Dr. Baric testified that the “DARPA PREEMPT” solicitation - which called on researchers to learn what makes a virus jump
between species “down to the nucleotide level” - could only be understood one
way: “That’s a gain-of-function experiment. There’s no other way to think about
it”.
As for “DEFUSE”, the proposal that Baric submitted with
Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, and Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan
Institute of Virology (WIV), Baric confirmed that inserting a “furin cleavage site” into a “viral backbone” would be done by him, directly admitting, “That part
would be done by me”. The “furin cleavage site” is the very feature of SARS-CoV-2
that first drew lab-origin scrutiny.
