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Welcome to another episode of Fallout. Today we're going to dive into a key article that

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was recently published by Dr. Alex Washburn on his Substack that I think Jan and I both agree

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is the definitive article to date concerning the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the lab leak hypothesis

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and the debunking of the natural origin theory. Well right exactly so we've kind of known that

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the lab origin has been likely for some time. Alex Washburn's piece I think is the closest to

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having the complete set of evidence available at this point and I noticed actually that he's

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been updating it with as new information comes out as well. So we know pretty much unequivocally

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this came from a lab this is not a natural origin. Alex is deeply embedded in this whole world this

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specialized world of virus hunting and has deep insights into the proposal structure that was

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originally used by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to fund a group of

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these kind of virus hunter, international virus hunter programs, which included the one that

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originally EcoHealth Alliance together with Wuhan Institute of Virology in UC Davis had submitted a

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proposal to that's referred to as the diffuse proposal. Because of the work of U.S. Right to Know,

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a non-profit that does freedom of information actions, the public has obtained access to a series

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of draft proposals that were submitted by EcoHealth Alliance that provide really kind of smoking gun

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evidence that Alex nicely dissects in this essay that he's put out. So why should we care about Alex

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Washburn? What is it that he brings to the table? What's interesting about him? Why is he a viable expert?

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A credible expert in analyzing all this information. So Alex happens to be a expert in prediction of viral

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evolution and analysis, sequence analysis of viral evolution. And this was the specific role that he

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played in a proposal that was actually awarded by this DARPA program, where he and the team that he worked

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with went all over the world and collected a type of virus called Hanipa virus, and then analyzed them

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for their ability potentially to be transferred into humans. So the phrasing used was jump ready. So Alex

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brings this detailed understanding in the actual program that DASIC and EcoHealth Alliance and Shi

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Lee and others had submitted their original proposal to, but which was rejected. And as you'll recall, what

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happened was basically that proposal got restructured, submitted to NIH, NIAID, Tony Fauci's division,

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funding, and in its revised form was funded. But that wasn't the only money that DASIC and Equal Health

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Alliance had available. They had a very large amount of money from USAID, from another branch of DOD,

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DITRA, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and various other sources of capital. But Alex provides

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a really granular analysis for what seems to have happened and how this relates to what we now know.

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A couple of things jump to mind. The first one is, Alex notes that it's actually drastic that basically

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obtained this diffused proposal. It's this loose group of people out there. I want to give them a shout

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out because they've done some amazing work. A lot of anonymous people, clearly very skilled, basically

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trying to help with this and have done some amazing work. The second thing is that what U.S. Right to

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Know, which was using this FOIA system basically to get at EcoHealth documents found, is that

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this furin cleavage site, we keep hearing about it, okay, furin cleavage site. So this is something that on

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the one hand has never been found, never been seen in this particular class of coronavirus. On the other

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hand, it makes it highly infectious to human beings. So furin is a key protein in human biology that was

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only discovered about 15 or 20 years ago. And it's kind of been the answer to a longstanding question,

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how are a lot of membrane proteins, things that are associated with the outside part of the cell,

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how are they processed, in other words, clipped from their full-length protein starting point,

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immature form, into smaller subunits that are then active in a variety of different aspects of human

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biology. And it was discovered that this particular protein that's associated with human cell membranes,

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called furin, is responsible for this endoproteolytic cleavage. So these are like protein scissors.

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Furin is like a protein scissor that cleaves proteins. And it happens to be critical for the maturation of

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human influenza virus proteins, the ones that are kind of like the spike that sit on the outside of the

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human influenza virus. But in that category of serbicoviruses around SARS-1 and SARS-2,

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you don't find this furin cleavage site, as Alex, who's an expert, points out.

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And just quickly to call these serbicoviruses, this might be a new term for people. This is this class

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of coronaviruses that we're talking about, kind of grouping, right?

