Fauci pal update: NIH has removed virologist Ralph Baric from all his grants; UNC placed Baric on leave. Senior HHS officials says UNC was complicit in starting the COVID pandemic, at last.
RCI has a piece on the secret email campaign in the waning days of the Soetero presidency to change the limits on gain of function research, at Fauci's behest on behalf of his pals, Baric and Daszak.
Quote:
"Scientists tend to write their grants based on research they have already done," said an NIH official not cleared to speak to the media. She added, "It's a classic joke inside the research community."
Congressional investigators questioned Baric about the DEFUSE proposal in a 2024 deposition. Baric testified that, when a SARS virus that never before had a furin cleavage site appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, he forgot that he had proposed, the year prior, to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS viruses at the Wuhan lab.
"I had forgotten about the DEFUSE proposal, quite frankly," Baric testified. "The grant was not funded, so I moved on."
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield is convinced the COVID virus came from a lab.
Virologist and former CDC Director Robert Redfield told RCI that Baric was probably misleading Congress in the interview. He believes virologists did the research in the DEFUSE proposal and then submitted the grant for funding because that's how science advances. "I know enough about these proposals," he said. "About 50% of the work you propose in a grant is already done."
Baric appears to have a habit of forgetting details of virus research when disclosure and transparency might cast a bad light on the scientific field. After giving a private briefing in January 2020 to intelligence officials, where he discussed a possible lab accident in Wuhan, he gave a public talk to congressional staff a month later that omitted the possibility of a lab accident and failed to note that the pandemic virus had a unique furin cleavage site that made it deadly to humans.
The UNC connection being left out of the congressional report about the origins can be traced to Senator Burr, of NC:
Quote:
Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University and long-time critic of gain-of-function studies, said he "was surprised the released report omitted discussion of U.S. actions, including the role of USAID, NIH, and EcoHealth Alliance in funding research on SARS-related coronaviruses in Wuhan." Ebright said Senate staff interviewed him several times about NIH's funding for gain-of-function research and NIH funding for Wuhan.
After leading a Senate committee that ignored Baric's work in its report on the pandemic's origins, former Sen. Richard Burr joined Baric's company.
One expert interviewed by the Senate said that staff stripped out any mention of NIH funding for gain-of-function research in the United States, while another pointed the finger at the Republican who ran the committee: Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, who was months from retirement.
During his decades in Congress, Burr was a strong supporter of pandemic preparedness and virus research, ushering through legislation that turned on the spigot for biodefense spending, such as the 2006 legislation that created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
Much more at the link, as RCI pieces are generally outstanding and also very lengthy. For anyone still incensed by what Team Fauci did with this research/pandemic, and the politics that flowed from it after Trump '45 left office, I highly encourage reading it. I don't want to copy/paste too much into a post, but the email campaign in 2016 before Trump was sworn in is particularly infuriating to me.