Top U.S. virologist Ralph Baric engineered the COVID-19 virus SARS-CoV-2 in his lab at the University of North Carolina as part of his work in connection with the 2018 DEFUSE funding proposal. That’s the story that’s been going round the internet for some months now (and not just in alternative media) and it all looks very damning for Baric and those connected with his research. Details of the DEFUSE project were first leaked by Major Joseph Murphy, an employee of U.S. military research agency DARPA, in the summer of 2021 and further details of earlier drafts have come to light this month thanks to public record requests from U.S. Right to Know (USRTK).
In DEFUSE, Baric proposed to create a virus that was, to most intents and purposes, SARS-CoV-2. The proposal included inserting a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus spike protein, an order for the restriction enzyme BsmBI, the search for a binding domain that would infect ACE2 human receptors and a requirement for a viral genome around 25% different to SARS.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus contains a furin cleavage site in its spike protein, its genome includes the restriction enzyme BsmBI, it has a receptor binding domain finely tuned to infect the ACE2 human receptor and its genome is around 25% different to SARS. A number of virologists have said that such features make SARS-CoV-2 a smoking gun for an engineered virus.
Baric obtained a patent for such novel viruses in 2018, just as he was putting DEFUSE together. In DEFUSE he proposed to infect wild Chinese bats with his newly patented viruses.
Many regard this as case closed for the lab leak.
But this is not the full story. That’s because Baric’s DEFUSE proposal did not win the DARPA funding. And while it is rightly pointed out that, with or without the funding, much of the work was already in hand, it’s what happened next with the winning DARPA proposal where the story really gets interesting.
U.S. researcher Jim Haslam has done an incredible job on his Substack page Reverse engineering the origins of SARS-CoV-2 documenting all the toings and froings among the virology community in connection with the creation of this peculiar virus and the subsequent cover-up. What follows is in large part indebted to his meticulous research, though any errors are of course my own.
The winning 2018 DARPA bid – for a project called PREEMPT – included top bat virus specialist Dr. Vincent Munster (pictured above) based at Anthony Fauci’s NIH Rocky Mountain Lab. Both Munster’s PREEMPT proposal and Baric’s losing DEFUSE project had the same basic idea: to try to prevent a (hypothetical) future pandemic by using an engineered virus to vaccinate the bats from which it is believed such a virus was likely to spill over. The idea being, of course, that the vaccinated bats would no longer be a reservoir for the virus, thus ‘defusing’ or ‘preempting’ the zoonotic spillover. Sounds crazy? Too right – far too much meddling with nature and placing too much faith in the ability of vaccines to prevent infection and transmission. But crazy or not, that’s what the scientists proposed, and Munster’s PREEMPT proposal won and DEFUSE lost.
The key difference between Baric’s DEFUSE and Munster’s PREEMPT proposal – aside from Munster’s proposal coming in around $4m cheaper at $10m – is that rather than relying on spraying bat caves with a non-transmissible virus-vaccine, Munster’s plan involved making the virus-vaccine transmit between the bats via aerosols. This made it a self-spreading vaccine, able (in theory) to reach all the bats without humans having to go and find all their caves and spray them. The risks of such a plan should have been obvious. Indeed, Baric himself, who went awfully quiet after his DEFUSE project leaked in mid-2021, resurfaced in mid-2023 to say that such work involving engineering transmissible virus-vaccines was “too edgy” for him.
After the DARPA funding went to Munster, Fauci rode to Baric’s rescue with a bumper $82m programme called CREID, awarded in summer 2019, in which both Baric’s and Munster’s teams would cooperate in the research into Munster’s concept of self-spreading bat vaccines. Already in late 2018 Baric and Munster cooperated on a project trying to infect Egyptian fruit bats with a SARS-like virus.
Exactly what happened next is not publicly documented, so we do need to fill in some gaps. It appears that Munster took Baric’s patented SARS virus-vaccine and made a transmissible version at his Rocky Mountain Lab (Baric’s version was not intended to be transmissible). What is the evidence for that? Perhaps most telling is that, as Jim Haslam observes, SARS-CoV-2 transmits efficiently in only five known mammals, and those five – American deer, American deer mice, Syrian hamsters, American mink and Egyptian fruit bats – are all found in Munster’s (and Fauci’s) Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana. SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t infect lab animals common in Chinese labs or present in the WIV, such as Chinese horseshoe bats. This would suggest that SARS-CoV-2 acquired its transmissibility in an American lab context and not a Chinese one or elsewhere.
