A Montana laboratory funded by the National Institutes of Health and overseen by Dr. Anthony Fauci in 2018 infected 12 Egyptian fruit bats with a SARS-like virus called WIV1 shipped from the Wuhan lab thought to be the source of the COVID pandemic, according to a paper published on the research and uncovered by a taxpayer watchdog group.
The paper, SARS-Like Coronavirus WIV1-CoV Does Not Replicate in Egyptian Fruit Bats, was published in 2018 in the journal Viruses, according to the White Coat Waste Project.
The research, which involved injecting bats from a Maryland zoo with the WIV1-coronavirus and then euthanizing them to analyze their organs, was a joint venture between Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborator Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina and the NIH's Rocky Mountain Lab.
Researchers said the virus did not "cause a robust infection" and "observed very limited evidence of virus replication."
White Coast Waste Project founder Anthony Bellotti said the probe "has uncovered the real-life horror story of how a shady roadside zoo whose curator was an NIH animal experimenter shipped off bats to a deadly government virus lab overseen by Dr. Fauci to be infected with a coronavirus obtained directly from the Wuhan lab that experts believe caused COVID."
Many lawmakers have called for Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who oversaw the U.S.' response to the COVID pandemic, to be put in jail for allegedly lying to Congress about the virus' origins.
"In public he's saying, 'Oh, if you say it came from the lab, you're a conspiracy theorist, you're crazy, it's a fringe theory,' " Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said last month. "But in private, he's saying … 'We're very concerned because the virus appears to be manipulated. And we're also very concerned because we know they're doing gain of function research in Wuhan.' "