Let's be blunt: Richard Ebright helped Tony Fauci cover up a Wuhan lab leak

You often become what we pretend to fight

Yes, this is a hit piece, but it was written by popular request. Most people have a hard time comprehending a Fauci made bat vaccine, but they can follow a US academic cover-up.

The much-anticipated Tony Fauci grilling ended with a thud. There was a collective shrug of non-answers and much ado about nothing. There was just one question that needed to be asked: “What was your $82M contractor doing inside that Wuhan BSL4?” That simple question would have answered everything from lockdowns to masks and mandates.

In 2021, we learned that Dr Ralph Baric of UNC pre-confessed to the Wuhan crime. In 2018, he proposed to insert furin cleavage sites into live coronaviruses and test them on live bats in Wuhan! This bombshell was confirmed by Dr Linfa Wang of Duke University since “UNC is doing the virology, so it’s pretty obvious.”

Dr Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, a prominent gain of function critic, quickly pounced on the outlandish claim:

Linfa’s first answer was “I don't know who proposed that” but his second answer was “UNC.” Either his first answer was a lie, second answer was a lie, or both answers were lies. In view of the fact that his answers to other questions were demonstrably untruthful, it is hard to choose.

If you read a mainstream news report about a lab leak, it probably quoted Dr Ebright. To his credit, he’s been warning us about virologists like Baric causing a potential pandemic. But when it came to holding those accountable, he was less truthful than Linfa and Dr Peter Daszak. In March 2022, Daszak of EcoHealth confirmed what Linfa told us:

Reporter: When asked if you had done this work with the furin cleavage site, you said no.

Daszak: “For the furin cleavage site, you should really ask Ralph Baric. He wrote that section of the DARPA grant.”

Reporter: So you’re saying that that would be a good question for Ralph Baric, whether he has done any of these insertions?

Daszak: “I don’t know what Ralph Baric has done. But I doubt that he would go ahead and do that work without the funding.”

Dr Ebright replied:

Daszak's interview responses are a cesspool of fraud. Daszak even insists EcoHealth never funded work with humanized mice, despite fact that Daszak submitted grant progress reports to NIH reporting results of EcoHealth-funded work with humanized mice (*SARS2 does not infect humanized mice).

We now have two academic insiders on the DARPA grant, both pointing the finger at the biological gunman: Dr Baric of UNC. The furin cleavage site was the single most distinguishing feature of SARS2. It is “the magic sauce of this virus,” said Dr Michael Worobey in the above debate. “Whether it’s natural or genetically modified, this is why this virus is circulating in humans.”

Daszak said, “I doubt that (Baric) would go ahead and do that (FCS) work without the funding.” Based on Baric’s $176M NIAID-funded lab, it was obvious he had a close relationship with Fauci, who was very comfortable with the gain of function. Fauci was also comfortable with research in Wuhan, so Fauci funding DARPA Defuse sounded like a plausible scenario.

In Jan 2022, Project Veritas (re)leaked the DARPA Defuse documents. Except this time, we had Major Joseph Murphy’s letter to the DoD. He clearly stated, “As is known, Dr. Fauci with NIAID did not reject the (Defuse) proposal.” Fauci was directly asked about this proposal in Jan 2022 and replied: “We have never seen that grant, and we have never funded that grant.”

The phrase “that grant” was doing a lot of work in Fauci’s prepared denial. On that same day, Ebright asked if the “2020 CREID pro quo explained the road-to-Damascus conversion?” He called it a ‘CREID pro quo,’ suggesting a $9M bribe to silence lab leak proponents like Kristian Andersen and Bob Garry, but they both said the grant started in 2018 and 2019.

Ebright’s alleged $9M bribe was debated in a 2023 Congressional hearing. It was part of a much larger $82M CREID grant that was in the NIAID bureaucracy months before a Wuhan lab leak. Fauci himself responded to Ebright (and his Congressional proxies) via Fox News!

• 2024 FOIA update: Fauci approved Daszak and Baric’s CREID grant (aka DARPA Defuse TA2) in November 2019

As if an $82M NIAID contract (of which $18M went to Daszak, Baric, Dani, Linfa, Andersen, Garry, etc.) was awarded within months of a January 2020 lab leak. If anyone should know how slow the government grant process crawls, it would be a Rutgers professor with a $14M NIAID lab.

