Baric Comes Clean, Sort Of

By Hans Mahncke & Jeff Carlson

The House Covid Select Committee finally released a transcript of its deposition of Ralph Baric. Baric is the man who taught the Wuhan lab how to manipulate SARS viruses. While Baric admitted that Covid may have come out of the Wuhan lab, he was coy when it came to his DEFUSE blueprint for making Covid-like viruses.

We have long advocated for Ralph Baric to be hauled before Congress to testify about his role in seeding the creation of Covid – or perhaps even his role in creating Covid – and his role in covering up the pandemic’s origin. 

Baric managed to escape the spotlight for four long years. But that wasn’t going to last forever and Baric was finally deposed by the congressional Covid Select Committee in January 2024, although it took another four months to finally released the 212 page transcript of what Baric told Congress in private and under oath. 

The reason why this should have all happened a long time ago is that Ralph Baric has been publishing coronavirus papers since 1984. That’s long before the Wuhan lab or anyone else knew anything about these viruses. He is the world’s foremost coronavirus expert. No one else comes close. In fact, Baric has written more coronavirus papers than everyone else combined. 

Baric is also the godfather of gain of function experiments. He has been manipulating viruses for decades and developed stunning new technologies, including the ability to create new viruses in a lab without leaving any traces, as well as humanized mice on which one can test how infectious newly created viruses are in humans. Baric taught the Wuhan lab the highly advanced techniques which he himself developed. He also gave the Wuhan lab his specialized mice, which the Wuhan lab then started sharing with others in China, something that Baric had strictly told them not to do. 

A naive scientist who didn’t understand that no one can be trusted in China and that everything is ultimately controlled by the Communist Party? Probably not. It is far more likely that Baric recklessly disregarded the potential consequences of his actions. There is simply too much cozying up to the Wuhan lab to be put down to mere naivete. In 2015, Baric conducted an experiment with the Wuhan lab’s director, Shi Zhengli. They modified coronaviruses to make them more infectious in humans. It was that study which set off warnings about a man made pandemic. 

Perhaps most importantly, Baric co-authored the 2018 DEFUSE blue print for making Covid-like viruses together with Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak, the person through whom Fauci funneled American taxpayer money to the Wuhan lab.

Let’s sum up: Baric knew the most about coronaviruses of anyone in the world, he had developed the technology to create new coronaviruses in a lab without leaving a trace, and he had drafted a blue print for making Covid in a lab – which he shared with the Wuhan lab. 

If there was one person in the world that needed to be consulted (or, to use a more appropriate word, interrogated) when the pandemic started, it was Baric. 

Yet, very curiously, Fauci did not invite Baric to Fauci’s secret teleconference on February 1, 2020, a teleconference which, according to Fauci, he had convened to investigate the origin of Covid. 

Why did Fauci not invite the world’s premier expert on the topic at hand? The answer seems obvious: Baric knew perfectly well that the pandemic started in a lab and so, for his part, he did not want to get dirtied up by Fauci’s cover up. As for Fauci, he knew that his cover up was more likely to succeed if Baric was kept far away from the public spotlight. 

But as it now turns out, that was not the full story. In the newly released testimony from the House Select Committee on Covid, Baric admits that he was part of Fauci’s February 1, 2020 teleconference after all. 

How is that possible? We have the emails inviting people to the secret teleconference, we have the replies. Baric is not mentioned anywhere.

The answer points to an even deeper web of lies and deceit on the part of Fauci – and Baric - than we already knew.  Unless Fauci had two secret teleconferences on February 1st – and there is no evidence that he did – Baric was listening in on Fauci’s secret teleconference but without the others knowing that he was there. 

The only people who appear to have known about Baric’s involvement in the secret teleconference were Fauci, his boss Francis Collins, British pharmaceutical trust director, Jeremy Farrar and Patrick Vallance – who was the British Fauci. 

And this finally also solves another riddle we had been pondering for the past few years. We knew from previously released emails that during Fauci’s secret teleconference, the head honchos – that means Fauci, Collins, Farrar and Vallance – had a separate secret phone call to discuss something that the other participants weren’t supposed to hear. We always wondered what that was and it now looks as if those men stepped out to consult with Baric. 

So rather than Baric being excluded because he knew the truth, Baric was an integral part of the cover up. But for reasons that are self-explanatory, he did not want to be the public face of the cover up. 

The two papers that came out of the secret teleconference, the fraudulent Lancet letter written by Daszak and Farrar, as well as the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper, commissioned and stealth edited by Fauci but published under the names of Fauci-funded scientists, are on their face absurd. 

