HILTON: “Now, despite the controversy surrounding this type of research, it always had one steadfast champion, a leading figure in the world of infectious diseases, Anthony Fauci. His institute funded that first ferret study at the time he co-wrote an op-ed in ‘The Washington Post’ describing the research as ‘a risk worth taking; important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory.’ And shortly before the Obama Administration’s ban on gain of function research in 2014, Fauci commissioned this. It was a project to assess the risk of new Coronaviruses emerging from wild animals like bats. One of its stated aims was to see what viruses can infect both animals and humans. Now pay close attention to these words right at the end of the project summary. ‘Predictive models of host range (I.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.’ That is a description of viral gain of function research — the exact type of research that the Obama Administration stopped. But Fauci didn’t stop it, he continued on by subcontracting it to this group — Ecohealth Alliance based in New York. It is run by a big name in the field of virus research, Peter Daszak. He is a zoologist who specializes in wildlife diseases. His claim to fame, and it’s a big one, is that he was the person who first discovered the bat origin of the SARS pandemic just over a decade ago. Daszak established that the virus came from bats by a civet cat in the Chinese market. Ever since then, Daszak developed a reputation as the ‘Batman.’ He and his team would literally go to remote jungle caves to collect back samples for scientific research. The project that Fauci commissioned gave Ecohealth Alliance more than $3 million over the course of six years, despite the Obama Administration’s ban.
And here we come to the crucial step which has never before been reported. Peter Daszak himself subcontracted a key piece of the Fauci project — the gain of function piece. He gave that to a well-known center of expertise in gain of function virus research which specialized in bat Coronaviruses. Yep, he gave it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The question is, did they give it to us? Let’s see what they did with the Fauci money. In the projects result page, there are 13 papers co-authored by Shi Zhengli, who is the head of the Wuhan Institute’s Infectious Disease Unit. One of the papers was published in 2017, roughly halfway through the project, Peter Daszak is listed as a co-author. It’s a kind of progress report. Inside the funding section of the paper is the I.D. of the Fauci commission project. That is the money trail. Until now, the only reporting of Fauci’s role in all this has been on his funding of the Wuhan lab in general. But tonight we can go further thanks to this paper. We can see the specific activity that Fauci funded and it’s terrifying. So terrifying, in fact, that after we reached out to NIH and Peter Daszak’s group for comment, this paper was mysteriously taken offline on Friday for a while. But we downloaded it weeks ago. Here are the details.
We’re putting the actual scientific language on screen now, but this is what it means in plain English: They collected samples of bat feces from a cave near Kunming in Yunnan Province, China. They found many novel bat Coronavirus is in the feces, they analyzed them and sequenced their genetic information. They then built various chimeras, genetically engineered new viruses, man-made in the lab. They infected human cells with them in the lab. And they then showed that their man-made viruses could replicate as a functional virus. Here is the most important part. The genetic changes they made in the lab unlocked a highly specific doorway into the human body. The virus that causes Covid-19 uses that same exact doorway. To be clear, none of the genetically engineered viruses created back in 2017 and reported in this paper were the exact ones we’re dealing with now, but what they confirm is that it was possible to make the Covid-19 virus using the techniques developed in the Fauci project. And that project continued for three more years. Three more years of experimentation, three more years of man-made mutation.
Now let’s look at the actual Covid-19 virus. How does it compare to the ones we know were made earlier in the Wuhan lab? The actual pandemic virus was found to stick to human cells 10 to 20 times tighter than the original SARS virus, which is why it’s much more infectious. Scientists would expect increases in infectiousness to happen through cycles of mutation, but with this virus it was there from the start. In a paper published in February 2020, Shi Zhengli confirmed that the backbone of the pandemic virus matches one from the Wuhan Institute’s library of collected samples. Their 2017 paper describes how they swapped parts of Coronavirus found in other animals into bat Coronavirus strains in order to make more infectious man-made versions. And sure enough, the pandemic virus looks like a combination of two very different bat viruses mixed with parts of a virus from a completely different species. Could something like that occur in nature? That’s what Peter Daszak is saying. Quote, ‘Maybe a farmer got infected, or a farmer’s animals, and they were shipped into their markets. If a person brings it in, or an animal, that virus will spread. And it looks like that’s what happened here.’ If we’re to believe that natural origin story, here are the coincidences that would’ve had to happen. Multiple different species of bats in south China would have to infect each other and some other unknown animal that either these animals or an infected human would need to have traveled 1000 miles without affecting anyone until they got to Wuhan. In its first incarnation before any mutations, it would’ve been 10 to 25 more infectious than any previously observed virus. And most incredibly of all, the infected animal or human would have somehow chosen to make their thousand-mile track to the only place in all of China with a lab that had the world’s most extensive collection of the viruses it was already infected with and the one place in the entire world that carried out genetic research which matched that virus. We’re not suggesting for a second that the Coronavirus was created or released as a bio-weapon. But lab accidents happen. That’s literally the reason the Obama Administration stopped this kind of research. During the SARS epidemic, two researchers studying that virus in the lab in China became infected and sparked outbreak. Another research in Singapore was infected with SARS and he wasn’t even studying it, other people in his lab were. Even with proper precautions, these leaks can happen.”

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