by Paul D. Thacker via RealClearInvestigations,
In
March 2020, a couple of months after the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention reported the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the
United States, editors at the journal Nature Medicine appended a note to
a coronavirus study it had published five years prior. “We are
aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified
theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered,” the journal editors wrote. “There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.”
The prestigious journal appears to have taken this extraordinary action for two reasons. First,
the study described cutting-edge gain-of-function research that mixed
different viruses together to create a man-made chimera, or hybrid of
both viruses – experiments some suspected were the origin of
the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the pandemic. Second, the study’s
authors were Shi Zengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology – a research
lab in the city that was ground zero for the pandemic – and Ralph Baric,
the world's leading expert on coronaviruses, of the University of North
Carolina.
The renowned virologist Simon Wain-Hobson said that
note was an early sign of the years-long effort by the scientific
establishment to distract the public and obscure the link between lab
studies to create dangerous viruses and the COVID pandemic that wrecked
the global economy and killed millions across the planet. During a March
talk at the National Institutes of Health, Wain-Hobson blasted former
NIH leaders Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci for funding these lab
studies and then misleading the public about their dangers.
“Sorry to be blunt,” Wain-Hobson told NIH researchers. “I know these are former colleagues.”
Since
the pandemic’s outbreak six years ago, a slew of emails and documents
released by Congress and through public records requests cast a dark
shadow on the NIH and the virologists it funded, with nearly two-thirds of Americans now
believing the virus came from a laboratory in China. Although the
question of whether the virus that causes COVID-19 originated in a lab
or in the wild is still a subject of debate, there is no doubt that
scientists at the highest level worked to dismiss the lab-leak theory
and shut down their connections to the work in Wuhan. Efforts by Collins and Fauci to delegitimize dissenting voices have been reported, but the central role played by Baric has been obscured.
The UNC researcher’s work on coronaviruses and his connection to the
Wuhan lab are now receiving renewed attention after
RealClearInvestigations learned that the federal government has quietly
removed Baric from all his NIH grants. RCI has also learned that UNC
placed Baric on leave. UNC has also refused to cooperate with NIH
officials as they have attempted to gather more facts and emails about
Baric’s coronavirus research, which evidence leads them to believe led
to the coronavirus pandemic.
Baric did not respond to multiple,
detailed requests for comment and clarification about these matters and
other issues reported by RCI. UNC Chancellor Lee H. Roberts did not
respond to multiple requests for comment about actions taken against
Baric nor UNC’s lack of cooperation with the federal government.
RCI’s
months-long review of hundreds of pages of emails and interviews with
more than a dozen current and former congressional staffers and
administration officials shows that Baric’s public proclamations
about his work, which has been connected to tens of millions of dollars
in federal research grants, have not always reflected his own private
reservations about risky experiments. Baric has also
participated in campaigns to cast doubt on the dangers of virus
research, while politicians and the FBI have sought to protect him. In
addition, the University of North Carolina has blocked both private
individuals and federal agencies demanding more transparency.
“He’s
got good PR people at the University of North Carolina helping him, but
nobody has strung together his entire history,” said Gary Ruskin,
executive director of U.S. Right to Know. Ruskin has been suing Baric’s
university since 2020 to obtain access to his communications, and his
nonprofit has published thousands of emails spotlighting Baric’s work
and ties to research in Wuhan, China. “Six years later, we still know so
little,” he said. “That’s just amazing to me. The public deserves to
know what happened.”
“The investigations have been terrible,” said
a senior congressional staffer who has followed the Senate and House
probes of the COVID pandemic. “And Ralph Baric’s fingerprints are
everywhere.”
A researcher whose security clearance allowed him to
view still-classified documents told RCI there is no doubt the virus
came from a lab in Wuhan. “This is a good view of what happened to
virology,” he said. “They started willy nilly mutating viruses, and then
got upset when this led to 20 million deaths.”
Controversial History
Baric’s virus research has long been controversial as he pioneered “gain-of-function” studies,
which design viruses with unique genetic features that make them either
more deadly to humans or more likely to cause an infection. This line
of research posits that generating deadly viruses in labs allows
scientists to create treatments before a similar pathogen evolves in the
wild and begins killing humans.
Federal funding for studies to
enhance viruses hit a snag in 2011 when Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical
Center and Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin created a
new and deadly flu virus that could spread through the air.
