Guest Post by Alex Berenson
Baric, who worked hand-in-glove with the lab in Wuhan from which Sars-Cov-2 likely leaked, also insisted the government keep its rules on coronaviruses loose so he could tinker with them more easily.
(SECOND OF TWO PARTS; PART ONE IS HERE)
Questioned under oath in 2022, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci largely denied knowing Dr. Ralph S. Baric, a North Carolina scientist and the world’s top coronavirus researcher.
Fauci’s claim came though he met one-on-one with Baric as Covid raced around the globe in early 2020 – and though he had funded Baric’s work and hosted Baric at a day-long coronavirus research conference in 2013. (I wrote about Fauci’s unlikely memory lapses here, in Part One of this piece.)
Why did Fauci try so hard to insulate himself from Baric 18 months ago – even at the cost of giving nonsensical answers while under oath?
Baric’s role and the plans he outlined in the conference on June 24, 2013 may help answer that question.
As I explained in Part One, the National Institutes of Health put the day-long event together during an outbreak of a novel coronavirus called MERS-Cov, which was highly lethal but not very transmissible.
A complete video of the conference is publicly available here. For anyone interested in understand the science – and the scientists – that may have led to Covid, it is a six-hour must-watch.
About 50 people attended the event. They included leading coronavirus researchers, as well as Peter Daszak and members of his EcoHealth Alliance, and federal officials concerned about infectious diseases. But Baric was without doubt the star of the show.
He made the first presentation, then another after lunch. He rarely went more than a few minutes without asking questions. He had earned the role. After earning a PhD in microbiology from North Carolina State University in 1982, Baric turned to infectious disease research.
He became known for his ability to handle coronaviruses, which can be hard to grow in labs, as well as in making genetic modifications to them. Because coronaviruses have a relatively large genome – the nucleotides that encode the information necessary for them to replicate themselves – they are harder to genetically modify than some other viruses. But Baric and his researchers did so with relative ease.
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(Destroying the world in order to save it, a presentation by Dr. Ralph S. Baric. Yes, that’s Tony Fauci in the front row.)
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Coronaviruses are named for their striking shape. They have a halo of “spike” proteins sticking out of a shell that protects the strand of genes that lets them replicate. The spikes attach to receptors on human cells, letting the coronavirus begin the process of copying itself.
Doctors had historically considered coronaviruses minor health threats compared to influenza, much less terrors like smallpox. The four coronaviruses known to infect humans before 2002 were generally associated with common colds.
Most respiratory virus researchers focused on influenza, whose dangers were more obvious. But the 2002-03 SARS epidemic, which killed about 800 people and caused a worldwide panic, and the MERS outbreak a decade later, made coronaviruses a hot topic among infectious disease researchers – and the policymakers who funded them.
Baric made sure everyone understood the risk of his favorite virus – and the need for well-funded research programs to reduce it.
Sure, neither SARS nor MERS appeared very transmissible, with MERS in particular seemingly requiring prolonged and close contact.
But their fatality rates were striking — 10 percent for SARS, 50 percent for MERS. With a few genetic modifications, similar coronaviruses might spread far more quickly, Baric argued.
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The best way to predict and ultimately reduce that risk would be to build coronaviruses more lethal and transmissible than any yet found in nature, Baric said in response to a question near the end of his first presentation:
The other way to do it… [is] make in essence recombinants where you drop the spike gene in different bat coronaviruses which you think may have appropriate properties that could be emergent, preemergent strains and characterize their ability to replicate in human cells…
Baric then acknowledged such work might be so risky that it might fall into the category of “dual-use experiments,” meaning research that militaries or terrorists might use to create deadlier biological weapons.
“Now, maybe dual-use experiments of concern, that’s another issue,” he said, with a slight giggle. (Yes, the video makes clear he does giggle, at approximately 45:55.)
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(Do-it-yerself coronaviruses, the Ralph Baric way! From a 2006 Baric paper titled “Synthetic Viral Genomics: Risks and Benefits for Science and Society.”)
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At a 2014 conference in Washington, D.C., Baric would also acknowledge his laboratory work outran any natural mutations that coronaviruses so far discovered in living animals had managed to produce.
After discussing three potential ways for the viruses to broaden their “host range” — that is, infect different species of animals, including humans — Baric acknowledged that two of the three “have only been identified using in vitro models, although the potential exists for similar mutants to emerge naturally in nature.”
Why do this work at all?
