Top US virologist Ralph Baric engineered the Covid-19 virus SARS-CoV-2 in his lab at the University of North Carolina as part of his work in connection with the 2018 DEFUSE funding proposal. That’s the story that’s been going round the internet for some months now (and not just in alternative media) and it all looks very damning for Baric and those connected with his research.

Details of the DEFUSE project were first leaked by Major Joseph Murphy, an employee of US military research agency DARPA, in the summer of 2021 and further details of earlier drafts have come to light this month thanks to public record requests from U.S. Right to Know (USRTK).

In DEFUSE, Baric proposed to create a virus that was, to most intents and purposes, SARS-CoV-2. The proposal included inserting a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus spike protein, an order for the restrictive enzyme BsmBI, the search for a binding domain that would infect ACE2 human receptors and a requirement for a viral genome around 25% different to SARS.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus contains a furin cleavage site in its spike protein, its genome includes the restrictive enzyme BsmBI, it has a receptor binding domain finely tuned to infect the ACE2 human receptor and its genome is around 25% different to SARS. A number of virologists have said that such features make SARS-CoV-2 a smoking gun for an engineered virus.

Baric obtained a patent for such novel viruses in 2018, just as he was putting DEFUSE together. In DEFUSE he proposed to infect wild Chinese bats with his newly patented viruses.

Many regard this as case closed for the lab leak.

But this is not the full story. That’s because Baric’s DEFUSE proposal did not win the DARPA funding. And while it is rightly pointed out that, with or without the funding, much of the work was already in hand, it’s what happened next with the winning DARPA proposal where the story really gets interesting.

US researcher Jim Haslam has done an incredible job on his Substack article Reverse engineering the origins of SARS-CoV-2 documenting all the toings and froings among the virology community in connection with the creation of this peculiar virus and the subsequent cover-up. What follows is in large part indebted to his meticulous research, though any errors are of course my own.

The winning 2018 DARPA bid was for a project called PREEMPT led by Dr. Vincent Munster (pictured above) based at Anthony Fauci’s NIH Rocky Mountain Lab. Both PREEMPT and Baric’s losing DEFUSE project had the same basic idea: to try to prevent a (hypothetical) future pandemic by using an engineered SARS virus to vaccinate the bats from which it is believed such a virus was likely to spill over.

The idea being, of course, that the vaccinated bats would no longer be a reservoir for the virus, thus ‘defusing’ or ‘preempting’ the zoonotic spillover. Sounds crazy? Too right – far too much meddling with nature and placing too much faith in the ability of vaccines to prevent infection and transmission. But crazy or not, that’s what the scientists proposed, and PREEMPT won and DEFUSE lost.

The key difference between Baric’s DEFUSE and Munster’s PREEMPT – aside from PREEMPT coming in around $4 million cheaper at $10 million – is that rather than relying on spraying bat caves with a non-transmissible virus-vaccine, Munster’s plan involved making the virus-vaccine transmit between the bats via aerosols. This made it a self-spreading vaccine, able (in theory) to reach all the bats without humans having to go and find all their caves and spray them. The risks of such a plan should have been obvious. Indeed, Baric himself, who went awfully quiet after his DEFUSE project leaked in mid-2021, resurfaced in mid-2023 to say that such work involving engineering transmissible virus-vaccines was “too edgy” for him.

After the DARPA funding went to PREEMPT, Fauci rode to Baric’s rescue with a bumper $82 million programme called CREID, awarded in summer 2019, in which both Baric and Munster’s teams would cooperate in the research into Munster’s concept of self-spreading bat vaccines.

Exactly what happened next is not publicly documented, so we do need to fill in some gaps. It appears that Munster took Baric’s patented SARS virus-vaccine and made a transmissible version at his Rocky Mountain Lab (Baric’s version was not intended to be transmissible). What is the evidence for that? Perhaps most telling is that, as Haslam observes, SARS-CoV-2 transmitsefficiently in onlyfiveknown mammals, and those five – American deer, American deer mice, Syrian hamsters, American mink, and Egyptian fruit bats – are all found in Munster (and Fauci’s) Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana. SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t infect lab animals common in Chinese labs or present in the WIV, such as Chinese horseshoe bats. This would suggest that SARS-CoV-2 acquired its transmissibility in an American lab context and not a Chinese one or elsewhere.

The virus-vaccine having been made transmissible in Montana, it would then have been sent to the WIV to be tested on Chinese bats, which were not available in American labs. There can be little doubt who would have done this testing at the WIV, as there was only one scientist with the necessary connections and expertise.

Dr. Danielle Anderson, known as Dani to her colleagues, gained fame in June 2021 as the “last and only foreign scientist in the Wuhan lab” as she went public to make the case for a zoonotic origin. Dani was a member of the Lancet origins commission, chaired by Jeffrey Sachs and disbanded by him in October 2021 over frustrations that the Western virologists like Dani weren’t cooperating. Dani was based on and off at the WIV in the high security BSL4 lab (not Shi Zhengli’s BSL2 lab), but she didn’t work for the WIV. She worked for Duke-NUS, the Singapore-based medical school of North Carolina’s Duke University, under the virologist Dr. Linfa Wang. Linfa and Anderson were part of Baric’s DEFUSE proposal, and Duke-NUS was later a partner in Fauci’s CREID project.