Fearing the virus could be used as a bioweapon, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked two scientific journals to
delete details of the scientific methods and specific mutations in the
Fouchier and Kawaoka studies on the lab-engineered bird flu. Public outcries then prompted the Obama administration to call for new rules on gain-of-function studies.
In 2014, the federal government released guidelines which NIH director Francis Collins said would help
“preserve the benefits of life-science research while minimizing the
risk of misuse.” But these rules did little to slow dangerous studies.
Within weeks, the virology community was hit with a bracing setback. Following
poor safety procedures, dozens of CDC workers were potentially exposed
to anthrax, and vials of smallpox virus were found unsecured in an NIH
storeroom. In response, the Obama White House announced a pause on all gain-of-function virus research so the risks and benefits could be better assessed.
The
researcher most affected by the pause was Ralph Baric, who was
described as America’s “foremost coronavirus biologist” in an NPR report
headlined, “How A Tilt Toward Safety Stopped A Scientist’s Virus Research.” Referring to gain-of-function research, David Relman,
a microbiologist at Stanford University, told NPR, “I don’t think it’s
wise or appropriate for us to create large risks that don’t already
exist.”
Baric, however, countered that his animal experiments on the SARS and MERS viruses posed no threat to people. “No. 1, mice don’t sneeze,” he told NPR.
Baric also told NPR that he would accede to the ban. “The NIH has asked me to stop those experiments,” Baric said, “and so we have stopped those experiments.”
But
in the waning days of the Obama administration, the government sought
to draft new guidelines that would lift this pause on dangerous studies.
Newly disclosed emails acquired by RCI show that NIH officials
under Anthony Fauci and Baric’s former employee, virologist Matt
Frieman, began a secret lobbying campaign to influence the Obama White
House to ensure recommendations would not inhibit scientific funding.
These emails have never been reported and were provided by a researcher familiar with this effort.
Secret Lobbying
A
few weeks after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election – but
before he was inaugurated – White House employees in the Office of
Science Technology Policy (OSTP) began to finalize a new government-wide
guidance for gain-of-function research. Suggesting the importance of
this effort both to science and national security, senior officials from
multiple agencies were working with OSTP to finalize the
new advice, including HHS, FDA, USDA, FBI, CDC, DOD, State Department,
DNI, CIA, and branches of the military, according to leaked emails.
But
while senior officials at agencies across the government fought for the
ear of the White House, OSTP invitedFrieman for a personal visit from
the nearby University of Maryland, and he appears to have acted as a
lobbyist for his fellow gain-of-function researchers.
While waiting for a train, Frieman dashed off a group email, urging coronavirus researchers for examples of gain-of-function studies that had been halted by White House policies. The first person listed on the group email was Frieman’s former boss, Ralph Baric.
“We
all know that our work has been impacted in grants but also in projects
that were stalled, or didn’t pursue because of the moratorium,” Frieman wrote.
He then asked the scientists for examples of gain-of-function studies
that had been stopped for safety reasons. “Specifically, I need examples
of people that have been impacted and a brief description of the
experiment(s).”
Working with Frieman, researchers then compiled a five-page list of virus studies – which included constructing new SARS chimeric viruses – that had been stopped by the Obama White House.
According to the emails, Frieman reported back to NIH officials working for Tony Fauci that he met with OSTP associate director Jo Handelsman. He was joined at the meeting by Stacy Schultz-Cherry, an NIH-funded infectious disease researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
Schultz-Cherry
remains a strong proponent of gain-of-function research. In 2023, she
and two of the virologists Frieman contacted to lobby Handelsman led a
report by the American Society of Microbiologists arguing for “a balanced scientific discussion” that emphasized the benefits
to society of gain-of-function virus research. Handelsman, who is now a
professor at the University of Wisconsin, served as a participant for
the American Society of Microbiologists’ report.
The White House OSTP released the recommendations weeks before Trump was sworn into office in 2017. While
calling for more rigorous review of research involving enhanced
potential pandemic pathogens, it also stated that, “Projects that have
been paused under the existing moratorium will now be reviewed utilizing
a process consistent with the recommended policy guidance. Any projects that are determined suitable to proceed will do so with appropriate risk mitigation measures in place.”
In
Wain-Hobson’s telling, the American Society of Microbiology reports on
gain-of-function virus research put self-interest and continued taxpayer
funding ahead of the public good. “This is to defend the boys and keep
the money coming in for microbiology,” he said. “They see themselves as
the defenders of the faith; they are the self-anointed priests.”
