DailyMail.com
Bombshell new documents shed light on a shady 2018 project between US and Chinese scientists to create a novel virus with the same rare features seen in Covid.
The proposals lay out plans to use US taxpayer money to engineer bat coronaviruses with several properties that would make them infectious to humans – a year before the pandemic happened.
All four characteristics spelled out in the research proposal match features of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, according to a watchdog who exposed the files, as well as several experts who reviewed them.
The experiments, part of a grant known as DEFUSE, were to be a collaboration between US scientists and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is where the FBI and many scientists believe Covid leaked from.
The proposal was ultimately denied funding and there are no official records that the experiments were actually carried out. Nonetheless, virology experts have called the records are a clear ‘blueprint’ to create Covid-19.
The documents – which consist of hundreds of emails, grant applications and scientific papers – highlighted four characteristics that would make the new viruses a ‘clear… danger of a new SARS-like pandemic.’
Jamie Metzl, an adviser to the World Health Organization and founder of One Shared World, a group working to prevent the next pandemic, said on X the documents disprove the zoonotic origin theory of Covid – that the virus began in the wild and spilled over to humans.
He tweeted: ‘The details of the 2018 DEFUSE proposal plus the phylogenetic data make an extremely convincing case for a COVID19 research-related origin in Wuhan.
‘The evidence for zoonosis in the wild or in the Huanan market is essentially nil.’
Dr Richard Ebright, a chemical biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, tweeted the proposal ‘provided step-by-step plans for the construction of a virus having the sequence and properties of’ SARS-CoV-2.
He added: ‘The match between the evidence provided by the genome sequence and the evidence provided by the FOIA release is remarkable and elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of “noteworthy” to the level of “smoking gun.”‘
The documents come from a March 2018 grant proposal called Project DEFUSE: Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses
The DEFUSE project proposal was made by the now-notorious EcoHealth Alliance, a New York nonprofit that channels US government grants abroad to fund these types of experiments.
The first set of documents pertaining to the DEFUSE grant were released in December 2023. The above is an excerpt of an email from the March 2018 proposal showing a comment from PD – Peter Daszak.
The first set of documents pertaining to the DEFUSE grant were released in December 2023. The above is an email from Peter Daszak to researchers included in the 2018 proposal talking about work to be done by scientists as part of the project
The first set of documents pertaining to the DEFUSE grant were released in December 2023. The above is an email from Peter Daszak to researchers included in the 2018 proposal
Previously published documents from the proposal in December 2023 showed the research team sought to synthesize spike proteins with furin cleavage sites that had been designed to bind to human receptors more easily.
The grant then proposed attaching the furin to coronavirus strains and infecting mice to see how sick it would make them.
The furin has been one of the focal points of debate about Covid-19‘s origin, with some experts claiming it could only have been acquired through lab experiments.
It was what ‘supercharged’ Covid into a highly transmissible pathogen.
The plan for the DEFUSE project was then to use drugs and vaccines to treat pathogens that had not arisen yet – effectively getting ahead of future pandemic.
The 2023 documents also showed how the grant applicants tried to mislead the Pentagon on how risky the experiments were to secure funding.