For his part, Fauci aided and abetted in this scheme by pretending not to know who Baric was. That claim – which Fauci made under oath in a deposition in the free speech case of Louisiana versus Biden – was always preposterous. 

There is simply no way that Fauci did not know the world’s foremost coronavirus expert – especially after the outbreak of a coronavirus pandemic. 

And indeed, as it now turns out, Fauci knew Baric well. Not only did Baric admit in his testimony that he was at Fauci’s secret teleconference to discuss the origin of Covid but he also admitted that, a few days later, he personally visited Fauci in Fauci’s office. 

That means we have to diametrically opposed statements – both made under oath. But given the existence of a calendar entry that confirms Baric’s version of the story, it can now be proven beyond any doubt that Fauci lied under oath.

But there is more. One of the biggest concerns Fauci had about his funding of the Wuhan lab being exposed as the cause of the pandemic was the Baric and Shi Zhengli paper from 2015 which we mentioned earlier. 

In a panicked email to his assistant on the morning of the day of the secret teleconference, Fauci attached the Baric and Shi paper with the subject line: "Baric, Shi et al, Nature Medicine - SARS Gain of Function”. Fauci knew exactly who Baric was.

So what else did Baric reveal in his newly released testimony? Quite a lot and none of it is good for Fauci or Baric. 

Perhaps the second most important fact to come out of Baric’s under oath deposition – other than that he was at the secret teleconference – is Baric’s admission that the Wuhan lab had access to secret SARS virus backbones – that means backbones which they didn’t publish and that no one in the West knew about. 

By the way, Daszak made the same admission during his congressional testimony earlier this month. Contrary to his previous claims, Daszak now says that he doesn’t know what went on at the Wuhan lab, that he hasn’t actually seen any databases, and that he had no access to the Wuhan lab’s samples. 

These admissions are hugely important because the entire rationale for claiming that Covid came from nature – in fact the only rationale – was that Covid does not have a previously known back bone. In layman’s terms, the backbone means the basic genetic makeup of the virus, to which bits and pieces can be added in a lab. The fraudulent Proximal Origin paper touted the fact that Covid has an unknown backbone as dispositive proof that the virus must have come from nature. But given that even Daszak and Baric now admit that the Wuhan lab had thousands of unpublished virus backbones and the ability to create new ones, that entire argument is dead.

Another huge revelation made by Baric was that he now admits that Covid could have come out of a lab and that the Wuhan lab’s biosafety was totally inadequate. "You can't rule" out "escape from the laboratory" because "they do work at [biosafety level two]". Those are Baric’s words, not ours.

Incredibly, we now also have an email from Baric to Daszak, in which Baric blasts Daszak for pretending that biosafety level two, which is a very low biosafety level equivalent to a dentist’s office, was adequate when playing around with dangerous coronaviruses: “don't insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS”.

Baric also admitted that Covid did not start at the Wuhan seafood market because the cases there were at least two months after the initial outbreak.

But it wasn’t all just admissions from Baric. While it is true that Baric’s testimony is generally that of an exasperated man who is upset that the Wuhan lab did stupid things with the technology and know how they got from Baric, there is one issue where Baric’s exasperation turns into evasion and plain dishonesty.

That issue is the DEFUSE blueprint for making Covid in a lab. Baric now claims that when Covid emerged he somehow forgot about the blueprint. That statement does not pass the smell test.

Before the pandemic, Baric was completely obsessed with finding a SARS virus with a furin cleavage site, as were Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak. It was known within virology circles, for instance by looking at MERS viruses, that a furin cleavage site could dramatically increase a virus’s virulence so this was an area of great interest.

But despite looking at more than 1,500 SARS viruses, they never came across one with a furin cleavage site – in fact, to this day, no one has ever found a natural SARS virus with a furin cleavage site.

So because nature didn’t give them what they wanted, Baric, Shi and Daszak decided to create a SARS virus with a furin cleavage site in a lab. That is exactly what the DEFUSE proposal was about. What is more, the lab that was going to make this virus was the Wuhan lab. The plan was to lie to US authorities by saying they would use Baric’s lab in North Carolina and as soon as they got the money, they would shift the work to Wuhan.

And then, a year later, the exact virus which they could not find in nature, turned up in Wuhan, exactly where they were going to construct it in a lab. 

Now even if we assume that Baric was not directly involved with making Covid and that the Wuhan lab took the DEFUSE blueprint and went ahead on its own, there is no chance whatsoever that Baric forgot about his blueprint. It’s impossible.

It would be like searching for a unicorn and then, once the unicorn miraculously turn up, you forget that you had a blueprint for engineering a unicorn in a lab.