1. According to his 2018-19 documents, Ralph Baric at UNC created a SARS-like genome that triggered an immune response in mammals—he even cited the “precise molecular blueprint for SARS-CoV-2.”

Baric referenced a PRRVR furin cleavage site in 2019, while SARS2 emerged with PRRAR. That precise molecular blueprint, called MERS-MA30, was found by computational biologist Andreas Martin Lisewski. We interviewed him in 2024, and you can find that Substack link in the latest 2026 PNAS publication!

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2601806123

Christian Drosten—the Baric of Germany—initially appeared receptive to the evidence presented by Lisewski. Since then, however, he seems to have changed course and is now attempting to debunk the very theory he once entertained.

Drosten focused on Lisewski's theory of double spillover in Wuhan and Saudi Arabia. But Drosten ignored Baric’s 2019 citation (#41) of MERS-MA30. Many virologists, including Baric, claimed no one would add the leading (P) proline to the furin cleavage site (RRAR). Baric testified:

Why would anybody engineer that and do it that way, putting in an extra residue, which is a (P) proline, which puts kinks in proteins; it usually screws things up. And ultimately, that proline changed within one or two variants. So that didn’t make much sense to me. But if you were going to engineer it, I guess the question would be, you don’t need to put four amino acids in, it’s easier to put three amino acids in, in the frame. And also, you’d probably want to put one in that was efficient. The sequence in SARS2 is not a very efficient cleavage site.

When the student challenged the Master

Drosten was my hero early in the lab leak debate. He ruled out Shi Zhengli as a suspect because her Vero cells delete the furin cleavage site. He also pointed out that her reverse genetic system was more like a car stereo (e.g. WIV1) than a new car (e.g. SARS2). That left me with one suspect: Ralph Baric, who specialized in live-animal (in vivo) experiments.

For Drosten's latest experiment, he relied on test tube (in vitro) experiments, whereas Baric favored in vivo mouse adaptation. MA30 literally means "mouse-adapted 30 times." Baric described this as "the classic virology approach to mouse-adapting a virus, using blind serial passage."

Notice Baric had 2019 UNC permission for 35 passages on MERS, with a furin cleavage site of PRSVR.

In 2017, Baric’s colleague, Stanley Perlman at the University of Iowa, noticed the MERS virus acquired a mutation at the S1/S2 furin cleavage site during serial mouse passage (MERS-MA30), changing the motif from PRSVR to PRRVR.

Why PRRVR? To develop live attenuated vaccines, just like SARS2.

Why RRAR and not RRVR, which is what Drosten tried to answer? In 2018, Baric researched ENaC with the RRAR/SVAS amino acid sequence.

Why MERS? It was Baric’s select agent workaround. And as Jeff Sachs and I wrote:

This evidence is especially pertinent in view of the clear homology between amino acid sequences of SARS-CoV-2 and the furin cleavage site of ENaC (a lung and kidney epithelial protein studied at UNC), as shown below.

• QTQTNS_____RSVASQ (RaTG13; Shi lab, WIV)

• QTQTNSPRRARSVASQ (SARS2; RRARSVAS is identical with UNC research)

• QTQTNSPRRVRSVASQ (2019 MERS-MA30 Perlman labs; BMC)

• QTQTNS_____RSVASQ (Laos Banal-52; Eloit lab, Pasteur Institute)

Baric testified that the proline (the “P” in PRRAR) was unnecessary. Yet, as noted by Lisewski and presented to the World Health Organization, a similar furin cleavage site with a proline residue is present at the S1/S2 junction in the mouse-adapted MERS-MA30 variant, which Baric referenced in 2019. Because SARS-like viruses (sarbecoviruses) lack furin cleavage sites, Baric investigated MERS-like furin cleavage sites instead. He testified that “we were fundamentally interested in why didn’t sarbecoviruses have a furin cleavage site,” and that adding such a site was a “simple solution to the problem” of growing synthetic viruses in his lab.

I knew Drosten, like many virologists, read this blog. What I didn't expect was for him to critique my book:

The hypotheses about the lab origin are now flourishing, says Drosten, “and each time, the subtext is aimed at a specific research group.” The MA30-Furin rift is also a central element in various lab leak narratives, such as the book by blogger Jim Haslam, “Covid-19: Mystery Solved.” Drosten describes it as “a mixture of a completely fabricated tall tale, biological mix-ups and misunderstandings, and finger-pointing at certain individuals.”

From “just a blogger” to Citation #7 in PNAS. I’ll take it. But Drosten was cited twice in a controversial 2018 paper by Baric and Vincent Munster.

Basically, Baric and Munster referenced Drosten’s research on MERS-like (e.g. furin) and SARS-like (e.g. TMPRSS2) protease sites to create SARS2.

Baric and Munster were trying to get the bat virus inside the bat cell, or what Baric called “intracellular proteases.” Drosten et al called it “convertases.”

Drosten’s name is one of 100 in the back of my book because I asked him to provide a biological explanation for why this Old World virus, called SARS2, loves New World lab animals, but he didn’t respond. I linked to several peer-reviewed in vivo papers, mainly a German lab on Egyptian fruit bats, but he’s only produced in vitro evidence.

Drosten has been picked for round 2 of SAGO, along with Linfa Wang, so I look forward to continuing the in vivo debate, using peer-reviewed evidence.

In Vitro vs In Vivo

In vitro evidence (Latin for ‘in the glass’) is irrelevant to the origin of SARS2, because scientists can fudge answers. For example, an in vitro bat SARS2 paper reported “low expression” in Rousettus Aegyptiacus (Egyptian fruit bats), but a German paper reported “reservoir host” characteristics using in vivo research.

A visual of what happened: Shi shared bat samples with Baric, who created SARS2 in vitro, then Munster aerosolized the agent in Egyptian fruit bats (in vivo), and Dani Anderson tested the final product in Chinese bats.

Fauci even defended himself by holding up Shi’s WIV BSL2 paper, which he wrote on as “only in vitro work,” but the new debate is Munster’s in vivo research.

D614G origins

Drosten’s PNAS paper also speculated on the origins of D614G, the first major mutation in SARS2 that led to the B.1 variant. Guess who researched the exact same mutation at the exact same spot? Ralph Baric! Back then, it was referred to as D613G in his SARS1 papers from 2006. Baric wrote in his 2011 vaccine paper:

Interestingly, the recombinant icSARS GD03-S virus described by Deming et al. developed a mutation (D613G) in a similar region of S during the process of virus stock generation, suggesting that some unique selective advantage for growth in culture may be encoded within this undefined region of Spike.

Drosten vs Wiesendanger

A court has forbidden Roland Wiesendanger from accusing Christian Drosten of lying regarding the origin of the coronavirus. Drosten was fully vindicated.

https://www.zeit.de/gesundheit/2026-04/christian-drosten-roland-wiesendanger-landgericht-hamburg-cicero-gxe

Most lab leakers dislike Drosten for various reasons, but I always admired him. After DARPA Defuse leaked, he identified UNC as the source of the furin cleavage site idea, and showed regret for signing the Lancet letter:

It also became known that there were plans to introduce furin cleavage sites, but this was to be done in an American laboratory, and the project was not funded,” Drosten said. “Many scientists, myself included, vouched for our colleagues in Wuhan at the time in The Lancet, but we weren’t informed about these projects. Had I known about them, I would at least have had questions before signing off on them.”

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CIA’s MKUltra mind control hearing turned into lab leak applause

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Edward Snowden exposed government surveillance of its citizens. Daniel Ellsberg exposed government lies. U.S. Marine Major Joseph Murphy exposed something larger: the biodefense blueprint behind a pandemic that killed millions.

Snowden’s leak sparked a worldwide debate about privacy. Murphy’s leak, known as the DARPA DEFUSE proposal, should have sparked a global reckoning over the real origins of SARS-CoV-2.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funds high-risk academic research to protect U.S. troops from future threats. One team proposed modifying bat coronaviruses to spread more effectively—not among humans, but mammalian bats. Testing would occur in Wuhan, where the right bat colonies existed. This was not a fringe idea. It was a biodefense concept encouraged by DARPA under the first Trump administration.

Taken together, the 2018 DEFUSE proposal, plus FOIA documents, emails, and peer-reviewed papers, support Murphy’s hypothesis: SARS-CoV-2 was created in U.S. labs but tested in Wuhan, where it accidentally leaked. This theory has since been debated in the scientific literature, including Nature.

The U.S. intelligence community did not miss this. It moved the unclassified 2018 DARPA project, advertised on Twitter, into a classified 2021 folder.

The 2018 blueprint

The very agencies that claimed to be searching for answers had the facts all along, stored in a top-secret folder. They knew that Peter Daszak (EcoHealth), Zhengli Shi (WIV), Linfa Wang (Duke), and Ralph Baric (UNC) had proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses and testing them on Chinese bats in Wuhan.

Snowden took on the NSA. His leaks revealed that U.S. intelligence treated global pandemics as surveillance targets, explicitly searching for “SARS in China.” Murphy confronted something far more entrenched: what he called the “biodefense oligarchy,” a network spanning DARPA, intelligence agencies, academia, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

A resignation

One node of that system was already in Wuhan. A NIAID-linked contractor, Danielle Anderson, was stationed at the maximum-security BSL4 lab. She previously told Bloomberg she worked on Ebola, but her name appears alongside Baric’s in the classified DEFUSE files.

Her Duke supervisor, Linfa Wang, resigned on January 10, 2020—the same day the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published. After Murphy leaked DEFUSE, Wang identified Baric as its author.

After Zhengli Shi published the closest known bat sample, RaTG13, she told The New York Times that “my” lab was not involved in gain-of-function research and that “I” did nothing wrong, so “I” had nothing to fear.

Privately, Baric warned UNC colleagues that Shi could be “arrested” for releasing the embargoed sequence. RaTG13 highlighted what made SARS-CoV-2 unique: the furin cleavage site (PRRAR), which Baric would “introduce” in DEFUSE documents.

YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNS_____RSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (RaTG13)

YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNSPRRARSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (SARS2)

RaTG13 mattered not because it was closest, but because it exposed what Baric proposed to add. Notice the PRRAR insertion, which Baric referenced in 2019. He would even “provide” his novel genomes to Anderson’s boss, Wang, for “immune boosting of bats.”

Daszak later admitted that Anderson was working with Chinese bats in the Wuhan BSL4. Weibo social media posts indicate the BSL4 dormitory was an early transmission hotspot. Notably, Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan was arrested for videotaping the remote BSL4 facility, not Shi’s downtown BSL2 lab.

Why Wuhan made sense

During World War II, Wuhan was occupied by the Japanese. In 1944, the U.S. firebombed Wuhan, killing 20,000 civilians. Seventy-five years later, the U.S. would return to Wuhan, but not with bombs, with bat vaccines.

Wuhan later became a hub for live bat research. During the debate over the Wuhan wet market, one question lingered: why Wuhan? In 2017, DARPA’s program manager Jim Gimlett told Daszak he wanted to vaccinate Chinese bats against SARS-like viruses. Daszak responded, “Interesting idea.”

Daszak and Shi even visited Gimlett at DARPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. They invited Baric to join their team, who called it a “marvelous opportunity.”

While drafting DEFUSE in 2018, Baric wrote, “I have no bat colony, no way for me to do the experiment, which I definitely think needs to be done, or we have no credibility. My understanding [is] another bat colony exists in China.”

Unlike most R&D projects, which can be tested in U.S. labs, Baric’s biotechnology had to be tested in Chinese labs. His technology can be shipped worldwide in 1-mL tubes packed on dry ice.

The genome matched the proposal

In addition to the “peculiar” furin cleavage site, more evidence emerged. In March 2020, U.S. government biodefense officials asked Baric in the Red Dawn emails whether SARS-CoV-2 contained “any restriction sites.” He replied, “No, there is absolutely no evidence of genetic engineering.”

In June 2020, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is like the CIA but for the Pentagon, analyzed the genome. They identified five restriction sites, yielding six pieces, but labeled the DIA report “secret.”

In DEFUSE, Baric proposed dividing the genome into six pieces to simplify manipulation. He later testified, “We think our [UNC] approach is safer [than the WIV] because we’ve divided the genome into six pieces.”

Murphy’s conclusion

In August 2021, Murphy wrote to the DoD Inspector General:

“SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine or its precursor virus.”

This was an unintended consequence of good intentions. The genome was engineered to resemble a natural Chinese bat virus. Why? To better infect Chinese bats. If Baric’s synthetic genome leaked from a Wuhan lab, it would appear to originate from a Wuhan wet market.

After Murphy leaked DEFUSE, Baric claimed he “forgot” about the proposal, misled the FBI, and was forced to resign.

The man in the back row

Murphy noticed something: a classified folder that did not match the government’s narrative. The DEFUSE files were there because intelligence agencies had requested information in July 2021. But they'd never been shared with Congress, the FBI, or the public. Murphy wrote:

This folder was empty for a year. The files, completely unmarked with classification or distribution data, were placed in this folder in July 2021, which conspicuously aligns with media reporting, my probing, and Senator Paul’s inquiry into NIH/NIAID gain-of-function programs. The unmarked nature, combined with the timing, signals that the documents were being hidden. No files at DARPA go unmarked in classification or distribution, including proprietary documents. Furthermore, PREEMPT is an unclassified program.

Murphy wasn’t a senior official or policy advisor. He was a Marine Corps fellow at DARPA in 2021. A junior military officer in the back of the room, doing administrative work.

I will inevitably be asked how I figured this out and discovered the documents. The pandemic response became the predominant focus of my fellowship efforts. DARPA worked on many pandemic innovations, and much of its team was familiar with biodefense. I had the opportunity to “sit in the back row” per se and observe and listen in on the government’s efforts. My obligation-light fellowship also allowed me to observe and read the field. This observation grew in scope to the point that it became a series of reports like a military scout would prepare when tasked to investigate a problem.

He reported it to the DoD Office of the Inspector General and answered the question that fifteen government agencies avoided:

Eventually, I concluded that what leaked from the WIV could be a bat vaccine or its precursor. It was feasible that the US would try to avoid a SARS-CoV outbreak by stopping it at its source, not by halting its infections amongst people, but by halting its infections amongst the bats. Americans are creative, even if imprudent, and technologically confident enough to try it. This concept seemed to fit within the PREEMPT program construct as well. Moreover, the unusual nature and pathology of the virus hinted that it could be a vaccine or be vaccine-like. A technological challenge as difficult as inoculating bats in China would be tried at DARPA first.

Following the money

When The New York Times reported on DEFUSE, it claimed the project “was never funded by the United States,” implying Chinese funding. Yet the proposal invokes the American “warfighter.” Unless China is now a Pentagon ally, the funding logic points back to U.S. agencies.

Murphy attached the unfunded $14 million DARPA DEFUSE proposal to “inoculate” Chinese bats and added:

“As is known, Dr. Fauci with NIAID did not reject the proposal. The work took place at the WIV and several U.S. sites, which are identified in detail in the proposal.”

When confronted about DEFUSE funding, Fauci issued a narrowly worded denial: “We have never seen that (DEFUSE) grant, and we have never funded that grant.” The emphasis mattered. Partial funding through revised or renamed proposals remained an option.

After 9/11, Fauci’s biodefense portfolio at NIAID rivaled DARPA’s annual budget. In 2021, The Intercept sued NIAID to obtain two 2019 grants to EcoHealth:

• $3.2 million “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” grant

• $7.5 million “Zoonotic Virus Emergence” grant

Those two grants, plus a later $3 million Laos grant, totaled the same $14 million budget as DEFUSE. Personnel, experiments, and even the language were recycled. DEFUSE was not rejected. It was rerouted through NIAID under different grant names. When asked directly, Daszak, Baric, and Fauci never denied this.

All were also asked to deny that a novel genome listed in two 2019 NIAID documents, called HKU3r-CoVs, could be SARS-CoV-2. Baric described his “chimeric spike” as an unnatural combination of genomes from China and Southeast Asia, differing by 25% from SARS-CoV-1. SARS-CoV-2’s spike differs by the same margin. A genome listed in a 2019 NIAID grant matches the virus that emerged months later.

Only after The Intercept exposed the NIAID grants did Murphy come forward. He stated what the bureaucracy would not: NIAID funded DEFUSE in practice, if not in name. Lab leak researchers, known as DRASTIC, later confirmed this in Daszak’s emails marked “not to be shared with Congress.”

The Republican-led congressional committee concluded that the U.S. funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the WIV. But Shi was paid to ship samples (such as RaTG13) to Baric, who could modify Chinese pathogens into live-attenuated vaccines. The dangerous gain-of-function research took place in North Carolina and Montana, not in Wuhan.

From North Carolina to Montana

Murphy’s hypothesis was not a bioweapon, but an animal vaccine. He identified Baric’s research on attenuated or weakened viruses, but made one error:

“It is likely a live vaccine that has not yet been engineered to a more attenuated state than the program sought to create with its final version. It leaked and spread rapidly because it was aerosolized so it could efficiently infect bats in caves, but it was not ready to infect bats yet, so it does not appear to infect bats.”

Scientists have not identified a reservoir host in the Wuhan wet market; however, SARS-CoV-2 infects and transmits among American lab bats. The reservoir host is the Egyptian fruit bat, an American surrogate for developing global bat vaccines.

Egyptian fruit bats do not live in China. They are housed at Fauci’s “satellite campus” in Montana, called Rocky Mountain Laboratory (RML), an original DEFUSE vendor. Vincent Munster, who would later be indicted for monkeypox smuggling, ran the Egyptian fruit bat colony at RML and controlled the samples shipped to Wuhan.

We know the above details only because Murphy told us where to look. Fauci later funded a Chinese (Rhinolophus) bat-breeding facility in America so they wouldn’t have to test in China.

The congressional committee interviewed everyone except Murphy, who wasn’t mentioned in their 557-page report. Murphy added:

“The asymptomatic nature is also explained by the bat vaccine’s creators’ intention (a good vaccine does not generate symptoms).”

Designed to spread

What many assumed was a Chinese bioweapon, owing to COVID’s asymptomatic spread, appeared to be an academic creation. Self-spreading vaccines “evade the immune response” because any “pre-existing immunity to the vaccine vector will slow vaccine spread.” Gimlett testified that “self-disseminating vaccines” were under DARPA consideration.

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield echoed a similar theory, calling Baric the “scientific mastermind” while citing aerosolization and immune evasion. But Redfield, like Murphy, claimed SARS-CoV-2 does not infect bats.

The CDC’s Atlanta bat lab confirmed that Egyptian fruit bats are a “non-natural” reservoir host for SARS-CoV-2. These bats are housed in only one other BSL4 facility: Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana.

Fauci called this: Dual-Use Research of Concern. What appeared to be a Chinese virus was actually a contagious animal vaccine, designed to mimic a natural virus and created by a military-academic complex of scientists. Fauci even edited an EcoHealth bat vaccine paper on January 8, 2020.

The military connection

During World War II, the Pentagon developed Project X-Ray: bat bombs armed with napalm, designed to exploit bats’ roosting behavior to ignite enemy cities. Eighty years later, DARPA scientists revived the same principle—not as a weapon, but as a delivery system for self-spreading vaccines.

COVID was not a Chinese creation. It was the culmination of a decades-long U.S. biodefense effort that began after SARS-CoV-1 in 2003, when U.S. military bases in Asia were quarantined. In the DEFUSE draft, Baric noted that tens of thousands of U.S. troops were deployed across East Asia.

Since SARS-CoV-1 emerged from Chinese horseshoe bats in 2003, the U.S. government has funded several projects in the area. The U.S. military even collected the closest progenitor to SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic.

If you were infected with COVID, your body has antibodies to a bat virus collected by a Pentagon agency in Laos in 2017. Can you spot the difference?

LTPTWRVYSTGSNVFQTRAGCLIGAEHVNNSYECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNS_____RSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNNSIAIPTNFTISVTTEILPVSMTKTSVDCTMYICGDSTECSNLLLQYGSFCTQLNRALTGIAVEQDKNTQEVFAQVKQIYKTPPIKDFGGFNFSQILPDPSKPSKRSFIEDLLFNKVTLADAGFIKQYGDCLGDIAARDLICAQKFNGLTVLPPLLTDEMIAQYTSALLAGTITSGWTFGAGAALQIPFAMQMAYRFNGIGVTQNVLYENQKLIANQFNSAIGKIQDSLSSTASALGKLQNVVNQNAQALNTLVKQLSSNFGAIS (RaTG13 & Laos Banal-52 collected pre-pandemic)

LTPTWRVYSTGSNVFQTRAGCLIGAEHVNNSYECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNSPRRARSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNNSIAIPTNFTISVTTEILPVSMTKTSVDCTMYICGDSTECSNLLLQYGSFCTQLNRALTGIAVEQDKNTQEVFAQVKQIYKTPPIKDFGGFNFSQILPDPSKPSKRSFIEDLLFNKVTLADAGFIKQYGDCLGDIAARDLICAQKFNGLTVLPPLLTDEMIAQYTSALLAGTITSGWTFGAGAALQIPFAMQMAYRFNGIGVTQNVLYENQKLIANQFNSAIGKIQDSLSSTASALGKLQNVVNQNAQALNTLVKQLSSNFGAIS (SARS-CoV-2)

The SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site (PRRVR, RRAR, RXXR, or intracellular proteases) wasn’t inserted to infect humans; it was inserted to infect bats, whose cells also express furin. To date, no other SARS-like virus has this feature.

The cover-up

In 2024 testimony, Baric admitted the 2018 furin cleavage site idea “was clearly mine,” but said DEFUSE was drafted in response to the 2018 National Biodefense Strategy, which called for a more “active posture” to detect and contain emerging biological threats.

“SARS” was cited in that strategy, issued during the first Trump administration. Recall Trump’s April 2020 press conference, when he canceled the Obama-era grant to Wuhan.

That NIAID grant was renewed in July 2019 during his administration—a $3.2 million investment by Trump in the DARPA DEFUSE project.

DEFUSE was pursued under Trump and buried under Biden. The Pentagon later acknowledged the proposal was moved into a classified system for sharing with intelligence agencies, but not with the public. Murphy added:

“A technological challenge as difficult as inoculating bats in China would be tried at DARPA first. The massive “Manhattan Project”-level of information suppression executed by the government and the Trusted News Initiative indicates that it would be covered up if something bad happened. The lab leak hypothesis and squabbling between Senator Paul and Dr. Fauci indicated that the cover-up was more localized. Further, an actual cover-up would be more disciplined with its paperwork. So, I presumed that unclassified files would be concealed on a higher network and found them where I expected them. I understood what they were and their content, pushed the files off-site, and compiled this [Inspector General] report.”

Murphy’s actions mirror those of Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers. Like Ellsberg, Murphy did not seek fame. Murphy’s modesty is buried in a Brownstone footnote, since he “uncovered the possible blueprint for SARS-CoV-2, called Project DEFUSE, while a Marine Corps fellow at DARPA in 2021.”

What Murphy found was extraordinary. A 2018 blueprint described the kind of virus that would later appear in Wuhan—trained for transmission in American bats. Leading virologists have been challenged to disprove this hypothesis. None have.

Snowden showed us the government sees everything. Murphy proved it hides everything. One was prosecuted, but the other was promoted. What happened to Major Murphy? He’s now a Lt. Col. and offered one quote:

To those seeking answers, I offer encouragement. There are good people striving for the truth, working together in and out of government, and they succeed.

To those that withhold, I pray for you. Find the moral courage to come forward. Don’t let a lie be our legacy to posterity.

People will forgive. A commitment to truth is in the heart of this nation.

Semper Fi

Maj. Joseph Murphy, USMC

Since exposing DEFUSE, Rand Paul’s Senate office has republished his DoD letter, Murphy has gone viral, and recently wrote:

It may stun some, but had I known of DEFUSE and withheld its existence, or had I discovered DEFUSE but not reported it, I could be convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer for moral failure regardless of whether I appropriately followed policy. Unsurprisingly, the other officers who assisted felt the same, as no one hesitated to assist in rectifying years of infidelity.

And in contrast to the inaction of many who knew, many others saw the implications of the matter immediately, like the federal agents who repelled those who wanted to prosecute me for revealing DEFUSE, or those in the Inspector General who told me I was subject to reprisal investigations even though they were not supposed to do so.

DARPA program manager Jim Gimlett, who funded the SARS-CoV-2 bat colony at Rocky Mountain Lab, was asked for comment but never responded.

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When the county council holds hearings on RML, the discussion is no longer theoretical. It becomes an issue of transparency and trust. At a recent public hearing, Vincent Munster was the subject of lively debate. The council invited the RML director, Marshall Bloom, and the safety manager, Commander Megan Brose. Her title “Commander” underscores the biodefense research at RML.

Bloom and Brose were there to discuss the recent monkey-bite accident, but the locals wanted to talk about Vincent Munster, the bats, and his smuggling incident. Munster’s lab won several DARPA-funded military projects to develop self-spreading vaccines. One of those bat projects was DEFUSE, which included a furin cleavage site that the locals knew about.

The council asked tougher questions than the U.S. government or the media. One council member asked whether the lab conducts gain-of-function research, and Bloom and Brose said no. In 2018, RML and Munster celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the 1918 flu pandemic by resurrecting it. In 2019, Munster gave DARPA a presentation on the progress of his SARS2-like bat vaccine.

Then another council member asked for an “exacting definition of what GoF is.” The people of Hamilton may not know every detail of virology, but they understand accountability. Based on the questions they asked, they are no longer willing to simply take the experts at their word. A local resident, Dan, who wrote a Substack post about the ordeal, asked the best questions.

1. Did you know what was going on with Munster at the airport?

2. Were the scientists allowed back into the lab after the incident?

3. Did you talk to Munster after the incident?

4. With biolabs all over the world, run by either the US or our allies, why do we need to import dangerous pathogens into the country?

5. Is there a mechanism for alerting the public when potentially dangerous accidents or breaches of protocol (like smuggling at the border) occur?

You can watch the clip below and determine for yourself whether or not his questions were answered by Bloom and Brose.

Dan’s thoughts:

• The lab director and his assistant were there to assure the public that nothing untoward is happening at RML, that it is a wonderful asset to the valley and country, and that it upholds the highest safety standards. As for the incident in Detroit, well, we can’t say anything, and we’ll let our rock-solid and fair justice system handle that.

• Many people in the audience were supportive of the lab and didn’t seem at all concerned about the smuggling incident. I think this is part of the left/right divide. Whatever happened in Africa/Detroit/at RML is less important than opposing the Trumpian yahoos that come down to complain about the guvmint. Anti-Lab equals right-wing retardation, and Pro-Lab means pro Science!

• The uncomfortable seriousness of the issues that kept creeping up was offset by injecting humor and a ‘fun’ atmosphere into the proceedings.

• I haven’t studied the issue enough to claim that RML is a major part of the Covid scam and helped create and spread the 2020 SARS2 virus. But we may as well just trust these folks.

