Written by by DYLAN HOUSMAN at dailycaller.com
The American researchers who have, for years, been at the center of the COVID-19 origins debate, were revealed this week to have misled the U.S. government about their research partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The University of North Carolina’s Ralph Baric and EcoHealth Alliance co-founder Peter Daszak drafted a grant proposal a year before the outbreak of COVID-19 that disguised the risky nature of their work to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is part of the Pentagon. While DARPA ultimately opted not to fund the project, newly-unearthed communications between Baric and Daszak reveal that the two scientists knew U.S. researchers and government officials would “freak out” if they knew exactly what research the pair was seeking to do, and perhaps more critically, where they wanted to do it.
The communications were revealed by reporter Emily Kopp and U.S. Right To Know (USRTK), a watchdog group that advocates for transparency in public health and has released a number of bombshell reports on the origins of COVID-19. Advocates of the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 origin believe that the deadly global pandemic emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Believers in the lab leak most often believe either that the virus was captured in nature before being brought back to the WIV for research, from where it was accidentally released in a tragic mishap, or that it was genetically engineered in some fashion by researchers connected to Baric and Daszak at the WIV.
According to the new revelations from USRTK, Baric and Daszak said of their 2018 “Project DEFUSE” grant proposal that they needed to conceal how much of the work was being done in Wuhan, lie to the Pentagon about how secure the laboratory at the WIV was and downplay the involvement of Chinese scientists in the project.