The Disturbing Truth About COVID’s ‘Toxic Protein’ | FALLOUT

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] The virus that causes COVID-19 is now understood to have originated in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Yet there is still, to this day, a concerted effort to hide this fact from the public.

Alex Washburne, a mathematical biologist and researcher of economic, ecological, and epidemiological systems, recently released an article, synthesizing all evidence surrounding the COVID-19 lab leak theory.

How do we know this virus does not have natural or zoonotic origins? How do we know that the virus originated in a lab? And how do we know there was a concerted effort to cover up the facts?

We reveal all that and more in this episode.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the hosts, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Robert Malone:
Welcome to another episode of Fallout. Today we’re going to dive into a key article that was recently published by Dr. Alex Washburne on his Substack that both Jan and I agree is the definitive article to date concerning the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the lab leak hypothesis,
and the debunking of the natural origin theory.

Jan Jekielek:
We’ve known that the lab origin has been likely for some time. At this point, Alex Washburne’s piece is closest to having the complete set of evidence available. I noticed that he’s been updating it as new information comes out. We pretty much know unequivocally that this came from a lab. This is not of natural origin.

Mr. Malone:
Alex is deeply embedded in this specialized world of virus hunting, and has deep insights into the proposal structure that was originally used by DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] to fund a group of these international virushunter programs. One included EcoHealth Alliance, who together with Wuhan Institute of Virology and UC Davis submitted a proposal that’s referred to as the Diffuse Proposal.

Because of the work of U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit that does freedom of information action, the public has obtained access to a series of draft proposals that were submitted by EcoHealth Alliance which provide smoking gun evidence that Alex dissects in this recent essay. Why should we care about Alex Washburne? What is it that he brings to the table? What’s interesting about him? Why is he a viable, credible expert in analyzing all this information?

Alex happens to be an expert in prediction of viral evolution and sequence analysis of viral evolution. This was the specific role that he played in a proposal that was actually awarded by this DARPA program, where he and his team went all over the world and collected a type of virus called Henipavirus and then analyzed it for its potential to be transferred into humans. The phrasing used was jump ready. Alex brings this detailed understanding in the actual program that Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Shi Zhengli and others had submitted their original proposal to, but which was ultimately rejected.

That proposal got restructured, submitted to NIAD [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], Tony Fauci’s division, and in its revised form it was funded. But that wasn’t the only money that Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance had available. They had a very large amount of money from USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], from another branch of DOD, DTRA [Defense Threat Reduction Agency], and various other sources of capital. But Alex provides really granular analysis for what happened and how this relates to what we now know.

Mr. Jekielek:
Alex notes the investigation group DRASTIC obtained this Diffuse Proposal. It’s a loose group of anonymous people, clearly very skilled, that has done some amazing work. Then U.S. Right to Know, which was using this FOIA system to get at EcoHealth documents, found this furin cleavage site that had never been found in this particular class of coronavirus. On the other hand, it makes it highly infectious to human beings.

Mr. Malone:
Furin is a key protein in human biology that was only discovered about 15 or 20 years ago. It has been the answer to a longstanding question—how are a lot of membrane proteins associated with the outside part of the cell processed, in other words, clipped from their full-length protein starting form into smaller subunits that are then active in a variety of different aspects of human biology?

It was discovered that this particular protein associated with human cell membranes called furin is responsible for this endoproteolytic cleavage. These are like protein scissors. Furin is like a protein scissor that cleaves proteins. It happens to be critical for the maturation of human influenza virus proteins, the ones that are like the virus. It’s like the spike that sits on the outside of the human influenza virus. But in that category of Sarbecoviruses around SARS-1 and SARS-2, you don’t find this furin cleavage site, as Alex, who’s an expert, points out.

Mr. Jekielek:
Sarbecovirus might be a new term for people. Is this a class of coronaviruses that we’re talking about?

Mr. Malone:
Yes, it’s a subcategory of coronaviruses. We’re familiar with beta-coronaviruses, which are the common cold viruses. Sarbecoviruses are another branch of the general category of coronaviruses that include a lot of these very unique bat coronaviruses that have been the focus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in their collection. There is something fascinating about this Diffuse Proposal that was submitted by EcoHealth Alliance as part of a consortium that included UC Davis and Wuhan Institute of Virology.