New NIAID director

After Fauci headed the agency for 40 years and built RML into a biodefense lab, this will be the third director in three years:

The NIH has appointed researcher John Powers III to lead its infectious disease institute on an acting basis, after weeks of being in leadership limbo following reports that the previous director, Jeffrey Taubenberger, had stepped down. (NYT reported he was fired).

Earlier this year, Powers, along with Bhattacharya and Taubenberger, put forth a “new vision” for NIAID. The paper outlined a transition away from biodefense research, previously one of its three top priorities, and HIV research.

The email sent to NIH staff states that the search for a permanent NIAID director “remains ongoing.”

Quay & MHC

Steven Quay’s name has been mentioned as a possible permanent replacement for the NIAID director, but he may continue his predecessor’s preference for defending Ralph Baric, despite limited evidence. While trying to exonerate Baric, Quay references MHC and immune evasion, which Baric researched and patented, to “improve or otherwise modulate an immune response in a subject without deleterious effect on the subject.”

Quay mentioned “9 factors” that exonerate Baric and incriminate Shi, but I’ll guess we will have to read his book to find those.

Questions for the old NIAID director: Fauci

Senator Rand Paul’s office will question Fauci soon, so here is a list of questions that need answers:

1. What was your $82M CREID contractor, Danielle Anderson, doing inside the Wuhan BSL4?

2. Why did her Duke-NUS boss, Linfa Wang, resign as director of Duke’s EID program on January 10, 2020?

3. What did you discuss with RML during your weekly teleconferences that began in January 2020 at the same time?

4. What did Munster present to you on January 27, 2020? Why were Munster and Baric’s names provided to you on January 27? You testified in 2022 that you barely knew them.

   

5. In 2016, you gave a joint presentation with Munster. Your NIAID office also offered Munster early tenure if he set up a live bat colony at RML. By 2018, Baric and Munster were infecting Egyptian fruit bats. Why are these bats the reservoir host for SARS2?

6. What was your “satellite campus” in Montana doing with both DARPA Preempt and DEFUSE projects in 2018-2019? What is a “targeted immune boosting treatment” of bats? How would Munster run “experimental trials on Rhinolophus bats,” which are found in Wuhan? Is this why you built a $125 million Rhinolophus breeding facility at RML?

   

7. In 2014, you told Francis Collins that RML was developing a “new vaccine platform [CMV] targeting wildlife vaccination.” But it was only tested in a mouse model and “very early stage of development.” How far advanced was this technology in 2019?

8. When Major Murphy leaked DARPA DEFUSE, he claimed you funded it. You claimed you did not. But in 2019, Baric and Peter Daszak resubmitted DEFUSE to NIAID for funding, which you approved in the R01 and U01 grants.

9. Why did you blind copy (bcc) John Mascola on your reply to Kristian Andersen? Andersen testified he, not you, wanted to contact the FBI.

   

10. Did you invite John Mascola to the February 1, 2020 call? Did you or Mascola invite Baric to the February 1 call? Baric testified that “NIH staff” invited him. Newly released emails show there was a February 2 meeting?

11. Why didn’t you contact the FBI? You testified that you did not, but Andersen wanted to contact the FBI on January 30.

    

12. Why did your NIAID office nominate Munster and Heinz Feldmann for the WHO Mission to China in February 2020?

13. During the NASEM meeting on February 3, 2020, why did Baric “attack” Andersen for bringing attention to the furin cleavage site? In 2018, RML published a paper about a furin cleavage site needed in a bat virus for “intracellular proteases.”

14. RML was cited in a recent Nature paper on the theory that COVID was a bat vaccine. Do you deny that COVID was a bat vaccine developed at RML?

    

15. Do you have an alibi for Rocky Mountain Lab?

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New details on the previously reported smallpox found in a closet

On July 1, 2014, an FDA investigator at NIH was inspecting a cold storage room in Building 29A, on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, when he made a chilling discovery: a vial labeled “variola.” It’s the virus that causes smallpox, which was eradicated by 1980, but was sitting unmonitored among 12 cardboard boxes. Alarmed, he immediately closed the box and washed his hands, but further inspection revealed additional vials of variola, along with other dangerous pathogens like Q fever and rickettsia.

Over the next several hours, the discovery rippled through the chain of command. FDA scientists Gerald Feldman and Jerry Weir notified Carolyn Wilson, who coordinated with Deborah Wilson from the NIH Division of Occupational Health and Safety. Wearing gloves and a lab coat, Dr. Carolyn Wilson carefully placed all 12 boxes into a larger container, sealed it, and hand-carried the material across campus to a BSL3 laboratory in Building 13 on the NIH campus in Bethesda. There, Dr. Deborah Wilson secured the material in a biosafety cabinet.

The material had sat unsecured in a shared cold room for an unknown period without detection. The FBI and CDC Division of Select Agents and Toxins (DSAT) were notified by early evening, and access logs later confirmed that no one entered the BSL3 lab until a joint CDC-FBI team began photo documentation and inventory six days later.

When the missing smallpox story was first reported a week later, on July 8, 2014, officials celebrated: an FDA scientist found the vials while cleaning, recognized the danger, and authorities contained them. It was later reported that the cache also contained dengue, influenza, Q fever, and rickettsia, likely collected between 1946 and 1964. The FDA destroyed 32 samples on-site, transported 279 to the Department of Homeland Security’s National Bioforensic Analysis Center, and sent 6 to the CDC.

D.A. Henderson, the researcher who led smallpox eradication, shrugged it off as typical, since virologists often “lose track” of specimens. Science magazine noted this wasn't the first time: other labs had quietly found forgotten smallpox samples in freezers, sparking fears of poorly secured bioweapons falling into terrorist hands.

Peter Jahrling, who was director of NIAID’s BSL4 lab at Fort Detrick, once joked about “keeping a retirement fund in his freezer in the form of a smallpox virus and selling it to the highest bidder.”

Fort Detrick pathogens lost under the freezer

In July 2016, a vial of cerebrospinal fluid from an Ebola-infected primate was discovered hidden under a freezer at NIAID’s Fort Detrick BSL4 lab during routine maintenance. The vial had apparently been dropped six months earlier during sample transfer and had gone unreported. Although the lab was thoroughly searched and no exposures occurred, the lapse prompted a federal report to CDC/DSAT. But it was never reported, until now.

Missing Ebola samples at the same NIAID lab

In September 2024, NIAID’s Fort Detrick Integrated Research Facility (IRF) reported that four vials of Ebola virus working stock had gone missing. Each tube held nearly a milliliter of one of the world’s deadliest pathogens. Investigators suspect the samples were simply “used but not documented” by a former staff member who has since left NIH.

But the paper trail was empty. The samples weren’t found, the lab notebooks offered no answers, and the data reviews provided no resolution. That forced NIH biosafety officials to escalate the issue: they flagged the incident to the Federal Select Agent Program. They prepared for the FBI to step in and locate the former staff member.

As one internal email put it, “We continue to believe this is truly an error and a result of poor adherence to documentation … rather than a nefarious action. But we need [FBI] help in trying to provide as much resolution to this incident as possible.”

Four missing tubes of Ebola in 2024. No accountability. The FBI and NIH closed the case after failing to find the missing tubes and referred to it as an “inventory discrepancy.”

Monkeypox spill at NIH

On December 15, 2017, a biosafety incident occurred in NIH’s BSL3 biolab (Building 33 on the Bethesda campus, next to Fauci’s Building 31) during the transfer of monkeypox cell cultures by a researcher. While moving five 6-well plates from a biosafety cabinet to an incubator, the top plate sloshed, and a few drops escaped onto the benchtop. The researcher immediately contained the spill, cleaned the area, and planned to submit the formal Form 3 documenting the incident. But we never heard about it, and I doubt most Americans knew there was a BSL3 on the NIH campus.

Another Building 33 incident

In November 2019, an animal caretaker at NIH Building 33 in Bethesda overloaded an autoclave with carcasses, exceeding its maximum weight limit. The excess waste was temporarily stored in a nonregistered freezer before being incinerated days later. No exposures or missing carcasses were reported, but the incident still triggered a mandatory CDC Form 3 submission as a “potential release.”

Form 3 reports were not publicly available until 2025, when the new administration began releasing federal biosafety incident records. Those disclosures later revealed 27 biosafety incidents in April 2025 alone, nearly one per day.

Same lab, another BSL3 accident

In January 2025, the NIH campus biolab (Building 33) experienced a brief air handler failure, leading to positive pressurization in four BSL3 suites. Staff in two labs were handling tuberculosis and SARS-CoV-2, but all materials remained sealed within biosafety cabinets. The NIH reported the incident to its Office of Science Policy, characterizing the risk as “negligible.”

Needlestick at NIH’s neighbor

Across the street from the NIH campus sits the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU). It’s the NIH’s counterpart to DARPA. USU scientists are connected to the Baric–Munster CREID network, and the campus hosts a Select Agent lab. Safety hasn’t always been perfect: in August 2009, a student there accidentally stuck herself with a needle containing Shiga toxin type 2 (a poison from E. coli). She survived without harm.

Who watches the watchers?

The Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) is the joint CDC–USDA regulatory program that oversees labs working with Select Agents and Toxins — the most dangerous pathogens (such as Ebola, anthrax, and SARS). FSAP conducts inspections to verify compliance with security, biosafety, and record-keeping requirements. FSAP is supposed to conduct unannounced inspections, but sends 1-3 day notices via email. That is plenty of warning time to clean up spills and organize records.

Unreported Plague incident near New York City

In March 2010, a scientist at the Public Health Research Institute (PHRI) in Newark, NJ, reported a potential needlestick with Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. He was infecting mice as part of a SUNY Stony Brook protocol.

Although the needle never broke skin, he felt enough pressure through two layers of gloves that officials treated it as a real exposure. He underwent immediate decontamination, was evaluated by occupational medicine and infectious disease specialists, and was placed on prophylactic antibiotics. The CDC was notified, and PHRI’s biosafety team launched a full review with retraining planned.

The researcher was shaken but healthy. Even a suspected prick with plague bacteria was enough to trigger a federal report and a cascade of medical oversight. The incident wound up in Ian Lipkin’s Columbia University inbox, but the case was closed since “We don’t need to report on potential incidents.”

From needlestick to guinea pig

In 2015, when an American scientist in Sierra Leone pricked himself with an Ebola-contaminated needle, a race across continents ensued. Standard vaccine protocols weren’t approved, leaving only an FDA Emergency Investigational New Drug (eIND) application. Emory University in Atlanta scrambled to secure approvals, while the NIH navigated consent and logistics. With the Sierra Leone ethics board monitoring and the CDC coordinating, a high dose of 100 million plaque-forming units (PFU) was ready but never administered.

Parts 1-3 unreported accidents

Parts 1–3 tell the same story. Plague without approval. Pathogens shipped to the wrong house. Needlesticks, monkey bites, torn spacesuits, missing Ebola, forgotten smallpox, and endless Form 3 filings. Every lab incident is dismissed as minor, isolated, and fully resolved. Yet their answer is more bureaucracy than biosecurity, with less transparency and more secrecy. For years, most of the above incidents remained hidden from public view. They weren’t reported then. They are now.

Reported biothreats in Wisconsin

In November 2013, two separate accidents shook Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka’s avian influenza lab at the University of Wisconsin.

On November 9, a researcher spilled highly pathogenic H5N1 inside an ABSL3+ lab. Investigators later discovered the scientist had two to three inches of bare skin exposed between his Tyvek suit and shoe covers. None of the liquid reportedly touched his skin, but NIH officials were blunt: bare skin in a BSL3+ lab handling engineered H5N1 was “unacceptable.” USDA’s Select Agent Program agreed.

Just days later, on November 16, 2013, a University of Wisconsin researcher stuck himself with a syringe carrying a recombinant H5N1 bird flu — spliced with the backbone of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic strain. The accident occurred inside an ABSL-3+ lab during tissue culture collection. He scrubbed the wound, reported it immediately, and was placed under home quarantine. His family was relocated to a hotel, he was prescribed Tamiflu, and daily swabs confirmed he never became sick.

But the fallout exposed deep problems. NIH discovered the procedure violated UW’s own rules banning needles for that purpose. Worse, Kawaoka’s lab had promised a “designated quarantine apartment” in its federal application, but none existed. The real plan was home isolation, with family members hustled away.

NIH officials were furious. In December 2013, they issued a letter halting all mammalian-transmissible H5N1 work in Madison until a proper quarantine facility was secured. Internal NIH emails circulated the warning: “No research with mammalian transmissible H5N1 strains may be carried out until this plan is operationalized.”

In 2018, Fauci was sitting next to Kawaoka while joking about the GoF “aggravation he causes me.”

Earlier this year, a University of Wisconsin lab technician, infuriated that he was passed over for promotion, poisoned his co-worker’s water bottle and shoes when they got the job instead.

Biosafety watermarks

Igor Rogozin’s 2025 letter calling for watermarked genomes has sparked interest. Others have claimed the idea of a watermark started in 2010. Steve Massey from the University of Puerto Rico has recently published a detailed paper.

Given these considerations, it is proposed that a short non-disruptive signature sequence be incorporated into the infectious clone virus genome, to ensure traceability. The sequence may be cryptographically signed, allowing attribution to the originating lab.

https://zenodo.org/records/19699408

Dr Quay Oped

Second, genetically watermark synthetic or manipulated pathogens. A small genomic change could identify a laboratory lineage without altering the organism’s biology. If an outbreak occurred near a lab, the watermark could identify that facility or exonerate it, protecting the public and responsible scientists alike. After covid, uncertainty about origin became corrosive to public trust. Federal guidelines can help address that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/06/09/covid-pandemic-warned-virus-research-ebola-is-reminder/

A recent Justice Department complaint alleging that virologists smuggled biological materials — including deactivated mpox virus, also known as monkeypox — into the United States from an African outbreak region underscores the point: The danger is not only what happens inside a lab, but how pathogens, samples and researchers move across the globe.

Quay released Chapter One from his new book, The Code as Witness, but doesn’t mention the ancestral strain WA1.

Senator Paul’s newly released documents

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026.06.05_FINAL-RELEASE.pdf

1. EcoHealth discussed having Munster hand-carry samples on a commercial flight.

   1. In a 2011 email about shipping samples from Congo to NIH’s RML, an EcoHealth Alliance researcher noted that the courier could not transport dry ice and floated an alternative: “take our chances” shipping some samples in lysis buffer and serum on wet ice, while Munster could “hand carry” another set in viral transport media on dry ice during a later trip. “I think you can take up to 2kg with you on commercial flights,” the researcher wrote.

2. “Just diagnostics” had a history within this research network.

   1. In 2013, NIH moved to distribute a Jordan strain of MERS coronavirus to a group of investigators that included Munster at RML and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. The shipment NIH sent to the Baric Lab was incorrectly labeled as “diagnostic, not infectious,” a mistake flagged as “a big problem.” The shipment also lacked an itemized list of contents and a dangerous goods declaration.

3. Officials previously warned Munster that improper shipments could become a national scandal.

   1. In December 2021, Munster told colleagues he would arrange an international shipment of the Omicron variant “without the involvement of NIH shipping.” An NIH official warned him, in writing, that doing so risked becoming “a Washington Post moment or congressional inquiry,” and noted that his facility, RML, had no approved shipping procedures on file.

4. Pathogen samples in this network had gone missing in transit before.

   1. In a 2022 email exchange with the subject line “inactivation diagnostic lysis buffers MPX,” a colleague asked Munster whether he had ever recovered his luggage; Munster replied, “[n]ope, so no Congo basin clade for now,” indicating the lost luggage had carried Congo Basin monkeypox material. In a separate 2022 exchange, a collaborator urged Munster to contact DARPA “asap” about sending coronavirus samples to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID); Munster replied that he would, adding that “numbnuts lost the first shipment.”

5. Returning from the Congo with monkeypox samples had happened before.

   1. In April 2024, Kwe wrote that he and his colleagues had “just returned from the Congo with DNA from MPOX positive samples.” A related NIH sequencing request logged 35 monkeypox virus DNA samples derived from human patients and answered “Yes” when asked whether the samples contained or were derived from a regulated “select agent.”

Senator Paul released Fauci’s emails to the intelligence community

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Fauci-Intel-Release-2026.06.11.pdf

2003: Fauci's feedback was incorporated into a published National Intelligence Council paper on SARS as a formal reviewer.

2003: Fauci received a copy of a CIA report titled "The Darker Bioweapons Future," which warned that pathogens could be genetically engineered to be more dangerous.

2007: Fauci was invited by an outside review panel commissioned to look at future directions for DTRA's countering weapons of mass destruction division.

2020: Fauci is invited to speak at JASON, a secretive external advisory group that advises the national security agencies.

An email from the then NIH director, Francis Collins, said the Proximal Origin paper is “work that Tony Fauci, Jeremy Farrar, Larry Tabak, and I helped with, but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly in the paper.”

Bat vaccine theory

Virologist Angie Rasmussen summarized the Munster situation well:

You might wonder why I’ve been avoiding having substantive conversations with my colleagues at NIAID, and especially Vincent Munster. I believe that the administration is going to accuse Vincent and Ralph Baric of starting the COVID-19 pandemic with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Zhengli Shi of the WIV. As best as I can tell, Senator Paul thinks that Vincent and Ralph, who is one of the most accomplished molecular coronavirologists in the world if not in history, GOFed up the virus. After getting proto-SARS-CoV-2 from WIV via EcoHealth Alliance, Ralph cloned the virus and inserted a furin cleavage site to make it more transmissible and pathogenic and Vincent serially passaged it through Rousettus aegyptiacus (Egyptian fruit bats). This is based exclusively on imaginative interpretation of cherry-picked emails from early 2020 in which Vincent was discussing the possibility of experimentally infecting R. aegyptiacus to study pathogenesis in a bat host, not serial passage. There’s also no reason to think serial passage would somehow result in a pandemic virus. Last I checked, February 2020 is too late to have made SARS-CoV-2 since the pandemic had already started by then. There’s no explanation about how, if Ralph and Vincent did make SARS-CoV-2, the virus somehow found its way back to Wuhan from North Carolina and Montana. There is no evidence any of this happened.

It won’t stop there. My friends and colleagues Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry may be accused of covering it up at former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci’s request. I may be accused of aiding the cover-up as well, along with co-authors on our papers showing repeatedly that the pandemic began via two zoonotic spillovers at the Huanan Seafood Market due to the wildlife trade, not a “lab leak.” I’ve discussed this before, but I wrote an explainer of what the evidence actually shows.

My comment on her Substack clearly stated that all other virologists are innocent and unaware of what happened in Wuhan. In 2019, Munster presented Egyptian fruit bats to DARPA for his self-spreading vaccine research, so he would use them for serial passage. But Angie gives Rand Paul a playbook for his next move:

Paul has a vendetta against Fauci, so he is alleging that Fauci is the biggest GOF virologist in the game. This is likely to find a pretext to prosecute Fauci for a crime not covered by President Joseph Biden’s preemptive pardon (granted to Fauci because of anticipated unfair prosecution). Paul can’t nail Fauci on anything that happened in the past, but that pardon does not cover any new “crimes” Fauci might commit. The back and forth about who is lying in 2022 is instructive in this regard.

By forcing Fauci to give a transcribed interview about Vincent and Kwe (and likely Ralph and EcoHealth Alliance and their grants) in a closed door setting with nobody present from the minority party, Paul is setting Fauci up for charges of perjury. This is, for Rand Paul, about revenge. But it’s about more than that. A lot more. It is about sticking a knife into the heart of American democracy.

Fauci is scheduled to testify before Paul in a closed-door Senate session “later this month.” We will have many questions.

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This week, the FBI charged Vincent Munster and his postdoc Kwe with smuggling monkeypox and lying about it. Upon arrival at U.S. customs:

Munster and Kwe were inspected and interviewed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials upon their arrival. CBP officers observed Kwe and Munster traveling with a large black plastic case. Munster and Kwe falsely told CBP officers that the black case contained diagnostics and testing equipment. But subsequent investigation by CBP and FBI agents revealed that the case actually contained 113 vials in Styrofoam coolers. As of the date of the complaint, the FBI has tested 20 of the 113 vials. Seventeen of them contained deactivated monkeypox virus, one contained the Chickenpox virus, and two contained only human DNA.

The criminal complaint paints a picture of a scientist accustomed to getting his way.

Kwe was selected for a secondary inspection by CBP. CBP officers did not have prior knowledge that Kwe was traveling with Munster. CBP officers approached Kwe at primary inspection and instructed him to retrieve his checked luggage for secondary inspection. CBP officers observed nervous behavior from Kwe. CBP officers observed Kwe retrieve a large black plastic case and place the case on a cart next to an unknown individual. CBP officers approached the unknown individual and identified him as Munster and learned that Munster and Kwe were co-travelers.

Munster also said that he had everything he needed and that this wasn’t his first time. He identified himself as the “guy in charge” and said that Kwe worked for him.

Upon arrival at the passport control area, Munster was instructed to access all required documentation. Munster replied, “Yes, yes, it’s all in my laptop, but you won’t need them. I do this all the time.”

On Friday, Senator Rand Paul’s office released an explosive FOIA that confirmed this wasn’t the first time Munster and Kwe had smuggled monkeypox in their luggage.

In a 2022 email exchange with the subject line “inactivation diagnostic lysis buffers MPX,” a colleague asked Munster whether he had ever recovered his luggage; Munster replied, “nope, so no Congo basin clade for now,” indicating the lost luggage had carried Congo Basin monkeypox material.

In April 2024, Kwe wrote that he and his colleagues had “just returned from the Congo with DNA from MPOX positive samples.” A related NIH sequencing request logged 35 monkeypox virus DNA samples derived from human patients and answered “Yes” when asked whether the samples contained or were derived from a regulated “select agent.”

Virologist Angie Rasmussen believes Munster is innocent, but the smuggling charges are “pretextual” for bigger charges, such as creating COVID or Fauci’s involvement with RML. But big-time crooks are never charged with the crime; it’s always the cover-up. Munster appears to have lied or misled the CBP agents when they asked him to write down what was in the 113 vials.

Two anonymous virologists told me they agreed with Rasmussen because monkeypox was inactive, but they said Munster’s handwritten note could be damning. It goes into detail about primers, dNTPs, etc., yet makes no mention of viral DNA or inactivated virus. That’s an attempt to deceive, even if he was not violating any laws regarding the transport of viruses.

To me and others, Munster “smuggles” monkeypox samples into the country under the guise of a diagnostic test. Why? It erases the chain of custody and paperwork for storing select agents. One detail that strengthens the government’s case is the email we quoted above. In 2024, Kwe wrote:

“We just returned from the Congo with DNA from MPOX positive samples, and we’re eager to perform full genome sequencing...”

Part 2: Unreported lies and deception

Last week, Part 1 detailed RML’s many failures in Hamilton, Montana. Part 2 exposes who enabled them. By 2026, Munster faced federal charges for monkeypox smuggling. But the smuggling was his only visible crime. Munster’s story began long before his vials landed at a U.S. airport.

Fauci’s office bet on Munster

By 2015, Fauci’s NIAID was jealous of the live bat colony at the US CDC in Atlanta, Georgia. The CDC maintained a colony of Egyptian fruit bats, born and raised in captivity, for several novel experiments. CDC scientists infected the African bats with Marburg to prove they were the reservoir host.

In 2016, Fauci’s #2, Hugh Auchincloss, then acting director of intramural research, offered Munster early tenure if he set up the live bat lab at RML. Fauci’s office in Bethesda, Maryland, knew RML was a bureaucracy run by veterinarians, not virologists. Munster quickly began clashing with every vet in the Montana building, demanding that the bat colony be set up so he could achieve his goals. Munster’s confrontational attitude surfaced, but Fauci had Munster’s back, even giving a joint 2016 presentation with him on aerosolized Ebola and coronaviruses.

By 2018, Munster lost the battle against the Montana bureaucracy, so he outsourced the bat breeding to Colorado State University. By 2025, the new $125 million bat lab would be built on the RML campus, and bats would be moved to Montana. But this logistical quirk led to our smoking-gun email proving that Munster’s Egyptian fruit bats are the SARS2 reservoir host. Ironically, NIAID announced Munster’s tenure in 2020 during the pandemic he helped create.

Wrong number at the wrong time

The NIH’s Behavioral Health Screen for BSL4 workers was created after a Fort Detrick virologist, Bruce Ivins, mailed anthrax letters. He killed five Americans and frightened the public more than 9/11. The NIH program screens for depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and unsafe attitudes. It was designed to catch insider threats before they occur.

In August 2024, the NIH’s biosafety office scheduled a routine behavioral health screening for one of RML’s BSL4 staff members. These screenings are mandatory for anyone handling select agents or toxins. But when the official dialed in for the call, the number didn’t reach the staff member—it rang straight through to Munster’s personal cell phone.

Annoyed, he shot back an email: Why was his private number listed under someone else’s appointment? The slip seemed minor, but if the system can’t keep phone numbers straight, what else might be falling through the cracks?

Where is Munster’s headspace?

In July 2024, Munster wasn’t worried about the dangers of aerosolized Ebola leaking from his BSL4. He was worried about his paycheck. In a midnight email to NIAID brass, Munster raged that principal investigators in Montana were paid tens of thousands less than their cushier Bethesda peers (he apparently had no clue about the cost-of-living factor). He accused NIAID of favoritism, hidden discrimination, and protecting “very senior unproductive investigators.”

Munster then accused the Division of Intramural Research of misusing Title 42—the NIH’s special hiring authority meant to reward and retain top scientists—saying it only seemed to protect a “cohort with a lack of gender and racial diversity.” He claimed his early tenure was deliberately blocked in 2016–17, that his salary lagged behind peers despite his output, and that even his last raise was nullified by bureaucratic sleight of hand.

This man, who created COVID, was furious that his salary bracket wasn’t high enough. He called NIAID’s internal review system a sham, complained that his “outstanding” ratings were meaningless, and whined that NIAID refused to recognize his “roles, responsibilities and achievements.”

Munster confides his guilt to colleagues

In early 2024, a reporter contacted Munster for comment on Will Jones’s article for The Daily Sceptic. The article identified Munster as the creator of COVID, citing my Substack. Munster didn’t reply but forwarded the article to a few friends and colleagues and said: It’s ok if you don’t want to associate with me. Only one replied, offering her condolences on the conspiracy theory. Munster did the same for his bosses at NIAID in Bethesda, but again, only one replied and apologized for the situation.

A year later, the article went viral and circulated around the office. Munster replied, “Can you refrain from sending this around? I really don’t need to know all the BS written about me. I’m already well aware.” Munster added, “At least there’s nothing new.”

