Ralph Baric Testimony

So most people probably heard about the circus show known as the Daszak interview on May 1. Some of you might have read Daszaks transcribed interview from November that was made available the same day.  A few might have caught the Baric puff piece on Vanity Fair released the same day summarizing Ralph Barics transcribed interview from January, which was released the same day

I am not going to bother with Daszak here, he is just the designated patsy to keep you from seeing the truth.

Baric Transcript

https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Baric-TI-Transcript.pdf

Baric Puff Piece

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-leak

This is too long for Email by the way.

I have written a lot about Baric here in too long to read posts, but before I get on with his transcribed interview I feel its important to quote from his 2006 article written for the Biodefense Community

Will synthetic or recombinant bioweapons be developed for BW use? If the main purpose is to kill and inspire fear in human populations, natural source pathogens likely provide a more reliable source of starting material......

If notoriety, fear and directing foreign government policies are principle objectives, then the release and subsequent discovery of a synthetically derived virus bioweapon garner tremendous media coverage, inspire fear and terrorize human populations and direct severe pressure on government officials to respond in predicted ways.

It is conceivable that a bioterrorist could order  genome portions from various synthesis facilities distributed in different countries throughout the world and then assemble an infectious genome without ever having access to the virus.

To our knowledge, no international regulatory group reviews the body of synthetic DNAs ordered globally to determine if a highly pathogenic recombinant virus genome is being constructed.

The technical skill needed to develop full length infectious cDNAs of viruses is not simple and requires a great deal of expertise and support: technically trained staff, the availability of state of the art research facilities, and funding.

https://www.jcvi.org/sites/default/files/assets/projects/synthetic-genomics-options-for-governance/Baric-Synthetic-Viral-Genomics.pdf

You might think that in a 6 hour interview with the Godfather of Coronaviruses they might have wanted to talk about some of this.

As it comes out, during the interview Ralph Baric was asked if he had Security Clearance and he answered in the affirmative.  That should be no surprise though. Unfortunately they did not ask for how long he had the clearance. I suspect he has had it for quite awhile, perhaps around the time of SARS.

In fact Ralph Baric developed his Reverse Genetics System for Coronaviruses in partnership with the USAMRIID in 2003

In the aftermath of the SARS outbreak in 2003, the Baric team collaborated with the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) and developed a novel reverse genetic system for synthesis of a full-length cDNA of the SARS-CoV, which was published in a paper in 2003.   The paper claimed that within two months after obtaining the RNA of the SARS virus, the full-length cDNA of the virus was successfully synthesized, which shows that as early as 2003, these institutes already had advanced capabilities to synthesize and modify SARS-related coronavirus.

In December 2008, Dr. Baric co-authored another paper on the successful reconstitution of a chimeric virus with the genome backbone from a bat SARS-like coronavirus and the receptor binding domain (RBD) from SARS-CoV using similar synthetic biology techniques, arguing that the design and synthesis of various SARS-related coronaviruses are important steps to prevent similar outbreaks in the future.

It is worth noting that the Baric team has close collaboration with USAMRIID, and they co-own the patent related to manipulation of coronavirus genome and have published multiple papers together.

The scope of this cooperative relationship was further expanded after Lisa Hensley, one of Dr. Baric’s students, joined USAMRIID

https://news.cgtn.com/news/files/Coronavirus-Research-Conducted-by-Dr-Ralph-Baric-s-Team.pdf

Ralph Baric also worked on Remdesivir before COVID . Here is what he said in his testimony

Who else worked on Remdesivir?

USAMIID s Chief Scientific Officer and Scientific Director Sina Bavari sits on the editorial board of the journal where Shi Zhengli is the Editor-in-Chief, Virologica Sinica. Sina Bavari has been at USAMRIID since 2011

Note: USAMiD is located on Fort Detrick, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., and is a subordinate lab of the United States Army Medical Research and Development Command

Fort Detrick scientists, in collaboration with Gilead Sciences of Foster City, California, had success in 2015 with a treatment that blocked the Ebola virus’s ability to replicate.

They issued a press release heralding their achievement. The treatment was an antiviral compound called GS-5734 – more commonly known as Remdesivir. Sina Bavari was one of the clever scientists behind this antiviral treatment and is listed as a contributor on the research, which was funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Medical Countermeasure Systems Joint Project Management Office, under the US Department of Defense.