What if Fauci’s $82M CREID project funded DARPA Defuse? Ebright pondered this question the day Defuse leaked, “rejected by DARPA but revived by Fauci.”

What if Fauci’s CREID project funded Baric’s furin cleavage site work? Baric even wanted to “evaluate the impact of the furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 border” in a recent paper funded by CREID.

In May 2021, Baric signed a letter calling for a Wuhan lab leak investigation, which Ebright proudly referenced. Baric was doing media interviews until July 2021, but he went radio silent after his Defuse proposal leaked in September 2021. Was it odd for a fellow academic to defend a man who will not defend himself? I’ll argue Dr. Ebright was not defending Dr. Baric; he is defending the entire Western scientific enterprise (patents, publications, grants, tenure, awards), from which they all greatly benefit.

Who is Richard H. Ebright?

Like everyone in this lab leak story, he is ‘complicated’ but interesting.

The scientist who persuaded hundreds of his colleagues to sign a letter criticizing U.S. spending on biodefense research is not only worried about its impact on basic microbiology. Richard H. Ebright is also passionately opposed to the proposed expansion of biodefense labs. It might seem like a pacifist's argument, but far from it; as one former labmate puts it, Ebright is "complicated."

In 1980’s, Ebright spent six years as an undergraduate and graduate student in the laboratory of Harvard geneticist Jon Beckwith, a left-leaning social activist on everything from the Vietnam War to genetic discrimination. As an outspoken conservative, Ebright "was unusual in my lab," says Beckwith; "we would get into lots of debates." Ebright held his own and also excelled academically, publishing his first paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences while still in college. He was now a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, where he studies the initiation of DNA transcription.

Ebright was selected as a prestigious HHMI investigator, which serves as a great example of Western capitalism funding Western science. Howard Hughes was the Elon Musk of his day and left a fortune in a scientific trust, called HHMI. It selects “people, not projects,” providing generous and flexible support to talented scientists so they can go where their science leads.

In other words, it was $1M a year in F*ck-You funding; do as you please because we at HHMI believe you are brilliant. Ebright is no longer with HHMI, but he does have tenure at Rutgers, so he can (partially) criticize the science of lab leak. Jesse Bloom and Trevor Bedford are HHMI investigators and provided a balanced debate on a potential lab origin.

Fauci’s team even tried to bully Bloom from publishing a lab leak paper, but as Ebright noted, “they realized Bloom was an HHMI Investigator, and, as such, none of his salary was under their control. The relative independence of HHMI Investigators has been NIAID officials' sole point of vulnerability over the last two decades. They have been able to buy--or at least rent--non-HHMI scientists but have found it harder to do so for HHMI scientists. I’m speaking from personal experience,” said Ebright.

Ebright was asked the ‘ultimate’ question: Did you have more academic freedom under Howard Hughes's capitalist wealth (HHMI) or Fauci’s $6B empire? No response.

Since 9/11 and the anthrax letters, Ebright, like his former adviser, has taken on a cause. When the National Institutes of Health proposed a massive new biodefense program, Ebright began to worry that vastly increasing the number of labs and people working on bioterror agents would only raise the risks that a pathogen would accidentally escape or be deliberately released by a "disturbed, disgruntled, or adversarial" scientist, he says. As he argued in a letter to Nature he co-authored in January 2002, a better strategy would be to expand research on related, less pathogenic agents, while limiting work on bioterrorism agents to a few strictly controlled labs. It's a view shared by "most policy experts on bioweapons outside the government," he contends. It also makes for some strange bedfellows: Ebright, still a registered Republican, shares information with Edward Hammond, a liberal Democrat and U.S. leader of the Sunshine Project, a weapons watchdog that is tracking the biodefense buildup. Hammond, who praised Ebright as "brave" for expressing what many scientists believe but don't say, called it a "tactical alliance."

Ebright's views have often made him a lone voice amid the many researchers who are benefiting from the biodefense boom. Some of these scientists have now added their signatures to the open letter, which them media-savvy Ebright sent to reporters at major newspapers and journals. The signers share a concern about preserving basic microbial science, even though they "have different views on other aspects of biodefense," Ebright says.

