Red Flag: A New Lab in Colorado Will Conduct Experiments on Bats
Didn’t they learn from the pandemic?
Right after the worst days of the pandemic, one issue should have occupied the center stage of discussions in political circles: the danger posed by high-security laboratories. There are approximately dozens if not hundreds of those high-security labs in the world, most of which are likely to harbor highly pathogenic micro-organisms that constitute a serious health and security risk.
The United States reportedly houses 200 of these labs and as if this were not bad enough, a new one, which is set to open its doors in 2025, will be built in Colorado. The scariest part: its researchers will conduct experiments on dangerous diseases using bats, which, as we now know, carry coronaviruses.
Infected Bats in Colorado
There is another part of the story that should be viewed as a red flag: all the controversial names that put the world in danger in the years preceding the pandemic are back on stage for an encore. These are the National Institutes of Health, and Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, “an NGO whose mission is to protect people, animals and the environment from emerging infectious diseases.”
These two organizations will be teaming up with Colorado State University (CSU), in Fort Collins, Colorado, which received a $6.7 million grant from the NIH to establish its lab. According to The Daily Mail, “the 14,000 sq ft facility could store and study some of the most transmissible pathogens on the planet — including Ebola, Nipah virus and COVID-19 ”, and “is proposed to import, house, breed and experiment on dozens to hundreds of bats.”
Republican senators and Fort Collins residents have already voiced their concerns over the construction of the lab, which is quite understandable. A document submitted by CSU researchers in December 2022 states: “We will infect horseshoe bats with SARS-CoV2 and a SARSr-CoV detected in these bats.”
Leaked emails and notes from meetings show that the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), considered by many the culprit behind COVID-19, is slated to collaborate with CSU, the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance. One of WIV’s most well-known researchers is Shi Zhengli, who fought unsuccessfully for her institution to be cleared of all suspicion in the COVID-19 case.
About the Chinese scientist, The Daily Mail reports that “documents from 2017 show Zhengli attended a symposium hosted by CSU that served as a kickoff for the Global Bat Alliance, a group proposed to ‘build and leverage country and regional capabilities to generate an enhanced understanding of bats and their ecology within the context of pathogens of security concern.’”
Shi Zhengli is no stranger to Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance. Both worked together, conducting experiments in China using bat coronaviruses.
During the first months of the pandemic, Daszak, knowing that zillions of fingers would be pointed at him, started a bullying campaign against those who were searching for the truth. And that whole campaign started in February 2020 with a text that changed everything.
Peter Daszak, the Protector of the Chinese Communist Party
That month, an open letter was published in The Lancet, a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal, by 26 scientists who condemned “the conspiracy theory” that COVID-19 was not of natural origin. The impact was major. From this point on, those who dared to support the lab leak thesis preferred to remain silent for fear of being ostracized. And the mainstream media made sure that the message was clearly understood.
What was kept from the public, however, is that the 26 co-signatories were just mere pawns used by the real author of the letter: Peter Daszak. It was later established that Daszak’s approach had only one objective: to cover with an opaque veil the disturbing reality of laboratory experiments.
The whole thing, therefore, was a huge cover-up: leaked emails show that as early as February 2020, just when Daszak was about to publish his letter in The Lancet, U.S. and UK scientists believed in the likelihood that COVID-19 might have escaped from a lab, but they preferred to remain silent so as “not to harm science.”
In one such email dated February 2, 2020, Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation focused on health research, discussed the possibility that COVID-19 rapidly evolved from a SARS-like virus inside human tissue in a laboratory. The message in question, sent to Anthony Fauci, at the time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and to Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), indicated that such evolution may have accidentally created a virus that spreads easily among humans.
Francis Collins, who was in a state of panic, then felt the need to tell his two colleagues that raising this issue might disturb “international harmony.”
Peter Daszak “Could Have Put Local Communities at Risk”
When the first rumors about a possible COVID-19 leak started flying around, Daszak went on the offensive, which led to the publication of the letter in The Lancet. For him, the stakes were high: his company, EcoHealth Alliance, had until then received millions in U.S. government grants to conduct coronavirus research, among others with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This single letter published in The Lancet contributed to building a (false) scientific consensus around the question of the origin of COVID-19 in the mainstream media. Before the pandemic, few had heard of what is called, in technical terms, “gain-of-function” research, which is an operation aiming to genetically modify an organism to make it more pathogenic or more transmissible to humans. Generally speaking, “gain-of-function” research consists in reproducing viruses to develop antivirals or vaccines.
This is precisely Peter Daszak’s expertise, which is frowned upon by many because of the risks it entails. The distrust in “gain-of-function” is likely the reason why the American government imposed a moratorium in 2014 on the funding of research on “pathogens with pandemic potential”, a moratorium that was lifted in December 2017.
It has become a habit for Daszak to navigate in troubled waters. Eighteen months before the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, EcoHealth Alliance submitted a $14.2 million grant application to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a United States Department of Defense agency responsible for the research and development of new technologies for military use. One of the researchers who was approached to work with Daszak and DARPA is none other than Shi Zhengli, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Fortunately, DARPA did not respond to the call, and for a good reason: “It is clear that the proposed DEFUSE project led by Peter Daszak could have put local communities at risk”, the agency responded. The project in question encompassed a program for the study of potentially dangerous pathogens whose primary goal was to generate and manipulate bat coronaviruses to make them more capable of infecting human cells.
But what Daszak lost with DARPA, he got with CSU: a project that will allow him to manipulate viruses in a brand new lab, this time in Colorado.
Sources
Colorado State University, Fox News, Government of Canada, The Daily Mail #1, #2, The New York Post #1, #2, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Examiner via Yahoo News
