(GoRealNewsNow.com) – New bombshell evidence is indicating that the devastating COVID-19 virus was, in fact, leaked from a lab in Communist China’s Wuhan as freshly leaked internal documents now show that US scientists working at the Chinese facility wanted to produce similar coronaviruses just before the pandemic.
Specifically, in 2018, about a year before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, American researchers submitted a proposal to engineer coronaviruses closely resembling SARS-CoV-2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This information comes from documents obtained by US Right to Know, a watchdog group, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The grant proposal and related documents reveal that an American virologist, in collaboration with the Wuhan laboratory, intended to create a virus similar to SARS-CoV-2.
This was part of a joint US-China research project, “DEFUSE,” led by the New York City-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.
EcoHealth Alliance received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a US government agency, which it then directed to the Wuhan lab for research on coronaviruses in bats.
That included specifically gain-of-function research boosting natural coronaviruses.
Despite the intriguing nature of this proposal, it was ultimately rejected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Nevertheless, the application highlights the intense focus of American and Chinese scientists on coronaviruses closely related to the one that later caused a global pandemic, resulting in millions of deaths, the report points out.
An EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson clarified that the research proposed in the application was never conducted.
Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist from New Zealand, told National Review that there was increasing evidence pointing towards the accidental release of SARS-CoV-2 from a laboratory.
Yet, he noted that this does not definitively prove that the virus was lab-created.
“But it is a significant step in that direction,” Demaneuf said.
In their DEFUSE proposal, scientists outlined plans to modify the SARS-CoV-2 virus, specifically by adding furin cleavage sites to the spike protein, a distinctive feature of the virus that contributes to its high transmissibility to humans.
The proposal also mentioned assembling synthetic viruses using specific restriction enzymes, BsaI and BsmBI.
These enzymes are commonly used in genetic engineering and are central to the debate over the lab leak theory.
The presence of these enzymes in SARS-CoV-2 is seen as highly unlikely to have occurred naturally.
“Our preprint found strong evidence suggesting SARS-CoV-2 was assembled with a known lab protocol, adding weight to the theory SARS-CoV-2 originated as a lab construct,” stated Alex Washburne, co-author of a study on the virus’s origin.
The recent disclosure of these documents adds to the growing suspicion that SARS-CoV-2 might have been genetically engineered, challenging the earlier belief that the virus originated from an infected mammal at the Huanan Seafood Market in China.
The FBI and the US Energy Department have concurred that the pandemic likely originated from a laboratory accident.
“There is no – zero – remaining room for reasonable doubt that EcoHealth and its associates caused the pandemic. The match between the evidence provided by the genome sequence and the evidence provided by the FOIA release is remarkable,” Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright commented before The US Sun.
“It elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of ‘noteworthy’ to the level of ‘smoking gun.’ The 2018 EcoHealth proposal provided step-by-step plans for construction of a virus having the sequence and properties of the virus that emerged a year later in Wuhan: SARS-CoV-2,” he added.