Researchers there will inventory the viruses, document their genetic makeup and use controlled cell culture experiments to assess their ability to infect humans.
June 2018
Shi uploaded bits and pieces of RaTG13 to the NIH server (released in 2022). RaTG13’s kissing cousin, RaTG15, was apparently ready to be published in early 2020 by RML.
Three of the authors from the infamous ‘Proximal Origins’ published a paper criticizing Gain-of-Function.
July 2018
UNC published RRAR/SVAS sequence, which later showed up in SARS2 as the infamous furin cleavage site.
Munster in Montana, who won DARPA Preempt, was working on the “feasibility and scalability of the (self-disseminating) vaccine in (Egyptian fruit) bats.”
August 2018
Dani traveled to Duke’s hospital in Kenya for the first of two trips, to sample MERS in local camels.
September 2018 to December 2019
DRASTIC members wrote two detailed reports showing interest in “papers related to SARS2 and/or SARS more generally, previous research, cited papers, furin cleavage sites, TMPRSS2, research on mice, porcine coronavirus, etc.”
October 2018
Fauci let everyone know that SARS was still on his mind.
A Wuhan meeting with Baric, Daszak, Linfa, Shi and Dani (2nd row & 3 to right of Shi).
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.” He referenced the “lethal human sequences” of the Mojiang mine in China.
December 2018
The first disease listed on the first page of the President’s Biodefense Strategy was SARS.
Fauci debated which virus to make transmissible via upper respiratory route “for the betterment of society."
He later admitted some gain-of-gunction studies were funded for the “protection of public health and national security.” The same 2018 conference was attended by Daszak and an FBI WMD specialist.
January 2019
Baric traveled to China for a presentation on “predictive modeling” and a “shopping list of virulence determinants.” RML was studying transmission of chronic wasting disease in American deer.
Fauci bragged his NIAID budget, which started out at $300M in 1984 and was now over $5B, “so if I was a Wall Street mogul, I would get some sort of golden parachute…”
April 2019
Shi published a paper that mentioned RaTG13 (aka 4991).
Baric’s longtime UNC postdoc, Vineet Menachery now at UTMB, gave a presentation in April 2019 at Belfast coronavirus conference. He “talked about a longitudinal study that had been done by Shi’s group at the WIV on Chinese horseshoe bats, which led to a big shift in our thinking about these bat coronaviruses, because it revealed they are much closer to the epidemic SARS strains than previously thought.” Their results suggested that “coronavirus emergence is more complicated than receptor binding alone.” Baric and Menachery published a trypsin paper using an RXXR furin cleavage motif in their September 2019 paper. Both RRAR and trypsin are found in SARS2.
June 2019
Dani traveled from Beijing to Wuhan; which was also the application due date for CREID. Dani remained at the Wuhan BSL4 until November 29th, which was the scientific merit review deadline for CREID.
Two particular Chinese horseshoe bat papers, from Shi at WIV and a Hong Kong lab, are heavily referenced in the DRASTIC report. “The (google search) data does not show what kind of event, but indicates that there was an anomaly in June 2019 (+/- 1 month). But also note that the massive reads following June 2019 does indicate a follow-up to this event.”
September 2019
Baric published an RxxR furin cleavage site paper in a MERS type virus. SARS2 has a RRAR furin cleavage site.
The decade long USAID Predict project started to wind down.
By coincidence, N.I.A.I.D. announced that it would spend $82 million over five years to create 11 CREID “centers” in which American and foreign scientists would collaborate to hunt emerging diseases.
The WIV database allegedly went offline in September but actually was online until February 2020.
October 2019
Fauci visited RML in Montana for the last of many times.
The cell phone traffic at Dani’s BSL4 in Wuhan was non-existent.
Munster was at the German One Health conference with Daszak.
November 2019
NIH scientist published an optimal timeline for a “transmissible vaccine” campaign. The animals “being considered” are white-tailed deer (for Tuberculosis) and fruit bats (for Ebola). The same group published a self-spreading vaccine paper (post pandemic) about “well studied coronaviruses” such as Shi’s WIV1 isolate.
Per the cell phone report, Linfa Wang visited the Wuhan BSL4 from November 24-30th. Dani left Wuhan on November 29th, for unannounced reasons, after years of onsite research.
December 2019
On December 9-10th, NIAID sponsored a bat conference in Singapore with Linfa, Dani, Munster and Shi. Wuhan pneumonia rumors started circulating by “mid-December” and “first week of December.”
