U.S. Taxpayers Gave Wuhan Lab Collaborator $262 Million; Now He’s Hiding the Data

A judge in North Carolina has rejected a Freedom of Information (FOIA) claim for documents which almost certainly contain crucial evidence about the origin of Covid. The case was brought by the transparency group U.S. Right to Know. The target of the request was the world's most renowned expert on coronaviruses and godfather of gain-of-function experiments, Ralph Baric, who runs the Baric lab at the University of North Carolina (UNC).

Baric is the brains behind the 2018 DEFUSE blueprint for making Covid-like viruses in the lab. The blueprint was designed in collaboration with Shi Zhengli, the Director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, at whose lab some of the work was to have been done. DEFUSE was not the first project on which Shi and Baric worked together. In 2015, they created SARS viruses in a lab that could infect humans. At the time, Rutgers biologist Richard Ebright warned that the Shi-Baric experiments would cause a worldwide pandemic. He was sadly proven right.

While Shi and her laboratory have garnered significant attention, Baric has largely remained under the radar. This may be understandable, given that Shi’s lab is situated in the city where the pandemic originated; however, it is somewhat counterintuitive when one considers the availability of evidence. On September 12, 2019, shortly before the outbreak began in Wuhan, Shi’s lab deleted its entire virus database. Although this action is incriminating, the likelihood of obtaining any data from China has always been virtually nonexistent. In contrast, for Baric, who falls under U.S. jurisdiction, the prospects of acquiring information should have been nearly certain—unless he was being shielded from scrutiny.

What makes the lack of interest in Baric—whether from the media, Congress, or any other oversight body—even more curious is that, as we report here for the first time, he has received at least a quarter of a billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer funding over the past two decades.

A further curiosity is that when Anthony Fauci learned of the likely lab origin of Covid in January 2020 and convened his now infamous secret conference among supposed experts, Baric was notably missing. It never made any sense why the world's most prominent expert on coronaviruses was excluded from a crucial meeting at the highest levels of the US government, whose reported intention was to learn more about the new virus. When Fauci was asked about Baric, he claimed, under oath, that he had heard of the name but had never met the man. It was later revealed, when Fauci’s schedules were released pursuant to a FOIA lawsuit against Fauci’s organization, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that not only did Fauci know Baric well, but that the two men had a long meeting in Fauci's office shortly after the pandemic started. All these facts were hidden from the public.

When U.S. Right to Know started making FOIA requests for Baric’s data related to his collaboration with Shi, and with respect to the DEFUSE blueprint, they ran into a brick wall. The transparency organization then sued for the data but was once again stymied by UNC at every step of the way. Eventually, the matter came before Alyson Grine, a judge for Orange and Chatham Counties in North Carolina, last week. Shockingly, Grine sided with Baric and ruled that, but for a handful of useless documents, he would not have to hand over anything. U.S. Right to Know is now considering its legal options.

By analyzing the grants awarded to Baric over the past two decades, we can confirm that he has received taxpayer funding exceeding $262 million. This figure is based solely on grants awarded to Baric. When considering other indirect funding sources, the actual amount may be significantly higher. Notably, Baric's first multi-million dollar grant, awarded in 2005, was for the development of “Vaccine Candidates for the SARS Coronavirus.” 

How is it possible for a government-funded scientist, who has received over a quarter of a billion dollars from taxpayers, to conceal the data obtained with those funds?

President Biden's hand-picked NIH Director, Monica Bertagnolli, has just announced that her organization prioritizes “integrity and transparency.” However, the continued funding of Baric, coupled with the lack of any effort to obtain the missing data, suggests that what she truly values is dishonesty and the concealment of facts. 

However, there is another culprit. We already knew that the NIH, and the federal government more widely, is completely corrupt. This should not surprise anyone. It is the role of the judiciary to rein in the government and provide at least a semblance of checks and balances, and this is where Judge Alyson Grine from North Carolina comes into the picture.

As most legal practitioners will tell you, state judges are often worse than federal judges, and that is saying something. Regrettably, among an already disastrous pool of state judges, U.S. Right to Know somehow was unlucky enough to have drawn the worst possible individual to decide whether Baric can conceal his documents. According to testimonials posted by Grine on her own website, she appears to be a social justice warrior focused on racial and equity issues. In other words, she is the least suitable individual to preside over a case that challenges the Deep State. Far from representing checks and balances against the Deep State, she is, in fact, a product of it. Unsurprisingly, she was appointed by North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who advocates for so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). But even if Grine were not a DEI judge, the mere fact that she both studied and later worked at UNC should have meant her recusal from the case. 

There is simply no justification for government funded scientists to conceal their data—data that the public has financed. An honest scientist would not only be eager but also proud to share their data. Baric’s lawyers assert that he holds intellectual property rights over his data; however, even setting aside the question of how someone can claim proprietary rights based on taxpayer-funded projects, the fact that Covid caused the deaths of 20 million people and damages of at least $30 trillion should have taken precedence over any intellectual property claims. The irony that we are expected to believe Covid originated in nature while simultaneously accepting that intellectual property rights are involved does not escape us.

One aspect we have not yet discussed is the role of the intelligence community and the Department of Defense in this matter. It is known that Shi and the Wuhan Institute of Virology worked for the Chinese Communist Party's Thousand Talents Program, which aims to steal Western technological secrets for use by the Chinese government and military. It is also know that a Chinese military scientist died when he mysteriously fell from the roof of Shi’s lab shortly after the pandemic began. That scientist happened to be the first person in the world to register a patent for a Covid vaccine on a timeline that would not have been possible unless Covid had started earlier than the “official” timeline of December 2019. Baric's extensive cooperation with a known asset of the Chinese Communist Party is deeply concerning, and one cannot help but wonder whether this is part of the reason why his data remains concealed.

While it is now up to U.S. Right to Know to determine whether they can afford to take this matter to an appeals court, where hopefully more competent and less conflicted judges than Alyson Grine preside, it should be noted that U.S. Right to Know is a small organization with very limited resources. At this juncture, it appears that our only hope lies in a potential new Trump administration addressing this task. In the meantime, it should be evident to anyone with a modicum of common sense that Baric should not receive any further public funding as long as he continues to conceal data.