The Real Covid19 Timeline 2017-2023

The following email correspondence was obtained by U.S. Right To Know (USRTK) through FOIA.

On April 24, 2017, Peter Daszak, president of Ecohealth Alliance, sent an email to Erik Stemmy, the NIH Program officer overseeing his research, stating his intention to bring Shi Zhengli to the US for a visit to the NIH.

On May 24, 2017, Peter Daszak sought a security clearance for Zhengli and three other colleagues of hers in an email correspondence with Erik Steemy. Daszak listed himself as (PI) principal investigator on the NIAID COV (coronavirus) grant and as the lead on the NIAID PREDICT project with the last guest being a ‘liaison for China at Ecohealth Alliance. Peter Daszak said of the meeting “Zhengli and I will do a double act, and we’ll cover the work we’re doing on an NIAID project” referring to subcontracting NIAID grants to Zhengli’s lab in Wuhan.

Note: The name of the NIH grant referenced in the email btw is Understand the risk of Bat Cornavirus Emergence. Shi Zhengli listed USG grants in excess of $1.2 million on her CV including $665K from NIH and $560K from USAID between 2014–2019. Daszak repackaged government grants and allocated them to research institutes conducting gain-of-function research including the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The repackaged grants in question were allocated by the NIH to 18 gain-of-function research projects between 2012 and 2020.

On June 29, 2017, Shi Zhengli and the three colleagues, listed in Daszak’s May 24th email to Steemy, visited NIAID Division of Microbiology in the US and gave a presentation on novel coronaviruses. The email correspondence confirms that the meeting was arranged by Peter Daszak with Erik Stemmy hosting them.

Despite the Obama admin placing a moratorium on federal funding for gain-of-function research in October 2014, the NIH, NIAID and Eco Health Alliance designated their research on SARS-Coronaviruses in China as falling outside the definition of gain-of-function research.

In 2017, a video of Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists handling bats without PPE and being bitten was aired on Chinese state run TV. Another clip from the same broadcast shows scientists working with viral samples in a lab without pressurized suits or even masks.

• The institute only has 1 lab with the highest biosafety protocol BSL-4 where researchers are required to wear pressurized body suits with oxygen tanks. Most are designated as BSL-3 and BSL-2.
• Shi Zhengli, the lead coronavirus researcher at the Wuhan Institute, publicly acknowledged that most of her coronavirus research was conducted at less secure BSL-2 and BSL-3 labs.
• As reported in Vanity Fair, there have been 4 incidences of SARS related lab breaches in China since 2003 including the 2003 SARS outbreak.
• Only two other labs in the world were conducting similar research on bat related coronaviruses: one in Galveston and one at UNC Chapel Hill.
• The outbreak occurred in winter when bats hibernate and no bats were sold at Huanan wet market.

Between October 1–3 of 2017, Fauci, Daszak and Zhengli all attended the Cell Symposium: Emerging and Re-emerging Viruses together in Arlington, VA.

NIH lifted the moratorium and continued GOF research grants 2 months later in December 2017.

On March 8, 2018, Toni Rocke at US Geological Survey emailed Dr. Ralph Baric at UNC with questions about the “SARS-CoV spike glycoproteins you are developing with respect to the DARPA grant we are collaborating on.”

In 2018, DARPA rejected an application for a $14 million proposal grant from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth Alliance and Chapel Hill UNC under Dr. Ralph S. Baric. The grant proposal was formally called DEFUSE proposed to synthesize spike proteins with furin cleavage sites into SARs coronavirus, of the same species as the wild type ancestral variant, and test their ability to infect human cells in genetically engineered mice. While the formal proposal states that the work will be conducted at Chapel Hill, Peter Daszak mentions in a comment that this is only to please DARPA and that most of the work will be conducted in Wuhan (at a lab with a lower bio-safety level).

