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This is Part 3 of a series. To read Part 1 click here. To read Part 2 click here.

Dr. Richard Ebright first found out that a SARS-like respiratory illness was spreading in Wuhan, China, on January 3, 2020.

As he opened his computer that day, he found a report on his ProMed email that described several cases of SARS-like pneumonia circulating in Wuhan.

This, in and of itself, was not new news. There had been reports circulating within the medical research community about this SARS-like illness in Wuhan for weeks.

The key new piece of information, according to the email, was that inside sources in China were saying that this new illness was being caused by a SARS-related coronavirus.

To Ebright, it was a pretty close call at the time as to which was more likely: a lab leak or a zoonotic origin.

Ebright’s first thought when he read this news was simple: Contrary to the claims of the Chinese government, this virus would obviously be transmissible from person to person.

His second thought, following immediately after, was equally simple: There was also obviously a possibility that this virus had escaped from one of the laboratories in Wuhan, including the the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“These laboratories had been the subject of discussion for five years prior to that,” Ebright told Blaze News.

Indeed, Ebright’s thought cannot have been unique. Everyone in the virology research community knew about the famous work that had been done in Wuhan by Dr. Shi, in collaboration with Dr. Ralph Baric, over the past several years.

So when a coronavirus that had genetic signatures that made it “(potentially) look engineered,” in the words of Dr. Kristian Andersen, Ebright’s concern about the possibility that the virus had escaped from the lab must have been shared by virtually everyone in the small group of people who were following the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic closely.

To Ebright, it was a pretty close call at the time as to which was more likely: a lab leak or a zoonotic origin. There simply was not enough evidence to make a concrete prediction either way.

He would soon watch, with very great disappointment, as a number of scientists who also did not have enough information to make a confident prediction nonetheless claimed that they did.

What came next was not a furious scramble to make sure that the world was safe but rather a furious scramble to make sure the world never found out about how close they came to suffering an H5N1 pandemic.

But while the whole sordid tale of the furious effort to suppress the lab-leak theory unfolded, America may have narrowly missed falling victim to another, far more deadly pandemic.

This one would not have started in Wuhan, China, but rather here at home, in Madison, Wisconsin.

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You may recall that in part 1 of this series, one of the first studies to force gain-of-function research into the consciousness of the American public was a study conducted by a team led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that caused the highly lethal H5N1 to be transmissible in ferrets.

At the time, the New York Times editorial board spoke for probably over 99% of the people in the world when it said, rather sensibly, that the virus “ought to be destroyed.”

Unfortunately, the researchers at the University of Wisconsin did not take the New York Times’ advice, and the world suffered an extremely close call as a result.

It turned out, however, that no such on-site quarantine room existed.

As the virus that would come to be known as SARS-CoV-2 was circulating quietly in Wuhan, hidden from the world by the Chinese authorities, a team of researchers was studying the H5N1 virus in a lab in Wisconsin.

Unbeknownst to the world, on December 3, 2019, one of the researchers studying this virus in the BSL-3 containment lab suffered a breach in his containment suit when the hose that connected his breathing apparatus came loose from his suit.

As detailed by investigative reporter Alison Young in her book “Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk,” what came next was not a furious scramble to make sure that the world was safe but rather a furious scramble to make sure the world never found out about how close they came to suffering an H5N1 pandemic.

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According to Young, incredibly, this was not even the first time this lab had suffered a breach of containment of this incredibly dangerous virus.

Back in 2013, in a moment of carelessness, one of Kawaoka’s assistants had inadvertently punctured his finger with a needle that was contaminated with the mutant H5N1 strain.

In response to the immense public scrutiny the ferret research had brought upon the NIH and upon Kawaoka’s lab in particular, the University of Wisconsin had promised the NIH that there were a number of fail-safes in place to ensure that even in the event of an accident, the public would be safe.

There is no way to ascertain how many members of the unsuspecting public the worker might have made contact with on the way to his home.

One of those fail-safes was supposed to be an on-site quarantine room that would house any worker who inadvertently suffered a breach.

It turned out, however, that no such on-site quarantine room existed.

Kawaoka’s team called the CDC for advice and were told that the breach should be treated as a “serious exposure.” The Wisconsin Department of Health told the University that the researcher should quarantine in isolation for 7-10 days and take regular Tamiflu.

The university followed this order — sort of. Instead of keeping the worker on site, officials instead sent him home to quarantine in place.

There is no way to ascertain how many members of the unsuspecting public the worker might have made contact with on the way to his home.