COVID Blueprint
About
a year after the White House passed new guidance for safer
gain-of-function studies, Baric, his Wuhan colleague Shi Zhengli, and a
slew of other researchers presented one of the first major tests of the
guidelines. In 2018, they submitted a grant to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
DARPA
is a research agency housed within the Department of War, known for
funding high-risk, high-reward projects. The existence of this proposal –
which many see as a blueprint for the COVID virus – remained hidden
until late 2021 when a military officer leaked it to a group of online
investigators called DRASTIC.
“Lots of people knew about it and chose not to tell us,”
said author Matt Ridley, in a recent talk at the NIH discussing
evidence that the pandemic started at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Led
by Peter Daszak at the NIH-funded EcoHealth Alliance, the DEFUSE grant
lists studies that stretch on for several pages and includes research in
both the lab and in the field, such as collecting bat viruses from
different caves in China to study them back at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology.
Scientists wrote that the studies in the DEFUSE
proposal were important because the viruses they planned to collect and
engineer were so dangerous. “These viruses are a clear and present
danger to our military and to global health security,” read the DEFUSE proposal, “because of their circulation and evolution in bats and periodic spillover into humans.” They also proposed studies that seem more science
fiction than science research, such as vaccinating wild bats using
aerosolized, lab-created viruses to prevent them from infecting American
soldiers in some possible future war.
But one specific
study that Baric and the other virologists planned may have had tragic
global consequences. The researchers proposed taking the backbone of a
bat virus and inserting a spike protein with a furin cleavage site.
A furin cleavage site allows viruses to infect the cells of human
lungs. To see whether these lab-created viruses could cause SARS-like
disease, the DEFUSE researchers planned to test them in mice whose genes
had been modified to make their lungs more like those of humans. The
particular line of humanized mice Wuhan researchers use in such
experiments was created many years ago in Baric’s lab.
A DARPA official rejected the proposal but
wrote that the research was interesting and could merit funding in the
future. However, he added that the virologists would need a
gain-of-function “risk mitigation plan” if DARPA funded the studies.
A
year after DARPA denied this proposal to create chimeric bat viruses at
the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a novel bat virus with a furin
cleavage site began infecting humans in Wuhan. No other closely related
virus has this furin cleavage site.
When members of
DRASTIC published the DEFUSE proposal in late 2021, people began
pointing the finger at DEFUSE as the blueprint for the COVID virus that
had, by this time, killed millions.
“Of all the gin joints in all
the towns, in all the world, the virus walks into the city where this
research is happening, the year after someone has proposed to put a
furin cleavage site into [coronavirus],” author Matt Ridley quipped during a talk on the DEFUSE proposal last month at the NIH. “That’s quite a coincidence.”
Virologists
have pushed back, asserting that the DEFUSE proposal was never funded,
so the research never took place. However, this argument has been
received with widespread skepticism. Research labs have multiple streams
of funding, and scientists often do many of the proposed experiments to
get initial results before submitting grants.
The most famous example involves University of Utah professor Mario Capecchi. After the NIH rejected a proposed line of research,
he used other NIH money to do studies on creating transgenic mice in
which specific genes had been turned off. When the NIH later awarded him
a grant for research they had previously rejected, they wrote, “We are
glad that you didn’t follow our advice.”
At first rejected for NIH funding, Capecchi’s study led to a Nobel Prize in 2007.
“Scientists
tend to write their grants based on research they have already done,”
said an NIH official not cleared to speak to the media. She added, “It’s
a classic joke inside the research community.”
Congressional investigators questioned Baric about
the DEFUSE proposal in a 2024 deposition. Baric testified that, when a
SARS virus that never before had a furin cleavage site appeared in the
same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, he forgot that he had
proposed, the year prior, to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS
viruses at the Wuhan lab.
“I had forgotten about the DEFUSE proposal, quite frankly,” Baric testified. “The grant was not funded, so I moved on.”
Virologist
and former CDC Director Robert Redfield told RCI that Baric was
probably misleading Congress in the interview. He believes virologists
did the research in the DEFUSE proposal and then submitted the grant for
funding because that’s how science advances. “I know enough about these
proposals,” he said. “About 50% of the work you propose in a grant is
already done.”
