Jeffrey Sachs: SARS2 was engineered at UNC
Six years ago, Baric verbally attacked his colleagues for claiming the same
Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs drops my name and the research we documented here!
Sachs mentions Rocky Mountain Lab and their SARS2 reservoir host: Egyptian fruit bats.
Hopefully, Sachs and I will co-publish a piece with some new Baric news soon.
Baric files
U.S. Right to Know lost its appeal for Ralph Baric’s 2019 UNC records, so it appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court.
https://www.carolinajournal.com/top-nc-court-urged-to-take-public-records-case-linked-to-covid-unc/
An initial public records request in July 2020 led UNC to report “that there were 3.36 gigabytes of records, which was estimated to be over 336,000 pages of documents,” according to the court filing. “Most of these records were not turned over to US Right to Know.”
Of more than 88,000 pages of documents ultimately pulled in response to multiple records requests, the university turned over roughly 530 pages, according to the court filing. UNC cited a university research exemption in the state’s public records law when withholding many of the requested documents.
Baric is hiding behind a “proprietary” definition because he patented the SARS2 genome in 2018.
The Appeals Court had rejected US Right to Know’s argument that “proprietary information” should be defined as a “trade secret.”
“While ‘proprietary information’ includes trade secrets, ‘proprietary information’ extends beyond the definition of trade secrets,” the judges wrote. “Thus, because the General Assembly chose to use ‘information of a proprietary nature’ and not ‘trade secret,’ we decline to, and in fact cannot, swap the definition of ‘trade secret’ for ‘proprietary information.’”
“Therefore, the trial court did not err in defining ‘proprietary information’ pertaining to research to ‘include information in which the owner has protectable interest,’” the judge added.
During the drafting of DARPA Defuse, Baric admitted his chimeric immunogens (e.g. HKU3-Smix) are potentially proprietary.
Natural origin author uncovers new evidence?
Six years ago, a February 1, 2020, teleconference debated the unnatural origins of Baric’s SARS2 genome. Philipp Markolin (Philipp Markolin, PhD) breaks some new Baric news while uploading Chapter 3 of his natural origin book: Lab Leak Fever.
But Markolin doesn’t show his readers what virologists were looking at during the Feb 1 teleconference. Kristian Andersen had aligned Shi Zhengli’s RaTG13 sample with Baric’s SARS2 genome to claim it “looks engineered.” Andersen later testified that NIH director Francis Collins said, “That nails it for a lab leak, doesn’t it?”
Andersen ended his Feb 1 presentation with references for his engineered hypothesis. All of the papers were from Baric, including the infamous 2015 Baric-Shi Nature Medicine paper, along with five others.
After Shi published RaTG13 on January 24, 2020, Andersen and Eddie Holmes became suspicious of Baric. Markolin writes:
After discussing the situation with Kristian, Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome Trust contacted Eddie again. He and Eddie were thunderstruck, wondering what the next steps were. They wanted to assemble a group of people who could discuss this clearly, and they started spitballing names. Experts like Ron Fouchier, Christian Drosten, and Marion Koopmans came to mind.
They didn’t invite Ralph Baric, a pioneer in CoV research who collaborated with Zhengli, because he was too close to WIV. “Let me tell you now, Ralph did nothing wrong. But we wanted to make this a proper investigation and felt he was too close to the work,” Eddie explained their reasoning.
Fauci secretly invited Baric to listen to Holmes and Andersen’s evidence for engineering, but they had “no idea.”
Baric then attacked their crackpot theory two days later. Andersen wrote on Feb 3:
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.
All this suspicion occurred 18 months after Baric proposed inserting a furin cleavage site in a genome like RaTG13 and testing it on live bats in Wuhan.
Fauci: I did see it
After the Feb 1 teleconference concluded, Francis Collins emailed Fauci about the “strong similarity” of SARS2 to RaTG13.
Fauci replied, “I did see it.” Collins claimed there was “no evidence this was supported by NIH.” But RaTG13 was collected with NIH funds, therefore to be shared with Baric.
