Discussion: Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Wuhan has been working with bats and coronavirus for many years - DNA manipulations, cloning....

[Shiloh]

Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/leaked...s_4011711.html

Leaked Documents Reveal Proposal by Daszak’s Organization for Developing COVID-Like Viruses
Whistleblower document reveals 2018 funding proposal that detailed risky gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses
Jeff Carlson
Hans Mahncke
September 22, 2021 Updated: September 23, 2021

Commentary

New documents detail how Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology were planning to use gain-of-function experiments to artificially insert “human-specific cleavage sites” into coronaviruses in order to increase their ability to infect human cells.

The newly released documents, which are part of a funding proposal submitted to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program in 2018, detail a blueprint for the creation of a COVID-19-like virus. The ostensible goal of the research was to get ahead of nature by predicting whether viruses might evolve over time to acquire these enhanced traits...

[Emily]

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/

Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research

The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.

Sharon Lerner, Maia Hibbett

September 23 2021, 6:16 p.m.

A grant proposal written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.
The EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to inquiries about the document, despite having answered previous queries from The Intercept about the group’s government-funded coronavirus research. The group’s president, Peter Daszak, acknowledged the public discussion of an unfunded EcoHealth proposal in a tweet on Saturday. He did not dispute its authenticity....
...

Tipping the Scales

“Some kind of threshold has been crossed,” said Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and co-author of the upcoming book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” Chan has been vocal about the need to thoroughly investigate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab while remaining open to both possible theories of its development. For Chan, the revelation from the proposal was the description of the insertion of a novel furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses — something people previously speculated, but had no evidence, may have happened.
“Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”

Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, whose work tracking bats and other animals was referenced in the grant application without his knowledge, also said it made him more open to the idea that the pandemic may have its roots in a lab. “The information in the proposal certainly changes my thoughts about a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Wikelski told The Intercept. “In fact, a possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”...

[Emily]

https://drasticresearch.org/2021/09/20/1583/

DRASTIC Analysis of the DEFUSE Documents

[Pathfinder]

‘Lab-leak’ and natural origin proponents face off—civilly—in forum on pandemic origins

Science-sponsored face-to-face debate was long overdue, scientists say

30 SEP. 20214:50 P.M.BYMARTIN ENSERINK

The four scientists who participated in a Science-sponsored discussion today about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic differed sharply on several issues, but there was one thing they could agree on: Amid an increasingly politicized media frenzy over the issue—and tons of Twitter vitriol—it’s still possible to have a civilized scientific debate about whether SARS-CoV-2 originated from a “lab leak” or a natural jump from animals to humans that didn’t involve researchers.

Moderated by Science reporter Jon Cohen, the online debate brought together scientists from both sides of the issue. Linfa Wang, a bat coronavirus researcher at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, is convinced the virus originated in nature. Evolutionary virologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona said he had kept an open mind from the start. He signed a May letter in Science asking for more serious investigation of the lab-leak theory but now strongly leans toward a natural origin.

On the other side were evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center—who said he considers a lab origin “highly plausible”—and Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute who specializes in genetic engineering. Chan, who has become one of the most visible proponents of the lab-leak idea and has co-authored a book on the origins issue, paraphrased comedian Jon Stewart to explain why she believes it is just too much of a coincidence that the pandemic began so close to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV): “In 2019, a novel SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] coronavirus, with a novel genetic modification, appeared in a city where there’s a lab studying novel SARS coronaviruses with novel genetic modifications.”
...

Video:
https://www.science.org/content/arti...ndemic-origins

[Shiloh]

Source: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Co...ted-COVID-case

China PCR test orders soared before first reported COVID case
Government contracts show surges in Wuhan-area purchases starting May 2019

MASAYA KATO, Nikkei staff writerOctober 5, 2021 04:00 JST

TOKYO -- Purchases of PCR tests in China's Hubei Province surged months before the first official reports of a novel coronavirus case there, according to a report from researchers in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.

About 67.4 million yuan ($10.5 million at current rates) was spent on PCR tests in Hubei during 2019, nearly double the 2018 total, with the upswing starting in May. The report, released by a research team that includes former intelligence officers, is based on records from a website aggregating information on bids for public sector procurement contracts.

The report casts further doubt on China's official line about the origins of the virus, a topic that has fueled tensions between Beijing and Washington.

PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, tests are used to detect the presence of a particular genetic sequence in a sample, and they have applications beyond COVID-19 testing. But the report alleges the unusual uptick likely signals awareness of a new disease spreading in and around Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province...

