The US-based EcoHealth Alliance has dismissed allegations that the organisation misled the Pentagon about intended research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, but the new revelations add to the weight of evidence that the EHA’s president, Peter Daszak, has been dishonest with US funding organisations.

Emily Kopp from the investigative research group ‘U.S. Right to Know’ (USRTK) has revealed that, according to documents obtained by USRTK via the Freedom of Information Act, Daszak and Ralph Baric, who is in charge of coronavirus research at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill in the US, concealed from the Pentagon their intention to conduct high-risk coronavirus research in Wuhan under lax safety standards.

In an article published on December 18 Kopp explains how USRTK obtained an early draft of a project entitled DEFUSE  (Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses) that contains comments from “PD” and “BRS.” Emails show that PD is Daszak and BRS is Baric (pictured left).

The documents show that the EHA proposed carrying out DEFUSE experiments in Wuhan with fewer safety precautions than are required in the US – apparently to save on costs, Kopp says.

“American scientists at the center of the ‘lab leak theory’ controversy appear to have concealed this from their desired funder – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – in order to evade any national security concerns about doing high-level biosecurity work in China,” she writes.

“The documents call into question the credibility of these scientists’ assurances that the pandemic could not have sprung out of their collaboration on coronavirus engineering research with the lab in Wuhan.”

The EHA submitted its DEFUSE grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US on March 24, 2018. The proposal was made to the DARPA under the umbrella of the PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) programme.

According to documents leaked to the investigative group DRASTIC, the EHA requested a total $14,209,245 over 3.5 years ($8,411,546 for phase 1 and $5,797,699 for phase 2),

The EHA proposed injecting deadly chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by WIV researchers into humanised and “batified” mice, DRASTIC states.

“Batified” mice are mice that have been irradiated and injected with bat bone marrow.

The DEFUSE proposal includes discussion about the planned introduction of human-specific cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses.

An FCS is a segment of four amino acids that enables a virus to use furin in the human body as an enzyme to dissolve its coating so that it can release its genetic material to infect cells. Furin cleavage sites tend to be more infectious than cleavage sites that use other enzymes.

Co-author of the book Viral about the search for the origin of Covid-19, Alina Chan, tweeted in June 2022: “Imo the DEFUSE proposal is the most compelling piece of evidence for a lab #OriginOfCovid. It sits atop a massive amount of circumstantial evidence describing a robust pathway by which SARS-like viruses were being ferried from the spillover zone to Wuhan.”

The DARPA rejected the DEFUSE proposal and Daszak insists that the proposed work was never done.

The EHA says the allegations made in Kopp’s article are false and are “based on misunderstanding of edits and comments on the document, and based on misleading out-of-context quotations, and a lack of understanding of the process by which federal grants are awarded”.

Kopp tweeted on December 19: “EcoHealth Alliance’s response to my story does not actually include any ‘false statements,’ which is why they dodged my questions and didn’t say anything until after the story published. The statement argues that DEFUSE wasn’t funded so it shouldn’t matter that EcoHealth lied to DARPA and has been lying to the public for years. I disagree.”

The formal DEFUSE grant proposal states that work on engineering the coronavirus spike proteins and testing their ability to infect human cells would be done at UNC in Chapel Hill.

However, in a comment on an early draft, Daszak says he wants to stress the US side of the proposal so that DARPA are “comfortable with our team”. He commented: “Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well …”

The comment is addressed to Baric and senior scientist at the WIV Shi Zhengli.

In another comment, Daszak said that he was trying to downplay the non-US focus of the proposal by not highlighting the involvement of Shi Zhengli and Linfa Wang, who is a professor at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.

Kopp also reveals that it is stated in an early draft of the DEFUSE proposal that the engineering and testing of novel coronaviruses would occur in biosafety level two (BSL-2) conditions.

“The proposal advertised this approach to DARPA grantmakers as ‘highly cost-effective’,” she writes.

“BSL-2” was, however, edited to “BSL-3”.

“In a comment on the document, Baric acknowledged that U.S. researchers would ‘freak out’ if they knew the novel coronavirus engineering and testing work would be conducted in a BSL-2 lab,” Kopp writes.

In the final proposal it is stated: “Experimental work using bats and or transgenic mice will be conducted at the BSL-3 lab in WIV, Duke-NUS, UNC, or NWHC [the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Reston, Virginia].”

Justin Kinney, who is a quantitative biologist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-founder of the NGO Biosafety Now, said the new revelations were damning.

He told USRTK: “These revelations are important because these specific experiments could, quite plausibly, have led to the genetic engineering and accidental release of SARS-CoV-2.”

Daszak has been under the spotlight since early on in the Covid-19 pandemic. There were serious concerns about his presence in the World Health Organisation team that went to Wuhan in January/February 2021.

On November 14 he gave a voluntary, transcribed interview that was requested by five members of the US Congress who are investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2. He testified for nine and a half hours.

The interview was requested by the chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Brad Wenstrup; chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Cathy McMorris Rodgers; chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Morgan Griffith; chair of the Subcommittee on Health Brett Guthrie; and chair of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability James Comer.

The five committee chairs said in a statement on September 14 this year that their renewed request for Daszak’s testimony was “critical to the investigation into the potential use of American taxpayer funds to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology”.

They requested that Daszak provide them with a host of documents and records of communications in advance of the interview.

Peter Daszak on X before his interview. “Nice day for it”.

Daszak declines to answer questions posed by Arjun Singh from The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US has given the EHA millions of dollars in funding to conduct research in collaboration with scientists at the WIV.

Daszak led the Lancet Covid-19 Commission’s task force that was set up to investigate the origins of SARS-CoV-2, but, in June 2021, it was announced that he was recused from commission work on the origins of the pandemic.

In his testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on March 6 this year, the chairman of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission, Jeffrey Sachs, said that NIH leaders, including Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, kept gain-of-function research hidden from the Congress and the public and repeatedly misled the Congress and the public about the subject.

Sachs added: “They did not properly disclose the NIH work that supported dangerous genetic manipulation of SARS-related coronaviruses.”

He made reference to the DEFUSE project and said: “The grant proposal was not funded by DARPA, but the research may have been, and quite possibly was, carried out using other resources.

“They did not disclose the DARPA proposal and its possible relevance to the origin of SARS-CoV-2. In fact, the public learned of the DARPA proposal only through a leak.”

Numerous scientists have commented on social media about USRTK’s latest revelations. The viewpoint shared on X (Twitter) by a pathologist in the US, Stephen Lagana, is indicative of the very serious concerns being expressed.

Lagana tweeted: “It also shows a clear intent to deceive for the express reason of getting the work done faster bc of less safety requirements. The combo of dishonesty and recklessness should horrify anyone who understands the forces they were playing with.”

The EHA said that, had the DARPA selected the DEFUSE proposal for funding, the work would have been subject to further detailed review.

“This would have included review of any proposed work with animals, with human samples, with select agents (pathogens known to be lethal to people), and recombinant virus experiments,” the EHA said.

“It would also have included detailed review of biosafety considerations for the proposed work, of any potential overlap with other federally funded work, and of the allowability of foreign institutions to conduct specific aspects of the proposed work.

“All of these changes would have been agreed to explicitly with DARPA before the work proceeded. Because the work was not selected for funding, any assertions about these details are by definition based on review of incomplete information and are extremely misleading.”

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