North Carolina lawmakers are now lab leakers

Red team meeting, bioweapons, & Fauci vs Paul Round 2

Fauci has an upcoming date with Congress

Senator Paul’s office has subpoenaed several agencies, including UNC, RML, and Duke. Fauci will be interviewed in the fall of this year, and Paul said to expect “some surprising findings when we put this all together.”

Paul mentioned communications involving the University of Minnesota, WIV, UNC, RML, and Duke during the 2018-19 period, as they cross-referenced each other in the post-DARPA Defuse research.

Fang Li of Minnesota was Baric’s intermediary to Zhengli Shi of WIV

The FOIA target is now Fauci’s funding of Baric’s DARPA Defuse bid via CREID.

CREID cancelled

Baric testified that he “forgot” about his 2018 multimillion-dollar bid, but months later, he resubmitted his DARPA Defuse scope of work (FCS, HAE, personnel, money, etc) for Fauci’s CREID project (U01).

CREID was Fauci’s version of DARPA's Preempt. Since Fauci’s NIAID budget was twice the size of DARPA's, he spent twice the amount, $82M compared to $40M. Others, like Richard Ebright, believed CREID was hush money for Kristian Andersen in 2020. But CREID was scored in 2019, and funded the creation of Covid. Daszak and Baric utilized their $7.5M U01 subgrant to fund TA2 in DARPA Defuse.

Dani Anderson of Duke edited the DARPA Defuse documents in June 2019 before entering the Wuhan BSL4. Ralph Baric and Anderson then appeared on CNN, blaming Shi’s BSL2. After the DARPA Defuse documents leaked, both went radio silent for years. I suspect Baric is concealing his 2019 emails with Anderson and Vincent Munster.

North Carolina lawmakers are now lab leakers

A secretive North Carolina legislative commission wants UNC-Chapel Hill to release a slew of records linked to elite coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric.

House Speaker Destin Hall directed UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts to deliver the records to House majority staff of the Joint Legislative Commission on Governmental Operations, in a June 11 letter obtained exclusively by The News & Observer from Hall’s office.

Some of the records that Hall is seeking are among those the university has fought to not release to 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. A Hall staff member described the request as a fact-finding mission that he initiated because he “has a personal curiosity about the truth of what happened, about what Baric was researching and its relevance to COVID.”

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article307770080.html

Woody White, who sits on the UNC Board of Governors, told Carolina Journal in an emailed statement that he commends Speaker Hall’s efforts to learn more about COVID’s origins. “Like many around the world, and especially in North Carolina, I’ve followed this issue closely, especially Prof. Baric’s testimony before Congress, and the lawsuit that seeks more disclosure,” he said. “The sooner all information is made public, the quicker important questions will be answered. If there were no errors made or lapses in either judgment or performance under grant guidelines, then there should be no reluctance to make everything available for public inspection.”

Another North Carolina newspaper tried to debunk the lab leak by referencing a paper that Baric had ghostwritten:

Before the pandemic, Baric had collaborated with a Wuhan researcher [Shi] on coronavirus genetic studies. The results of that work, published in 2015, showed coronaviruses in bats were capable of directly infecting humans rather than evolving in another animal first, the N&O previously reported. A 2020 article in the journal of Emerging Microbes & Infections found no connection between that research and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2015 research paper listed Shi as a co-author for sharing bat samples (SHC014) before publication. The 2020 natural origin article had editorial input from Ralph Baric, who didn’t “want to be cited as having commented prior to submission.” His co-authors wrote, “We don’t want to appear that we are defending Ralph even though he did nothing wrong.”

Another North Carolina newspaper wondered why Baric is a GOP target? They referenced Baric’s NYT propaganda piece with his DARPA Defuse colleague, Ian Lipkin. “He’s a superb scientist,” Lipkin said of Baric, who he described as a close friend during an interview with The N&O this week. “I trust him implicitly and explicitly.”

Another colleague of Baric, Marion Koopmans, is worried about public witch hunts.

