NIH spied on this blog so we spy on them

Inside the Gain-of-Function bureaucracy

Lab leakers are already mad with the new NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya. He shows little interest in a real gain-of-function ban, but the old regime still surrounds him. The NIH posted an unusual statement on Twitter supporting him.

The recent Daily Caller story is factually incorrect. NIH has been a strong supporter of the Executive Order and the President, and we will continue to be. Policy development is led by the White House Office of Science & Technology (OSTP), with NIH and other agencies providing input and guidance.

NIH is now under the leadership of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose priorities are fully aligned with this administration and who directs NIH’s approach to GoF oversight.

August 2025 Daily Caller story by Emily Kopp

The NIH bristled at reports of fired staffers who wanted a permanent ban on Gain-of-Function (GoF) research. Whether true or not, that effort stood little chance. Today, it sounds even less likely than it did just three months ago.

The irony is obvious: during Trump’s first term in 2017, a GoF ban was quietly lifted. Deep in the bowels of Bethesda’s Building 1, ambitious bureaucrats rose quietly through the NIH ranks.

In the summer of 2017, an NIH bureaucrat asked: White House OSTP docs ‘recommends’ right? It doesn’t have actual teeth? Or does it?

Another woman responded: Trump's White House does not “instruct,” but “recommends” and provides “guidance.” Yet another faceless lady added: Edits seem ok to me.

One week before Christmas 2017, while Washington was emptying out for the holidays, NIH quietly announced the end of the so-called “pause” on GoF research.

Today (Dec 19, 2017) the National Institutes of Health announced that it is lifting a funding pause dating back to October 2014 on gain-of-function (GOF) experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses. GoF research is important in helping us identify, understand, and develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health.

Former NIH director Francis Collins signed the statement. But the real authors were two NIH insiders who had long overseen the gray zone of controversial science: Lyric Jorgenson, who managed chimeras, stem cells, and primate brain research, and Jessica Tucker, the NIH’s own “GoF guru.”

For the past decade, these two women have survived multiple regime changes. They outlasted directors, secretaries, and scandals. Both work at the NIH and under Health and Human Services (HHS), now run by RFK Jr.

Their December 2017 timing was exquisite. HHS was leaderless—Trump’s first secretary had just resigned in scandal, and his replacement would not be sworn in until January 2018. In the vacuum, Fauci’s NIAID and Collins’s NIH restarted funding for “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens.” The scientific community barely noticed.

Even Collins himself seemed confused. In 2023, he asked Jorgenson for a recap of what had happened during the 2014–2017 pause. Her reply was pure bureaucratese: exceptions could be granted if “urgently necessary to protect public health or national security,” with staff feeding recommendations from Fauci’s NIAID, then submitted to Collins for the rubber stamp.

When Collins asked how many exceptions were approved during the “pause,” her answer was blunt: 21 projects were identified as subject to the moratorium, and 10 were exempted by Fauci and Collins themselves. The rest had their funding quietly redirected.

The “pause” was never real. From Substack post #3, the bat virologists were giddy—they were ready to show off their new animal vaccine platforms.

GoF research never stopped, as an anonymous longtime NIH official said: “If you ban GoF research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the (2014) moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done GoF research anyway.” Fauci, in early 2019, said it was a sound decision to let the research officially resume.

How insiders rewrote the rules while the world slept

On Christmas Day 2011, Fauci line-edited government language about “dual use research of concern.” He wasn’t just skimming memos—he was dictating how every tracked change should be handled, insisting his edits become the baseline. This wasn’t a bureaucratic afterthought; it was something he managed word by word, even on a holiday.

In 2015, Fauci privately clarified what few outside the Beltway understood: there was never a real “pause” on Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC), such as anthrax or plague. The only pause was on GoF experiments, such as Baric's turbocharging of SARS, and even that had exceptions. If a project claimed to involve vaccines or “public health needs,” exceptions were quietly granted. Fauci himself admitted he favored loosening restrictions on GoF as long as “proper oversight” existed.

