North Carolina judge protects UNC
And another Baric alibi bites the dust
Judge rejects appeal for Baric’s UNC records
US Right to Know filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on Baric’s 2019 records in 2020. Six years later, we have bad news. The North Carolina judge, who graduated from UNC, engaged in legalese:
The North Carolina Court of Appeals has ruled against a group seeking public records from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The records are tied to US Right to Know’s search for the university’s role in COVID-19’s origins.
The unanimous decision Wednesday upheld a trial judge’s 2024 decision accepting UNC’s interpretation of a research exemption in the state’s public records law.
“In this case, we are presented with a question of statutory interpretation regarding an exception from the Public Records Act, section 132-1, contained in section 116-43.17,” wrote Judge Jefferson Griffin.
US Right to Know presented two arguments, Griffin explained. “First, Plaintiff argues ‘the trial court erred in concluding that the phrase “of a proprietary nature” in [section] 116-43.17 only modified the word “information” and does not modify either “data” or “records.”’ Second, Plaintiff argues ‘the trial court erred in interpreting the phrase “proprietary nature” in [section] 116-43.17 broadly “to include information in which the owner has a protectable interest.”’ We disagree.”
Griffin tackled the text of the disputed provision. “[T]he context of the plain text does not indicate the phrase ‘of a proprietary nature’ modifies any other term apart from ‘information,’” he wrote. “Here … the phrase ‘or information of a proprietary nature’ is grammatically separated by punctuation — commas — indicating that the prepositional phrase ‘of a proprietary nature’ solely modifies the noun preceding it, ‘information.’”
That interpretation means that university research data and records do not have to be “of a proprietary nature” to enjoy the protection of the public records exemption.
Why is Baric hiding behind a “proprietary” definition of his public records? Baric patented the SARS2 genome back in 2018 (called HKU3-Smix), and said he would “provide” it to Zhengli Shi and Linfa Wang for testing in Chinese bats:
What’s next?
“We are disappointed in today’s result,” said Gary Ruskin, US Right to Know executive director, in an email to Carolina Journal. “We believe that the public has a right to know where the Covid pandemic may have come from. We believe that the University of North Carolina, as an institution of higher learning, should help the public understand the lessons of the pandemic, and not obscure or bury them. We are evaluating our legal options and potential next steps.”
The North Carolina government is now investigating Baric
North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) doesn’t have to turn over additional records of the work of prominent scientist and coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric, the N.C. Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday. But U.S. Right to Know, the advocacy group denied the records, is not the only one seeking documents from UNC.
But UNC has turned over many documents as part of a separate legislative inquiry into Baric’s research, House Speaker Destin Hall said. House Republicans’ staff on the General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Commission on Governmental Operations, known as Gov Ops, are conducting that inquiry. The legislature exempted Gov Ops from public records law, so the commission decides when and if investigative documents are shared publicly. Not all investigations or inquiries by Gov Ops result in a commission hearing or action.
Hall told The N&O in a recent interview that they have received “a ton of documents” from their UNC request. Baric’s life’s work laid the foundation for the development of vaccines against COVID-19 and UNC’s role in researching the virus. He is a distinguished professor in UNC’s Department of Epidemiology and professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, is considered a world leader in studying coronaviruses.
Hall directed UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts to deliver records of that work to Gov Ops’ House majority staff in a June 11 letter exclusively obtained by The N&O. The records that Hall sought includes those the university has fought to withhold from U.S. Right to Know, a private advocacy group that has sued UNC for records as part of its campaign to collect more information on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. But The N&O was not immediately able to determine whether any of those withheld documents were among those turned over to the legislature.
The General Assembly’s request to UNC:
All records sought by U.S. Right to Know for a series of dates from 2020 to 2024;
All documents provided to members of Congress about Baric, the Baric Lab, the SARS-Cov-2 virus, the Wuhan Institute of Virology; and communication from any account connected to the Baric Lab and to or from accounts connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth Alliance or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency from 2018 to 2021.