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Yeah. So it's a subcategory of coronaviruses. We're familiar with

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beta coronaviruses, which are the common cold viruses. And serbicoviruses, it's another branch

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of the general category of coronaviruses that includes a lot of these very unique bat coronaviruses

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that have been the focus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in their collection, etc. And so

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what's fascinating is this diffuse proposal that was submitted by EcoHealth Alliance as part of a

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consortium that included UC Davis and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They lay out a series of

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steps that happens to precisely predict the nature of SARS-CoV-2 and how it would be created. The engineering of

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a furin cleavage site, which is a little group of amino acids, protein building blocks that they

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would engineer into a specific place within the spike protein, the S1-S2 boundary, which is a region

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that is appropriate for this kind of engineering and should, and if it was cleaved more efficiently,

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would make this more infectious. And so this is something that's never existed before. They lay

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out a specific plan for how to engineer it. They lay out a specific plan for engineering the source virus

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as six discrete fragments that can be easily clipped apart with a specific restriction endonuclease.

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This is an enzyme which cuts DNA, bacterial enzyme which cuts DNA at very specific places,

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and they propose to engineer the virus using reverse genetics. In other words, this is an RNA virus,

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but they're going to work at the DNA level to do this engineering and then recreate the virus from it.

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So this is called reverse genetics. And they lay out specifically how they're going to engineer

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these clipping sites for the DNA restriction endonucleases so that it can fall into six

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different pieces that will be easily manipulated, and how they're going to engineer the furin cleavage

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site into this specific place in the virus, the S1-S2 boundary, which happens to be precisely about the place

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where the furin cleavage site is located in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has infected people all over the world.

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So they lay out this program of how they're going to do it, all the nuances they include in the budget,

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the cost for these molecular scissors, for the restriction endonuclease is necessary to make

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these clips so that they can reassemble these reverse engineered DNA fragments.

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There's a suggestion also, and this is something that actually a number of people have worked on

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these types of proposals that I'm aware of have mentioned, is that often this research, when you're

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applying, this has actually already been done or already done in part, and you're applying for

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something that will, you know, essentially fund you further, right, on something that you already

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know you can do, and then you can show, hey, look, we did it, we were successful with our project.

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And so this is, so is this, was this research already done what had already been done in Wuhan?

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So I can say a couple things about this. One of my core competencies is that I have

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become an expert over time at writing these large proposals, and also as a reviewer. So before

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all this happened, and I kind of destroyed my career with, and credibility with the NIH,

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they used to call me routinely to serve as what's called study section chairperson. In other words,

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being in charge of the peer review process with many other academic researchers for these kinds of

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proposals. So I'm very familiar with proposal building and done it for decades, as well as

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reviewing them. So what you're describing is a normal part of the, let's call it ecosystem of

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capturing larger government contracts. And if you look at it from the government's point of view,

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it's risk mitigation. You know, you could have somebody from University X propose all kinds of

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wonderful things, but you have no assurance they can actually do it. You really want to see evidence

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that the people that are proposing to do something can actually do it. They can actually deliver on it,

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because otherwise you're going to waste the government's money. And so that's what's given

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rise to this tendency, historically, to only award grants to people that have already done a

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significant fraction of the work. And what you do is you look in the proposal for evidence of

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preliminary data, which is used to justify that in fact, this team can perform the things that they're

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saying they're performing. But that's kind of a code for, for we've already done it.

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We've already done a large fraction of it, enough to convince you, the reviewer,

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that we're going to be able to finish the project. It's quite probable that a significant fraction of

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this work was already done at the time the proposal was submitted. And it appears that,

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now that we have this historic record, to the extent that it hasn't been expunged by the CCP and by

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the people at UC Davis, that in fact, there was already a large body of data developed. Remember,

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this proposal was submitted in 2018, so a year before the outbreak occurred. We have a group,

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an international consortium of leading experts in sarbicoviruses, working with arguably the greatest

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repository of sarbicoviruses, Wuhan Institute of Virology, laying out this specific proposal for

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reverse genetic engineering, which none of the other proposals to this particular program

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suggested that they were going to do. All the other proposals, including all the ones that were funded,

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were collecting wild viruses and then analyzing the risk that they would jump into humans.

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But this group from EcoHealth Alliance was alone in saying, well, what we're going to do is take

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known viruses that we already have and genetically engineer them using reverse genetics, using these

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specific steps that happen to be precisely aligned with the sequence that we now know of SARS-CoV-2.

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And this is what Washburn lays out so eloquently.

