The COVID-19 outbreak being the result of a lab leak continues to be confirmed.

COVID-19 may have been created in a Chinese lab, a British professor told the UN Wednesday, with another expert claiming that evidence of the likelihood has reached “the level of a smoking gun.”

Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, was quoted saying in a new Wall Street Journal article that the virus that killed millions around the world may actually have been manmade in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

He cited evidence found in a 2018 document from the lab that talked of making such a virus.

Dr. Erbright has long held that the Chinese coronavirus originated from a lab and has paid a huge price resulting from scorn from his colleagues. So far, he shows no signs of backing down (a good thing).

The document Erbright cites was from the Wuhan Institute of Virology; he says the paper contained drafts and notes regarding a grant proposal called Project DEFUSE, which sought to test engineering bat coronaviruses in a way that would make them more easily transmissible to humans.

The proposal was ultimately rejected and denied funding by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade says the discovery of documents in the Wuhan lab (where the coronavirus leak is alleged to have taken place) advises a strong interrelationship:

Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time Covid-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019 … This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin.

Dr. Erbright’s conclusion is plausible when taking into account that during May of 2021, a study, whose authors cited prima facie evidence, was published concluding that the coronavirus was released by a Wuhan lab but Chinese scientists quickly tried to cover it up. So, in this case, the coronavirus experiment initially rejected by the U.S. was taken up by Chinese scientists at a laboratory with questionable safety practices one year before the COVID-19 outbreak. Soon after that, the rest is history.

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