[Emily]

https://drasticresearch.org/2021/09/...ect-documents/
The DEFUSE PROJECT Documents

DEFUSE doc snips
https://drasticresearch.files.wordpr...nce-defuse.pdf








DARPA rejection for GOF safety concerns. Correction: Rejection was not for the GOF concerns. That was a concern if a modified project was later funded. See this post for a discussion of why DEFUSE was rejected. It had to do with epitope inadequacy if just the spike was used in a vaccine, and also concerns about the methods proposed to deliver a preemptive vaccine to bats. (Sheer lunacy, IMO.)

https://drasticresearch.files.wordpr...ecommended.pdf

[Emily]

Bat measles next.

https://twitter.com/acritschristoph/status/1447594267023532033

Alex Crits-Christoph
@acritschristoph

Replying to@conTaminatedsci
and@StevenSalzberg1

I agree we're there for many viruses, maybe not all. But speaking of, I'm surprised there wasn't more attention given to https://biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.17.460143v1.full considering they synthesized a full-length infectious clone from a metagenomic sequence. The first time that has been done I think.

biorxiv.org
Zoonotic potential of a novel bat morbillivirus
Bats are significant reservoir hosts for many viruses with zoonotic potential[1][1]. SARS-CoV-2, Ebola virus, and Nipah virus are examples of such viruses that have caused deadly epidemics and...


11:05 AM · Oct 11, 2021·Twitter Web App

[Shiloh]

Source: https://nypost.com/2021/10/21/nih-ad...ign=SocialFlow

NIH admits US funded gain-of-function in Wuhan — despite Fauci’s denials
By Emily Crane
October 21, 2021 1:43pm Updated

It’s another Fauci flub.

The National Institutes of Health has stunningly admitted to funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at China’s Wuhan lab — despite Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly insisting to Congress that no such thing happened.

In a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Wednesday, a top NIH official blamed EcoHealth Alliance — the New York City-based nonprofit that has funneled US funds to the Wuhan lab — for not being transparent about the work it was doing.

NIH’s principal deputy director, Lawrence A. Tabak, wrote in the letter that EcoHealth’s “limited experiment” tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”

The lab mice infected with the modified virus “became sicker” than those that were given the unmodified virus, according to Tabak.

“As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do,” Tabak said...

[Emily]

https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/p/analcdotal

S.C.I.E.N.C.E.
Scientists Concealing Important Evidence Neatly Consistent with lab Emergence

[sharon sanders]

bump this

[sharon sanders]

We cover all sides of an issue, including denials:

“I obviously totally disagree with Senator Paul. He's absolutely incorrect. Neither I nor Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, lied or misled about what we’ve done,” Dr. Anthony Fauci tells
@GStephanopoulos in response to NIH letter on Wuhan lab. https://abcn.ws/3nmWiBk

-------------------------------------------------------

Thread


See new TweetsConversation


Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
·
3h
In any event, there's no way for the corporate media to ignore this story now. The NIH letter *admitting* EcoHealth's research, funded by Fauci, made bat coronaviruses more contagious *proves* Fauci's statements to Congress were false. Only question is if Fauci knew it was false.
61
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1.3K
Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
·
3h
This
@VanityFair
article does a good job on the *highly incriminating* new evidence. Ironically, the FOIA requests of the
@TheIntercept
- intended to clear Fauci - provided the best proof until yesterday (and credit to them, I guess, for not hiding it).
Quote Tweet

Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
· 17h
This article -- examining the new proof that research funded by Dr. Fauci did exactly what he's spent 18 months vehemently denying and calling everyone a liar for suggesting: making bat coronaviruses more contagious -- is absolutely crucial to read: https://vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/...ch-in-wuhan…
26
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908
Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
·
3h
Here's another article that does a great job on this new evidence. There's no proof this research was what caused COVID-19. The key is Fauci's money went to research that made bat coronaviruses more contagious: what he's vehemently denied for 18 months: https://plus.cq.com/shareExternal/doc/news-6371861/oDCKlYdwHIA9lYeMv6QteTg03Es?0…
27
262
1K
Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
·
3h
And yes,
@RandPaul
is absolutely owed an apology he'll never get. Unlike the media which wanted to bury the story, and social media that *banned* discussion of it, Paul just wanted answers about the research EcoHealth was doing. We now have those answers:
Quote Tweet

Zaid Jilani
@ZaidJilani
· Oct 23
News media who attacked Rand Paul over Fauci questions owe him an apology. Paul was actually using his time to try and get crucial information, as opposed to the grandstanding members of both parties often use these hearings and briefings for.
Show this thread
34
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1.7K
Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
·
3h
But this whole debacle yet again proves how fundamentally broken the US media is. For a full year, they declared the lab leak theory so insane that social media companies censored it. The **NYT COVID Reporter** said it was "racist" to investigate it. And now the truth emerges.
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Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald
Here's the key unanswered question: The NIH admits that the research it funded through EcoHealth under Fauci made bat coronaviruses more contagious, but Fauci didn't lie because he didn't know until now. But EcoHealth insists Fauci knew all along because they told him & NIH:

