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Scientists in the United States and China were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic broke out, according to leaked proposals.
Last month, a grant application submitted to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) found that an international team of scientists planned to mix genetic data from similar strains to create a new virus.
The grant application was made in 2018 and was disclosed to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group.
“We will compile sequence / RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare entire genomes, looking for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors.
“The candidate genomes for consensus will be synthesized commercially using established techniques and genome-length RNA and electroporation to recover recombinant viruses,” the request states.
American and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic broke out, according to leaked proposals. Pictured: Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose scientists participated in a research grant proposal
This would result in a virus that has no clear ancestor in nature, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert told The Telegraph.
The expert, who asked the newspaper not to publish his name, said if such a method had been used, it could explain why no close matches have ever been found in nature for Sars-CoV-2.
The closest natural virus is the Banal-52 strain, which was reported in Laos last month. It shares 96.8% of the Covid-19 genome.
No direct ancestor, of which one would expect a share of about 99.98 percent, has been found so far.
The WHO expert told the Telegraph that the process detailed in the request would create “a new virus sequence, not a 100% match with anything.”
“They would then synthesize the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a viral genome that did not exist in nature but that looks natural because it is the average of natural viruses.
“Then they put that RNA in a cell and get the virus out of it.
“This creates a virus that has never existed in nature, with a new ‘backbone’ that did not exist in nature but which is very, very similar because it is the average of natural backbones,” said declared the expert.
The proposal was rejected, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s virus strain database was taken offline some 18 months later, making it impossible to verify what the scientists were working on.
Scientists at the institute have always denied creating the coronavirus in their lab.
The grant application proposal was submitted by British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a group including Daszak EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore, reported The Telegraph.
The grant application proposal was submitted by British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a group, which included Daszak EcoHealth Alliance
Experts told the newspaper that creating an “ideal” average virus could have been part of the job to create a vaccine that works on coronaviruses.
Last month, it emerged that the United States had funded research similar to that described in the 2018 grant proposal.
Files obtained by The Intercept as part of a FOI request to explore the possible root of COVID and find out if the United States played a role in it showed that In 2014, the National Health Institute (NIH) approved a five-year annual grant of $ 666,000 per year for five years ($ 3.3 million) for the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. research organization, in bat coronavirus.
EcoHealth Alliance, in its proposal to NIH, acknowledged that the risks involved were “the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs” among staff, who could then carry it out of the lab.
The NIH still gave them the money – something Dr.Anthony Fauci was once forced to admit when testifying before Congress in May of this year. EcoHealth Alliance then donated $ 599,000 in money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
At the time, and on several occasions since, Fauci denied that the research was what is known as “job gain” research.
Gain-of-function research is the scientific term given to research that deliberately modifies an organism to give it new functions in order to test a theory.
When it comes to studying human viruses, this can mean making the virus more transmissible and even deadly in order to test what can and cannot survive in it.
“The documents make it clear that claims by NIH Director Francis Collins and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci that the NIH has not supported research into gain of function or potential amelioration of pandemic pathogens at the WIV are untrue, “Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, tweeted.
Ebright studied the articles and alleged that scientists had carried out “the construction – in Wuhan – of new chimeric coronaviruses linked to SARS that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus and confirmed that the resulting viruses could infect human cells ”.
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