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by Will Jones from DailySceptic Website
Article also
HERE...
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.
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.
But this is not the full story.
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.
Dr. Vincent Munster
The winning 2018 DARPA bid - for a project called PREEMPT - included top bat virus specialist Dr. Vincent Munster 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:
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?
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,
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 program 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, ...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.
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...
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.
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,
This would explain how the virus got to Wuhan.
It would explain, in other words,
Admittedly,
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,
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 epicenter for the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, based on social media data.
It also appears that Dani's supervisor Linfa Wang may have quickly realized 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 program, 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 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...
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 realization 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,
...a reference perhaps to how Munster's "edgy" engineering of transmissible virus-vaccines was picked over his non-transmissible version.
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:
Is that the closest we'll get to a confession...?
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