“There’s a ton of documents that our folks have gotten. As I understand it, they have maybe spoken to (Baric) as well,” Hall told The N&O in a recent interview. He said that it’s up to Congress for some scrutiny of the documents, but that state House Republicans also wanted to know more about Baric’s research given it has received national attention.
“We’re certainly not saying he did anything wrong one way or the other. By all accounts, with people who know him, he’s a good guy who was in a specialized area of research,” Hall said. “And we’re just trying to understand — was there something going on here, from the institutional standpoint, that maybe was too dangerous. Obviously, COVID was a significant world event. And we are the body over the UNC System, and so (we’re) taking a look at those things,” he said.
UNC spokesperson Kevin Best said Thursday when asked about the status of the legislature’s request that nothing has changed since its statement to The N&O in June, which was that due to state law, “any request made to an agency employee by Commission staff and any communication between Commission staff and an agency employee is confidential.” “The University deeply values and appreciates its partnership with the General Assembly and is committed to legal compliance and transparency,” Best said.
Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article314235856.html#storylink=cpy
A North Carolina editorial
Our Opinion: ‘Sunshine’ is a cure for UNC’s secrecy on virus research:
To the uninitiated, Wednesday’s appellate ruling may seem like an exercise in tortured legal hairsplitting. Yet Judge Griffin and his colleagues did yeoman’s work grappling with questions of statutory construction. Whether words like “proprietary” are defined one way or another and whether an adjective modifies one or more terms — outlined in a doctrine called the last antecedent canon — can change the way a law is read and applied.
Quoting state Supreme Court precedent holding that the Public Records Act “is intended to be liberally construed to ensure that governmental records be open and made available to the public, subject to only a few limited exceptions,” Griffin and his colleagues were duty-bound to recognize and apply those limited exceptions. The fault lies not with the courts, but with shortcomings of the statute itself.
THE SOLUTION
If state lawmakers believe a UNC professor’s work with the Chinese research lab that might have been the COVID-19 pandemic’s point of origin should be accessible to the taxpayers who subsidize public university research, they don’t have to purge the Public Records Act of all intellectual property protections. Instead, legislators ought to support the Sunshine Amendment, an addition to the state constitution that would create an overarching presumption of openness.
Bills to place the Sunshine Amendment on voters’ ballots were filed in the House and Senate in June 2024 after last-minute language buried in the 2023 state budget gave the General Assembly a broad legislative exemption from transparency laws, allowing individual senators and representatives to designate records as public or confidential at their sole discretion.
“Why amend the state constitution instead of strengthening the N.C. Public Records Act and the N.C. Open Meetings Law? Because the temptation to lard up the lawbooks with loopholes has proven impossible for our elected representatives to resist,” we wrote in 2024.
Because the N.C. Constitution supersedes general statutes, a Sunshine Amendment establishing government transparency as a first principle could close some loopholes and drastically limit others. Lawmakers wishing to expand state secrecy would have to secure voters’ buy-in for future amendments rather than relying on procedural chicanery.
Recent North Carolina polling shows overwhelming public support for open government. We call on Nash County’s legislative delegation, Sen. Lisa Barnes and Reps. Allen Chesser and Dante Pittman, to support and sponsor a Sunshine Amendment in 2026.
A lab leak conspiracy theory that led to another Baric lie
Flo Debarre, a natural origin scientist, wrote a long blog making fun of a lab leak conspiracy theory:
https://pandemonium.hypotheses.org/331
In 2015, Baric published a controversial Nature paper, but listed Zhengli Shi as a co-author. Baric had created a novel chimera using Shi’s bat samples. The paper was even referenced by Fauci during the cover-up.
Baric later clarified why Shi was a co-author, since Shi shared an unpublished bat sample with him.
So I said that we had access to the spike proteins of this virus called SHC014 that was provided by Zhengli Shi before she published it, which was generous. Most scientists would not do that. Later, she sent the plasmid on filter paper and coding the spike sequence of that virus as well.
But all the SHC014-MA15 engineering was performed at UNC. Something similar happened in 2019 with RaTG13, since Baric testified that the WIV would share samples with him before publication:
And my role was to study a couple of the viruses that the Wuhan Institute of Virology found that they were willing to share with me [in 2019]. So I always viewed that as not number one оr number two on the list, maybe number five or number six on the list.
