I interviewed US lab leak researcher Jim Haslam, who has been researching the lab leak theory for three years now. He arrives at a startling conclusion: Contrary to what most lab leakers believe, the coronavirus did not originate in a Chinese lab, but in a U.S. lab, because it bears U.S. "fingerprints" it: certain gene sequences that can only be found in U.S. research papers and U.S. patents. At the center of his investigative research is the question of what was actually released in 2019. According to Haslam, SARS-CoV-2 is a "self-spreading bat vaccine" that was released in a laboratory accident in Wuhan in the fall of 2019. The vaccine was to be tested at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on wild-caught bats before being released in the wild. The idea of vaccinating bats was based on the fact that they are considered by virologists to be a "reserve population" for highly dangerous viruses: SARS1, MERS, Nipah, Hendra, Marburg - all these highly dangerous viruses for humans would survive in bats and from there jump to humans again and again via intermediate hosts. The idea was to make nature safer for humans. And the rest, as they say, is history.
What sounds almost unbelievable at first, Haslam proves in detail by means of conspicuous gene sequences in the COVID-19 genome, a multitude of declassified documents, Slack messages, emails, research proposals, patents and public statements of the "DARPA DEFUSE" protagonists in the years before and after Corona. In my opinion, the topic lab leak and Haslam’s research on it is relevant because ultimately it is about the question of how society wants to deal with high-risk biotechnologies such as gain-of-function research in the future - if there is a strong suspicion that Corona may have been based on a lab accident in which a product of US biotechnology was released.
The interview is available in three different versions: Original English Version without subtitles, Original English original version with German subtitles and a German dubbed version, narrated by Andreas Sparberg.
Who is Jim Haslam and why do I consider his theory of the lab leak to be the most convincing of all the lab leak theories I have encountered? Jim Haslam called himself a "nobody" when he commented his appearance on an podcast this spring - and expressed the wish that it would stay that way. I therefore did not discuss his professional background in my conversation with him, because I wanted to respect the fact that he, as a person, prefers to remain in the background. In the meantime, however, a lot has happened: For example, Haslam recently gave an interview to the renowned US physician Peter McCullough, in which he spoke openly about his professional background. It is now public knowledge that Haslam works as an engineer in the oil industry. So he is not from the field of virology - but neither are we journalists when it comes to this topic.
Why can Haslam speak on a topic like the lab leak, although he has no professional background in virology? The answer lies in the longstanding, almost complete ignorance of this topic by the so-called mainstream media: Since the debate about the COVID-19 origin was for a long time largely dismissed as a "conspiracy theory" by the major media houses, a diskursive vacuum was created, which was filled by grassroots actors. In social media such as X, a veritable "lab leak scene" of free media, NGOs, freelance journalists and citizen journalists has emerged in the last few years, doing independent and investigative research on the topic. The DRASTIC group, which was instrumental in uncovering the DARPA DEFUSE project, and the NGO "US Right To Know" (USRTK), led by journalists Sainath Suryanarayanan and Emily A. Kopp, are particularly worthy of mention. Everything we know today about the origins of COVID-19 is essentially due to a passionate armada of grass-roots journalists such as the DRASTIC group, USRTK, or authors like Jim Haslam, who independently and with a lot of self-denial put together the most important pieces of the puzzle in their spare time. In this way, a clearer picture has slowly emerged since 2020.
Haslam calls himself a "second-generation" lab leaker: He joined the already ongoing lab leak discussion in 2021. But he went deep: He researched the biographies of the protagonists of the so-called "DARPA DEFUSE" proposal, their follow-up projects and government funding, their job applications, their research papers, their patents, their statements in the years before and after Corona, their public appearances. On the basis of all the evidence available to him, he came to the conclusion that the origin of the COVID-19 gene sequence must not be in China, but in the United States.