The drug came to global prominence when it was touted as a potential treatment option for Covid-19 some five years later. Despite the US government contributing research and funding, it didn’t get credit in the Gilead Remdesivir patent.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/coronavirus-american-scientists-caught-up-in-wuhan-web-of-intrigue/news-story/90f5dc0317a87513caf99762407cc6b8?amp

The linked article is now behind a paywall but here is one of my threads covering this article

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1786584525713403921.html

USAMRIID’s Chief Scientific Officer and Scientific Director Sina Bavari sits on the editorial board of the journal where Shi Zhengli is the Editor-in-Chief, Virologica Sinica. Sina Bavari has been at USAMRIID since 2011

theaustralian.com.au/nation/coronav…

Bavari had visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2014 or 2015, he said, for an editorial board meeting of Virologica Sinica. /2

In October 2018, a senior USAMRIID laboratory director gave a presentation on Ebola in the facility’s conference room number. /3

Also sitting on Shi Zhengli’s Virologica Sinica editorial board is Professor Jens Kuhn, the Virology Lead at Anthony Fauci’s NIAID. Not only is he at the NIH, but he is listed as a contractor among Fort Detrick’s “Integrated Research Facility Leadership and Scientists”

/4

At a hotel in Wuhan in May 2017, a commander at USAMRIID participated in a workshop on lab safety with the Institute’s top scientists. The workshop was called the “Second China–US Workshop on the Challenges of Emerging Infections, Laboratory Safety and Global Health Security”./5

Gain-of-function research, laboratory risks and gene editing were key topics during the conference, held from May 17 to 19. Shi Zhengli and George Fu Gao, the Director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, gave presentations at the conference /6

The Virologica Sinica editorial board overseen by Shi Zhengli consists of PLA members, a virologist who was kicked out of Canada for security breaches and the director of China’s Centre for Disease Control. /7

George Fu Gao, the Director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, who rang Dr Redfield in tears on January 3, 2020, is also on the advisory board for Shi Zhengli’s journal. /8

On the editorial board is Zhang Yong-Zhen, the scientist responsible for sharing the genetic sequence of Covid-19.

One of the associate editors is connected to the PLA: Tong Yigang was previously the Director of the Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology at the Academy of Military Medical Science, which sits under the PLA. /9

What’s highly unusual is that two members of Shi Zhengli’s editorial board were linked to USAMRIID, given US intelligence has tied the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the Chinese military. /10

Fort Detrick scientists, in collaboration with Gilead Sciences of Foster City, California, had success in 2015 with a treatment that blocked the Ebola virus’s ability to replicate. /11

GS-5734 – more commonly known as Remdesivir. Sina Bavari was one of the clever scientists behind this antiviral treatment and is listed as a contributor on the research, /12

which was funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Medical Countermeasure Systems Joint Project Management Office, under the US Department of Defense. /13

Despite the US government contributing research and funding, it didn’t get credit in the Gilead Remdesivir patent. /14

While Bavari was Director, Fort Detrick was also temporarily shut down in 2019 for two breaches of containment. USAMRIID announced in mid-November 2019 it would restart operations on a limited scale /15

two breaches reported by USAMRIID to the CDC demonstrated a failure of the army laboratory to “implement and maintain containment procedures sufficient to contain select agents or toxins” that were made by operations in BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories. /16

Pompeo seems surprised to learn about the connection between Fort Detrick scientists and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “It is unusual. It’s a small world, you’ve seen that, right. These international virologists are a very tight-knit circle. /17

Shi Zhengli’s links to Ralph Baric, from the University of North Carolina, continued as well. She emailed him in February 2018, inviting him to fly to Wuhan. “It was nice meeting you in Galveston and learning your recent great work,” she wrote. /18

“As we have discussed, we would like to invite you attend our meeting ‘the 8th International Symposium on Emerging Virus Diseases’ to be held in Wuhan this year. Your local cost and travel between Hong Kong and Wuhan will be covered by our meeting sponsor.” /19

Ralph Baric replied a few hours later: “Hi Zhengli, Nice talking with you in Galveston . . . I would enjoy the opportunity to meet with you in Wuhan for the 8th international symposium on emerging infectious diseases.” 20/

Barics transcribed interview is 212 pages long, and the House Select Committee chose to make it available as a scanned pdf, which means the font is small and light colored, and you cant copy and paste text to make it more readable. You also can not do a word search so its very tedious to navigate. Clearly intentional.  Fook you Congress Critters.

So I will have to resort to screen shots. Sorry.

The Congress Critters as expected were hyper focused on Daszak and WIV. Baric was not a suspect and was treated with respect unlike the shit show you saw with Daszak.  That said, there is some interesting information presented.

