Scientists backtrack and admit that virus experiments could have been carried out in China | United States | Sars-CoV-2 | Ecohealth Alliance

Article translated and adapted from English, originally published by the American headquarters of the Epoch Times.

A scientist with strong ties to China and the United States 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, diverging from previous statements.

Another scientist involved in the proposal also says he does not know if the work was done.

“As far as I know… the work hasn’t been done,” Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, told a congressional panel this week.

However, Mr. Daszak admitted that he does not know whether scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China carried out the proposed experiments.

“Do you know if WIV started this work?” he was asked during a hearing of the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in Washington.

“No,” Mr. Daszak replied.

“So you can’t say the work wasn’t done,” said Mitch Benzine, the panel’s staff director.

“There is no evidence that the work was done. There is no evidence that WIV began,” said Mr. Daszak.

Has he already asked Shi Zhengli, a top scientist at WIV, if she carried out the proposal?

“WIV1 is a bat coronavirus found in China.”

“No,” Mr. Daszak acknowledged.

The proposal in question, called Project DEFUSE, was submitted in 2018 to the US 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 leaked to the public in 2021, Mr. Daszak and EcoHealth have definitively stated that the proposed experiments were never performed.

“DARPA’s proposal was not funded. Therefore, the work was not done. Simple,” Mr. Daszak told TheIntercept in 2022.

“The proposed research was never carried out,” EcoHealth added in a recent statement.

Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina who was also listed in the DEFUSE proposal, also said in newly released statement who did not know whether the proposed experiments were carried out.

“Certainly not by my group,” Mr. Baric told the subcommittee. “I don’t know what China did.”

Mr. Baric and Ms. Shi created chimeras, or combined viruses, among other works together.

“There is no evidence that they were doing this type 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 on the functions of the spike genes of zoonotic strains that they later discovered, but I don’t know if they did any engineering or anything like that. type.”

Mr. Baric also stated that he had forgotten about DEFUSE, so he did not discuss it during the meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci, a senior US government official, on February 12, 2020.

Mr. Daszak said Wednesday that DARPA later turned to EcoHealth “to try to fund parts” of DEFUSE, but no lawmakers pressed him on that disclosure.

“They were always honest”

EcoHealth separately for years funneled grant money from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to Wuhan researchers, including money that funded experiments that increased virulence of a bat coronavirus.

Asked how his group verified information about these experiments, Mr. Daszak acknowledged that it relied on statements from the WIV. “I have no other way to check,” he said.

Scientists in Wuhan “have always been honest with us,” he later added. “They were always true. There was never anything wrong, nothing dishonest happening. I have no reason to think they were under pressure to lie. There is no indication of that.”

After the pandemic began, WIV researchers refused to turn over lab notebooks and other files to EcoHealth after the U.S. government requested the records, resulting in the government prohibiting the WIV from receiving grant money from the US.

“Nearly two years have passed since NIH first requested that WIV provide the requested information and materials, and still WIV has not done so,” a suspension official wrote to Ms. Shi.

In comments on a draft of the DEFUSE proposal, Mr. Daszak he said that part of the work would be done in the Wuhan laboratory.

“If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be led by Ralph, but I want to highlight the U.S. side of this proposal so that DARPA feels comfortable with our team,” Mr. Daszak wrote in a comment. “Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe many of these trials can be done in Wuhan as well.”

Mr. Daszak told Mr. Baric in a May 27, 2021 email, released by the subcommittee, that Ms. Zhengli said that the cultivation of animal viruses was being done under biosafety level two conditions, or one level below that applied in many other countries.

“We checked with Zhengli, who informed us that he was wearing ‘BSL-2 with negative pressure and appropriate PPE’. I also know they are stricter now with SADS-CoV… since you showed it was capable of infecting human airway epithelial cells,” he wrote.

Mr. Baric responded by saying that Mr. Daszak was “being fed a lot of [palavrões]”.

“BSL-2 with negative pressure, spare me,” he wrote, later adding, “You believe this was appropriate confinement if you want, but don’t expect me to believe it. Also, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to give me this load of [palavrões].”

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