Based Underground is now a conservative news aggregator AND curated newsletter.
- Researchers with the NIH’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) infected 12 Egyptian fruit bats with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-like WIV1-coronavirus (CoV) in 2018
- The bats came from the Catoctin Wildlife Preserve (CWP) in Thurmont, Maryland, a roadside zoo with numerous animal welfare violations and a curator with NIH ties
- The WIV1-coronavirus came from the lab in Wuhan, China, that may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic
- The research took place at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana — a biolevel 4 facility — under the direction of Dr. Anthony Fauci
- Rocky Mountain Laboratories also has a Lyme disease connection, as evidence suggests it may be a biological weapon gone rogue
(Mercola)—In 2018, researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana — a biolevel 4 facility — experimented with a SARS-like coronavirus to see if it would infect bats.1 The revelation came from a resurfaced study published by the group, which was flagged by activist group DRASTIC.
The White Coat Waste Project, which aims to stop taxpayer-funded experiments on animals, is also using the Freedom of Information Act to find out more about the research, noting:2
“We’ve uncovered new details about how a shady roadside zoo whose curator was an NIH animal experimenter shipped off bats to a deadly government virus superlab to be infected with a coronavirus obtained from the notorious Wuhan lab that experts believe caused COVID.”
Fauci’s US Lab Experimented With Wuhan COVID Virus Before Pandemic
Researchers with the NIH’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — formerly run by Dr. Anthony Fauci — and colleagues, including gain-of-function (GOF) researcher Ralph Baric, Ph.D., at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, infected 12 Egyptian fruit bats with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-like WIV1-coronavirus (CoV) in 2018 to see what would happen.3
The bats came from the Catoctin Wildlife Preserve (CWP) in Thurmont, Maryland, a roadside zoo with numerous animal welfare violations. In addition to confining 523 federally regulated animals — 241 of them bats — the zoo’s curator has ties to NIH. According to the White Coat Waste Project:4
“We’ve uncovered how the person who is the zoo’s curator and in charge of the animals’ well-being, CWP’s “Director of Animal Health,” worked at the in-house animal testing labs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 2003-2012! … under their supervision, CWP shipped animals to an NIH in-house lab, then run by Dr. Anthony Fauci, for cruel and deadly experiments!”
What’s more, the WIV1-coronavirus came from the lab in Wuhan, China, that may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.5 The study found WIV1-CoV did not cause a robust infection in the bats,6 but once again highlights the taxpayer-funded coronavirus experiments with ties to the Wuhan lab.
Did Lyme Disease Also Originate in the Montana Lab?
“OK, so look, I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, tweeted, “but it looks like Covid may have actually been made in the same military lab where the Pentagon created Lyme disease.”7
He’s referring to evidence presented in Kris Newby’s book “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons,” which suggests U.S. bioweapons researchers used ticks as biological weapons and may have created Lyme disease for this purpose.8
In an interview with investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, Newby describes being at a party where a former CIA agent bragged about a Cold War operation that involved dropping infected ticks on Cuba. “At that point, I knew I wasn’t done with the story,” she told Thacker. “This CIA guy was a little bit in his cups, but what he said rang true. I started doing some research, interviewed him several times, and found that it was a verifiable story.”9
She also filmed Willy Burgdorfer, who discovered Lyme disease. Burgdorfer worked at Rocky Mountain Labs in Montana — the same lab that tested the WIV1-coronavirus on bats prior to the pandemic. Thacker says:10
“Rocky Mountain Lab, run by the National Institutes of Health, shows up in documents as collaborating on coronavirus research with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. This is the scientist who was working with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology where the pandemic may have started.
So Rocky Mountain Labs are now part of the investigation into how the current pandemic started—they are involved in this coronavirus bat research.”
Burgdorfer was retired at the time of the filming, and Newby and her team flew out to his house for the interview, as no one from the NIH or the CDC agreed to be filmed. Someone from Rocky Mountain Labs showed up at the filming to try and intervene. She told Thacker:11
“We were setting up our lights and cameras for about 45 minutes. And then there was a pounding on the door; it was one of the people from Rocky Mountain Labs where he had worked his whole career. The visitor said he was told to sit in on the interview by someone at NIH. And we said, ‘No, we’re not going to let you sit in.’
It was a stressful confrontation — frightening. But he finally left and then Willy said things he might not have said otherwise. He said the NIH knows Lyme disease is chronically disabling. It’s more neurologically damaging to children who have developing neurological systems. And then at the end of the interview — with this evil little smile — he said, ‘I didn’t tell you everything.’”
While most of the evidence is circumstantial, when taken together, it forms a highly suspect picture that Lyme disease may be a biological weapon gone rogue. Newby continued:12
“The official story is that Willy Burgdorfer was sent to Lyme, Connecticut, and Long Island to research this crazy epidemic. In 1980, he discovered the Lyme spirochete and he said, ‘This is what’s causing the disease.’ … I did an animation of the outbreak, and the point source for the beginning of the epidemic was the mouth of the Connecticut River, near Long Island.
