COVID virus made in Chinese lab as bat vaccine, Marine researcher says

From Washington Times.com (Jan. 12):

A Marine Corps officer working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency disclosed in a memorandum last August that his study of the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic concluded that it was produced as part of vaccine research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to documents made public by a conservative investigative group.

Maj. Joseph P. Murphy notified the Pentagon inspector general that his analysis of the virus origin concluded the nongovernment organization EcoHealth Alliance, the National Institutes of Health, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology produced the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 through controversial gain-of-function research outlined in a Pentagon grant proposal.

“SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus,” Maj. Murphy stated in an August 13, 2021, memo made public this week by Project Veritas. “It was created by an EcoHealth Alliance program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), as suggested by the reporting surrounding the lab leak hypothesis.”

Asked about the 24 pages of internal documents made public by Project Veritas, DARPA spokesman Jared Adams told Inside the Ring in an email that federal regulations prohibit the agency from commenting on DARPA programs or documents.

“We are precluded by Federal Acquisition Regulations from discussing who may or may not have bid on a DARPA program, and are unable to confirm the authenticity of the documents Project Veritas has published,” Mr. Adams wrote.

Maj. Murphy and the Office of Naval Research did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.

According to Project Veritas, Maj. Murphy declined to discuss the document but told the group: “To those that seek answers I offer encouragement. There are good people striving for truth, working together in and out of government, and they succeed. … Don’t let a lie be our legacy to posterity.”

According to Maj. Murphy, now with the Office of Naval Research, details of the program were hidden since the pandemic began in Wuhan, China in December 2019. New facts were uncovered by Maj. Murphy from a grant proposal made to DARPA by the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance in March 2018 and “not publicly disclosed,” he stated.

The proposal was made in response to DARPA’s Project Defuse, aimed at addressing what the agency called the threat posed by bat-borne coronaviruses. SARS-CoV-2 is a bat coronavirus.

The proposal lists several U.S. researchers who would take part in the work and included the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city considered the epicenter of the possible pandemic.

China’s government has denied the virus leaked from any of its laboratories, but has refused to provide information about the virus’s origin. Beijing also has accused the U.S. military of launching the pandemic.

The $14 million grant proposal to DARPA was produced by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance who worked closely on dangerous virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Mr. Daszak did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.

DARPA rejected the grant as potentially dangerous virus work, despite Mr. Daszak claiming in the proposal that the work would not violate U.S. restrictions on gain-of-function research.

However, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Anthony Fauci, approved a grant for the EcoHealth Alliance, and work on bat coronaviruses continued until halted by the federal government in April 2020.

Dr. Fauci has repeatedly denied during congressional testimony that the U.S. government funded any gain-of-function virus research in China.

In the 2018 proposal, Mr. Daszak stated that “we will intensively sample bats at our field sites where we have identified high spillover risk SARSr-CoVs” – the term for bat coronaviruses.

“We will sequence their spike protein, reverse engineer them to conduct binding assays and insert them into bat SARS-CoVs (WIV1, SHC014) backbones (these use bat-SARSr-CoV backbones, not SARS-CoV, and are exempt from dual-use and gain of function concerns) to infect humanized mice and assess capacity to cause SARS-like disease,” Mr. Daszak stated.

The work was aimed at developing a vaccine to be sprayed on bats that the researchers believed would prevent another disease outbreak like the first SARS outbreak in China in 2003.

Mr. Daszak said the work would include Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who was to lead research on infecting humanized mice with the lab-created bat vaccine. Ms. Shi has also denied the lab has any role in the origins of COVID-19 or its spread among the local population.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a public assessment last year that the virus was caused by either a leak from a Chinese laboratory or from emergence from an infected animal. The Murphy memorandum reflects the views of a good portion of U.S. intelligence analysts who believe the virus came from the Wuhan institute.

Maj. Murphy stated that his analysis is that the COVID virus likely emerged as a precursor, “deliberately virulent, humanized recombinant” virus that was reverse-engineered into a live bat vaccine.

Regarding efforts to conceal the work, Maj. Murphy said Pentagon officials placed the unclassified EcoHealth Alliance proposal in a top-secret file within DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office.

Maj. Murphy stated that the COVID virus is a synthetic “chimera” or lab-produced virus engineered to infect human cells. The virus is likely a live vaccine that escaped from the  Chinese laboratory before it could be engineered into a less dangerous state, he added.

“It leaked and spread rapidly because it was aerosolized so it could efficiently infect bats in caves,” Maj. Murphy said, adding that initial escape took place in August 2019. The virus should be called “SARS-CoV-Wuhan,” Maj. Murphy stated.

The document also discloses the identity of a U.S. government team of experts who first concluded the virus came from a leak at the Wuhan lab. The group is called the Decentralized Radical Search Team Investigating COVID-19, or DRASTIC.

“This collection of scientists and sleuths broke open the lab-leak hypothesis into the mainstream and has picked apart Chinese and World Health Organization (WHO) reports on SARS-CoV-2’s origins in Wuhan,” he said. [read more]

Another article on the subject:  

'Synthetic' virus? COVID origin paper sparks backlash, author sees minefield in peer review