Ecohealth is back in Bat Virus Business

Grant behind collaboration with Wuhan Institute of Virology, suspended by Trump admin, is reinstated.

A brief post — I just sent this one on notes, and then decided it was worth the email feed.

EcoHealth is back in bat virus business.

source: Science

DEFUSE, the Ecohealth initiative supported by the grant and spearheaded by the notorious and insufferably smug Peter Daszak, is an almost mind-bendingly stupid premise. As such it is nothing but obvious non-governmental-organization welfare-slash-graft.

It seeks to hunt for bat coronavirus spike genes with the potential to gain tropism in humans. But there is no possible value to hunting for potential human-tropic spikes because nothing can be done with that knowledge. Bats are not going to let humans run coronavirus eradication campaigns (as described in DEFUSE), it’s the stupidest idea in scientific history. Daszak, essentially, is just a fixer for government scientific embezzlement.

But, as stupid and corrupt as DEFUSE is, I’ll say again, it and the work carried out by WIV in support of it are not likely the source of SARS-CoV-2:

Defending the case against a WIV origin

For example, recently there was a gargantuan FOI-prompted document dump of everything at NIH regarding the suspended (and now restarted) grant: https://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/NIH-EcoHealth-Grant-FOIA-April-2023.pdf

Igor reported this release, and discussed references to use of HIV pseudoviruses:

Coronavirus-HIV Mutants Were Discussed in NIH-funded Work that Led to COVID-19

However, this would be completely unremarkable were the work actually carried out, and most importantly not reflect any interest in HIV nor HIV-like viral properties; and, no such work is included in any of the yearly progress reports.

As argued in my “Defending” post, instead the NIH paper-trail shows that WIV and the Ecohealth’s progress was profoundly glacial, with yearly goals routinely unmet. (And further, as previously pointed out, instead of attaching spikes of interest to HIV at any point, nor to the genetic “backbone” of SARS-CoV-2, WIV worked on unrelated backbones which mean any virus actually escaping from the lab should carry those genes.) And yet year after year, the money still flows. That’s because the work was never about generating results. NGO welfare, and government scientific embezzlement, explain DEFUSE; not wild schemes of creating an airborne HIV.

Going forward, post-renewal, DEFUSE will continue not to be about results, and not to have relevance as anything except a distraction.

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