United States: A document detailing the plans to create a COVID-like virus in China months before the pandemic has been obtained.
Experts said, “lab leak almost certain” after recovering this trove of documents, which are obtained by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on requests by nonprofit public health research group- US Right to Know, Dailymail reported.
What do the documents reveal?
The document exposed laying out a plan to ‘engineer spike proteins’ that would then be ‘inserted into SARS-Covid backbones’ at the Wuhan virology lab from December 2018 in order to infect human cells.
Within a year, in late 2019, with a unique masterly ability to infect humans, COVID-19 emerged and became a deadly global pandemic.
As per the documents, the proposal was made by the now ill-famed, New York-based nonprofit organization – EcoHealth Alliance, which routes US government grants abroad to finance such types of experiments.
The application for the grant was eventually denied by the US Department of Defense; however, critics claimed that the plan designed in the proposal worked as a ‘blueprint’ for the making of COVID-19.
A biologist and science writer who wrote extensively about the probable lab leak in the past, Matt Ridley, said, “This latest (document) leak makes the case for a lab leak almost certain.”
Misleading the government
EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) tried to mislead the Department of Defence, US, by deliberately hiding the amount of risk involved in the experiment to secure funding, revealed the document, Dailymail reported.
In a statement issued on Tuesday by EHA, while addressing the documents, it said that the documents are ‘incomplete’ and added that the “allegations are false based on a misunderstanding of edits and comments on the document, and based on misleading, out-of-context quotations and a lack of understanding the process by which federal grants are awarded.”
Ridley also said, “A reckless experiment, known at the time to be reckless, probably caused the death of millions of people.”
About the grant proposal from EHA
The grant proposal was named- Project DEFUSE: Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses.
It proposed that engineering high-risk coronaviruses of the same species as the original SARS to prevent a human spillover and develop vaccine technology and strategies.
It strived to make spike proteins with furin cleavage sites that had been designed to bind to human receptors more easily. The furin has been in the news as one of the focal points of debate about COVID-19’s origin, as some experts believe it could only have been acquired through lab experiments.
The grant further proposed attaching the furin to coronavirus strains and then contaminating mice to see its effect. The next step of the plan, as stated in the grant proposal, was to treat the infection through drugs and vaccination.
According to a chemical biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey – Dr Richard Ebright, “These revelations are important because the experiments in the grant proposal likely – indeed highly likely – led to the creation and release of SARS-CoV-2,” as per Dailymail.
Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth, was the principal investigator on the project. Other members listed to be on the team are researchers from Duke-NUS Medical School, the University of North Carolina, the USGS National Wildlife Health Center, Palo Alto Research Center, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the lab where Covid is believed to have originated from.
Professor Shi Zhengli, who has been termed the ‘bat lady’ for her extensive work on bat coronaviruses at the WIV – working as the lead on the project in Wuhan, was also listed in the proposal.
Dr Ralph Baric, who is a known expert in making recombinant coronaviruses, was listed as a subcontractor on the project.
More about DEFUSE
The proposals in DEFUSE showed, initially, the lab work was to be done in a biosafety-level 2 lab, which researchers said would appeal to The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant-makers as ‘highly cost-effective’ despite the fewer safety precautions taken in lower-level labs. Similar experiments in the US are conducted in BSL-3 labs. A later version of the proposal changed BSL-2 to BSL-3.
As per Dr Ebright, “The new documents reveal that EcoHealth Alliance planned to use US Department of Defense funds to perform high-risk virus experiments at WIV at a biosafety level that was inadequate for research with a potential pandemic pathogen.”
He further added, “The new documents also reveal that EcoHealth Alliance deliberately concealed these plans – both the plan to perform high-risk experiments at WIV and the plan to perform them using inadequate biosafety protections – from the US Department of Defense in order to improve the chances of receiving funding,” Dailymail reported.
The earlier DEFUSE grant proposal stated that Dr Baric was to carry out the manufacturing of the coronavirus spike protein in North Carolina.