Who Created SARS-CoV-2?

A lawsuit against Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak (the prime suspects)

Photo Caption: Ralph Baric (fourth from left) receiving the 2021 North Carolina Award for his “contribution to science.”

On February 23, 2017, Nature magazine published “Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world's most dangerous pathogens” on the occasion of the new BSL-4 lab in Wuhan about to commence operations. The Nature article mentioned that the lab’s construction was approved in 2003 and “built with French assistance,” but it doesn’t provide any details. In fact, the Wuhan BSl-4 lab was built by the French biotech company bioMerieux SA pursuant to a cooperative agreement between France and China in 2003, following the emergence of the first SARS virus in China. In subsequent posts I will examine this French Connection, with special attention to Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna.

Midway into the article, the Nature reporter noted: “Future plans include studying the pathogen that causes SARS …” As we now know, SARS (which prompted the construction of the facility in the first place) was the lab’s primary focus. Until the end of the 20th Century, the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex had mainly focused its pandemic planning on the possible emergence of a virulent influenza virus. In theory, mankind could experience another flu pandemic as severe as the 1918 Spanish Flu. Until 2003, there was little discussion of the possibility of a virulent coronavirus threatening mankind.

The emergence of the first SARS in 2003 changed everything. At that point, microbiologists in France, China, and—most importantly—the United States, set about studying coronaviruses, and planning for the emergence of the next one in human populations. The stated mission of the new BSL-4 lab was to prepare for “the emergence of zoonotic viruses — those that jump to humans from animals, such as SARS or Ebola,” as Bruno Lina, director of the VirPath virology lab in Lyon, France explained.

All of this sounds good in theory, but in practice, this enterprise did NOT simply involve studying coronaviruses found in nature—i.e., in animals such as the Chinese horseshoe bat. Examining this virus was just the first step. The second step was deliberately modifying the virus so that it would infect humans. In microbiology jargon, this kind of modification is called Gain of Function—a term of Orwellian Newspeak that enables slippery public health authorities to obscure the reality of this extremely dangerous activity.

The proposition that coronaviruses found in bats could jump to humans is purely theoretical. The theoretical mechanism by which it could make this leap is natural selection—a process that involves random mutations and selections over a long period of time. Deliberately modifying a bat coronavirus—optimizing its ability to infect humans and transmit from one human to another—ENSURED that this theoretical possibility became a reality. What was a hypothetical danger was thereby made a clear and present danger, just one human error away from killing millions of people all over the globe.

Such a human error could scarcely be characterized as a low probability event. As was noted in the Nature report:

The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey.

For years, Dr. Ebright tried to sound the alarm about gain of function research and lab leaks, but the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex didn’t listen because there was no profit to be gained from heeding his warning. This goes to the heart of the true objective of gain of function research—namely, to develop new, commercially valuable vaccines against the very pathogens that the Dr. Frankensteins are creating.

Who are these Dr. Frankensteins? A massive paper trail of federal grants, scientific papers, and even popular magazine articles prior to 2020 points to Ralph Baric, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance.

One of the many bizarre features of the obfuscation that now passes for official public discourse in Washington D.C. is that none of Senator Rand Paul’s assertions about gain of function research are even remotely controversial. On the contrary, the dangerous activity of which he has spoken before the Senate has been published in the MIT Technology Review and other journals.

Because our public officials apart from Senator Paul are unable or unwilling to pursue criminal or civil action against the perpetrators of this extremely reckless activity that resulted in the death of millions, it was left to a concerned and intrepid citizen to do so. As was reported in the Daily Clout on October 11, 2022, Dr. Pam Popper, Director of the Wellness Forum Institute, has filed a toxic tort lawsuit against Ralph Baric, Peter Daszak, and others in a US Federal Court in New York. The defendants did not, as Dr. Popper anticipated, file for a motion to dismiss, but instead filed for a 50-day extension to respond to the suit. How will the lawsuit play out? What (if anything) will be revealed in discovery? Stay tuned.