Ralph Baric, the world's top coronavirus researcher, discussed "human adaptation" of coronaviruses with the CIA before Covid began

Does that mean the CIA caused Covid? Well, no. But it does mean Baric needs to answer publicly about his relationship with US intelligence agencies before and during Covid - and his silence since.

Years before Sars-COV-2 emerged from China, Dr. Ralph Baric — a North Carolina virologist who worked closely with the Chinese lab that is the likely source of the virus — met with American spies to discuss the “human adaptation” of coronaviruses.

Emails released by Kentucky senator Rand Paul reveal the meetings, which again raise the question of whether American spies are protecting Baric and covering up their own possible role in risky Chinese lab work that likely caused Covid.

Now Paul is pushing the agencies for more documents that may finally offer an answer — nearly six years after Covid began.

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(Uncovering the coverups, with your help.)

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Since 2020, Baric has largely escaped scrutiny, despite his central role pushing for risky coronavirus research and working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the most likely source of the virus. (I wrote about Baric and his relationship with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci in a two-part series last year.)

Baric has never even had to testify under oath in public about his coronavirus work. The new emails may help explain why.

They are heavily redacted. Still, they make clear that Baric has had a long relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which was created after Sept. 11 to help supervise the CIA. (The emails were first reported by Emily Kopp of the Daily Caller.)

In September 2015, an official at the ODNI emailed Baric to tell Baric that someone at the CIA hoped he could “draft a short paper outlining some of the items you discussed during the last quarterly meeting.”

That email offers no further specifics, but the CIA official then follows up by telling Baric “the topic concerns Coronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.”

Baric responded to the CIA officer that he would “be glad to discuss this in more detail” — as soon as he returned from a trip to China whose purpose he did not specify.

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(Not quite a smoking gun, but locked and loaded for sure…)

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At the time, Baric was working closely with Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology on research to make coronaviruses more dangerous.

In November 2015, the two scientists would publish a paper on work they had done combining two coronaviruses to make a new one that aggressively attacked lung cells. In a press release about the research, Baric called the new virus “highly pathogenic” — while implying that it was natural rather the work of his lab.

Baric and Shi kept working closely following the 2015 paper, with Peter Daszak, a British zoologist who ran a National Institutes of Health-funded group called “EcoHealth Alliance,” frequently collaborating. And on Dec. 31, 2019, as the first reports of a mystery virus in Wuhan began to circulate among scientists, Baric emailed Daszak to ask what he’d heard of the virus.

Although Baric has publicly dodged making definitive statements on his view of Covid’s origins, the emails that Paul released show that Baric worried from the first that a lab leak might have been responsible.

In late January, he warned a secret American intelligence group of the risk of “accidental release,” noting that the Wuhan lab had worked on highly infectious coronaviruses in “BSL2 [Biosafety Level 2] conditions” — laboratories not designed to handle such transmissible viruses.

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(Slide from a presentation Baric made to an American intelligence group in late January 2020)

SOURCE

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Yet Daszak, Baric’s close collaborator, spent the spring of 2020 doing everything possible to derail any public discussion of a lab leak theory. In April 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci strongly publicly denied the possibility as well.

Meanwhile, Baric has stayed mostly out of sight. After giving an interview to an Italian television network in 2020 in which he explained it is possible to modify coronaviruses without leaving evidence, he did not (as far as I can determine) make any public statements until March 2025, when he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times calling for stricter standards for viral research.

He would know.

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(For pennies a day, the news the legacy media won’t touch.)

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So just how close was Baric to the “three-letter agencies” — the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — as well as to Fauci and Ft. Detrick (the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where the military conducts research on potential biological pathogens)?

We still do not know. But Rand Paul is pushing Tulsi Gabbard and the ODNI to release whatever it has on Baric, the Wuhan lab, and its coronavirus research.

The deadline for ODNI to turn over documents is tomorrow.

Stay tuned.

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(2024 ARTICLE ABOUT BARIC’S LINKS TO TONY FAUCI AND HIS CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH IN TWO PARTS BELOW)

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