Fauci: "I doubt if I've ever met him [Ralph Baric]."

The bizarre (apparent) absence of the world's leading authority on bat coronaviruses.

By John Leake

Dr. McCullough and I often marvel at how the mainstream media somehow fails to see and report facts of enormous importance—facts that are documented in academic papers, grant proposals, e-mail correspondence, and video footage.

All a journalist has to do is read the documents and report their content. And yet, somehow, most legacy media journalists are apparently unable to gain awareness of and report what is immediately at hand.

Take the 2015 paper published by UNC Chapel Hill Professor Ralph Baric et al. titled A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. As the authors (including Zhengli-Li Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology) state in their abstract:

Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations¹. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system², we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.

The purported purpose of this Gain-of-Function work—i.e., generating a chimeric virus (combining genetic material from two different viruses) capable of infecting human airway cells—was to lay the groundwork for vaccine development and testing in the event that a wild bat coronavirus were eventually to infect humans.

Under the paper’s section titled Biosafety and biosecurity, the authors wrote:

Reported studies were initiated after the University of North Carolina Institutional Biosafety Committee approved the experimental protocol (Project Title: Generating infectious clones of bat SARS-like CoVs; Lab Safety Plan ID: 20145741; Schedule G ID: 12279). These studies were initiated before the US Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses (http://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf). This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH.

So there it is. Ralph Baric and his colleague at the Wuhan Institute of Virology plainly state that they engineered a bat coronavirus, using Gain-of-Function methods, that infected the respiratory tract of humanized mice, and the NIH approved their study because it was initiated before the US Government pause on Gain-of-Function Research.

UNC Professor Ralph Baric

Anyone familiar with Ralph Baric’s storied career as the world’s greatest authority on bat coronaviruses (both natural and chimeric) has, for the last three years, wondered: “Where is Professor Baric? Why isn’t he an official consultant on the nature of SARS-CoV-2? Why hasn’t he been a member of any pandemic response task force?”

Until late 2022, no one in Congress, the White House, or in any of the federal health agencies ever mentioned the name Ralph Baric in any official public discussions. This is probably the most glaring omission in the history of scientific investigations. It’s the equivalent of a Congressional investigation into the development of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan without questioning or even mentioning Robert Oppenheimer or Enrico Fermi.

Finally, on November 23, 2022, Dr. Fauci was deposed by John Sauer, counsel for the State of Missouri, on the origins of SARS-CoV-2. As the Epoch Times reported on March 8, 2023, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana told a federal court in a recent filing that parts of Dr. Fauci’s testimony are not credible.

Especially conspicuous and dubious were his statements about Ralph Baric. To quote the Epoch Times report:

“I know who he is. I doubt if I’ve ever met him,” Fauci said during the late 2022 deposition—the first time he answered questions under oath since the pandemic began.

Fauci acknowledged the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he headed until around the New Year, provided funding for Baric.

“But you don’t remember ever meeting him in person?” he was asked.

“I don’t recall. I could have met him. I run into several thousands of scientists that we refer to, but I don’t recall, certainly, having a relationship with him,” Fauci responded.

But Fauci’s official calendar lists a one-on-one meeting with Baric on Feb. 11, 2020. And a newly revealed message from a professor who recounted Baric’s account of the meeting showed they talked about man-made virus combinations.

“I talked to Ralph for a long time last night. He sounds beat,” Matt Frieman, a University of Maryland professor, wrote in a Feb. 18, 2020, message. “He said he sat in Fauci’s office talking about the outbreak and chimeras.”

Why did Dr. Fauci claim he had no memory of meeting Dr. Baric and conversing with him about man-made coronaviruses?