A trove of documents released last week by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) may “explain why no one has been able to find the SARS2 virus (aka SARS-CoV-2) infesting a colony of bats,” according to one prominent science reporter.

Writing for City Journal, Nicholas Wade, former science editor for The New York Times, said the newly revealed documents — which showed U.S. scientists were planning to work with scientists from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to develop novel coronaviruses, provide evidence that COVID-19 “has never existed in the natural world.”

The USRTK documents revealed that scientists involved with a joint U.S.-China research proposal — “Project DEFUSE” — a year before the outbreak of COVID-19, planned to engineer coronaviruses that would be rare in nature, and that had many similarities with the genome of SARS-CoV-2.