Baric and other scientists at the 2013 conference explained their work as necessary both to understand the potential threat from coronaviruses and to defuse it by helping research on antiviral drugs and vaccines.
Never mind that the despite the publicity the SARS and MERS outbreaks had garnered, theor combined global death toll equaled roughly one day of flu deaths.
Never mind that vaccines for flu, the closest counterpart to coronaviruses, appeared mostly useless and that decades of research had not brought the world closer to better ones.
By making stickier spikes and fitter, more dangerous viruses, Baric would enable the development of better vaccines and antivirals. He would create an arms race, in order to win it.
Baric never put it quite this bluntly, but near the end of the conference – five hours and 26 minutes in, according to the video – he came close. “It’s basically structure-based antigen design,” he said. “You can blend S [spike] components… to provide a broader neutralizing response within that cluster.”
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Baric wasn’t just outlining potential research pathways in June 2013. He intended to do the work, and he did. In November 2015, he — along with a Chinese virologist named Shi Zhengli — published what became a notorious paper in Nature Medicine:
A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence
Baric, Shi, and the other authors explained they had “generated” a “virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.”
In other words, Baric had combined multiple coronaviruses to make one better at infecting humans. The new lab-made virus would “replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells,” the paper explained. “Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.”
Baric’s co-author Shi was, of course, none other than the head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institutes of Virology, the lab from which Covid likely leaked in 2019. In 2018, Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance attempted to get federal funding for a new project where the Wuhan lab and Baric would again collaborate on work to make coronaviruses more dangerous.
The United States government rejected the request as too risky; but whether Shi’s group went ahead with the research anyway and accidentally created Sars-Cov-2 is the most important question about Covid’s origins. The second most important is what Baric, Daszak, and other American researchers knew or suspected about Shi’s research as Covid exploded worldwide.
(In 2020, Nature Medicine added a defensive, if snippy, note to the article complaining that it was “being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true.”)
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In 2016, Baric was the senior author on a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that arguably went even further than the Nature Medicine paper. The research group he led had manipulated a coronavirus provided by Shi and found it “poised for human emergence.”
The authors explained that they had “construct[ed] chimeric and full-length zoonotic coronaviruses to evaluate emergence potential… the results indicate a significant threat posed by WIV1-CoV.” The lab-grown viruses “replicated efficiently in human airway cultures,” they wrote.
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Within the biomedical research community, research like Baric’s was controversial even at the time.
In a 2011 paper, virologists had shown that they could make avian influenza transmissible between ferrets, who are considered excellent animal models for humans. Avian flu does not easily infect humans, but it can be highly lethal when it does, so the avian flu experiment stirred serious concerns.
But the infectious disease researchers had an important ally: Tony Fauci, who wrote in the Washington Post in 2011 that the flu research was a “risk worth taking.”
Still, the obvious risks posed by highly infectious and dangerous viruses like smallpox had led the federal government to create what it called a list of select agents which required special precautions. Besides smallpox, the list included anthrax, plague, and the original SARS.
But MERS, despite its lethality, was not considered a “select agent”. And in the final moments of the June 24, 2013 conference, Ralph Baric called for the government not add it to the list.
“If you want fast movement forward, and you restrict it with select agent status, then that will have a very chilling effect on productivity,” Baric said. “I think somebody had to say it.”
MERS was never added to the select agent list.
And six-and-half-years later, the massive and deadly coronavirus epidemic that Baric had predicted – and worked so hard to stop – exploded around the globe.
(END OF PART TWO)
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PART ONE, IN CASE YOU MISSED IT AND YOU’RE A GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT
Why did Tony Fauci say under oath he barely knew top coronavirus scientist Ralph Baric – when in fact Fauci hosted a daylong 2013 meeting where Baric laid out his plans for risky research?
(PART 1) The evidence has been hiding in plain sight for years. On June 24, 2013, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci invited a small group of top coronavirus researchers to an all-day brainstorming session at a conference center at the National Institutes of Health.
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for those of you who may of missed it.
one Dr shi zhengli was conducting viral bat studies at UNC until h&hs cut off funding.she worked under Dr baric.
she returned to the Wuhan clinic where she received high kudos from the chicom gov.
They did no such thing, there are no viruses to make more lethal, there are millions of lies to get you to inject poison.
I’m pretty sure that you are coming from the p.o.v. that there are no viruses and that sickness is a result of the environment.
I have heard this theory from many credible sources, one being Mike Adams, aka the Health Ranger.
