The Covid Reckoning
Ralph Baric, Gain-of-Function Hubris, and the Man-Made Catastrophe.
The official narrative on Covid-19 continues to fall apart. For years, skeptical voices were smeared as “conspiracy theorists” for daring to question whether a novel coronavirus, perfectly adapted for human transmission, appeared naturally and emerged from a wet market, or escaped from a lab.
Now, stunning revelations about Ralph Baric, a well-known virologist at the University of North Carolina, confirm what many of us suspected: American taxpayer-funded science, chasing risky “gain-of-function” experiments’, played a central role in spawning the global disaster.
Covid killed or maimed millions – not in itself, but through vaxx damage, disrupted health services, Modazolam, ventilators. The politicians’ response to it savaged the economy and piled debt on future generations, and it gave the global elite the perfect excuse for an experimental worldwide lockdown – and it was not natural.
The truth is finally coming out thanks to Gary Ruskin, executive director of the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, which focuses on government accountability. The campaigner has been suing Baric’s university since 2020 to obtain access to his communications, and his nonprofit has published thousands of emails spotlighting Baric’s work and ties to research in Wuhan, China.
The information unearthed by Ruskin and his team through lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests has been picked up by RealClearInvestigations, an independent journalistic outlet known for in-depth investigative reporting.
RCI’s months-long review of hundreds of pages of emails and interviews with more than a dozen current and former congressional staffers and administration officials shows that Baric’s public proclamations about his work, which has been connected to tens of millions of dollars in federal research grants, have not always reflected his own private reservations about risky experiments.
Baric has also participated in campaigns to deny or downplay the dangers of virus research, while politicians and the FBI have sought to protect him. In addition, the University of North Carolina has resisted transparency at every turn, hiding behind exemptions while Americans demanded answers.
“The investigations have been terrible,” said a senior congressional staffer who has followed the Senate and House probes of the COVID pandemic. “And Ralph Baric’s fingerprints are everywhere.”
Baric, long hailed as the “godfather of gain-of-function research,” didn’t just study viruses, he engineered them. His lab at UNC specialised in tinkering with coronaviruses to make them more transmissible or virulent in humans, all under the banner of “pandemic preparedness.”
Gary Ruskin puts it starkly: “Baric designed the gun. But the Chinese built it, and then they pulled the trigger.”
Baric collaborated closely with researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), including Shi Zhengli, the so-called “Bat Woman.” His work provided the scientific blueprint – the “how-to” manual – for creating hybrid viruses capable of jumping to humans.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), under figures like Anthony Fauci, funded these high-risk experiments, often covering their tracks by channelling the support through intermediaries like EcoHealth Alliance.
When the essentially man-made virus designed by Baric escaped – either through deliberate release or from the inadequately secured Wuhan lab – the cover-up machine swung into action: Natural origin theories were pushed, the lab-leak hypothesis was censored, dissenting scientists were attacked and there was mass deplatforming of those who dared to ask awkward questions. Baric played an active role in this deception.
RealClearInvestigations have now learned that the federal government has quietly removed Baric from all his NIH grants and placed him on leave. UNC still refuse to cooperate with NIH officials as they have attempted to gather more facts and emails about Baric’s coronavirus research, which the evidence leads them to believe created the coronavirus pandemic.
This isn’t some minor administrative move – it’s a quiet admission that the star researcher at the heart of the controversy has been caught out and exposed.
Before the outbreak, Baric and other virologists working on gain-of-function proposed taking the backbone of a bat virus and inserting a spike protein with a furin cleavage site. A furin cleavage site allows viruses to infect the cells of human lungs.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency rejected the proposal but wrote that the research was interesting and could merit funding in the future. It warned, however, that the virologists would need a gain-of-function “risk mitigation plan” if it was to fund such studies.
A year after DARPA rejected this proposal to create hybrid bat viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a novel bat virus with a furin cleavage site began infecting humans in Wuhan. No other closely related virus has this furin cleavage site.
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, the virus walks into the city where this research is happening, the year after someone has proposed to put a furin cleavage site into [coronavirus],” author Matt Ridley quipped during a talk on the gain-of-function proposal last month at the NIH. “That’s quite a coincidence.”
Former CDC Director Redfield told RCI that in the first month of the pandemic, he was given classified material that highlighted the COVID virus’s furin cleavage site. He then briefed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo:
“I said, ‘Mike, this is the smoking gun. This virus came from a lab.’” Redfield added that he believes NIH and allied virologists ran a campaign to smear people as conspiracy theorists in order to protect their money and reputations.
These revelations are a huge step forward, but the fact remains that, up until now, there have been no real consequences for one of the greatest policy failures – and crime against humanity – of our lifetime.
https://nickgriffin544956.substack.com/p/the-covid-reckoning