Weekly lab leak news
$100,000 bets, mRNA, FBI, Baric & Fauci funded DARPA Defuse?
The FBI questioned Baric?
The Congressional committee, investigating the origins of Covid, sent a letter to the Director of the FBI. The committee wants to talk to the unnamed FBI agent, who was talking to Dr Ralph Baric of UNC. The Feb 16, 2024, Congressional letter reads:
Dear Director Christopher Wray (of the FBI):
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has been investigating the origins of COVID-19 for more than a year. On February 27, 2023, we sent you a letter requesting documents within the Bureau’s possession. We have yet to receive unclassified documents responsive to this request. As an accommodation to the Bureau, this letter provides clarity and further scopes the original requests.
Since the Select Subcommittee’s first letter, we have gathered new facts and information. Based on documents in possession of the Select Subcommittee, it has come to our attention that Special Agent
XXXXXX XXXXXXwas in direct and ongoing communication with Dr. Ralph Baric, a professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and renowned corona-virologist. This communication was not just regarding threats Dr. Baric was receiving but also the substance of the origin debate and how UNC was responding to numerous North Carolina Freedom of Information Act requests. Pursuant to the Select Subcommittee’s February 27, 2023 letter, we respectfully request an in person transcribed interview with Special AgentXXXXXXXon March 8, 2024.
Has the Congressional committee questioned Dr Baric? Who is the unnamed FBI agent? It sounds like everyone investigating lab leak is now flying too close to the sun!
Fauci funded DARPA Defuse aka CREID?
As Will Jonespreviously wrote:
We know that SARS-CoV-2 readily transmits in the lab animals found in Munster’s Rocky Mountain Lab but not in the lab animals found in the WIV. From this we can further conclude that Dr. Anderson’s experiment to infect Chinese horseshoe bats with the new virus at the WIV presumably failed. This may be why she left Wuhan at the end of November, which was the deadline for the ‘scientific merit review’ for CREID.
According to the below November 2019 email, Fauci “will be making this decision,” since he is “the head of NIAID.” The CREID email (aka EIDRC) presumably cc’d Linfa Wang and Ralph Baric.
Linfa and Dani of Duke-NUS are referenced below, since “the results suggest that we’re all doomed.”
Baric’s famous “SARSr-CoV” proposal from DARPA Defuse is referenced below.
Peter Daszak was going to “work on CoVs” in June 2019.
Search for “Cheers” to read more of Daszak’s redacted emails.
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/DOD-USU-batch-1-combined.pdf
A tech entrepreneur bet $100,000 on lab leak but lost
Rootclaim hosted a debate on the lab origins. It is a neat concept where the money was put in escrow and two “independent” judges decided. A court in Israel would serve as arbitration, but Rootclaim admitted defeat and paid the natural origins challenger $100,000. This format is good example that A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit.
https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaims-covid-19-origins-debate-results/
The debate lasted 18 hours, but it was over in the first 18 seconds, since the lab leak narrative has focused solely on Dr Shi and her $11/hour postdocs.
One judge’s decision for natural origins was apparently based on the “imprecise” Rootclaim lab leak hypothesis. “If lab leak is being this imprecise (in a seemingly biased way) I should be skeptical of all their other evidentiary claims,” he said.
The other judge was overwhelmed by the underwhelming evidence:
When the “novel coronavirus” started dominating headlines in mid-January 2020, I was checking the news every day: counting cases, tracking international transmissions, wondering when it would reach my city, and preparing for quarantine.
I know now in retrospect that instead of planning for the coming pandemic I should have spent that time reading about covid origins theories, and kept at it for these past four years uninterrupted, as only then might I have been adequately prepared for the deluge of detailed claims and arguments presented during the debate. Before participating in this debate I had no realization of the vast depth of evidence and analysis encompassed in the gamut of “was covid a lab leak?”
The 750 slide PowerPoint debate got bogged down in Bayesian analysis and the Wuhan wet market. It’s a red herring that leads nowhere, since the downtown market was a super spreader event.
Professor Dali Yang from Chicago commented on the last post
“Hi, Jim, I trust your smart readers will be motivated to follow your lead and read Wuhan: How the Covid-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control. You highlight the importance of knowing how the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) reached Wuhan, but they'll see that research on the Covid-19 pandemic should also go beyond the question of how the virus got to Wuhan. They'll want to understand how the initial outbreak was handled and what lessons China's response hold for China and globally.”
Sen. Joni Ernst demands answers on Biden USDA’s $1M ‘dangerous bird flu experiments’ in China
Does the above New York Post headline jive with the details? No, it appears the risky work will be done in US, but not China. A USDA spokesperson told Science, “USDA’s funding is only being committed to the specific components carried out by our own team located in Athens, Georgia, and is not any way contributing to research taking place in the U.K. or China….not only is there no transfer of money between the countries, there’s no transfer of reagents or materials.”