They lay out a series of steps that happen to precisely predict the nature of SARS-CoV-2, how it would be created, and the engineering of a furin cleavage site. That is a little group of amino acid protein building blocks that they would engineer into a specific place within the spike protein, the S1-S2 boundary. This is a region that is appropriate for this kind of engineering and if it was cleaved more efficiently it would make this more infectious. This is something that has never existed before.

They lay out a specific plan for how to engineer it. They lay out a specific plan for engineering the source virus as six discrete fragments that can be easily clipped apart with a specific restriction endonuclease. This is a bacterial enzyme which cuts DNA at very specific places. They proposed to engineer the virus using reverse genetics. In other words, this is an RNA virus, but they will work at the DNA level to do this engineering and then recreate the virus from it.

This is called reverse genetics. They specifically lay out how they will engineer these clipping sites for the DNA restriction endonucleases so that it can fall into six different pieces that will be easily manipulated. They lay out how they’re going to engineer the furin cleavage site into this specific place in the virus, the S1-S2 boundary, which happens to be precisely about the place where the furin cleavage site is located in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has infected people all over the world.

They lay out this program of how they’re going to do it with all the nuances. They include in the budget the cost for these molecular scissors, the restriction endonuclease that is necessary to make these clips so that they can reassemble these reverse-engineered DNA fragments.

Mr. Jekielek:
A number of people have worked on these types of proposals. When you are applying, often this research has already been done in part, and you’re applying for something that will essentially fund you to complete it. Then you can say, “Look, we did it. We were successful with our project.” Was this research already done? Would it have already been done in Wuhan?

Mr. Malone:
I can say a couple of things about this. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I have become an expert over time at writing these large proposals and also being a reviewer. Before all this happened and I destroyed my career and credibility with the NIH [National Institutes of Health], they used to routinely call me to serve as a study section chairperson.

In other words, being in charge of the peer review process with many other academic researchers for these kinds of projects. I’ve been doing that for a long time, so I’m very familiar with proposal building. I’ve done it for decades, as well as reviewing them.

What you’re describing is a normal part of the ecosystem of capturing larger government contracts. If you look at it from the government’s point of view, it is risk mitigation. You could have somebody from university X propose all kinds of wonderful things, but you have no assurance they can actually do it. You really want to see evidence that the people that are proposing to do something can actually deliver on it, because otherwise you’re going to waste the government’s money.

This has given rise to this tendency to only award grants to people that have already done a significant fraction of the work. You look in the proposal for evidence of preliminary data, which is used to justify that this team can perform the things that they’re saying they’re performing. But that’s kind of a code for, “We’ve already done it. We’ve already done
a large fraction of it, enough to convince you, the reviewer, that we’re going to be able to finish the project.” It’s quite probable that a significant fraction of this work was already done at the time the proposal was submitted.

Now, it appears that we have this historic record, to the extent that it hasn’t been expunged by the CCP and by the people at UC Davis,
that there was in fact already a large body of data developed. Remember this proposal was submitted in 2018. A full year before the Covid outbreak occurred, we have an international consortium of leading experts in Sarbecoviruses, working with arguably the greatest repository of Sarbecoviruses, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, laying out this specific proposal for reverse genetic engineering, which none of the other proposals to this particular program suggested that they were going to do.

All the other proposals, including all the ones that were funded, were collecting wild viruses and then analyzing the risk that they would jump into humans. But this group from EcoHealth Alliance was alone in saying, “We’re going to take known viruses that we already have and genetically engineer them using reverse genetics, using these specific steps that happen to be precisely aligned with the sequence that we now know of SARS-CoV-2.” This is what Washburne lays out so eloquently.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is also one of the reasons that we have destruction of evidence happening. The sequences used in making this thing were found on computers or actually assembled in some cases. That would provide smoking gun evidence that this was created in a lab.

Mr. Malone:
Washburne has two key insights that explain certain things that I hadn’t been able to understand. One of them is because of his expertise in viral evolution and sequence analysis of viral evolution. He points to the thesis that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally from some bat virus that only exists as a general category a long way from Wuhan. If it was brought to the seafood market and jumped from bats or pangolins and then infected people, that means there were viruses there that were capable of jumping to humans. That means you would see multiple crossover events, with leaps into human populations along the route of their importation into Wuhan. There’s no evidence of that.

He conclusively demonstrates through sequence analysis and other insight that the data that were used to establish the case, in proceedings in The National Academy of Sciences, Lancet, and other papers that we now know were essentially propaganda. It said that this virus had two main branches evolutionarily consistent with multiple events of crossover into humans. He posits that is false, and that a lot of the data assumptions behind those predictions are really not tenable. They represent artifacts in sampling, and that is one thing that Washburne demonstrates.