I can’t get past my own observations taken over my life where sickness travels from host-to-host-to-host-and etc., and never returns to the original host.
It seems to me to confirm the viral model. How else would you explain the phenomenon?
ALEX JONES WAS RIGHT!
Uh… worked so hard to CREATE, not Stop. Accountability or REVOLUTION.
Facts people!
Covid was developed at Ft Detrick sometime between 2012-2015, in deep secrecy, likely with the collaboration of Fauci, Baric, and others . Then, the US Army tested on the US population in 2016-2017 in nursing homes and some public areas. Once it was established as highly communicable and worse than any annual Flu, they got down to business blame-shifting.
How do I know about the testing?
I spent 20 years as a pharmaceutical research scientist (1980-1999). If you were in that space, you knew about Fauci from the “AIDS epidemic” which was a complete fraud. They chose a cohort of immune weakened people (gay IV drug users) as their lab rats, used the PCR “test” to produce fraudulent diagnoses, and spread global fear. This was a test of the fear factor and also a weak shot at population control. Who dared to find a mate?
At the same time, the inventor of PCR, Dr. Kary Mullis, began calling BS on the whole thing because PCR was never a “test” for anything. It was a production method which could be applied to any sample containing fragments of DNA or RNA. Even if the amount of genetic material in the sample was vanishingly small, with enough “cycles”, enough could be produced to to study and analyze. A powerful tool for researchers, and that is all. I was at UCB at the same time as Dr. Mullis. He got a NOBEL for his work, and became Fauci’s arch enemy very publicly. Dr. Mullis died of a respiratory disease in 2017. Check this with the date range above for testing on the public. At this point in time he was not a healthy man, although he had never stopped his public campaign to discredit our own Dr. DEATH. Coincidence?
In 2016-2017, I was taking care of my elderly aunt in Chicago. I had become her Successor Trustee, as the first son of her brother (my father). She was in a high-class senior complex/nursing home. She was winding down and I visited frequently from my home in California as I flew back and forth from CA to NH to establish a new residence upon retirement.
On my last trip to visit before moving (early Feb ’17) I stopped in Chicago on the way to NH, spent a couple days there and flew home to Sacramento via The Windy. I was in MIDWAY changing planes when I got a call from the head nurse alerting me of a “really nasty flu” that was going around the facility.
I told her that would explain why I was starting feel more than a bit fuzzy. That was a long day, as the symptoms increased rapidly. Up to that point I was in top condition and had never had a flu that lasted more than a few days. I was nearly immobilized for 3 weeks, could barely breathe and feed myself. Probably had pneumonia. I had learned to avoid MDs long before that, so I was good at staying healthy and toughing it out. Another story for another time.
The night before my final flight to NH via Chicago, I got a call from the Nurse that my Aunt had passed. It was her time and I didn’t connect the dots at that moment.
Then in 2019 or before, Fauci and crew got on with the blame-shifting to cover their asses. They shared samples with their sister lab in Winnipeg and also with WIV in Wuhan to set up the false flag. Everyone needs some, right?
Then, in late 2019, the previously scheduled International Military Games (uniformed Olympics) took place in Wuhan, and the BIO-BOMB was dropped by US and Canadian Army soldiers, probably by aerosol release of some sort a few blocks from WIV. The rest is HISTORY.
Ever since then, these fuckers have been running for cover with limited success.
A word about viruses: First, the last thing a virus want is to kill the host. It is suicidal for them. And so it is well known in the business that when a virus mutates (VARIANTS) it always DOWN-MUTATES, becoming less virulent as it spreads.
The COVID was special in that it carried the SPIKE PROTEIN, which was specifically inserted to interact with the VAX in deadly ways. So the virus was harsh, but if you were healthy you survived it and gained NATURAL IMMUNITY. We lost some people, but not even close to the published figures.
The vax is the weapon, the virus was just the saturation bombing to set up the invasion.
China knew it had been set up pretty much right away. That explains a lot about the current geopolitical situation, with new alliances every day. Might even be why China is being blamed for the Fentanyl problem. Probably another false flag though, with DOD and Mexican cartels doing it. Just like ISIS, the cartels are our guys. Its the WAR WITH DRUGS folks.
Western .mil has been doing this kind of genocide for at least 200 years. Smallpox bankys for Native Americans. Fort Riley deployment of TB infected soldiers to Europe in WW1, and so on. Nothing new under the Sun for 10,000 years. These fuckers play a LONG GAME.
Over and out.