This project sounds a lot like DARPA Defuse, except with the transfer of reagents and materials. Defuse proposed to collect Chinese bat samples and develop countermeasures (vaccine, treatment, etc.) on US soil. These ‘countermeasures’ were to be tested on Chinese bats in Wuhan labs under the collaboration umbrella.
Is China protecting the American warfighter?
The former NYT science writer, Nicholas Wade, gave an interview. The word “warfighter” appeared seven times in the US military grant proposal called DARPA Defuse. But the Brit repeated his claim the CCP funded the US military project to protect the American warfighter based in Asia.
Munster in the Dutch news!
It’s a reprint of Will Jones brilliant piece, but it was conveniently translated into Dutch for Vincent Munster.
The key difference between Baric’s DEFUSE and Munster’s PREEMPT proposal – aside from Munster’s proposal coming in around $4m cheaper at $10m – is that rather than relying on spraying bat caves with a non-transmissible virus-vaccine, Munster’s plan involved making the virus-vaccine transmit between the bats via aerosols. This made it a self-spreading vaccine, able (in theory) to reach all the bats without humans having to go and find all their caves and spray them. The risks of such a plan should have been obvious. Indeed, Baric himself, who went awfully quiet after his DEFUSE project leaked in mid-2021, resurfaced in mid-2023 to say that such work involving engineering transmissible virus-vaccines was “too edgy” for him.
Disclaimer: After Linfa Wang confirmed his resignation in Feb 2023, I then asked Baric for an alibi. Dr Baric’s non-response was given via the July 2023 Time interview.
The Dutch connection?
Vincent Munster was trained as an aerosol specialist at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. He was the lead author on the controversial ferret transmission experiments. Munster’s mentor was Ron Fouchier, whom Fauci funded and defended in 2012. The Dutch did not allow Erasmus University to publish the details of the experiment, so it was a secret recipe known only to the Dutch researchers.
Peter Daszak sent his 2020 Lancet coverup letter to Dr Munster and three other professors at Erasmus, but only one of them signed the final document.
Is SARS-CoV-2 a ‘consensus’ sequence?
According to Dr Tony VanDongen, SARS2 is a consensus sequence. The SARS2 strain is basically an average of all bat strains in the Asian region. If you start with the RaTG13 sample, there are ~1200 nucleotides difference to SARS2. Add the Laos Banal bat samples to the hopper and it is just ~300 nucleotide gap. Add up all the known sequences in the region and it’s 99.999% identical to SARS2. Most of those sequences were previously collected by the Dr Shi, the US Navy or USAID Predict.
What is a consensus sequence? Dr. Baric proposed to create one in the DARPA Defuse proposal. The idea behind Baric’s ‘consensus sequence’ was best described by an anonymous WHO collaborator.
Jeffrey Sachs also had good explanation.
More evidence
Dr. VanDongen was also a co-author on the restriction enzyme paper that was covered by the Economist. Their preprint focused on the seen restriction sites, but notice the lack of stray restriction sites (Bsal and BsmBl) in the top two lines? The designer of the SARS2 consensus sequence (Tim Sheahan of UNC) removed all the extra noise from the below genomes.
Old Baric news is still relevant
In Feb 2020, Baric said his coronavirus lab was the only one in America that could “boot up” or “resurrect” the SARS2 virus using the sequence. In other words, UNC could create a live SARS2 virus with an uploaded computer code (ttgtagatct…) from China.
Baric says he doesn’t see a particular danger to synthesizing the new virus at this stage of the outbreak, especially because the virus is still circulating in the wild. The important thing is to figure out what it does and stop it. “Whether you get it from a cell or synthesize it, it ends up the same thing,” says Baric.
The White Elephant known as mRNA
War spurs medical innovation. Ambulances to swiftly deliver the casualties of Napoleon’s armies to field surgeons were the brainchild of Jean-Dominique Larrey. Florence Nightingale established professional nursing in the Crimea. The Kaiser’s War brought the Thomas Splint, reducing mortality and amputation following limb fracture; 1939-45 spurred Florey and Chain’s development of penicillin and McIndoe’s reconstructive plastic surgery. All are now integral to civilian healthcare.
mRNA vaccines are offspring of George Bush’s ‘War on Terror’.
Thanks for an enjoyable summary. I thought the name of the FBI agent in question was already exposed in other FOIA'd emails, no?
Special mention to Dr Brad Wenstrup for giving the FBI a patient but firm talking-to: "If the Bureau fails to make the witness available or misses this request deadline, we will be forced to evaluate the use of the compulsory process."