Daily Sceptic by Will Jones 30 January 2024
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 restrictive 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 restrictive 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 – was led by 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.
More:
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/01/30/is-this-the-man-who-created-covid-19-in-faucis-u-s-lab/