Anderson’s role in DEFUSE was to test the virus-vaccines on “wild-caught captive” Chinese horseshoe bats at the WIV. It is thus reasonable to assume it is her who would be responsible for testing Munster’s self-spreading virus-vaccine on the same Chinese bats. This would explain how the virus got to Wuhan.

It would explain, in other words, how a non-transmissible virus-vaccine designed by Ralph Baric at UNC as per the DEFUSE proposal became a transmissible virus and ended up on the loose in Wuhan. Namely, because it escaped via a laboratory-acquired infection during Anderson’s testing of it on Chinese horseshoe bats in her WIV BSL4 lab, with Dani herself or a colleague as patient zero.

Admittedly, we don’t have direct evidence of this – we don’t have direct evidence that a Munster-Baric SARS-2 virus-vaccine was being tested on Chinese bats in the WIV in 2019, nor that Dr. Anderson or a colleague was infected by it in the lab. But there is a heap of evidence that points to it as a likely scenario.

We know, for instance, that both Baric and Munster were proposing to vaccinate Chinese bats using an engineered virus based on SARS, with a furin cleavage site inserted to increase infectivity. We know that Munster’s PREEMPT proposal, in which the virus-vaccine was to be self-spreading, won the DARPA funding, beating Baric’s DEFUSE proposal for a non-self-spreading virus-vaccine, and that in 2019 both teams were brought together in an $82 million grant from Fauci’s NIAID.

We know that SARS-CoV-2 readily transmits in the lab animals found in Munster’s Rocky Mountain Lab but not in the lab animals found in the WIV. From this we can further conclude that Dr. Anderson’s experiment to infect Chinese horseshoe bats with the new virus at the WIV presumably failed. This may be why she left Wuhan at the end of November, which was the deadline for the ‘scientific merit review’ for CREID.

Vir: Will Jones, Brownstone Institute

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Preverba z UI (ChatGPT 40):

The article titled “Is This the Man Who Created COVID-19 in Fauci’s US Lab?” from the Brownstone Institute posits that Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, played a central role in the creation of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. It suggests that his research, allegedly funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under Dr. Anthony Fauci, involved gain-of-function experiments that may have led to the pandemic.Wikipedia

Evaluating the Claims

1. Dr. Ralph Baric’s Research:
Dr. Baric is renowned for his extensive work on coronaviruses, including studies on their replication and potential for cross-species transmission. His research has been instrumental in understanding coronavirus biology and developing therapeutic interventions. While his lab has conducted experiments to assess the pandemic potential of various coronaviruses, there is no conclusive evidence linking his work to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.Wikipedia

2. Gain-of-Function Research and NIH Funding:
Gain-of-function (GoF) research involves modifying organisms to study changes in their properties, such as transmissibility. The NIH has funded studies to understand coronaviruses better, some of which have been categorized as GoF. However, the NIH has stated that the research it supported did not involve enhancing the pathogenicity or transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Fauci has testified before Congress, asserting that the NIH did not fund GoF research related to SARS-CoV-2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.CBS News+7Congress.gov | Library of Congress+7Oversight Committee+7

3. Lab-Origin Hypothesis:
The origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains a subject of investigation. While some scientists and officials have considered the possibility of a lab-related incident, the majority of studies support a natural zoonotic origin. For instance, a study published in Nature Medicine concluded that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. Additionally, the World Health Organization’s joint study with China deemed a laboratory origin “extremely unlikely.”Wikipedia+7Wikipedia+7Wikipedia+7Vanity Fair

4. Brownstone Institute’s Perspective:
The Brownstone Institute has been known to publish content that challenges mainstream scientific consensus on COVID-19. While it’s essential to consider diverse viewpoints, it’s equally crucial to assess claims based on empirical evidence and peer-reviewed research.

Conclusion

The assertion that Dr. Ralph Baric created SARS-CoV-2 in collaboration with Dr. Fauci lacks substantive evidence. While the origins of COVID-19 are still under study, current scientific consensus leans towards a natural origin. It’s vital to approach such claims critically, relying on peer-reviewed research and official investigations to form informed opinions.Wikipedia+3The Heritage Foundation+3Oversight Committee+3

References

• Andersen, K. G., et al. (2020). The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nature Medicine, 26(4), 450–452. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9

• World Health Organization. (2021). WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part

• National Institutes of Health. (2021). NIH Statement on Gain-of-Function Research. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-statement-gain-function-research

• Congressional Testimony of Dr. Anthony Fauci. (2021). https://www.congress.gov/event/117th-congress/house-event/LC67203/text?s=1&r=1

• Baric Lab Research Overview. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://sph.unc.edu/adv_profile/ralph-s-baric-phd/