Daszak’s former NIAID Program Officer in China, Dr. Eun-Chung Park, gave a presentation on “The Progress and Challenges in Vaccine Development.” She ended it with a question for the Singapore audience:
Should a bat vaccine be considered to control Nipah transmission? Bats constitute the reservoir, not only of Nipah but also other viruses causing disease in humans. Preventing viral shedding from bats could prevent human disease.
Fauci’s NIAID planted the seed in Singapore about vaccinating the animal reservoir: bats.
Pregnant women in Norway and American blood donors already show SARS2 antibodies.
On New Years Eve, Baric forwarded a ProMed alert to Daszak about a mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan.
Fauci claimed CDC Robert Redfield, on New Years Eve, notified him of outbreak in Wuhan: “that would be an unusual situation, to jump to 24 people at the same time, that is just not the way zoonotic (spillover events) occur.”
January 2020
4th - Baric commented on Wuhan’s mysterious pneumonia while speculating it’s a coronavirus.
“Wuhan is the epicenter for a lot of virology research in China. They have state of the art BSL3 and BSL4 facilities and world-class facilities to do anything that you would want to do on new emerging infectious diseases. So it’s occurring in the right spot,” Baric said.
6th - Fauci started weekly teleconference with Munster and wife Emmie at RML.
10th - SARS2 sequence was published and Linfa Wang resigned as director of Duke’s EID.
10th - Baric downloaded the SARS2 sequence to “reverse-engineer a live virus from the sequence” since he “leads one of the few labs in the world that can re-create coronaviruses just from their sequences.”
12th - Western virologist, like Bob Garry, were aware of the furin cleavage site.
13th - Baric emailed Daszak that “we found our highly variable SARS-like CoV!” which was the same description Baric used in his Defuse proposal.
14th - Fauci participated in the first of many National Security Council meetings at the White House.
22nd - Munster at RML somehow missed the furin cleavage site in his SARS2 paper.
23rd - A Chinese paper showed the first Covid cases did not have links to the wet market.
24th - Shi’s lab published RaTG13, using the same MS-DOS software called GeneDoc, which ironically brought attention to the SARS2 furin cleavage site. The natural RaTG13 sequence fueled rumors of SARS2 unnatural sequence being engineered.
27th - The SARS2 furin cleavage site was published by a Beijing university.
29th - Furin cleavage site was discussed on virology forums for the first time. Baric missed the furin cleavage site in his first SARS2 paper.
31st - Jeremy Farrar heard engineering rumors from US scientists, and introduced Fauci to three world class evolutionary virologists. Fauci was then formally notified SARS2 “looks engineered.” The same virologist later testified that he wanted to call the FBI, which kept Fauci up until 3am, covering his tracks.
February 2020
1st - A secret teleconference occurred with Fauci. The three evolutionary virologists are bullied into the natural origins camp by a “most angry” Ron Fouchier. He was a grantee of Fauci and mentor to Munster. Fauci and Farrar later “prompted” the three virologists to write a natural origins paper, which referenced both Munster and Baric papers, that missed the furin cleavage site. Both Fauci and Farrar had funded self spreading vaccine research.
2nd - Public rumors of SARS2 being engineered via an Indian paper suggesting HIV inserts in the SARS2 genome (but they also appear in similar RaTG13 and Banal sequences). Shi was willing to "bet my life that (SARS2) has nothing to do with (her) lab."
3rd - Fauci organized a NASEM meeting with the White House representatives to try and quiet the SARS2 rumors. The meeting included Baric, FBI and ODNI.
5th - Wuhan University (not the WIV) published the partial RaTG13 sequence (4991) nearly two weeks after Shi uploaded the full RaTG13 sequence.
6th - A published paper noted the Wuhan wet market and new China CDC BSL2 facility are separated by 1000 feet. This paper prompted Eddie Holmes to turn Kristian Andersen’s lab leak “report” into a natural origins paper due to his collaboration with that particular lab.
9th- Fauci appeared on a Newt Gingrich podcast with Daszak to call a Wuhan lab origins a “conspiracy theory.”
10th - A French lab called the furin cleavage site “peculiar” since it was the first in a SARS-like coronavirus (sarbecovirus group 2b).
Daszak’s boss showed a bat soup video claiming wet market origin, and Fauci’s lieutenant gave a natural origins arguments.
