The onetime lab-leak “conspiracy” has come full circle with the revelation that 15 federal agencies, from the National Institutes of Health to three Cabinet-level departments and multiple components, could have warned the public as early as 2018 of the research planned by China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance, its nonprofit conduit for federal funding. The […]
Posts Tagged ‘chimeric’
From ‘conspiracy theory’ to ‘cover-up’? Agencies hid 2018 pitch to fund chimeric coronavirus


Wuhan scientists planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14 million from DARPA


Wuhan and US scientists were planning to release enhanced airborne coronavirus particles into Chinese bat populations to inoculate them against diseases that could jump to humans, leaked grant proposals dating from 2018 show. New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles and aerosols […]
Monkeys in Asia harbor virus from humans, other species


Near the border of Cambodia, UW researcher Lisa Jones-Engel holds an Asian rhesus macaque. Credit: Lynn Johnson When it comes to spreading viruses, bats are thought to be among the worst. Now a new study of nearly 900 nonhuman primates in Bangladesh and Cambodia shows that macaques harbor more diverse astroviruses, which can cause infectious […]