When I drew a 50-mile radius around that point, there were three new, highly virulent tick-borne diseases that showed up at that same time, in the late ’60s. This was 13 years before the Lyme bacterium was declared the cause of ‘Lyme disease’ in 1981.
I started looking through military records to see if the outbreak could be tied to any bioweapons accidents. And that’s when I discovered this massive bug-borne weapons program, as well as a program where germs were sprayed from airplanes over large areas, called Project 112. Some of those germs were tick-borne diseases that they freeze-dried and aerosolized for spraying.”
Montana Bat Tests Were a Joint Venture With Baric
China’s GOF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has been at the center of concerns that COVID-19 may have originated in a lab. The 2018 study was a joint venture with Baric, who developed humanized mice used in GOF research by WIV.13
Baric worked closely with Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., the director of WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases. Also known as “bat woman,” Zhengli was involved with research using genetic engineering to create a “new bat SARS-like virus … that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.” According to Peter Gøtzsche with the Institute for Scientific Freedom:14
“Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to ‘examine the emergence potential.’ In 2015, they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS virus replacing its spike protein with one from another bat virus known as SHC014-CoV.15 This manufactured virus was able to infect a lab culture of cells from the human airways.
They wrote that scientific review panels might deem their research too risky to pursue but argued that it had the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks. However, the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the COVID-19 pandemic was negative, as this research highly likely created the pandemic.”
February 26, 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Energy Department had revised its assessment of the origin of SARS-CoV-2, concluding the pandemic “most likely arose from a laboratory leak.”16
In March 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray also acknowledged that the lab-leak theory has likely been right all along, stating in an interview with Fox News that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan … You’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans, and that’s precisely what that capability was designed for.”17
Yet, this doesn’t show the full picture, as evidence continues to emerge about US-funded GOF research with ties to the Wuhan lab. I first raised the lab leak theory February 4, 2020, but it wasn’t until June 2021 that Facebook finally reversed its censorship policy on this topic, stating, “In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”18
Virus-Hunting Project Quietly Shut Down
Millions of U.S. tax dollars have been sent overseas for experiments aimed at identifying new viruses in animals that could trigger the next pandemic,19 despite growing concerns that such experiments may have been involved in the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Although critics have raised concerns over the potentially catastrophic risks of such virus hunting activities, hundreds of millions of dollars in unabated funding have symbolized a commitment to the effort,” investigative journalist David Willman wrote in the BMJ.20
In 2021, the U.S. also launched a five-year project intended to hunt for viruses in wildlife in South East Asia, Africa and Latin America. The program, named DEEP VZN — for Discovery & Exploration of Emerging Pathogens–Viral Zoonoses — was run by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the US State Department.
DEEP VZN succeeded the earlier USAID PREDICT program, which funded laboratory equipment for the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China through grants to the EcoHealth Alliance. Zhengli, the top coronavirus researcher at the WIV, also worked with PREDICT.21
Washington State University officials, who were hired to administer DEEP VZN, intended to collect about 480,000 wildlife samples to identify potential pandemic threats, with plans to characterize up to 12,000 new viruses. At least for now, however, a potential catastrophe may have been avoided, as DEEP VZN was quietly shut down in 2023. Willman reported:22
“The previously unpublicized decision by USAID to terminate DEEP VZN comes amid heightened concerns over the many risks of working with exotic viruses — including unresolved questions about whether a research mishap or a naturally occurring spillover of virus from an animal species to humans caused the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
… In the wake of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic others have raised additional concerns, saying that the risks of collecting animal-to-animal transmitted viruses should not be dismissed lightly. Such research typically entails collecting biological specimens — such as excrement, blood, or saliva from bats dwelling in caves or tree groves — followed by shipments of the samples to one or more labs for analysis.
A mishap at any stage of the work would, some experts warn, invite the risk of an outbreak or a pandemic … In May of this year three leaders of the Republican controlled House Energy and Commerce Committee asked the Government Accountability Office to open a scientific audit to ‘assess the benefits and risks of conducting predictive field research programs for viruses.’
The members cited research funded over the past decade by both USAID and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an arm of NIH.
Although such research, including USAID’S PREDICT program (DEEP VZN’s predecessor), had ‘identified thousands of new viruses,’ wrote the House members, ‘some researchers have questioned whether collecting and characterizing viruses found in animals can accurately predict those that may infect humans, or what the effect would be if and when humans are subsequently infected.’”
