Internet Sleuths Uncover Joint Proposal Of US NGO And Wuhan Institute of Virology To Do Dangerous Research On Bat Coronaviruses

DRASTIC (Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Teams Investigating Covid-19), a group of researchers, scientists and investigators from different countries who are collaborating and coordinating online over the past one year to solve the mystery of Covid-19 origins, have now unearthed a joint proposal by United States Non-Governmental Organisation EcoHealth Alliance led by Peter Daszak and Wuhan Institute of Virology that intended to do dangerous research on bat coronaviruses in China.

DRASTIC team has perhaps done more than anyone to bring evidence in the open to bust the narrative that the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing Covid-19 has only natural origins. It’s due to this team’s exhaustive work that enabled a significant majority of scientists to propose the theory that the virus could have leaked from the Wuhan lab as well. Even the leading lights of believers of natural origins theory are now reluctantly accepting that both the theories are equally plausible.

It is pertinent to note that National Institutes of Health (NIH) which Anthony Fauci has led since 1984 had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology via the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance to the tune of $600,000 over a period of five years. The grant was provided to "study the transmission of coronaviruses from bats to humans to better understand the SARS-CoV-1 epidemic in the early 2000s".

Also, early in the pandemic, on 19 February 2020 The Lancet published a statement by scientists condemning "conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" which all but ensured that anyone in the scientific community who talked of lab-leak was branded a conspiracy theorist. This statement was arranged by none other than Dr Peter Daszak.

The latest find of the DRASTIC team is documents received via a whistleblower that show how EcoHealth Alliance and Wuhan Institute of Virology "attempted to carry out advanced and dangerous human pathogenicity Bat Coronavirus research that would clearly qualify as Gain of Function (GoF)". The documents are a part of grant proposal submitted by EHA and WIV to the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018.

The idea was to inject deadly chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by the WIV into humanised and 'batified' mice. The proposal termed ‘DEFUSE’ was "ultimately rejected for full funding (but leaving open the door for partial funding), in part because it mis-interpreted the Gain of Function guidelines". Despite the research being rejected by one US agency, Department of Health and Human services (HHS) approved similar work without Potential Pandemic Pathogens (P3CO) review in 2018 and 2019, DRASTIC says.

The part of grant proposal which has never been made public until now proposes "vaccinating wild bats using aerosolized viruses and further work on published and unpublished strains that could have directly produced SARS-CoV-2".

”This is literally the most crazy jaw dropping thing I’ve read in the last year. Just utterly damning,” The Seeker, one of the team members of DRASTIC from India, tweeted about the leaked proposal. “They are very clear in what they intended: bat sampling, virus characterization, high-risk experiments, captive trials on bats, and large scale inoculation of bats in Yunnan to “DEFUSE” a potential SARSr-CoV spillover. They demonstrated their capacity, and their expertise,” he added.

"We will analyze all SARSr-CoV S gene sequences for... proteolytic cleavage sites in S2 and for the presence of potential Furin cleavage sites..[W]e will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero cells and HAE cultures,” reads the proposal at one place.

When an Internet user asked Richard H Elbright, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, to translate the above paragraph for laymen, he tweeted that it ‘Translates" as “We will artificially insert furin cleavage sites at the spike-gene S1-S2 border of bat SARS-related coronaviruses, and we will ask whether this increases their ability to infect human cells."’