"Top US 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...
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 restrictive 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 restrictive 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...
But this is not the full story. That’s because Baric’s DEFUSE proposal did not win the DARPA funding. And... it’s what happened next with the winning DARPA proposal where the story really gets interesting.
The winning 2018 DARPA bid was for a project called PREEMPT led by Dr. Vincent Munster... based at Anthony Fauci’s NIH Rocky Mountain Lab. Both PREEMPT and Baric’s losing DEFUSE project had the same basic idea: to try to prevent a (hypothetical) future pandemic by using an engineered SARS 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...
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...
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)...
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...
It would explain... 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 [Dr. Danielle] Anderson’s testing of it on Chinese horseshoe bats in her WIV BSL4 lab, with Dani herself or a colleague as patient zero."
The author is editor of the Daily Sceptic.
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