That research was in line with Chinese national programs 2013FY113500 and its successor, the ‘2019 Scientific Survey, which stated:

'(4) Complete the pathogenic characteristics analysis of 10 important new viruses/strains, which for at least

5 important pathogenic new viruses should be based on a biosafety risk assessment at the cell level and small animal level'

See archive.is/OIC5C and archive.is/HA9ql

Research which was partly funded by the NIH via EcoHealth under the project 'UNDERSTANDING THE RISK OF BAT CORONAVIRUS EMERGENCE':

projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_h…

The latest NIH grant was for project 2R01AI110964-06 (July 2019- June 2021.) The objectives of that project include:

3. [--]. We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding [--]

Going back to the previous annual grant (in the series of 6) we find similar wording, but no mention of work on 'newly discovered viruses', as that one only introduced in the Chinese '2019 Scientific Survey' project.

So if you want to know what Ben Hu and Shi Zhengli were doing, just read the NIH grant descriptions to EcoHealth alliance.

All the experiments paid for with US taxpayers money were taking place in Wuhan.

But I am sure that Peter Daszak had a good little chat yesterday with his friend and colleague Pr Shi Zhengli.

A little chat which must have definitely removed any suspicion that the experiments that EcoHealth was paying for may have to do with this pandemic.

It reminds me of all these media reports and scientific studies that were pushed by the cigarette lobby to explain to the public that tobacco was good for them, and that there were no credible proof of any link to cancer..

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Well at least they were not leading a WHO investigation. So the appalling conflicts of interest here only make this worse.

I have put the full notes online:
docs.google.com/document/d/e/2…