In December 2018, U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance laid out a proposal to "engineer spike proteins" to infect human cells that would then be "inserted into SARS-Covid backbones" at China's Wuahn Institute of Virology, according to documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit public health research group U.S. Right to Know.
Scientists who have not been compromised say the documents make the case of a lab leak of the coronavirus all but certain.
Matt Ridley, a biologist and science writer who has written extensively about the potential lab leak, wrote: "A reckless experiment, known at the time to be reckless, probably caused the death of millions of people. Scientists and the media conspired to conceal the evidence. Let that sink in."
The 2018 EcoHealth Alliance proposal was ultimately rejected by the U.S. Department of Defense, but critics say the plans laid out in the proposal served as a "blueprint" for how to create Covid.
Dr Richard Ebright, a chemical biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told DailyMail.com: "These revelations are important because the experiments in the grant proposal likely — indeed highly likely — led to the creation and release of SARS-CoV-2."
Covid was the likely result of risky gain-of-function research which was bankrolled by the U.S. taxpayer through Dr. Anthony Fauci's former department, a theory the FBI and other government agencies now subscribe to.
The principal investigator on the project is listed in the documents as Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth.
Other team members listed on the proposal include researchers from Duke-NUS Medical School, University of North Carolina, the USGS National Wildlife Health Center, Palo Alto Research Center and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab where Covid is believed to have originated from.
The proposal listed Professor Shi Zhengli — who has been dubbed the "bat lady" for her extensive work on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab — as the lead on the project in China.
Additionally, Dr. Ralph Baric was listed as a subcontractor on the project. Dr Baric is a known expert in making recombinant coronaviruses.
The documents show the experiments were proposed to take place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biosafety-level 2 (BSL-2) lab, which has fewer safety precautions for working with pandemic-potential specimens than the U.S. The use of the Wuhan lab was advertised to the Department of Defense as cost-saving.
Baric acknowledged in an edited version of the proposal that U.S. researchers would "freak out" if they knew novel coronavirus engineering and testing was being done in a BSL-2 lab.
Similar experiments in the U.S. are conducted in BSL-3 labs.
Ebright told DailyMail.com: "The new documents reveal that EcoHealth Alliance planned to use US Department of Defense funds to perform high-risk virus experiments at WIV at a biosafety level that was inadequate for research with a potential pandemic pathogen.
"The new documents also reveal that EcoHealth Alliance deliberately concealed these plans — both the plan to perform high-risk experiments at WIV and the plan to perform them using inadequate biosafety protections — from the U.S. Department of Defense in order to improve the chances of receiving funding."
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