The rabbit hole that leads to answers about how the COVID-19 pandemic began just got a little deeper. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, has released documents revealing a troubling connection between the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and a University of North Carolina professor, Ralph Baric.
This isn’t the first time Baric’s name has surfaced in connection with COVID origins. Nicholson Baker of New York Magazine wrote a story about work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in 2021, where a U.S.-funded project created a coronavirus with the bio signature of the virus that killed more than 7 million people worldwide.
“Not bioterrorism. It was bio-stupidity. It was a bunch of scientists who got together and decided to play God by creating a Frankenstein monster of a coronavirus just to see how bad it could get,” I wrote at the time.
Baric’s involvement in the Wuhan project directly led to the ODNI’s lies about the probable laboratory origins of COVID-19. The intelligence office attempted to conceal its ties to Baric, whose U.S.-funded research would have strongly suggested a connection between the pandemic and his work. The ODNI publicly rejected the lab leak theory as “misinformation” while privately acknowledging the possible connection between Baric’s work and the pandemic.
“Baric gave a presentation to the ODNI in January 2020 showing that he advised American intelligence that COVID may have emerged from a lab, the documents also indicate,” reports the Daily Caller. The report continued, “Baric shared that the WIV had sequenced thousands of SARS-like coronaviruses, including strains capable of epidemics, the slides show.”
Baric noted that the Wuhan lab does this work under low biosafety levels despite the ability of some of these viruses to infect and grow in human lung cells.
What Baric omitted: He had submitted a grant application in 2018 with intentions to conduct research to make coronaviruses with the same rare features seen in COVID while concealing the Wuhan lab’s low biosafety level, jotting in the margins of a draft of the grant application that Americans would “freak out” if they knew about the shoddy standards.
One year after Baric’s presentation, ODNI had hardened against the lab leak hypothesis.
Wuhan’s lab was officially a BSL2 (bio-safety level 2, where four is the most secure), which was very misleading considering the danger posed by the leak of a coronavirus designed to sicken and kill a significant number of people. The WIV was, for all intents and purposes, a third-world lab with poorly trained lab assistants and a horrible safety record. Americans called out its safety protocols on several occasions.
The cover-up of these facts, as well as the ODNI’s connection to Professor Baric and his work with the specific coronavirus that might have leaked, fills in some blank spaces in the pandemic origins narrative.
Baric’s presentation in 2020 to the ODNI should have set off alarm bells about our funding of Wuhan. Instead, the agencies decided to hunker down and weather the storm.
One year after Baric’s presentation, ODNI had hardened against the lab leak hypothesis.
When State Department officials pushed to declassify certain intelligence related to a plausible lab leak in January 2021, the ODNI expressed concerns that it would “call out actions that we ourselves are doing.”
Former ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) Director Kathryn Brinsfield, a medical doctor, also dismissed a January 2021 presentation by government officials about a plausible lab origin of COVID as “misinformation,” two sources told the DCNF. Her top aide Zach Bernstein, who possesses a master’s degree in security studies but no scientific credentials, also dismissed the presentation, according to three sources.
It’s unclear if Anthony Fauci was aware of the cover-up. He was certainly aware of the research Baric was doing. It was clearly “gain of function” research where Baric was trying to engineer a coronavirus that would be more contagious and more lethal than anything that appeared in the wild.
Paul has been trying to indict Fauci for perjuring himself when he denied that there was any gain-of-function research performed by U.S.-funded scientists. Fauci’s pardon by Joe Biden is going to face challenges, given Biden’s mental state. Fauci skirted the line between obfuscation and perjury many times during his congressional testimony.
Much of what the new documents reveal had been suspected previously, but not proven. Sen. Paul is getting closer to uncovering a conspiracy that would indict many respected scientists and U.S. intelligence agencies in a cover-up that led to the deaths of seven million people.
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