SARS2 – designed in UNC, given wings in Montana, leaked in Wuhan
And another Baric alibi bites the dust
The US government has been just as curious as we are about whether SARS2 leaked from a lab in Wuhan. Early in the pandemic, they asked Ralph Baric: Is this virus engineered? Baric responded, “No, there is absolutely no evidence that this virus is bioengineered.”
Ralph Baric also delivered multiple technical presentations to US government officials, but none of his slides referenced the unusual furin cleavage site (FCS).
Baric’s first presentation was on February 13, 2020, but he didn’t mention the FCS while comparing SARS2 to SARS1.
SARS2 is the only SARS-like virus to contain an FCS, so it serves as a warning sign for a potential pandemic pathogen. Baric’s next presentation was two weeks later, for congressional staffers at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., but he didn’t mention the FCS.
The above presentations occurred days after Baric met with Fauci in Washington, D.C. Baric said they discussed the “outbreak and chimeras,” and added Shi Zhengli might be “arrested” for publishing RaTG13. Why? Because Shi’s publication of RaTG13 exposed the SARS2 FCS.
After Shi published RaTG13, Kristian Andersen testified that he wanted to contact the FBI and CIA to notify them that SARS2 is engineered.
If I believe this could’ve come from the lab, who am I supposed to contact? And I thought about -- I have some brochures and pamphlets from, like, the FBI, I believe. Am I supposed to call the FBI? Am I supposed to call the CIA?
But Baric “attacked” Andersen before that could happen. This came up during Baric’s 2024 testimony.
Committee: [Kristian Andersen] said something about you, and I would like to get your side of the story on what he said.
Baric: Hopefully, he didn’t say anything negative.
Committee: This is a quote from Dr. Andersen’s Slack messages. “I should mention that Ralph Baric pretty much attacked me on the call with NASEM, essentially calling anything related to potential lab escape ludicrous, crackpot theories. I wonder if he, himself, is worried about this, too.” I’m just trying to get your side of this.
Baric: Can you read that again?
Committee: “I should mention that Ralph Baric pretty much attacked me on the call with NASEM, “ National Academies of Science, “essentially calling anything related to potential lab escape ludicrous, crackpot theories. I wonder if he, himself, is worried about this, too.”
Baric: I don’t recall this. So because of this, I’m going to at least say one thing that I gave in the BSEG meeting on January 25th or 26th. My summary of the origin of the pandemic was the following. There are three potential causes for, that pandemic. First is natural origin, second was laboratory escape, and the third was genetically engineered.
Did Baric have an alibi? Did he notify US government officials that SARS2 could be “genetically engineered?” Everyone at the time was surprised, so we wanted to see this “BSEG” presentation by Baric.
Well, Rand Paul’s Senate office has released it.
The new records released by the Committee show that on January 23, 2020, Dr. Baric was summoned by “the Sponsor” to present at a meeting of ODNI’s Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG), which operates under the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC). Dr. Baric agreed to participate, replying that he would “put together a few slides that capture the essence of the problem.” The response was enthusiastic: “[t]he Sponsor will be excited to hear that you are willing to lead this timely and important discussion.”
Six days later, on January 29, 2020, Dr. Baric emails a copy of his PowerPoint presentation which included a slide titled “Origins” that discussed the possibility of an accidental laboratory release at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A hypothesis that was later publicly dismissed, labeled a conspiracy theory, and vilified by Dr. Fauci and his inner circle.
ODNI is essentially the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc., and BSEG is a group of US academics with security clearances. So, what was in this high-level, top-secret presentation by Baric?
It was the same ~50 slide presentation as all the others, but with this one “Origins” slide added:
Baric brought attention to Shi’s BSL2, but the next slide omitted the FCS. The same FCS that Shi brought attention to by publishing RaTG13. Baric knew it and subtly referenced RaTG13, but not the FCS.
Baric makes no mention of SARS2 being “genetically engineered,” no mention of his collaborator, Dani Anderson, at the Wuhan BSL4, and no mention of his DARPA Defuse plans to engineer an FCS in a SARS-like virus.
On March 10, 2020, Baric gave a virtual presentation with Fauci during the lockdowns, but again missed the FCS.
The first and only public presentation where Baric (briefly) mentioned the FCS was in May 2022. This is well after his DARPA Defuse bid leaked, revealing Baric’s plans to insert an FCS into a SARS-like genome and test it on bats in Wuhan.
SARS2 – designed in UNC, given wings in Montana, leaked in Wuhan
https://www.counterview.net/2025/10/sars-cov-2-designed-in-unc-given-wings.html
Five years ago, around this time of year, the world had come to a halt under lockdowns—apparently to contain a novel and dangerous virus. However, the virus was not dangerous to most of the population, as it was not designed to be lethal. Who designed it, and why?
None of the containment measures worked, as the virus was engineered to spread via airborne aerosols. Who taught it to do so, and why? Understanding the origins of the so-called pandemic—which led to some of the gravest rights violations in human history outside of wartime—is crucial.
From early 2020 onward, any mention of the lab-leak possibility was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. However, it turns out that it was not a conspiracy theory, but rather a conspiracy practice.
In December 2024, a U.S. House of Representatives committee report supported the lab-leak hypothesis. The official narrative claims that the U.S. funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that there was an accidental leak in Wuhan. But this, according to a book, is not even one percent of the full story.
