(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Newly released records have been released about controversial gain-of-function research that may have led to the COVID-19 pandemic, showing that U.S. scientists downplayed their connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology—where many suspect the pandemic originated—when they sought funding from the Pentagon.
The scientists named in the records include Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak, who have argued vociferously that COVID was a natural disease and not man-made. Their grant application sought to synthesize spike proteins with furin cleavage sites—“the same feature that supercharged SARS-CoV-2 into the most infectious pandemic pathogen in a century,” said U.S. Right To Know, the group that obtained the records.
Even though the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, ultimately rejected the grant application, U.S. Right To Know argued that Baric and Daszak’s attempt to conceal their links to Wuhan further destroys their credibility. The group also noted that Baric and Daszak may have secured alternative funding for their proposal, which would further implicate them in being responsible for the pandemic.
“New documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know now show that these experiments were proposed to occur in part in Wuhan with fewer safety precautions than required in the U.S. — apparently to save on costs. American scientists at the center of the ‘lab leak theory’ controversy appear to have concealed this from their desired funder [DARPA],” the group said in an article Monday.
“The documents call into question the credibility of these scientists’ assurances that the pandemic could not have sprung out of their collaboration on coronavirus engineering research with the lab in Wuhan.”
The records obtained by U.S. Right to Know include emails from Daszak to Baric and Wuhan Institute of Virology Senior Scientist Zhengli Shi.
“Ralph, Zhengli. If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team,” Daszak wrote in one email. “Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well…”
Other records include comments made by the scientists on early drafts of their grant proposal—what’s since been referred to commonly as the DARPA DEFUSE proposal.
In one comment, Baric acknowledged that U.S. researchers would “freak out” if they knew the novel coronavirus engineering and testing work would be conducted in a BSL-2 lab, according to U.S. Right to Know.
Despite the scientists’ apparent attempts to downplay safety concerns about their proposal, DARPA did not give them the grant. But U.S. Right to Know noted argued Monday that questions remain about whether the work was subsequently completed without the DARPA funding.
Daszak has reportedly insisted that the experiments proposed to DARPA were never carried out.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
