In our debate on Covid origins, Peter @tgof137 kept insisting that the DEFUSE proposal was only interested in viruses that are only within a 95% similarity to (i.e. at most 5% different from) SARS1. I thought I fully explained that Peter was mistaken and the judges have agreed with me (see the clip below) but Peter keeps repeating that claim (e.g. in the Astral Codex writeup). Now, with the FOIA of the DEFUSE drafts we now have clear evidence that even strains with up to a 25% difference from SARS1 were of interest. 🚨 Moreover, the 2019 EcoHealth grant renewal letter for their joint grant with WIV actually said that they would PRIORITIZE strains that had between 10% and 25% difference from SARS1 in their spike gene. Details in the thread below.
This is the relevant excerpt from the DEFUSE FOIA:
🚨 But this is an even more important piece of evidence as this is the 2019 EcoHealth NIH grant renewal application for their joint grant with WIV that has been ongoing since 2014. In it we see that by 2019 their interest has shifted to focusing on novel SARS-like strains that are 10-25% different from SARS1 in their spike. It is also noteworthy that they are talking of anticipating finding another 100-200 novel CoVs by sampling 5000 bats. ecohealthalliance.org/wp-content/upl…
Finally, I want to point out this part of the EcoHealth renewal letter for their joint grant with WIV. They basically talk about creating synthetic backbones (reverse genetics systems) out of novel SARS-like strains that are able to evade immunity elicited by SARS1, and then using those novel strains (potentially passaging them?) to infect human respiratory cell cultures and/or humanized mice, and doing all this in the presence of mutagens (nucleoside analogs): “We will sequence full length genomes of high risk strains that are antigenically distinct and escape SARS cross neutralization, synthetically reconstruct a small subset (1-2) and evaluate the ability of nucleoside analogues to inhibit growth in HAE cultures and/or in vivo (55, 56).”
@ydeigin They had to synthetically reconstruct novel SarsLike viruses because WIV could not isolate and culture them well. The reconstruction was done by Barics lab, much like SHC014