Ebright and Hammond renewed their ‘tactical alliance’ in 2020. Hammond recently asked: “What’s the deep past of US Government links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology? The last time I saw Col. David Franz, ex-commander of Fort Detrick, was at a United lounge at Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. in May 2015. He was going to China (with Baric) to talk to them about their BSL4 lab construction binge.”

To make a long story short, it was sunk cost, personal politics, lab leak narratives, and groupthink that got in the way of the truth, but not in the way you assumed.

The first of many lies, post DARPA Defuse

It is hard to get into Baric’s mind because he will not talk to the media. But we can tell what was on Ebright’s mind: Dr Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The Baric bombshell was a chance to revisit everything about the WIV. In particular, why did Shi even publish the natural RaTG13 sequence, bringing attention to the unnatural SARS2 furin cleavage site?

Baric’s PRRA insert

Ebright responded twice: “To improve (her) chances of acceptance of paper in Nature...and thereby qualifying for 140,000 RMB ($20,000 USD) bonus.” Her January 2020 publication kept Fauci up until 3 AM, but Ebright was always thinking about money.

Ebright has delivered hell to Shi, tweeting about her nearly 200 times while still calling her a liar. He then claimed Shi tried to hide the furin cleavage site! This was months after DARPA Defuse leaked, with Baric’s fingerprints on the murder weapon. ‘Murderer’ was a word he used to liberally describe US Presidents, Texas Governors, and even Fauci.

All the while, Ebright was still thinking about the woman from Wuhan, but was it the right woman in Wuhan? In March 2020, Dr James LeDuc of UTMB in Texas asked for permission to send Shi an infectious clone of SARS2 (lab-made technology). It’s unclear if the request was approved, but this was basically proof Shi did not have the necessary tools to create SARS2 in 2019. Ebright basically called LeDuc a liar.

He also noted of a fellow lab leak friend: “I was all ‘Of course,’ you know? There’s a pattern here.” The mainstream narrative was Ebright’s theory: Shi had copied Baric’s engineering methods (via an Anarchist Cookbook), or Shi was “taught” how to create SARS2. It’s a biosecurity myth that knowledge can be shared since “we can know more than we can tell.” But bat samples and animal vaccines are shared in this international industry of virologists.

Ebright was then notified of Baric’s unpublished biotechnology. Baric never uploaded a full 30,000nt genome sequence in order to keep his No See’m engineering method “obscure” from Chinese copying. Ebright then claimed Baric’s “relevant sequences” were uploaded for Shi’s use. The great irony was Fauci and Baric kept their methods secret, from the likes of Shi and China, because of biosecurity hawks like Ebright!

Ebright even defended Baric’s select agent workaround in DARPA Defuse since “bat SARS-related CoVs are not now, and never have been, select agents.” He also referenced Shi and Baric’s 2015 Nature paper as evidence for a Wuhan lab leak. He was then notified Shi had nothing to do with the UNC paper, so Ebright focused on Shi’s 2017 paper.

The first sign of Ebright’s trouble with the truth came from Dr Stuart Neil of King’s College in London. While they were debating the 2017 WIV paper’s relevance to the origins of SARS2, a wicked logic question was left unanswered, proving Shi could not engineer SARS2. The Wuhan paper was basically Chinese junk, but that did not stop Ebright from ghostwriting a letter from Senator Rand Paul’s office to Fauci.

That Congressional letter, and Ebright’s lifelong agenda, dovetailed very nicely. It was another ‘tactical alliance’ to blame Shi, but Ebright was now carrying Fauci’s water. Fauci was not funding one project in Wuhan, but he was funding two projects in Wuhan! One was an open record $120,000 R01 project that involved safe lab mice in Shi’s BSL2. Another was a soon-to-be-funded $82M CREID project that involved unsafe live viruses injected into live bats in Dani’s BSL4. With Linfa’s Jan 10, 2020, resignation, it was safe to assume Dani was not socially distancing from those Wuhan bats.

“Not my lab,” said Shi in Feb 2020

Ebright was asked for one paper showing WIV interest in a furin cleavage site; he then referenced a lab in Holland and Minnesota. Ebright also called Dr Christian Drosten a liar, who told his German podcast listeners that Shi’s Vero (monkey) cells would delete the furin cleavage site. Ebright then claimed, without evidence, that Shi had primary human airway epithelial (HAE) cells needed for the furin cleavage site. Think of your human throat with mucus, living in a UNC petri dish!

