Rejected Wuhan research project hints at origins of pandemic Project Defuse detailed plans to investigate and manipulate coronaviruses with the potential to infect humans — but experts insist it is not a smoking gun "The documents form a grant proposal from 2018 for a pre-pandemic collaboration between US and Chinese scientists. The proposal described how coronaviruses could be found, combined and cultured with the ability to infect human cells. The stated idea was to find ways to protect against the emergence of zoonotic viruses. The proposal of more than a thousand pages, released after a freedom of information request, outlines the full details of the plans. Michael Lin, associate professor of neurobiology and bioengineering at Stanford University, called the full document “quite shocking.” Lin said that it did not constitute a recipe to make Sars-CoV-2, as some have claimed. “However,” he wrote on Twitter/X, “the intention was to identify natural viruses with features that would help them infect cells. So it may be not much of a difference functionally.” Proponents of the “lab leak hypothesis” argue that even if the original proposal was rejected by the US funding agency Darpa, it could have been carried out anyway in China, perhaps using updated protocols. Cummings said the latest release showed that scientists “planned to engineer changes that match just what we see in Covid and it’s unarguable that the US and UK governments have covered this up”. Writing on his blog, he said: “In spring 2020 Whitehall’s top scientists and the top intelligence officials walked into the PM’s office and told the PM and me that lab leak ‘is definitely false’ and ‘a conspiracy theory’.” He added that one of his own advisors, James Phillips, formerly a neuroscientist, said at the time that their confidence was misplaced. Cummings implied that his subsequent attempts to expose what he called the “monumentally false advice” Johnson received on this topic were redacted by the Covid Inquiry." Tom Whipple https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rejected-wuhan-research-project-hints-at-origins-of-pandemic-znpwzgm2k ➡️ Boost RobinMG 🚀