What sounds completely absurd at first - after all, it is undisputed that a virus has broken out in China - turns out to be hard to deny on closer inspection. Haslam takes his readers into a universe that is difficult to comprehend from the outside: The world of virology, one of the world's most internationally networked industries. According to Haslam, the place where a virus breaks out tells us virtually nothing about where the virus was made - because virologists are constantly sending genetic sequences, samples, and vaccines around the world, and national borders play no role at all in this highly interconnected industry. He shows that certain "genetic fingerprints" in the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus - such as the furin cleavage site - have been a real fascination for US virologists for many years, and that many US patents have been filed around them. A major development in virology in the years 2016 to 2019, according to Haslam, completely missed the public eye: Research into self-replicating vaccines for the animal kingdom. This research, says Haslam, is central to understanding SARS-CoV-2.
Why there was a paradigm shift in the USA regarding the origin of COVID-19 - from zoonosis to laboratory origin as the most likely origin narrative - is mainly due to one document: The DARPA DEFUSE proposal leaked in September 2021 by a Major named Joseph Murphy. The document shattered the then mainstream consensus on zoonosis as the most likely scenario of origin, as it presented a kind of "blueprint" for the production of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The research team around the NGO EcoHealth Alliance had submitted the DEFUSE proposal to the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) with the idea to produce a so-called chimera - a combination of several viruses - from different coronaviruses in the Asian region, into which a furin cleavage site was to be inserted via gain-of-function research in order to make it more transmissible than natural viruses. This chimera should be less dangerous than naturally occurring viruses, but spread much faster among bats and "immunize" them against more dangerous viruses. The "vaccine" was to be applied to nature in order to make it safer for humans - for example for US soldiers stationed at numerous military bases in Asia. Before that, it was to be tested in a laboratory in Wuhan on living bats. What could possibly go wrong?
The project was not accepted by the DARPA - primarily for reasons of cost, since the project proposal, with a cost factor of 14 million dollars, was quite expensive, even for an agency such as the DARPA, the "brain" of the Pentagon, the US Department of Defense. Nevertheless, the announcement of the DARPA DEFUSE application changed the lab leak debate in the USA significantly, because for the first time these invasive practices of virology became known to a wider public. Since the publication of DARPA DEFUSE, it has been clear to many that this document must have something to do with Corona, even though the project was ultimately not funded by DARPA. Many lab leakers stop their research at this point and assume that Chinese researchers, such as Zhengli Shi from the Wuhan Institute of Virology mentioned in the DEFUSE proposal, "secretly" continued to work on their own with the knowledge from the DARPA DEFUSE proposal in Wuhan. Unfortunately, we will never find out, because the Communist Party of China will never release the files, case closed.
Haslam goes one step further at this point, and looks at what the other actors who appear in the DARPA defuse proposal did from 2018 to 2019. And he arrives at the conclusion: The DARPA-DEFUSE project was indeed funded and implemented - split into three sub-proposals, under the umbrella of the NIAID, whose director at the time was none other than Anthony S. Fauci. The DARPA-DEFUSE team found itself in 2019 under Fauci's "CREID" research umbrella, with a total budget of 82 million. For years, it had been the modus operandi of Peter Daszak's NGO EcoHealth Alliance - a regular contractor for the US defense industry - to simply submit a project proposal that was not accepted by a particular agency to the next agency. "Everything gets funded in Washington D.C.", says Haslam in our interview. It is often difficult to imagine the enormous resources that the American government has at its disposal, so that even the craziest ideas have a chance of being realized within the framework of such a "monster machine".
According to Haslam, Anthony Fauci's NIAID had about twice the budget of DARPA. In case of doubt, military research projects could always be carried out in the context of civilian research, within the framework of a "One Health" approach, in which animal and human health are regarded as one. Research on highly dangerous viruses and so-called gain-of-function research - also research in which viruses are given a functional advantage through genetic manipulation - is always dual in nature: It is “DURC”, "Dual Use Research of Concern", research with a dual purpose. It is inherent in such research that both civilian and military interests are always connected with it.