Ebrights op-ed

Richard Ebright of Rutgers finally musters the courage to bring attention to Baric, but incorrectly asserts that Covid is linked to Baric’s (safe) humanized mice and falsely claims that the engineering was outsourced to Wuhan.

https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/uncovered-risks-no-oversight-of-uncs-extreme-virology/

Drosten and WHO SAGO update

Andreas Lisewski explained to Multipolar that he has contacted Christian Drosten about his paper since January 2, 2025. Drosten has generally shown himself open to a MERS origin hypothesis. This is where things are becoming politically explosive, as Drosten initiated a special meeting of a WHO working group based on Lisewski's research paper. This is the so-called SAGO, the "Scientific Advisory Group for Origins of Novel Pathogens," a WHO working group investigating the virus's origins since 2021. Drosten and several other international researchers are members of this group. He arranged for a special meeting of this WHO working group on February 18, where he presented Lisewski's research. Multipolar has learned that the data has met with great interest at the WHO. An "independent assessment," i.e., an assessment by the WHO, is to be published soon. According to a SAGO member, the report has already been finalized. At the end of May, Lisewski learned from SAGO Chair Marietjie Venter that the report was still being discussed and processed internally within the WHO and could “hopefully” be published in the coming months.

https://multipolar-magazin.de/artikel/corona-biowaffe

The remainder of the German article focuses on Dirk Gerhardt's Chinese military bioweapon theory.

Is Covid a bioweapon?

No, it has a 99% survival rate. Dirk Gerhardt's research is a classic case of believing humans are the only mammals on the planet. Since Covid is circulating among humans, he assumes it was designed for humans as a bioweapon. For instance, Gerhardt lists the 15 receptor pathways that SARS2 targets:

Gerhardt: Yes, there are at least 15 receptor pathways. ACE2 is the primary pathway, the one the public has focused on, as a widespread receptor in human cells, but also NRP-1, CD147, DC-SIGN/L-SIGN, AXL, ASGR1, KREMEN1, MR, MGL, GRP78, integrins via RGD peptide, TMEM106B, as well as sialic acid-binding pathways and CEACAM.

Gerhardt’s list comes from this paper, highlighted by

BILLY BOSTICKSON

showing Covid targets several mammalian receptors:

Baric researched all of these: APN, CEACAM1, DPP4, sugar receptors in PEDV, ACE2 in Egyptian fruit bats and Chinese bats, neuropilin, AXL, ASGR1, DC-SIGN, heparan sulfate, Siglec, nicotinic, D614G vs D613G, etc.

Baric threw everything but the kitchen sink at this SARS2 genome to get it to stick and transmit in bats, not humans. Unfortunately, he turned us into his lab bats. Then, he attacked anyone who suggested a lab origin.

Red Team Meeting

Whenever the US government wants to debate a controversial subject, it creates a red team to oppose the status quo. In January 2021, the US State Department organized a Covid origins debate called the red team meeting. They invited lab leak proponents Steven Quay and Alina Chan to debate a surprise guest: Ralph Baric.

With deep distrust simmering, the State Department team convened a panel of experts to confidentially “red team” the lab-leak hypothesis. The idea was to pummel the theory and see if it still stood. The panel took place on the evening of January 7, 2021, one day after the insurrection at the Capitol. By then, Chris Ford had announced his plan to resign from the State Department.

Twenty-nine people logged on to a secure State Department video call that lasted three hours, according to meeting minutes obtained by Vanity Fair. The scientific experts included Ralph Baric, Alina Chan, and the Stanford microbiologist David Relman.

David Asher of Trump State Department invited Dr. Steven Quay, a breast cancer specialist who’d founded a biopharmaceutical company, to present a statistical analysis weighing the probability of a lab origin versus a natural one. Scissoring Quay’s analysis, Baric noted that its calculations failed to account for the millions of bat sequences that exist in nature but remain unknown. When a State Department adviser asked Quay whether he’d ever done a similar analysis, he replied there’s “a first time for everything,” according to the meeting minutes (never published by Katherine Eban’s Vanity Fair).

Though they questioned Quay’s findings, the scientists saw other reasons to suspect a lab origin. Part of the WIV’s mission was to sample the natural world and provide early warnings of “human capable viruses,” said Relman. The 2012 infections of six miners was “worthy of banner headlines at the time.” Yet those cases had never been reported to the WHO.

Baric added that, if SARS-CoV-2 had come from a “strong animal reservoir,” one might have expected to see “multiple introduction events,” rather than a single outbreak, though he cautioned that it didn’t prove “[this] was an escape from a laboratory.” That prompted Asher to ask, “Could this not have been partially bioengineered?”

Vanity Fair did not publish Baric’s response, which is provided below. He consistently told US government officials the SARS2 genome was not engineered. According to Alina Chan, she did not expect Baric to attend, and he “bullied” Quay for suggesting the SARS2 genome was engineered.