Most of you know of the infamous Feb 1, 2020 phone call on COVID ORIGINS.  Everyone of importance was present except Ralph Baric, or so we thought.  Turns out Ralph Baric was present, although he apparently didn’t say anything. Quiet as one of his lab mice. When asked why he didnt bring up DEFUSE he said he forgot about it.😂

If you believe that I have a Bridge you might want to buy.

A major focus of Barics testimony was WIV doing work in BSL-2.  The work they were doing in BSL-2 was culturing of viruses in bat samples, something they were remarkably ineffective at. Out of tens of thousands bat samples they had only been able to culture 3 sarbecoviruses, none of which was particularly dangerous to humans.

Ralph was not doing any surveillance work in his lab, he knew which viruses he was culturing and so he had more success, meaning there was a higher risk, especially since he only cultured viruses of interest.  Even so, there are no regulations against culturing Sars related batviruses in BSL 2 in the US.  Ralph made that devision on his own, maybe for insurance purposes or so he could charge more for his grants, maybe safety, maybe all of those reasons, who knows.

Yet even working in an enhanced BSL 3 he had his share of accidents

From A. Youngs Pandora Gamble

During the 5years before the pandemic began, at least 6 UNC researchers were required to undergo medical monitoring following 4 incidents where they were potentially exposed to what the NIH now confirms were types of lab-created SARS coronaviruses.

In addition, two other UNC researchers had to undergo medical surveillance because of their potential exposure to a type of lab-created MERS coronavirus. The monitoring involved reporting temperatures or any symptoms to university medical officials twice daily.

In each case, the reports indicate these workers were allowed to go about their lives while waiting for symptoms to appear.

From Jan. 1, 2015, through June 1, 2020, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reported 28 lab incidents involving genetically engineered organisms to safety officials at the National Institutes of Health

Anyways, when you look back on it Baric was one of the first prominent scientists to back a possible lab origin , starting with a letter he signed in May 2021, in the journal Science affirming that the lab and natural origin hypotheses are both viable and calling for further investigation

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj0016

Then we have his email to Daszak the same month which Baric knew would one day be public via FOIA

This is what you call CYA.  Perhaps so people would focus their energy on WIV and not him

Of course Ralph was so worried about WIV he sent them human transgenic mice to infect with coronaviruses in their labs.  WIV did their animal work in BSL-3 according to Ralph, so maybe thats why.

Fact of the matter is Ralph wasn’t terribly worried because the odds are so remote

Anyways, one of the things I learned was that Daszak and Barics working relationship was rather short, starting in 2018 with the DEFUSE proposal and then formally with Daszaks RO1 Grant with NIAID , the latter of which did not involve Baric until year 6 which started in the fall of 2019, right when COVID was released.

For some reason I thought it went back earlier but that was probably because Baric had hooked up with Shi Zheng li earlier going back to 2010, and knowing of their collaboration on the 2015 Nature Paper (she provided sequence and plasmids) and his 2016 PNAS paper where he Acknowledged her

We thank Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology for access to bat CoV sequences and plasmid of WIV1-CoV spike protein. Research was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease

Anyways, Baric was  rather evasive when asked what the closest virus to Sars-Cov-2 he had in his library of viruses, when reminded that Shi Zheng Li found RaTG13 after looking through her library after the COVID sequence was released.

Rather snippy.

I bet you money he also had a copy of RaTG13 which was fully sequenced around the time of the DEFUSE proposal in 2018, but we cant prove that.

Ralph surely has many other viruses in his library other than those found by Shi Zheng Li surveillance.  DTRA, USAID PREDICT, NMRC (NAMRU-A), plus his own chimeras and consensus viruses.  Anyways, he never really answered the question

He was also asked a similar question and also was evasive

Ralph sort of babbles on about not being able to make Sars-Cov-2 without a backbone but when pushed would only say he never made anything with the same pathogenicity, but not mentioning structure (eg like a spike with FCS).