These are the main topics in my interview with Haslam. In part 1, we talk about the basics of laboratory theory: The DARPA-DEFUSE proposal, the Furin cleavage site, the RaTG13 sequence, the "cover-up" - the verifiable concealment of the laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 by well-known virologists, the most important protagonists of the Lab Leak such as Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Linfa Wang, Danielle Anderson, Zhengli Shi and Vincent Munster, the significance of bat research for virology, and ultimately the topic of "self-spreading vaccines". The interview is also on YouTube.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:21 What leaked?
01:39 Why should we still be talking about the lab leak in 2024?
04:22 The controversy among the proponents of the lab leak theory
07:12 The DARPA DEFUSE proposal
10:00 Is the lab hypothesis consensus in the US?
11:09 The cover-up: The virologist's slack messages
13:30 The Furin Cleavage Site
16:15 Further indications of a lab leak: The restriction sites
20:12 Who is Shi Zhengli?
22:11 The obsession of biotechnology from 2015 to 2019: Wild bats
23:25 Why bats?
29:32 Are the suspects nervous?
28:13 Jim Haslam's theory
32:21 The BSL-2 and BSL-4 lab in Wuhan
33:36 The researcher in the BSL-4 lab: Danielle Anderson
40:07 How did Anderson become infected in a BSL-4 lab?
42:31 Wuhan, bats and self-spreading vaccines
Sources:
Interview mit Jim Haslam bei Peter McCullough
Jim Haslam’s book: COVID-19 Mystery Solved
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic
Anthony Fauci Hearing 03.06.2024
Peter Daszak Hearing 01.05.2024
YouTube / AP Archive: Two members of WHO mission in China leave Wuhan
Peter Daszaks TED-Vortrag mit Cockroaches 2010
Der Entwurf des DARPA DEFUSE Antrags
FOIA’ed Emails of „Proximal-Origin“-authors with Anthony Fauci
FOIA’ed Slack-Chat of „Proximal Origin“-authors, first title: "Project Wuhan Engineering“ - later renamed "Project Wuhan Pangolin" despite lacking evidence
Zhengli Shi publishes RaTG13 on January 24, 2020
Nature: The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2
Furin Cleavage Site Animation: FCS Film: Quelle: Coronavirus Structural Task Force, www.insidecorona.net
Visualization Furin in the human body
Bruttel et al: Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v2
YouTube / BioBricksFoundation, 2009: Ralph Baric brags on Synthethic Biology 4.0 Conference in 2009, building Coronaviruses would be like playing with legos
Spiegel: Das Rätsel von Wuhan (The mystery of Wuhan), 02.07.2021
Furin Cleavage Site Paper from 2010, inkl. Vincent Munster
Ralph Baric’s infamous 2018 patent
Sky News Australia: WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Footage proves bats were kept in Wuhan lab
WIV MTA with NIAID in 2018: WIV signed an MTA with NIAID in 2018
Nature: A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence 09.11.2015
Friedrich-Löffler-Institute Paper: „Stellar evidence for the Western creation of a lab leak“
National Geographic: Virus Hunters
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic memo: Dr. David Morens (NIAID) emails
List of public payments to EcoHealth Alliance: Independent Science News: Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance Has Hidden Almost $40 Million In Pentagon Funding And Militarized Pandemic Science 16.12.2020
YouTube/ CGTN: Liu Xin’s exclusive interview with China’s batwoman 27.08.2020
The Sydney Morning Herald: Australian scientist, the sole foreign researcher at the Wuhan lab, speaks out, 28.06.2021
Bloomberg: Danielle Anderson: The Last—And Only—Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out
Danielle Anderson Interviews 1 | 2
Linfa Wang Powerpoint Presentation 2019
NBC News: Report says cellphone data suggests October shutdown at Wuhan lab, but experts are skeptical
YouTube / NBC News: Scientist Speaks Out About Coronavirus Origin: Exclusive | NBS Nightly News, 27.02.2020
BSL-4 in Wuhan „built by the French“
Science: Eroding norms over self-spreading viruses
Nature: Self-disseminating vaccines to stop zoonoses
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