New bombshell documents released Monday by Project Veritas indicate that the U.S. military’s premier scientific research organization had declined to fund a research project on bat coronaviruses since it met the standard of banned gain-of-function research. At the same time, the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under the direction of Dr. Anthony Fauci, proceeded with that project in Wuhan, China, and at several sites across the United States.
According to Project Veritas, EcoHealth Alliance (a U.S.-based non-governmental organization “with a stated mission of protecting people, animals, and the environment from emerging infectious diseases”) contacted DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses.
In its executive summary of project “DEFUSE,” EcoHealth claimed, “Our goal is to analyze, predict, then “DEFUSE” the spillover potential of novel bat-origin high-risk SARS-CoVs in Southeast Asia and across these viruses’ distribution.”
The organization proposed conducting in-depth sampling of bat coronaviruses and models using bat and viral data to estimate the viruses’ “jump potential.” The approach included sequencing the spike protein and modeling spike structure to assess ACE2 binding (or the major cell entry receptor of the coronaviruses) and then test them “in vitro and ACE2 humanized mouse experiments.” The results would then be tested in machine-learning to predict viral spillover risk. The project also proposed “modeling evolutionary/recombination rates capacity to infect humans.” The infection potential should have been validated with previously collected human serum to identify the viruses’ “spillover potential.”
To achieve all of that, the researchers would inoculate bats with immune modulators “to upregulate their naturally inhibited innate immunity and suppress viral replication, transiently reducing viral shedding/spillover risk.
The bats would also be injected with “novel chimeric polyvalent recombinant spike proteins to enhance their adaptive immune memory against specific, high-risk viruses.”
Finally, the project would try and develop an aerosol-cased vaccine for the infected bats at “our three test cave sites in a cave complex in Yunnan, China, where SARSr·CoVs have infected people.”
DARPA, however, declined the proposal, and the money was not an object. The agency’s Biological Technologies Office that studied the projects said it has “significant weaknesses,” including the following:
1. The proposal is considered to potentially involve GoF [gain-of-function]/DURC [Dual Use Research of Concern] research because they propose to synthesize spike glycoproteins which bind to human cell receptors and insert them into SARSr-CoV backbones to assess whether they can cause SARS-like disease.
2. However the proposal does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research.
3. Nor does the proposal mention or assess Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) issues, and thus fails to present a DURC risk mitigation plan.
Which means that DARPA did classify the project as a gain-of-function, which the U.S. government issued a moratorium on due to safety, ethical, and moral concerns raised within the scientific community in 2014. It was at this point that funding for GoF research started being funneled through the EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (covered by The New American here).
“We had a big scare with SARS-CoV-1 [SARS] back in 2002, 2003 where that particular virus unquestionably went from a bat to an intermediate host to start an epidemic,” Fauci told the House Appropriations Committee back in May 2021 when confirming the National Institute of Health did send WIV $600,000. “It would have been almost a dereliction of our duty if we didn’t study this, and the only way you can study these things is you’ve got to go where the action is.”
Project Veritas also released a report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense written by U.S. Marine Corps Major Joseph Murphy, a former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) fellow, on August 13, 2021, in which he “detail[s] great concern over the COVID-19 gain of function program, the concealment of documents, the suppression of potential curatives, like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, and the mRNA vaccines.”
In that report, Murphy states that he “came across” some “incriminating documents” regarding the NIH funding GoF research in Wuhan lab.
The major described that his primary concerns were that that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 “exactly matched” SARS vaccines that “NIH-EcoHealth program was making in Wuhan”, the Defense Department rejected those vaccines because found them “ineffective,” “the spike proteins being inserted into the [coronavirus] variants were too dangerous (gain-of-function),” and that the DOD has moved to mandate the armed forced to take the vaccines that “copy the spike protein previously deemed too dangerous.”
In that report, Murphy explicitly called SARS-CoV-2 “an American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus.”
All of the documents published by Project Veritas were apparently hidden in a top-secret shared drive, even though they were not classified.
In a video breaking this story, James O’Keefe wondered,
Who at DARPA made the decision to bury the original report? They could have raised red flags to the Pentagon, the White House, or Congress, which may have prevented this entire pandemic that has led to the deaths of 5.4 million people worldwide and caused much pain and suffering to many millions more.
When asked about the Project Veritas report, Dr. Fauci claimed that it was “distorted.” “We have never seen that grant and we have never funded that grant,” he added.
On Tuesday, the GOP Oversight Committee released additional documents indicating that Dr. Fauci likely hid information about gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
The committee’s Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.) and House Committee on the Judiciary Ranking Member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) called on the Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to arrange Fauci’s testimony regarding his knowledge and alleged cover-up of information on the issue.
