In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance submitted a proposal to the US Department of Defence’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), requesting $14 million for gain-of-function research on bat sarbecoviruses. The proposal spelled out the intent to insert “human-specific cleavage sites” into sarbecoviruses, a genus of coronavirus to which SARS-CoV belongs. This also happens to be one of the radically novel features that make SARS-CoV-2 so infectious to humans.

At the end of December 2023, US Right to Know (USRTK) received an early draft of the proposal with comments from Daszak and Baric in the margins. The comments reveal that Daszak misled DARPA about where the research was to be conducted.

The Pentagon rejected the proposal, but questions remain about whether the research was conducted under some other programme.

As noted by Spiked reporter Matt Ridley, “It is completely normal to start inquiries into mass deaths by asking how they happened – so that you can stop them happening again.”

Yet in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, all questioning and discussion about the origin of the virus have been dismissed as more or less irrelevant and mainstream journalists have mysteriously steered clear of what could easily be one of the biggest stories of their lifetimes.

As reported by Ridley: “The evidence that this virus probably came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV] is now voluminous, detailed and strong. That an outbreak caused by a bat sarbecovirus should happen in the one city in the world that had been collecting hundreds of bat sarbecoviruses and experimenting on them is striking enough.

“That it happened one year after that lab proposed inserting the one feature that distinguishes SARS‑CoV‑2 from all other viruses of the same kind makes it a heck of a coincidence.

“That the virus was highly infectious from the start, highly attuned to human receptors and evolving comparatively slowly, implying it had been already trained on human cells, was a shock.

“That the lab in question refuses to this day to release the database of the viruses it had been working on is as insulting as it is suspicious. The coincidences of time and place are truly spectacular. …

“Millions are dead around the world and the most likely cause is an accident during a risky experiment in a laboratory. Should we not be learning lessons from that?”

Evidence suggests the lab leak theory has been intentionally ignored because the individuals who had a hand in the creation of SARS-CoV-2 needed to cover up the fact that it was manmade to protect reputations and money flows.

The lesson to be learned is that we cannot afford to allow this kind of research to continue, and that’s a public realisation the scientific community is desperate to avoid. The reality, however, is that extremely risky research is being conducted and the scientific community is playing fast and loose when it comes to safety.

In 2018, Peter Daszak, a British zoologist and president of EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based research organisation, submitted a grant proposal to DARPA, requesting $14 million for gain-of-function research on bat sarbecoviruses.

His DEFUSE proposal specifically spelled out the intent to insert “human-specific cleavage sites” into sarbecoviruses, a genus of coronavirus to which SARS-CoV belongs.

This also happens to be one of the radically novel features that make SARS-CoV-2 so infectious to humans. Of the 1,500 coronaviruses known to exist, none but SARS-CoV-2 has this cleavage site.

According to the proposal, the work was to be carried out either at a biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab in Wuhan, the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, Ralph Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and/or the US Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Centre.

It didn’t specify which portions of the research would be done where, yet Daszak has insisted that the work was always intended to be carried out at the UNC, not the WIV.

The DEFUSE proposal came to light after being leaked in the fall of 2021. In his defence, Daszak has argued that the Pentagon rejected the proposal, so the research was never carried out.

However, at the end of December 2023, Emily Kopp with USRTK received an early draft of the DEFUSE proposal with comments from Daszak and Baric in the margins, which revealed Daszak intentionally misled DARPA about where the research was to be conducted.

In one comment, he even admits seeking to “downplay the non-US focus of [the] proposal” by not including the biographies of Shi Zhengli, the so-called “bat lady” at the WIV, and Duke-NUS Medical School professor Linfa Wang, both of whom were going to be involved in the experiments. Baric, for his part, also stressed the risks involved.

“Ralph, Zhengli. If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph [Baric], but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team,” Daszak wrote, adding:

“Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well.”

Baric replied to Daszak’s comment, stating: “In the US, these recombinant SARS-CoV are studied under BSL3 … In China, [we] might be growing[g] these virus[es] under BSL2. US [researchers] will likely freak out.”

As noted by Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and cofounder of Biosafety Now, the comments by Daszak and Baric are “damning.”

“These revelations are important because these specific experiments could, quite plausibly, have led to the genetic engineering and accidental release of SARS-CoV-2,” Kinney told Kopp.

Kinney added: “BSL-2 experiments are more convenient and less expensive than BSL-3 experiments … However, BSL-2 provides a far lower level of biosafety than BSL-3 does. This lower safety level is especially dangerous for experiments involving viruses that can be transmitted by air. …

“It is very concerning that Daszak and Baric appear to have considered it legitimate to move high-risk experiments from BSL-3 to BSL-2. It is also concerning that they appear to have considered doing so in secret, instead of disclosing this important change of experimental plans and biosafety precautions in their grant proposal.”

Was the risky gain-of-function research still carried out?

As for whether the research detailed in the DEFUSE proposal was ever carried out, it’s possible, but evidence is still lacking.

According to Ridley, “There is every chance the work went ahead with funding from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.”

USRTK also notes that even though the Pentagon didn’t fund it, Daszak may have had the ability to do the research using an earlier grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH):

“A progress report for that NIH grant for the year ending in May 2018 shows that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance conducted gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and tested them in mice engineered to express human receptors.”

• The Defender report  / By Dr Joseph Mercola, founder of Mercola.com