Baric appears to have a habit of forgetting details
of virus research when disclosure and transparency might cast a bad
light on the scientific field. After giving a private briefing in
January 2020 to intelligence officials, where he discussed a possible
lab accident in Wuhan, he gave a public talk to congressional staff a
month later that omitted the possibility of a lab accident and failed to
note that the pandemic virus had a unique furin cleavage site that made
it deadly to humans.
Missing Slide
In January 2020 – when the COVID-19 virus began circulating in the U.S. – an official inside the intelligence community emailed Baric about “the current coronavirus situation,”
asking him to give a presentation. “Very timely and appropriate,” Baric
wrote back. “I was going to email this suggestion to you when I finally
shed myself of reporters today.” Although the exact date of his talk is
not disclosed, Baric emailed a slide presentation to his intel contact on January 29.
On one of the slides, Baric detailed the possibility that the pandemic started from an accidental release at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which he noted studies bat viruses closely related to the new coronavirus.
That
same month, NIH officials and Baric’s academic colleagues began an
intensive campaign to discredit as a “conspiracy theory” any question
that the pandemic started in a Wuhan lab.
A week after Baric’s private presentation, Fauci
appeared on a podcast hosted by former Speaker of the House Newt
Gingrich, who asked if the COVID virus could have leaked from a Wuhan
lab. “I’ve heard these conspiracy theories,” Fauci said, “And like all conspiracy theories, Newt, they’re just conspiracy theories.”
The
following day, virologist Vincent Racaniello at Columbia sent Baric and
an NIH colleague a disturbing email, recounting rumors that the new
virus had a furin cleavage site “that might have been engineered.”
“If true this is very bad for all of virology research,” wrote Racaniello, in an email made public only last year.
Wain-Hobson
said the intent of this email was not transparency. “What Racaniello
has in mind is to shut down the discussion,” he said.
By
mid-February 2020, suggestions that the pandemic could have been
unleashed by a lab accident in Wuhan were attacked in the media.
“[Arkansas Sen.] Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory
that scientists have disputed,” reads a Washington Post headline.
The Post quoted an MIT professor castigating Cotton for spreading a
“conspiracy theory” and said he should focus more on funding
virologists.
After the New York Post published a column arguing
that the virus may have leaked from a lab, one of Baric’s colleagues on
the DEFUSE proposal, virologist Danielle Anderson, called the claim “appalling”
in a supposed fact-check on the piece. Like Baric, Anderson remained
mum about the experiments in the DEFUSE proposal. Two days later,
Facebook began blocking the New York Post article for promoting “false information.”
At the end of February, Baric gave a public talk to
congressional staffers about the virus and presented many of the same
slides he used to brief intelligence officials a month prior. However,
the slide discussing a possible lab accident in Wuhan did not appear,
and Baric made no mention of the DEFUSE experiments. Nor did Baric bring
up the virus’s furin cleavage site, which makes it uniquely adapted and
deadly to humans.
Baric did not respond to requests for comment
about why his public talk to congressional staff did not contain the
slide discussing a possible lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology.
Former CDC Director Redfield told RCI that in the first
month of the pandemic, he was given classified material that highlighted
the COVID virus’s furin cleavage site. He then briefed Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo in a SCIF, a secure room that holds secret government
documents.
“I said, ‘Mike, this is the smoking gun. This virus came from a lab.’” Redfield added that he
believes NIH and allied virologists began a full-court press in
February 2020 to smear people as conspiracy theorists about a possible
lab accident, because they needed to protect their money and
reputations.
Emails make it hard to believe Baric did not
understand that his colleagues were mounting a push to smear people
questioning the bat-in-the-wild origin story as “conspiracy theorists.”
In fact, Baric himself participated in this campaign.
Choreographed Censorship
The
effort to shut down debate about the pandemic’s origins gained steam as
the death toll mounted rapidly in 2020 and draconian lockdown policies
kicked in. During the first few months of the pandemic, virologists
published three scientific papers that labeled the possibility of a lab
accident a “conspiracy theory.” These papers shut down chatter about a
Wuhan accident during the pandemic’s first year.
In what many see
as a sign of Baric’s singular connection to the unfolding health
catastrophe, the ramifications of his signature on these papers were
weighed strategically by his close associates.
The first example was a widely reported February letter in The Lancet, signed by 27 scientists, that cast a Wuhan lab accident as a “conspiracy theory.” Emails show the letter had been orchestrated by Baric’s ally, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance.
