zlacker

>>BellLa+(OP)
I could be missing something but this isn't exactly the smoking gun the title makes it seem. I'm sure there are proposals, plans and applications for all types of things. What I'm waiting for, perhaps naively, is strong evidence, revelated an independent investigation, that there was some foul business going on here. Until I see that, I'm more inclined to rely on the word of experts who have no connection to any of this. A novel aspect of a viral genome isn't enough for me to leap to the conclusion that it's human made.

>>chrsw+t8
I think the chain of evidence is suspicious to say the least.

1. In 2018 EcoHealth Alliance(Peter Dazsak and team) apply to a grant to darpa for viral modification research and highlight a change in "furin cleavage site" at the same location as covid-19's change, this change has never been seen before in nature.

2. In the darpa proposal is listed "Wuhan institute of virology" as a team member, this was a year before the covid-19 outbreak in wuhan in 2019.

3. Rather damning for Peter Dazsak is he publicly denied any plausibility in the idea of a lab created source for covid-19, while behind the scenes at the same time telling his two students to distance themselves from this darpa proposal as the virus was rapidly spreading through cities in the world.

4. Even more unusual is that Peter Daszak and Linfa Wang, two of the researchers who submitted the proposal, did not previously acknowledge it until now.

>>subsub+dZ
This is rather damning for other reasons that people may not even realize. DARPA is a rather fast moving agency, and DARPA grants can be fairly short term with a fast turnaround in comparison to say NIH or NSF. Thus for DARPA grants (and others, but especially DARPA), it's extremely common have already started some aspects of the research in order to make the timelines in the grant achievable. Thus as someone in a nearby field (not something with such hefty security issues, but bio-related), when I see it say that they wrote down they wanted to insert this site into the virus, that is a public admission that someone in some lab has already started gathering preliminary data showing that it could work.