In audio from that Jan. 6, 2021 red team meeting, involving Ms. Keen [natural origin WHO scientist], she promoted the viewpoint of Ralph Baric, a U.S. scientist who has worked closely with scientists at the lab, according to Sky News. Ms. Keen was responding to an analysis from Dr. Steven Quay, who has said evidence points to COVID-19 coming from the lab.

"I think Ralph pointed out some of the issues with the probabilities you’ve come up with Dr. Quay. I share a lot of those concerns," Ms. Keen was quoted as saying during the meeting.

"It would be in the best interest of the public to know what were 'the comments of a natural origin advocate, Ralph Baric' during the January 6, 2021 meeting mentioned," Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University and co-founder of the group Biosafety Now, told The Epoch Times via email.

Prof David Relman of Stanford then invited Baric to sign his May 2021 Science letter calling for an investigation into Shi’s BSL2 lab, which Baric happily obliged. Baric never disclosed his DARPA Defuse bid, which leaked four months later.

Atlantic puff piece on lab leak

David Relman of Stanford gathered the courage to be quoted. Robert (Hanes underwear) Kadlec is in line for a DoD biosecurity job. Alina Chan is flirting with NIH. However, none of the above scientists responded to the WA1 survey at the back of my book. Bryce Nickels tweeted it out, which led to interesting feedback.

https://archive.ph/1FKOT

Quay puff piece

Why SARS-CoV-2 is not a vaccine designed by Baric, by Steven Quay

https://zenodo.org/records/15388162

Quay also believes that Covid is a PLA bioweapon designed for humans, so any evidence of an animal vaccine short-circuits his big brain. The same goes for Ebright, who freaks out when I mention the moral use of Baric’s No See'm engineering.

Baric found UGGUCGC in RaTG13 and Banal-52 "fascinating" and "unique." He would use a wild-type TRN for an LAV bat vaccine. Quay contends this TRN is not at the beginning of Orf1a, but unpublished FOIAs show Baric using it without a fixed location.

Stanley Perlman, Baric’s (MERS-MA30) buddy, explained why LAV is preferred for animal vaccines but is never approved for humans.

Perlman responded to my WA1 question but used a broad host range excuse. They claim Covid infects cats and dogs, but no onward transmission. Major Murphy mentioned that Covid was an LAV bat vaccine, but no one listened. Baric’s CRG7 LAV experiments prove that he had RaTG13 by 2019, but some believe that RaTG13 is fake.

Is RaTG13 fake?

No, Steve Massey proved RaTG13 was a real genome sequence. It was tested at Rocky Mountain Lab before the pandemic. People confused "hard to grow" with "fake."

According to Shi, RaTG13 was never isolated or grown in cell culture. This makes sense because isolating bat viruses from bat guano is difficult. Only three bat viruses have been isolated, all by Shi, and none by Baric. Baric prefers to download Shi’s bat sequences and engineer them to grow in cell culture.

Why did Baric insert the furin cleavage site in SARS2?

Covid committee: Do you have a moment when your memory was jogged about DEFUSE?

Baric: After it was released by — I forgot the name of that group — the computer sleuths [Muphy & DRASTIC] that found and released it, and it popped up on the news. And I was thinking, what's this? And I read it. Yeah, I wrote the grant, part of it, yeah.

I can also tell you one of the drivers that sort of stopped me thinking about that line of research was that we were interested in protease cleavage sites, for example, because it was a second barrier for virus emergence. We also had several MERS-related strains and SARS strains that we couldn't culture. We knew the clone was infectious and the virus could replicate, but couldn't spread.

We realized that if we add exogenous trypsin, another protease, and put it in the media, some of those viruses will grow. It's a simple solution to the problem. You didn't exactly have to engineer anything to make it grow. So we published a paper on that, and we used it on a variety of viruses. It's kind of a simple solution to a more technologically different approach.

The published paper Baric mentioned was his 2019 RXXR trypsin paper, which referenced the SARS2 furin cleavage site (MERS-MA30). Again, Baric was trying to get the bat virus into the mammalian bat cell, which also contains furin, like human cells.

As one Twitter user summarized:

This bat vaccine idea has got to be the King of Instant Karma: Designing a novel pathogen to infect other species of mammals (starting with bats) to protect humans, but then being the first (intermediate) mammal to infect itself in the lab to start a pandemic. Mammal then writes Proximal Origins.

Baric was a ghostwriter on the 2020 Proximal Origin paper and, five years later, the mammalian target of the origin investigation.