Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright said there is "smoking-gun" evidence that SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19, was created in a Chinese lab, according to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.

Ebright was referring to evidence found in a 2018 document from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that discussed making such a virus, according to the Journal piece written by former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade.

The documents from the lab contained drafts and notes for Project DEFUSE, a grant proposal that aimed to engineer bat coronaviruses to make them more transmissible to humans.

While the project was ultimately denied funding by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Wade speculated that the work could have been done by researchers in Wuhan who had secured funding from the Chinese government.

"Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time Covid-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019," Wade wrote. "This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin."

In addition to the new documents, Wade said another strong indication of "the virus's laboratory birth" was the specific genetic structure of the coronavirus.

"Whereas most viruses require repeated tries to switch from an animal host to people, SARS-CoV-2 infected humans out of the box, as if it had been preadapted while growing in the humanized mice called for in the DEFUSE protocol," Wade wrote.

Scientists may continue to debate whether the COVID-19 pandemic came about naturally or through man-made engineering, but Ebright believes that the development of COVID-19 can be traced back to the work of EcoHealth Alliance.

After the 2018 documents were obtained by U.S. Right to Know through a Freedom of Information Act request and published, the Daily Telegraph reported that Ebright said the evidence was clearer that the virus had been synthesized in a lab.

In the newly released documents, the researchers proposed adding "appropriate human-specific cleavage sites" to the spike proteins of SARS-related viruses — the same method that a number of biologists have said could have been used to manufacture the pathogen.

Researchers had planned to take advantage of the safety standards at the Wuhan lab — which did not meet U.S. standards — by conducting a portion of the research there in conditions that they claimed would "likely freak out" American scientists, the documents revealed.

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