(OPINION) An esteemed molecular biologist has come forward to warn of “smoking gun” evidence that COVID-19 not only originated from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, but it was engineered by researchers at the Chinese lab.
Richard H. Ebright, Ph.D., is a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and is on the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology.
The Harvard Junior Fellow earned the Searle Scholar Award, was named a Johnson & Johnson Discovery Research Fellow, was awarded the Walter J. Johnson Prize, was named Infectious Diseases Society of America Fellow, and took home the National Institutes of Health MERIT Award.
Ebright has also served on the National Institutes of Health Molecular Biology Study Section and National Institutes of Health special emphasis panels. He has more than 175 publications and more than 40 issued and pending patents.
Ebright is also an outspoken critic of the unchallenged narrative of the origins of the COVID-19 virus. Ebright notes that a document from 2018 points to “smoking gun” evidence that COVID-19 was engineered by researchers at a Chinese lab.
Ebright spotlights a March 2018 grant proposal for experiments called “Project DEFUSE.”
American and Chinese virologists lobbied to receive a $14 million grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, for funding to engineer bat viruses related to SARS-CoV-1 to examine how they could jump to human transmission.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “The proposal for Project DEFUSE specified that the viruses’ infectivity would be enhanced by inserting into them a genetic element known as a furin cleavage site.
Depending on the starting viruses, this protocol could have produced SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, which has a distinctive furin cleavage site.”
The proposal involved Chinese bat researcher Zhengli Shi, EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak, and Ralph Baric – a University of North Carolina professor, who reportedly collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on “risky bat-virus research” in 2015.
Commentary noted, “The proposal outlines a joint project between Baric’s UNC lab and a team headed by WIV senior scientist Zhengli Shi, the famous ‘Bat Lady’ of the Wuhan lab. The proposal was drafted under the supervision of Peter Daszak — whose EcoHealth Alliance would funnel the hoped-for grant money to the researchers — and was addressed to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).”
The proposal was ultimately denied by DARPA. However, Project DEFUSE may have been funded by the Chinese government and executed by researchers at the Wuhan Lab of Virology.
The Washington Times reported, “Nonetheless, speculation persists about whether the research may have proceeded with support from the Chinese government.
Project DEFUSE also suggested modifications to bat coronavirus spike proteins, introducing ‘human-specific cleavage sites.’ Notably, these techniques are similar to those some biologists surmise could have played a role in crafting the coronavirus responsible for the global health crisis.”
Nicholas Wade – a former science editor of the New York Times – wrote in the WSJ, “Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time COVID-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019. This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin.”
Dr. Filippa Lentzos – an associate professor of science and international security at King’s College London – has also urged the world to acknowledge that the COVID pandemic may have originated from research by scientists.
“We have to acknowledge the fact that the pandemic could have started from some research-related incident,” Lentzos said in a United Nations speech. (READ MORE)
