Excerpt:
"US researcher Jim Haslam has done an incredible job on his Substack article Reverse engineering the origins of SARS-CoV-2 documenting all the toings and froings among the virology community in connection with the creation of this peculiar virus and the subsequent cover-up. What follows is in large part indebted to his meticulous research, though any errors are of course my own.

The winning 2018 DARPA bid was for a project called PREEMPT led by Dr. Vincent Munster (pictured above) based at Anthony Fauci’s NIH Rocky Mountain Lab. Both PREEMPT and Baric’s losing DEFUSE project had the same basic idea: to try to prevent a (hypothetical) future pandemic by using an engineered SARS virus to vaccinate the bats from which it is believed such a virus was likely to spill over.

The idea being, of course, that the vaccinated bats would no longer be a reservoir for the virus, thus ‘defusing’ or ‘preempting’ the zoonotic spillover. Sounds crazy? Too right – far too much meddling with nature and placing too much faith in the ability of vaccines to prevent infection and transmission. But crazy or not, that’s what the scientists proposed, and PREEMPT won and DEFUSE lost.

The key difference between Baric’s DEFUSE and Munster’s PREEMPT – aside from PREEMPT coming in around $4 million cheaper at $10 million – is that rather than relying on spraying bat caves with a non-transmissible virus-vaccine, Munster’s plan involved making the virus-vaccine transmit between the bats via aerosols. This made it a self-spreading vaccine, able (in theory) to reach all the bats without humans having to go and find all their caves and spray them. The risks of such a plan should have been obvious. Indeed, Baric himself, who went awfully quiet after his DEFUSE project leaked in mid-2021, resurfaced in mid-2023 to say that such work involving engineering transmissible virus-vaccines was “too edgy” for him.

After the DARPA funding went to PREEMPT, Fauci rode to Baric’s rescue with a bumper $82 million programme called CREID, awarded in summer 2019, in which both Baric and Munster’s teams would cooperate in the research into Munster’s concept of self-spreading bat vaccines.

Exactly what happened next is not publicly documented, so we do need to fill in some gaps. It appears that Munster took Baric’s patented SARS virus-vaccine and made a transmissible version at his Rocky Mountain Lab (Baric’s version was not intended to be transmissible). What is the evidence for that? Perhaps most telling is that, as Haslam observes, SARS-CoV-2 transmits efficiently in only five known mammals, and those five – American deer, American deer mice, Syrian hamsters, American mink, and Egyptian fruit bats – are all found in Munster (and Fauci’s) Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana. SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t infect lab animals common in Chinese labs or present in the WIV, such as Chinese horseshoe bats. This would suggest that SARS-CoV-2 acquired its transmissibility in an American lab context and not a Chinese one or elsewhere.

The virus-vaccine having been made transmissible in Montana, it would then have been sent to the WIV to be tested on Chinese bats, which were not available in American labs. There can be little doubt who would have done this testing at the WIV, as there was only one scientist with the necessary connections and expertise."