The other thing is the explanation for why it was so necessary to delete the viral sequences, as was done in September at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, ostensibly under direction of the CCP or the PLA. It also explains the suppression of the viral sequences that were on computers at UC Davis, one of the team members of this EcoHealth Alliance Consortium. Washburne speculates those sequences had to be deleted, because if in analyzing those computer databases it was revealed that the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 existed on people’s computers before SARS-CoV-2 appeared in the human population, that would be a smoking gun demonstrating that in fact this had been synthetically created in the first place. Therefore, it was necessary to delete those sequences.

This is a profound insight and suggests a deep cover-up. Essentially, we’re talking about the intentional destruction of evidence to avoid traceability and avoid any forensic analysis to identify the origins of this as having come from an international consortium of laboratories, and specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Mr. Jekielek:
We have been going down the rabbit hole concerning the lab origin for years. But we would never have produced these particular vaccines if we had understood that this virus was of synthetic origin from a bioresearch lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There is no scenario where you could justify that.

Mr. Malone:
I would like our viewers to think this through with us for just a minute. We have the intentional engineering of this surface protein, this toxic protein that we call spike, that is responsible for the ability of SARS-CoV-2 and other Sarbecoviruses to infect human cells. This protein has been intentionally engineered to make it more infectious, potentially more toxic, more readily able to bind to things like ACE2 and other key proteins, which, by the way, are essential for human homeostasis and for regulation of a lot of the biology in our bodies. This virus protein binds and blocks key human proteins and it has been engineered to do so more efficiently.

Yet, those that are engineering the vaccines, particularly the genetic vaccines, Adenovirus, and the mRNA products, take this protein that we now know has been genetically engineered, place it directly into these delivery technologies, these gene therapy vectors, adenovirus and mRNA, and deliver that particular protein with two specific mutations that have nothing to do with the purine cleavage site.

They make it more immunogenic. They were discovered years ago with other vaccine sarbecovirus development. They make those two proline mutations. They take this toxic protein, put it directly into these gene therapy vectors, and call it a vaccine. It makes your body produce this toxic protein.

How does that make any sense at all? The only way I could imagine that could be justified is if they truly believed, or at least there was the ruse, that this protein came naturally from a naturally occurring virus, rather than being genetically engineered. We’re back at this point again that comes up so often in this whole story of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID crisis. Was this nefarious intent, or was this incompetence?

Tony Fauci and NIAID were directly involved in the funding of EcoHealth Alliance for this kind of work. It’s hard to imagine that the scientists at another branch of Fauci’s operation, the Vaccine Research Center that directly engineered the Moderna vaccine, were completely unaware of the work of Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance, and the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I can’t square that.

Mr. Jekielek:
Keep in mind that some of the authors of the infamous Proximal Origin paper who said it definitely was of natural origin, behind the scenes, were thinking it seemed to be of lab origin. It was under discussion. Even the State Department thought it was of lab origin. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] took the position that it’s of natural origin. I’ve yet to understand how those two agencies came to different conclusions.

Alex Washburne did a really fantastic job of summarizing the scenario. He said, “The forensic scientific case of SARS-CoV-2 origins is like the case of a close network of friends who are all in a room together in which someone died. We have a proposal by those friends to kill that specific person with a specific bullet in the specific room at the general time when all of these researchers were in the room together. While the statement wasn’t funded, it should be read as a revelation of the intentions of the researchers.”

Mr. Malone:
I agree that’s a key clause and another fantastic metaphor by Alex Washburne to make this accessible to the common person. It’s clear this was the strategy and it’s specifically laid out in great detail. It absolutely corresponds with the known sequence for this virus. Talking about smoking guns, this is clear evidence that this information was all hidden very aggressively, using a variety of tactics, including manipulation of the press, censorship, defamation, and character assassination.

These same strategies were deployed all the way through the Covid crisis in order to suppress the information that this was a laboratory-engineered virus. If that had been generally known, it probably would have changed the course of history in a number of ways, not the least being that Mr. Fauci would have been held accountable. It would have been untenable for him to lie to Senator Rand Paul and say that there was no gain-of-function research.

Senator Rand Paul:
Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?

Anthony Fauci:
Senator Paul, I have never lied before to Congress, and I do not retract that statement.

Mr. Jekielek:
Most of the world witnessed the destruction of the global economy and the largest transfer of wealth in history. There were a number of deaths, not just from SARS-CoV-2, but from the policies that were enacted to deal with it.