The “oversight” was two women in the NIH office. Like Fauci, Lyric Jorgenson and Jessica Tucker are workaholics. Behind the scenes, they were the ones counting the DURC inventory on late nights and weekends, joking over email about “hot Saturday nights” spent auditing experiments with pandemic potential.

The NIH decisions were run by internal emails at Building 1 on the Bethesda campus. The slow-moving bureaucracy favored those who typed the fastest. The men signed the statements, but it was the women with the 2,000-word emails who really ran the show. They decided when the “pause” ended—though in truth, it never did.

Per a recent report in the Daily Caller:

NIH Associate Director for Science Policy Lyric Jorgenson, who also led former Biden’s GoF research policy and whose expertise is in neuroscience, now leads NIH on writing Trump’s policy, according to two government sources.

Jorgenson had help from the most recognizable men in American science—Collins and Fauci. In 2014, dissenters on the GoF board, officially the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), were purged. Those anti-GoF scientists then lobbied Obama’s White House OSTP to impose a research “pause.” But it was theater. The pause lasted only three years, and in that time, NIH quietly approved 10 projects.

In 2019, the decision was made to allow resumption of aerosol transmission experiments. By January 2020, while an airborne transmission experiment called COVID-19 was brewing in Wuhan, the NIH women had scheduled an NSABB meeting.

One new board member warned about the seven deadly sins of GoF. NIH senior advisor Carrie Wolinetz once joked that GoF = Girls of Fishing. She introduced me to the world of chimeras, quoting her dual-use teaching material: Biotechnology Research in an Age of Terrorism.

Along with Wolinetz, the women (and Chris Viggiani) rebuilt the NSABB in their own image—stacking it with loyal insiders. They cultivated friendly journalists to amplify their narrative. Outwardly, they spoke in cautious tones; privately via email, their dual-use agenda was expansive, almost evangelical.

The NSABB committee selection was never neutral. Members were chosen for their willingness to greenlight GoF, not to question it. In their NIH minds, the Select Agent program was needless competition.

Select Agent program is our path to safe regulation

Ironically, the USDA and CDC’s Select Agent program had more teeth than the NIH, HHS, and White House combined. Ralph Baric, Heinz Feldmann, and Vincent Munster constantly bitch about it and openly discuss ways to circumvent it. FedEx no longer ships Select Agents (e.g. SARS).

Unlike NIH, the Select Agent program audits labs. In 2018, a CDC inspector visited Munster’s lab. In early 2018, EcoHealth asked Baric for dual-use language. In DARPA Defuse, Baric wrote in the first paragraph:

In Technical Area 1 (TA1) we will intensively sample bats at our field sites where we have identified high spillover risk SARSr-CoVs. We will sequence their spike proteins, reverse engineer them to conduct binding assays, and insert them into bat SARSr-CoV (WIV1, SHC014) backbones. These use bat-SARSr-CoV backbones, not SARS-CoV, and are exempt from dual-use and gain of function concerns.

Baric added:

These are BSL-3, not select agents or subject to P3CO (they use bat SARS-CoV backbones which are exempt)

Baric’s logic was twisted but true: we are playing with bat viruses, not human viruses. After all, his bat virus HKU3r-CoV would soon become the human virus SARS-CoV-2. Baric himself drafted all of TA1 and TA2 in the Defuse proposal, then recycled the same language into fresh NIAID grant applications. In the NIAID R01 grant, he wrote:

Make sure Wuhan is not planning any work with wildtype SARS-CoV, otherwise, their facility will have to be registered as a select agent facilty by the US government. Likely a problem.

Ironically, the Select Agent registration led to the creation of COVID in US labs. An early 2018 draft of DARPA Defuse was very incriminating:

Subcontracts: #1 to Prof. Baric, UNC, to oversee reverse engineering of SARSr-CoVs, BSL-3 and select BSL4 humanized mouse experimental infections at the NIH RML in collaboration with Dr. Munster, design and testing of targeted immune boosting treatments; #2 to Prof. Wang, Duke-NUS, to oversee broadscale immune boosting

Last year, Senator Rand Paul quizzed Wolinetz about the DARPA Defuse proposal and her knowledge of Rocky Mountain Lab.

