Weekly lab leak tidbits
We're all bats now
DARPA Defuse FOIA
Jimmy Tobias delivers another great FOIA. This is a March 2018 email from the United States Geological Service (USGS) to Ralph Baric. The USGS was organizing an American bat colony to test Baric’s bat vaccine. They suggested the University of Wisconsin (UW) develop an animal vaccine delivery similar to vaccinating wildlife (foxes, coyotes, raccoons) against rabies. Neither scientist knows how to vaccinate bats as they are picky eaters, making it challenging to use baited vaccines.
The USGS lab in Madison, Wisconsin, can keep Tadarida brasiliensis (i.e., American bats) in their BSL3. In 2022, the USGS successfully infected their Tadarida brasiliensis bats with SARS2. They assumed SARS2 transmission if the bat cages were smaller, or without “social distancing.”
Much has been made of SARS2 not infecting Chinese bats, but it loves American bats. The biggest logistical issue with DARPA Defuse was testing Baric’s bat vaccine on Chinese bats. EcoHealth tried to import the fragile Chinese horseshoe bat before and after the pandemic. They failed, so they had to develop Baric’s bat vaccine in American bats and test it in Wuhan on Chinese bats. This is the reason NIAID is building two Chinese bat labs, costing $135M. The USGS is also building a $55M bat vivarium.
As a thought experiment, take one weird immunological term from that 2018 FOIA (MHC I) and cross-reference it against SARS2 in 2021.
Baric continued that MHC I interferon study with Munster and his Egyptian fruit bat colony.
DARPA said no, their $14M Defuse bid was too expensive, so EcoHealth Aliance was going to “look for other sources of funding” in 2018. Can you see Fauci funding Defuse in 2019? If you replace the USGS role in DARPA Defuse, with RML in Montana, a lot more will make sense.
This is the first Dr Danielle Anderson email in several FOIAs.
Do people get it?
Yes, they do.
reposted piece on Vincent Munster. Read the comment section to gauge people's understanding of a complex subject. had the best line: “We’re all bats now.”My other favorite: “So their plans were to engineer this to make it look like it originated from bats? Wow just sick…these people are insane.”
The Rootclaim debate turned into a root canal
said he “watched 15 hours of COVID origins arguments, so you don't have to - but you should!”Avoid the comments section in that Substack post. It’s part of a cult called the “rationalist” community obsessed with Bayesian analysis. It’s a reminder of what happens when you mindlessly debate the Wuhan wet market. The ancestral strain of SARS2 (WA1) efficiently transmits in Montana lab animals. To date, animal species known to transmit SARS-CoV-2 are the American mink, Cat, Deer mouse, Egyptian fruit bat, Ferret, Hamster, House mouse, N. American white-tailed deer and Raccoon dog. “But cats, ferrets, and several hamster species are infected, most likely originating from an infected human; in such situations, there is a very low risk of spillback infection to humans, and little or no animal-to-animal transmission, as indicated by genomic analysis.” Try not to conflate infection with transmission:
WA1 and Fauci
I’ve never seen a confident man like Fauci act so nervous. The WA1 sample is America’s Patient 0 and SARS2's best-known ancestral strain.
Wuhan on the Rockies?
The new Colorado State University lab will collaborate with NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratories to "assess the susceptibility of bats to Nipah virus and ebolaviruses," according to a 2021 proposal by CSU's Arthropod-borne and Infectious Disease Laboratory. Nipah's case fatality rate for humans is 40-75%, the World Health Organization estimates.
Former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci oversaw RML when it obtained bats from a low-rated zoo near the Camp David presidential retreat to infect with a coronavirus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading suspect for the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.
The professor’s theory has gone viral
Virologist Marc Johnson of Missouri posted evidence suggesting COVID-19 spent significant time in some non-bat animals before jumping to humans. He thinks the (natural) SARS2 virus went from a bat gut virus to a human respiratory virus without fighting an immune system. As he put it, SARS2 “was originally from a bat, but has been acclimating in some other animal tissue for many years.”
https://x.com/SolidEvidence/status/1772329032287404326?s=20
That animal tissue was in Vincent Munster’s Rocky Mountain BSL4 lab. Munster can supercharge a harmless pathogen into an airborne agent. Something that takes Mother Nature eons probably takes him weeks. It’s called forced serial passaging. Munster’s methods are obscure, but he aims for massive amounts of virus in the upper respiratory tract of a mammal with a targeted temperature. He takes the infected snot from an animal (deer, deer mice, mink, hamster, EFB) and shoves it down the nose of another. He then forces a sneeze to get the pathogen airborne. He was the original author of the 2012 ferret papers. It led to the NYT headline: An Engineered Doomsday.
He uses a transmission cage with a negative pressure pump. This airborne vaccine is called the gut-lung axis, and Munster was obsessed with it. In their joint 2018 paper, he and Ralph Baric mentioned the intestines of EFB bats seven times.
A former NYT science reporter admits defeat
The former senior journalist at the New York Times, Donald McNeil Jr, admitted that virologists misled him about a potential lab leak: “In any case, I think it’s generally a bad idea to mislead reporters. In democracies, all the beans eventually get spilled.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/03/26/new-york-times-donald-mcneil-wuhan-lab-leak-theory/
h/t
who keeps an extensive list of links.Bread and circuses
Congressional COVID committee sent letters to the editors-in-chief of The Lancet, Science and Nature science journals requesting their testimony for a hearing.
Mathematician Nick Patterson on lab leak
Nick signed the May 2021 Science letter with Ralph Baric, who went radio silent after DARPA Defuse leaked in September 2021. Here’s a link to Nick’s Substack, which links to a pdf.
Great Wall of Silence
https://www.the-sun.com/news/10889616/bombshell-intel-lab-origins-covid-secret-files/
The WHO’s Power Grab
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-whos-power-grab