Many of the actors knew all along that it was engineered. From the beginning, this wasn’t rocket science, because a lot of the evidence was readily available. It was a much greater probability for the lab origin than for the natural origin.

Mr. Malone:
The data was so strong that they had to deploy a massive propaganda and censorship campaign to keep that information from the public. The truth of the matter is that we were not just lied to. We were gaslit and propagandized at a global level in order to hide the truth of what happened here. If the U.S. government admits or is forced to acknowledge in some way, because of the burden of data, that it was directly involved in funding and working together with its global competitor, the CCP, the liability trail here is enormous.The geopolitical consequences of an acknowledgement of culpability by these two global powers would be profound. I can’t even begin to imagine the damages.

Mr. Jekielek:
I find it extremely concerning that the Chinese Communist Party has U.S. government agencies running for cover, because effectively, that’s what has happened. That is terrible.

Mr. Malone:
Functionally, the CCP and the PLA have co-opted much of the world’s biodefense research using a variety of strategies.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is a document from the Chinese regime that states bioweapons development is a high priority for them. It is unbelievable that these scientific research relationships would be so deep. But they are experts at subversion and taking advantage of all of our weaknesses.

Mr. Malone:
Not the least of which is this love of money. It is a craving by this particular cast of elite scientists to have the funding that they believe they need and deserve in order to play around with viral biology. I read Washburne’s essay and carefully thought through his points about UC Davis. I was a professor at UC Davis myself, working with the Primate Research Center, and I worked with these same scientists. Early on in the outbreak, when people were asking me about this gain-of-function research and the logic behind it, I reached back to my own experience as a young professor at UC Davis.

I recalled the gain-of-function research that was done in an adjacent lab on the simian immunodeficiency virus. They made chimeras using the same reverse genetics approach of HIV, SIV, and human cytokine proteins to make it more pathogenic. I objected to this, which essentially resulted in me being blackballed within the department.

This research was done with no oversight and basically the justification that, “We know what we’re doing. The oversight body that should be involved in authorizing this really doesn’t have the expertise to judge us, so we can just go ahead and do it.”

In reading the Washburne piece, I see the projection of that ethic through time. The development of SARS-CoV-2 and its impact upon the world could have been stopped decades ago if somebody had had the courage within the administration to say, “No, it is not okay to do this.” It was not consistent with the rules of recombinant DNA that existed at the time with the Asilomar conference.

We’ve essentially allowed this type of viral research to run wild and be completely unrestricted in its ability to play God with nature, to play God with life, and to manipulate genetic sequences just for the pleasure of discovering what if—because that’s what this really is.

The insertion of a furin cleavage site, and none of the other proposals included anything like that, was done by a group of people that felt that they were entitled to do this kind of messing around and make a more potent virus by engineering it for dual function research, which means both fundamental research and discovery research. There are a lot of “what ifs” that we can come up with.

This is a group of people in a culture that believes that they are so gifted, so deserving, and so knowledgeable that they don’t need to have any supervision. They shouldn’t have supervision. They should be given the capital and the facilities to play with the fundamentals of life.

This is why one of the most important public policies that must come out of this is a global prohibition on gain-of-function research, particularly to this point of developing a more highly pathogenic agent, whether it’s a virus or a bacteria.

There needs to be something akin to an international atomic energy commission to survey and monitor any laboratories that are engaged in this type of research, just like they do with nuclear facilities. There needs to be global consensus that this type of research is too risky. To their credit, DARPA got this proposal and they said, “No,” because it was too risky.

These are experts that live at the cutting edge. DARPA literally created the internet and the SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft. They have been at the forefront of military technology for decades and decades. They have the experience. They looked at this proposal and said, “No, this is too risky.”

Yet, we had NIAID under Tony Fauci that felt that it was okay to go ahead. The USAID said, “What could possibly go wrong? Let’s shovel money at these people.” The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, whose job at the threat mitigation branch is to keep this type of thing from happening, basically said, “Yes, why not? We want to have intelligence in terms of what the CCP is doing in biowarfare research, so we’re going to shovel money to them in exchange for allowing us to get some information about what they’re up to.”

Mr. Jekielek:
We also need to renegotiate the biowarfare treaty. The current monitoring mostly focuses on actual bioweapons development sites, not university labs doing gain-of-function. I hope that’s very clear to our audience that all of this is in effect dual function research, and it certainly was at Wuhan Institute of Virology. As we finish up for today, let’s visit the Malone farmstead.