11th - Baric met with Fauci to discuss “the outbreak and chimeras.” Fauci later testified under oath to have never met Baric, but was shown in his calander showing otherwise.
26th - Baric gave a one hour technical presentation to staff members of Congress, in the US Capitol, but fails to mention the furin cleavage site. He also never mentioned his (unfunded DARPA Defuse) proposal to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses and test on live bats in Wuhan.
27th - Fauci described the science behind the coronavirus, saying it jumped from a bat to a “civic cat” served at feasts in China and then humans. “Lo and behold now...we have a new Coronavirus.” Fauci said they are “almost certain” the virus jumped species.
March 2020
A US government scientist asked if there are any restriction sites in the SARS2 genome and Baric responded “no,” failing to mention the BsaXI restriction site, which he published in 2017. Baric also failed to mention the odd furin cleavage site, which UNC published in 2018 (RRAR). That particular restriction site flanked the furin cleavage site in SARS2.
At the same time Wuhan scientists warned the world that Covid was airborne, both Fauci and his ‘aerosol specialist’ downplayed concern for aerosol transmission stating to Washington Post:
Vincent Munster, a virologist at RML who led the research on aerosolized coronavirus, said it is possible aerosolized particles are capable of spreading the virus — but this could be a very minor element in the pandemic.
“The question is, ‘What is currently driving the pandemic?’ If it’s mostly droplet transmission, and if we do have airborne or aerosol transmission, what is the relative role? These are all big questions that I still think need to be addressed,” Munster said.
Fauci called aerosol transmission “terribly misleading” (achoooo!!!) but SARS2 traveled up to 27 feet (later MIT reported 60 feet). By August, Fauci allowed for “a degree” of airborne spread after reading the “classic literature.” Finally in September, he admitted aerosol transmission.
April 17th 2020
Fauci said SARS2 was “totally consistent” with a jump from an animal to humans. He then referenced the natural origins paper that he himself prompted and “reviewed” and then followed up with an email to the reporter. That same day Fauci called SARS2 a “shiny object that will go away.”
May 2020
Baric finally uploaded the SCH014 sequence to the NIAID database because “after consultation with the NIH and the journal, we purposely did not provide the genetic sequence of the chimera in the original 2015 publication. Thus, our exact method remained obscure.” He called it a “Catch-22” and was trying to quiet the SARS2 engineering rumors around his lab at UNC.
Baric praised the “compelling” arguments of the Proximal Origin paper.
Baric, and his UNC employed wife Toni, switched over to Gmail. Baric also gave an interview admitting that “proximity is a problem” for the WIV.
July 2020
Remember the one million mink culled in Europe? They were actually American mink called Neovison vison. They are not found in China but the same species was found with bloody noses in Michigan and Montana biolabs.
August 2020
Fauci’s NIAID publicly announced its $82M CREID project, but it was awarded in 2019 to EcoHealth, UNC and Duke, who recycled “batified mice” from the rejected DARPA Defuse bid.
September 2020
Baric made his last of five appearances on TWiV but noted SARS2 does not infect or transmit in lab mice. He earlier noted they are safe (i.e. not airborne) because “as we all know they don’t sneeze or cough” (@1h27m). A preprint showed American deer mice can become both infected and transmit SARS2.
A German paper showed SARS2 both infects and transmits in Egyptian fruit bats, which both Baric and Munster tried to infect in 2018. The CSU professor, Tony Schountz from the TWiV episode, confirmed Munster’s BSL4 in Montana has an Egyptian fruit bat colony. Both Munster and Schountz in 2017 had published a bat immunology paper referencing deer mice five times. Six years later, Schountz deer mice studies were shut down because of fundingL “too bad, though; the SNV-deer mouse model is the best reservoir host-virus system developed.”
October 2020
EcoHealth and Schountz continue conversations about importing Chinese horseshoe bats into US. “RML imported the Lassa virus reservoir by having them born in captivity in Africa, the offspring were imported directly to RML. Don’t know if the (Chinese) horseshoe bats can be born in captivity, but that could be an avenue to alleviate CDC concerns.”
Five years earlier, US CDC had started their own live EFB bat colony the same way:
The captive-born bats used in this study originated from the ERB breeding colony at the CDC in Atlanta, GA, USA. This MARV-free colony was established from wild-caught EFBs imported from Uganda.