In June 2025, the WHO released a report suggesting that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, likely originated naturally, spilling over from bats. However, thousands of tests on 218 Chinese species failed to detect SARS-CoV-2 in any of them—a major shortcoming in the natural-origin hypothesis.
Jim Haslam’s book, “Covid-19: Mystery Solved”, claims to connect the dots. The book’s subtitle summarizes it in one line: “It leaked from a Wuhan lab but it’s not Chinese junk.” The book draws on leaked documents, U.S. FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) disclosures, congressional hearings, and numerous scientific research papers.
The story begins in 2004, when President George W. Bush signed “Project Bioshield,” a $6 billion bio-bureaucracy led by Anthony Fauci. Following 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, Fauci became fixated on preventing future spillovers of dangerous viruses from bats to humans.
Simultaneously, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) worried about potential spillovers affecting its troops in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2018, a proposal titled DEFUSE was submitted to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) by Professor Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC).
The proposal aimed to prevent spillovers by “vaccinating” bats using modified viruses to trigger antibodies. DARPA rejected the proposal, which only came to light when Major Joseph Murphy leaked it in 2021.
To this end, Baric created the SARS-CoV-2 virus in his UNC lab. According to the book, “Baric admitted in 2024 testimony that manipulating the protease (furin) was his idea,” using the term chimera twenty times. A chimera combines two or more viruses—in this case, from Asian bats. The goal, the book claims, was not malevolent: SARS-CoV-2 was intended as a bat vaccine.
However, vaccinating bats was expensive. Baric initially proposed spraying bat cave entrances, but the costs were prohibitive—one reason DARPA declined funding.
The story then moves to a second U.S. lab—the Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana—where Vincent Munster (chief of the Virus Ecology Unit) and Peter Daszak (president of EcoHealth Alliance) were researching “self-spreading vaccines.” They developed methods to train viruses to spread via airborne aerosols by selectively propagating mutations that enhanced transmissibility.
Baric’s UNC team collaborated with Munster’s Montana lab to make the virus “self-spreading.” Though DARPA had rejected DEFUSE in May 2018, Fauci’s NIAID later funded a similar project in October 2018 under the CREID (Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases) program. Thus, the virus created in UNC was “taught to fly” in Montana.
This may explain why SARS-CoV-2 efficiently transmits in several U.S. species—American mink, white-tailed deer, deer mice, Egyptian fruit bats, and Syrian hamsters—all used in Montana experiments—while not found in Chinese wildlife.
The next stage involved testing in Wuhan. Researcher Danielle Anderson, funded by Fauci, worked in the Wuhan BSL-4 lab to test airborne spread among Chinese horseshoe bats. Early prototypes failed; the final one succeeded—tragically, as the book suggests. The supposed “kill-switch” that was meant to prevent human transmission worked in Montana monkeys but failed in humans.
Haslam observes: “Every congressional question (to Fauci) about schools, lockdowns, social distancing, masks, beagles, and mandates could have been answered with one question: What was your $82 million CREID contractor (Danielle) doing inside that Wuhan BSL-4?”
On 24 January 2024, Baric twice evaded congressional questions about what was in his UNC freezer—possibly, the author suggests, because the answer was incriminating.
According to Major Joseph Murphy: “SARS-CoV-WIV is not meant to kill the bats but to immunize them. This nature may explain its general harmlessness to most people and its harmfulness to the old and co-morbid, who are generally more susceptible to vaccine reactions.” He also noted, “The [injectable] vaccine recipient has no defense against bloodstream entry, but their nose protects them from the recombinant spike protein quasi-species during ‘natural infection’ (better termed aerosolized inoculation).”
There was no ill intent in creating or aerosolizing the virus, the book claims; the real crime was the cover-up. While Fauci funded research to make SARS-CoV-2 airborne, he allegedly misled the public about surface transmission, six-foot distancing, school closures, lockdowns, and later, about the safety and efficacy of injectable COVID-19 vaccines.
To reiterate, according to the author, the COVID-19 origin and response were not a “conspiracy theory,” but a “conspiracy practice.” The virus was the (bat) vaccine; the [injectable] vaccine was more dangerous than the virus itself.
Bhaskaran Raman is a Professor at IIT Bombay. Views are personal. He has authored “Math Murder in Media Manufactured Madness,” which uses simple math to illustrate the absurdities in the mainstream COVID-19 narrative, available on bookshelves
RML update
Rocky Mountain Lab is now required to disclose its current projects. It’s a lot of live bat research, but they recently canceled the deer mice and “livestock” research.
https://ors.od.nih.gov/sr/dohs/biosafety-committee-minutes/Pages/default.aspx
Wuhan body bags
Trump’s evidence for a Wuhan lab leak was always interesting: body bags.
Josh Rogin from the Washington Post clears up Trump’s conspiracy.
The lab leak panel also included Michael Gordon from WSJ, who pushed the conspiracy that Shi’s postdoc, Ben Hu, was sick, along with the Weapons of Mass Destruction conspiracy that led to the invasion of Iraq.
Wow this is excellent work.
Baric has been a known problem since before covid. The montana link is new to me.
Excellent research, outstanding article. I haven't yet read closely enough to nitpick but this is absolutely top.
Please everyone share and copy it. (Reader View, Print to File)
Just a point of data:
Although I don't follow MSM here much it appears that in NZ there is still a news blackout on any suggestion that covid-19 could have be lab engineered in the US. The origins debate has been almost totally silent for several years now, with the lingering conclusion that it was either natural evolution or some cover up by the Chinese - but no new data has been released. .