I believe Wolinetz, because she specialized in long emails, not airborne agents. Her bioweapon was the keyboard, but it left a trail to the culprits. Even back in 2015, NIAID brass in building 31 were worried less about public safety than about public perception.

In one email, Hugh Auchincloss (Fauci’s longtime deputy) warned Wolinetz that his staff had “major concerns about giving out detailed grant information” on labs caught up in the GoF pause—because of “stigma issues.”

One of those labs was Baric’s UNC. Another was RML, where Auchincloss offered Munster an early tenure if he set up a live bat lab. Fauci visited RML every year, where he notified his boss, Collins, that they were working on a “new vaccine platform targeting wildlife vaccination.”

Fauci’s pardon?

Almost all the GoF research falls under Fauci’s NIAID umbrella in Building 31, so it’s understandable if Collins, Wolinetz, and NIH bureaucrats in Building 1 were out of the loop. Fauci, in early 2018, reminisced about the “trouble we used to get in.”

Senator Rand Paul has recently announced that Fauci is still in trouble.

My NIH file

The NIH keeps a file on us, because they have also read this Substack:

“Jim Haslam, who has written seven essays on the origin of COVID-19, believes that SARS-CoV-2 was created in the US as a “self-spreading” vaccine intended for bats that are a reservoir for SARS-related coronaviruses, that accidentally leaked during in vivo testing of bats at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

The NIH followed this blog closely. In vivo, or in the living, is risky live bat research in Dani Anderson’s BSL4. In vitro, or in a petri dish, is relatively harmless. Fauci defended himself by holding up Shi Zhengli’s WIV BSL2 paper, which he wrote was “only in vitro work.”

Fauci’s great defense by holding up Shi’s WIV BSL2 paper, but the pandemic started in Dani’s BSL4

My NIH file came up during internal deliberations on whether to answer my book’s survey question. On July 18, 2024, I sent the following to then NIH director Lawrence Tabak (and 100+ other scientists listed in the back of my book):

Dr Tabak,

As part of a published survey, please provide a biological explanation for why American mink, deer mice, deer, and lab bats (i.e., Egyptian fruit bats) are reservoir hosts for WA1, which is the best-known ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2.

Thanks,
Jim Haslam

References:
Sharun et al., “SARS-CoV-2 in Animals: Potential for Unknown Reservoir Hosts and Public Health Implications,” May 2021.
Fagre et al., “SARS-CoV-2 Infection, Neuropathogenesis and Transmission Among Deer Mice: Implications for Spillback to New World Rodents,” August 2020.
Cool et al., “Infection and Transmission of Ancestral SARS-CoV-2 and Its Alpha Variant in Pregnant White-Tailed Deer,” August 2021.
Schlottau et al., “SARS-CoV-2 in Fruit Bats, Ferrets, Pigs, and Chickens: An Experimental Transmission Study,” September 2020.
Varrelman et al., “Transmissible Vaccines in Heterogeneous Populations: Implications for Vaccine Design,” February 2019.
Schreiner, et al., “When to Vaccinate a Fluctuating Wildlife Population: Is Timing Everything?” November 2019.

The follow-up question was customized for the high-level receiver:

Larry, following up on behalf of 8 billion people—please confirm (or deny) the $14.2M Defuse bid was resubmitted by EcoHealth to NIAID under 3 grants totaling $14.1M?

• 2R01AI110964 China (eg Defuse TA1)

• U01AI151797 CREID (eg Defuse TA2)

• R01AI163118 Laos etc

And please confirm (or deny) the “HKU3r-CoVs” chimera listed in all 3 NIAID grants is equivalent to the SARS2 genome?

Thanks, Jim

The above email caught Tabak’s attention because he forwarded it to his closest lieutenants, which included Michael Lauer.

From left to right: Collins, Lauer, Tabak

Lauer had previously sent EcoHealth a sternly worded letter. Four years later, in 2024, he received my survey question, found my podcast, and shared it around the NIH office.