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This is also one of the reasons why we have a lot of destruction of evidence happening,

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because a lot of these types of sequences in the process of making this thing, these were found on

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computers or actually assembled in some cases that would provide a kind of smoking gun evidence that

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this is something that's from a lab.

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So Washburn has kind of two key insights here that explain some things that I hadn't been able to

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make sense of before. One of them is because of his expertise in viral evolution and sequence analysis

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of viral evolution. He points to the thesis that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally from some bat virus

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that really only exists as a general category a long way from Wuhan.

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So if it was brought to the seafood market and it was somehow leaking out and infecting people,

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it was capable of jumping from those animals that were bats or pangolins or whatever,

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raccoon dogs that were coming from out in the hinterlands of Canada and then being brought into the wet market

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or potentially even being brought into the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And there were viruses

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there that were capable of jumping to humans that you would see the trace of multiple crossover events

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of these kinds of leaps into human populations along the route of their importation, let's say, into Wuhan.

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There's no evidence of that. He conclusively demonstrates through sequence analysis

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and other insight that the data that were used to establish the case in Proceedings of the National

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Academy of Sciences, Lancet, and other papers that we now know were essentially propaganda,

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that this virus had two main branches evolutionarily, consistent with multiple

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events of crossover into humans, that that's false. That a lot of the data assumptions

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behind those predictions are really not tenable. They represent artifacts in sampling,

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which is one of the things that Washburn demonstrates. And then the other thing that

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I just in rereading picked up is the explanation for why it was so necessary to delete the viral

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sequences, as was done in September at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, ostensibly under direction of the CCP

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or the PLA, and then also suppression of the viral sequences that were on computers at UC Davis.

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One of the key team members of this Equal Health Alliance consortium. And Washburn speculates that

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the reason why those sequences had to be deleted would be that if in forensically and now analyzing those

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laptops, those computer databases, it was revealed that the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 existed on people's

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computers before SARS-CoV-2 ostensibly appeared in the human population, that would be a smoking gun to

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demonstrate that in fact, this had been synthetically created in the first place. And so it was necessary.

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This is a profound insight and suggests a deep coverup. Essentially, we're talking about destruction of

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evidence intentionally to avoid traceability and avoid any forensic analysis by whomever to identify

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the origins of this as having been coming from a consortium, international consortium of laboratories

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and specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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So, you know, something that's been troubling me as we've been kind of going down the rabbit hole of

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this lab origin, of course, we've been doing it for years, but, you know, we could never have made

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the vaccines that we made if we had understood that this was a synthetic origin, right? From the Wuhan

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Institute of Virology, from a bioresearch lab, whoever else had been working on it. There's no

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scenario where you could justify that. So think this through with us for just a minute.

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We have the intentional engineering of this surface protein, this toxic protein that we call spike,

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that is responsible for the ability of SARS-CoV-2 and other sebico viruses to infect human cells.

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So this protein has been intentionally engineered to make it more infectious, potentially more toxic,

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more readily able to bind to things like ACE2 and other key proteins, which by the way are essential

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for human homeostasis, for regulation of a lot of the biology in our bodies. So this virus protein

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binds and blocks key human proteins. It's been engineered to do so more efficiently. And yet

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those that are engineering the vaccines, particularly the genetic vaccines, adenovirus and the mRNA products,

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quote, vaccines, they take this protein that has, we now know has been genetically engineered,

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and they place it directly into these delivery technologies, these gene therapy vectors,

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adenovirus and the mRNA, and deliver that particular protein with two specific mutations that have

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nothing to do with the purine cleavage site. They make it more immunogenic. And they were discovered

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years ago with other vaccine, sarbico virus development. So they make those two proline mutations,

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and otherwise they take this toxic protein, put it directly into these gene therapy vectors and call

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it a vaccine. So it makes your body produce this toxic protein. How does that make any sense at all?

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The only way I could imagine that that could be justified is if they truly believed, or at least there

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was the ruse, that this protein came naturally from a naturally occurring virus, rather than being

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genetically engineered. So we're back at this point, again, that comes up so often in this whole story

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of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID crisis. Was this nefarious intent or was this incompetence? Because it's hard to

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imagine, since Tony Fauci and NIAID was directly involved in the funding of EcoHealth Alliance for

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this kind of work, that another branch of his operation, the Vaccine Research Center, that directly

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engineered the Moderna vaccine, that those scientists at the Vaccine Research Center were completely unaware

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of the work of EcoHealth Alliance, Wuhan Institute of Virology, and DASIC. I can't square that.