Fauci later claimed ignorance of Baric
Ironically, the lawyer who questioned Fauci is now Trump’s Solicitor General. But they will all get away with this.
Fauci’s text messages
Early in the pandemic, George Gao, head of China’s CDC, communicated with Fauci via intermediary on WhatsApp. Fauci “did not recall” the 8:00 p.m. January 31, 2020, call he set up with Gao. But two hours later, Fauci was told by Kristian Andersen that SARS2 “looks engineered.”
Fauci emails
In 2022, Fauci testified that he barely knew Peter Daszak of EcoHealth.
But Fauci (ASF) was debriefed by Daszak after his 2021 WHO visit to China. Fauci’s office had nominated Vincent Munster and Heinz Feldmann of RML to go to China, but they used Daszak instead.
“ASF (Fauci) would like to be briefed” on Daszak’s February 2021 WHO trip to Wuhan. Fauci was upset when this secret Daszak meeting came up in his 2024 testimony. He was also angry when the secret Feb 1, 2020, teleconference was reported in June 2021.
NIH director Francis Collins 2024 testimony
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Collins-Transcript-5.16-Release.pdf
You can see what the Feb 1 group was scared of: intentional engineering.
Committee: And then you continue, “I hoped the Nature Magazine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this. But probably didn’t get much visibility. Anything more we can do? Ask the National Academy to weigh in?” Do you recall sending this email?
Collins: Let me make it clear that at the time this email was written, my focus was on the question about whether this virus had been human engineered. And based on the detailed analysis of the experts, I felt that that had been convincingly excluded as a possibility.
Committee: Can I ask for clarity? When you say human engineered, do you mean almost like de novo from scratch?
Collins: From scratch…I think you would have seen in emails back in February that I was among those wondering about the possibility of whether this virus had been under study in a lab. So I wouldn’t have called that hypothesis a conspiracy. But to say that it was de novo engineered, that crosses the line…
The sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would not have been predicted to be a particularly effective and infectious virus. Somebody who was aiming to design this from scratch would never have chosen the particular sequence of nucleotides that this virus represents.
Committee: As we have discussed at length, in some interviews, it is unclear if RaTG13 or BANAL-52 were ever studied with U.S. funds. But the statement strikes me as awfully certain when there is no way to be certain. You have been doing this a long time. In your experience, do grantees or researchers publish every experiment that they conduct?
Collins: No, I suppose not.
Shi had shared unpublished bat sequences, like SHC014, with Baric before publication.
Committee: Do they publish every virus that they collect or sequence?
Collins: They would certainly be inclined to publish those that were of particular interest.
Committee: But not every single one?
Collins: Sometimes the data is not good enough to be published.
If Baric wound up on that Feb 1 call, it was Fauci who invited him, because no one else knew about it.
Committee: Did Dr. Fauci ask you to join the Feb 1st 2020 call?
Collins: Yes.
Committee: Prior to being asked to join the call, did you express interest in joining the call?
Collins: I don’t think I knew it was happening until he reached out. Again, I was his boss. It would not be unusual for him to feel that his boss should be included in something of this magnitude.
Committee: Do you know how many conference calls Dr. Fauci had on a weekly basis?
Collins: A ton.
Committee: How many others did he invite you to?
Collins: Very few.
Collins was recently nominated for a National Academy of Sciences award for “guiding responses” to the COVID-19 pandemic. He later regretted the lockdowns and admitted to being in a D.C. bubble with these decisions:
As a guy living inside the Beltway, feeling a sense of crisis, trying to decide what to do in some situation room in the White House with people who had data that was incomplete. We weren’t really thinking about what that would mean to Wilk and his family in Minnesota, a thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard. We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city,” explained Collins at July 2023 conference.
“The public health people — we talked about this earlier and this really important point — if you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is. And that is something that will save a life; it doesn’t matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from. So, yeah, collateral damage. This is a public health mindset and I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset and that was really unfortunate. It’s another mistake we made.”
Congrats Jim for having been recognized by Sachs! Not only on Fauci/ Baric’s rôle, but also on RML very important contribution to the final virus.
I'm glad I bought the book in 2024. Mystery solved.