January 2021
An extensive Wuhan lab leak hypothesis was published in New York Magazine, which mentioned Fauci, Peter Daszak and Ralph Baric over 80 times.
The outgoing administration reported that ‘several’ WIV researchers were sick in Autumn 2019. It was later (confusingly) narrowed down to a November or October timeline. The three names recently leaked to the press, but one of the three names was backwards. And it appeared to be a rumor from “two foreign government scientists” spread by a terminated State Department contractor.
February 2021
The WHO investigators visited Wuhan. The team included Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Munster’s former Erasmus colleague, Marion Koopman, who was on February 1st lab leak teleconference.
March 2021
NIAID posted a grant opportunity about ‘researching bat immunology.’ Dani and Linfa were basically two world class bat immunologists on Fauci’s payroll while in Wuhan.
May 2021
A popular lab leak publication quoted a well known virologist about the furin cleavage site. He called it the ‘smoking gun' for an engineered origin. Baric signed a letter calling for an investigation into the origins of SARS.
June 2021
The Fauci gate emails are published showing he was told SARS2 “look engineered” with a follow-up secret teleconference.
The same evolutionary scientist who told Fauci SARS2 looked “engineered,” lied about the publication of RaTG13. He claimed Shi published RaTG13 after the February 1st teleconference, but it was before, becoming the engineering tattletale.
Shi answered a phone call from the NYT claiming not "my" lab and "I" did nothing wrong and "I" have nothing to fear.
Danielle Anderson’s “Last–And Only–Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan” profile appeared in Bloomberg. She claimed to be working on Ebola, but 0 Ebola research papers on Dani’s lengthy resume.
July 2021
Baric’s last public statement before DARPA Defuse leaked. He noted his reverse genetic method was “obscure” and therefore the Chinese couldn’t reverse engineer it.
We never provided the chimeric virus sequence, clones, or viruses to researchers at the WIV; and Dr. Shi, or members of her research team, never worked in our laboratory at UNC. No one from my group has worked in WIV laboratories.
Let me make it clear that we never sent any of our molecular clones or any chimeric viruses to China.
Someone with top-security clearance moved the rejected DARPA Defuse bid into a top secret folder, where Major Joseph Murphy later leaked it, making sure the Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier.
August 2021
SARS2 antibodies were found in North American white tailed deer and (pregnant) deer can transmit virgin virus (WA1) from Wuhan.
COVID-19 antibodies transmitted from moms to babies during pregnancy.
A 2019 transmissible vaccine paper noted “pregnant females could be targeted with vaccines capable of vertical transmission.”
September 2021
DARPA Defuse leaked and NIAID’s CREID documents are published, where Danielle Anderson appears on both documents. The Laos Banal samples are (re)published, which were collected by the US Navy (NMRC-A based in Singapore) in 2017.
October 2021
CSU in Colorado won a $6.7M grant from NIH to build a live bat colony for the “successful breeding and rearing” of Chinese horseshoe bats.
December 2021
Very high viral loads (not just antibodies) are found in American deer. Scientists later called it “stunning” and “gobsmacked” levels of Covid in American deer. The NYT asked if deer are the (only) wildlife reservoir for SARS2?
January 2022
Project Veritas published Major Murphy letter to the Department of Defense, calling SARS2 “an American created recombinant bat vaccine.” Fauci was asked if he funded the DARPA Defuse grant? But the word “that grant” was doing a lot of work in his prepared denial. Fauci’s $6B NIAID budget was nearly twice that of DARPA’s $3B budget.
Sneezing hamsters in Hong Kong, imported from the Netherlands, become only the second animal known to be able to infect people, after farmed mink. Dutchman Munster previously used Syrian hamsters for his animal transmission models. The third mammal will become American deer.
February 2022
Shi gave an in depth interview admitting the same as Baric, there was no collaboration and she was only listed on 2015 Nature paper for sharing SHC014 sequence (same scenario as RaTG13?)
American deer are the only bovine species on the planet susceptible to Covid infections.
June 2022
Baric received $65M NIAID grant for his pet program and remained radio silent since the DARPA Defuse proposal leaked. Baric “wrote that section” about inserting furin cleavage sites into live coronaviruses, and testing them on live bats in Wuhan.
July 2022
USGS reported Mexican free tailed bats can be infected with SARS2. In 2018, DARPA Defuse referenced the same bats (T brasiliensis) in their bat vaccine paper.
