He Worked with Wuhan Institute, but Forgot to Tell Congress
He Worked with Wuhan Institute, but Forgot to Tell Congress
How one U.S. coronavirus expert went to Capitol Hill as the pandemic was emerging and left out some important things about his bat virus work.
Dr. Baric Goes to Washington …
On February 26, 2020, NIH-funded, University of North Carolina (UNC) scientist Dr. Ralph Baric, one of the world’s leading bat coronavirus experts, told Congressional staffers about Wuhan’s emerging COVID-19 virus in a briefing entitled, “What We Know about the Coronavirus[.]”
He told them the Chinese eat bats.
A Few Details Dr. Baric Left Out
Dr. Baric NEVER mentioned he’d worked with Wuhan’s virus lab or with Wuhan’s famous bat lady, Dr. Shi Zhengli. In fact, over the course of the entire hour-long presentation, Dr. Baric did not even mention the Wuhan labs that study bat viruses.
In his talk, pointing to this slide at minute 20:18, Dr. Baric told the Congressional staffers that bats’ parts, which in his words are used in Chinese “delicacy dishes,” were likely sold at Wuhan’s wet market. He also said bats were used by the Chinese “in medicinal medicines.” He basically left the impression that the way in which people in Wuhan eat and use bats, likely resulted in this novel coronavirus, just as he’d predicted was likely.
Dr. Baric’s Secret Virus Work & His Special “Humanized” Mouse:
Thanks to the filings and lawsuits from the tireless folks at USRTK , we now know that Dr. Ralph Baric, along with NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, was heavily involved in the secret, behind-the-scenes January and February 2020 discussions of where this virus had come from, and who or what was responsible for its creation or evolution.
As far as we know, though, Dr. Baric kept one secret to himself, something that stayed a secret until the recent leak of his 2018 grant application:
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Baric, along with an international team of scientists from Wuhan and the U.S., asked Uncle Sam for $14 million to study bat viruses.
Not just any bat viruses.
The team was going to mix together a special chimeric stew of “SARS-like” viruses, some modified from bat viruses pulled from Chinese caves (WIV-1, WIV-16, and SCH014), and some modified from Chinese SARS1 patients, and make a chimera bat coronavirus, or two.
They told DARPA they were going to add a specific furin cleavage site to the viruses (something that helps them more easily infect human cells), then they were going to inject them into “humanized mice,” mice that Dr. Baric was developing in his lab.
Dr. Baric’s mouse, which he would publish about the following year in Nature, had what he called a “humanized” immune system, developed using parts from second-trimester human fetal lungs and human fetal kidneys and thymuses. He and his colleagues planned to inject bat viruses with pandemic potential into his mice to see if the viruses stuck to the human fetal lung chunks inside the mouse’s back, and caused infection.
The researchers next proposed making a vaccine and spraying it on Wuhan lab bats and in China’s caves “for large-scale inoculation of the bats.” All this to “protect the warfighter” (DOD’s stated grant objective), from catching a deadly coronavirus.
Dr. Baric’s DARPA Application with the Wuhan Lab
The 2018 DARPA grant application documents, themselves, lay out how UNC’s Dr. Ralph Baric and WIV’s Dr. Shi Zhengli proposed working as a team if DARPA funded their $14 million coronavirus proposal:
At minute 32:30 in his Capitol Hill briefing, UNC's Dr. Baric showed this slide depicting (on the right-hand-side), four known dangerous bat coronaviruses (boxed in red), plus the new one emerging out of Wuhan (boxed in blue).
It shows viruses “Poised for Human Emergence” (aka viruses that could infect humans).
The slide is interesting, not for what it shows, but for what Dr. Baric didn’t say about it.
Deep in his 2018 DARPA proposal were details about how Dr. Baric & Wuhan’s bat lady Dr. Shi Zhengli planned to work with three of these exact same bat coronaviruses WIV16, WIV1 & SCH014.
They weren’t just going to work with them, they planned to do something novel: make a bat vaccine against them and spray Wuhan lab bats and bats in China’s caves with a bat vaccine, ultimately to protect the warfighter.
Seems all this was worth mentioning in a briefing about a novel Wuhan bat virus.
DARPA Said No to Dr. Baric and Wuhan’s Bat Lady
DARPA turned down their 2018 grant application, with DARPA Program Manager Dr. James Gimlett writing, among other things, their proposal left out an assessment of “potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research and DURC.” (DURC stands for dual use research of concern, basically when scientific research can be used, or misused, as a dangerous threat or weapon.)
Many wonder if the rejected proposed study went forward with other funding and also question why the researchers involved kept their proposed project secret, even after a bat virus-related pandemic emerged in 2019.
Some scientists note that some of the work in the DARPA pitch may have already begun before the team applied for the grant. Evidently, that’s often how it’s done, you test a bit before you pitch.
The video of his February 2020 Congressional talk shows that Dr. Baric did not share details of his DARPA grant application (which some since have called a recipe for the COVID-19 virus), nor did he even mention his “humanized” lab mouse, designed for pandemic testing.
Why wouldn’t Dr. Baric share his work and his proposed work with these dangerous viruses, especially with the Wuhan connection to the emerging pandemic virus?
Perhaps, without U.S. DOD funding, Wuhan’s lab made its own bat stew and bat vaccine and tested it or sprayed it, and something went horribly wrong, leading to the emerging pandemic virus.
That would not be Dr. Baric’s fault, right?
Whatever his reason, Dr. Baric did not mention his own or Dr. Shi’s, or their collaborative work with those viruses. Not. A. Peep.
Why Didn’t He Discuss His Bat Virus Work?
It would have been honorable for Dr. Ralph Baric to share that day what he actually knew was going on in the field of bat coronavirus research, including research that he’d done on pandemic pathogens, and some of the secret origins conversations he was privy to with NIAID’s Dr. Anthony Fauci and NIH’s Dr. Francis Collins.
The fact is, he did not share.
Maybe Dr. Baric is read into classified information, information that is not available to the American public, and he couldn’t or was forbidden by law, to discuss more about what he knew. Maybe that explains his omissions that day.
But Dr. Baric sure left the impression, you can watch it yourself, that he had a working cure for an emerging pandemic—the Remdesivir he’d helped develop (see minutes 35, 52, 53, 59, and 1:01)—and that those Wuhan folks eat bats in their delicacy dishes and that’s probably why they got sick.
Why did he say those things and not say so much else that he knew in his talk entitled, “What We Know about the Coronavirus”?
For now, we can only wonder.
Two years out, there’s a lot we still don’t know.
Perhaps Dr. Baric could host another Congressional briefing?
Perhaps this time, he can tell the world what he really knows.
*Special thanks to all my science friends and fellow covid sleuths, including Twitter user @jhas5, who first found this briefing video.
Batsh*t Crazy is researched and written by an American researcher, following history’s footnotes to try and uncover the truth about how, and maybe why, COVID-19 began.
An excellent write up! Your arguments, information is well conveyed and it’s really easy to read! Thanks for doing this work.
This is incredibly well done history with source documents.. If corp news cared about informing readers this would be a great feature to anchor a pandemic deep dive, fab work thank you!