(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) An esteemed molecular biologist warned the public of “smoking gun” evidence that COVID-19 not only originated from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology but was also engineered by researchers at the Chinese lab.
Richard H. Ebright, Ph.D., a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, highlighted a March 2018 grant proposal for experiments called “Project DEFUSE” as evidence of his claims, according to Blaze Media.
The news source also added that both American and Chinese virologists lobbied to receive a $14 million grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, for funding to engineer bat viruses related to SARS-CoV-1 so that they would be able to examine how they could jump to human transmission.
The viruses’ infectivity would be enhanced by inserting into them a genetic element known as a furin cleavage site, according to the specifications of the proposal for Project DEFUSE that were reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal added that, depending on the starting viruses, this protocol could have produced SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
It was also reported that the proposal involved Chinese bat researcher Zhengli Shi, EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak, and Ralph Baric, a University of North Carolina professor, who reportedly collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on “risky bat-virus research” back in 2015.
Ultimately, the proposal was denied by DARPA, Blaze Media wrote.
Project DEFUSE, however, may have been funded by the Chinese government and executed by researchers at the Wuhan Lab of Virology, according to the Washington Times.
“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,” Nicholas Wade, a former science editor of the New York Times, wrote in the Journal.
Dr. Filippa Lentzos, an associate professor of science and international security at King’s College London, also suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated from the laboratory.
“We have to acknowledge the fact that the pandemic could have started from some research-related incident,” Lentzos said.