Fauci’s lie

Early in the pandemic, NIH director Francis Collins was suspicious of RML’s non-airborne study on COVID because Munster used a pure viral prep rather than an in vivo model. He asked Fauci who NIAID’s mink expert is and said, “I’m having flashbacks to the sneezing ferrets.”

Collins was referencing a 2012 ferret transmission study that triggered a New York Times headline: “An Engineered Doomsday.” Munster was a co-author on that paper.

Fauci replied: Jeffrey Taubenberger on ferrets, but didn’t mention mink in RML. By 2016, Munster was already running mink transmission experiments in these cages. He was also aerosolizing Ebola in ferrets and monkeypox in prairie dogs using these same cages.

Who is calling the shots?

In June 2024, Munster blindsided NIH leadership with a stunning announcement: H5N1 avian influenza would no longer be subject to Select Agent regulations. This meant that USDA, FBI, and FSAP oversight would no longer apply, and the virus could be handled in BSL3 labs rather than BSL4.

Acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak and his deputy, Lyric Jorgenson, were caught off guard by the declaration. Weeks later, Jorgenson and colleagues pressed Munster with pointed questions:

1. How much money is going toward field work (farm animals/bats/other) that contributes to viral discovery and characterization?

2. Provide concrete examples of outputs from this work, such as specific countermeasures and diagnostic tests, to help the interagency understand the beneficial outcomes this research has produced.

The concern was apparent: if NIH was going to permit dangerous pathogens like H5N1 to be studied under looser rules, it needed to justify this with something more than Munster’s promise of “viral discovery.”

Munster’s ties to EcoHealth and Wuhan?

Munster is much closer to former EcoHealth Vice Presidents Jon Epstein and Kevin Olival than to Peter Daszak. Munster, Epstein, and Olival are similar in age, exchanging dozens of emails and sharing information and bat samples. In 2015, Munster traveled to Wuhan for a virology conference.

In a 2011 email about shipping samples from Congo to RML, Epstein from EcoHealth noted that the courier could not transport dry ice and floated an alternative: “take our chances” shipping some samples in lysis buffer and serum on wet ice, while Munster could “hand carry” another set in viral transport media on dry ice during a later trip. “I think you can take up to 2kg with you on commercial flights,” Epstein wrote.

Warm bat blood

In 2018, Munster and Kevin Olival set up Material Transfer Agreements for coronavirus samples on a Pentagon bat project. After capturing the bats, they used a heating pad to warm the bats’ blood to ease extraction with a needle.

By February 2024, that collaboration had become a liability. A PNAS editorial board member reached out to Munster, asking him to serve as handling editor for EcoHealth’s submission. His task: sift through the manuscript, recommend three to five reviewers, and enforce a 67% rejection rate at initial screening. Administrative work would be handled “for him,” yet judgment and oversight rested squarely on his shoulders.

It’s a reminder that even journal peer review is entwined with layers of entangling alliances. But Munster’s name is nowhere on this EcoHealth bat paper, which was published in Nature, but he could have killed the publication (if EcoHealth said anything bat about him). Munster was also listed as a reference for an August 2025 EcoHealth bat paper, but his name appears nowhere in the text.

Munster lied to the NIH director’s office?

In October 2024, just weeks after my WA1 survey question, Tabak’s office sent Munster a question regarding his relationship with EcoHealth. In particular, a Nipah bat vaccine grant would involve EcoHealth (Jon Epstein) sending Munster bats and bat samples. Munster would create Nipah bat vaccines for EcoHealth, but he dodged the question by discussing Australian bat labs.

Tabak was concerned that a member of Congress might mention Munster and RML during the November 2024 hearing. It didn’t happen, as the David Morens topic dominated the debate.

Letter from US Senators

A year earlier, in November 2023, Senators Ernst and Schmitt asked NAID about what really goes on at RML. An internal scramble began. Should RML virologists mention their COVID-19 vaccine work? Too inflammatory. Maybe Ebola? Better. Prion diagnostics? Even safer. Anything but the BSL4, the bat colonies, or the coronavirus experiments that might raise eyebrows. Munster pushed Ebola as the showcase achievement. Heinz Feldmann preferred prions and bacteria—anything “less inflammatory.” In other words, RML’s own virologists admit the most controversial work is the very research they most want to downplay.

Bats, bureaucrats, and containment strategy

In June 2024, a reporter from Science sent Munster a list of uncomfortable questions. She wanted to know how the suspension of EcoHealth’s funding would affect the bat vivarium being built at Colorado State University, and whether it was really safe to import bats that carry Nipah and coronaviruses. She also asked the obvious follow-ups: what’s the value of this new bat lab, what could be studied at the RML BSL4 facility that can’t be done elsewhere, and why should the public believe it’s safe? Straightforward questions. But inside the NIAID communications department, those questions triggered the equivalent of a five-alarm fire drill.

First came Munster, who did what he does: jot down blunt answers. Yes, bat capture could be handled by staff on the ground overseas with the proper training. Yes, CSU already had a small colony (including Munster’s Egyptian fruit bats, the reservoir host for SARS2). But CSU was expanding into a new NIAID-funded facility. Yes, there were domestic groups (zoos) that could help supply animals, but they no longer sell to biolabs. The answers were dry but direct.

Then came the NIAID and RML communications officers. Suddenly, the draft answers weren’t good enough. Munster was instructed to focus on “research questions only,” avoid mentioning sensitive grant details, and frame their work in terms of “value to pandemic preparedness.” Talking points had to be filtered through multiple layers of communications staff, then sent to higher-level press leads, and finally pre-cleared by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Even basic scientific explanations had to be rewritten so senior officials—who might not grasp the research—would feel “comfortable” approving them. Live interviews? Too risky. Written responses only so that every word could be controlled.

By the end of the week, the machinery had done its job. The Science reporter never got unvarnished answers from Munster, who was actually running the bat program. She got sanitized talking points, polished by press handlers and lawyers, stripped of anything that might connect real science to real risk.

The irony is rich: bats meant for a BSL4 containment lab were less tightly managed than the words coming out of NIAID. Scientists may control viruses with steel doors and HEPA filters, but bureaucrats control information with clearance chains and red pens. The public sees only what survives both.

Munster’s PR response to Science

The RML vivarium is to support the complete RML experimental animal program (e.g., vaccine development and other countermeasures), so in that sense, it is conceptually completely separated from the CSU vivarium, which is only focused on bats. The RML vivarium will function as an integrated veterinary research facility, which will include imaging, pathology, holding space, etc. The CSU vivarium is envisioned to become the basis of a central bat research program, something which currently does not exist in the US (or globally). Given the very specific requirements of bat species and to strengthen US-based research programs, a centralized center of bat research was envisioned.

For RML and my research interest, specifically having continuous access to laboratory colonies of these animals would allow us, on one hand, to develop specific tools to understand genetic, molecular, and immunological factors underlying very specific host-pathogen interactions. In particular it would allow us to compare the pathophysiology of infections with maximum containment pathogens in bats and compare those with traditional animal models (e.g. mice and hamsters) to understand specific host-pathogen interactions (e.g. susceptible vs non susceptible, disease vs asymptomatic, shedding profiles etc.). Additionally, these models would allow us to make inferences on the population level of the data we are generating with collaborators (e.g. our work in Bangladesh and Nipah virus, with a large group of collaborators like ICCDR,B and US based investigators). One of the additional goals is also to have a broadly available, well characterized bat species (Artibeus jamaicensis) to have it as an equivalent of mouse models, with a large variety of different reagents such as cell lines, organoids, mAbs, fully annotated genome, cellular flow panels, host transcriptomics and single cell sequencing, metabolomics, microbiome etc. this is something Dr. Schountz and my team have been working on over the last decade.

From RMLs, the work would strengthen our natural reservoir research lines of several PIs, which have historically been one of the spear points of RML’s research, including tick work. In that sense, the bats would be an important addition to supplement our work in domestic and non-domestic rodent species to understand Hantavirus (deer mouse), Lassa virus (multimammate rat), and more recently, Mpox (multimammate rat and dormouse), and use this to understand Nipah virus and Ebola virus better.

Munster didn’t mention that his hamster cages were designed to transmit disease, and are a SARS2 reservoir host.

An RML BS4 lab accident

In February 2025, a BSL4 worker tore their glove while inside a hot zone full of ferrets infected with Ebola. The 1/2-inch tear occurred while peeling off duct tape. Although two inner gloves stayed intact and positive pressure kept air flowing out, the breach was severe enough to trigger a federal incident report (Form 3).

The RML safety director claimed the exposure risk was “negligible.” But it was open cages of Ebola-infected ferrets, duct tape stuck to a spacesuit, and a ripped glove.

Unreported gas chamber incident

In October 2024, Munster’s postdoc at RML found herself trapped in the middle of a live fumigation. She had suited up to re-enter BSL4 to check on prairie dogs, only to realize too late that the decontamination cycle in the entry chamber had already begun. With the shower door sealed behind her, the other door left open, and no working phone in sight, she was locked inside as formaldehyde gas filled the air. Unsure whether her positive-pressure suit could withstand the chemical, she cranked her ventilation to maximum and clung to her air supply, waiting out the cycle in silence.

Minutes later, colleagues rushed to the scene, pulled her out, and checked her suit. She felt only a sting of formaldehyde as she peeled it off. RML medical staff examined her and determined she was unharmed. Within hours, her supervisor and biosafety officers reassured her that everything had been handled “well” and that the suit was “safe for continued service.”

Hot RML animals

In 2024, a planned transmission study by Munster encountered a setback when the approved cages were unavailable, and the animals were already “hot.” It’s lab slang. A “hot” animal contains a live infectious agent and must be handled under strict biosafety rules.

The only workaround was to use old guinea pig cages, but under stricter rules: no overnight co-housing, constant monitoring for hours, and experiments aborted at the first sign of fighting. Scientists called it “complicated and scientifically suboptimal,” but decided to press ahead anyway.

Australia vs. America: Virus Edition

Munster attempted to obtain virus samples from a BSL4 facility in Australia. However, moving a bat virus in Australia requires Olympic-level paperwork. Australia’s NIAID equivalent, CSIRO, won’t budge on material transfer agreements (MTAs). Labs must comply with the Convention on Biological Diversity, honor the Nagoya Protocol, and adhere to all national and local regulations.

In the U.S., negotiations collapsed because requiring Munster to “warrant” compliance with laws constitutes illegal indemnification under the Anti-Deficiency Act. Translation: The American system is so loose that U.S. labs can’t even promise to follow their own rules without triggering a legal technicality.

DEFUSE denials

By spring 2024, even routine grant paperwork had turned into a political minefield. A NIAID staffer forwarded Munster urgent questions from Rand Paul’s Senate office: Please confirm—no one here touched this DEFUSE thing, right?

The attachment came from DARPA’s Proposer’s Day, when biodefense vendors play musical chairs. Munster’s reply was defensive and curt: his lab had nothing to do with it, and EcoHealth had used his name without permission. Later, DRASTIC found a detailed DEFUSE draft with Munster’s name on it in an EcoHealth file marked “not to be shared with Congress.”

RML transparency?

In October 2024, Munster attempted to black out 30 pages of a nearly 200-page DARPA PREEMPT report before NIAID sent it to the Department of Defense. Feldmann objected to the animal details, while others worried the full ASP (Animal Study Proposal) would be exposed.

Let’s end on a high note with Munster calling in sick!

In December 2024, Munster called in sick with a dry cough and fever after international travel. NIAID’s biosafety bureaucracy learned about it the same way we did—from an email. The system was designed by scientists. It’s policed by scientists. And Munster proved it works exactly as intended.

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Fauci kept a secret

In 2011, RML quietly broke one of the most serious rules in U.S. biosecurity. A Principal Investigator engineered Yersinia pestis, a plague bacterium resistant to multiple antibiotics. Such work requires prior approval from the US CDC’s Division of Select Agents and Toxins (DSAT). RML never had it.

The violations weren’t covert. The unauthorized plague strains were openly listed in the methods sections of published papers. They came to light only during a DSAT inspection in November 2011, when CDC inspectors asked about the resistant strains. Days later, RML’s biosafety officer admitted they existed but claimed they’d already been destroyed.

By December 2011, DSAT referred the case to the HHS Inspector General, citing violations of 42 CFR 73.13. The NIH Director, Francis Collins, didn’t hear about it from his own agency. Collins first learned of the problem from the CDC Director’s morning briefing email, sent by Tom Frieden. Only then did Fauci scramble to explain that RML’s work had been “an unfortunate situation,” not deliberate misconduct.

The CDC, meanwhile, had just given RML a glowing safety review, praising its oversight as “highly laudatory.” In other words, plague strains were illegally engineered, yet Fauci himself dismissed the incident as little more than a bureaucratic hiccup.

Early next year, in 2012, Fauci received an email from the NIAID public relations department regarding an incident:

Dr. Fauci, in case the situation at RML becomes public, we have prepared the language below for possible use in response to media/congressional inquiries, should we receive them. We may not need this, but we should be prepared.

The illicit plague experiment was never reported until now, along with many more.

Wrong shipping address

In 2015, RML lost control of a package of biological samples shipped from Japan. Instead of arriving at its secure facility in Hamilton, Montana, the box was left on the doorstep of a random home 50 miles away in Missoula. The box was labeled “dangerous goods,” but no signature was required.

The homeowner returned, found the biohazard box, and called the sheriff. Only then did RML security officers collect what was supposed to be under lock and key the entire time. RML chief virologist, Heinz Feldmann, didn’t push back hard on the World Courier shipper. Why? Because FedEx and others had already stopped handling Select Agents like SARS, and Feldmann didn’t want to lose another carrier.

Feldmann’s onetime postdoc, Vincent Munster, conveniently blamed regulations: under DSAT (the Division of Select Agents and Toxins) rules, labs can’t hold on to select agent samples indefinitely. They must be transferred or destroyed. That means constant turnover and more chances for packages of pathogens to wind up on the wrong doorstep.

Munster’s inspection report

In June 2018, CDC inspectors caught Munster handling MERS-CoV RNA in a BSL2 positive-strand room, but it’s a BSL3 virus. The inspectors requested permit updates to authorize the BSL2 work. Munster did not have what Baric’s lab did: a select agent BSL2.

RML staff, meanwhile, confused the issue with Nipah virus paperwork, debating whether it was a Select Agent or just needed “Form 2,” before casually updating the MERS permit. Munster kept “trying to fight this.”

The Ebola needle that pierced 3 gloves

On the morning of February 3, 2015, a “highly experienced” BSL4 scientist at RML was finishing routine work on mice infected with mouse-adapted Ebola more than a week earlier. The animals were on the mend and still receiving an injectable treatment.

As the scientist uncapped a syringe, their hand slipped, and the clean needle punctured the outer suit glove, both inner gloves, and the skin of their finger, drawing blood. The co-worker calmly completed the procedure while the injured researcher removed the pressurized suit, scrubbed the wound, and notified biosafety officials.

The risk assessment came back as “negligible” since the needle was clean, the animals were recovering, and viral shedding was thought to be minimal. Still, the incident triggered NIH’s medical surveillance plan, but none of this was reported until now.

SSN

Not all scandals at RML involved pathogens or monkey bites. Sometimes it was sheer incompetence. In December 2015, a contractor at RML sent an all-staff email that included an employee’s personal health enrollment form. The form included Social Security numbers.

Piggybacking

In July 2015, a staffer was caught walking into the RML animal facility, holding another person’s badge, to toss animal carcasses into a freezer. The staffer wasn’t authorized to enter that RML building, so the badge incident was called “piggybacking.”

The response was pure bureaucracy: a facilities manager wrote a report, HR debated “precedent” and “severity,” and senior staff concluded it was “no different from the Strober incident.” In other words, this wasn’t the first time.

Lights out at RML

In December 2016, RML’s BSL4 Building 28 briefly flirted with chaos when a transformer experienced a 40,000-amp surge, shutting down power for eight minutes. Alarms screamed across freezers, incubators, and critical equipment as staff ran around in controlled panic.

In the negative-pressure BSL4 animal rooms, air pressure briefly flipped positive, a tiny reminder that even the most “secure” labs are one false reading away from catastrophe. No animals died, and no pathogens escaped, but the power went out three times over one weekend. The incident reached Fauci’s inbox, where it was buried.

Splash zone

In the same month, December 2016, a researcher dropped a 24-well plate into a biohazard bag and felt a small splash on their cheek. Although the liquid was likely harmless PBS or water, the bag also contained a recombinant Salmonella typhimurium strain. The researcher was wearing proper PPE and was immediately placed under medical surveillance.

A Nipah needlestick at RML

In July 2017, a researcher at RML stuck themselves with a needle during a Nipah virus experiment. The syringe was clean and uncontaminated, but the incident triggered a cascade of notifications. The CDC, DSAT, and NIH leadership were alerted within hours, but the public was not. Feldmann and Munster’s DIR boss, Steve Holland, notified Fauci, who replied, “Thanks, Steve. Please keep me posted.”

The unnamed worker was placed on a three-week medical watch for fever. NIH officials downplayed the risk, but even a “non-infected” stick inside a high-containment lab working on one of the world’s deadliest viruses is treated as a state secret.

Protesting a reportable incident at RML

In 2017, RML disputed a biosafety inspection observation. The issue centered on a minor BSL4 lab incident on March 9, 2017, when a researcher’s glove developed a pinhole while working with a bioagent. RML argued that the incident posed “no risk” and that a Form 3 was unnecessary. The form is used to report the theft, loss, or release of select agents.

The Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) disagreed. Their review found that RML could not prove that no bioagent or contaminated air was present at the time of the incident. The pinhole in the positive-pressure suit compromised its protective integrity, creating a potential exposure risk. Similar past incidents at RML had resulted in Form 3 submissions.

FSAP cited scientific evidence highlighting the dangers of even minor tears in positive-pressure suits, reinforcing the potential risk. Ultimately, FSAP denied RML’s dispute, required corrective action, and left the option to appeal open.

Holes in RML spacesuits

In May 2017, an RML lab worker in a high-containment ABSL-4 animal room discovered a one-inch tear in her suit after her foot was soaked with disinfectant during the decontamination shower. The animals were in open pens, one of which carried a Tier 1 select agent. No direct contact occurred, and the risk of exposure was very low. Form 3 was duly filed. But we never heard about it until now.

2018 rules loosen Form 3 reports

Federal oversight of the most dangerous pathogens has a certain theatrical quality. Spills inside a biosafety cabinet? Non-news. Needlesticks with non-contagious agents? Who cares. The agent involved doesn’t even need to be named, just categorized as bacterial, viral, or “other.”

In June 2018, Gerald Epstein, Assistant Director for Biosecurity and Emerging Technologies at the White House OSTP, sent a memo to the Biosafety and Select Agent Toxins (BSAT) members:

I have attached the version of the BSAT incident reporting policy and template that will be circulated for review prior to the next BSAT Policy Coordination Committee (PCC). Since it was last widely circulated, I have been working with individual departments, particularly Department of Defense, on certain aspects of it. In this version:

1. The threshold for publicly reporting an incident is that it pose “significant risk of occupational, public, or environmental exposure.” This definition is meant to capture incidents that surrounding communities would have reason to care about; it is not tied to Form 3 reporting and is not intended to capture incidents that may be violations of protocol or good laboratory practice but do not put anyone at risk. Spilling an agent within a biosafety cabinet, for example, would not be reportable. Note that occupational exposures are included, even if they could not lead to public exposure (i.e,. a needle stick with a non-contagious agent). It is also not necessary that occupational or public exposure be confirmed, so long as there was “significant risk” of such exposure.

2. The agent involved in an incident is not required to be identified, but rather only the “type of agent” (i.e., bacterial, viral, etc.).

3. The template “or its equivalent” can be used; if a laboratory already has an incident reporting system that is consistent with this policy, it can continue to use it.

4. Incidents shall be reported on at least a monthly basis; a facility that already provides monthly incident reports of a type and level of detail described in the template can consider itself as in compliance with the policy.

5. The template asks for some measure of context to be provided to give some recognition of the rate at which incidents occur. The context measure is not specified, since facilities may differ in the type of information they have available to characterize overall laboratory use, but presenting incident rates per laboratory entry, or per person-hour of operation, would be useful.

As in previous versions, this policy only applies to federal facilities working with select agents and toxins. The expectation is that non-federal facilities may wish to follow suit, but there has been no policy decision to require them to.

This Friday will be my last day at OSTP, so I am not in a position to solicit comments. I hope I have been able to resolve all agency critical comments in this version, but if your agency will require changes before your PCC member can approve this, please contact Hillary Carter at the National Security Council prior to the July 19 subPCC. Even if the policy and template are approved as is, note that someone whose Word or PDF skills are greater than mine will have to turn this Word document into a fillable PDF form – the blank boxes in this version do not accept text. And if anyone can figure out how to remove the completely blank page at the end of the document, I’m sure there are trees to be saved as a result.

The 2018 email reads like a group of bureaucrats trying to standardize the PR side of lab accidents. The debate wasn’t whether incidents occur, but which incidents the public deserves to hear about. Under that secretive system, Form 3 reports largely disappeared from public view.

2025 reversal

In September 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reversed that policy and ordered federal labs (RML, Fort Detrick, NIH campus) to disclose Form 3 incidents. Two months later, a newly released Form 3 revealed the mysterious monkey-bite incident at RML. That disclosure led to a whistleblower complaint alleging a broader NIAID cover-up, Munster’s removal from the laboratory, and RFK Jr’s public statement: “We sent the referral to the FBI immediately. I assume [Munster] is going to prison.”

Broken pipes

In August 2018, RML had another “incident” to quietly file away. This time it wasn’t a monkey bite or a needlestick. A propylene glycol coolant pipe burst in the guinea pig room, dumping roughly 100 gallons of liquid onto the floor. The guinea pigs survived, though they had to be evacuated while cleanup crews mopped up the spill.

Pigsty biolab

At RML, even the trash tells a story. In March 2019, just before a DSAT inspection, RML’s BSL4 suites were found littered with pipette tips, wrappers, and bottle caps. It sounded like a drug den rather than a maximum-containment facility.

Managers scolded researchers for sloppiness, while RML staff countered that extra cleaning would only increase biosafety risks. But the most revealing line came from Munster, who warned colleagues not to hash this out over email because FOIA requests could “take things out of context.”

The cooler of doom

At RML, the walk-in cooler looks more like a chaotic storage area than a controlled environment. Shelves are blocked, samples are on the floor, and trip hazards are everywhere. Their solution? A meeting about new shelving. Because nothing says biosafety like debating storage while pathogens sit on the floor.

The TB Turf War

By 2017, RML had become a stage for bureaucratic knife fights. An email trail shows senior staff debating control of a new tuberculosis project. One faction wanted a shiny, semi-autonomous consortium under a different office; another shot back that this violated NIH’s own manual and would only appease a notoriously difficult personality.

Everyone cited expertise, safety, or “team effort,” but the email drips with first-person singular pronouns: I conceived, I developed, I hired. It’s less about science and more about who gets to wear the crown in the RML animal kingdom. The deer and mink are pawns. While the public hears about “global health missions” and “pandemic preparedness,” inside the lab walls, the white coats are caught up in bureaucratic rivalries and personal vendettas.

More holes and jokes about spacesuits

In 2018, the spacesuits, meant to contain the deadliest pathogens on the planet, were failing at the seams. The weak point? Lab workers wore Crocs inside their suits. Tiny tears only appeared when the Crocs were removed before entering the chemical shower.

Staff patched the seams with duct tape and hoped the manufacturer would come up with a real solution. Heinz Feldmann’s primary concern with switching to a “booted” design was the difficulty of cleaning the tread and the risk of tracking bedding and feces into the suit room. This was a problem that Fort Detrick (NIAID’s IRF) solved with shoe covers and boot brushes.

RML director, Marshall Bloom, couldn’t resist the irony: his 20-year-old Gore-Tex waders, costing a fraction of these multi-thousand-dollar suits, outlasted them all. “I told my friend who owns Simms Waders he should try making the suits,” he joked, prompting another to quip, “Sounds like we need to hire Dr. Scholls onto the staff.”

Rationing spacesuits

RML spends $1.3 million every five years just for BSL4 spacesuits, which are so scarce they’re rationed by size. Since COVID, Munster’s lab has doubled in budget, salaries, and space, swelling from a couple of postdocs to a full team.

Breakroom meltdown

In May 2018, during a rehiring session for lab contractors at RML, one of the HR reps allegedly lost control. According to NIH’s own Animal Program Director, a contractor manager “charged” at a technician, got in her face, pointed, and yelled, “Be careful what you say” and “Tread lightly.” The intimidation was loud enough to be heard in offices down the hall.

This was happening in the animal BSL3. Employees described feeling “afraid” and “intimidated.” An NIH vet dryly noted that this behavior was “especially egregious” in such an environment. The contractor’s leadership—senior VP, HR director, and operations director—was present but didn’t intervene or apologize; they just let it hang there.

The junior staffers were left to consider calling NIH’s Civil program for protection against workplace bullying. In the end, the email went into the NIH system like so many others: another “incident report” buried in the bureaucratic paper trail.

PR alarms

In late 2023, some bad press about RML was making staff nervous. In early 2024, Principal Investigators (PIs) were summoned to a “quarterly meeting” to coordinate responses to negative press coverage, including coverage questioning RML’s bat experiments and biosecurity. This was an internal discussion on how to spin the White Coat Waste story about the Baric-Munster bat vaccine paper. Munster replied, “I’ll be there!”

RML alarms

At RML, a plastic cover on an oil separator in the BSL4 air system ruptured, causing a temporary loss of control air. This depressurized the APR (Air Purifying Respirator) door gaskets, triggering alarms, though magnetic locks kept the doors closed. No one was in the lab, and rodents infected with high-risk viruses were safely housed in microisolator cages.

RML activated its Incident Command System and decontaminated the adjacent corridor with formaldehyde “out of an abundance of caution.” The incident was reported via CDC Form 3, but was never disclosed until now.

Good news

Your tax dollars paid for these labs, the spacesuits that tear, and the duct tape to repair them. Staff filled out the incident reports, but they vanish into the NIH system and PR strategy meetings.

As of September 2025, the NIH finally posted its IBC meeting minutes. The NIH campus lab in Bethesda, Maryland, reported 27 biosafety incidents in one month, which is one per day. RML reported just one. But there were many more going back many years.

Feldmann has since moved to Fort Detrick. Munster’s name was deleted from the HHS directory and is under FBI investigation. Jeffrey Taubenberger was demoted after his brief tenure at NIAID.

Part 2 will follow their trails.

Accountability? Jessica McCormick-Ell, NIH director of the Division of Occupational Health and Safety, was asked for comment, but she never responded. Part 2 will show why.

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Last week, Taubenberger was scheduled to appear alongside NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Bhattacharya did not refute the claim that Taubenberger was no longer serving as NIAID director.

The reason was not given, but the date coincides with David Morens’ indictment on April 28, 2026. Morens exchanged numerous lab leak emails with Taubenberger, and they enlisted Peter Daszak and Ralph Baric.