Ralph was also pretty adamant that he shared nothing with WIV except transgenic mice

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He also didn’t seem too impressed with the WIV Cloning Technology that he discusses in more depth elsewhere

There was an interesting section where Ralph explains how Sars-Cov-2 was only 3-4 recombination events from known viruses at the time

This is as close as Ralph or anyone gets to talking about building a virus from consensus sequence taken from several different coronaviruses.  Ralph stays hyperfocused on the need for a backbone even though in 2008 he developed a virus made from a consensus sequence

When this study was initiated, 4 Bat-SCoVs had been identified (HKU3–1, HKU3–2, HKU3–3, and RP3) as the virus reservoir populations from which SARS-CoV emerged (10–12). Because none had been recovered in culture, the infectivity of the reported viral genomic RNA sequences was hypothetical……

Therefore, we used the 4 reported Bat-SCoV sequences to establish a putative consensus Bat-SCoV sequence (GenBank accession no. FJ211859) and designed cDNA fragments with junctions precisely aligned to the existing SARS-CoV reverse genetics system

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0808116105

In the interview he talks about using that same consensus backbone and introducing a triple chimera

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Now there is another interesting discussion on the feasibility to engineering Sars-Cov-2

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The shotgun mutagenesis theory is interesting.  The more I learn about the complexity of virology I become more skeptical a lone scientist in a medium size laboratory could engineer something like Sars-CoV-2 on their own, even a master like Baric.   It would have to be trial and error on a large scale, preferably in parallel. Almost a Manhattan Project in scale,  but instead of focusing on mutating specific nucleotides you would do a variety of combinations of consensus sequences with viruses you have that are 10-25 % away from SARS, separating out the backbone which is more complex and spike which is more understood

So you end up with dozens of backbones and spikes which you can interchange and then test on various cell lines then animals, etc.. Lots of work, lots of money needed.

Ralph has apparently given some thought to how you would filter out these genomes to find those that would infect , and he is being a bit mysterious by saying “you don’t want me to answer whats on the table unless you press me”.  The topic is then immediately closed

My thinking on this even before seeing the transcript is what if you just released whatever you had on captive populations (animal or human) somewhere in the world where the population can be contained and let the fittest virus tell you which virus wins. No doubt there would be some recombination.

Clearly there would be ethical issues for humans, but not anymore than injecting billions with an under tested experimental vaccine

For animals I am thinking Rocky Mountain Labs who were involved in some of the DARPA PREEMPT Awards and is a NIAID lab.  Egyptian Fruit Bats, White Tail Deer, Deer Mice all are infected and transmit Sars-Cov-2.

Vincent Munster and RML were listed as DEFUSE partners on Proposers Day (Jan 28, 2018). Too bad nobody asked why he was dropped.

For humans, who knows, maybe in Ukraine where Hunter Biden and Metabiota have ties/labs.  Sars-Cov-2 seemed to have an affinity to Slavic populations based on my crude analysis of COVID /Excess deaths.  Anyways, just a theory.

Ok, back to the interview.

Ralph gave us his thoughts on his idea to add FCS to the spike protein and admits this was his idea and he wrote that section

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Baric goes to great lengths explaining experiments where FCS did not increase infectiousness or pathogenicity in some coronaviruses but fails to mention his 2018 paper inserting a FCS into SARS that suggests it would, nor mentioning that MERS has a FCS and one with a Proline

To examine the potential use of the SARS-CoV S1–S2 and S2′ positions as sites for proteolytic cleavage, we first introduced furin cleavage recognition sites at these locations by making the following mutations 664SLLRSTSQSI-SLLRRSRR SI671 (S1–S2) and 792LKPTKRSF-LKRTKRSF799 (S2′). Expression of these mutants in VeroE6 cells induced cell–cell fusion in the absence of any trypsin treatment to different extents .

As described previously (29), introduction of the furin site at position 667 (furin667) enhanced cell–cell fusion to a modest extent (17% of nuclei in syncytia) compared with wild-type spike, where <5% of nuclei were in syncytia . In contrast, the mutant furin797 showed extensive syncytia formation, with ≈55% of cells in syncytia.

We also created an additional mutant with furin recognition sites at both S1–S2 and at S2′ (furin667furin797). This mutant protein induced formation of very large syncytia, with >95% of cells in syncytia.

these data suggest that SARS-CoV can be proteolytically cleaved at the S2′ position to activate membrane fusion, and that cleavage at the S1–S2 boundary facilitates both cleavage at S2′ and S2′-activated membrane fusion.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2660061/

He also suggests that inserting the FCS as opposed to creating a FCS by point mutations indicated a nefarious intent

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And of course since its not permitted to discuss the possibility Sars-Cov-2 was created or released for nefarious purposes, the case is closed.

Or is it?.

Ralph seemed pretty adamant that the virus began circulating in Wuhan sometime at the end of October. Why do that when he must know the Wuhan Military games were in Oct (18-27)🤔

If you wanted to start a Pandemic and blame an adversary you would pick a city w/ BSL labs working on coronaviruses so you could blame them for a lab leak if natural  origins  was questioned

US early efforts to push lab leak theory

In January 2021, Five Eyes intelligence-sharing nations were convened to discuss the possibility of a lab leak as the US warned that China had covered up research on coronaviruses and military activity at a laboratory in Wuhan.

