American scientists applied to engineer coronaviruses with remarkable similarities to SARS-CoV-2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018, just one year before the pandemic’s outbreak, according to newly released internal documents.
The 2018 grant proposal and related documents — obtained by the watchdog group U.S. Right to Know through a Freedom of Information request — reveal that an American virologist working with the Wuhan lab planned to engineer a virus that resembles SARS-CoV-2 as part of a U.S.-China research collaboration called “DEFUSE.” The research project was to be led by EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City-based research nonprofit that received funding from the NIH and routed that funding to the Wuhan lab to perform gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in bats.
While the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) ultimately rejected this particular funding request, the application shows that American scientists and their counterparts in China were particularly interested in researching coronaviruses with striking similarities to the one that eventually emerged as a global pandemic that claimed millions of lives. An EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson said in a statement that the research outlined in the proposal never took place.
Gilles Demaneuf, a New Zealand data scientist who has studied the mathematical probability of each of the Covid origin theories, told National Review that data and predictions are now piling up to suggest that the release of SARS-CoV-2 was a research accident.
The new information “still does not prove a lab-created virus,” Demaneuf said. “But it is a significant step in that direction.”
In the DEFUSE proposal, scientists laid out plans to “insert furin cleavage sites at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein,” sites that are relatively unique to SARS-CoV-2, and made the virus more transmissible to humans. U.S. scientists also planned to “assemble synthetic viruses in six segments,” the documents show, using the restriction enzymes BsaI and BsmBI. Used to stitch DNA fragments together, the enzymes have been key factors in determining the legitimacy of the lab-leak theory. Although both enzymes can occur naturally, BsaI and BsmBI are also enzymes regularly used in genetic engineering, and scientists have estimated that the chance of an enzyme pattern similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 would have less than a 1 percent chance of occurring naturally.
“Our preprint found strong evidence suggesting SARS-CoV-2 was assembled with a known lab protocol, adding weight to the theory SARS-CoV-2 originated as a lab construct,” Alex Washburne, a co-author of a preprint studying Covid’s origin, said.
Newly released documents offer further evidence that the virus may have been genetically manipulated, contradicting the belief that SARS-CoV-2 was spread by an infected mammal at Huanan Seafood Market in China.
The FBI and U.S. Energy Department both agree that the pandemic most likely was the result of a lab leak.
“There is no – zero – remaining room for reasonable doubt that EcoHealth and its associates caused the pandemic. The match between the evidence provided by the genome sequence and the evidence provided by the FOIA release is remarkable,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright told the U.S. Sun. “It elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of ‘noteworthy’ to the level of ‘smoking gun.’ The 2018 EcoHealth proposal provided step-by-step plans for construction of a virus having the sequence and properties of the virus that emerged a year later in Wuhan: SARS-CoV-2.”
The new information comes days after Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee obtained U.S. Department of Health and Human Services documents proving that Chinese researchers in Beijing sequenced the Covid virus structure in a U.S. database run by the National Institutes of Health a full two weeks before sharing the sequence with the world. Chinese officials in those first weeks described the outbreak as a viral disease of “unknown cause.”
In response to the release of documents, Daszak, the EcoHealth Alliance president, wrote on X that he and his colleagues had “the misfortune of predicting” the Covid pandemic.
“Rather than taking these prescient ideas seriously, we’ve had 4 yrs of attacks,” he wrote.
An EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson also denied that the research the organization funded at the Wuhan lab qualifies as “gain-of-function” research under the NIH’s definition, which requires that the virus being researched has been shown to be infectious to humans. Several prominent scientists, including Ebright, have argued that the NIH narrowed its definition of “gain-of-function research” in a rhetorical effort to ensure that the research that was conducted at the WIV would fall outside of it.
The research conducted by EcoHealth Alliance at the WIV “epitomizes” the definition of gain-of-function research, which involves working with “enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (PPP)” or those pathogens “resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen,” Ebright previously told NR.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect a statement from EcoHealth Alliance.