While
gathering signatures, Daszak wrote to Baric saying he should not sign
the letter “so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work
in a counterproductive way.”
“We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice,” Daszak added in his email to Baric. The Lancet later added a lengthy disclosure to this letter. Like Baric, Daszak had extensive financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but he had hidden them from the Lancet editors.
When
congressional investigators questioned Baric about the Lancet
statement, he testified that he had a conflict of interest due to his
collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “So I didn’t think
it was appropriate to sign it,” Baric said.
Baric’s close ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology were such a problem that his fellow virologists excluded him from the Nature Medicine “Proximal Origins” of SARS-CoV-2 paper published in March 2020. “We decided not to invite Ralph Baric,” said one of the paper’s authors in a podcast. “Just because we thought he was too close to the WIV.”
This
became the most highly cited paper published in the scientific
literature for all of 2020. But like the Lancet Letter, the Nature
Medicine Proximal Origins paper is widely seen as discredited.
Republicans later charged that Fauci had helped orchestrate the paper. House Democrats released a report making the same accusations against Jeremy Farrar, a funder of virologists, then at the Wellcome Trust and now at the World Health Organization.
Despite
his documented, even self-professed, conflict of interest with the
Wuhan Institute of Virology, evidence shows that Baric directly
influenced the third paper that helped stifle talk about a virus
accident in Wuhan.
The commentary, titled “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2,”
appeared in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections, and became
one of the most widely read papers published by Taylor and Francis in
2020. Media outlets such as The Week, Buzzfeed, and Baric’s local newspaper, the Raleigh News & Observer, cited the article in passages that downplayed a possible lab accident.
However, emails show that both Baric and his Wuhan colleague Shi Zhengli provided secret edits to the manuscript. After one of the paper’s authors sent Baric a draft, asking for his input, he responded, “Sure,
but don’t want to be cited in as having commented prior to
submission.” After then submitting alterations to the text in track
changes, Baric added, “I think the community needs to write these
editorials and I thank you for your efforts.”
Although failing to
disclose authors on a paper is considered a form of research
misconduct, the journal failed to take action. Five years after publication, the journal added a disclosure in January 2025 that acknowledged Ralph Baric’s contribution to the commentary.
Congressional Cover
Democrats
never showed much interest in demanding answers from virologists or the
NIH about a possible lab accident once Fauci set the tone that asking
such questions was a “conspiracy theory.” But in late 2022, Republicans
on the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP)
began to finalize a report on the pandemic’s origin.
Yet
that investigation also seems to have been designed to distract from
dangerous research and to insulate Baric, in particular.
To give
the report more traction among liberals, Republican committee
investigators worked very closely with journalist Katherine Eban, whose
exclusive on the report’s details ran in Vanity Fair and ProPublica. “A
new Senate report concludes that SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes
COVID-19 – likely resulted from ‘a research-related incident,’” ProPublica posted on social media,
announcing Eban’s investigative exclusive. “The report includes
evidence of alarming biosecurity issues at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology.”
The Senate report, however, omitted any mention of
dangerous gain-of-function research funded by the NIH, and gave no
notice of virus studies conducted in the United States, even though
Baric is the top researcher in the field. The report pointed the finger
only at China as the sole problem with dangerous virus research.
“It
was a complete whitewash and really screwed over the other senators,”
explained a former congressional investigator. Instead of uncovering
these flaws, Eban’s story for ProPublica and Vanity Fair parroted the
report’s findings in a 9,000-word puff piece for the HELP committee,
with a highly colorful and flattering account of the staff who wrote it
and gave her insider access.
Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University and long-time critic of gain-of-function studies, said he “was
surprised the released report omitted discussion of U.S. actions,
including the role of USAID, NIH, and EcoHealth Alliance in funding
research on SARS-related coronaviruses in Wuhan.” Ebright said
Senate staff interviewed him several times about NIH’s funding for
gain-of-function research and NIH funding for Wuhan.
One expert
interviewed by the Senate said that staff stripped out any mention of
NIH funding for gain-of-function research in the United States, while
another pointed the finger at the Republican who ran the committee: Sen.
Richard Burr of North Carolina, who was months from retirement.