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Well, and keep in mind that some of the authors of the Proximal, the infamous Proximal Origin

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paper, who said definitely a natural origin, behind the scenes, they were thinking it seems like a lab

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origin. So it's not like this wasn't under discussion. Or, I might add, even the State

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Department saw a lab origin. ODNI took the position it's a natural origin. I've yet to understand how

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those two agencies found such a different answer to the question, especially the one with a natural

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origin. I want to go back from the beginning. I could actually even read from the paper. I think

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he did a really fantastic job, Alex Washburn, in summarizing the scenario.

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The forensic scientific case of SARS-CoV-2 origins is like the case of a close network of friends who

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are all in a room together in which someone died. We have a proposal by those friends to kill that

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specific person with a specific bullet in the specific room at the general time when all of

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these researchers were in the room together. While the statement wasn't funded, it should be read as

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a revelation of the intentions of the group. I agree that's a key clause and a fantastic,

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another fantastic metaphor of Alex Washburn to kind of make this accessible to the common person.

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But it's clear that this was the strategy. It's specifically laid out in great detail. It absolutely

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corresponds with the known sequence for this virus. And there is, talk about smoking guns, clear evidence

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that this information was all hidden very aggressively using a variety of tactics, including manipulation of

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press, censorship, defamation, character assassination, etc. All of these same strategies that we've seen

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deployed all the way through the corona crisis. In order to suppress the information that this was a

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laboratory engineered virus, at a time when if that had been generally known, it probably would have

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changed the course of history in a number of different ways. Not the least of which would be that

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Mr. Fauci would have been held accountable, hopefully, and it would have been untenable for him to lie to

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Rand Paul and say that there was no gain of function research. Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie

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to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th where you claimed that the NIH never funded

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gain of function research in Wuhan? Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress and I do not retract

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that statement. You know, the parties, the harmed parties are actually, I think most of the world,

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because we witnessed, you know, the destruction of the global economy, largest transfer of wealth in

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history by a margin. You know, of course, any number of deaths, not just from SARS-CoV-2, but from the

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policies and sort of enacted to deal with suicide, so many different things to think that all along,

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you know, so many of the actors knew very well that it was engineered. And I'm not just talking about,

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you know, the people directly involved. It wasn't rocket science from the beginning, because a lot of that

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evidence was already available right at the beginning. In terms of probabilities, it was, you know,

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orders of magnitude greater probability for the lab origin than the natural origin, pretty much from

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the get-go. And the data was so strong that they had to deploy a massive propaganda campaign and

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censorship campaign to keep that information from the public. That's the truth of the matter, is we were

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not just lied to. We were gaslit and propagandized at a global level to try to hide the truth of what

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happened here. If the U.S. government admits or is forced to acknowledge in some way because of the

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burden of data that it was directly involved in funding and enabling this, working together with its

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ostensible global competitor, the CCP. Or, you know, from the CCP's perspective, sworn enemy.

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Yeah. The liability trail here is enormous. The geopolitical consequences of an acknowledgement

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of culpability by these two global powers would be profound. I can't even begin to imagine the damages.

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You know, I find it extremely convenient that the Chinese Communist Party has, you know, sort of,

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basically the U.S. effectively, the U.S. government or U.S. government agencies running cover for it,

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because that's effectively what happened. That's terrible.

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I think you've made the case that, functionally, the CCP and PLA have co-opted much of the world

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of biodefense research in using a variety of strategies.

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You know, we have this, you know, document from the Chinese regime, which states how incredibly high

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priority bioweapons development is for them strategically. It strains all credulity that

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these relationships would be so deep. Except that, you know, of course, I know that these are experts

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at subversion and taking advantage of all of our weaknesses, I guess.

