Done In China
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Scientists with close ties to China and the U.S. government is now saying that risky experiments he proposed—which some experts believe could have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2—may have been done, deviating from earlier statements.
Another scientist involved in the proposal also says he doesn’t know if the work was done.
“To the very best of my knowledge ... the work hasn’t been done,” Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, told a congressional panel this week.
Mr. Daszak, however, admitted that he doesn’t know whether scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China have done the proposed experiments.
“Do you know if the WIV started this work?” he was asked during a U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing in Washington.
“No,” Mr. Daszak replied.
“Then you can’t say that the work was not done,” Mitch Benzine, the staff director for the panel, said.
“There is no evidence of the work being done. There is no evidence that WIV started it,” Mr. Daszak said.
Has he ever asked Shi Zhengli, a top scientist at the WIV, whether she carried out the proposal?
“No,” Mr. Daszak acknowledged.
The proposal in question, dubbed Project DEFUSE, was submitted in 2018 to the U.S. government as EcoHealth and its partners, including WIV, sought to take viruses from bats, reverse engineer them, and add features. Some outside scientists say the proposed work could have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) declined to fund the proposal, expressing concerns that adding features to coronaviruses could create a dangerous virus.
After the proposal was leaked to the public in 2021, Mr. Daszak and EcoHealth have said definitively that the proposed experiments never took place.
“The DARPA proposal was not funded. Therefore, the work was not done. Simple,” Mr. Daszak told The Intercept in 2022.
“The proposed research was never done,” EcoHealth added in a recent statement.
Ralph Baric, a University of North Carolina virologist who was also listed in the DEFUSE proposal, also said in newly disclosed testimony that he did not know whether the proposed experiments were conducted.
“Certainly not by my group,” Mr. Baric told the subcommittee. “I don’t know what China did.”
Mr. Baric and Ms. Shi have created chimeras, or combination viruses, among other work together.
“There was no evidence that they were doing this kind of work,” Mr. Baric said. “Well, there was evidence that they were building chimeras using WIV1 as a backbone, so they were doing some discovery work about the functions of spike genes of zoonotic strains that they discovered later on, but I don’t know if they did any of the engineering or anything.”
WIV1 is a bat coronavirus that was found in China.
Mr. Baric also claimed he had forgotten about DEFUSE so he didn’t discuss it while meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top U.S. government official, on Feb. 12, 2020.
Mr. Daszak said Wednesday that DARPA later returned to EcoHealth “to try and fund portions” of DEFUSE, but no lawmakers pressed him on that disclosure.
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