After Brownstone Institute 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.”
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.
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.
Anderson edited Daszak’s revised Defuse docs before entering WIV BSL4
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.
Defuse final
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.
Defuse draft
The above draft notes even made it into the Defuse final bid.
Defuse final
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.
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.
Kayfabe's applicability here goes way behind the mere sports analogy - it's key to understanding how a 'vaccine' created without ANY of the strict protocols generally assigned to such items could be posed as an "antidote" to a staged "pandemic" which presented ONLY via a 'testing device' inherently faulty - and would ultimately turn out to be more lethal than that "pandemic" itself.
“Basically, my interest in the topic of convergent wrestling lies primarily in the blurring of lines that constitutes “sports entertainment” — or, the idea that wrestling is simultaneously fake (as opposed to “real” sports) and real. Thus, I am interested in this concept of “kayfabe,” which can be summarized as portraying staged events as “real” or “true” to reinforce the idea that the competition, rivalries, and relationships between the participants is genuine rather than scripted, staged or pre-determined, as professional wrestling is known to be. Kayfabe is a code word of sorts for the act of maintaining this “reality” when interacting with general public.
/ The Co-Construction of Kayfabe\May 27, 2017 by prowrestlingstudies_21lb3c
A failed casino operator and 'reality TV' persona 'when interacting with the general public'... presented himself as "the Father of the Vaccine" and then handed the economy over to the care of economic terrorists masquerading as medical bureaucrats/researchers so that mad scientists would be given carte blanche for their laboratory cockups and venture funds posing as pharmaceutical outfits could be given monopolies over disease mitigation.
"Lock em up" became the acceptable social praxis of a whole generation of 'young leaders' trained to believe in the virtues of top down mass control agendas, while the real villains received 'get outta jail free' cards - and the 'real rivalries, competitions and relationships' between countries east and west became a scripted/staged playground for complicit 'journalists' to sketch their jaundiced support for a new form of social contract in which medical terrorism "Trumped" personal liberties ... & "VaxxDaddy" toyed with the notion of celebrating his second term by staging WWF spectacles on the lawn of the White House - perfectly illustrating the fusion of 'real' & 'fake' into the 'operating system' which defines the present moment.
All in all, 'fruit bats' have turned out to be the only really benign actors in the whole sordid drama.
Kayfabe's applicability here goes way behind the mere sports analogy - it's key to understanding how a 'vaccine' created without ANY of the strict protocols generally assigned to such items could be posed as an "antidote" to a staged "pandemic" which presented ONLY via a 'testing device' inherently faulty - and would ultimately turn out to be more lethal than that "pandemic" itself.
“Basically, my interest in the topic of convergent wrestling lies primarily in the blurring of lines that constitutes “sports entertainment” — or, the idea that wrestling is simultaneously fake (as opposed to “real” sports) and real. Thus, I am interested in this concept of “kayfabe,” which can be summarized as portraying staged events as “real” or “true” to reinforce the idea that the competition, rivalries, and relationships between the participants is genuine rather than scripted, staged or pre-determined, as professional wrestling is known to be. Kayfabe is a code word of sorts for the act of maintaining this “reality” when interacting with general public.
/ The Co-Construction of Kayfabe\May 27, 2017 by prowrestlingstudies_21lb3c
A failed casino operator and 'reality TV' persona 'when interacting with the general public'... presented himself as "the Father of the Vaccine" and then handed the economy over to the care of economic terrorists masquerading as medical bureaucrats/researchers so that mad scientists would be given carte blanche for their laboratory cockups and venture funds posing as pharmaceutical outfits could be given monopolies over disease mitigation.
"Lock em up" became the acceptable social praxis of a whole generation of 'young leaders' trained to believe in the virtues of top down mass control agendas, while the real villains received 'get outta jail free' cards - and the 'real rivalries, competitions and relationships' between countries east and west became a scripted/staged playground for complicit 'journalists' to sketch their jaundiced support for a new form of social contract in which medical terrorism "Trumped" personal liberties ... & "VaxxDaddy" toyed with the notion of celebrating his second term by staging WWF spectacles on the lawn of the White House - perfectly illustrating the fusion of 'real' & 'fake' into the 'operating system' which defines the present moment.
All in all, 'fruit bats' have turned out to be the only really benign actors in the whole sordid drama.
I do not think Ridley's sentences mean what he thinks they mean. ;-)