US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a brand new coronavirus, leaked proposals show

US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show.

Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus.

The WHO expert told The Telegraph that the process detailed in the application would create 'a new virus sequence, not a 100 per cent match to anything.

Experts told the paper that creating an 'ideal' average virus could have been part of work to create a vaccine that works across coronaviruses.

Files obtained by The Intercept as part of an FOI request to drill down the possible root of COVID and whether the US had any role in it showed that in 2014, the National Health Institute approved a five-year, yearly grant of $666,000 a year for five years for EcoHealth Alliance, a US research organization, into bat coronavirus.

Gain-of-function research is the scientific term given to research that deliberately changes an organism to make give it new functions in order to test a theory.

Ebright studied the papers and alleged that the scientists performed 'the construction - in Wuhan - of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells'.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10062775/US-Chinese-scientists-planning-create-brand-new-coronavirus-leaked-proposals-show.html