Taubenberger claimed he was merely cc’d on emails involving Daszak, Morens, and Fauci.

In reality, Taubenberger (in a gray suit) drafted the lab-leak cover-up papers himself. He blamed “human behavior,” not virologists playing God in labs.

Like Baric, most of my readers could see Taubenberger's resignation coming.

So the question is, who replaces Taubenberger, and which questions to ask him?

Steven Quay

Fellow lab leaker Dr. Steven Quay has emerged as a candidate for NIAID director.

Quay still blames Shi Zhengli. He was once a critic of Baric and Rocky Mountain Lab, which was brave, until a promotion appeared on the horizon. Now Quay’s critical tweets are deleted, and he praises Baric. Power has a remarkable way of cleaning house with its critics.

Quay even deleted a tweet that a sitting U.S. Senator referenced in a 2024 letter to RML about Munster’s research. That’s not cleaning up a resume. That’s burying evidence of a spine.

Because RML is a NIAID-run lab, unlike UNC, we ask the future director to address the following issues.

My open letter to the new NIAID director

Hundreds of scientists have been asked to explain why this Old World virus, SARS-CoV-2, spreads so efficiently among New World lab animals. Since no one has answered, this letter seeks to address that biological question.

The Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) began a century ago as a tent camp to study Rocky Mountain spotted fever. By 2006, NIAID Director Tony Fauci was visiting the construction site of RML’s new BSL4 facility. Today, virologists from around the world work on animal vaccines in Hamilton, Montana.

Because Fort Detrick’s BSL4 requires U.S. citizenship for security clearances, many foreign virologists are drawn to RML’s civilian research, which focuses on American reservoir-host models (e.g., white-tailed deer).

U.S.-trained veterinarians, by contrast, approach the same research through the lens of livestock health and regulatory oversight. This divide has created a healthy tension between international virologists studying pathogens and veterinarians focused on domestic animal biosecurity.

German virologist Heinz Feldmann, for example, studies the African Lassa virus in American deer mice. Every project requires approval from the Rocky Mountain Veterinary Branch (RMVB), which oversees animal procurement. Dutch virologist Vincent Munster, another RML principal investigator, relies on Colorado State University to breed his Egyptian fruit bats because RMVB lacks the capacity for bat husbandry.

By 2014, Feldmann was collaborating with Ralph Baric of UNC on recombinant coronaviruses. That same year, Fauci informed the then NIH director, Francis Collins, that Feldmann was developing a novel wildlife vaccine. In 2016, NIAID staff offered Munster early tenure if he set up the bat lab in Montana, but he butted heads with RMVB and outsourced it to Colorado.

By 2018, Feldmann and Munster started working on self-spreading bat vaccines. RML had also obtained IBC approval to test various viruses in Rousettus Aegyptiacus (Egyptian fruit bats).

By 2018, Munster and Feldmann won two of five DARPA PREEMPT projects. Munster claimed he could perform aerosol vaccination to block transmission from bats to humans. An early draft of the 2018 DARPA DEFUSE proposal outlined:

Daszak and Baric later incorporated similar DEFUSE language into NIAID grant applications that included RML, WIV, and Duke-NUS as collaborators. Munster and Baric also published work in Egyptian fruit bats while proposing “experimental inoculation studies” in Chinese horseshoe bats—animals available only for in vivo research inside Wuhan laboratories.

During the COVID-19 outbreak, the Egyptian fruit bat colony in Colorado suddenly became critical. In April 2020, Munster’s CSU collaborator Tony Schountz emailed him “peculiar data.” Their Egyptian fruit bats exhibited reservoir host characteristics—efficient transmission without symptoms. Schountz had bred this colony for Munster’s DARPA PREEMPT project, which aimed to develop a transmissible bat vaccine. The transmission models of SARS-CoV-2 overlap with RML’s self-spreading vaccine research (e.g., deer mice, Syrian hamsters, and Egyptian fruit bats).

Given the potential conflicts of interest, independent oversight of Feldmann and Munster’s research is needed. In February 2020, Fauci’s office nominated Feldmann and Munster for the WHO mission to Wuhan. In December 2020, Francis Collins questioned RML’s airborne research.

Both Munster and Feldmann have evaded answering direct questions from three U.S. Senators. Full transparency into their animal studies, shipping records, and DARPA proposals is essential to restoring public trust and safeguarding global health.

10 questions for the new NIAID director

1. Are you willing to release all inbound shipping records from UNC to RML, and all outbound shipping records from RML to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Duke-NUS (Singapore), or any other international laboratories?

2. Provide all 2018-19 RML Animal Study Proposals (ASPs) that mention Syrian hamsters, deer mice, mink, white-tailed deer, and Egyptian fruit bats.

3. Release all 2018-19 RML records that include the nucleotide sequences used in PCR assays for sarbecoviruses or merbecoviruses in challenge studies involving Syrian hamsters, deer mice, mink, white-tailed deer, and Egyptian fruit bats.

4. Release all in vivo records for RML Project Title: PRD-17-143 (Coronaviruses) and PRD-12-143. PI: Heinz Feldmann of RML. Start date: 09/26/2012. Expiration date: 12/19/2030. Collaborator: Ralph Baric of UNC.

5. Provide the RML inventory for all SARS-like and MERS-like RNA handled in the BSL2 (positive-strand room), BSL3, and BSL4 by Vincent Munster and Heinz Feldmann.

6. Conduct a SARS-CoV-2 challenge study using the ancestral strain (WA1) and the Egyptian fruit bat colony at Colorado State University, as suggested in Tony Shountz’s April 20, 2020, email to Munster (page 20).

7. Release all RML DARPA Preempt documents from Ian Lipkin at Columbia, Raina Plowright at Montana State University, and Brian Bird at UC Davis.

8. Release all of Munster and Feldmann’s 2018-20 emails, lab books, Slack messages (page 195), and Munster’s January 2020 PowerPoint to Fauci (page 500).

9. Release all NIAID communication with Baric, Daszak, Linfa Wang, and Danielle Anderson.

10. Will you commit to full, unredacted document releases, not piecemeal FOIA productions, and appear before Congress to answer questions about RML’s role in coronavirus research prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic?

That was more like 10 demands for transparency, but who's counting?

RML update via local newspaper

RML has admitted to not one, but two exposures to Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Virus (CCHFV). In a separate incident in February 2026, RML filed a required report regarding a hole in a glove that occurred while changing lab mouse cages.

The local Ravalli Republic newspaper also got a statement from NIH that corroborated the recent whistleblower letter:

“A November 13, 2025 workplace exposure to Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Virus (CCHFV) occurred in the Biosafety Level 4 facility at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories. The worker is highly experienced, wore all required protective gear, and followed all established procedures at the time of the exposure. The employee was immediately decontaminated, isolated and evaluated by experienced clinical experts in coordination with highly trained safety professionals.

“The patient was transferred to the nearest Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center (RESPTC) located at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center & Children’s Hospital in Spokane, Washington.

“Providence is one of 13 Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR)-supported Level 1 RESPTCs, part of the tiered National Special Pathogen System (NSPS) designed to protect patients, communities and the healthcare workforce.

“Established procedures for transport, patient care, waste handling, testing and safety were followed by all involved, from lab staff and agency safety and health support to hospital care team and medical specialists.

“At no time was there any evidence of disease transmission or infection, nor was there ever any risk to staff, caregivers, or the public.”

Notice that the RML whistleblower was right: the worker was “flown out” to Spokane, Washington, because local Hamilton hospitals wanted nothing to do with the infected scientist. If by air ambulance, it was an expensive, taxpayer-funded trip by a modified Gulfstream.

White Coat Waste has several billboards in the area calling attention to Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab because local people are not aware of its presence.

The billboards are up, but the next NIAID director won't have the luxury of silence.

The Dutch are asking. Will Washington D.C.?

A Dutch parliamentary COVID-19 inquiry committee will begin public hearings on May 29 and has named a former Prime Minister and former Health Minister among witnesses set to testify. The first witness scheduled to appear is Marion Koopmans, a prominent virologist who played a visible advisory role during the pandemic and contributed to international outbreak investigations and scientific assessments of the virus. She consistently questioned aspects of the pandemic response and was part of a WHO-led international mission that traveled to China in early 2021 to investigate the origins of COVID-19.

https://nltimes.nl/2026/05/21/mark-rutte-ministers-virologists-testify-dutch-covid-19-parliamentary-inquiry

Koopmans was the former boss of Munster while he was at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Koopmans also knows our Munster bat vaccine theory well, but she doesn’t defend him.

Dr. Nass on Munster

Dr. Meryl Nass () has offered a masterclass in accusation without liability. Simply cite my name, let the evidence speak, and journalists stay clean. From Hamilton to The Hague, the walls are closing in.

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https://www.theassemblync.com/news/education/higher-education/unc-coronavirus-researcher-ralph-baric-retire/

Hours later, Baric ran to Science magazine to complain about losing federal funding. Read his words for yourself. It’s the most he’s said since DEFUSE leaked five years ago.

https://www.science.org/content/article/virologist-accused-starting-covid-19-will-fight-u-s-ban-funding

The coward from Carolina showed his true colors. At age 72, Baric still bullies anyone who gets in his way. Behind the scenes, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr was waging war against him.

RFK Jr got Baric on a technicality about a 2014 gain-of-function experiment.

The HHS suspension letter says Baric referred to the virus his team created as “a chimeric gain-of-function virus” at an NAS symposium in 2014. Baric now says he misspoke, and that it would have been more accurate to say the experiment had gain-of-function potential.

In April 2025, the same month I tweeted the video clip above featuring Baric’s incriminating quote about “a chimeric gain-of-function virus,” HHS began a compliance review.

In April 2025, not long after Trump returned to office and named Bhattacharya NIH director, the agency froze Baric’s ability to receive pay from his multiple grants to conduct a “compliance review.” The next month, it asked for clarifications about the 2015 Nature Medicine paper reporting the 2014 work, the Wellcome Trust grant, and potential conflicts of interest with companies that collaborate with his lab. UNC put him on administrative leave May 2025, barring him from campus for many months, before reinstating him in January 2026.

Ironically, in the video above, after Baric admits that his 2015 Nature paper was gain-of-function, his next slide shows the SARS2 genome (HKU3 + BtCoV 279 = HKU3-Smix). But Baric told Science:

Baric has a succinct response to HHS’s debarment accusations. “They’re bullshit,” he tells Science. Baric contends they’re a direct result of allegations that the coronavirus behind COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, was engineered with his help and leaked from a lab. Baric, who like many scientists believes the pathogen probably had a natural origin, says he has nothing to hide in his emails or lab records.

Baric has never released his 2018-19 emails or lab records. His multimillion-dollar grants were canceled, and he was suspended a year ago. Science writer Jon Cohen, who interviewed Baric and is familiar with our bat vaccine theory, didn’t ask Baric why his patented chimera (HKU3-Smix) was recently cited in Nature.

Although some of the researchers submitting the DEFUSE grant application held patents on recombinant chimeric live coronavirus vectors, they did not propose to vaccinate bats using this technology. In their grant application — which was never actually funded — they proposed using only recombinant proteins (or subunit antigens) to vaccinate bats. These cannot replicate or spread.

We already responded to Nature above, but Science continues below.

Virologist Robert Redfield, who was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during Trump’s first term and the start of the pandemic, has gone further still with regard to Baric. “I think there is a real possibility that the virus’ birthplace was Chapel Hill,” Redfield said on a podcast in 2024. He has called Baric “the scientific mastermind” of a Chinese government project to engineer the virus. Reflecting the lack of evidence around the possible lab-leak scenario, another camp asserts Baric did not create the virus, but taught the WIV scientists the methods they used to make it.

Like the rest of the lab-leak crowd, they’re cowards like Baric. The funniest part is that Baric still won’t defend himself, and his fellow virologists remain silent. He lets journalists, professors, and academic hall monitors do it for him. It’s remote-controlled scientific reputation management. In the end, Baric still got the last laugh.

I take solace in the fact that his last response to the pandemic was his non-response to our article accusing him of creating COVID.

Baric’s origins via my Chapter 23: Of Mice and Men

Ralph Steven Baric was born in 1954 to Beverly and Rudy in a small farm town in South Jersey. His father, Rudy, was a former basketball player and coach. His mother, Beverly, a nurse, sparked his early fascination with science. Growing up in Penns Grove, Ralph’s high school basketball team, coached by his father, counted Bruce Willis among its alumni.

Baric’s curiosity extended beyond sports. His favorite book, The Biological Time Bomb, popularized the term “cloning” in the 1960s and fueled his scientific ambition. His favorite movie is Alien, and his favorite show is Seconds from Disaster. With this nerdy competitive mix, he rose to the top of the coronavirus world.

Baric earned an athletic swimming scholarship to North Carolina State University, just 30 minutes from the UNC campus. He excelled academically and athletically, often sitting front and center in team photographs. He was a conference champion and record holder in the 500, 1000, and 1650-yard Freestyle, 400-yard Individual Medley, and 800-yard Freestyle Relay. The Individual Medley highlighted his status as the best overall swimmer.

Baric found a simple undergrad job cleaning flasks in an NC State lab. There, he discovered his love of viruses. “I started as a dishwasher,” he recalled to NPR. Baric noted viruses can be dangerous, but “there is a certain beauty in them.” He studied attenuated vaccines while washing dishes in the lab.

After graduating from NC State in 1977 with a degree in zoology, Baric pursued a PhD in microbiology. His first research paper, published in 1984, focused on the Sindbis, a mosquito-borne virus related to West Nile virus. Four decades later, but before SARS2, Baric was still working on vaccines for RNA viruses. His approach was old school, aiming to create a live virus to prevent a future one from spreading.

Baric’s postdoctoral fellowship (1982-1986) led him to the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, where he studied under Professor Michael Lai, known as the “father of the coronavirus.” Lai, from Taiwan, developed a mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) infection model while researching multiple sclerosis with Professor Leslie Weiner of USC. This MHV model was crucial for understanding coronavirus pathogenesis and immune response.

During his time at USC, Baric learned from two generations of brilliance. Baric and Lai mapped out the first genetic sequences of coronavirus found in mice. No one had ever done this. Their collaboration resulted in several papers focusing on MHV, a member of the coronavirus family that was then unknown.

Lai left California for Taiwan after the SARS 2003 outbreak, coincidentally visiting Wuhan in 2014. He once remarked, “Viruses are more intelligent than human beings. Their history on the planet is far older than human history. They know better than humans about how to survive.” Lai also quipped, “Viruses are smarter than virologists.”

RFK Jr on Munster’s whistleblower letter

“We sent the referral to the FBI immediately,” and “I assume [Vincent Munster] is going to prison.” RFK Jr told Laura Loomer.

That was the response to last week’s whistleblower letter. That is a major admission from the sitting HHS Secretary. HHS has declined to comment to other reporters because this is an active FBI investigation, but Loomer’s independent reporting on Robert Kennedy Jr’s confirmation blows this story wide open. If true, and Kennedy didn’t deny any of the claims made in the whistleblower letter, this is a massive taxpayer-funded biosecurity scandal.

Whoever wrote the letter above and sent it to the White Coat Waste probably reads what we write, so please contact me at jimhaslam@substack.com.

Rand Paul’s whistleblower

During the Senate committee hearing, the CIA tweeted out a bizarre statement because they didn’t approve of their employee publicly testifying.

The whistleblower was James E. Erdman III, a Senior Operations Officer at the CIA. He was also a lab leaker who posted on Reddit five years ago while searching for answers online. I’m reminded of my mother’s line from the chaotic 1980s and 90s: all the CIA does is sit around and read the international newspapers. Now the spies lurk on Reddit and plagiarize misspellings.

Erdman's hour-long Senate testimony didn’t contain any bombshells, but his written testimony on BSEG was insightful.

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/letter-and-testimomy.pdf

After 9/11, the Intelligence Community (IC) recruited and provided security clearances to scientists as part of an initiative it was forming called the Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG). Originally, the IC wisely intended to limit the use of these scientists to the analysis of complex topics, but their functionality quickly expanded far beyond the intended scope of work. The BSEG scientists assisted in vetting the scientific value of raw intelligence, drafted white papers in support of background analysis and finished intelligence, and conducted lab research on sensitive WMD topics.

Their work in the IC provided justification for continued public health funding for their academic and professional research, and their collaboration with organizations like the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). This also led to a positive feedback loop that further incentivized more funding for their work, more IC contracts, and deeper collaboration with government officials responsible for crafting of and oversight over WMD and GoF policy and research. The lines between public health and biodefense have been blurred beyond recognition ever since.

Baric was part of BSEG, to whom he lied by omitting the full cleavage site from his January 2020 presentation. This was the main part of our Sachs-Baric article, which hopefully led to Baric’s retirement.

The new disclosures show that in 2015, Baric participated in a Biological Security Executive Group (BSEG) meeting convened by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which included CIA participation, to brief on biological threats. Emails released in response to congressional inquiries also suggest that ODNI and the CIA later contacted Baric for expert advice on coronavirus issues; in January 2020, he briefed an ODNI “B Group” on possible lab-leak scenarios. Again, Baric did not mention the unusual furin cleavage site, which he admitted to seeing just three weeks earlier.

Rand Paul later said the quiet part out loud, calling Baric a paid informant misleading the lab leak investigation. He also claimed more to come.

My new favorite lab leaker

Justin Goodman with White Coat Waste has become my favorite lab leaker. He’s an animal lover trying to stop government-funded testing. Because Rocky Mountain Lab conducts many animal experiments, Goodman has the goods. He dropped tons of details about Vincent Munster, including DARPA Defuse and the 2018 Egyptian fruit bat test, which became the SARS2 reservoir.

Goodman said the whistleblower letter was sent to his PO Box. Ironically, this Munster smuggling story is being pushed by US Senators, not the US media. Why? They are terrified of defamation lawsuits from living scientists, such as Munster, Baric, and Fauci.

Dog experiments

Beagles are a popular choice for the same reason people love them as pets: they’re small, docile, and eager to please people, including lab technicians. They’re unlikely to do much more than bark, and Ridglan will sever their vocal cords for an extra fee.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2026/05/12/how_opposition_to_animal_testing_is_bridging_the_political_divide_1182121.html

Animal-rights activists storm beagle breeding facility

About 1,000 animal welfare activists who tried to enter a beagle breeding and research facility in Wisconsin were turned back by police, who fired rubber bullets and pepper spray into the crowd and arrested the group’s leader. Protesters tried to breach barricades that included a manure-filled trench, hay bales, and a barbed-wire fence. Some protesters got through the fence but were unable to enter the facility, where an estimated 2,000 beagles are kept.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ridglan-farms-blue-mounds-wisconsin-beagles-protest/

Fauci slaughtering kittens?

When Trump shut down the USDA’s kitten slaughterhouse in 2019, Fauci didn’t stop the experiments. He insourced them to evade Congress. FOIA records obtained by White Coat Waste show that in 2021, NIAID scientists quietly resurrected the kitten protocols in NIH’s own labs in Bethesda, where they remain active through at least December 2026. One document instructs staff to reprogram the cats’ microchips at the end of each study to erase any record that they were ever in a federal lab.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/05/exclusive-fauci-moved-kitten-experiments-nih-after-trump/

Fauci on Beaglegate in his book

In his book, Fauci describes how an animal rights group added to rising animus and vitriol around him by releasing a report alleging he had directed federal funding “to be used for cruel testing on beagle puppies.” The resultant fuss was short-lived but fierce, resulting in more than 3,500 threatening calls in one 36-hour period and even acquiring a name, Beaglegate, inspired by actual political scandals.

On the page, Fauci describes being called a “demon doctor” on the floor of the U.S. House by Madison Cawthorn, then an attention-seeking pro-Trump Republican representative from North Carolina. Fauci also describes seeing Donald Trump Jr. “selling T-shirts emblazoned with messages like ‘Fauci Kills Puppies.’”

“You really cannot make this stuff up!” Fauci writes. “Though, of course, they did.”

According to Fauci, the accusations were ludicrous but nonetheless “bothersome” because National Institutes of Health research involving animals was conducted under “strict” guidelines for the care of the animals, and because “I am a passionate animal lover, especially of dogs.”

Fauci called his charges ludicrous. Baric called his bullshit. Munster hasn’t said anything yet. But the beagles never got a say, and neither did the kittens.

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Full Coverup Mode

NIH’s response was not to notify RML staff or alert the tax-paying public. According to an anonymous whistleblower letter obtained by White Coat Waste, senior NIH officials “went into full cover-up mode.” Munster and his postdoc, Claude (Kwe) Yinda, who traveled with him, were quietly banned from the RML campus in Montana. No NIH announcement or transparency.

The anonymous letter was written sometime after the January 25, 2026, incident, but was just published this week. A subsequent report confirmed the whistleblower’s allegations.

Virologists regularly collect viruses from far away countries and bring them back to their own cities to study. And according to emails has seen that are now circulating inside the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), one of those virologists is the NIH’s Vincent Munster.

“We are unable to comment as this is under investigation,” wrote HHS spokesperson, Andrew Nixon in an email. “So we will refer you to the FBI.”

When contacted about their investigation into Munster and his NIH researcher, the FBI press office replied by email, “We decline to comment.”

While on a trip back from the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this year, Munster and a scientist in his NIH lab were pulled aside for an airport security inspection. Inside their luggage, one of the two had a hard-shelled protective case used to transport sensitive property such as electronics and firearms. When the protective case was opened, it was found to contain pathogen samples collected from patients.

However, the human pathogens, which included monkeypox virus, may have been inactivated by reagents and rendered no longer infectious.

We found out because Munster had been quietly removed from the NIH/HHS staff directory. Whether the monkeypox virus was inactive is irrelevant; Munster didn’t declare it. Neither did the NIH. No press release. Just a whistleblower letter, which continues below.

What was Munster doing in Africa?

Munster makes several trips to Africa each year. He often traveled to the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) to collect bat samples.

Munster usually rode the Congo River to a remote camp along the border of the dangerous Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa). He packed lab diapers, air mattresses, mosquito nets, and bite kits for his bat-hunting trips.

He would pitch a tent and start collecting African bat samples, which Science Magazine once tagged along in 2017.

At 2 a.m., Munster and epidemiologist Sarah Olson start their workday. She’s clad in scrubs and a protective suit and wears a visor, a respirator, and leather gloves on top of two layers of plastic gloves. She unties a bag and carries it to a tent serving as a makeshift laboratory. Munster, similarly clad minus the leather gloves, is waiting. A bare bulb illuminates the tent, an island of light in the dark forest, powered by a loud generator. The back wall is made of banana leaves.

Grasping the bat’s head between her thumb and index finger, Olson exposes its lower body. Munster massages its bladder until urine dribbles into a plastic vial. Then Olson unpacks the whole animal, and Munster examines and measures it while another researcher takes notes. “Hypsignathus monstrosus,” Munster says, though the only thing monstrous about the hammer-headed fruit bat is its scientific name. The huge head with its big, yellow eyes, cleft chin, and curled lower lip evokes pity rather than fear. “Endearingly ugly,” Olson calls it.

The first bat examined tonight is alive and apparently well. “Good body condition,” Munster says. “Head length, 42 millimeters. Body, 97. Lower arm, 95.” He swabs the mouth, nostrils, and anus. Suddenly the animal flinches, and a claw scrapes across Munster’s plastic glove. Even though no tear is visible, he discards his outer gloves and dons a new pair.

Then comes the most dangerous part: While Olson holds the animal, Munster plunges a needle into a vein in the wing and slowly draws blood. “You have to be extremely careful,” he says. “We’re talking about Ebola, after all.”

Before Munster lets the sampled bat go, he injects it with a tiny ID chip. This allows the researchers to identify animals that they have recaptured.

Munster knows how to handle deadly viruses. He was in Monrovia during the 2013–15 Ebola outbreak, testing hundreds of samples. Far too many were positive for the virus. “We underestimated the virus,” he says. He is determined not to make that mistake again. The Republic of the Congo is changing rapidly. The researchers’ tents are perhaps 100 meters from a road that transects the country, stretching 800 kilometers south to Brazzaville. When Munster first came here a few years ago, the road was red dirt. Now, it’s smooth asphalt. If the virus emerges from the forest again, it could be in Brazzaville tomorrow, he says—and in Boston, Bombay, or Berlin the day after.

Munster used to ship the samples back to Montana using liquid nitrogen, but that is a “bureaucratic nightmare” that takes “months.”

One by one, the team examines the 13 animals and releases them. At about 5 a.m., the cries of the hammer-headed fruit bats subside. The last bag is opened, and the researchers swab the last animal. They store the night’s crop of samples in liquid nitrogen. Because shipping material that might contain the Ebola virus is a bureaucratic nightmare, the samples might not arrive in the United States for months.

Once the samples arrive, they will be split, with one part tested for Ebola RNA in Munster’s Montana laboratory. If it proves positive, the researchers will mix another portion of the sample with cultured bat and monkey cells to test for active virus. “You just add a bit from that sample to your cells and wait [to see] whether you get virus replication,” Munster says. If enough samples test positive, his team might be able to build a model of how virus levels fluctuate in the bat population. That kind of monitoring helped scientists understand the factors that trigger flu viruses to jump from animals to humans—and it may one day lead to a similar understanding for Ebola.

This time, he apparently smuggled contraband back but got caught. I’m often asked for an NIH procedure proving that Munster created COVID, but this isn’t a guy who follows scientific rules.

Munster vs Baric

Ralph Baric of UNC never had to smuggle his Chinese pathogens into America, since he could create them in his North Carolina lab. Here, in 2013, Baric and Munster debated the issue of importing select agents.

Baric update

While Munster was getting pulled aside at customs, his longtime collaborator, Baric, was having his own quiet moment in the spotlight. It was reported by lab leak journalist Paul Thaker () that Baric was “on leave” from UNC. But Baric brilliantly turned on his out-of-office reply over the weekend to announce he was still there. Thacker also believes Baric didn’t create the SARS2 genome.

Dutch media on Munster

Toine de Graaf, who wrote my first formal book review last year, is on the latest story this year.

The reputation of Vincent Munster, trained at Erasmus MC and working at the Rocky Mountain Lab (RML), which falls under the American National Institutes of Health (NIH), since 2009, has been under pressure for some time. Last month, De Andere Krant (no. 15) reported that Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and American engineer/researcher Jim Haslam believe that American virologist Ralph Baric and Munster together laid the foundation for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that gripped the world from Wuhan, China, in 2020.

Two incidents & two coverups = one institution.

The smuggling incident isn’t the only thing NIH decided the public didn’t need to know about. The same whistleblower apparently tipped off the media.

In January, White Coat Waste first reported that an RML lab staffer had been exposed to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. It’s a deadly foreign virus used at RML on primates. NIH offered no explanation for how the exposure occurred.

