Prologue: Mark Steyn mentions a paywalled Telegraph article, Wuhan scientists planned to release coronavirus particles into cave bats, leaked papers reveal.
It can also be found here. It’s a good thing there’s still some journalism going on in Britain. It isn’t happening here.
Chimeras, Cleavage and Bounced Czechs
New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.
They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund the work.
Papers, confirmed as genuine by a former member of the Trump administration, show they were hoping to introduce “human-specific cleavage sites” to bat coronaviruses which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells…
A Covid-19 researcher from the World Health Organisation (WHO), who wished to remain anonymous, said it was alarming that the grant proposal included plans to enhance the more deadly disease of Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers).
“The scary part is they were making infectious chimeric Mers viruses,” the source said.
“These viruses have a fatality rate over 30 per cent, which is at least an order of magnitude more deadly than Sars-CoV-2.
Drawing inspiration about merging viruses from a mashup of Jurassic Park with The Andromeda Strain, or possibly a combo of Frankenstein and Contagion; Dr. Fauci’s GovFundMe guy, Peter Daszak, says: “Here’s an idea! Let’s create an airborne coronavirus also transmissible through the skin.”
American taxpayer funding for the coronavirus particle accelerator experiment was spiked following a DARPA review. There’s a check-box on the DARPA grant denial form: “Don’t give the ChiComs any ideas!”
Some Daszak inspired coronavirus research that Dr. Fauci did fund, and about which Rand Paul asked Dr. Fauci, was exempted from DARPA review. By Fauci.
The responsibility of the NIAID and NIH is even more acute because for the first three years of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance there was a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research. When the moratorium expired in 2017, it didn’t just vanish but was replaced by a reporting system, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, which required agencies to report for review any dangerous gain-of-function work they wished to fund.
The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly as “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”
But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
This seemed to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the exemption in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research, and later to avoid notifying the Federal reporting system of her research.
“Unfortunately, the NIAID Director and the NIH Director exploited this loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to the Pause –preposterously asserting the exempted research was ‘urgently necessary to protect public health or national security’ — thereby nullifying the Pause,” Dr. Richard Ebright said in an interview with Independent Science News.
Fauci has also admitted there’s no way of knowing whether researchers in Wuhan carried out undisclosed gain-of-function research. Grant money is, of course, fungible.