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Not the least of which is this love of money, this craving by this particular cast of elite scientists

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to have the funding that they believe they need and deserve in order to play around with viral

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biology. That's one of the things that, in retrospect, reading Washburn's essay and

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carefully thinking through his points about UC Davis, having been a professor at UC Davis myself,

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working with the Primate Research Center, working with these same scientists. Early on in the outbreak,

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when people were asking me about how this kind of thing can develop, this gain of function research

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and the logic behind it, I reached back to my own experience as a young professor at UC Davis and

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recalled the gain of function research that was done in an adjacent lab on the simian immunodeficiency

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virus in which they made chimeras using the same reverse genetics approach of HIV, SIV, and human cytokine

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proteins to make it more pathogenic. And I objected to this, which essentially resulted in me being

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blackballed within the department. But it was done with no oversight and basically the justification that,

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well, we know what we're doing and the oversight body that should have been involved in authorizing

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that really doesn't have the expertise to judge us. And so we can just go ahead and do it. And I find it

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fascinating in reading the Washburn piece to see the projection of that ethic through time. Now in the

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the development of this episode, SARS-CoV-2 and the impact upon the world in a way could have been

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stopped decades ago if somebody had had the courage within the administration to say, no, this is not

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okay to do this. This is not consistent with the rules of recombinant DNA that existed at the time,

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the C. Lamar Conference, etc. We've essentially allowed this segment of viral research to run away

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and be completely unrestricted in its ability to, various phrases are used, to play God with nature,

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to play God with life, to manipulate genetic sequences, just for the pleasure of discovering what if.

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Because that's what this is. The insertion of a furin cleavage site, which none of the other proposals

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included anything like that, was done by a group of people that felt that they were entitled to do this

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kind of messing around to make a more potent virus by engineering it for, there's no other word for it,

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dual function research, which is to say both fundamental research, discovery research, what if,

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and there's a lot of what ifs we can come up with. But this is a group of people in a kind of culture

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culture that believes that they are so gifted, so deserving, so knowledgeable, that they don't need

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to have any supervision. They shouldn't have supervision. They should be allowed the capital

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and the facilities to play with the fundamentals of life. And this is why I argue one of the most

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important public policy things that I believe must come out of this, is a global prohibition on gain

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of function research like this, particularly to this point of developing a more highly pathogenic agent,

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whether it's a virus, bacteria, etc. I think there needs to be something akin to an International Atomic

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Energy Commission to survey, monitor any laboratories that are engaged in anything like this time of

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research, just the same as they do nuclear facilities. And there needs to be global consensus that this

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type of research is too risky. And to their credit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency got this

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proposal and they said no. Why? Because it was too risky. These are experts. These are people that live

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at the cutting edge. DARPA created, literally created the internet. They created the SR-71. They have been at

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the forefront of military technology for decades and decades and decades. They have the experience and they

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looked at this proposal and said no. This is too risky. And yet we had a NIAID under Tony Fauci that felt that it was

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okay to go ahead. USAID that said, hey, what could possibly go wrong? Let's shovel money at these people.

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Defense Threat Reduction Agency, whose job in the threat mitigation branch is to keep this kind of

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stuff from happening, basically said, yeah, why not? We want to have intelligence in terms of what the

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CCP is doing in biowarfare research. And so we're going to shovel money to them in exchange for allowing us to

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get some information about what they're up to. And we also need to renegotiate the biowarfare

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treaty. Frankly, I want to kind of come back on a future episode to discuss how we might actually

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organize this monitoring. Because as far as I understand it, the current monitoring mostly

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focuses on places that are actual bioweapons development sites, not university labs doing

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gain of function. But we know now, I hope that's very clear to our audiences, that all of that

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is dual use, in effect, and certainly was at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So let's do that in a

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future episode. But for now, as we finish up, let's go back to the farmstead.

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That sounds great. Take a break from all this heavy stuff.

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So let's go get some eggs. Sounds fantastic. People talk about humane and high quality eggs.

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They talk about words like cage free, and free range, and organic. Those are all USDA approved terms,

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but they don't actually mean much. They're used to convey a sense that these things are,

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these eggs are superior in some way. But the truth is, the only way to really know about the quality

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of the eggs is to actually meet the farmer and see how they're raising the animals and what they're

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feeding them. So let's go get some. All right. Cage free. I think of, you know, chickens sort of

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running around sort of utopia for chickens. So what's the reality? Chicken paradise. Right. That's

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right. So chicken barns typically, even if they're quote cage free, which means they're not locked in

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these little tiny cages. What that means is you still have 40,000 chickens in a great big long chicken

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barn all packed together. And typically they have to cut the ends of their beak off or they'll kill each

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other, peck each other to death. And so cage free only means that they're not in this little tiny box.