- 1, 5 Daily Mail October 31, 2023
- 2, 4 White Coat Waste Project October 30, 2023
- 3, 6 Viruses. 2018 Dec; 10(12): 727
- 7 Twitter, Mike Benz November 1, 2023
- 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 JoSPI March 11, 2023
- 13 YouTube June 29, 2021
- 14 Scientific Freedom May 19, 2021
- 15 Nature Medicine volume 21, pages1508–1513(2015)
- 16 Wall Street Journal February 26, 2023 (Archived)
- 17 CNN February 28, 2023
- 18 Reason June 4, 2021
- 19 Daily Mail August 12, 2023
- 20, 22 BMJ 2023;382:p2002
- 21 USRTK March 16, 2022
‘Merely Coincidental’: Secular Scientist Work Overtime to Explain Away the Miracles of Christ
by Harbingers Daily
Was the miracle of Jesus feeding the 5,000 with just five loaves and two fish a little less than miraculous? Well, that’s what a group of scientists are claiming in a recent paper published in a scientific journal. Instead of a supernatural provision by the Lord, they claim the feeding…
Google Hosts Party for Democratic Operatives Plotting To ‘Resist the Republican Agenda’
by Free Beacon
The resistance’s bar tab is on Google. Priorities USA, a top Democratic super PAC with an affiliated dark money group, is convening a summit of left-wing digital activists on Wednesday afternoon to deliver a post-mortem on Vice President Kamala Harris’s election loss and strategize how to “resist the Republican agenda,”…
“The Correction Before the Surge”: Why Gold and Silver’s Future Is Brighter Than Ever
by Sponsored Post
It was long overdue by most estimates. Precious metals prices have been steadily rising for far longer than even the …
Ukraine Denies Reports From Think Tank That It Is Months Away From Developing a Nuclear Weapon
by Natural News
Ukraine has denied reports suggesting it could develop a nuclear weapon soon, following claims by a Ukrainian military think tank. The report, published by the Ukrainian think tank and nongovernmental organization the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, claimed that Kyiv could use spent nuclear fuel from its remaining…
Alex Jones Reveals Elon Musk Saved Infowars From Being Sold to The Onion
by End Times Headlines
Alex Jones has declared ‘the cavalry is here’ as attorneys for Elon Musk’s X jumped in to help put a temporary pause on the sale of his controversial Infowars to The Onion. The satirical news publication said the bid was sanctioned by the families of Sandy Hook Elementary victims who…
FBI Whistleblower Says FBI Intentionally Blocking Security Clearances for Trump Officials
by The Conservative Treehouse
It should not come as a surprise to see the same methods deployed against President Trump in 2024 that were used by the FBI in 2016. The difference is now that President Trump understands the full power of his office in the security clearance process and that he doesn’t need…
Pastor Greg Locke Burns Voodoo Doll He Claims Was Found on His Property
by End Times Headlines
Even amid ongoing warfare, we are called to stand firm on the Word of God. Pastor Greg Locke knows well the spiritual and physical attacks directed at him; he was recently targeted by a gunman. Now, he faces another spiritual assault, this time from someone attempting to place a curse…
Trump’s Incoming FCC Chief Already Putting Target on Big Tech ‘Censorship Cartel’
by WND
Social media companies have become a “cartel” for suppressing information with which they disagree, and that agenda now is going to be getting the attention of Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. It was social media companies who played a role…
Sabotage: Two Undersea Internet Cables Connecting Four NATO Nations Were Severed
by Publius
Many in the international community are claiming sabotage as the only viable explanation for two fiber optic internet cables in the Baltic Sea being severed less than 24-hours apart. Fingers are being pointed at Russia as one of the the cables connected NATO nations Germany and Finland. The latter was…
Pennsylvania Supreme Court Orders Democrats to Immediately End Counting of Illegal Ballots
by Infowars
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Monday ordered Democrats in several counties to immediately halt their unlawful counting of illegal ballots in the Senate race recount. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled before the election that mail-in ballots lacking formally required signatures or dates should not be included in official results….
22-Year-Old Woman With Depression Was Almost Euthanized, She Changed Her Mind Right Before She Was Killed
by Life News
Why do you oppose euthanasia, Wesley? If people want to die, we should help them die. No. And here’s an individual example explaining just one reason why. A deeply depressed woman was about to be lethally injected in the Netherlands — but changed her mind just in the nick of…
“Massive Breach”: T-Mobile Network Hacked by Chinese State Sponsored Intelligence
by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge
(Zero Hedge)—Where’s John Legere in a pink t-shirt when you need him? Among the multiple stories over the last few weeks about Chinese intelligence and hackers either attempting to, or outright gaining access, to U.S. cell phone networks (with reports stating President Trump and his team were targeted), comes news…
Trump’s Idea to Shut Down Department of Education Gets High Five From Top Christian Evangelist
by WND
A priority for the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump is to tackle the Deep State, the bureaucracy in Washington that is a self-perpetuating industry, to find what American taxpayers don’t need or want. And get rid of it. One of the targets he’s already identified is the Department of…
Experts Sound Alarm Over ‘Shocking’ Spike in Strokes Among ‘Healthy’ Young People
by Slay News
Health experts have issued a chilling warning to the public over a “shocking” spike in strokes among “healthy” young people. The “alarming” surge was identified in official UK government data. The data shows that recorded cases of deadly strokes skyrocketed in 2023 and continued soaring this year. In 2023/24, the…