During
his decades in Congress, Burr was a strong supporter of pandemic
preparedness and virus research, ushering through legislation that
turned on the spigot for biodefense spending, such as the 2006 legislation that created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
In Burr’s final year in the Senate, President Biden’s 2022 budget asked
for an historic $88.2 billion for pandemic and biodefense funding
spread across five years. Working to finalize the report, Burr then introduced legislation that
established ARPA-H within the NIH to support billions more in taxpayer
spending for companies to manage pandemic preparedness.
“One
of the greatest successes to come out of the pandemic was the federal
government’s partnership with the private sector to deliver life-saving
vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics with unprecedented speed,” Burr said in a statement when introducing the ARPA-H bill.
A few months after Burr sponsored the bill, the NIH awarded a $65 million grant to
develop antivirals to a North Carolina biotechnology company called
READDI that was co-founded by none other than Ralph Baric.
After retiring, Burr became a lobbyist for DLA Piper on biodefense and biomedicine, taking with him two of his staffers who worked on the committee. Burr also joined Baric’s company, READDI, as a member of the board.
When asked to comment on this matter, former Senator Burr told RCI that UNC is a client of DLA Piper. “Accordingly, I am unable to comment or provide information, on or off the record.”
House
investigators later deposed Baric in 2024, but critics say it was a
softball interview in which Baric was not pressed for answers.
Democratic investigators spent much of Baric’s deposition trying to
defend him, while Republican investigators got tied in knots by Baric’s responses, drowned in technical scientific details.
As
with Senate staff, House investigators gave Vanity Fair’s Katherine
Eban exclusive access to the deposition, which she broadcast in a story
before the transcript was even released. Vanity Fair’s exclusive portrayed
Baric in a positive light as a hard-nosed, objective researcher who
remained undecided yet committed to finding out how the pandemic began.
Instead of dismissing the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy theory, Baric
testified that he had warned his Chinese colleagues that the Wuhan
Institute’s safety protocols were insufficient.
And like Senator Burr, Baric pointed the finger at China as the source for any answers to explain if the virus came from a lab.
A month after deposing Baric, House investigators sent a letter to the director of the FBI demanding
to interview one of their agents who they had caught communicating with
Baric. The House redacted the name of the agent but wrote that he had
been discussing “the substance of the origin debate and how UNC was
responding to numerous North Carolina Freedom of Information Act
requests.”
House investigators never made anything public
afterward about this matter, and the committee investigating the
pandemic’s origin has since been disbanded. A source close to the House
investigation told RCI that emails show the FBI agent was discussing
with Baric how to withhold emails requested by the nonprofit U.S. Right
to Know under the Freedom of Information Act.
The FBI did not respond to RCI’s repeated requests for comment.
Accountability at Last?
Once
hailed as “the big cheese” of coronavirus research, Baric’s scientific
career now seems imperiled with the NIH’s decision to remove him from
all grants because of that very same work. “There’s a real possibility
that the virus’s birthplace was Chapel Hill,” said former CDC Director Redfield on a 2024 podcast.
Redfield told RCI that virologists went ahead with dangerous virus experiments for money and fame. “This
is a real big source of grant money. It’s a big source of fame. A big
source of science prizes,” he said. “They’re not thinking about whether
there’s a downside. But there’s a huge downside. And I think we
experienced it. It was called the COVID pandemic.”
Redfield is
not alone in assigning some blame for the pandemic to Baric. Columbia
University economics professor Jeffrey Sachs published a 2022 essay in PNAS that called for an open inquiry into COVID origins
and full transparency by U.S. labs for “independent analysis” of
collaborations with Wuhan scientists. At the time, Sachs led a task
force commissioned by The Lancet into the origins of the coronavirus
pandemic.
Last month, Sachs pointed to Baric as the likely creator of the COVID virus.
The
hits to Baric’s reputation are not likely to end. Ruskin has spent over
$100,000 in staff time and attorney fees filing over a dozen freedom of
information requests, while UNC has never released all its documents.
For the year prior to the COVID outbreak, UNC has released only six
pages of Baric’s documents that Ruskin has asked to review.
“This is obviously the most important time, because it’s the time when the pandemic started, but only six pages?” Ruskin said. “Why is that? UNC has never explained.”
A
senior official inside the Department of Health and Human Services told
RCI that the answer is obvious. After reviewing the government’s
classified material, the official said that UNC is terrified that the
public will learn that they were complicit in starting the pandemic.
“Baric designed the gun,” he said. “But the Chinese built it, and then they pulled the trigger.”
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