SARS2 – designed in UNC, given wings in Montana, leaked in Wuhan Five years ago, around this time of year, the world had come to a halt under lockdowns—apparently to contain a novel and dangerous virus. However, the virus was not dangerous to most of the population, as it was not designed to be lethal. Who designed it, and why? None of the containment measures worked, as the virus was engineered to spread via airborne aerosols. Who taught it to do so, and why? Understanding the origins of the so-called pandemic—which led to some of the gravest rights violations in human history outside of wartime—is crucial. From early 2020 onward, any mention of the lab-leak possibility was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. However, it turns out that it was not a conspiracy theory, but rather a conspiracy practice. In December 2024, a U.S. House of Representatives committee report supported the lab-leak hypothesis. The official narrative claims that the U.S. funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that there was an accidental leak in Wuhan. But this, according to a book, is not even one percent of the full story. In June 2025, the WHO released a report suggesting that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, likely originated naturally, spilling over from bats. However, thousands of tests on 218 Chinese species failed to detect SARS-CoV-2 in any of them—a major shortcoming in the natural-origin hypothesis. Jim Haslam’s book, “Covid-19: Mystery Solved”, claims to connect the dots. The book’s subtitle summarizes it in one line: “It leaked from a Wuhan lab but it’s not Chinese junk.” The book draws on leaked documents, U.S. FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) disclosures, congressional hearings, and numerous scientific research papers. The story begins in 2004, when President George W. Bush signed “Project Bioshield,” a $6 billion bio-bureaucracy led by Anthony Fauci. Following 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, Fauci became fixated on preventing future spillovers of dangerous viruses from bats to humans. Simultaneously, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) worried about potential spillovers affecting its troops in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2018, a proposal titled DEFUSE was submitted to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) by Professor Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC). The proposal aimed to prevent spillovers by “vaccinating” bats using modified viruses to trigger antibodies. DARPA rejected the proposal, which only came to light when Major Joseph Murphy leaked it in 2021. To this end, Baric created the SARS-CoV-2 virus in his UNC lab. According to the book, “Baric admitted in 2024 testimony that manipulating the protease (furin) was his idea,” using the term chimera twenty times. A chimera combines two or more viruses—in this case, from Asian bats. The goal, the book claims, was not malevolent: SARS-CoV-2 was intended as a bat vaccine. However, vaccinating bats was expensive. Baric initially proposed spraying bat cave entrances, but the costs were prohibitive—one reason DARPA declined funding. The story then moves to a second U.S. lab—the Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana—where Vincent Munster (chief of the Virus Ecology Unit) and Peter Daszak (president of EcoHealth Alliance) were researching “self-spreading vaccines.” They developed methods to train viruses to spread via airborne aerosols by selectively propagating mutations that enhanced transmissibility. Baric’s UNC team collaborated with Munster’s Montana lab to make the virus “self-spreading.” Though DARPA had rejected DEFUSE in May 2018, Fauci’s NIAID later funded a similar project in October 2018 under the CREID (Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases) program. Thus, the virus created in UNC was “taught to fly” in Montana. This may explain why SARS-CoV-2 efficiently transmits in several U.S. species—American mink, white-tailed deer, deer mice, Egyptian fruit bats, and Syrian hamsters—all used in Montana experiments—while not found in Chinese wildlife. The next stage involved testing in Wuhan. Researcher Danielle Anderson, funded by Fauci, worked in the Wuhan BSL-4 lab to test airborne spread among Chinese horseshoe bats. Early prototypes failed; the final one succeeded—tragically, as the book suggests. The supposed “kill-switch” that was meant to prevent human transmission worked in Montana monkeys but failed in humans. Haslam observes: “Every congressional question (to Fauci) about schools, lockdowns, social distancing, masks, beagles, and mandates could have been answered with one question: What was your $82 million CREID contractor (Danielle) doing inside that Wuhan BSL-4?” On 24 January 2024, Baric twice evaded congressional questions about what was in his UNC freezer—possibly, the author suggests, because the answer was incriminating. According to Major Joseph Murphy: “SARS-CoV-WIV is not meant to kill the bats but to immunize them. This nature may explain its general harmlessness to most people and its harmfulness to the old and co-morbid, who are generally more susceptible to vaccine reactions.” He also noted, “The [injectable] vaccine recipient has no defense against bloodstream entry, but their nose protects them from the recombinant spike protein quasi-species during ‘natural infection’ (better termed aerosolized inoculation).” There was no ill intent in creating or aerosolizing the virus, the book claims; the real crime was the cover-up. While Fauci funded research to make SARS-CoV-2 airborne, he allegedly misled the public about surface transmission, six-foot distancing, school closures, lockdowns, and later, about the safety and efficacy of injectable COVID-19 vaccines. To reiterate, according to the author, the COVID-19 origin and response were not a “conspiracy theory,” but a “conspiracy practice.” The virus was the (bat) vaccine; the [injectable] vaccine was more dangerous than the virus itself. Bhaskaran Raman @br_cse_iitb is a Professor at IIT Bombay. Views are personal. He has authored “Math Murder in Media Manufactured Madness,” which uses simple math to illustrate the absurdities in the mainstream COVID-19 narrative, available on bookshelves