In February 2020, the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections (EMI) published a Commentary dismissing claims that SARS-CoV-2 has been engineered in a laboratory. Those engineering rumors started when Shi uploaded RaTG13:
The EMI co-authors even referenced the alignment of Shi’s RaTG13 (top) to Baric’s SARS2 genome (bottom).
One of the authors of the EMI paper, Susan Weiss, noticed the furin cleavage site (PRRA) and wrote, “frightening to think it may have been engineered.”
The other co-authors knew what they were doing, defending Baric from Wuhan lab leak rumors in early 2020.
Baric and Shi were asked for comment before EMI publication, but weren’t listed as co-authors. Why? Because Baric explicitly asked not to be “cited.”
Baric’s main edit was to compare his unpublished chimera, SHC014-MA15, with that of SARS2.
Baric noted that the difference between SHC014-MA15 and SARS2 was more than 6,000 nucleotides (nts).
Baric uploaded the 2015 genome on May 22, 2020, to demonstrate that it was not related to SARS2. That turned out to be a significant mistake.
Another Baric alibi bites the dust
In a 2021 interview, Baric said Shi couldn’t replicate his methods because he never uploaded his novel chimeras, such as SHC014-MA15, until after the pandemic. Also, during Baric’s 2024 testimony, he tried to provide an alibi that he wouldn’t engineer with six uneven pieces, as was found in SARS2 genome:
The second thing is, [Bruttel’s paper] counts six pieces, but one of the pieces is about 8 KB [8,000 nts or fragment B below] and the other is about 300 nts [fragment D below]. If you look at any of the molecular clones that I’ve engineered, with SARS, they’re usually 5 KB apart, so that you have five or six KB pieces that you can work. Having a tiny little piece like that, if I looked at it, that would irritate me, like, to no end, and we would silence it, one of those sites. And then separate this, so that the fragments are of equal size. The first size piece is also too small, and so it leaves larger pieces, and the larger clones are unstable with passage. So you would want it more equally distributed…
Since Baric had finally uploaded the 2015 genome, SHC014-MA15, we could compare his unknown engineering methods with SARS2:
Note the five restriction sites, which create six unequal-length pieces. The first piece is tiny, just like fragment D in SARS2, and the last fragment is large (~11 KB), just like fragment B in SARS2. In DARPA Defuse, Baric also proposed “six contiguous cDNA pieces” linked by five restriction sites:
American bat vaccine
Baric’s DARPA Defuse colleague, Tonie Rocke from the US Geological Survey (USGS), appeared in a recent PBS special on vaccinating American bats.
https://www.pbs.org/video/bat-vax-wild-hope-mkxltv/
Ironically, USRTK had to FOIA the USGS to get Baric’s DARPA Defuse records. Baric emailed Tonie Rocke in 2018, outlining his problem: I have no bat colony to test my chimeras.
They decided to use the USGS Mexican free-tailed bat colony as “proxies” for the Chinese bats.
Guess which bats Covid infects?
Of ten Mexican free-tailed (Tadarida brasiliensis) bats oronasally inoculated with SARS-CoV-2, five became infected and orally excreted moderate amounts of virus for up to 18 days postinoculation. These five subjects all seroconverted and cleared the virus before the end of the study with no obvious clinical signs of disease.
No transmission occurred, though, because the USGS bat cages were too large, and they blamed “social distancing.”
COVID-19 is still killing Americans, Study Finds
Between 2022 and 2024, COVID-19 killed roughly 100,000 Americans annually, new research by CDC scientists shows.
Did US Right to know FOIA Munster’s Rocky Mountains Lab for its work on Darpa and Creid grants in association with UNC and Daszack ?
Always the same game of deliberate ignoring - but look at the division of costs, very telling 🥲 : https://infocuria.curia.europa.eu/tabs/jurisprudence?searchTerm=%22T-623%2F22%22&lang=DE&logicDocId=306565