The whistleblower letter provides one: a macaque being “infected and sickened with no pain mitigation” bit through the lab worker’s protective suit.

The injured RML technician was quietly “flown out” rather than treated at a dedicated Hamilton hospital. Most RML staff were never told the accident happened. According to the whistleblower, the decision to bury it came directly from NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

New RML documents

Graduate student Tyler Stepke filed a 2024 RML FOIA request for their IBC minutes, covering February 2014 through April 2024. 1,000+ pages uploaded here:

https://ibc-minutes-rml-foia-2014-2024.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/NIHFOIA61911_RMLIBC2014-2024.pdf

By 2014, Feldmann was collecting deer samples. In 2016, Munster and Heinz Feldmann received IBC approval to infect their bats with Baric’s synthetic genomes.

Notice NIH redacted Munster’s name above, and Baric’s name below.

By 2018, RML had IBC approval for aerosolizing agents for live bats.

Rand Paul’s whistleblower?

Senator Paul announced that a whistleblower will testify this Wednesday about the COVID cover-up. I’ll guess it’s Major Joseph Murphy, who leaked the DARPA Defuse proposal. No matter who it is, Paul has openly discussed Murphy’s role.

Part of the problem with the lab leak debate is that no one even knows what COVID is, a contagious bat vaccine aerosolized by Munster. None of us knew that until Murphy’s own letter leaked, calling COVID an “American-created bat vaccine.”

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/whistleblower-testimony-on-the-covid-coverup/

Why the FCS?

In early 2020, TWiV host Vincent Racaniello emailed Munster, saying he had heard that the furin cleavage site “might have been engineered.”

“If true, this is very bad for all of virology research,” Racaniello wrote to Munster, who forwarded it to his DARPA postdoc and Baric collaborator, “And the fun begins.” Baric inserted the furin cleavage site to infect bat cells, and Munster used it for onward transmission.

Hantavirus outbreak

Three people died from a Hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship. TWiV host Racaniello has a good episode on the dirty details.

Hantavirus comes from deer mice, which are also reservoir hosts for SARS2!

Why? Because scientists like Munster and Feldmann used deer mice to develop self-spreading vaccines.

Feldmann and RML also use Baric’s genomes, so it’s not hard to figure out why SARS2 loves deer mice!

Feldmann’s DARPA colleague, Scott Nuismer, once asked, “How do you go out there and vaccinate a bunch of deer mice against Hantavirus by hand?” Nuismer gave a 2018 presentation that gave us a glimpse of what RML was working on: self-spreading vaccines using deer mice.

Morens’s update

Dr. David Morens was offered wine bottles and meals at Michelin-starred restaurants by vendors such as EcoHealth. After appearing in court on Friday, Morens drove off in his BMW 5-Series. The US government bureaucrat supposedly owns 2 homes and is a product of PHS Title 42.

The Public Health Service (PHS) Title 42 hiring authority was established in 1944 during World War II to create a flexible “excepted service” category for recruiting top-tier scientific talent without the constraints of standard civil service rules.

This authority allows agencies such as the NIH, FDA, and CDC to offer lucrative salaries—sometimes exceeding $350,000—to attract “experts” for hard-to-fill research and medical roles. Morens made $242,000 while serving as a senior advisor to Tony Fauci. Title 42 was designed to attract the best minds in a national emergency. Whether it attracted the right ones is now a matter for the courts.

One rogue scientist with a suitcase full of vials; a border incident scrubbed; a monkey bite buried; a staff directory quietly updated. The pattern isn’t incompetence. It’s NIH policy.

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Morens indicted

Tony Fauci’s longtime senior scientific advisor and chief cover-up intermediary, David Morens, has been criminally charged by federal prosecutors in Maryland with five counts. The charges include altering and destroying records in a federal investigation and conspiracy against the United States.

Morens faces decades in prison if convicted. For those of us following this story, none of what’s in the indictment is surprising. What’s surprising is that it’s finally happening. Even Morens joked about this a few years ago. A new USRTK FOIA revealed that Morens asked Peter Daszak, “Please come visit me in prison.”

Gmail, fine wine, and dining by Peter Daszak

We already knew Morens was Fauci’s intermediary using Gmail.

The email above about Fauci’s Gmail was addressed to Daszak, who is listed as “co-conspirator #1” in the legal documents. The new tasty tidbit in the indictment alleges that Daszak supplied Morens with “illegal gratuities,” including two bottles of wine and a promise of a future meal at a “Michelin-starred” restaurant.

Burner phone suggestion

After the DARPA Defuse documents leaked in September 2021, things got more urgent. Fauci, through an intermediary named Gerald Keusch, who was listed as “co-conspirator #2,” effectively advised Morens to acquire a burner phone.

The raid

In one of Morens’ many infamous 2021 emails, Fauci claimed no one could “mess with us,” and Fauci had “macho comments about how there is always a guy with an AR-15 right outside his door.”

The Feds decided to return the favor and arrest the 78-year-old Morens in a SWAT raid.

He opened his front door to find a half-dozen federal agents carrying guns and wearing tactical gear, including bulletproof vests, according to two sources who spoke with him but asked not to be identified. Another team of officers stood in the distance and observed, as did neighbors.

The agents did not harm Morens, but took off his pants and shirt, handcuffed him, and drove him 65 kilometers to the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, where he was fingerprinted, photographed, and jailed. He was released on his own recognizance later in the day, but was asked to return to Greenbelt and surrender his passport, which he did.

The WSJ called out the scientific press reports:

The press is portraying the indictment of former NIH official David Morens as political retaliation. That’s hard to square with the facts in the indictment, which say he intentionally sought to obfuscate the NIH role in funding the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which may have contributed to the virus leaking from a Chinese lab.

There are many connections between Morens and Fauci, who claims he barely knew Morens, which is “pretty bizarre.”

FOIA paper trail

Morens had emailed Daszak after the Intercept published Fauci’s two EcoHealth grants. Notice the “ASF—FOIA” subject line, and told him to “have a stiff drink before you read.”

These were the 2 grants that Daszak and Ralph Baric used to fund DARPA Defuse.

Fauci barely knew him?

At a 2024 congressional hearing, Fauci claimed not to know Morens well. This is hard to reconcile with the documentary record.

Fauci played dumb and claimed not to know Morens during a 2024 hearing. Daszak called it a “sad day” for Fauci to “deny his decades-long relationship” with Morens.

Fauci and Baric are also listed in the indictment

Fauci is listed as “Senior NIAID Official 1.”

It also mentions Baric as “North Carolina Scientist 1.”

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.603873/gov.uscourts.mdd.603873.1.0_1.pdf

Baric on leave?

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.

Lab leak journalist goes on to reference the Sachs-Baric article, and sounds like he read our 40 questions for Baric. It’s a good, long piece.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2026/04/28/covid_cover-up_campaign_to_hide_star_researcher_ralph_barics_ties_to_global_pandemic_1179562.html

Even Elon Musk was impressed:

But it’s unclear if Baric is on UNC leave or if his grants have been deleted:

UNC and Duke researchers told The N&O this week they have regained access to funding through previously terminated awards, allowing them to resume incurring science-related expenses.

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article304369386.html

Thacker’s source for Baric’s suspension appears to be his buddy, Jeff Taubenberger, who replaced Fauci at NIAID. It sounds like the NIH is panicked about our Sachs-Baric article?

Taubenberger canceled Fauci’s $82M CREID grant, which included $7.5M to Baric and Daszak, partially funding their DEFUSE bid.

did get UNC to respond to the suspension allegations, citing only “personnel matters,” which sounds like a leave. But like Linfa Wang, these are professors for life, and Baric is still represented by UNC lawyers and the UNC communications department.

Update since a local newspaper got an out-of-office reply from Baric: Baric did not respond Thursday or Friday to a request for comment. The News & Observer received an automatic reply from his email that reads: “I am away from the office and will return May 4.”

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article315590798.html

Who is next to be indicted?

White Coat Waste Project wants Fauci’s replacement, Jeff Taubenberger:

https://amgreatness.com/2026/05/01/faucis-lab-leak-henchmen-are-finally-facing-accountability/

Rand Paul wants Fauci, who emailed his secretary, Greg Folkers, and told him to delete emails.

writes the next indictment should be Folkers:

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-next-indictment-should-be-against-greg-folkers/

To recap: the guy who used Gmail to evade FOIA, who was advised by Fauci to buy a burner phone and joked about going to prison. The two people named in the indictment, Fauci and Baric, are enjoying their retirements. The press is calling it political retaliation. And somewhere, Daszak still owes Morens a Michelin-starred dinner.

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Best background reading on DRASTIC and its international members:

https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-amateur-sleuths-broke-wuhan-lab-story-embarrassed-media-1596958

Operating under a pseudonym from somewhere in Asia, Bostickson coined the DRASTIC name in May 2020 and organized the loosely connected group into subgroups focused on different aspects of the COVID origins investigation. His Twitter icon — a cartoon of a beat-up lab monkey — became one of the most recognizable symbols of the early lab leak movement.

At one point, Bostickson averaged 30 Tweets per day, then claimed he was burned out and out of money, so he would quit researching for free. But he kept going. Nicholson Baker’s 2021 article in New York Magazine first introduced Americans to his relentless research. Bostickson told German media about his online experience:

My avatar—an injured lab monkey—and my pseudonym refer to my past. I was active in opposition networks in China and Hong Kong for a long time . Anonymity was vital for survival. The Chinese state also targets people abroad who work with sensitive information. I had to protect myself and my sources. The avatar also allows me to sharply criticize institutions without endangering my safety. Some accuse me of lacking credibility because of this. I’ve been called a CIA agent, a Russian spy, or an Oxford professor on Twitter. For me, that’s more of a badge of honor—a sign that our work is having an impact.

He describes himself as an anarchist. But Bostickson would explain that anarchy is a world without rulers, not rules. He pushed for tighter biosecurity guidelines since international virology is like an “anarchical society,” where BSL4 labs have “daily interactions with other labs within China and across the world.”

The bottom-up Bostickson added:

And we need more pressure from below. We’re working with groups like US Right to Know and Biosafety Now to shed more light on these issues through Freedom of Information Act requests. Science needs oversight—through transparency, public scrutiny, and independent structures

Bostickson was the only member of DRASTIC with a radical political label, though the group deliberately avoids ideological debate. Colleague Gilles Demaneuf told German media, “It’s not about ideology, but about science and logic.” Their plan was to develop arguments understandable to laypeople, present consensual facts first, and target journalists sympathetic to their lab leak narrative, often in conservative media or tabloids.

Partially because of this, French newspapers have written hit pieces on DRASTIC. Le Monde wrote of Bostickson:

The coordinator of DRASTIC is a multilingual anarchist who cultivates discretion – Billy Bostickson is, in fact, a pseudonym, as are several of his online identities. This political opponent of the Chinese Communist Party has, in ten years, gone from the anti-capitalist Anonymous movement to a pro-Russian discourse and Trumpian sympathies. He initially believed that SARS-CoV-2 was designed to target the Asian population, before leaning towards the theory of an accident.

Others have compared DRASTIC to Bellingcat, which publishes open-source intelligence for U.S. intelligence agencies. But Bostickson summarized that Bellingcat is “much more professional and focused. We are a bit amateurish in comparison, and being decentralized, autonomous, and radical means that we often don’t get things done as much as we hope. However, we aren’t linked to any NGOs or international bodies and have diverse political views.”

Bostickson’s activist background predates COVID entirely. Before DRASTIC, he served as PR Secretary for Rage University — a self-described “the first free online university for activists” that advanced the “tactics, tools and techniques of radical activists.” He recently wrote, “Good to see Generation Z in Asia growing a set of balls and fighting back against shit governments.”

Bostickson’s ResearchGate and LinkedIn profiles list studies in Virology at the Instituto de Medicina Tropical “Pedro Kourí” in Cuba from 2003 to 2006, followed by Biological Safety at the National Center for Biological Safety Higher Institute of Applied Technologies and Sciences from 2009 to 2011.

Whether these credentials are real or part of a carefully constructed alias remains one of many unanswered questions. His real identity remains unknown. His online profile says Hong Kong or Uruguay. Others say Southeast Asia. I suspect the Philippines. He probably likes it that way.

Others have tried to dox Bostickson, but he published the threats because he believes the “best way to deal with bullies is to expose them!” He co-authored more than 20 papers on COVID origins, including a damning 60-page forensic report on Wuhan laboratories that documents biosafety lapses, crumbling sewers, and filthy cages. A 2023 Senate report acknowledged about 40 of DRASTIC’s arguments.

One of Bostickson’s most consequential discoveries came from a government blunder. Peter Daszak’s hidden EcoHealth Alliance files were inadvertently exposed in a congressional FOIA release — an internal email contained a link to EcoHealth’s private Google Drive.

Bostickson accessed it and downloaded documents that Daszak had internally flagged as “not to be shared with Congress.” No one inside the U.S. government retrieved them first. The world’s most powerful government was scooped by an anonymous researcher with a laptop. Those documents showed that Tony Fauci funded a risky DARPA project.

Back in February 2020, Bostickson was the first to flag DARPA and live bats. Two months later, Ralph Baric and Vincent Munster were flagged. By October 2020, he identified the DARPA PREEMPT self-spreading bat vaccine project. He later wrote 293 questions for Baric and added, “When that day finally comes, and Baric raises his right hand, every word in there will be waiting for him.” 

Bostickson brought attention to a creepy Baric 2006 paper. Baric described that his synthetic genomes could create a “scapegoat option, leaving a sequence signature that misdirects efforts at tracking the true originators of the crime. Even better, the approach could be used to build mistrust and/or precipitate open warfare.” During testimony, Baric called DRASTIC the “computer sleuths.”

Bostickson documented what Baric sought: live bats inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Bostickson also discovered U.S. military involvement in the Laos BANAL bat caves as early as 2017. In September 2021, DRASTIC received and published the DARPA DEFUSE document.

After Major Murphy’s letter leaked via Project Veritas in January 2022, Bostickson was the first to identify Murphy as the likely DEFUSE leaker. He also discovered Linfa Wang’s January 10, 2020, resignation as Duke EID director and was contacted by the FBI in connection with DRASTIC’s investigation.

In late 2021, DRASTIC split up due to an internal power struggle. Bostickson kept the DRASTIC Research website alive and continues to push for biosafety reform through his lab blockchain proposal. His real identity remains unknown, but we interview him here.

• When did you become interested in the lab leak debate?

  • I was “interested” from the very beginning, and I did my own research, into WIV mainly, then saw the often deleted blog post published by Adrian Bond on Feb 15, 2020 (who unfortunately went off on a 5G tangent later) and the retracted paper, “The Possible Origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus" by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao. Then I started reaching out to people on Twitter like Richard Ebright, Yuri Deigin, Dan Sirotkin, Rossana Segreto, etc.

• In Alina Chan and Matt Ridley’s book, Viral, they claim Yuri Deigin was a founding member of DRASTIC, under its original name of Peter “Daszak’s fan club,” but the name was changed when you joined?

  • Yes, several people were already discussing the origins. I was a member of that small group and came up with the name. My main work apart from researching and publishing many reports has always been as a coordinator, setting up small working groups, trying to get journalists to write stories about our findings, and later helping run our website.

• Where did the DRASTIC name come from?

  • I wouldn’t say I formed “DRASTIC”, just that I was there at the beginning, and played a significant role as a coordinator. I came up with an acronym as an inspiration. Normally, I would start with three letters that were important and mainly accurate attributes, in this case D, decentralized, R, radical, A, autonomous, and also the last one being the focus, C for Covid-19, the other three S, T, I emerged through mental juggling.

• Are you a fan of Thomas Paine? You come across as someone who enjoys his radical ideas?

  • Yes indeed, he led an interesting life, and here are three of his sayings that I heartily approve of:

    • “It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.”

    • “The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

    • ”All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

• Were Dan Sirotkin and Jonathan Couey the only two original American members of DRASTIC?

  • Probably, but also there was “Kevin”, perhaps an American or British or dual citizen, who died some time ago, and Luigi Warren. Not sure what nationality he holds now.

    

• Who was the high-maintenance member of DRASTIC? Who was your favorite member?

  • Yuri Deigin, Segreto, the Seeker, and Francisco in the first wave. Gilles Demaneuf and the Engineer in the second wave. My favorite after years of work must be Demaneuf, as only he has rivaled me in dedication.

• How did you find the live bat video in the WIV?

  • Yes, it was found lurking online by UACjesse, whom I really enjoyed working with, but who sadly departed our group, and then deleted many threads later, which was quite annoying as they were full of Chinese gems.

My favorite former member of DRASTIC was Art (ico_dna), who quit because of the Indians (the Seeker), but he showed me the 2018 Baric-Munster bat paper, wanting to vaccinate Chinese bats. DRASTIC documented live bats inside a WIV lab. The bats in the above video are Myotis, which are used for longevity studies, but the focus of the WIV patents is on bat cages and bat breeding. Daszak later admitted, via Danielle Anderson, that there were live bats in the BSL4.

• Did the FBI contact you, or did you contact them? What did they ask?

  • I was in contact with the FBI WMD Division in 2020 – 2021 and later, together with my co-author Yvette Ghannam, who was my initial contact with them. My subsequent reports in 2021 were published from the massive report we had worked on with them, when they said it was OK to make them public. They asked for as much information as we could get, and then it was studied by their in-house PhDs.

• How did you discover the U.S. military in the Laos Banal bat caves back in 2017?

  • I think that was a case of putting two and two together, reviewing the two main documents, and checking the geographic coordinates and researchers’ names, etc.

• In September 2021, you received the DARPA DEFUSE document from an unknown source via an American DRASTIC member, Charles Rixey. What did you think when you first read DEFUSE? Was there a vote within DRASTIC to release it? Who voted against publication?

  • Well, I was “gobsmacked”, it seemed too good to be true at the time, like a miracle we had been praying for. We set up a group to discuss, digest, analyze, verify and write about it. The working group was larger than I would have liked and that meant that leaks and conflict were more likely to arise. Some of us were very much in favor of publishing it quickly, especially after we heard that the Washington Post had gotten hold of a copy and was going to run a story on it. Most of us felt that, especially Mona, Gilles, and I, that given our hard work analyzing and checking it, we should be the first to publish, and we had to discuss legalities and how to do so. In the end, most of us agreed to publish on our website, and I know that Charles Rixey felt quite a lot of stress, understandably, about protecting his source, Major Murphy. Even so, he also agreed that we should publish rather than allowing the U.S. media to publish a neutered version.

    • As for a vote, it seemed to be a consensus decision, rather than an official vote, and perhaps Deigin and Seeker were not so keen that we published first.

Radically transparent Bostickson has been criticized by Alina Chan for not allowing mainstream media outlets to publish the Defuse documents, which would have garnered more attention. But Bostickson said, “We had to publish Defuse before the Washington Post could run a watered-down version. The system has its own gatekeepers who soften or ignore inconvenient information.”

• After Major Murphy’s letter leaked via Project Veritas in January 2022, you were the first to speculate/identify Major Joseph Murphy as the leaker of DEFUSE. DRASTIC had no idea who leaked the documents in early September 2021. What do you think of his letter? Deigin was not impressed with Murphy’s letter.

  • Well, Rixey of course knew, I wasn’t aware that he had not commented at that time. As for me, I found his letter interesting, but needed to be understood as his own viewpoint, not as definite facts. One thing was the document itself and what it showed, another was its history, and another was his opinion about it.

• In late 2021, there was a split in DRASTIC led by Deigin. What happened? He formed the now-defunct “Drastic Science,” but you kept the “Drastic Research” website alive.

  • I will be writing more about that in my long-awaited memoir, but I suppose we could say it was a kind of power struggle in the end. At the time, it made me very bitter, especially the feeling of being betrayed by some people I had introduced into DRASTIC. It was a nasty example of academic mobbing, but then again, splits like these are quite normal for our kind of groups, and we separated into two, like an acrimonious divorce where most of us remained friends eventually.

• You flagged both Ralph Baric and Vincent Munster in April 2020. You were the first to flag the DARPA Preempt bat vaccine self-spreading vaccine project in October 2020.

  • Yes, it was all very bizarre when I first stumbled upon that project, as if we had opened the doors to a lunatic asylum, and I uncovered a whirlwind of other connections and networks, some of which still puzzle me to this day.

• In 2020, did you discuss the FOIA of the Colorado State University DARPA Preempt program with Sai of USRTK? It’s the best of many because it contains the smoking gun email.

  • Got me there, Jim, I honestly can’t remember that now, although it is likely I did, but I could trawl through old emails if necessary.

• How did you discover the US CDC BSL4 experimenting with Egyptian fruit bats?

  • That came from carefully reading their published work, as I was busy investigating DARPA, PREEMPT, PREDICT, and the labs in the U.S. where deadly overseas viruses were sent to, like Lipkin at the Mailman Lab and Stuart Nichols at Atlanta CDC BSL4.

• How did you learn about Linfa Wang's Jan 10, 2020, resignation as the Duke EID director?

  • Someone who knew him told me via direct message on Twitter, but that person did not want their name or location to be known.

• Where did the alias Billy Bostickson come from?

  • It came out of a magician’s hat!

• You co-published over 20 papers about a lab leak. My favorite is October Surprise. What about you?

  • Thank you, yes, that was the best for me, and the next best was the report on Wuhan Labs, Bat Research and Biosafety. The strangest one was the “second peak” papers, as one of the co-authors vanished while we were finalizing it! My “final report” on Pangolin Coronaviruses is also excellent, but so massive that I may soon be obliged to republish it in 10 parts. Overall, I am inspired to see that my 20+ reports on Zenodo and ResearchGate have been read and downloaded 200,000 times now, not a small achievement!

• Looking back, what was DRASTIC’s single most important discovery?

  • Above all, the discovery that by working together independently and following our own curiosity, we could help unravel the truth, dissect the lies, effect change in the world, influence the public, and challenge vested interests.

• Do you have any regrets about how DRASTIC operated?

  • The split was a bitter time, but our democratic, autonomous and consensus driven approach has allowed us to survive. Ultimately, nobody could be forced to do what they did not want to do, and some projects fell by the wayside due to lack of interest or perhaps lack of control (always an issue with decentralized “anarchist” organizations!)

• I don’t expect you to tell us, but I’ve guessed you live in the Philippines or some island in the Spanish East Indies?

  • I was mainly based in South America, Central America, then China, Hong Kong, and from the mid-2020s in Southeast Asia, with forays to Europe.

• Anything else?

  • Well, we may often disagree about certain aspects of the Covid origins investigation, but you certainly have my respect as a dedicated researcher who often finds gems that others miss, and my admiration for you getting your book published!

    I certainly believe that despite its flaws, DRASTIC will leave its mark on history and be an inspiration to those who seek the truth and do tons of research without funding, purely because they refuse to accept narratives that are pushed upon us, and have a healthy sense of curiosity and bloody mindedness.

Despite everything, recently shared something most people didn’t know:

Just to clarify my situation:

I was diagnosed with colon cancer 2 years ago, had 4 operations, chemo at home with capecitabine, some ct scans, endoscopies, etc.,. a colostomy bag and finally last year a reverse Hartman’s operation. I am keeping my fingers (and intestines) crossed that it stays in remission.

Unfortunately, when my colon burst, I had no medical insurance, so I had to pay for everything, and even though I went through the public hospital system here in SE Asia whenever possible, the medical costs and loss of income ruined me financially.

If you want to know more, please message me, and I am very grateful to those who choose to donate to help me!

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-billy-bostickson

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-billy-bostickson

In 2018, Baric proposed “introducing” a furin cleavage site (RXXR) into a coronavirus at the S1/S2 border. The resulting chimera, called HKU3-Smix, would be “provided” to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for “immune boosting” of Chinese horseshoe bats.

In 2018-19, Baric resubmitted the rejected DARPA Defuse proposal to Fauci at NIAID. On February 1, 2020, a small group of the world’s top virologists gathered on a secret teleconference organized by Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrar. The new virus had a feature that alarmed Kristian Andersen: a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 border, designated RRAR.

Andersen presented the engineering evidence during that February 1 call. Baric was not on the original invite list but was a surprise participant. Two days later, after Andersen had privately told Fauci that SARS2 looked engineered and that he wanted to contact the FBI, Baric ambushed and “attacked” Andersen at a follow-up meeting.

“I should mention that Ralph Baric pretty much attacked me on the [Feb 3] call with NASEM, essentially calling anything related to potential lab escape ludicrous, crackpot theories. I wonder if he, himself, is worried about this, too.”

Andersen later admitted he had “no idea” Baric was on the February 1 call because Farrar did not invite him, though apparently Fauci did. By May 2020, Baric praised Andersen’s Proximal Origin paper and dismissed the lab leak theory. But Andersen had no idea what had happened. He was gaslit and steamrolled before calling the FBI.

What Baric did not say on that February 1 call was that he had identified the idea of manipulating a furin cleavage site as “clearly mine.” He did not mention that in 2018, he proposed creating a SARS2-like genome in a DARPA grant proposal. He did not mention that he had patented a chimeric coronavirus called HKU3-Smix that was 25% different from SARS1, or that SARS2’s spike protein is 24.7% different. He did not mention that he proposed creating this novel chimera using six restriction sites.

In March 2020, U.S. government biodefense officials asked Baric in the Red Dawn emails whether SARS-CoV-2 contained “any restriction sites.” Baric responded, “No, there is absolutely no evidence of genetic engineering.”

SARS-CoV-2 contains five restriction sites, yielding six pieces. Baric later testified, “We think our [UNC] approach is safer [than the WIV] because we’ve divided the genome into six pieces.”

Baric gave technical presentations to intelligence officials in January 2020, to HHS in February, to congressional staff in February, and jointly with Fauci in March. These hour-long presentations discussed the receptor-binding domain in detail, but somehow, Baric never mentioned the obvious furin cleavage site.

Many lab leakers believe intelligence agencies have the answers, but Baric was lying to them. Most lab leakers mistakenly believe that a classified meeting or a top-secret document will solve this riddle. The evidence has already been collected; it’s the conclusion that mortal minds struggle with.

The questions below were assembled from congressional testimony, FOIA documents obtained by DRASTIC and USRTK, DARPA Defuse records, NIAID grant filings, IBC biosafety committee documents, and internal EcoHealth files inadvertently made public.

These are the questions that investigators, senators, and the WHO SAGO committee should have asked, but never received straight answers to. Any enterprising reporter, ambitious politician, or attorney eyeing UNC’s $5 billion endowment might want to ask Baric or UNC:

1. In January 2021, you, Ralph Baric, attended a red team meeting organized by the State Department, David Asher, David Relman, Alina Chan, and Steve Quay. Quay presented his Bayesian paper supporting a lab origin. Quay said you bullied him?

   

2. Former CDC director, Robert Redfield, has called you the “scientific mastermind” and would like to see your shipping receipts. Redfield claims COVID is a vaccine because of immune evasion or asymptomatic spread. Comments?

