The greatest trick Ralph Baric ever played was convincing the world he didn't exist

The North Carolina virologist who is the world's foremost expert on coronaviruses has been almost silent since Covid erupted in 2020. Gee, I wonder why? And why can't anyone do anything about it?

Remember Ralph Baric?

Baric is the University of North Carolina virologist who has spent the last 30 years working with coronaviruses. He’s especially good at making “chimeric” coronaviruses. That’s a fancy way of saying he jams pieces of different natural viruses together, often to see if the new artificial one will be good at infecting human cells.

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You might wonder what the point of all this research is.

If he were willing to talk — though he is very much not willing to talk — Baric likely would tell you it’s to make sure we know how risky coronaviruses can be. Except we already know that. In general, natural coronaviruses are not very dangerous. They mostly infect bats. On those rare occasions when they jump species to infect humans, they usually produce cold-like symptoms. On those even rarer occasions when they are dangerous, they haven’t been easily transmissible — outside of hospital settings, they quickly burn out.

But that answer doesn’t make for a lot of research funding!

So Baric and his partners in, umm, research — notably an English zoologist named Peter Daszak — spent the decade before Covid trying to prove that coronaviruses were a serious threat to humanity.

First, Daszak helped scour caves all over China and Southeast Asia to catch bats and swab their little bat behinds for coronaviruses. No one involved in these group trips seems to have asked the most basic question: doesn’t going deep into caves to search out viruses humans are unlikely to encounter pose more risk than simply leaving them and the bats that host them alone?

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(Yes, hero-for-our-time Dr. Anthony S. Fauci was involved too. Of course he was.)

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In any case, the viruses the bat-butt-researchers found were disappointingly un-deadly. And so Baric and his friends at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — led by Shi Zhengli, the “bat woman” — got to work.

In late 2015, about four years before Sars-Cov-2 suddenly emerged in (wait for it) Wuhan, they published a paper showing that they had made a “chimeric” coronavirus much riskier than its natural predecessors.

Even at the time, that research was controversial, with skeptical scientists suggesting its risks outweighed its benefits. Fauci was not among the skeptics; in October 2012, he had argued such research would be worth conducting even if a “scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic.”

So Team Coronavirus pushed on. In 2018, Daszak asked for more American government funding so Baric and Zhengli could genetically modify coronaviruses in a way that would make them almost identical to the coronavirus we call Sars-Cov-2.

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(Virtual meeting, actual pandemic!)

SOURCE

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None of this is new.

But it’s still news.

Because somehow — six years after Covid killed millions of people, shut down the world, and led to the greatest infringement of civil liberties in peacetime since modern democracies began — Baric has somehow never had to explain his actions or his work with Zhengli and Daszak in public. The closest he came was in January 2024, when he spoke in private to Congressional investigators.

And the University of North Carolina — a publicly funded, state-run university — has been fighting for years just to keep details of Baric’s unpublished lab work hidden from the public. So far it has succeeded.

Why? Why is Baric so protected? No one knows for sure.

But we do know that Baric is connected everywhere, from the CIA to Ft. Detrick, where the Army works on deadly viruses. And we know Fauci led efforts to divert attention from the potential that Covid had emerged from Wuhan almost immediately.

As Alina Chan, a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who has been fighting for the truth since 2020, posted on X on Tuesday:

The Covid origins cover up showed that top virologists - some are US intel assets - suffered an abrupt loss of intelligence or became parties to a conspiracy to shut down public discussion of a catastrophic lab leak in Wuhan.

By 2018, these virologists knew gain-of-function bat coronavirus experiments were planned or ongoing in Wuhan and the scientists there were making chimeric, genetically modified viruses out of sequences that weren't shared with the public or other scientists.

Yet, when Covid emerged, these same virologists authored or ghost authored influential papers claiming a lab origin was a conspiracy theory.

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Six years after Covid first emerged, nearly every bit of evidence we have points in the same direction: the pandemic was a scientific disaster, not a natural one, and American scientists and the National Institutes of Health played a crucial role both in driving it and covering it up.

None of this should be forgotten. Yet it has been.

Baric remains in the shadows.

Remember Ralph Baric?

Remember Ralph Baric.

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(Baric’s CIA connection, revealed.)