https://disinformationchronicle.substac ... -documentsNewly leaked Defense Department documents made public by the research group DRASTIC further erode the vanishing credibility of the National Institute of Health’s Anthony Fauci and pandemic researcher Peter Daszak regarding their claims about gain-of-function studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Released last week, the documents show that Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance nonprofit submitted a research proposal in 2018 to the U.S. military research agency DARPA to collect bat viruses and then create and study chimeric versions—making the viruses more transmissible or virulent.
Describing the viruses he was collecting from bat caves, Daszak wrote in the proposal, “These viruses are a clear and present danger to our military and to global health security because of their circulation and evolution in bats and periodic spillover into humans.”
But a DARPA official rejected the proposal and added that the EcoHealth Alliance would need a gain-of-function “risk mitigation plan” if DARPA later funded part of the research that involved making chimeric viruses. Despite this protest from DARPA, Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance was already creating gain-of-function chimeric viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, without a risk mitigation plan, through a grant funded by Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Details of the EcoHealth Alliance’s NIH grant were made public earlier this month, following a freedom of information lawsuit filed by The Intercept.
In testimony earlier this year before Congress, Fauci denied funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), while Daszak has called attempts to make his grants public the work of “conspiracy-theory outlets and politically motivated organizations.”
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After reviewing both Daszak’s DARPA proposal and the studies Daszak was conducting through an NIH grant, Shannon Murray, a staff scientist at US Right to Know, said they describe similar gain-of-function experiments. “Some of the same experimental platforms flagged by DARPA as being gain-of-function and dual use research were those performed in the bat coronavirus emergence grant funded by [NIH] for 6 years,” said Murray.
The new DARPA documents also undermine previous statements by Peter Daszak, who has collaborated for around 15 years with virologist Shi Zhengli, funding her research at the WIV, and some of her salary, through U.S. federal subcontracts. Shortly after the pandemic started, Daszak shot down suggestions that SARS-CoV-2 could have first infected people through a leak at Shi Zhengli’s lab by orchestrating a letter published in The Lancet that labeled such discussions a “conspiracy theory.”
As reported by the New York Times, Daszak has also called it a conspiracy theory to suggest that Shi Zhengli worked with live bats at the WIV:
On Dec. 10, Peter Daszak, who organized The Lancet letter denouncing the questioning of Covid-19’s natural origins and was announced as a member of the W.H.O. origins investigation committee last fall, insisted it was a conspiracy theory to suggest that there were live bats in labs he had collaborated with for 15 years. “That’s not how this science works,” he wrote in a tweet he later deleted. “We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them!”
But evidence to the contrary has accumulated. An assistant researcher told a reporter that Dr. Shi took on the role of feeding the bats when students were away. Another news report in 2018 said a team led by one of her doctoral trainees “collected a full rack of swabs and bagged a dozen live bats for further testing back at the lab.” The Chinese Academy of Sciences website has listed the Wuhan institute as having at least a dozen cages for bats, and in 2018 the institute applied for a patent for a bat cage. Dr. Shi has talked about monitoring antibodies in bats over time — which would not be done in a cave. Recently, another video surfaced that reportedly showed live bats in the institute.
Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Daszak changed his claims. “I wouldn’t be surprised if,” he said, “like many other virology labs, they were trying to set up a bat colony.”
The newly leaked 2018 proposal Daszak submitted to DARPA makes clear why he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Shi Zhengli had a bat colony at the WIV: Daszak promised the Department of Defense that bats would be studied there.
A paragraph in Daszak’s 2018 DARPA proposal where he states that bats would be studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
On a separate page of the DARPA proposal, Daszak wrote that the Wuhan Institute of Virology would capture and house 20 adult bats.