3. Who invited you to the February 1, 2020, teleconference? You testified, “NIH staff?” If Fauci, was it via email, text, or phone? Kristian Andersen testified that you were not invited due to your COIs.

4. Why did you verbally “attack” Andersen just two days later during the February 3 NASEM meeting? It was an argument that Bob Kadlec heard about.

5. Why did you think Shi Zhengli may be “arrested” for publishing RaTG13?

   

   1. When Shi published RaTG13 on January 24, 2020, the SARS2 furin cleavage site was easy to see for Kristian Andersen.

      

   2. “On either side of the new furin site, the amino acid sequence is identical in both from aa614 to aa1133 – an apparent insert of PRRA is the only difference in an otherwise 100% conserved 519 amino acid region.”

      

   3. Andersen recently lied about this, but he needed Shi’s RaTG13 to see your engineered furin cleavage site.

6. You testified that you saw the furin cleavage site (FCS) on January 6th or 7th, 2020. You also testified that the “idea of manipulating the protease [e.g. furin] was clearly mine.”

   1. Why did you omit the FCS from your ODNI presentation on January 23? The FCS should appear on page 31 of 56, comparing SARS1 and SARS2.

   2. Why did you omit the FCS from your HHS presentation on February 21?

   3. Why did you omit the FCS from your congressional staff presentation in Washington, D.C., on February 26?

   4. Why did you omit the FCS from your joint Fauci presentation on March 10? These are hour-long technical presentations that discuss the receptor binding domain, but not the FCS?

      1. The only time you publicly declared the FCS was in May 2022.

7. Did you have a copy of the RaTG13 genome before 2020? It was partially uploaded to the NCBI database in July 2018, but embargoed for 4 years and released in 2022. You testified that the WIV was to “share” bat samples with yourself, since you were added to their R01 grant in 2019.

   1. Did Shi or anyone else share any Chinese genomes with you before 2020?

   2. Fang Li served as your intermediary for Shi and her samples, like MERS 422?

   3. In March 2017, you told Fang Li you were working on novel viruses that are 20% different from SARS1, and SARS2 is 20% different (25% at the spike only)?

      

   4. Did you reconstruct RaTG13 in early 2020 but not publish the results?

      

8. On March 5, 2020, US biodefense officials in the Red Dawn emails asked, “Are there any restriction sites [in SARS2 genome] suggesting this is engineered?” You replied, “No, there is absolutely no evidence that this virus is bioengineered.”

   1. Why did you not mention the FCS?

   2. Nor did you mention the restriction sites (BsmBI, BsaI, BsaXI)? You even budgeted BsmBI (R0580S) in the DARPA Defuse draft. Will you provide your New England Biolab orders from 2018-19?

      

   3. Nor did you mention your DARPA Defuse plans to create a SARS2-like chimera with six pieces using five restriction sites?

      

9. Will you release all of your BioBasic, Blue Heron, or any other synthetic DNA orders from 2018-19?

10. During your testimony, “We think our [UNC] approach is safer [than the WIV] because we’ve divided the genome into six pieces.” The DIA intel report shows 6 segments in SARS2?

    

11. During testimony, you admitted that SARS2 has “six pieces” created by five restriction sites (3 BsmBI and 2 BsaI), but claimed the segments are not evenly spaced and that you would never do that. Your SCH014-MA15 sequence was published post-pandemic and has uneven spacing. Comments?

    

12. While recreating the SARS2 genome in early 2020, you inserted a new restriction site (6 total) between each existing site, for a total of 7 segments. In other words, you could have recreated the SARS2 genome with 0 modifications, but added unnecessary work. Why?

    

    1. This same engineering method was replicated by your longtime postdoc, Vineet Menachery, at UTMB Galveston. Why?

13. Why did you think it was a “good decision” not to sign the Lancet letter calling a lab leak a conspiracy?

    1. In May 2020, you praised the Proximal Origin paper’s “genetic and biological data as strong evidence against deliberate generation, and the arguments are compelling.” Do you still feel that way? Did you add the two citations to Andersen’s Proximal Origin paper, because two references are UNC? Did you change footnote #20 from your 2015 paper to this irrelevant 2014 paper?

       

14. On February 11, 2020, you met with Fauci and NIAID staff (Hugh Auchincloss, Alan Embry, Emily Erbelding), but claimed you had “forgotten about the Defuse proposal in DARPA.” Just 7 months earlier, in June 2019, you had recycled DARPA Defuse language into the U01AI151797 CREID grant. You even had a draft reference to the “furin cleavage sites.”

    

    

15. On October 21, 2018, you traveled to Wuhan for a meeting. The next day, you emailed Daszak about renewing the R01AI110964 grant, but used the DARPA PREEMPT rejection letter as a draft. You have now split and resubmitted the rejected DARPA Defuse grant into two NIAID grants?

    

    Note the subject line: You have converted the March 2018 DARPA rejection letter (below) into an NIAID 2R01 grant renewal (above).

    

    Daszak’s Mandarin-speaking assistant, Hongying Li, was explicit in her English:

    

    Do you deny that you have split the Defuse bid into two NIAID grants (R01 = TA1 and U01 = TA2)?

    

16. In March 2018, UNC conducted research on ENaC (RRAV/SVAS) that aligns with the SARS2 FCS. According to a 2018 IBC FOIA, did you perform ENaC research?

    

17. During testimony, you asked, “Why would anybody engineer” that proline (PRRAR) in the SARS2 FCS. Christian Drosten recently presented evidence to the WHO SAGO committee showing MERS-MA30 (PRRVR) matches the SARS2 FCS. You referenced this MERS-MA30 research in 2019?

    1. Florence Debarre recently found your MERS-like FCS research (RXXR) at the S1/S2 border in the 2018 Defuse document. Your early 2020 UNC paper also referenced MERS-MA30 (PRRVR). Because SARS-like viruses don’t have an FCS, you had to use MERS-like in SARS2 (PRRAR). That MERS-like FCS research continued with Egyptian fruit bats, which are a SARS2 reservoir host. Do you have an alibi?

       

18. In 2015, you told STAT News that any SARS-like virus that was less than 25% different from SARS1 was being targeted for your research. In the DARPA Defuse bid, you referenced a novel chimera, HKU3-Smix, that differs by 25%. In the 2019 R01 grant, you referenced a novel chimera, HKU3r-CoVs, that differs by 25%. SARS2 spike is 24.7% different. Please provide all genomic sequences related to this research.

    

19. In DARPA Defuse draft notes, you mention a novel chimera (293 + HK3) is 20% different from SARS1. The entire SARS2 genome is 20% different. You testified that 293 was a typo. Is it 279? Is this your HKU3-Smix patented chimera? The SARS2 spike is 24.7% different, but the entire genome is only 20% different. You testified that it was 22% different, but “we were within the range.”

    

20. Was HKU3-Smix renamed HKU3r-CoV in the R01 and U01 NIAID grants? Is this genome equivalent to SARS2, which is also group 2b? The WHO SAGO committee tried to defend your patent by debating clades. You testified that HKU3-Smix is a clade 2 backbone with a clade 1A spike. The spike domains (NTD, RBD, S2) were modular. That modularity is how you achieved a 25% deviation from SARS-CoV-1—exactly where SARS-CoV-2’s spike sits at 24.7%.

    

21. DRASTIC recently uncovered a draft of your DARPA Defuse bid. You would “provide” Shi Zhengli and Linfa Wang with your novel chimeras, such as HKU3-Smix, for “immune boosting of bats.” Were any of your chimeras shipped to Wuhan, Duke-NUS, or Rocky Mountain Lab before 2020?

    

22. Who added and then removed Vincent Munster of RML from the DARPA Defuse team? Was Munster to forward your bat vaccine to Linfa Wang?

    

23. Who added Munster to the U01 CREID grant? What was the “ongoing collaboration?”

    

24. In September 2021, you appeared on a CNN special about the origins of COVID. You appeared with Danielle Anderson of Duke-NUS. What is your working relationship with her? Why did her boss, Linfa Wang, resign as Duke’s EID director on January 10, 2020?

    

25. In September 2021, days before your DARPA Defuse bid was published, Peter Daszak emailed you a heads-up. He appeared caught off guard by your FCS plans?

26. In May 2021, after signing the Science letter calling for an investigation of Shi’s BSL2 lab, you sent this CYA email from your Gmail account, but there was no mention of Danielle Anderson’s BSL4 research?

    

27. Why did your wife, Toni Baric, tell Daszak to use her Gmail address? Why did you and your wife mislead the FBI agent about the USRTK FOIA’s?

    

    

28. Daszak later tweeted that Danielle Anderson was working with live bats in the Wuhan BSL4. In DARPA Defuse, she was assigned to perform the “animal studies.” She told Bloomberg she was working on Ebola, but her name is next to yours in the Defuse and CREID documents?

    

    

29. In 2019, Linfa and Danielle referenced your “consensus” sequence research on coronaviruses. In Defuse, you proposed to create a “consensus” sequence like SARS2. Will you release all records and communications with them?

    

30. As shown above in your DARPA Defuse draft, why do RaTG13 and Laos Banal-52 have <5% variation from SARS2?

31. Did you have a copy of any Laos bat samples (e.g. Banal) before 2020?

    1. Did NMRC-A or anyone else share any Laos genomes with you before 2020?

32. What is your relationship with Rocky Mountain Lab? Did you ever engage in self-spreading vaccine research with RML? Robert Redfield believes Covid is a self-spreading vaccine because of three phenotypes: aerosolization (oral spread), reinfection (superinfection), and asymptomatic spread (immune evasion).

33. In 2019, you shipped samples to Heinz Feldmann at RML. Was Munster or Feldmann your point of contact? Was Alexandra Schaefer of UNC your RML intermediary?

    

34. What is the CRG7 mutant? Why is it (UGGUCGC) found in your 2018 LAV bat vaccine paper, RaTG13, Laos Banal-52, and SARS2 in the Orf1a reading frame?

35. Why are Egyptian fruit bats a non-natural reservoir host for SARS2? Why were you and Munster experimenting with these bats in 2018? It appears your collaboration with Munster began in 2016, as you were sending Munster tubes of samples.

    

36. In the middle of your 2018 bat paper, you added a line about intracellular proteases, or a furin cleavage site? At the end of the paper, you plan for an “experimental inoculation study using Chinese horseshoe bats.”

    1. Who was to lead that Wuhan experiment, Danielle Anderson? In March 2018, during the drafting of DARPA Defuse, you wrote, “I have no bat colony, no way for me to do the experiment, which I definitely think needs to be done, or we have no credibility. My understanding [is] another bat colony exists in China.” In the U01 grant, Danielle Anderson has a similar scope of work:

       

37. SAGO’s recent Nature commentary addressed our bat vaccine theory directly and named UNC and Defuse as the central focus of their investigation. They acknowledged that you held patents on recombinant chimeric live coronavirus vectors and conducted binding assays using SHC014-CoV on human ACE2 cells. They concluded it was “scientifically implausible” that SARS2 derived from the Defuse chimeric backbone. Will you provide all genomic sequences related to HKU3-Smix, HKU3r-CoV, and the 293/279 chimeras so that SAGO’s implausibility claim can be independently verified?

38. SAGO states that “even if Defuse had been approved, the work was never done.” Yet in October 2018, you traveled to Wuhan and immediately emailed Daszak about converting the rejected DARPA bid into an NIAID R01 — using the original DARPA rejection letter as a draft template. The work described in Defuse subsequently appeared in NIH grants U01AI151797 and the renewed R01AI110964. Do you dispute that the Defuse research program was continued under NIH funding after DARPA’s rejection, and if so, on what basis?

39. Linfa Wang resigned on January 10, 2020. Daszak appears to be out of the loop on your furin cleavage site plans. Do you, Ralph Baric, have an alibi? Jim Haslam and Jeffrey Sachs recently asked you for an alibi, but you did not provide one. Will you defend yourself?

40. At what point did you decide the world didn’t need to know what you already knew on February 1, 2020 — and who made that decision with you?

The shipping receipts exist. The restriction site orders exist. The chimeras exist. The patent exists. The email in which Baric converts a DARPA rejection letter into an NIAID grant in Wuhan exists. The only thing that doesn’t exist is a straight answer. The WHO SAGO committee quietly pointed to UNC, but nobody in Washington, D.C., noticed.

Congress had a chance with Baric and walked away with nothing, apparently unable to locate the furin cleavage site in a man who testified it was “clearly mine.” The same Congress that can’t believe Baric was on the February 1 call somehow also can’t bring itself to ask why. Many years later, the documents are still here. The receipts are still waiting. So are we.

Because contrary to what Ralph Baric told the Red Dawn group in early 2020, there is absolutely evidence of genetic engineering — and it has his name on it.

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Igor Rogozin’s letter calling for a biological barcode received a positive response.

In February 2020, Ralph Baric was asked by UNC’s Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) to insert a molecular signature into his recreation of the SARS2 genome. Did Baric leave his signature on COVID-19?

In April 2025, Dr. Steven Quay gave two U.S. senators a draft bill for a similar genetic watermarking. Quay wrote:

Attached is a draft of the BIOSEAL Act of 2025. I think it would be an important legislative effort to balance allowing important pathogen research to proceed but with safeguards that allow attribution if the research causes a laboratory-acquired infection that gets into the community or even spreads more widely. It requires that all research funded by the federal government that involves human or animal pathogens be traceable. This traceability is made possible by requiring all researchers to insert a laboratory-specific 'watermark' into the genome of any organism they intend to work on. This watermark is a silent mutation that is in a position of the genome where it does not change the properties of the pathogen, thus not affecting the research in any way. The location of this mutation in the genome is reported to the federal funding agency within 30 days of funding and the beginning of research. From that time forward, any community infection with an organism that is also under study at a nearby laboratory can be quickly identified as a lab leak, or not, by sequencing the organism. If it has the watermark, there is a 99.99% likelihood it came from that lab (it is not 100% because a natural mutation could, 1 out of 30,000 times, be in the same spot in the genome). If it does not have the watermark, the lab is exonerated.

Billy Bostickson mentioned his lab leak blockchain proposal. And Rutger’s biosecurity hawk, Richard Ebright, had the worst comment:

The corruption inside the biodefense community

While Igor Rogozin distributed his biosecurity letter, he was told that “countermeasures are a cash cow,” so don’t bother rocking this rich boat. Below is a group of biodefense lobbyists, many of whom are former members of Congress and state governors. They are trying to renew the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), which calls for developing “countermeasures.” The same research pipeline that produced DEFUSE is the one these lobbyists want to protect.

The D.C. power brokers lament that no one remembers the 2001 Anthrax attacks (by a Fort Detrick insider trying to goose spending), so the former FDA commissioner, Peggy Hamburg, says we should try the Iran War as a “news hook.”

Which raises a question that recently asked:

https://brownstone.org/articles/what-if-the-fda-were-eliminated/

Matt Ridley goes to D.C. to cover up a Wuhan lab leak

Reverend Ridley stood at the (NIH) pulpit and preached. He delivered his sermon on the Mojiang mineshaft and the Book of Wuhan. But Lord Ridley only gave us half the lab leak gospel and forgot to name the church COVID came from. My snide comments on his sermon at Mount Bethesda:

The Elephant in the lab leak room

Bryce Nickels () and Simon Wain-Hobson () spent a full hour discussing SAGO’s recent Nature response to the COVID origins debate:

But they did not mention that Baric and UNC are the central focus of that article.

Challenging widely circulating theories

During our work, we were presented with several reports from civil movements and scientists working with scholars from unrelated fields of expertise. One theory that has been widely promoted in parts of the popular press and on social media focuses on a grant proposal known as DEFUSE. This was submitted to the US Department of Defense in 2018 by EcoHealth Alliance, in collaboration with researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Some have argued that, in trying to design a vaccine to reduce the load of coronaviruses in bats, researchers in the United States used reverse genetics to create SARS-CoV-2, which then escaped from a lab in China. Another widely circulating theory is that the virus could have escaped from animal experiments conducted in US labs. In the end, we decided to address these theories in our report to highlight some of the misconceptions, misinterpretations and speculations on which they are based.

The DEFUSE grant proposal mentions a vaccine technology based on recombinant chimeric live coronavirus vectors, which contain parts of different Sarbecovirus genomes. It also mentions recombinant expression of synthetic genes encoding chimeric spike proteins. These are proteins (not viruses) that consist of parts of the spike protein of a bat coronavirus, SHC014-CoV, parts of another previously known bat coronavirus, HKU3, as well as parts of SARS-CoV-1.

The SHC014-CoV sequence was provided by a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and a research team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill conducted binding assays to determine whether SHC014-CoV is capable of infecting human cells with ACE2 receptors. But the genome elements making up the recombinant chimeric live coronavirus do not belong to the clade to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs (a clade is a group of genetically similar viruses). Indeed, the terms recombinant and chimeric have different meanings depending on whether they are being used for live viruses or mere proteins.

Although some of the researchers submitting the DEFUSE grant application held patents on recombinant chimeric live coronavirus vectors, they did not propose to vaccinate bats using this technology. In their grant application — which was never actually funded — they proposed using only recombinant proteins (or subunit antigens) to vaccinate bats. These cannot replicate or spread.

Thus, contrary to the theories put forward, there was never any intention to use spreading, coronavirus-derived vaccine vectors on bats. Even if the DEFUSE grant application had been approved, and even if the researchers had used the recombinant chimeric live virus technology in human cell lines or lab animals, it is scientifically implausible for SARS-CoV-2 to have been derived from the genome elements in the chimeric vaccine backbone or proposed spike protein.

Other grant proposals submitted to the US National Institutes of Health and implicated in theories about a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 involved vaccinating bats with a vaccine consisting of modified vaccinia Ankara and vesicular stomatitis virus vectors. This vaccine technology uses safe, well-characterized, non-replicating vaccine vectors that present only a single protein of the pathogen in question to stimulate an immune response. Lastly, animal experiments involving SARS-CoV-2 were conducted in various species and countries only after the virus had been discovered in 2020.

Just having Baric’s name in Nature, linked to a Wuhan lab leak, is a huge win for the cause. SAGO’s commentary was a direct response to our bat vaccine theory.

Yet somehow, two scientists, Nickels and Hobson, who have spent years publicly demanding transparency on COVID origins, avoided the Baric issue for 60 minutes. These lab leak academics can discuss the touchy subject in the abstract, but when it comes to who caused the man-made pandemic, they suffer from memory loss. Simon’s NIH lab leak talk was “leaked,” but who cares, since he said nothing new.

Does socialism (& science?) require lying to the proletariat?

The World Socialist Website asked Peter Daszak to comment on the WHO SAGO report, which addressed our DEFUSE was funded claim, but Daszak lied.

Daszak: DEFUSE was one of probably over a hundred grant proposals I’ve written in 25 years. Scientists write grant proposals to get funding. Most are rejected—a typical success rate is 5 to 10 percent. DEFUSE was a response to a DARPA request asking us to use ecological and epidemiological methods combined with genetic tools to reduce the risk of future pandemics. We focused on bat coronaviruses because by 2018 they were a clear and present danger.

We proposed that if a SARS-related coronavirus emerged with a furin cleavage site, it might transmit more efficiently. To test that, we would look for bat CoVs with elements of a furin cleavage site in their spike protein and test (by genetic manipulation) if they are likely able to rapidly evolve to infect human cells. We also proposed to look for bat-CoVs 15 percent or more distinct from SARS-CoV, so that we could help better design vaccines and therapies that are able to prevent emergence of a wide range of CoVs. It turned out to be exactly the right scientific question because the virus that emerged was a SARS-related bat coronavirus, 20 percent different from SARS, had a furin cleavage site. But we didn’t do the work because DARPA rejected the proposal. The WHO SAGO team’s first point about DEFUSE was precisely that: it was not funded; the work was never done.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/06/jhmx-a06.html

In October 2018, the rejected DARPA team met in Wuhan. Baric emailed Daszak about recycling the rejected DEFUSE bid (TA1) into an NIAID R01 grant. Baric even used the March 2018 DARPA email chain to continue their NIAID plans.

Rasmussen on Jay, Ridley, lab leak, etc

writes:

There is one piece of evidence that would make me immediately convert to lab leaker: evidence that the WIV possessed a progenitor virus (a virus that is similar enough to SARS-CoV-2 that it was used to create SARS-CoV-2). There is no evidence that WIV had ever collected a virus similar enough that it could have been passaged, engineered, or otherwise become SARS-CoV-2.

We proposed to SAGO that Baric’s patented HKU3-Smix chimera is the progenitor virus for SARS2.

Bioweapon BS

A natural origin scientist, Zach Hensel, wrote up an interesting article on $1/2 billion Wuhan air conditioners, inflated vaccine timelines for PLA General Zhou Yusen, and a Beijing-to-Wuhan geography lesson for Matt Ridley.

In October 2022, Katherine Eban and Jeff Kao wrote “Investigating a ‘Complex and Grave Situation’ Inside a Wuhan Lab” for Vanity Fair and ProPublica. Their investigative reporting was funded by a $5M grant from the Bankman-Fried family to “look holistically at biothreats, including the security of labs around the world doing cutting-edge research.” The unspent portion of the grant was returned when Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud was exposed.

https://www.the-gallop.com/bob-kadlec-i-call-it-virological-russian-roulette/

Charges dropped against Chinese postdocs

China’s government intervened and helped get charges dropped against three Chinese scientists at the University of Michigan who were accused of helping a colleague smuggle biological materials into the U.S., defense lawyers said. It was a bacterium already widespread in North America.

The materials turned out to be mostly tiny, transparent worms — nothing dangerous — though U.S. officials last year hailed the arrests as a victory for national security. (Former) Attorney General Pam Bondi said the government must be vigilant when foreign nationals try to “advance a malicious agenda.”

https://apnews.com/article/chinese-scientists-worm-smuggling-university-michigan-896b11c79141ee852318c8c918a59b2f

Trump’s ballroom is a bomb shelter built for biodefense

President Trump on Tuesday delivered a new justification for his White House ballroom, just hours after a federal judge ordered him to halt construction. The $400 million project, he argued, is a matter of presidential security.

“We have a drone-proof roof,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, reading from prepared notes. He said the ballroom would also include bulletproof glass, “air-handling systems,” “biodefense all over,” “secure telecommunications and communications all over,” bomb shelters, a hospital and “major medical facilities.”

Trump made the unusual disclosure of the security features, including apparent references to the bunker being built beneath the ballroom. He said the ballroom “essentially becomes a shed for what’s being built under.”

Mr. Trump had previously spoken of the ballroom mostly as a matter of hospitality.

Bats on local weather radar

These are Mexican free-tailed bats, which Baric used as “proxies” for his Chinese bat vaccine, so COVID infects and immunizes them.

Why are bats killed by wind turbines?

Researchers in Germany have published a study claiming bats are killed by wind turbines due to mating calls. They installed microphones inside the nacelles (the housing at the top) of 22 wind turbines across Germany and recorded 83,000 acoustic recordings over three years. They also used a thermal camera to get a visual on the action. They discovered that males of at least seven bat species regularly perform “song flight” courtship displays around the massive structures, circling the towers while belting out mating calls that can be heard 100 meters away. Strong evidence that bats are attracted to turbines and are calling other bats to come join them there.

Horseshoe bat infection test

Sato Lab in Japan infected greater horseshoe bats (not Chinese horseshoe bats but similar) with SARS2. They cheated by using a more infectious Delta lineage (not Lineage A or WA1) and didn’t observe transmission or demonstrate reservoir host status (unlike Egyptian fruit bats). Sato essentially ran a raccoon dog or hACE2 in vivo test:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.19.712934v1.full

New space virus movie: Hail Mary

A schoolteacher-turned-astronaut with amnesia wakes up on a spaceship. He is the sole survivor of a desperate mission to save Earth from a killer microorganism. As his memory returns, he forms a friendship with an alien to develop a solution and save both their civilizations.

https://ew.com/project-hail-mary-blasts-off-to-record-breaking-80-million-dollars-premiere-11931907

Geopolitics

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has trapped a quarter of the world’s oil and a third of the world’s commercial helium, threatening the coolant that powers MRI scanners and advanced microchips. The AI boom is dependent on helium.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-iran-war-disrupts-global-helium-supply-and-artificial-intelligence-chip/

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI thought it was real

Even if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that ‘this entire paper is made up’ and ‘Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y

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His Idea

Rogozin’s proposal was elegant in its simplicity: add a unique molecular identifier to each experimental virus. A barcode, which has no biological effect but provides a traceable signature that would survive a lab leak.

The cost would be minimal. The technology already exists. Similar barcoding methods are regularly used in genetics research to track rare mutations in affected families. Rogozin had already secured initial agreements with mathematicians to develop the theoretical framework and received positive responses from two experimental labs willing to conduct proof-of-principle experiments.

Rogozin was not naive about scientific politics and welcomed debate. He estimated that the first generation of barcoding systems could be ready within a year. But he died before his idea could be published.

Rogozin’s Own Words from His Unpublished May 2025 Letter

If society decides to invest substantial amounts of money in new vaccines, well, as a scientist, I will accept this. However, as a reliable member of society, I must think about safety and public well-being.

My strong opinion: We need to develop new safety protocols to avoid situations “oops, virus jumped out of our building, bad luck, sorry… well, it's almost impossible to trace this anyway, we are Ok.” Lab leaks are not something incredible; it is not a drama, it is just one potential outcome of experiments that should be avoided as much as we can. I have personal experience: an obvious leak of mouse DNA causing contamination of human DNA in our well-maintained lab was documented and published. Fortunately, this experiment had nothing to do with public safety.

ONE POSSIBLE SAFETY PROTOCOL. “Dead” viruses are “not dead” before inactivation procedures. When we talk about the new generation of vaccines, we should try to simplify future investigations of leaks as a result of experiments and bad production standards. Thus, each EXPERIMENTAL setting and PRODUCTION pipeline should have an assigned unique identifier (molecular barcode) that is inserted in viral molecules. The associated costs are negligible. It is easy to develop unique barcoding systems. Similar techniques are widely used in many biological experiments, for example, for delineation of extremely rare cases of genetic changes in studies of affected families. This is not a gain-of-function, just a neutral molecular marker.

I already have preliminary agreements with experts in math who are ready to develop theoretical frameworks of barcoding systems. I also have positive responses from two experimental labs that can run “proof-of-principle” experiments. I have no doubt that the first generation of new barcoding systems (for scientific labs and industrial pipelines) can be developed within one year.

I will enjoy arguing with people who do not agree with the use of barcoding systems. I expect exciting and productive conversations.

I think that new safety protocols are equally important for both science and public safety.

I believe that the barcoding system needs to be developed in order to increase the responsibility of people involved in this dangerous research and production.