In a previously unreported phone call that month, Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state, presented evidence that supported the lab leak theory to Dominic Raab, then the Foreign Secretary, and representatives from Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

Speaking to The Telegraph, two Trump administration officials accused Mr Raab and the UK Government of ignoring the lab leak theory because of resistance from government scientists who supported the explanation that the virus had jumped between animals and humans.

Mr Pompeo presented a summary of classified American intelligence reports collected in the early days of the pandemic and compiled by the State Department. The intelligence reports themselves are understood to have been shared separately with the UK via the Five Eyes network between October and December 2020.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/04/us-shared-gobsmacking-lab-leak-evidence-with-uk-pandemic/

And shortly thereafter Ralph began to push the lab origin possibility.  Ralph of course had security clearance so maybe was acting on the advice of some intelligence agency.

Thus setting up the false dialectic of Natural Origin vs Accidental WIV lab Leak to distract from consideration of Bioterrorism to usher in a Pandemic to achieve predetermined goals (Profit, Power, Policy).

Near the end of the interview, when Ralph is pretty tired he mentions a few interesting things, one of which is this relating to DEFUSE

Sadly nobody pursued questioning of how he would be building these novel virulent viruses

An early draft of the DEFUSE proposal — obtained by FOIA release to US Right to Know in Dec. 2023—states the following:

We will identify the best consensus candidate and synthesize the genome using commercial vendors (e.g., BioBasic, etc.),

as six contiguous cDNA pieces linked by unique restriction endonuclease sites that do not disturb the coding sequence, but allow for full length genome assembly,” the grant states. 

This work was clearly intended to be done by Barics lab.

This part seems out of synch with the overall objective of DEFUSE which was to inoculate bats with either Raccoon Poxvirus vector containing spike protein or with spike protein nanoparticles alone (no viral vector).

and

But lets see how Baric describes the purpose of DEFUSE

Ralph stays away from talking about their immune boosting strategy with bats to protect the warfighter.   Maybe because if I was DARPA I would be asking if we can inoculate bats  why not the warfighter.  Ralphs primary job with DEFUSE was to engineer spike protein so the bats immune system would respond to any spike protein and reduce virus levels no matter what coronavirus infected it.  Why not use that pan coronavirus spike to vaccinate the troops.

This is why I think DEFUSE was rejected, it was stupid.  Imagine China letting a DARPA funded program to innoculate bats in a Chinese bat cave so America War Fighters would be safe from coronaviruses😂

DARPA is not stupid.  But China could not do anything about them revamping DEFUSE under some other name and creating a human vaccine based on spike protein.

Guess what Ralph has been working on since 2020 or even earlier. Yup.

In fact in 2018 he was working on a Attenuated Live Virus Vaccine but I imagine that proved too risky😉

Emerging and re-emerging zoonotic viral diseases are major threats to global health, economic stability, and national security. Vaccines are key for reducing coronaviral disease burden; however, the utility of live-attenuated vaccines is limited by risks of reversion or repair. Because of their history of emergence events due to their prevalence in zoonotic pools, designing live-attenuated coronavirus vaccines that can be rapidly and broadly implemented is essential for outbreak preparedness. Here, we show that coronaviruses with completely rewired transcription regulatory networks (TRNs) are effective vaccines against SARS-CoV.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-018-0175-7

Now Baric suggested they wanted to create a virus like Sars-Cov-2 just so they could knock out the FCS and see what happened.  I don’t believe it for a second.   

Anyways, this has been done now and it was discovered that FCS really is important to Sars-Cov-2 pathogenesis and knocking it out attenuated it. No surprise there

As Mike Pompeo said, COVID is a Live Exercise

Anyways, there was a lot more such as Baric claiming Sars-Cov-2 wasn’t engineered because it wasn’t done in a way he would do such as restriction sites, RBD and FCS efficiency but if you wanted to make a low pathogenic virus and hide the fact you were the engineer thats probably exactly what you would do (not saying he did).

Lots of questions about Daszaks GOF in yr 4-5 and he basically said it did not violate GOF regulations because its   an animal virus but his R01 contract required he report any viral enhancement greater than the log 1 rule and stop the experiment.

He did make one interesting prediction

Bio-ag, who knew?  Bugs for breakfast anyone?

Anyways, I am done,