NIH concern
Within weeks of the pandemic’s outbreak, Wuhan Institute of Virology Senior Scientist Shi Zhengli published a preprint about RaTG13 and submitted its sequence to a public database.
Its resemblance to the novel coronavirus gripping the globe set off sirens among top virologists and NIH leaders Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, their emails show.
“In case you haven’t seen this preprint from one week ago,” Collins said in a February 1, 2020, email to Fauci obtained by U.S. Right to Know.
“No evidence this work was supported by NIH,” he said.
The NIH leaders joined a teleconference hours later with top virologists concerned about signs SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, which included discussion of similarities between the emerging novel virus and RaTG13.
Neither the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s preprint nor the final version published in February 2020 acknowledged any U.S. funding.
However, an addendum published nine months later revealed that the WIV partially sequenced RaTG13 in a 2016 study under its original name, RaBtCoV/4991.
This 2016 study did acknowledge funding from an NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a longtime partner of the WIV lab.
U.S. ties to COVID cousin
Documents obtained and analyzed by U.S. Right to Know confirm that the U.S. government helped fund the discovery of RaTG13.
Progress reports for the NIH grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance confirm that the 2016 study was “published from work funded by this NIAID R01 [grant].”
A University of California Davis letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., goes further, suggesting that USAID may have been involved with its discovery.
“In China alone, we sampled >10,000 bats and ~2,000 other mammals, using PREDICT protocols to discover 52 novel SARS related-CoV’s [coronaviruses], including the closest relative of the Wuhan nCoV [SARS-CoV-2],” reads the letter.
https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/us-funded-discovery-of-close-covid-19-relative/
Metabiota - Viral Surveillance for the PREDICT Program 20150410
https://globalprojects.ucsf.edu/project/metabiota-viral-surveillance-predict-program-20150410
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Would this be the same Metabiota funded by Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca?
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“In China alone, we sampled >10,000 bats and ~2,000 other mammals, using PREDICT protocols to discover 52 novel SARS related-CoV’s [coronaviruses], including the closest relative of the Wuhan nCoV [SARS-CoV-2],” reads the letter.
https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/us-funded-discovery-of-close-covid-19-relative/