Senator takes US federal agencies to task for not speaking up about DEFUSE research proposal

By Annette Gartland on April 12, 2024

United States senator Rand Paul has written to several federal agencies requesting information about the ‘Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses’ (DEFUSE) grant proposal that the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US in March 2018.

Several scientists who have been investigating the possible origin of Covid-19 say the DEFUSE proposal is a blueprint for SARS-CoV-2.

The DEFUSE proposal was submitted to DARPA by the EHA under the umbrella of the PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) programme.

It was not funded, but it has been suggested that work may well have gone ahead on the project nevertheless.

Paul says that at least 15 federal agencies knew from the beginning of the pandemic that the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) were seeking federal funding in 2018 to create a virus “genetically very similar if not identical to” SARS-CoV-2.

“Disturbingly, not one of these 15 agencies spoke up to warn us that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been pitching this research,” Paul said.

Paul, who is a ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has asked the 15 agencies he has contacted to provide all of their documents, records, and communications related to the DEFUSE project and a ‘PREEMPT Proposers Day’ hosted by DARPA where potential applicants presented proposals to agency representatives.

He said he had been fighting for years to obtain records from dozens of federal agencies relating to the origins of Covid-19 and the DEFUSE project.

It was only under duress, he said, that the administration had finally released documents indicating that at least 15 federal agencies participated in the ‘PREEMPT Proposers Day’.

During the event, the president of the EHA, Peter Daszak, pitched the DEFUSE project, which sought federal funds “to manipulate known viruses with spike proteins of novel viral strains”, Paul said.

According to leaked documents made public by the investigative group DRASTIC in September 2021, the EHA requested in its proposal 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 chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by researchers at the WIV into ‘batified’ mice and humanised mice genetically altered to express the human ACE-2 receptor.

‘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.

Richard H. Ebright, a microbiologist working at Rutgers University, who is a member of the leadership team at the NGO Biosafety Now, tweeted on January 19 this year: “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 …”

In January, the investigative research group ‘U.S. Right to Know’ (USRTK) released a 1,417-page file of documents that contained early drafts of, and emails about, the DEFUSE proposal. This followed USRTK’s earlier release of 235 pages on December 18 last year.

USRTK says Daszak and Baric concealed from the Pentagon their intention to conduct high-risk coronavirus research in Wuhan under lax safety standards,

An early draft of the DEFUSE proposal shows that the EHA proposed carrying out DEFUSE experiments in Wuhan with fewer safety precautions than are required in the US.

In its response to an opinion piece written by Rand Paul for Fox News, and published on April 9, the EHA said: “EcoHealth Alliance did submit a proposal for a project named DEFUSE to DARPA for funding, but the agency declined to select the project for support and the proposed research was never done.

“Beyond the fact that EHA did submit a proposal to DARPA, every other statement about EHA reported by Fox News in this story is unfounded.”

The EHA said the DEFUSE proposal was never submitted to any other federal agencies for consideration and the EHA did not support gain-of-function research at the WIV.

“Any assertions to the contrary are based either on misinterpretation, or wilful misrepresentation of the actual research conducted,” the EHA said.

“Neither EcoHealth Alliance, nor any of its staff members, ‘concealed’ the DEFUSE proposal. Instead, it was submitted to a federal agency, and subject to the normal rules governing grant proposals.”

The EHA says the list of its partners shared at the ‘PREEMPT Proposers Day’ event included people and organisations who/that were not ultimately involved in drafting the DEFUSE proposal, which was submitted months later.

“Furthermore, the presence of a federal agency at the Proposer’s Day event does not mean that they had detailed information on the DEFUSE proposal, which had not yet been drafted,” the EHA added.

The agencies contacted by Paul include DARPA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the Department of Health and Human Services, the United States Agency for International Development, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite at least 15 federal agencies having knowledge of the DEFUSE project in 2018, its existence was not revealed to the public until 2021 and the involvement of the NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) research facility in the initial proposal has never been previously disclosed, Paul says.

He says the failure of the 15 agencies to disclose their awareness of the risky research proposed in the DEFUSE proposal at any point over the past six years raises serious concerns.

Paul’s letters to the 15 organisations state that the RML research facility was listed as a partner in the DEFUSE proposal alongside the WIV, Ralph Baric’s laboratory at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, Walter Ian Lipkin’s laboratory at Columbia University, and the Duke-NUS Medical School.