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In individual cages. And I remember seeing that, but that's almost unimaginable. But they're still

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packed in like sardines in a great big chicken barn. Then there's free range is a USDA term,

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and it can be almost anything. So long as they can stick their head out of a hole and see the outside

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world, they're still considered free range. So it does, it almost is meaningless. That's astonishing.

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It's a marketing ploy. Now, what we do here is really pasture raised, except for this little group

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here that's still kind of seeking the comfort of being in the horse stall. And the reason why you want

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pasture raised eggs, if you can get them, is because this is how they get the good vitamins, the good

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omega-3, vitamin D, and all that kind of stuff is by being outside, getting sunshine, eating bugs,

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eating dirt, eating grass, and all those kinds of things.

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So let's see some of these chickens that are, you know, really out of the pasture.

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Okay. Let's see if she's left us anything.

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And this one's still warm.

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Wow. That's incredible.

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So that's, when we think about farmyard chickens, that's really what we're thinking about is they're

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out there laying eggs and feeding on the grass and the bugs and everything else. That's the old

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style of the way people would hold chickens in the farmyards.

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And why do you keep them in the stall for those ones that are there again?

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So that's, Jill bought a whole bunch of newly hatched chicks and we had to put them somewhere to raise

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them up. And so what we did is we put them in the stall here and that's just the ones that haven't yet

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kind of decided that they want to live out in the big wide world.

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And so the other question I have is I tend to buy organic eggs. And so how does that fit into this whole

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picture? So organic really matters a lot. And the reason is because they use what are called desiccants

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to dry out the grain. So this is a great example. It costs a lot more, but we buy organic food for the

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chickens. And the reason we do it is because that means that it doesn't have glyphosate and other

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herbicides that they use to dry the grain because all that stays in the food chain. It gets in your

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body. Right. And so the only way to avoid that is really if you're going to feed them yourself or buy

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them. You want to buy eggs that are not fed these desiccants like glyphosate, which is otherwise known as

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around them. So in the end what you want is pasture raised organic. That's the ideal. That would be

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the ideal. And also organic. Then you want a farm that isn't using glyphosate all over the place and

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other pesticides, which we don't do. This is a chicken tractor, which is something that's used to

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be moved around. The tractor can move this and then the hens stay in it at night time. So you want to get

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some eggs? Okay. You want to carry them up? Let's go back to the kitchen.

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So bottom line, how do I know I can get good eggs? Number one, buying local or keeping birds yourself.

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Keeping a few hens yourself is a great way. So what do you want to look for if you're buying local? You

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want to make sure that chickens have access to outside, to pasture, to green forage, or are being

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fed a diet that includes greens and various other healthy foods that aren't just grains. And it just,

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you know, I'm sort of trying to imagine having chickens in a suburban setting. It's not very typical,

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right? You know, you'd be surprised. Many people do. The secret is just keep three or four hens,

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small amount, consider chicken tractor that can be moved around and do not have any roosters. So

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Jan, let me show you how you can tell if an egg is fresh.

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You know, so basically what you want to do is just crack open an egg,

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and you're going to look at the egg white. And with a really fresh egg, the egg white will dome up.

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That's really remarkable. I've never looked at that before. And I don't actually know if I've had a

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fresh egg before now that I think about it. Well, when you buy commercial eggs, the egg white just goes

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flat a lot of times. And that is not fresh. And often when they're not fresh, they taste a little

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funny. They don't taste as good. And the other thing about chickens that have a diet with a lot of

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greens and bugs and dirt and everything else is that the composition of the nutrition is different.

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It has way more omega-3s, it has more antioxidants, and it has more vitamin D. So getting an egg from a

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chicken that's been exposed to a lot of different foodstuffs is really important. Plus they are a

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little more yellow. Yeah. Plus they're a little more yellow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess it's time

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for lunch. Absolutely. So that concludes this week's segment of Health and Home with the Malones.

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And we'll see you next week on Fallout.