9:58 AM · Oct 24, 2021·Twitter Web App

[Shiloh]

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/nih-funded-re...225727049.html

NIH funded research in Wuhan lab, unrelated to pandemic
Aisha Powell
Sun, October 24, 2021, 6:57 PM·4 min read

The NIH revealed that federal funding was used to study bat coronavirus and said the research was not the source of the pandemic

The National Institute of Health (NIH), the government agency that is responsible for biomedical and public health research, has said that it funded virus-enhancing coronavirus research, after denying the claim for months. It should be noted that Covid-19 is a type of coronavirus and the coronavirus that was reportedly altered, is not Covid-19.

In a letter, the NIH stated that non-profit EcoHealth Alliance altered a bat coronavirus in an experiment and the virus became more infectious than the naturally occurring one. They also said that the organization failed to report all the findings relating to the changes of the virus...

[sharon sanders]

Again, we publish all denials....


October 20, 2021

Statement on Misinformation about SARS-CoV-2 Origins


To date, the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic has not been identified, despite intensive efforts to do so. This is not unusual — confirming with 100% certainty the origin of a virus is a long and complicated process. It took 14 years for scientists to find a single bat population that contained all the necessary genetic components of SARS-CoV, the virus that caused the 2003 SARS epidemic. We still do not know the origins of the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

Unfortunately, in the absence of a definitive answer, misinformation and disinformation are filling the void, which does more harm than good. NIH wants to set the record straight on NIH-supported research to understand naturally occurring bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded through a subaward from NIH grantee EcoHealth Alliance. Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.

The scientific evidence to date indicates that the virus is likely the result of viral evolution in nature, potentially jumping directly to humans or through an unidentified intermediary animal host. Historically, many viruses have emerged from animals to cause epidemics and pandemics, including influenza, Ebola, Zika, West Nile fever, SARS, and more. Importantly, after an intensive investigation, agencies in the U.S Intelligence Community agreed that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon and most agencies assessed that SARS-CoV-2 most likely was not genetically engineered.

Public health and scientific organizations, including NIH, are intensely interested in getting a definitive answer to inform efforts to prevent future events. This effort would benefit from less speculation and more scientific cooperation, especially from China, without which the SARS-CoV-2 origins will be impossible to identify.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, National Institutes of Health

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we...-cov-2-origins

[Pathfinder]

Fights over confidentiality pledge and conflicts of interest tore apart COVID-19 origin probe

...

18 OCT 20212:45 PMBYJON COHEN

An effort to probe the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic that was intended to sidestep politics has foundered amid accusations of conflicts of interest and bias. The head of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, an interdisciplinary initiative set up by the prestigious medical journal to improve the world’s response to the pandemic, last month quietly and abruptly dissolved its origin task force after 10 months of work. That news, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was preceded by a dispute over academic freedom, Science has learned, and also reflects the deep and bitter divisions that have been steadily escalating over whether a natural spillover of a virus was the trigger or whether laboratory studies might have played some role.

The commission’s chair, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, says he was concerned that five of the 12 task force members, including the original and current chairs, had potential conflicts of interest because of their direct and indirect ties to a lab in Wuhan, China, at the center of the origin debate. But Gerald Keusch, the current chair, charges that Sachs didn’t trust that the task force members would give the lab-origin hypothesis a fair evaluation and attempted to influence how they conducted their work, including demanding access to confidential interviews with experts on both sides of the debate whom they promised not to identify.
...
Last month, Sachs says, his concerns about conflicts broadened beyond Daszak to other task force members. On 10 September, he learned details of an NIH grant to EcoHealth, “Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in EID Hotspots of Southeast Asia,” which was released following Freedom of Information Act requests from The Intercept. Keusch and three other task force members are listed as co-investigators. “None of them reported this involvement with the EcoHealth Alliance grant, though they had been asked to do so,” Sachs says. “In these circumstances, I ended the task force.”
...

https://www.science.org/content/article/fights-over-confidentiality-pledge-and-conflicts-interest-tore-apart-covid-19-origin-probe

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Opinion: One person who might know what really happened in Wuhan

Opinion by the Editorial Board
Today at 3:33 p.m. EDT
...
Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit based in New York, organized a five-year research program funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to study bat coronaviruses and potential spillover risk to people, with significant participation by the WIV and its scientist, Shi Zhengli. The government of China, Ms. Shi and Mr. Daszak all insist the laboratory could not be the source of the pandemic strain. Mr. Daszak has been particularly aggressive in promoting the zoonotic spillover hypothesis and attacking the laboratory leak as a “conspiracy theory.”
...
He was at the center of public debate over virus origins, the only American appointed to the joint World Health Organization-China mission. Why did he not disclose his 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for research on bat coronaviruses with the WIV and others, which called for engineering a modification onto spike proteins of chimeric viruses that would make them infect human cells in the way the pandemic strain did? What does he know about the databases of viruses that WIV took offline in 2019 and never brought back? Does he know what research the WIV may have done on its own, during or after their collaboration? What was being done at WIV in the months before the pandemic?

