Science Writers Hide as New Documents Expose Virologists Dissembling About Dangerous Virus Research in Wuhan—Once Again!

Thank you, Internet, for saving those receipts....

6 minute read

It’s become a pandemic truism that researchers and their pet science writers eventually get caught dissembling, when documents take the air out of authoritative statements and convictions underlined with purported scientific and journalistic authority.

Another example emerged this week.

The investigative nonprofit US Right to Know released documents showing that US virologists and Wuhan researchers attempted to mislead the Defense Department’s DARPA program about dangerous virus research in a 2018 grant called DEFUSE. DARPA rejected the proposal as some of the studies involved dangerous gain-of-function studies. We now know, from drafts of the DEFUSE proposal, that virologists planned to conduct those studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, although they have denied this several times after the DEFUSE proposal became public.

In previous statements, virologists and science writers assured the public that the proposed gain-of-function studies discussed in DEFUSE were to have taken place in the lab of Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, and not in the lab of Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As we all know, the pandemic began in Wuhan and increasing amounts of evidence points to something going awry in Shi Zhengli’s lab.

For example, during a March 8, 2023, congressional hearing on the origin of the SARS virus, science writer Nicholas Wade discussed the DEFUSE proposal and testified it was “easier to believe that the Wuhan researchers did exactly what they proposed and generated the SARS-2 virus in their lab.”

Shooting down Wade’s testimony, writer Jon Cohen charged in Science Magazine that the proposed chimeric experiments in DEFUSE would be done in North Carolina, not Wuhan. Cohen’s evidence? A statement by DEFUSE author Peter Daszak with the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance:

But the proposal [Wade] refers to, which was submitted by the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and included many collaborators, explicitly says those proposed experiments were meant to take place at the University of North Carolina (UNC), not WIV. “This section of the proposal was written by collaborators at UNC in the U.S., where the work would have been carried out,” says Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth, which posted a lengthy critique of other claims made at the hearing. “Importantly the grant was not funded and the work not done.

Science writer Laurie Garrett then promoted Cohen’s sloppy takedown of Wade.

Cohen’s Science Magazine article is typical of the science writer genre: whenever messaging threatens science, run to those to those very same scientists to get a canned quote and knock it down.

And now, ahem. The documents.

In early drafts of the DEFUSE proposal, Peter Daszak (or PD) commented to UNC’s Ralph Baric and Wuhan’s Shi Zhengli that some of the work to engineer chimeric SARS viruses would be done in Wuhan:

Ralph, Zhengli. If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team. Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well …

In another comment to the draft DEFUSE proposal, Peter Daszak writes that he is trying to downplay the resumes of Shi Zhengli and researcher Linfa Wang, because they work in Asia. “I realize your resumes are also very impressive, but I am trying to downplay the non-US focus of the proposal so that DARPA doesn’t see this as a negative.”

But it gets better. More receipts.

Months after Science Magazine’s Jon Cohen falsely shot down Nicholas Wade, virologist Linfa Wang (the guy who drafted DEFUSE) took part in an online debate hosted by … Science Magazine’s Jon Cohen.

When asked about the DEFUSE proposal that he wrote, Wang said that Wuhan researchers had been expected to do field work while the virus studies would have happened at the University of North Carolina. “The Wuhan Institute was the field research, I the bat immunology, and UNC is doing the virology, so that is pretty obvious, right?”

When I wrote about this debate, I noted that Linfa Wang misled the audience and that Jon Cohen jumped in to save him. I knew Wang was dissembling, because documents had been disclosed the week prior to Cohen’s debate. Those documents discussed another grant for (chimeric) virus research that also involved the Wuhan Institute and UNC. And those documents made clear, that during collaborations between Wuhan and UNC, virus research happened at Wuhan.

“UNC has no oversight of the chimeric work, all of which will be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Daszak had assured the funders.

Cohen then called me out on Twitter for promoting “disinformation.”

Two days after Cohen’s debate, virologist Stephen Goldstein rehashed Daszak’s “North Carolina” talking point with a quote to The Intercept. To direct attention away from chimeric research in Wuhan, Goldstein said, “Given that the work wasn’t funded and wasn’t proposed to take place in Wuhan anyway it’s hard to assess any bearing on the origin of SARS-CoV-2.”

That following day Goldstein told The Atlantic that it would have been unethical for the Wuhan lab to move forward with virus research—researche we now know the DEFUSE scientists planned for Wuhan:

Stephen Goldstein, a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary virology at the University of Utah and one of the co-authors of the pandemic-origins critical review, considers it “unlikely” that any such work would have gone forward in Wuhan. It would be unusual—even unethical—for a lab in China to pursue experiments that were originally proposed by one of its collaborators in the United States, he told us.

A month after Goldstein fibbed to The Atlantic, virologist Kristian Andersen with Scripps Institute offered up a different theory: Wuhan researchers at the WIV were not even positioned to do the proposed DEFUSE virus work, which would be carried out at UNC.

Not Wuhan where the pandemic started.

“Were they well-positioned to do the work? No-hence Baric/UNC.”

Science Magazine editor-in-chief, Holden Thorp, then misled the entire scientific community two months after that. (Brief aside: Thorp came from UNC where he was once chancellor, overseeing the university’s research, including Ralph Baric’s. Thorp resigned from the chancellorship after the UNC was caught in widespread academic fraud.)

Thorp claimed in a Science Magazine editorial that the DEFUSE virus experiments “hardly posed a threat” and implied that they would not have taken place in Wuhan because they “were proposed by UNC scientists.”

Thorp added that the DEFUSE proposal was merely bad public relations for science because “researchers failed to get ahead of the story” and “it looked like scientists were hiding something.”

Looked like scientists were hiding something? Oh, really….

Science writer Jane Qiu later chastised researcher Alina Chan for discussing the DEFUSE proposal a year after that.

“Please be rigorous,” Qiu posted on X. “DEFUSE proposal was conceived and written by Baric of Univ North Carolina and was intended to be done there.”

Please be rigorous……

Of course, we now know that little of what scientists told us about the DEFUSE grant was true. Virologists planned to do these dangerous virus studies in Wuhan, and they lied about it to the federal government to get funding. And then they lied to us about their intentions, after the pandemic started in Wuhan.

And science writers amplified these lies to you and the rest of the American public.

It’s all been one big, loooooooooooooooooooooong lie.