Mr. Malone:
That sounds great. We need to take a break from all this heavy stuff. Let’s go get some eggs.

Mr. Jekielek:
That sounds fantastic.

Mr. Malone:
People talk about humane and high quality eggs. They talk about cage free and free range and organic. Those are all USDA approved terms, but they don’t actually mean much. They are used to convey a sense that these eggs are superior in some way. But the only way to really know about the quality of the eggs is to meet the farmer and see how they’re raising the chickens and see what they’re feeding them.

Mr. Jekielek:
Cage free means chickens running around in a utopia for chickens. What’s the reality of that term?

Mr. Malone:
Cage free means they’re not locked in these little tiny cages. But you still have 40,000 chickens in one big long chicken barn all packed together. Typically, they have to cut the ends of their beak off or they’ll peck each other to death. Cage free only means that they’re not in this little tiny box.

But they’re still packed in like sardines in one big chicken barn. Free range is a USDA term and it can mean almost anything. As long as they can stick their head out of a hole and see the outside world, they’re still considered free range, so that is almost meaningless.

It’s a marketing ploy. What we have here on the farm is pasture raised, except for this little newly hatched group here that’s still seeking the comfort of being in the horse stall. The reason why you want pasture raised eggs is because that is how they get the good vitamins, the omega-3, and the vitamin D from being outside, getting sunshine, eating bugs, eating dirt, and eating grass.

When we think about farmyard chickens, that’s really what we’re talking about. They’re out there laying eggs and feeding on the grass and the bugs. That’s the old style of people raising chickens in the farmyard.

Mr. Jekielek:
Why do you keep that group in the horse stall?

Mr. Malone:
Jill bought a whole bunch of newly hatched chickens. We had to put them somewhere to raise them, so we put them here in the stall. These are the ones that haven’t yet decided if they want to live out in the great big world.

Mr. Jekielek:
I tend to buy organic eggs. How does that fit into this whole picture?

Mr. Malone:
Organic really matters a lot because they use what are called desiccants to dry out the feed grain. It costs a lot more, but we buy organic food for the chickens. It doesn’t have glyphosate and other herbicides that they use to dry the grain.

All that stays in the food chain and it gets into your body. The only way to avoid that is to feed them yourself or buy organic eggs. You want to buy eggs that are not fed these desiccants like glyphosate, which is otherwise known as Roundup.

Mr. Jekielek:
In the end, what you want is pasture-raised organic. That’s the ideal.

Mr. Malone:
That would be the ideal. You want a farm that isn’t using glyphosate and other pesticides all over the place. This small chicken house here is called a chicken tractor, and it can be moved around with our tractor. The hens stay in it at nighttime.

Mr. Jekielek:
Bottom line, how do I know I can get good eggs?

Jill Glasspool Malone:
Number one, by buying local or keeping birds yourself. Keeping a few hens yourself is a great way.

Mr. Jekielek:
What do you look for if you’re buying local?

Ms. Glasspool Malone:
You want to make sure that chickens have access to pasture, to green forage, or are being fed a diet that includes greens and various other healthy foods that aren’t just grains.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m trying to imagine having chickens in a suburban setting. It’s not very typical, correct?

Ms. Glasspool Malone:
You’d be surprised. Many people do. The secret is to just keep three or four hens, a small amount. Consider having a chicken tractor that can be moved around, and do not have any roosters.

Jan, let me show you how you can tell if an egg is fresh. Just crack open an egg, and look at the egg white. With a really fresh egg, the egg white will dome up.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s really remarkable, I’ve never seen that. Now, I don’t actually know if I’ve ever had a fresh egg before.

Ms. Glasspool Malone:
When you buy commercial eggs, the egg white just goes flat a lot of the time, and that means it’s not fresh. Often when they’re not fresh, they taste a little different and a little funny. They just don’t taste as good.

The other thing about chickens that have a diet with a lot of greens and bugs and dirt is that the composition of the nutrition is different. It has way more omega-3s, more antioxidants, and more vitamin D. Getting an egg from a chicken that has been exposed to a lot of different foodstuffs is really important.

Mr. Malone:
Plus they are a little more yellow.

Ms. Glasspool Malone:
Yes, plus they’re a little more yellow.

Mr. Malone:
That concludes this week’s segment of Health and Home with the Malones.

Mr. Jekielek:
We’ll see you on next week’s episode of Fallout.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.