Is This the Man Who Created COVID-19 in Fauci’s U.S. Lab?/ Daily Skeptic

This
is a very important dive into the origin of COVID–another MUST-READ.
The Montana NIAID lab that could have been associated with the origin of
Lyme Disease is where Munster studied SARS viruses.

by Will Jones. 30 January 2024

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/01/30/is-this-the-man-who-created-covid-19-in-faucis-u-s-lab/

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?