Despite having their application rejected, the three institutions went forward with the research using the aforementioned NIH grant for Emerging Bat Coronaviruses. According to The Times of London, the Wuhan Institute of Virology allegedly achieved this objective in 2019. However, the institute omitted this discovery in their first paper about the circulating Wuhan virus.

Last year, The London Times reported that the state department had uncovered evidence some virologists working on gain-of-function research were taken to the hospital with COVID like symptoms in November 2019. The first 3 COVID19 patients were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu in November 2019. All three were virologists conducting gain-of-function research on SARS viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In May 2020, the Seattle Times relayed a report about a retired nurse from Snohomish County, WA who contracted a mysterious bug right before Christmas in December 2019. Months later in 2020, a serology test confirmed she had antibodies for COVID. One other Snohomish County resident had confirmed COVID antibodies after falling ill in December 2019 and neither had traveled to China.

French researchers found a Covid19 case in their country dating back to December 27, 2019.

Alabama man Brandie Mccain developed Covid19 like symptoms in late December 2019 and nearly died in the hospital on January 4, 2020. Yet again a serology test confirmed covid19 antibodies.

In November 2019, Michael Melham, mayor of Belleville, NJ, developed covid19 like symptoms . Months after he recovered from his illness an antibody test administered by his doctor confirmed he had Covid19 antibodies.

In May 2020, The Palm Beach Post reported that 11 people within the same bloc of Del Ray Beach experienced Covid like symptoms between November 2019 and early January 2020. All took serology tests that confirmed they had covid19 antibodies. The earliest case was a man named Uf Tukel who first experienced symptoms in late November.

A retrospective waste water analysis conducted in Barcelona in 2020 found presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomes as far back as March 12, 2019.

Another retrospective waste water analysis conducted in three regions of Northern Italy in 2021 found evidence that SARS-COV-2 was already circulating around Milan and Turin in December 2019.

In January 2020, Chinese authorities arrested whistleblower Li Wenliang for “disrupting the social order.” Wenliang had worked at the Wuhan labs as an ophthalmologist and had tried to warn his colleagues that the mysterious Pneumonia spreading at the time could be a form of SARS. Wenliang conveniently died of COVID-19 the following month.

The guy who organized the February 2020 Lancet statement denouncing the lab leak theory as an unsubstantiated conspiracy was none other than Peter Daszak. He was also part of the fact-finding mission organized by WHO the following year.

On March 17, 2020 Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry and colleagues released a paper on The Proximal Origins of Covid19 in Nature Medicine; they had released the preprint on February 16, 2020. They admit to having considered a lab leak as a serious possibility before the paper but supposedly dismissed it after reviewing the evidence. However, emails obtained through FOIA reveal that pressure from superiors led to the dismissal and Andersen still expressed suspicion about a possible lab leak a month after publishing Proximal Origins.

Last year, a congressional investigation revealed that David M. Morens, a top advisor to Fauci at the NIH, admitted to using his Gmail account and deleting emails on his official account to evade FOIA requests, intentionally altering and destroying federal records.

The Peter addressed in this email is Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry who co-authored Proximal Origins are also copied. Bloomberg journalist Jason Gale was also copied in the email.

David Morens and his colleagues also DMed each other through a group messaging app called SLACK. Kristian Andersen advised his colleagues to communicate through their SLACK channel to avoid public scrutiny and until February 5, 2020 named their channel “project-wuhan_engineering”. The channel name was changed to “project-wuhan_pangolin” in line with the narrative change that the virus had emerged from an animal sold at a wet market such as a Pangolin.

• Four days before on February 1, 2020, Andersen communicated that: “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

• Robert Garry also expressed suspicion of a lab leak communicating that: “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF [gain of function] research [which increases infectiousness] we know is happening.”
• Three days before on February 2, 2020, Andersen communicated that we can’t prove whether this is natural or escaped.
• Two days before on February 3, 2020, Andersen attended a meeting, arranged by Fauci, at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Francis Collins, head of the NIAID, representatives from the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were in attendance. This marked the actual turning point in SLACK channel discussions from lab leak to crossover because that same day he and his colleagues shared Wikipedia articles about different animals the virus could have jumped from such as the Chinese ferret and Pangolin.