The virus-vaccine having been made transmissible in Montana, it would then have been sent to the WIV to be tested on Chinese bats, which were not available in American labs. There can be little doubt who would have done this testing at the WIV, as there was only one scientist with the necessary connections and expertise. Dr. Danielle Anderson, known as Dani to her colleagues, gained fame in June 2021 as the “last and only foreign scientist in the Wuhan lab” as she went public to make the case for a zoonotic origin. Dani was a member of the Lancet origins commission, chaired by Jeffrey Sachs and disbanded by him in October 2021 over frustrations that the Western virologists like Dani weren’t cooperating. Dani was based on and off at the WIV in the high security BSL4 lab (not Shi Zhengli’s BSL2 lab), but she didn’t work for the WIV. She worked for Duke-NUS, the Singapore-based medical school of North Carolina’s Duke University, under the virologist Dr. Linfa Wang. Linfa and Anderson were part of Baric’s DEFUSE proposal, and Duke-NUS was later a partner in Fauci’s CREID project.
Anderson’s role in DEFUSE was to test the virus-vaccines on “wild-caught captive” Chinese horseshoe bats at the WIV. It is thus reasonable to assume it is her who would be responsible for testing Munster’s self-spreading virus-vaccine on the same Chinese bats. This would explain how the virus got to Wuhan.
It would explain, in other words, how a non-transmissible virus-vaccine designed by Ralph Baric at UNC as per the DEFUSE proposal became a transmissible virus and ended up on the loose in Wuhan. Namely, because it escaped via a laboratory-acquired infection during Anderson’s testing of it on Chinese horseshoe bats in her WIV BSL4 lab, with Dani herself or a colleague as patient zero.
Admittedly, we don’t have direct evidence of this – we don’t have direct evidence that a Munster-Baric SARS-2 virus-vaccine was being tested on Chinese bats in the WIV in 2019, nor that Dr. Anderson or a colleague was infected by it in the lab. But there is a heap of evidence that points to it as a likely scenario.
We know, for instance, that both Baric and Munster were proposing to vaccinate Chinese bats using an engineered virus, in Baric’s case with a furin cleavage site inserted to increase infectivity. We know that Munster’s PREEMPT proposal, in which the virus-vaccine was to be self-spreading, won the DARPA funding, beating Baric’s DEFUSE proposal for a non-self-spreading virus-vaccine, and that in 2019 both teams were brought together in an $82m grant from Fauci’s NIAID.
We know that SARS-CoV-2 readily transmits in the lab animals found in Munster’s Rocky Mountain Lab but not in the lab animals found in the WIV. From this we can further conclude that Dr. Anderson’s experiment to infect Chinese horseshoe bats with the new virus at the WIV presumably failed. This may be why she left Wuhan at the end of November, which was the deadline for the ‘scientific merit review’ for CREID.
We also know that where Dani and her colleagues lived in central Wuhan was an early epicentre for the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, based on social media data.
It also appears that Dani’s supervisor Linfa Wang may have quickly realised that SARS-CoV-2 was one of his viruses. This would explain why he resigned from his post as Director of Duke’s Emerging Infectious Disease programme, a position he had held for nearly a decade, on the same day that the genome was published, January 10th 2020. The reason for his abrupt resignation has never been disclosed. Four days earlier he had told the New York Times he was frustrated that scientists in China were not allowed to speak to him about the outbreak. He cautioned against panic, arguing the virus was likely not spreading between humans because health workers had not contracted the disease. But privately was he fretting that it was from his lab – is that why he immediately resigned when the genome was published? It is hard to understand what else could have led him to quit so suddenly at that point, and the lack of explanation adds to the suspicion. He later called January 10th “the most important day in the COVID-19 outbreak” because it was when the genome was published.
If Linfa was anticipating the bad news, it could have been because he and Dani had been aware of the leak at the time it happened. Analysis of mobile phone records discovered an apparent shutdown of Dr. Anderson’s BSL4 lab between October 7th and 24th 2019 (identified by the lack of mobile phone usage in the vicinity). Nothing further has come to light about this incident and what lay behind it, but if it does denote a laboratory-acquired infection that Anderson and Linfa (and presumably others) were aware of, it would explain a lot.
The realisation that it was an engineered virus from the U.S. may also have driven the panic that pushed the Chinese Government to lock Wuhan down shortly after the genome was published.
Since 2021, Ralph Baric has thrown himself into developing vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses, even entertaining fantasies of “ring vaccination”, as is done with Ebola, to try to stop the outbreak in its tracks. Is this his way of trying to make amends, however misguided? I wonder if we are also able to detect a hint of him pointing to who he thinks is really to blame for the debacle, when he remarks that “governments, rather than scientists” are primarily responsible for choosing which risky gain-of-function experiments to fund and run – a reference perhaps to how Munster’s “edgy” engineering of transmissible virus-vaccines was picked over his non-transmissible version.
“It looks like American science is going to get shredded for a pandemic that started in China,” he told Time‘s Dan Werb, reverting to denial. When Werb suggested to him that despite the “conspiracy theories” there are many people happy that he became a scientist in the first place, he replied: “A fair number that probably wished I hadn’t. Let’s be honest.”