Mr. Daszak must answer these questions...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/25/one-person-who-might-know-what-really-happened-wuhan/

[Emily]

https://nypost.com/2021/09/08/covering-up-faucis-role-in-covid-leak-devine/

By Miranda Devine
September 8, 2021 10:23pm Updated

...

Fauci’s outfit at the National Institutes of Health gave a total of $14 million to Daszak in various grants. But by far the largest donor to EcoHealth was the Department of Defense, which has given Daszak more than $40 million since 2014, almost all of it through its Defense Threat Reduction Agency, for the stated purpose of “combating weapons of mass destruction,” and most of it since 2017.

A former EcoHealth employee says Daszak disclosed some years ago that he had been “approached by the CIA in late 2015.”

The employee believed that the CIA helped steer large chunks of federal funding to EcoHealth’s projects in parts of the world like China where they needed “human intelligence related to biological threats and capabilities. Many of these places are hard to collect good intelligence … Also, [the Department of Defense] was actively always asking for data, models, and analysis.”

If the intelligence community knew about the dangerous research going on at Wuhan and was directing funding to it through Daszak, then it is complicit in a coverup over COVID-19...

[Pathfinder]

Proposed changes to the composition of the SAGO committee



October 2021

DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.18805.50405/1

Projects: COVID-19 OriginPandemics

Authors:
Colin D Butler
Australian National University
Alina Chan
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo
Institut Jacques Monod
Gilles Demaneuf
Engineer and Data Scientist
Elisa Harris
Jonathan Russell Latham
The Bioscience Resource Project
Milton Leitenberg
University of Maryland, College Park
Jamie Metzl
Atlantic Council
Steven Quay
Atossa Therapeutics, Inc.
Günter Theißen
Friedrich Schiller University Jena
Roland Wiesendanger
University of Hamburg

...

Abstract


Comments on the proposed SAGO committee and proposed changes. Official SAGO notice: https://www.who.int/news-room/articl...(sago)-members


Public Full-text 1

Content uploaded by Gilles Demaneuf
Author content
Content may be subject to copyright.
October 26, 2021

Dear Dr. Tedros,

As scientists and science communicators who have signed one or more of four open
letters on pandemic origins, dated March 4,April 7,April 30, and June 28,2021,
respectively, we support your statements recognizing the limitations of the joint study
mission which performed some initial and partial studies on Covid-19 pandemic origins.
We also strongly approve of your call for access to raw data in China and for a proper
audit of the relevant Wuhan laboratories and sampling trips, which the initial joint
study mission did not have the mandate, access, or required skill set to accomplish. Only
such an approach - which goes beyond the standard epidemiological tracing more apt to
a purely natural origin - will allow for the most credible scientific investigation into all
plausible hypotheses.

For these reasons, we welcome the establishment of the new WHO Scientific Advisory
Group on Pandemic Origins (SAGO) as a positive step forward. If designed properly,
SAGO has the significant potential to make present and future investigations far more
transparent, effective, accountable, and legitimate.

The full potential of this effort will only be realized, however, if SAGO has the mandate,
the access, and, above all, the necessary team to realize its ambitions. For this reason,
we are concerned that the proposed list of 26 nominees to SAGO, announced on 13
October, lacks the diversity of skills and the scientific impartiality necessary for its
mission.

Specifically, we note that there are far too few nominees with backgrounds in biosafety,
biosecurity, or forensics (we counted only two out of 26) -- skills that are critical for
realizing SAGO’s mission. At best this imbalance will strongly hamper SAGO’s ability to
accomplish its task. At worst this will fundamentally harm SAGO’s credibility, and the
credibility of the WHO by extension. To function optimally, SAGO will require a team
able to fairly and credibly examine all pandemic origin hypotheses, both now and in the
future.

The group also includes a number of people who are on public record dismissing a
possible research-related origin of the current pandemic in often extreme terms and
using language indicating a lack of openness to all credible hypotheses. Some nominees
also seem to have conflicts of interests which have the potential to sap the credibility of
SAGO. By conflict of interest, we mean here individuals whose funding and research
activities could be significantly curtailed if the origin of the Covid-19 outbreak was found
to be research-related.
...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355585072_Proposed_changes_to_the_composition_of_the_SAGO_committee