• After co-authoring and releasing the preprint for Proximal Origins, Andersen admitted in an February 17th email that he was pressured by “higher-ups” to quickly put out the paper.

• On February 18th, 20th and 22nd, Andersen and Garry expressed doubt that any of the Pangolin (genome) sequences were the source of the virus jumping to humans.

Note: In a recent House subcommittee interview, Andersen revealed that the “higher ups” are in the intel community both in the US and UK: “it was clear that the White House Office of Science Technology Policy at that February 3rd conference call, Dr. Fauci, in my initial email to me, talked about contacting the intelligence community both here and in the United Kingdom. So that's what my assumption is, that when we're talking to the higher-ups here, the White House was aware of this.”

On December 9, 2020, officials within the State Department’s Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance bureau met in Foggy Bottoms to discuss the upcoming fact-finding mission to Wuhan the following year. Then director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, Christopher Park, not to say anything that would cause suspicion of the USG role in funding GOF research. Christopher Park had been instrumental in lifting Obama’s moratorium on funding GOF research in 2017 under the Trump admin.

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

On January 15, 2021, the state department published a fact sheet on Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which observed that (1) the institute has been conducting experiments with a bat coronavirus identified as RaTG13 since 2016 which the institute admitted was it’s closest sample to SARS-Cov-2. (2) The institute allegedly sampled RaTG13 from a cave in Yunnan province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS analogous symptoms. (3) The institute has a history of conducting gain-of-function research on chimeric viruses. (4) The institute has conducted classified research on behalf of the Chinese military (PLA) since at least 2017. (5) US government agencies and universities have funded and collaborated on “civilian” research at the institute and (6) USG has reason to believe that several researchers inside the institute fell ill in autumn of 2019 before the first cases were identified, despite claims to the contrary by senior researcher Shi Zhengli.

In February 2023, FBI director Christopher Wray told a reporter that his agency has been assessing the origins of the pandemic and believes the most likely explanation is a lab leak incident.

In a July 2023 congressional hearing, Kristian Andersen, lied to congress about having no pending grant requests before the NIH before his conference call with Fauci on February 1, 2020, before co-authoring the Proximal Origins paper. He claimed that he applied for his $9 million grant request for a West African Emerging Infectious disease center in June 2019 and had it scored and reviewed in November 2019. While it is true that the grant request had cleared an independent review in November 2019, it was still pending final approval by the NIAID director during Andersen’s conference call with said NIAID director. The grant was not finalized and awarded until May 21, 2020, well after the events of February 1, 2020 and even the writing of the Proximal Origins paper. How do we know? Because he time stamped it in a press release.

On July 22 of last year, Nature Medicine’s editor-in-chief, Joao Monteiro, told The Telegraph, in regard to The Proximal Origins of COVID19, that a retraction was “not warranted” because the paper was a “point of view” and not a research study.

Peter Daszak lied in a transcribed interview before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and the Committee on Energy and Commerce last year about where DEFUSE research proposal would be conducted. As I pointed out earlier a FOIA request for the DEFUSE draft that included edits reveals that some of the work would be conducted at WIV not exclusively at Chapel Hill.

The draft edits also reveals he lied about the bio-safety level of the WIV labs that would conduct this work, which reveals that Zhengli planned to conduct this at level 2 instead of the level 3 specified.

However, in this draft of the DEFUSE proposal, Dr. Shi Zhengli wrote that she planned to perform this work in BSL-2. In response to Dr. Shi’s proposal, Dr. Baric wrote the following alarmed comment:

IN [sic] the US, these recombinant SARS CoV are studied under BSL3, not BSL2, especially important for those that are able to bind and replicate in primary human cells. In [C]hina, might be growin [sic] these viruses under bsl2 [sic]. US researchers will likely freak out.