Just months later, in June 2022, Ebright now claimed Shi had primary HAE inside the WIV. He followed up with Congressional testimony in August 2022 and doubled down on the HAE falsehood. It was broadcast from his house hallway into the hallways of Congress.

Senator Rand Paul recited Ebright’s lengthy CV, but it was a conflict of interest.

Dr Ebright is the director of the Rutgers Institute of Microbiology with 175 publications and 40 patents with numerous awards. He is a member of the institutional biosafety committee at Rutgers. He is the project leader on three NIH research grants ($14M to be exact). He has provided testimony on the 2014 Anthrax accident. He was a founding member of the Cambridge Working Group whose cautionary statement on gain of function research…remains relevant today.

Ebright then recited his prepared speech with three falsehoods:

Using US funding, provided by the NIH in 2014-2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology: (1) constructed novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined the spike gene of one bat SARS-related coronavirus with the rest of the genetic information of another bat SARS-related coronavirus, (2) showed that resulting viruses efficiently infected human airway cells and efficiently replicated in human airway cells, and (3) showed that the resulting viruses exhibited up to 10,000-fold enhancement of viral growth in lungs, and up to 4-fold enhancement of lethality, in mice engineered to display human receptors on airway cells ("humanized mice").

1. It is complicated, but the WIV can only shuffle spikes into an existing genome called WIV1, which is 25% different from SARS2. To paraphrase Drosten, Wuhan can make a car stereo (WIV1), but they cannot make a new car (SARS2).

2. This is Ebright’s most egregious statement. He’s been told Shi’s Vero cells delete the furin cleavage site, so he’s moved UNC’s exclusive HAE into Wuhan without evidence. He previously claimed HAE can be ordered online. Per NIAID R01 grant, the select agent work with HAE was done in North Carolina.

3. The 10,000-fold enhancement is an embellishment based on an unknown baseline. Again, SARS2 does not infect or transmit in “humanized mice.” Over the next year, Ebright repeated these lies in his popular Twitter threads.

These three statements that Ebright made to Congress, are three more lies than Fauci, because “we have not funded gain-of-function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China since “the mail is filled with little envelopes with plasmid dried onto filter paper that scientists routinely send each other.”

Drosten of Germany said, “There were plans to incorporate furin cleavage sites, but this was to be done in an American laboratory (UNC).” Ebright conveniently missed this money quote in his lab leak news clipping. There is one lab leak article Ebright will never mention: Fauci’s personal biodefense lab in Hamilton, Montana.

Fauci defended himself holding up Shi’s WIV BSL2 paper he publicly funded. His note said “only in vitro work” but the new debate was Dani’s BSL4 in vivo work.

An international conflict of PhD interest

The post-9/11 biodefense building boom that Ebright railed against grew to include his own institution. Rutgers was studying live bats for White Nose Syndrome, which was referenced in DARPA Defuse as a strategy for spraying Chinese bat caves. Rutgers students also collected bat samples without proper PPE, so the threats abroad were always of an academic nature.

So, back to the $82M question, what was Fauci’s contractor doing inside that Wuhan BSL4? Rutgers biodefense network included Duke, a prime contractor on the CREID project. Was our Patient Zero, Dr Danielle Anderson of Duke, also an Ebright colleague?

Ebright still claims Shi did it, at the same time Baric’s ‘rough’ draft for Defuse leaked in 2024. It basically reads: “I, Ralph Baric, will insert furin cleavage sites into live coronaviruses and test them on live bats in Wuhan.” Linfa, Dani, and Ralph were referencing each other in 2019, so it doesn’t take a virologist to figure out what happened.

In 2022, I posed my own logic question to Ebright’s binary brain: “Your claim was Daszak (who you think is an idiot) wrote the virology in Defuse? Or you claim Shi wrote Defuse, since her English is bad, but better than yours?” In 2024, you can tell when Ebright gets nervous because the misspellings increase.

Western science was supposed to be objective, not subjective. It was based on an idea of what you know, not who you know, but that is still the case for “sub-mediocrities” like Richard H. Ebright.

Again, this (hit piece) was written at the request of fellow truth seekers.

P.S. Richard responded, “Any person who thinks I ‘helped Tony Fauci cover up a Wuhan lab leak’ needs mental health services. Urgently.”