You may remember the name Dr. Ralph Baric from the COVID madness years.
He was one of the many “experts” trotted out during the pandemic to give credibility to Anthony Fauci and company, and to trash anybody who questioned The Narrative™, especially those who suggested that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Well, unsurprisingly, that was not what he told the intelligence community when he briefed them on the origin of the virus. He made pretty clear that it didn’t appear to have a zoonotic origin and likely came from the lab. And he should know—he had done some work on coronaviruses in the lab and had warned officials there that they were not using sufficient biosafety measures for their research.
Prominent Virologist Warned Intelligence Community COVID-19 Could Have Leaked From Wuhan Lab. Then He Met With Fauci and Changed His Tune.https://t.co/0GMi41Hehh
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) November 4, 2025
This information was shared with the Washington Free Beacon by a whistleblower, who shared with them the PowerPoint deck that Baric used in his intelligence briefing, which closely mirrors the one he used to brief Congress later that year.
In fact, it was identical, but for the fact that he removed the information about the WIV and emphasized the theory that the virus came from a wet market.
A prominent U.S. virologist who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID-19 pandemic privately informed the U.S. intelligence community in January 2020 that the Chinese lab may be responsible for the outbreak. But in his public remarks to congressional staffers one month later—and after meeting with former White House health adviser Anthony Fauci—the researcher stayed mum about the Wuhan lab and lent credence to the discredited wet market theory.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill virologist Dr. Ralph Baric warned the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during a closed-door presentation with the agency’s Biological Sciences Experts Group on or around Jan. 29, 2020, that the Wuhan lab, which was conducting risky gain-of-function experiments on bat viruses similar to the one that causes COVID-19, may have accidentally released the virus into the human population. Baric’s presentation, which the Washington Free Beacon obtained from a whistleblower, went beyond mere speculation: Considered one of the world’s foremost experts on coronaviruses, Baric experimented with coronaviruses in 2015 with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s top researcher, Shi Zhengli. Later, in early 2024, he testified to House investigators that he had privately warned Shi that her lab lacked sufficient biosafety protections and that he always believed a lab leak origin was possible.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have put “expert” in quotation marks when it comes to COVID. After all, he really is one. I chose to do so because when he was speaking to the public during the pandemic, he didn’t act as an expert, but rather as a propagandist who told the public lies for the benefit of a regime.
I did not think US scientists would hide critical info about SARS-like virus research in Wuhan. But emails unearthed in the past 2 years suggest that a US scientist had received still unpublished coronavirus sequences from Wuhan.https://t.co/exAKX5uhur
— Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) November 6, 2025
“Experts” say what they believe to be true based on evidence and experience; propagandists say what they believe is helpful to a cause, regardless of what they believe.
Baric’s private presentation to the intelligence community in January 2020, which was first disclosed Friday by Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), was almost identical to a public briefing he delivered to the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus the following month on Feb. 26, 2020. For the public presentation, however, Baric removed the slides referencing the possibility that the virus could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Baric, during his private briefing, also downplayed the theory that a Wuhan wet market was responsible for the outbreak, noting that most of the first known cases of COVID-19 had no exposure to the market. He removed those slides as well and instead lent credibility to the wet market theory.
“From what I understand, bats are used in certain delicacy dishes and also used in medicinal medicines, so there’s a possibility that bat parts were in the market,” Baric said during his public congressional briefing.
Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright, one of the most prominent academic proponents of the lab leak theory, said it was no coincidence that Baric omitted his references to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in his public presentation. Ebright said Baric held a “highly unusual one-on-one meeting” with Fauci on Feb. 11, 2020, an appointment reflected in a copy of Fauci’s schedule obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request.
Moreover, Baric didn’t just lie about what he believed. He publicly trashed people who were saying what he believed to be true. That is Baghdad Bob-level BS, but unlike Baghdad Bob, who said stupid things as American tanks were rolling behind him, Baric was able to spout his BS without having to contradict evidence before our eyes. He could say “trust me,” and people did.
At the time, Fauci was quietly coordinating efforts to cast the lab leak theory as a baseless conspiracy. Fauci and former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins were also warned about the Wuhan lab’s potential role in the outbreak during a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call. But instead of heeding those warnings, Collins and Fauci, who led the federal agencies that funded gain-of-function research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, set out to cast discussions of lab origin of COVID-19 as a baseless conspiracy theory.
Collins lamented in an email exchange with Fauci the next day that discussion of a lab origin of COVID-19 “would do great potential harm to science and international harmony.” And Fauci, according to the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, prompted the creation of the infamous “Proximal Origin” paper published in Nature Medicine that sought to disprove claims the pandemic originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci later cited the paper during White House press briefings to downplay the lab leak theory.
Baric did not return a request for comment.
Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci were covering their behinds—they, after all, funded the Wuhan lab and hence the likely origin of a virus that killed millions.
But Baric? Was he just protecting his funding? His buddies? What were his motives? I’d like to know. And I would like a reckoning, please.
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