COVID Cover-Up: Hiding Star Researcher Ralph Baric’s Ties to Global Pandemic

In March 2020, a couple of months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States, editors at the journal Nature Medicine appended a note to a coronavirus study it had published five years prior. “We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered,” the journal editors wrote. “There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.”

The prestigious journal appears to have taken this extraordinary action for two reasons. First, the study described cutting-edge gain-of-function research that mixed different viruses together to create a man-made chimera, or hybrid of both viruses—experiments some suspected were the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the pandemic. Second, the study’s authors were Shi Zengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology—a research lab in the city that was ground zero for the pandemic—and Ralph Baric, the world’s leading expert on coronaviruses, of the University of North Carolina.

The renowned virologist Simon Wain-Hobson said that note was an early sign of the years-long effort by the scientific establishment to distract the public and obscure the link between lab studies to create dangerous viruses and the COVID pandemic that wrecked the global economy and killed millions across the planet. During a March talk at the National Institutes of Health, Wain-Hobson blasted former NIH leaders Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci for funding these lab studies and then misleading the public about their dangers.

“Sorry to be blunt,” Wain-Hobson told NIH researchers. “I know these are former colleagues.”

Since the pandemic’s outbreak six years ago, a slew of emails and documents released by Congress and through public records requests cast a dark shadow on the NIH and the virologists it funded, with nearly two-thirds of Americans now believing the virus came from a laboratory in China. Although the question of whether the virus that causes COVID-19 originated in a lab or in the wild is still a subject of debate, there is no doubt that scientists at the highest level worked to dismiss the lab-leak theory and shut down their connections to the work in Wuhan. Efforts by Collins and Fauci to delegitimize dissenting voices have been reported, but the central role played by Baric has been obscured. The UNC researcher’s work on coronaviruses and his connection to the Wuhan lab are now receiving renewed attention after RealClearInvestigations learned that the federal government has quietly removed Baric from all his NIH grants. RCI has also learned that UNC placed Baric on leave. UNC has also refused to cooperate with NIH officials as they have attempted to gather more facts and emails about Baric’s coronavirus research, which evidence leads them to believe led to the coronavirus pandemic.

Baric did not respond to multiple, detailed requests for comment and clarification about these matters and other issues reported by RCI. UNC Chancellor Lee H. Roberts did not respond to multiple requests for comment about actions taken against Baric nor UNC’s lack of cooperation with the federal government.

RCI’s months-long review of hundreds of pages of emails and interviews with more than a dozen current and former congressional staffers and administration officials shows that Baric’s public proclamations about his work, which has been connected to tens of millions of dollars in federal research grants, have not always reflected his own private reservations about risky experiments. Baric has also participated in campaigns to cast doubt on the dangers of virus research, while politicians and the FBI have sought to protect him. In addition, the University of North Carolina has blocked both private individuals and federal agencies demanding more transparency.

“He’s got good PR people at the University of North Carolina helping him, but nobody has strung together his entire history,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of US Right to Know. Ruskin has been suing Baric’s university since 2020 to obtain access to his communications, and his nonprofit has published thousands of emails spotlighting Baric’s work and ties to research in Wuhan, China. “Six years later, we still know so little,” he said. “That’s just amazing to me. The public deserves to know what happened.”

“The investigations have been terrible,” said a senior congressional staffer who has followed the Senate and House probes of the COVID pandemic. “And Ralph Baric’s fingerprints are everywhere.”

A researcher whose security clearance allowed him to view still-classified documents told RCI there is no doubt the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. “This is a good view of what happened to virology,” he said. “They started willy-nilly mutating viruses, and then got upset when this led to 20 million deaths.”

Controversial History

Baric’s virus research has long been controversial as he pioneered “gain-of-function” studies, which design viruses with unique genetic features that make them either more deadly to humans or more likely to cause an infection. This line of research posits that generating deadly viruses in labs allows scientists to create treatments before a similar pathogen evolves in the wild and begins killing humans.

Federal funding for studies to enhance viruses hit a snag in 2011 when Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center and Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin created a new and deadly flu virus that could spread through the air.

Fearing the virus could be used as a bioweapon, the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked two scientific journals to delete details of the scientific methods and specific mutations in the Fouchier and Kawaoka studies on the lab-engineered bird flu. Public outcries then prompted the Obama administration to call for new rules on gain-of-function studies.

In 2014, the federal government released guidelines which NIH director Francis Collins said would help “preserve the benefits of life-science research while minimizing the risk of misuse.” But these rules did little to slow dangerous studies.

Within weeks, the virology community was hit with a bracing setback. Following poor safety procedures, dozens of CDC workers were potentially exposed to anthrax, and vials of smallpox virus were found unsecured in an NIH storeroom. In response, the Obama White House announced a pause on all gain-of-function virus research so the risks and benefits could be better assessed.

The researcher most affected by the pause was Ralph Baric, who was described as America’s “foremost coronavirus biologist” in an NPR report headlined, “How A Tilt Toward Safety Stopped A Scientist’s Virus Research.” Referring to gain-of-function research, David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, told NPR, “I don’t think it’s wise or appropriate for us to create large risks that don’t already exist.”

Baric, however, countered that his animal experiments on the SARS and MERS viruses posed no threat to people. “No. 1, mice don’t sneeze,” he told NPR.

Baric also told NPR that he would accede to the ban. “The NIH has asked me to stop those experiments,” Baric said, “and so we have stopped those experiments.”

But in the waning days of the Obama administration, the government sought to draft new guidelines that would lift this pause on dangerous studies. Newly disclosed emails acquired by RCI show that NIH officials under Anthony Fauci and Baric’s former employee, virologist Matt Frieman, began a secret lobbying campaign to influence the Obama White House to ensure recommendations would not inhibit scientific funding.

These emails have never been reported and were provided by a researcher familiar with this effort.

Secret Lobbying

A few weeks after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election—but before he was inaugurated—White House employees in the Office of Science Technology Policy (OSTP) began to finalize a new government-wide guidance for gain-of-function research. Suggesting the importance of this effort both to science and national security, senior officials from multiple agencies were working with OSTP to finalize the new advice, including HHS, FDA, USDA, FBI, CDC, DOD, State Department, DNI, CIA, and branches of the military, according to leaked emails.

But while senior officials at agencies across the government fought for the ear of the White House, OSTP invited Frieman for a personal visit from the nearby University of Maryland, and he appears to have acted as a lobbyist for his fellow gain-of-function researchers.

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