Coronavirus: Lab Leak Part 17 - Scientists wanted to conduct research with cave bats in their natural habitat

The Telegraph (Sep 21) has a concerning article about funding that scientists were hoping to get approved (was not approved) for bat research:

New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles and aerosols containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.

They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to fund the work.

. . . The proposal also included plans to mix high-risk natural coronavirus strains with more infectious but less dangerous varieties.

The funding was rejected due to the fact that the unintended consequences weren't being considered.

Is this potentially fake news? Let's just go to this Nature (May 3) that discussed the release of genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida. Taking that into considering, this request for funding doesn't seem crazy.

I'm not a scientist and I don't even understand what is being discussed above and maybe a scientist will say that even though suspect, this proposal had nothing to do with what eventually became known as SARS-CoV-2, but does it matter? It seems to indicate to me that scientists were wanting to work on gain of function research that was at least tangential to what would eventually become SARS-CoV-2. And just because they didn't get the funding doesn't mean they weren't conducting some research in this area anyways.  

Let's also state that this proposal was submitted by Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. This is the same Peter Daszak who was on the team that went to China in February to gather data on the origins of COVID-19. This team stated that the introduction through a laboratory incident was extremely unlikely. He knew these types of requests were at least being made. 

This is just starting to smell. Let's say that COVID-19 didn't come from this type of research and did come from nature. But it would seem that this type of research could lead to a huge disaster in the future.