Is that the closest we’ll get to a confession?
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My father was born in Prague, and left for the UK in 1973. We always used to laugh as a family, about the Czechs who believed that, during the Cold War, the US airdropped loads of Colorado Beetles behind the Iron Curtain to destroy potato crops.
I have stopped laughing, to be honest. It no longer seems such a paranoid, far-fetched idea dreamed up in the minds of those with a persecution complex. Perhaps they were right!
It certainly isn’t the first piece of history I thought I understood which recent events have forced me to completely reassess.
I’m currently reassessing everything I’ve ever been taught, it’s an interesting journey.
Makes for some interesting conversations.
https://internationaltimes.it/reservoir-drugs-the-enduring-myth-of-lsd-in-the-water-supply/
Can’t remember the ‘Operation’ but the US Military dropped bags of Mosquitoes onto their own citizens for some type of research.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-insane-experiment-behind-the-covid-pandemic-and-disease-x-part-three/
Links to parts 1 & 2 in the article. Read them all – what is planned for us is horrifying, as and as these articles show, Covid was leaked deliberately.
Released deliberately and Wuhan is a red herring.
I have already posted these daily but no harm in reposting.
Yes I read part 3 link, as mentioned. I must read p1 & p2 also.
Another great example of asking the moral question ‘could we? Should we?’ And as with all human choices it is always could we? and never should we?
Money, power and reputation always trumps caution!
Well said. I wonder if there has ever been an instance of this pre-emptive dabbling proving useful. Would that these eye-watering sums of money be spent on improving health, and I’m not talking about another drug on which the patient becomes dependent and which doesn’t actually cure anything but just suppresses the symptoms, but help the human being resist disease in the first place, which is what we’re designed to do. Too much hubris, too little circumspection.
I can well imagine a scenario where Xi got on the blower to the USA and said something along the lines of:
“if you continue to blame China, I’m going to release all the information we have proving that it was the USA Government which funded creation of Covid 19; USA-funded scientists who engineered the virus and the USA Military who paid Chinese Scientists to test it in Wuhan. Do ya feel lucky, punk? Well do ya?”
It is also a possibility that the virus came from the US lab at Fort Detrick (which had to be closed due to security concerns) and transported to Wuhan during the World Military Games held there just weeks before the outbreak where 300 US personnel competed.
Maybe the idea from the US Deep State and it’s Dr. Strangeloves was to harm the Chinese economy. They believed it was not that virulent and there would be no blowback as was the case with SARS -Cov-1, how wrong they were.
Was it also just a coincidence that thousands of miles away top leaders in Iran were some of the first to die from Covid?
Just imagine what the accusations would have been if Covid had originated in a US city just after 300 Chinese military personnel had been there.
The Chinese government has already accused the US of bringing the virus to China.
https://thediplomat.com/2020/03/chinese-foreign-ministry-spokesperson-implies-us-military-brought-coronavirus-to-wuhan/
It wasn’t – which probably disappointed them.
And still these genetic engineering experiments continue apace in biolabs worldwide.
Apparently to save us all from disease X by developing “vaccines” to cure us before the killer virus is made.
Those responsible for this have killed millions of people, shattered millions of lives – the full butchers bill being yet to come courtesy of the jabs.
I don’t know what’s more staggering, the fact that this happened or the fact that those responsible are not only still breathing but flourishing.
So Covid could well have been an accidental leak with opportunists working at breakneck speed to exploit it, but now they have seen the benefits of a future pandemic it is highly likely another “lab leak” would be planned. The only down side is that they themselves would not escape it. Is this why so many billionaires are building bunkers?
“DEFUSE project had the same basic idea: to try to prevent a (hypothetical) future pandemic…”
As humanity becomes wealthier there is less and less reason for a pandemic like a plague to strike. We already interact with just about all the Flora and Fauna on the planet and have been for millennia and all human populations have been interacting with each other in large numbers for more than 100 years. The plague was spread with international trade and the conditions for it to spread have largely disappeared and none of the measures used to try and stop it worked. The best way to prepare humanity for any future waves of infection is allow prosperity to spread using modern industry and farming. What are we doing in the West? Phasing out industry and farming.
Mr Haslam is a marked but very courageous man. The US is finished , their economy will be saddled with the cost of reparations for a very long time.
Fauci, Baric, Daszak, Farrar , Tedris , Gates and Schwab have to be arrested pdq.
And there is no way British Intelligence was not up to (warp) speed on all of this – hence the panic to shut down so called anti/deniers by Dowden & co – let’s hope NO does an hour long special on this on Saturday ……
And Bill Gates has informed us, his plan is to have future vaccines for humans will be virus-vaccines transmissable by air. No need for mandates or informed consent. A little knowledge is dangerous.