Sincerely, Igor B. Rogozin

CSO, AVID-DATA LLC, rogozin@avid-data.com

Brief credentials: https://loop.frontiersin.org/people/35211/overview

A reviewer of my letter had critical questions, and these are my responses:

Question: Could one possible negative of barcoding be sabotage? Might a bad actor maliciously use a bar code to make it appear that some bad viral leak came from a certain source, so that source was falsely blamed?

Answer: Yes, but it is a CRIMINAL violation. Checking barcodes is really easy, just random checks occasionally. We have the FDA and CDC after all.

Question: The WHO wants to have a bank of viruses from across the world. Presumably, those would not be barcoded. So if there was a leak, one would still not know where those viruses came from.

Answer 1) Our country should lead as it happens from time to time. Show an example to other countries. Barcoding is a process that may take a long time for the whole world.

Answer 2) Many (at least some) countries have higher standards of working with viruses. I am sorry to say that.

Answer 3) WHO... well, keeping viruses is relatively safe... although I am also not sure it is a good idea. I agreed. Barcoding is easy to check, a few hours at maximum. WORKING with viruses is really UNSAFE.

Rogozin’s Biography by NIH Colleagues

Igor B. Rogozin is a prominent bioinformatician and computational biologist known primarily for his pioneering work on mutational processes, particularly in somatic hypermutation (SHM) in immunoglobulin (Ig) genes. He was one of the first to introduce the idea that mutational specificity (fingerprints) gives clues to the mechanisms of the underlying processes. He and colleagues identified DNA sequence motifs associated with outbursts of mutations during SHM. Dr. Rogozin first discovered and refined the DNA sequence motif, the RGYW/WRCY (R = A or G, Y = C or T, W = A or T), that is highly mutable during immunoglobulin somatic hypermutation. The GYW/WRC motif was later found to be a target for activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID), a key enzyme initiating SHM. Next was the discovery of the second motif, WA/TW, where mutations are created by another player in SHM – error-prone DNA polymerase η. Thus, Dr. Rogozin contributed enormously to the understanding of the molecular basis of antibody diversity and mechanisms of mutation targeting not only in humans but in other evolutionarily distant organisms. His following work extended to identifying novel mutation signatures involving these motifs in cancer genomes. The power of the mutation specificity approach pioneered by Dr. Rogozin proved to be a key strategy of modern analysis of mutation processes in cancer. Being a wide-profile computational biologist, Dr. Rogozin contributed to studies of DNA polymerases, helped to describe elements of the system protecting bacteria from viruses, now known as CRISPR/Cas9 DNA editing tool, and other problems of evolutionary biology. Dr. Rogozin contributed to methods for statistically identifying mutation hotspots using programs like CLUSTERM and CONSEN, which helped assign significance to mutation clusters and motifs context.

239 published papers. One final idea. Nobody listened.

Rogozin’s publications list in the PubMed database registers an outstanding 239 entries. Here are four:

Rogozin and Kolchanov, 1992: “Somatic hypermutagenesis in immunoglobulin genes. II. Influence of neighboring base sequences on mutagenesis” in Biochim Biophys Acta 1171, 11 (1992) established the foundation for mutable sequence motif analysis.

Rogozin IB, Pavlov YI, Bebenek K, Matsuda T and Kunkel TA (2001) Somatic mutation hotspots correlate with DNA polymerase  error spectrum. Nature Immunology, 2, 530-536 described SHM motif associated with DNA polymerase η.

Rogozin, IB, LM Iyer, L. Liang, GV Glazko, VG Liston, YI Pavlov, L Aravind, Z. Pancer. (2007) Evolution of lamprey antigen receptor diversification: evidence for an AID-like deaminase, Nature Immunology, 8(6):647-56 revealed that the system determining immunity in lamprey is completely different from humans, nevertheless the key player is still the cytosine deaminase, Pm CDA1.

Rogozin IB, Pavlov YI, Goncearenco A, De S, Lada AG, Poliakov E, Anna R. Panchenko, David N. Cooper (2018) Mutational signatures and mutable motifs in cancer genomes. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 19(6), 1085-1101is a summary of approaches used to analyze mutation signatures in cancers.

The Unfinished Request

In our 2025 letter to the WHO’s SAGO committee, we requested examination of all UNC molecular clones and their IBC signatures. The request was not rhetorical. During the pandemic, when Ralph Baric was reconstructing the SARS-CoV-2 genome at UNC, his own Institutional Biosafety Committee requested in February 2020 that he insert a small molecular signature into the infectious clone to distinguish it from the circulating wildtype virus.

If Baric left a signature in the virus that leaked from Wuhan, I believe it’s UGGUCGC, a unique sequence motif he described in a 2018 Nature paper on recombination-resistant bat vaccines. If Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountain Lab left one, it’s KLRS. But neither man will defend themselves, no regulator has compelled them to, and so we are left doing what Rogozin spent his entire career doing: reading the genome for fingerprints that someone hoped we wouldn’t find.

That is why the barcode matters. Not for the next pandemic but this past one.

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After bravely published our Ralph Baric article, prominent lab leak proponents Alina Chan, Matt Ridley, and Richard Ebright freaked out.

For the past 3 years, we have always called this an R&D accident involving 4 international scientists: Baric, Vincent Munster, Dani Anderson, and Linfa Wang.

If Munster’s colleagues didn’t know, neither did the CIA or the CCP. But Ebright called me “a scientific illiterate, a general ignoramus, and a brazen liar. He has nothing of value to contribute.”

One ally called them “The Lab-leak Industrial Complex” or LIC. Another mock name was “Saving Private Baric.” Then someone delivered the perfect meme.

Ridley then typed a 1,000-word tweet that was published by Daily Skeptic. But Ridley produced no evidence of a Wuhan lab leak and pushed his own CCP-level propaganda.

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/03/25/blaming-america-for-creating-covid-19-is-implausible-and-lets-china-off-the-hook/

Blaming America for Creating COVID-19 is Implausible – and Lets China Off the Hook

Was it the sorcerer or the apprentice?

There’s a new theory in the Covid origin debate being pushed by some people, namely that the virus was probably created in America by Ralph Baric’s research group at the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina – and sent to China from there.

We are not “blaming America” since Baric was the only American. We are not letting “China off the hook” because they invited Anderson and Wang into their Wuhan BSL4 and set up their Chinese horseshoe bat lab.

This international story is not a “new theory” since Daily Skeptic has covered Baric, Munster, Fauci, Anderson and Wang, but Ridley continues by inferring that Jeff Sachs and I are traitors:

It’s not plausible for many reasons. But it plays into the hands of the Chinese Government, who may be surreptitiously pushing it through their friends in the West to confuse the issue and distract from the evidence.

That evidence strongly suggests that there was indeed a lab leak but it was in Wuhan and it was of a virus assembled in Wuhan.

Ralph Baric did collaborate closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), it is true, and he pioneered the synthesis of chimeric sarbecoviruses and testing these on humanised mice – which his Wuhan counterpart, Shi Zhengli, later began doing in her own laboratory but at low biosafety level. That much is on the record.

In fact, Baric’s Wuhan counterparts were Linfa Wang and Dani Anderson, not Shi Zhengli.

Ridley goes on to defend a man who won’t defend himself:

Baric has steadfastly refused to share his email correspondence and his university has gone to court to prevent its release. He has also refused to testify in open session before Congress so far.

This is a mistake on his part because it is now fuelling speculation that he created the virus. He should reveal what he knows to clear the air.

Here are three reasons that it is highly unlikely that Baric made SARS-CoV-2 in a North Carolina lab.

First, sarbecoviruses do not exist in the wild in the Americas. The horseshoe bats that host them are only found in the old world. In order to work on SARS-related viruses at all, Baric has to import them or their digital sequences from China – in his case from Wuhan.

Where would he have got the backbone virus from to do the experiment? After all, the WIV and Baric were competitors as well as collaborators. Baric has admitted that the WIV would not have shared their most interesting strains with him, much less the novel lineage four viruses which they obscured in their 2019 paper.

Sarbecoviruses do exist in Baric’s North Carolina lab. In fact, Baric’s inventory is probably bigger than Shi’s, since every sample from NIH, DoD, PREDICT, and WIV winds up in his inbox.

Ridley’s favorite sample, RaTG13, was collected with NIH funds and partially uploaded to an NIH database in 2018, where Baric could download the genetic sequence and resurrect it into a live virus. As we wrote, “Baric testified that Shi was to share samples like RaTG13 with him prior to publication.” But Ridley continues:

Second, even if they did send him the information from which to assemble SARS-CoV-2, rather than doing it themselves, why on earth would he then ship the completed chimeric sarbecovirus back to Wuhan for testing? Or send the digital recipe for them to copy?

That would have been pointless as well as highly irresponsible. Baric may be guilty of encouraging foolish experiments and concealing his own role in collaborating with Wuhan, but there is no evidence for any of this.

Apparently, Ridley has not read DARPA Defuse. Baric makes it very clear that he wants to inoculate Chinese horseshoe bats with his novel chimeras (think Lego blocks of viruses).

HKU3-Smix, like RaTG13 and SARS2, has 25% divergence from SARS1 at the spike.

Below, Ridley continues, who has not read Baric’s testimony, who made it clear that the idea of inserting a furin cleavage site “was clearly mine.”

Third, the notorious DEFUSE proposal for inserting a furin cleavage site into a sarbecovirus for the first time in 2018 stated clearly that the work would mostly be done in Wuhan, because it could be done at a lower biosafety level there to save costs. (A shocking revelation in itself.)

An early draft of the proposal even includes an exchange in which Baric is told he won’t get to do most of the work, and he protests at the low biosafety level used in Wuhan, saying it will “freak out” US scientists.

Notice the bait-and-switch Ridley does. The above section has nothing to do with the furin cleavage site. The Defuse team was discussing binding assays, which are harmless PCR tests, and humanized mice, which COVID does not infect.

The above draft notes even made it into the Defuse final bid.

But notice Baric “will lead targeted immune boosting work.” On what? Chinese horseshoe bats, available only at the WIV. This answers Ridley’s question: why on earth would Baric then ship the completed chimeric sarbecovirus back to Wuhan for testing?

Ridley continues:

In our analysis of the origin of Covid, Alina Chan and I are often urged to speculate about exactly what happened but we resist going too far beyond the known facts. Expertise and funds went from America to Wuhan a lot: that much is a fact. Sequence information was sometimes shared. It is possible that synthesised viruses and sequences were whizzing back and forth too but we have no evidence of this for SARS-CoV-2. For several years before the pandemic, the Wuhan team had been successfully genetically engineering sarbecoviruses and experimenting with these in the lab. They had surpassed Baric in the quantity of these experiments and, most importantly, had access to a still-secret trove of bat sarbecoviruses from the regions where SARS-CoV-2’s closest relatives have been found. Baric was the sorcerer, certainly, but it is far more likely that the accident happened to the apprentice.

Actually, Baric was the apprentice of Linfa Wang, who honorably resigned on January 10, 2020, which is the same day the SARS2 genome was published. But Ridley persists with his “speculation” because he can’t present any biological evidence that anyone inside the WIV created SARS2. Because it’s “biologically impossible.”

More reactions to the Baric article

They can’t admit Baric would “provide” Wuhan with SARS2 (HKU3-Smix), lie to intel, attack Kristian Andersen, have no alibi, and not defend himself.

When I’m asked what it’s about, I give a simple answer: it’s theological. Something bad happened, so someone bad did it.

But these four simpletons will still defend Baric because of an “implausible speculation” supposedly “pushed by the CCP” in what they call “next-level spy fiction.”

Ridley then pushed the Ben Hu patient 0 theory, who was Shi’s postdoc, and he made $10/hr.

Again, if you think Shi, Ben, or anyone at the WIV inserted the SARS2 furin cleavage site and then published RaTG13 exposing it, you are a simpleton like Ridley.

Ridley’s NIH presentation from last week

https://videocast.nih.gov/watch/244438a5-0e6b-11f1-9f14-124f0a52e769

Best comment from our previous Ridley post

Yes, it was a well-curated version of the lab leak from the House of Lords guy. The debate was clearly set in keyfabe mode. No references to the Moderna patent or the 19-nt unique furin sequence. No reference to Duke-Singapore Lab and Linfa Wang. Crickets about RML, and that NIH is currently funding the CSU bat facility, and no word about our homegrown monster (forgive me for playing on words, Munster). Their new beautiful version is to blame China, to accept lab leak and tell the public that their stupid countermeasures would work for natural pandemics (isolation, lockdowns, and other freaking nonsense), while the lab-produced virus was so well adapted and spread so fast that it produced such meager results, and they were misled and lied to. Their curated “controlled opposition” list did not have real COVID origin diggers - you, Igor Chudov, Kevin McKernan, and many more. And after the lecture, Jay was guarded by two of Fauci’s top lieutenants. And the celebrity, well-connected and powerful Lord Ridley, was not interested in hearing the truth, as anybody else in this audience. They were debating an absurd native origin theory or a well-crafted English version of what happened. The English version quite well corresponds to the marketed version from WH (covid.org).

“Kayfabe” is a pro wrestling term for maintaining the illusion that scripted storylines are real.

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Last week, I interviewed Tommy, whose Twitter account was suspended (for unrelated reasons).

This week, British biologist Matt Ridley delivered a presentation at the NIH that should get him suspended. He listed every lab leaker except the most important: Major Joseph Murphy.

Murphy leaked Baric’s DARPA DEFUSE bid and declared SARS2 to be an American-created bat vaccine. DARPA didn’t fund it, but Murphy added, “As is known, Dr. Fauci with NIAID did not reject the proposal. The work took place at the WIV and several US sites, which are identified in detail in the proposal.”

Fauci’s nemesis and new NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, invited Ridley to the NIH stage, but basically said the origin debate doesn’t matter:

Bhattacharya said during the discussion portion of the event that he was inclined to find Ridley’s argument more compelling than theories supporting animal origins for the virus, but as a matter of policy, he said it likely does not matter whether the virus came from a lab or from animals.

Instead, he said, scientists and public health officials need to strengthen biosecurity no matter the cause of the pandemic.

“If the origin stems from a natural spillover, we must deepen our understanding of zoonotic transmission and strengthen surveillance of human-animal interface,” Bhattacharya said. “If a lab incident played a role, we must carefully examine research practices, biosafety protocols, and systems of oversight, and actually, we probably should just do both.”

Ridley’s presentation didn’t matter because he couldn’t provide one piece of evidence for a Chinese-made virus (e.g. Shi’s Vero cells delete the SARS2 furin cleavage site). His summary slide below even claimed SARS2 was lineage-4, but those viruses are in Africa.

Ridley’s lineage-4 conspiracy began with a thesis paper at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). However, Baric and SAGO refer to SARS2 lineage 2 and clade 1B, or simply group 2B, because that is what Baric was creating.

A new US Right to Know FOIA shows that Baric, not the WIV, was searching for (and patenting) a virus with 20% divergence from SARS1. SARS2 differs from SARS1 by 20%.

Shi’s publication of RaTG13 also exposed Baric’s furin cleavage site (PRRAR), making the WIV database irrelevant.

YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNS_____RSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (RaTG13)

YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNSPRRARSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (SARS2)

In DEFUSE, Baric would “provide” Shi with his group 2, clade 1B chimera, HKU3-Smix, which is now known as SARS2.

Ridley’s conspiracy involves RaTG13 itself. He doesn’t realize that Shi had renamed 4991 to RaTG13 and partially uploaded it to an NIH database in 2018, where Baric could download it.

Ridley’s 2-hour presentation will be uploaded to the NIH website later. If you want to watch it now, it’s available through streamed commentary, linked below:

Rasmussen Retorts

NIH FFS: The Freedom From Science Lab Leak Lecture Series

I’ve got a longer post coming, but this was 4.5 hours and I need dinner and a cocktail. THANK YOU to The Save America Movement, Science Fight Club (Stand Up for Science), and 27 UNIHTED. Proud to be part of a community that stands up for our science and our values…

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4 months ago · 74 likes · 7 comments · Dr. Angela Rasmussen and The Save America Movement

Virologists Rasmussen and Kristian Andersen provided commentary on Ridley’s presentation, so we will critique both sides of the origin debate.

Ridley’s presentation began with his favorite conspiracy: Shi’s omission of the furin cleavage site. But Shi’s genomic software is 30 years old and always cuts before the S1/S2 border, where the SARS2 site is located.

Rasmussen then offers an insider's comparison of NIH and DARPA bids, with detailed line-item breakdowns.

The gift of DEFUSE provided insight into Baric’s mind in 2018 and his fixation on the furin cleavage site.

Rasmussen states DEFUSE was unfunded, and Andersen repeats Baric’s false claim about “forgetting” DEFUSE.

On October 21, 2018, the rejected DARPA team met at the WIV. The next day, Baric emailed Peter Daszak about recycling the rejected TA1 bid into an NIAID R01 grant. Baric even used the March 2018 DARPA Defuse email chain to continue their NIAID plans.

Andersen’s rebuttal highlighted the 2019 2R01 grant (not the 2014 one) that Baric used to fund DEFUSE.

HKU3r-CoVs = SARS2, since the SARS2 spike (only ~15% of the genome) is 25% different from SARS1. I’ve asked Baric & NIH to deny this, but they won’t.

Lab leakers claim HKU3r-CoVs couldn’t be cultured, but Baric testified that adding a protease like furin was a “simple solution to the problem” of growing Chinese viruses in his American lab.

Sounds like Andersen listened to my recent interview with Alex Berenson, because I shared this crazy CIA and FBI story.

Kristian AndersEn references patient 0, Danielle AndersOn, who lied about working in the Ebola BSL4 lab in Wuhan, since she was part of the DEFUSE team.

Andersen referenced Baric’s 2024 testimony, but didn’t mention Baric’s “attack” on him for claiming SARS2 “looks engineered.”

To Andersen’s credit, unlike Ridley, he credits Baric with writing DEFUSE:

Ridley struggles with the peer-reviewed evidence we have provided to SAGO through numerous in vivo papers.

An American man visited Wuhan from November to January 2020, but he did not visit the Wuhan wet market. Yet his American lungs contained the oldest known sample of SARS2, called WA1, which only transmits in Rocky Mountain Lab animals. This is epidemiological ‘proof’ of a Wuhan area lab leak, but leads to a US lab origin.

When I figured this out years ago, I told Baric I would leave him out of this debate if he gave me Vincent Munster at RML. But Baric dug in, and his fellow virologists took the blame.

I sympathize with innocent scientists like Andersen and Rasmussen for getting caught in our crossfire, but don’t defend a man like Baric who won’t defend himself.

Sachs on UNC and Kopp on GoF

Natural origin virologists used to debate with Jeffrey Sachs, but they are scared of him once he started talking about Baric and Munster’s role.

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Disclaimer: If COVID-19 were linked to animal vaccine research, it would be an unintended consequence, though the institutional response was anything but accidental.

The new revelation that America’s top coronavirus scientist, Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC), worked with the intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the COVID-19 pandemic significantly raises the likelihood that Baric is the creator of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the evidence for and against this hypothesis remains incomplete because the U.S. government is engaged in an ongoing cover-up of key information. Regardless of the government’s willingness to be forthcoming, Baric himself could shed copious light on a matter of major public and scientific importance by making available his lab materials from the period leading up to the pandemic.

There is strong evidence backing the following key points:

1. Baric’s lab had the technical ability (reverse genetics systems, chimeric spike protein, infectious clone production) to build viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2.

2. The 2018 DEFUSE proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), led by Baric, explicitly outlined laboratory manipulations capable of producing a SARS-CoV-2–like virus.

3. Although DARPA declined to fund DEFUSE, most team members later received similar funding through other grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

4. U.S. intelligence agencies (including CIA and ODNI) consulted Baric and other experts from 2015 onwards and even ran pandemic war games (e.g., Event 201, Crimson Contagion) just before the pandemic. The CIA now assesses, albeit with low confidence, that a lab-related incident in China is more likely than a purely natural origin.

5. This new assessment is consistent with the “lab leak” hypothesis that Baric created the virus and “provided” it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for experiments on “wild-caught” Chinese bats.

6. Early in the pandemic, Baric omitted the furin cleavage site in his intelligence briefing. He later testified that he had seen it, and the idea of inserting such a site “was clearly mine.”

7. SARS-CoV-2 remains the only known SARS-like (sarbecovirus) with such a furin cleavage site (FCS), which significantly enhances infectivity and transmissibility.

One of us (Haslam) has set forth the most detailed and likely hypothesis regarding the origin of the pandemic, in the book COVID-19: Mystery Solved: It leaked from a Wuhan lab but it’s not Chinese junk (2024). No information has come to light that challenges or refutes the following sequence of events, as hypothesized in the book:

• Baric’s lab in North Carolina creates a chimeric SARS-like virus (SARS-CoV-2 or its immediate progenitor called HKU3-Smix) using DEFUSE-style methods.

• The proposed novel virus (HKU3-Smix) differed from SARS-CoV-1 by 25%; SARS-CoV-2’s spike differed by 24.7%. Baric later testified, “We were within the range.”

• Baric used Egyptian fruit bats as a surrogate at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana (a high-containment NIH facility that conducts DARPA research). His biotechnology was designed to be portable in a small tube and usable under BSL-2 conditions.

• The constructed virus was then sent to WIV for further experiments, likely at a Chinese bat colony (Rhinolophus sinicus) near the BSL-4 facility.

• The virus infected a lab worker, probably asymptomatically, and spread (initially undetected) in Wuhan from the WIV, triggering the pandemic.

• Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) have emerged as a non-natural reservoir host for SARS-CoV-2, and were referenced in DARPA DEFUSE.

Over the past year, we have debated this lab leak hypothesis with the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO). That debate became public with their recent Nature paper. We reminded SAGO that they have not identified a progenitor virus with 99% genome similarity, nor have they pinpointed an animal reservoir or intermediate host. We have proposed both Baric’s HKU3-Smix and Egyptian fruit bats.

We may also point to the whistleblower allegations about CIA internal behavior that support the idea that the CIA has known far more than it has let on all along. A 2023 article in Science reported an anonymous whistleblower’s claim that CIA managers offered monetary incentives to CIA analysts to downplay the lab-leak hypothesis. The CIA has denied this, and the matter is under congressional scrutiny.

Ralph Baric’s role is crucial in this hypothesis. Baric is widely regarded as the world’s leading betacoronavirus researcher. Well before COVID-19, he:

• Developed reverse genetics systems for SARS-like coronaviruses.

• Collaborated with Shi Zhengli’s team at the WIV, while testifying that Shi could not and did not replicate his engineering methods.

• Worked on gain-of-function style experiments to understand spillover risk.

The new disclosures show that in 2015, Baric participated in a Biological Security Executive Group (BSEG) meeting convened by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which included CIA participation, to brief on biological threats. Emails released in response to congressional inquiries also suggest that ODNI and the CIA later contacted Baric for expert advice on coronavirus issues; in January 2020, he briefed an ODNI “B Group” on possible lab-leak scenarios. Again, Baric did not mention the unusual furin cleavage site, which he admitted to seeing just three weeks earlier.

The organization EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), helmed at the time by Peter Daszak, is also central to the hypothesis because EHA:

• Received major NIH grants, including with Baric, to study bat coronaviruses, including active collaboration with WIV.

• Submitted the DEFUSE proposal with Baric and WIV, under which Daszak outsourced safe humanized mice work and PCR testing.

• Also received funding from Department of Defense agencies (DTRA) and USAID for global surveillance of emerging pathogens.

DEFUSE was submitted in 2018 to DARPA by EcoHealth Alliance with partners at WIV and UNC (Baric). In 2021, the DEFUSE proposal was leaked by whistleblower Major Joseph Murphy, who disclosed classified U.S. government information with significant public-health implications. Key elements of DEFUSE included:

• Sampling SARS-like bat coronaviruses,

• Using Baric’s reverse genetics system to insert novel features into spike proteins, including furin cleavage sites,

• Testing these modified viruses in humanized mice and bat colonies to assess spillover risk.

DEFUSE shows that US-funded scientists led by Baric envisioned and detailed exactly the kind of manipulations (inserting a furin cleavage site into a SARS-like coronavirus) that may have created SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, as Haslam has painstakingly shown, most of the scientific team in the DEFUSE proposal was later funded by the NIH after DARPA rejected the proposal.

Recently released emails, discovered by DRASTIC, reveal new details on the funding of DARPA DEFUSE. In 2018-19, Daszak and Baric recycled text from their rejected bid in two NIH grants.

• Technical Area 1 of DEFUSE (e.g., sharing RaTG13-like samples) became NIH 2R01AI110964.

• Technical Area 2 of DEFUSE (e.g., furin cleavage site) became NIH U01AI151797. (ResearchGate and Sachs-Haslam WHO letter).

These overlaps are shown in the table below.

On March 5, 2020, U.S. government biodefense officials asked Baric in the Red Dawn emails whether SARS-CoV-2 contained “any restriction sites.” Baric responded, “No, there is absolutely no evidence of genetic engineering.” SARS-CoV-2 contains five restriction sites, yielding six pieces. Baric later testified, “We think our [UNC] approach is safer [than the WIV] because we’ve divided the genome into six pieces.”

The Ongoing Government Coverup

The U.S. Government knows far more than it has revealed about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. While the cover-up does not prove Haslam’s hypothesis—submitted to hundreds of scientists and the World Health Organization—it makes the hypothesis far more plausible than the official narratives have implied. In short, the U.S. government has consistently hidden from the public view the nature of US-backed research and Baric’s role in it.

Crucially, the U.S. Government did not disclose DEFUSE at the start of the pandemic. The existence and contents of the proposal became public only after Major Murphy found it in a top-secret Department of Defense (DoD) folder. Baric spoke publicly to the media before DEFUSE leaked, but has not done so since it became public. Neither NIH, DoD, nor any intelligence agency came forward early to say: “By the way, the key EcoHealth/WIV/UNC team wrote a detailed proposal in 2018 to modify SARS-like coronaviruses in ways that bear on the current virus.” That silence deliberately deprived the scientific community and the public of vital context and amplified the impression that a purely natural origin was the only serious explanation on the table.

The second key element of the cover-up concerns how NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) handled the early recognition that SARS-CoV-2 might be engineered. On January 31, 2020, Scripps professor Kristian Andersen emailed Anthony Fauci, stating that he and colleagues “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

In other words, the initial assessment by some of the most influential virologists consulted by Fauci was that an artificial origin had to be seriously considered. Andersen concluded that the new SARS-CoV-2 genome “looks engineered” after comparing it with a bat sample called RaTG13, which Shi Zhengli of the WIV had published only days earlier. The comparison of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 (with PRRAR) is as follows:

YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNS_____RSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (RaTG13)

YECDIPIGAGICASYQTQTNSPRRARSVASQSIIAYTMSLGAENSVAYSNN (SARS2)

Under the 2018 DEFUSE proposal and related 2019 NIAID grants, Baric testified that Shi was to share samples like RaTG13 with him prior to publication. Although Shi could not isolate a live RaTG13 virus, Baric had written that inserting a furin cleavage site could help “recover non-cultivable viruses.” Importantly, Baric’s cell cultures preserve the furin cleavage site, while Shi’s Vero cells delete it. In this framework, Baric would “introduce” a furin cleavage site (e.g., PRRAR) and then “provide” Shi with the resulting chimera for testing on Chinese bats at the WIV.

