Scientist Alleges ‘Smoking Gun’ Evidence COVID-19 Intentionally Created in Wuhan Lab

Original article here.

A British professor recently addressed the U.N., suggesting COVID-19 might have been deliberately engineered in a Chinese laboratory.

Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist from Rutgers University, supported this claim by referencing a 2018 document from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that discussed creating a virus akin to COVID-19.

“[The document] elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of noteworthy to the level of a smoking gun,” Ebright said, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Project DEFUSE, a grant proposal found in the documents, aimed to engineer bat coronaviruses to be more transmissible to humans. Despite rejection from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, speculation arises that the research might have continued with Chinese government funding.

Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the Wuhan facility, was part of the team looking to create a virus more easily spread to humans.

“Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time Covid-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019,” wrote Nicholas Wade, suggesting a possible explanation for the pandemic’s timing and origin.

The genetic structure of the coronavirus, facilitating human infection, was highlighted by Wade as evidence of the virus’ laboratory origin.

“Whereas most viruses require repeated tries to switch from an animal host to people, SARS-CoV-2 infected humans out of the box, as if it had been preadapted while growing in the humanized mice called for in the DEFUSE protocol,” Wade noted.

The 2018 documents also detailed introducing “appropriate human-specific cleavage sites” to the spike proteins of SARS-related viruses, a method some biologists believe could have synthesized the pandemic-causing coronavirus.

Dr. Filippa Lentzos from King’s College London emphasized the need for stricter safety standards in scientific research.

“Are we going to find that out? In my view, I think it’s very unlikely that we will. We need to do better in the future,” Lentzos stated.