Vincent Munster was doing “transmission studies in Africa.” It was a “novel animal vaccine” for his DARPA Preempt project, called a contagious vaccine for African rats against Lassa.
Munster kept both those African rats (Mastomys) and similar American deer mice in his BSL4. The self disseminating technology allowed Munster’s DARPA bid to be $5M cheaper than Baric’s DARPA bid. SARS2 doesn’t infect Baric’s humanized mice but it transmits in Munster’s lab rats.
August 2022
Fauci’s retirement letter used the first person singular pronoun “I” 18 times.
“What particularly drove that spillover?” asked Vincent Munster.
October 2022
November 2022
SARS2 showed immune evasion in deer, which was a controversial topic in self-spreading vaccines.
March 2023
The Daily Tar Heel: Conspiracy theories surround UNC lab.
May 2023
NIAID restarted the cancelled R01 bat project that was going to the Shi and the WIV, but this time used Linfa Wang’s Duke as the primary beneficiary. Fauci later called the R01 grant “pencil dust” because no one investigated the $82M CREID U01 to EcoHealth, UNC and Duke-NUS. Again the same contractors from the rejected DARPA Defuse bid, that NIAID awarded in 2019.
July 2023
Baric gave his first interview in nearly two years, claiming Fouchier (and Munster) aerosolized transmission model GoF research “was too edgy for him.”
The Present
Technically speaking, everything in Baric’s DARPA Defuse proposal was safe (i.e. not transmissible). Even the human specific furin cleavage site, inside a typical humanized mouse model, was safe to us humans but dangerous to those mice. But Baric’s technology (transferrable) was expensive because it required field equipment, medicine, and tracking for deployment of an animal vaccine in remote South East Asian bat cave locations. Munster’s technology (transmissible) was a single injection into a single bat, then the SARS1 vaccine spreads via aerosol to the next bat, much like SARS2.
Baric warned in his February 2020 presentation to Congress: if the SARS2 virus comes to the US “we could have an animal reservoir that the Chinese don’t, and then it hangs around for a long time.”
This Washington D.C. presentation was just two weeks after meeting with Fauci. When Fauci was asked about the creation of Covid, he openly joked about creating WA1 (the virgin Wuhan virus isolated from a travelling Seattle man in January 2020).
Fauci’s “kitchen” was actually Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana. And while Montana wasn’t the epicenter of the Covid outbreak, its wildlife has become the only wild reservoir for SARS-CoV-2. RML is a 120 year old lab that has been studying American deer, America deer mice and American mink for decades, according to its own documentation.
The only reason SARS2 is a story? Transmission! We all survive infection but nothing stops transmission. Covid (i.e. WA1) transmits efficiently in only five mammals on the planet, and those five (American deer, American deer mice, Syrian hamsters, American mink, Egyptian fruit bats) are only found in Fauci’s RML in Montana. These mammals are the only wild species on the planet to become not just infected, but more importantly transmit SARS2, just like us humans.
All of the other animals you read about (cats, raccoon dogs, monkeys) are forced laboratory infections without onward transmission. Remember that if a virus like SARS2 was engineered, wherever it spilled over into the human population (e.g. Fauci’s $82M contractor, Dani, in the Wuhan BSL4) does not tell us where it was engineered (e.g. Fauci’s aerosol specialist, Munster, in a Montana BSL4).
NIAID and Fauci probably regret the delayed building of the new Chinese bat lab, on American soil. Because this tragically caused Fauci’s fateful decision to test a Montana made bat vaccine, on foreign soil. What made Wuhan special? It was the live Chinese horseshoe bat capitol of the world. This tiny bat was the reservoir species for SARS1, which ironically inflated Fauci’s biodefense budget over past two decades.
Fauci’s last visit to Montana was October 2019, probably to approve the shipment of Munster’s SARS1 bat vaccine to Dani, turning her (and us) into an intermediary species for SARS2, until it found its way home…
In essence China will coverup the lab leak while US virologists will coverup what leaked. Ironically the ‘virus’ itself will turn into the biggest whistleblower in human history, self disseminating around the globe, searching for the return address on the FedEx package, opened earlier that October day.
Amazing read. Thanks for this tremendous work. Will definitely share with friends.
Good work Jim. It gives me deja vu. https://www.bmartin.cc/dissent/documents/AIDS/Cribb96.pdf