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11 months ago
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SCIENTISTS lied to the US government about biosafety fears over Covid experiments in the Wuhan lab, bombshell new documents suggest.
Experts said the latest leaked records make the Covid lab leak theory “almost certain” after scientists appeared to deliberately mislead the Pentagon on the riskiness of their experiments.
Bombshell emails show how scientists concealed concerns about biosafety in WuhanRex
AFP
Twitter / @AyjchanThe Wuhan Institute of Virology has been at the centre of the lab leak theory ever since Covid first emerged just a stone’s throw from the facility – which was known to be studying very similar bat viruses.
Many scientists and intelligence officials suspect bungling researchers at the lab accidentally spread Covid during risky experiments on bat coronaviruses.
Even the FBI and the US Department of Energy now believe Covid most likely leaked from a lab in China.
Documents previously uncovered by DRASTIC – a team of scientists and sleuths investigating Covid’s origins – revealed how US scientists applied for funding to create a Covid-like virus in China.
A year later, Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan and spread across the world, killing nearly seven million people.
Now, new emails obtained by US Right to Know (USRTK) show how US scientists appeared to cover up their plan to carry out the high-risk coronavirus experiments in Wuhan with shoddy biosafety measures.
Emails show how they thought US researchers would “freak out” if they knew the experiments were conducted in a BSL-2 lab – a lower safety level than BSL-3 required in the US.
It appears American scientists covered up their intentions to work at the lab in Wuhan to “evade any national security concerns about doing high-level biosecurity work in China”, USRTK said.
The bombshell documents suggest they deliberately misled the Pentagon on the riskiness of the experiments in order to secure its backing.
The proposal – known as DEFUSE – came from EcoHealth Alliance, a New York non-profit that channels US government grants into overseas experiments.
The documents laid out explicit instructions for how to insert proteins that infect human cells “into SARS-Covid backbones” in the notorious Wuhan virology lab.
In an edited version of the proposal, Dr Ralph Baric – a known expert in creating recombinant coronaviruses – makes a note of its riskiness.
The proposal outlined the “highly cost-effective” nature of the experiment – which Dr Baric said was due to the lower biosafety lab facilities required in China.
As a subcontractor on the project, he wrote: “In the US, these recombinant SARS CoV are studied under BSL3 and BSl2, especially important for those that are able to bind and replicate in human cells.
“In China, might be growin[g] these virus under BSL2.
“The US researchers will likely freak out.”
The funding application was later refused by the US Department of Defence – but it’s not known if the project was completed without government funding.
But critics claim that the proposal clearly laid out plans to create a “mother of Covid” virus the served as a “blueprint” for how to create Covid, and in turn, kick start a pandemic.
Senator Rand Paul, a supporter of the lab leak theory, said the recently-uncovered evidence supports the “deception” used by players linked to the Wuhan lab.
And biologist Matt Ridley, co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, said the emails “make the case for a lab leak almost certain”.
“A reckless experiment, known at the time to be reckless, probably caused the death of millions of people,” he said.
“Scientists and the media conspired to conceal the evidence. Let that sink in.”
Justin Kinney, a biologist and co-founder of Biosafety Now, said the leaked emails were “damning”.
He told US Right to Know that the documents were significant because they show “these specific experiments” could have “quite possibly” led to the release of Covid.
Similarly, Dr Richard Ebright, a chemical biologist at Rutgers University, told the Mail that the revelations were “important”.
“The experiments in the grant proposal likely – indeed highly likely – led to the creation and release of SARS-CoV-2.”
SARS-CoV-2 is the virus which leads to Covid-19.
The rejected DEFUSE proposal involved engineering high-risk coronaviruses in order to begin developing future vaccines in case of a possible infection in the human population.
The team hoped to engineer “spike proteins” with “furin cleavage sites” that would bind to human receptors more easily.
The unique characteristic of Covid has been at the centre of debates over the origin of the virus as experts have alleged that it can only be produced through lab experiments.
The scientists wanted to attach the protein-infecting cells with furin to strains of coronavirus and infect mice with it to see how ill it would make them.
Further down the line, the plan was to produce a preemptive vaccine to prevent such a catastrophe as the Covid pandemic.
In a statement published today, EcoHealth alliance denied the allegations, stating they represent “incomplete or early drafts of the proposal”.
“These allegations are false, based on misunderstanding of edits and comments on the document, and based on misleading out-of-context quotations, and a lack of understanding of the process by which federal grants are awarded.”
The bombshell documents follow Dr Andrew Huff, former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance’s claims that Covid was genetically engineered in the Wuhan facility.
The whistleblowing scientist alleged he had a ringside seat to what he brands one of the greatest cover-ups in history – and the “biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11“.
It comes as The Sun revealed that US government health officials deliberately downplayed a lab leak as the most likely cause of the pandemic.
Former intelligence chief John Ratcliffe and top health department official Dr Robert Kadlec spoke out aout the fact what was being said in public was not supported by their own intelligence.
Over the summer, reports suggested that US spies were probing whether Covid was created by a Chinese military scientist before it leaked from a Wuhan lab.
Zhou Yusen, who worked for the People’s Liberation Army, filed a patent for a Covid vaccine before the pandemic was declared – and mysteriously died just weeks later.
It followed a secret memo that revealed that China ordered scientists to destroy all early coronavirus samples from their labs just two days after the world was first told about Covid.
As the pandemic was starting to explode across the world, panicked Beijing ordered the labs to share their samples with the government – or destroy them “on the spot”, the leaked order shows.
The memo – uncovered and translated by US Right to Know (USRTK) – exposes the Chinese government’s far-reaching crackdown in the early days of the pandemic.
AP
English (US)