The next day, February 1, 2020, Fauci and Francis Collins participated in a hastily convened teleconference organized by Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust, bringing together Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Robert Garry, and other prominent virologists. Subsequent congressional hearings and released emails and messages show that, on that call and in the ensuing days, several participants considered a laboratory origin—including genetic manipulation—to be plausible or even likely (with estimates such as 60–70% lab-related, 30–40% natural) before rapidly shifting toward the conclusion that a natural origin was far more likely.

The call itself and its full participant list were not publicly disclosed at the time. They became known only gradually, via FOIA requests and congressional investigations. What is clear is that: (i) NIH and NIAID did not inform the public that their hand-picked experts initially saw signs consistent with engineering, and (ii) the documents related to this call—emails, notes, and audio if it exists—have been released in a piecemeal, highly redacted manner rather than proactively. Andersen testified that they excluded Baric from the February 1, 2020, call due to his conflicts of interest with the WIV.

Two days later, both Andersen and Baric were invited to present evidence of engineering to NASEM officials (e.g., FBI, CIA, White House). In a redacted February 3, 2020, Slack message revealed in Baric’s testimony, Andersen wrote, “I should mention that Ralph Baric pretty much attacked me on the call with NASEM, essentially calling anything related to potential lab escape ludicrous, crackpot theories. I wonder if he, himself, is worried about this, too.” Andersen later admitted he had “no idea” that Baric was on the February 1 call, because Farrar did not invite him, but apparently Fauci did.

Senator Rand Paul’s office has also documented that just days before the Farrar call, Baric briefed a secretive Biological Security Executive Group (“BSEG”) convened under the ODNI umbrella on the “current coronavirus situation” and possible lab-related scenarios. The existence of that January 2020 briefing, and of follow-on contacts between Baric, Daszak, the FBI, and CIA, has only recently come to light through FOIA and independent digging (ResearchGate). The underlying slides, minutes, and analytic use of Baric’s input remain classified.

The now-famous March 2020 paper “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” (Andersen et al.) became the central scientific text used to assure the world that a laboratory origin was “not plausible.” Fauci cited it from the White House podium as dispositive evidence against a lab origin. Former CDC Director Robert Redfield later testified that he believed the authors of Proximal Origin and related scientists “acted more like politicians than scientists.” He has described Baric as the “scientific mastermind” and requested UNC shipping receipts.

The draft of the Proximal Origin paper came within days of Baric’s verbal “attack” on Andersen and reversed the frank assessments that had been made on the call. In the immediate aftermath of the February 1 call, email traffic shows sustained back-and-forth between Andersen, Garry, Holmes, and senior NIH officials, including Fauci and Collins, with Farrar coordinating. Several drafts were circulated, with Fauci “prompting” publication and Collins hoping it would “put down” the lab-leak hypothesis.

Seen in this light, the paper is almost surely a case of massive scientific fraud. Two aspects are salient from a cover-up perspective:

• Omission of DEFUSE and related work. Proximal Origin did not mention DEFUSE or other US-linked proposals envisioning manipulations of SARS-like coronaviruses, even though Fauci and others were, by then, aware of prior Baric–Shi work on chimeric viruses and of the peculiar presence of a furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2. Readers were thus never told that there existed, in the recent scientific literature and in a concrete grant proposal, a roadmap for generating viruses with broadly similar features.

• Hidden NIH/NIAID role. The NIH/NIAID role in nudging the paper’s direction and then promoting it as an independent, purely scientific assessment was never disclosed at the time. Only later email releases and hearings revealed how closely senior officials were involved and how much they saw the paper as serving a policy and reputational function—namely, deflecting attention from the possibility of a lab-related incident involving US-funded research partners.

The intelligence community’s handling of COVID-19 origins has been equally opaque. An unclassified ODNI summary released in 2021 stated that different agencies were split between a natural spillover and a lab-related incident, with all agencies acknowledging that both scenarios were plausible (DNI). That document did not, however, explain in detail what data each agency held, what role US-supported research in Wuhan played in their analysis, or which US programs and personnel had been examined.

In 2023, a whistleblower came forward alleging that CIA management had offered monetary incentives to analysts to change their assessment and downplay the likelihood of a lab origin, to maintain ambiguity. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and the House Intelligence Committee publicized this allegation, and ODNI acknowledged that the CIA was “looking into” it; the CIA has denied improper conduct (House Oversight Committee). Regardless of the ultimate findings, the fact that such a claim could be credibly raised by an internal whistleblower underscores deep concerns about politicization of the CIA’s analytic work on origins. There is also ample evidence that the ODNI has lied, obstructed, and obfuscated.

In early 2025, the CIA updated its internal assessment and concluded with low confidence that a laboratory-related incident in China was “more likely” than a purely natural origin (Reuters). The CIA’s change of view was not accompanied by any public explanation of what new evidence or re-weighted factors led to the shift. The agency has not released the underlying analytic products, the internal deliberations, or any detailed assessment of US-funded coronavirus work and its potential connection to lab-origin scenarios.

Together, these threads portray an intelligence apparatus that (i) has long been aware of credible lab-origin possibilities, (ii) has interacted repeatedly and directly with Baric and other key scientists, and (iii) has repeatedly adjusted its public stance without providing transparency.

A further, glaring aspect of the cover-up is the continued withholding of primary laboratory records and US program data that would be essential to any serious forensic investigation of SARS-CoV-2’s origin. As Harrison and Sachs argued in their 2022 PNAS call for an independent inquiry, a credible investigation requires access to viral sequences gathered under US- and European-funded surveillance programs, internal databases of virus constructs, and lab notebooks and electronic records from the laboratories that carried out relevant work. This evidence is especially pertinent in view of the clear homology between amino acid sequences of SARS-CoV-2 and the furin cleavage site of ENaC (a lung and kidney epithelial protein studied at UNC), as shown below.

• QTQTNS_____RSVASQ (RaTG13; Shi lab, WIV)

• QTQTNSPRRARSVASQ (SARS2; RRARSVAS is identical with UNC research)

• QTQTNSPRRVRSVASQ (2019 MERS-MA30 Perlman labs; BMC)

• QTQTNS_____RSVASQ (Laos Banal-52; Eloit lab, Pasteur Institute)

Baric testified that the proline (the “P” in PRRAR) was unnecessary. Yet, as noted by Lisewski and presented to the World Health Organization, a similar furin cleavage site with a proline residue is present at the S1/S2 junction in the mouse-adapted MERS-MA30 variant, which Baric referenced in 2019. Because SARS-like viruses (sarbecoviruses) lack furin cleavage sites, Baric investigated MERS-like furin cleavage sites instead. He testified that “we were fundamentally interested in why didn’t sarbecoviruses have a furin cleavage site,” and that adding such a site was a “simple solution to the problem” of growing synthetic viruses in his lab.

On January 7, 2026, U.S. Right to Know lost its appeal seeking access to 50,000 pages of Baric-related documents. To date, no such comprehensive disclosure has occurred. Neither NIH nor UNC has released a full, unredacted set of Baric’s coronavirus-related lab notebooks, virus libraries, plasmid maps, electronic records, or internal correspondence for the years immediately preceding the pandemic. Similarly, the full set of EcoHealth-funded sequences, raw data, and internal communications—whether held at EcoHealth, WIV, Rocky Mountain Laboratories, or elsewhere—has not been made openly available. Much of what is known has emerged via leaks, partial FOIA productions, or targeted congressional subpoenas.

While the ongoing cover-up does not logically prove that the Haslam hypothesis is correct, it strongly supports the core contention that the U.S. Government is concealing decisive information about the laboratory origins of SARS-CoV-2. The only way to resolve this credibly is through a truly independent, international inquiry with full access to the US records—including DEFUSE and related grants, Baric’s lab materials, EcoHealth Alliance’s data, NIH and ODNI files, and all relevant intelligence assessments. Until such an inquiry is carried out, the U.S. Government’s ongoing failure to come clean will itself remain one of the most damning facts in the entire story.

Professor Ralph Baric was provided an opportunity to comment on this draft prior to publication. Matthew Chamberlin, the Associate Dean for UNC Communications, responded, “Thank you for reaching out. As you likely already know, Dr. Baric has answered many questions on the record in proceedings before the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. That link is here to help you with your research.” That link led to six hours of Baric’s testimony, in which he never provided an alibi.

Berenson was perplexed by my mechanical engineering background, as were many in this virology debate. As I previously wrote:

I’ll also remind SAGO that it took a Group of 36 outsiders — many of them aerosol specialists, HVAC designers, and mechanical engineers — to push the WHO to acknowledge airborne transmission. Those of us trained in fluid dynamics recognized the signal early because we understand how particles move indoors. Since aerosolization is central to transmission, we can identify the (lab) animals that created COVID before 2020.

Also, sitting on Vincent Munster’s RML desk are two books. The subject of one book is raising bats in a lab, and the other book's title is Aerosol Technology.

William C. Hinds, a mechanical engineering professor at UCLA, recently passed away. He wrote the Bible for someone like Munster who wants to aerosolize an agent, which describes relative humidity, particle size, and respiratory deposition on human (and bat) lungs.

Munster basically aimed for a massive viral load in the upper respiratory tract at a targeted temperature. Unfortunately, humans share a similar temperature and ACE2 receptors. Munster did all of this in Hamilton, Montana. Ironically, his aerosol delivery route allowed us to use peer-reviewed in vivo papers to prove an RML lab origin.

John Wells from Hamilton

Alex Berenson’s best-selling spy novels were based on a fictional character, John Wells, from Hamilton, Montana. Berenson said the choice of Hamilton was random because he needed a small town.

I open Chapter 26 of my wannabe spy novel on Fauci’s RML:

Hamilton, Montana, epitomizes small-town America. It has a McDonald’s and a shuttered Kmart but is too small for a Walmart. Scenes from the popular TV show Yellowstone are filmed there. Locals fly fish in the summer and hunt deer in the winter. It’s 75% Trump country, but 10% of the town’s 5,000 residents work at the giant US government lab. Locals call it “the Lab.” Five hundred scientists have come from as far away as India, Britain, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) traces its origins to a small lab established in the 1880s on Staten Island, New York. During this time, waves of European immigrants were arriving in America, some carrying cholera and other infectious diseases. Physicians lacked knowledge about the causes of these diseases and relied on clinical signs for diagnosis.

A young medical officer at the Staten Island lab isolated a cholera organism from an arriving European passenger. Later, this lab moved to Washington, D.C., where Congress authorized it to investigate “infectious and contagious diseases and matters pertaining to public health.” By the 1930s, it had become part of NIAID, which had eventually moved to Bethesda, Maryland.

As the American population expanded westward, early settlers in the Bitterroot Range of the Rocky Mountains encountered a disease known as “black measles” or “spotted fever.” In response, the US government dispatched a research team to Montana in 1902 to find the disease’s cause. The team operated out of tents, cabins, and an old schoolhouse. They discovered ticks transmitted “black measles” and developed a vaccine against the tick-borne disease.

Those tents, cabins, and “schoolhouse lab” evolved into Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) in the 1930s. RML became a “national vaccine factory” producing spotted fever, typhus, and yellow fever vaccines for American troops during World War II. In the 1970s, it studied Aleutian mink disease. The current lab’s director said RML was built on deer tick research. A water-filled moat once surrounded the RML campus to catch ticks escaping their experiments. They have since drained the moat, and the lab now focuses on biodefense and building live bat labs.

The RML director, Marshall Bloom, said, “The term biodefense became prominent, largely through Dr. Fauci’s efforts.” Bloom added, “In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Dr. Fauci, in conversations with President George W. Bush, convinced the president to set up a big bio-defense program. And one element of that bio-defense program was to build a BSL4 facility out here at RML. We had the real estate to do it, and we had a group of scientists here who could do that work. The Bethesda campus of NIH didn’t have the real estate to build a facility like this on the main campus.”

Old picture of RML

The new BSL4 bat lab, or vivarium, below is being built next to the blue-roofed building above.

RML expansion

What started a hundred years ago as a tent for studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever has been expanded for the Chinese bat lab.

• Building 34, marked by the black circle, is the new BSL4 bat lab for Munster and Heinz Feldmann, complete with positive-pressure suits and negative-pressure containment for their live bat experiments.

• Building 28, marked by the orange square, was the older BSL-4 lab.

• Red zone construction: a $25 million BSL2 Chinese bat breeding facility. Munster’s early COVID-19 vaccine trials used Egyptian fruit bats in Montana but required Dani Anderson’s testing on Chinese bats in Wuhan.

The new Montana facility eliminates that need. Since Munster developed COVID-19 in the older building 28 using an American lab bat (Egyptian fruit bats), they had to test a Chinese bat vaccine in Wuhan (with Dani in the Wuhan BSL4). Now Munster won’t have to send his bat vaccines to Wuhan for testing; he can breed live Chinese horseshoe bats in the BSL2 and walk from Building 28 to 34 to test them!

Lover’s spat & Feldmann moves to Fort Detrick

At Fort Detrick, a lovers’ spat between two scientists left a hole in a BSL4 spacesuit, but an NIH report claimed it was “not possible to determine the cause of the hole or who created it.”

Heinz Feldmann, who wouldn’t respond, was either promoted or demoted to Fort Detrick.

https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/health/treatment_and_diseases/nih-lab-at-fort-detrick-where-biosafety-suit-was-compromised-will-be-restructured/article_bf16f60c-9472-59ca-857f-5013bb47fed2.html

RML accident update

Marshall Bloom from RML issued a statement on the 2025 Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever accident (in Munster and Feldmann’s BSL4 lab):

“The individual remained well and showed no evidence of being infected. They have been back at work for some time,” RML Associate Director for Scientific Management Marshall Bloom stated in an email. “The biological incident reported occurred when an RML employee was found to be potentially exposed to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever through an accidental breach of personal protective equipment,” NIH told the Ravalli Republic. “The employee was immediately isolated and monitored under appropriate care at a specialized medical facility before it was confirmed that no actual exposure or transmission had occurred. At no time was there any risk to the public or to other staff.”

RML must negotiate with local Hamilton hospitals to accept infected scientists, which seems challenging. As of 2014, no Montana hospitals were designated Ebola treatment centers.

Cute goats are sacrificed to the science gods

RML’s Nigerian dwarf goat is used in Rift Valley fever virus research.

The bats of RML

It’s very telling that Egyptian fruit bats are the reservoir host for SARS2. You don’t have to look hard to find them as the new American lab bat. Since they are easy to feed and breed, they serve as the pathway to publications. The University of California, Berkeley, is the latest school to establish a breeding colony.

We believe it is crucial to carefully select the appropriate model system for the scientific question at hand. Therefore, we utilize one of the most spatially, socially and acoustically sophisticated mammal on the planet – the bat (for example, when we utilized the bat — the only flying mammal – to ask how 3D space is represented in the hippocampus).

But the bats are not just for virology; they use them for neuroscience.

Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, wirelessly tracked the brain activity of Egyptian fruit bats as they flew throughout a custom flight room. When the researchers compared the bats’ flight paths with their neural readings, they found that the activities of the bats’ “place cells” — special type of neurons responsible for encoding an animal’s spatial position — were often more closely correlated with where the bats would be in the near future, rather than where they were in the moment…

Because the hippocampus is also a locus of many diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, where a person’s sense of location and memory is often disrupted, uncovering these basic neural computations could also give scientists a better understanding of disease-related impairment and help them devise more effective treatments.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/07/08/a-peek-inside-a-flying-bats-brain-uncovers-clues-to-mammalian-navigation/

Linfa Wang used his fruit bat colony (nectar) for heart disease and diabetes.

More bat vaccines and Dani Anderson

Days after Nature debates our bat vaccine theory, they are promoting bat vaccines.

Mosquitoes that have been designed to carry vaccines in their saliva have been used to inoculate bats against the rabies and Nipah viruses. Scientists are investigating whether this technique could stop such viruses from ‘spilling over’ from bats to people. But other researchers are sceptical about whether the strategy could be implemented in the wild.

Nature even referenced Dani Anderson:

Danielle Anderson, a virologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, says that the study successfully shows that mosquitoes can deliver vaccines to bats in laboratory settings. But the experiments were conducted in animals that had not previously encountered the viruses. In reality, many bats already harbour viruses such as Nipah, so it is unclear whether vaccination would stop these bats from shedding the virus — a key step in preventing spillover to other animals, including humans.

Simon Wain-Hobson on airborne research

French virologist, Hobson, was part of the infamous 2012 ferret paper debate, but he didn’t mention Vincent Munster’s role in that paper.

Hobson makes it sound like anyone could aerosolize an agent after publication, but Munster’s boss, Ron Fouchier, made it clear this was specialized knowledge that could not be shared with any “lone wolf.”

Fouchier was right. You can’t share this knowledge with a lone wolf. Unfortunately for us, Munster already had it. He was experimenting with Egyptian fruit bats using the aerosol textbook in a Montana town of 5,000 people. Nobody was watching.

Two dudes in Montana discover the RML story

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Unreported Truths

Coming at 3 p.m.: I talk live to Jim Haslam, who has investigated Covid's origins for years, about Ralph Baric, Tony Fauci, and the Rocky Mountain National Lab

Jim has a theory that draws on evidence I had not previously seen. Given what we already know about Baric, it’s worth airing - and scrutinizing. (I told Jim I will not go easy on him…

Read more

4 months ago · 104 likes · 7 comments · Alex Berenson

Today, Friday, March 13, at 3pm EST, link above:

Former New York Times writer Alex Berenson turned me into a lab leaker during a Joe Rogan podcast in December 2020. I tuned in for mRNA info, but it was his casual mention of the furin cleavage site at 1 min mark that caught my attention.

Nine months later, in September 2021, Linfa Wang named Ralph Baric as the man behind the furin cleavage site idea. Unlike Ralph, Linfa resigned on January 10, 2020, when the SARS2 genome was published.

was the first to question why Shi Zhengli even uploaded the RaTG13 genome.

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After SAGO published its COVID report in Nature, Ridley dismissed the bat vaccine theory as a conspiracy. I then called Ridley a creationist for denying the evidence, which he knows very well. He claimed this was the first time anyone had called him that, but it was actually the second.

Two years earlier, Jeff Sachs outlined the evidence, pointing to the 2018 paper on Egyptian fruit bats that connects Ralph Baric, Vincent Munster, and the SARS2 reservoir host.

Listen to Ridley gaslight an American biologist, Bryce Nickels, away from that dangerous idea.

I naively thought we lab leakers would sing Kum Ba Yah after learning how Baric et al got Fauci to fund DARPA DEFUSE. But this isn’t about a lab leak or the truth for Ridley. When he posts about DEFUSE, he conveniently crops out Baric’s appearance.

Just below the EcoHealth address are the subcontractors, like Baric’s UNC, who proposed to insert the furin cleavage site and test on live bats in Wuhan.

Two years ago, I reviewed Ridley’s lab leak book. I think the review aged well, but the book didn’t.

Ridley’s book, Viral, altered the publication date of RaTG13 to make Shi Zhengli look like she was involved in the cover-up, but it was Shi who caused the Western scientific cover-up. Ridley even praised Baric’s 2018 paper on a live-attenuated bat vaccine that led to the pandemic by writing:

Sadly, this (UNC) technology was not developed in time to contribute to ending the Covid-19 pandemic. It would be other kinds of novel vaccines, messenger-RNA (mRNA) vaccines and recombinant vector vaccines, rather than live attenuated vaccines, that would come to the rescue of humanity during 2021.

Ridley dismisses the vaccine theory as “a distraction” by writing:

SARS-CoV-2 does not appear to have features of an attenuated vaccine. If anything, it seems to have features that promote increased transmissibility, virulence, and ability to evade the immune system.

Immune evasion, or the asymptomatic spread of SARS2, defines Gain-of-Function research and a live attenuated animal vaccine. Baric’s 2018 paper describes exactly this: a live attenuated vaccine (LAV) tested on bats that could revert to virulence through recombination. Baric’s 2017 bat immunology paper even referenced the open reading frames used for immune evasion.

He sold the Wuhan lab leak while covering up the academic cause

Ridley continues promoting his book and the Shi Zhengli conspiracy by appearing on British podcasts. He did mention DEFUSE, but not Baric’s idea of vaccinating Chinese bats at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Ridley seems nervous when defending Baric, who won’t defend himself.

Since Ridley believes COVID, which floats 20 meters in the air, leaked from Shi’s low-level BSL2, he supports his creationist views. There’s a good reason Baric appointed Danielle Anderson to test his risky bat vaccines at the Wuhan BSL4.

I usually tell people to just read the cover page of DEFUSE to understand the main point.

Ridley’s only biological evidence is that COVID was “well-adapted” or “pre-adapted to human transmission.” He repeats it throughout his book as if humans were the only mammals that mattered.

Ridley suggested humanized hACE2 mice as the intermediary species. Again, claiming COVID infects hACE2 mice is to claim it also infects raccoon dogs in the Wuhan wet market. The biology writer saw “humanized” before mice and thought he was a mouse, but the pandemic proved he was just a 65,000,000-year-old lab bat.

Ridley saw COVID circulating among humans and believes it was designed for humans. This is why he often brings up a human vaccine from a dead PLA scientist named Peng Zhou in Beijing.

20 Million Reasons Ridley Won’t Follow the Science

Ridley can’t comprehend a bat vaccine circulating in humans. He claims COVID was bioweapon research, since he believes it was human-engineered for humans. Below, he revealed more. This isn’t about a lab leak; it’s about lobbying the British government for a $20 million grant to Cambridge.

Sir Gatekeeper in the House of Lords

In early 2020, Sir Ridley appeared in the House of Lords. Ridley promoted his own god-like solution to every minor problem: something similar to self-spreading vaccines.

He confused the relatively safer idea of a gene drive (e.g., sexual transmission via CRISPR) with self-spreading vaccines by using the word “infectiously,” but we didn't realize a self-spreading bat vaccine was running loose. The biologist who covered for it still believes humans are the only mammals on Earth.

Gene drive vs bat vaccine

Since bats only reproduce once a year, sexual reproduction was considered too slow. From the DEFUSE cover page, immune modulation is a fancy term for a bat vaccine.

During the DEFUSE draft, Baric and Linfa Wang debated the idea of CRISPR, but decided it was too slow.

But Ridley is still selling the CRISPR idea. I have identified the common COI that all bat vaccine skeptics, like Ridley, share: gene drive research. Both of these controversial ideas come from the same source: the U.S. military.

A 2017 trove of emails (The Gene Drive Files) from leading U.S. gene drive researchers reveals that the U.S. Military is taking the lead in driving forward gene drive development.

https://genedrivefiles.synbiowatch.org/2017/12/01/us-military-gene-drive-development/

CRISPR was the AI of 2018

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2026/02/17/gene-editing-has-struggled-to-go-commercial-this-nobel-laureate-has-a-1-billion-plan-to-fix-that/

So far, commercializing CRISPR (gene drive) has proven to be really, really hard. CRISPR companies across the board have been hit with scientific setbacks, layoffs and sharp stock declines. The first startup to come out of Doudna’s lab, Caribou Biosciences, launched in 2011, went public with big hopes a decade later, and has since seen its stock fall 91%, giving it a market cap near $150 million. Editas, for which Doudna is one of the scientific founders, laid off 65% of its staff and shelved its lead gene-editing program for sickle cell disease in December 2024. And in one of the more spectacular blowups, Tome Biosciences, which spun out of MIT, laid off almost all of its staff in 2024 and is no longer operating after raising more than $200 million.

Part of the challenge has been the downside cost of all the Crispr hype. “Crispr was the AI of 2018.”

Review of Bob Kadlec’s Muddy Waters lab leak report

https://www.accountabilityjournalism.org/insights/4nd5vqjcptbe2aaw5fhq7h9uqikf4t

The money that once poured in after the nearly forgotten episode of the anthrax letters in September 2001, on the heels of 9/11, has long ago dried up, and perhaps one can speculate that one aim of Muddy Waters may have been to restore funds and interest to the flagging biofense industry.

The only insightful tidbit:

But infection is not transmission: the sick miners (assuming they were infected by a coronavirus at all) do not appear to have passed the disease on to anyone else. Transmission is a high bar; most spillover infections from animal populations never adapt enough to allow transmission from one human host to another. Perhaps we can call transmission and adaptation essentially the same thing. That can’t be said for dead-end infections, no matter how effectively they exploit human tissues or how lethal they are.

Ridley’s favorite suspect is the dead General Yusen Zhou, who allegedly died after falling from a Beijing rooftop, along with his early work on vaccine development.

Unfortunately for Kadlec’s sleuthing, as Worobey and Crits-Christoph pointed out to me, Merck submitted its own vaccine patent in the United States on February 24, four days before Zhou did.

In both cases, the vaccine platform already existed, and merely had to be reconfigured to suit the new pathogen. There is nothing mysterious about it—no skullduggery involved in Dr. Zhou’s vaccine work, and the insinuation stains the dead vaccinologist’s reputation when he can no longer defend himself.

I’m not sure about Merck, but we now know Baric was developing a live-attenuated Chinese bat vaccine, now called COVID, well before Zhou or anyone else in China.

1977 lab leak

Kristian Andersen, like Ridley, also lied about Shi’s publication date of RaTG13, but Andersen admitted it. Andersen, who famously drafted the “Proximal Origin” letter dismissing lab leak hypotheses, has now co-authored a paper admitting that the 1977 Russian flu originated in a lab. He admits it was a live attenuated vaccine trial, since the 1977 genome was linked to a 20-year-old vaccine.

Andersen now confirms Baric’s mechanism, which we previously described: a 2018 replication-competent attenuated virus, HKU3-Smix, that escaped containment.

Andersen even cites Munster’s famous ferret transmission paper to support his analysis, but omits Munster’s own Rocky Mountain Lab animals — deer, mink, and Egyptian fruit bats — from the host range analysis entirely. Their omission is not incidental; including them would raise the question Andersen cannot answer.

Andersen then uses the 1977 admission to argue SARS2 is natural, based on the fact that its genomic structure differs from known vaccine candidates. But his own paper shows that live attenuated vaccines can be mistaken for natural spillover. He also mentions fruit bats as Ebola reservoir hosts, but ignores them as the SARS2 reservoir.

The 1977 concession and the SARS2 conclusion cannot both be right using the same evidentiary standard. Andersen has admitted the template while denying the copy. They conclude the 1977 flu was a live attenuated vaccine (& so was SARS2):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867426001716

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