This article was originally published by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge. 

Eighteen months before the pandemic, scientists in Wuhan, China submitted a proposal to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into the wild in an effort to inoculate them against diseases that could have otherwise jumped to humans, according to The Telegraph, citing leaked grant proposals from 2018.

New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.

They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to fund the work.

The bid was submitted by zoologist Peter Daszak of US-based EcoHealth Alliance, who was hoping to use genetic engineering to cobble “human-specific cleavage sites” onto bat Covid ‘which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells’ – a method which would coincidentally answer a longstanding question among the scientific community as to how SARS-CoV-2 evolved to become so infectious to humans.

Daszak’s proposal also included plans to commingle high-risk natural coronaviruses strains with more infectious, yet less deadly versions. His ‘bat team’ of researchers included Dr. Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as US researchers from the University of North Carolina and the US Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center.

Darpa refused the contract – saying “It is clear that the proposed project led by Peter Daszak could have put local communities at risk,” while warning that Daszak hadn’t fully considered the dangers involved in enhancing the virus via gain-of-function research, or by releasing a vaccine into the air.

Grant documents show that the team also had some concerns about the vaccine programme and said they would “conduct educational outreach … so that there is a public understanding of what we are doing and why we are doing it, particularly because of the practice of bat-consumption in the region”.

Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St Georges, University of London, who struggled to get work published showing that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out “gain of function” work for years before the pandemic, said the research may have gone ahead even without the funding.

“This is clearly a gain of function, engineering the cleavage site and polishing the new viruses to enhance human cell infectibility in more than one cell line,” he said. –Telegraph

As the Telegraph aptly notes (and you’ll never hear from Maddow, Lemon, or Hayes), Daszak is the same guy behind a letter published in The Lancet last year which ruled out the lab leak hypothesis and temporarily stifled debate on the origins of Covid-19.

“For more than a year I tried repeatedly to ask questions of Peter Daszak with no response,” said Viscount Ridley, who has co-authored an upcoming book on the origin of Covid-19, and has repeatedly implored the House of Lords to dig deeper into the origins of the pandemic. “Now it turns out he had authored this vital piece of information about virus work in Wuhan but refused to share it with the world. I am furious. So should the world be,” he added.

“Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) proposed injecting deadly chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into humanized and ‘batified’ mice, and much, much more.”

The documents, released by an international consortium of scientists known as ‘Drastic Research,’ were authenticated by a former Trump administration official. According to the group, “The actual DEFUSE Proposal Documents will be published in due course.”

“Given that we find in this proposal a discussion of the planned introduction of human-specific cleavage sites, a review by the wider scientific community of the plausibility of artificial insertion is warranted,” Drastic said in a statement.

Enhanced MERS?

One anonymous World Health Organization (WHO) scientist told The Telegraph that Daszak’s grant proposal shockingly proposed plans to enhance the more deadly MERS (Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome).

“The scary part is they were making infectious chimeric Mers viruses,” said the source, adding “These viruses have a fatality rate over 30 per cent, which is at least an order of magnitude more deadly than Sars-CoV-2.”

“If one of their receptor replacements made Mers spread similarly while maintaining its lethality, this pandemic would be nearly apocalyptic.”

Just remember, the initial cover story started with ‘bat soup.’