Documents Reveal Scientists' Safety Concerns Over Wuhan Lab in 2018 Research Proposal

The proposal, rejected by DARPA, sought to engineer bat coronaviruses for increased human transmissibility, raising questions about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Newly released documents reveal that a 2018 coronavirus research proposal, Project DEFUSE, coauthored by American researchers and scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raised safety concerns about the Chinese lab.
• The proposal, which was rejected by the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), sought to test engineering bat coronaviruses in a way that would make them more easily transmissible to humans.
• Internal messages and early drafts of the proposal suggest that the researchers planned to conduct a portion of the research at the Wuhan lab, where safety precautions are not up to US standards.
• The researchers sought to downplay the role of Chinese scientists in their proposal to please US funders but said they could allocate what work would be done where, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, if they got the funding.
• Despite the research never being funded or completed, some scientists believe the proposal and the lab's safety concerns support the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated from a lab leak.

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