Lipkin is one of the co-authors of a controversial paper entitled ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’, published on March 17, 2020, which dismisses the lab-origin hypothesis. There have been calls for the paper’s retraction.

Four of the paper’s co-authors were among the participants in a conference call on February 1, 2020, in which former director of the NIAID Anthony Fauci and former director of the NIH Francis Collins were warned that SARS-Cov-2 may have leaked from the WIV and, further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.

It’s been pointed out that what was being said by scientists during the February 1 conference call is completely at odds with what is stated in the Proximal Origin paper.

Scientist Alina Chan, who is co-author of the book ‘VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19′, tweeted on April 11: “Leaders of scientific funding agencies said Proximal Origin was a nice job. According to the lead author of Proximal Origin, Farrar, Fauci & Collins had advised and led them as they wrote the letter. So why won’t @NatureMedicine put these leaders in the acknowledgements?”

Chan added: “Not disclosing the role of funders in the genesis of Proximal Origin sets a clear and dangerous precedent. Other scientists publishing at @nature @NatureMedicine could decide not to disclose when funders have participated in “the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

In his letters to the NIAID and the NIH Paul says the new information about the RML’s involvement as part of the DEFUSE proposal team and the NIH’s participation in the ‘PREEMPT Proposers Day’ appear to contradict previous testimony by Fauci that the NIH was not aware of the proposal.

In his testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on March 6 last year, the chairman of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission, Jeffrey Sachs, said of the EHA’s DEFUSE proposal: “The grant proposal was not funded by DARPA, but the research may have been, and quite possibly was, carried out using other resources.”

Sachs said that NIH leaders, including Collins and 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. 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.”

Paul has on numerous occasions gone head-to-head in congressional hearings with Fauci.

Rand Paul (left) and Anthony Fauci.

During a congressional hearing in the US on May 11, 2021, Paul questioned Fauci about US funding for gain-of-function research.

Fauci told Paul that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology”.

It’s known, however, that the NIH did fund the EHA to surveil and understand the risks of the transmission to humans of SARS-related coronaviruses. That funding was later withdrawn.

Fauci has said that the NIH cut off funding for the collaboration between the EHA, which is based in New York, and researchers in Wuhan after the then US president Donald Trump told it to.

There was a heated exchange between Paul and Fauci during a senate committee hearing on July 20, 2021, in which Paul asked Fauci if he wished to retract his May 11 statement that the NIH had never funded gain-of-function research at the WIV.

Paul cited the 2017 paper entitled ‘Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus’ and pointed out that the NIH grant for the research was cited in the paper.

“This is high-risk research that creates new potential pandemic pathogens, potential pandemic pathogens that exist in the lab, not in nature,” Paul said.

Fauci continued to insist that the work referred to in the paper was not gain-of-function research. He said he had never lied before Congress and did not retract the statement he made on May 11.

“This paper that you’re referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function,” Fauci said,

Paul said on Fox News on January 8 this year: “The biggest lie from Anthony Fauci was that the United States government, and with his approval, did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

“We now have the Department of Energy, the FBI, and, actually, a group of scientists at the CIA, all agree that, in all likelihood, Covid-19 came from a lab in Wuhan that was funded by US taxpayer dollars.

“Anthony Fauci has continued to deny this and I believe that to be a lie …”

The EHA said in its statement on April 9: “The NIH defines ‘gain-of-function’ as research that will create new viral strains with ‘enhanced transmissibility or virulence’ for viruses that are already (1) ‘likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations;’ and (2) ‘likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans’.

“Because the SARS-related research conducted by EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology dealt with bat coronaviruses that had never been shown to infect people, let alone cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans, by definition it was not gain-of-function research.”

Daszak due to testify at congressional hearing

Daszak is due to testify at a public hearing before the United States’ Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on May 1.

He is being invited to “correct the record” regarding alleged discrepancies between his statements in a nine-and-a-half-hour voluntary transcribed interview on November 14 last year and comments he made elsewhere.

In two days of closed-door transcribed interviews with members of the US Congress in January this year Fauci answered questions about his role during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The interviews, which lasted a total 14 hours, were conducted by members of the US House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

The committee’s chairman, Brad Wenstrup, said that Fauci’s testimony on the first day of questioning (January 8) “uncovered drastic and systemic failures in America’s public health systems”.

He said that, while leading the nation’s Covid-19 response and influencing public narratives, Fauci “simultaneously had no idea what was happening under his own jurisdiction at NIAID”.