Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee announced on Tuesday they will investigate 15 federal agencies that were briefed in 2018 on a proposal to “insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus to create a novel chimeric virus that would have been shockingly similar to the COVID-19 virus.”

The $14.2 million project — DEFUSE, developed by Peter Daszak, Ph.D., president of EcoHealth Alliance in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Wuhan lab) — was proposed on Jan. 30, 2018, during the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) Proposers Day program.

“Disturbingly, not one of these 15 agencies spoke up to warn us that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been pitching this research,” Paul said in the announcement, which noted that it took until 2021 before the public even learned of the DEFUSE project.