A Guest Post with Jeffrey Sachs: Did Ralph Baric at UNC Create SARS-CoV-2
Baric provided six hours of testimony but offered no alibi
This is a guest post by me and Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor at Columbia University.
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:
Baric’s lab had the technical ability (reverse genetics systems, chimeric spike protein, infectious clone production) to build viruses similar to SARS-CoV-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.
Although DARPA declined to fund DEFUSE, most team members later received similar funding through other grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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.
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.
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.”
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)
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.
Congress Awaits ODNI Investigation of Itself by June 26, 2026.
I forwarded this excellent coverage, Jim, to Meryl Nass at CHD, Daniel O'Connor at TrialSiteNews.com, Nicolas Hulscher at Focal Points, Tony Lyons at MAHA Report and Skyhorse Publishing, Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone.org, and Jefferey Jaxen at thehighwire.com
Jim, of course your focus is on Baric. However, Munster/De Wit/Feldmann at NIAID et al did the transmission/serial passaging development to make the virus/animal LAV increasingly more dangerous, i.e. airborne.
Probably Munster was managing the project with the operational projectmanager Daszak.
As we currently see how Munster et al is doing most dangerous GoFRoC (see Fleetwood and our X-thread) on H5N1, in fact a repeat of the most dangerous research of Fouchier (including Munster). Bear in mind that pandemic risk depends on probability of occurrence and potential impact, with both most at risk by serial passaging, that is very difficult to control, and contagion is the predominate factor for dangerous exponential contagion.
Furthermore, Fouchier and Osterhaus have the MERS patents.
In the Netherlands the Parliamentary Inquiry is starting next month. Origin of Covid is one of the issues. So Fouchier, Koopmans, Osterhaus, Kuipers (CEO Erasmus MC, and later Minister of Dep of Health) will be questioned, as well as Kuipers' then boss PM Rutte. We anticipate Dutch IC will also be questioned.
As Sachs knows (chair of The Lancet COVID Commission, the airborne character cover up by WHO and Fauci is one of the key reasons for the massive failing of the pandemic response. So, it is necessary to question Munster et al thoroughly, including Fauci about the enormous risk to control the aerosolization process.