09.08
·Reported
·Importance III
·Sources 1
·United States
In an interview, RFK Jr. said that according to Fauci's documents, Fauci funded Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina to develop "traceless" gene editing techniques that could make pathogens more dangerous and cover up evidence of man-made modification, and that Baric later passed the technique on to Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan lab, while Fauci for years insisted that the novel coronavirus came from nature.
2019.03
·Reported
·Importance III
·Sources 3
·Wuhan
In March 2019, nine months before the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, Shi Zhengli and her research team published a paper warning that it was highly likely that another coronavirus epidemic similar to SARS or MERS would emerge in the future, and that the probability of it occurring within China was rising.
2015
·Reported
·Importance IV
·Sources 3
·Wuhan
In 2015, Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology took part in a study that synthesized a chimeric SARS-like coronavirus to understand its ability to infect humans; the hybrid virus described in the paper carried the spike protein of a Chinese horseshoe bat coronavirus.