Documents: ‘US, Chinese Scientists Sought Tried Releasing COVID In China’

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

(Worthy News) – The U.S. medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci came under pressure Wednesday after leaked documents showed American and Chinese scientists planned to release coronavirus particles.

The grant proposals from 2018 reveal that U.S. scientists and their colleagues in China’s city of Wuhan sought to release an airborne coronavirus into Chinese bat populations. They then wanted to inoculate the animals against diseases that could jump to humans.

In a potentially devastating development, the scientists planned to use the research to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, papers show.

The scientists requested $14 million from the U.S.-based Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund the work. DARPA is responsible for developing emerging technologies for use by the military, which apparently include viruses.

The revelations raised questions about Dr. Fauci, who also serves as President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor.

Dr. Fauci had denied to Congress that the National Institute of Health (NIH) funded studies to make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans.

WUHAN LAB

He testified after the NIH was accused of funding the research at a lab in Wuhan that has come under intense scrutiny as a possible source of the virus causing COVID-19.

Papers indicate the Chinese and U.S. researchers were hoping to introduce bat coronaviruses which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells.

The revelations worry Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at New Jersey-based Rutgers University.

Ebright, who is also laboratory director at the university’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, said the documents show “unequivocally” that NIH funded “gain-of-function” (GOF) research at the Wuhan Insitute of Virology in China.

Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the NIH, told Congress in May that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

UNTRUTHFUL ASSERTIONS

But Ebright suggested to the Newsweek publication that Dr. Fauci had lied about what he knew.

He said the “documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement in Wuhan are untruthful.”

Authorities claim more than 4.7 million people have died worldwide of the coronavirus that they claim originated in China.

Of those victims, Nearly 700,000 died of complications related to COVID-19 in the United States, officials say.

Most were older adults with underlying health difficulties.

Latest Worthy News