Lauer included my email in his weekly agenda meeting with Tabak, but we can only guess what they discussed. Weeks later, Tabak’s office asked Munster about his ties to EcoHealth, but Munster lied by denying any direct involvement with EcoHealth experiments.

How Fauci funded DARPA Defuse

Ralph Baric’s 2018-19 UNC emails with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth were recently referenced by DRASTIC. The online lab leak sleuths (i.e.

BILLY BOSTICKSON

) found an EcoHealth file that was “not to be shared with Congress.” Baric’s pre-DARPA Defuse draft was more incriminating than his Defuse documents.

This explains why Baric misled FBI agents during multiple FOIA requests. And it proves that Baric resubmitted the rejected DARPA Defuse TA1 document under Fauci’s new 2R01 grant.

A more detailed proposal of Baric's intended contribution, drafted by himself, is also available for the first time. It shows more emphasis on passaging and the FCS than the earlier version known to date…

And Baric is the one who suggested the language for the R01 [submitted in 2018].

In early 2018, Baric drafted all of Technical Area 1 and Technical Area 2 of the DARPA Defuse proposal. When DARPA rejected it that June, Baric simply recycled the text into two successful NIAID grant applications. The follow-up 2R01 and U01 grants carried forward the same ideas, now stamped with NIH approval. As Daszak himself admitted, Baric knew how to win NIAID grants.

Baric turned a lost DARPA email thread into winning NIAID grants. Hence, the question to Tabak and Lauer:

Please confirm (or deny) the $14.2M Defuse bid was resubmitted by EcoHealth to NIAID under 3 grants totaling $14.1M?

• 2R01AI110964 China (eg Defuse TA1)

• U01AI151797 CREID (eg Defuse TA2)

• R01AI163118 Laos etc

I’ve since learned the Laos grant was used by Daszak to replace the cancelled 2R01 China grant. However, by October 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was even asking Baric questions about his 2R01 grant, which focused on 10-25% different genomes.

Those genomes were collectively known as HKU3r-CoVs in the three NIAID grants. Hence, the 2nd question to Tabak et al:

And please confirm (or deny) the “HKU3r-CoVs” chimera listed in all 3 NIAID grants is equivalent to the SARS2 genome?

The SARS-CoV-2 spike is 25% different than the SARS-CoV-1 spike, as Baric described the HKU3r-CoV chimera. That patented chimera was previously called HKU3-Smix in DARPA Defuse. It’s now called SARS-CoV-2.

Days before the Defuse document leaked in September 2021, Daszak sent Baric a panicked email. Daszak was caught off guard by Baric’s furin cleavage site plans. Daszak copied and pasted the infamous furin cleavage site paragraph in his email to Baric, and basically said: Oh shit, but at least this work was proposed at UNC and funded by the NIH.

Baric basically replied the same to Daszak. Unlike the NIH, DARPA showed concern over Baric’s GoF proposal, so EcoHealth had asked him to add the following language:

We will sequence the spike protein, reverse engineer them to conduct binding assays, and insert them into bat SARSr-CoV (WIV1 , SHCO14) backbones (these use bat-SARSr-CoV backbones, not SARS-CoV, and are exempt from human gain of function concerns)

The under case “r” in HKU3r-CoVs was Baric’s workaround for any GoF regulations, since Baric experimented with a bat virus, not a human virus.

But Baric’s bat virus, HKU3r-CoVs, is now called the human virus SARS-CoV-2. Ironically, Baric’s grants were not even reviewed by the GoF committee. Even if they were, no one would care, because the culture remains.

For the next four years, lots of turmoil has occurred. Every name mentioned above is now gone from their current position, except for Baric, Munster, and these two ladies.

Earlier this week, I forwarded Tabak’s email to both women, asking them to confirm or deny whether the NIH funded DARPA Defuse and the HKU3r-CoV chimera = SARS-CoV-2? They didn’t respond, so we will share this post with them instead. And the NIH can add it to my file!