The scientists who care enough about the truth to pursue the biggest detective story/murder mystery of the 21st century have uncovered what one scientist says is the "smoking gun" proving that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was created in a lab.
It's a highly technical story and begins in March of 2018 when a team of American and Chinese scientists applied to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, looking for a $14 million grant to "manipulate viruses related to SARS-CoV-1, the bat virus that caused a minor epidemic in 2002," according to the Wall Street Journal investigation. Their goal was to identify bat viruses that could most easily make the jump to humans and then vaccinate the bats to prevent them from infecting soldiers.
They called it "Project DEFUSE," and they were determined to enhance the ease with which the virus could infect humans. This is where the "furin cleavage site" for the SARS-CoV-2 virus is first mentioned in official documents.
The furin cleavage is basically a hook that latches on to a human cell making it easier to transmit its genetic material. In this case, infecting people with the coronavirus. It would have been necessary to place the "furin cleavage site" into the genetic material of the new virus to achieve the desired result of increased infectability.
Three biologists, Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen, theorized about a possible structure of such a coronavirus, and what they came up with was eerily similar to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Their paper was derided as “kindergarten molecular biology” by the virologists who are favorites of the mainstream press for their opposition to the lab-leak hypothesis. But a batch of documents reveal new details about the DEFUSE proposal and confirm that the three authors were on target. Emily Kopp of U.S. Right to Know obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Interior Department, having noticed that a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey was a member of the DEFUSE team.
The new documents, which are background planning papers and drafts for the DEFUSE proposal, call for assembling SARS-like viruses from six sections of DNA, and include a cost estimate for purchase of the BsmBI restriction enzyme—exactly as the three authors had inferred. This clearly strengthens, perhaps conclusively, their contention that the virus is synthetic. Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, says it raises “to the level of a smoking gun” the genetic evidence that the virus was manufactured.
The head of the team of scientists who approached DARPA for the grant to study bat viruses was none other than Eco Alliance's Peter Daszak — a familiar figure in the COVID-19 origin story. Daszak says that the team never got funding for the research, so their proposal plays no part in the origin of COVID-19.
But one of Daszak's team members was Shi Zhengli, the "Bat Woman," whose lab at Wuhan has always been thought to be a possible origin for the virus. The U.S. may not have funded the research project, but what about China?
After Darpa turned down the DEFUSE proposal in February 2019, the researchers in Wuhan might have secured Chinese government funding and gone ahead by themselves. Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time Covid-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019. This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin.
The author of the WSJ piece, Nicholas Wade, is the former science editor for the New York Times. But the revelations are still likely to be ignored. That's because there's one, big, missing piece in this detective story: the identity of the parent viruses from which SARS-CoV-2 was derived. Wade believes that the identity of the parent virus isn't necessary and that the evidence for Wuhan Lab being the origin point for the virus is overwhelming.
As long as the parent virus goes unidentified, the theory of natural origin for COVID-19 remains viable, however unlikely. And since the original virus is likely locked away in a Chinese refrigerator somewhere, we'll probably never see it.