Nor is there any indication of whether his home was a stand-alone structure or apartment building, whether the researcher lived alone or with a family, or any number of other variables that would have made even quarantining at home a worthless measure.

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When the NIH, which had been funding this research, learned what had been done with the exposed worker, officials were furious and demanded an explanation from the university.

The university determined, apparently on its own initiative, that the breach of the worker’s containment suit was not a “significant exposure” and memory-holed the whole affair until officials belatedly filed, two full months later, a report with the NIH’s Office of Science Policy.

In response, the university actually had the temerity to complain about the requirement for an on-site quarantine facility. Officials complained that forcing staff to quarantine on site or in a hospital room would make them less likely to report breaches because they would be afraid of an unpleasant quarantine experience.

The NIH, in a rare moment of sensibleness, rejected these facially ludicrous complaints and threatened to pull all funding for the project if the university did not install a quarantine solution that was in keeping with the original promises to the NIH. The university folded and agreed to the NIH’s demands.

So when the second breach occurred in December 2019, Kawaoka and his team cannot have been honestly confused about what should have been done, which was to quarantine the worker on site for 7-10 days in isolation.

Instead, while the worker was initially placed in quarantine, a lab compliance worker released the worker from quarantine early.

According to Young’s investigation, it could not be determined whether “early” meant “after a few minutes” or “a few minutes early.” The university refused to respond to any questions regarding whether it consulted with anyone from the CDC, NIH, or Wisconsin Health Department before releasing the individual.

What is clear, however, is that the university did not notify the NIH, as officials were in theory required to do, after the breach occurred.

The university determined, apparently on its own initiative, that the breach of the worker’s containment suit was not a “significant exposure” and memory-holed the whole affair until officials belatedly filed, two full months later, a report with the NIH’s Office of Science Policy.

The events of the first six months of 2020 would change forever the way the world viewed Anthony Fauci.

When Young asked the NIH what were the consequences of failing to report this breach, she was told that the university was, effectively, given a talking-to. According to Young, the NIH “reminded the institution about its reporting responsibilities” and “noted that it should have been immediately reported to OSP.”

The university denied that this conversation ever happened. And at that point, given the state of the world in February 2020, the NIH moved on to other things.

And as we all sped into a world that would be forever changed by the COVID-19 pandemic, this sad affair constituted a pretty good representative sample of what the NIH considered to be acceptable handling of a potential biosafety outbreak.

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The events of the first six months of 2020 would change forever the way the world viewed Anthony Fauci. A man who had previously been a powerful but obscure bureaucrat who was viewed with distrust by many liberals because of his association with the Bush-Cheney biodefense program would instantly become a sainted hero of liberals.

The lens through which the world knew Richard Ebright would also soon change — but more on that later.

Given the state of knowledge at the time, no reasonable person could have disagreed with this assessment, certainly not with any level of certainty.

But as news of the unfolding SARS outbreak in China began to spread, it’s important to remember, from part 1 of this series, that Ebright had been, for two decades, a go-to source for mainstream media publications for comment on biosafety. From Reuters to the Associated Press to the Washington Post to the New York Times, when biosafety was in the news, Ebright was more often than not quoted.

On January 21, 2020, the Chinese government was forced to make an admission that Ebright had predicted with certainty would be coming: that the virus was spreading person-to-person and that the outbreak had begun in the same area as some of the world’s foremost coronavirus research labs.

This revelation turned the story from news that was largely contained to the biological research community to front-page news, of immediate concern to the general public.

And so when the media started to write about the new virus, they called Ebright, as they had done so often before. Not just mainstream media sources, but also publications that are more influential within the scientific community, including Science magazine.

Ebright’s initial reaction was measured and even. The article noted that Ebright had a “long history of raising red flags about studies with dangerous pathogens” but noted his belief that “the 2019-nCoV data are ‘consistent with entry into the human population as either a natural accident or a laboratory accident.’”

Given the state of knowledge at the time, no reasonable person could have disagreed with this assessment, certainly not with any level of certainty.

The third was the revelation that the closest known genetic relative to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, had been isolated and was in the collection at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

At this point, almost nothing was known about the origin of the outbreak, Chinese authorities were not being forthcoming, and it was definitely notable that the outbreak appears to have occurred in the same area as one of the world’s foremost coronavirus research labs.

Ebright told Blaze News that if pressed, at the time, he would have viewed the lab-leak scenario as slightly more likely, but there simply was not enough data to make a firm conclusion one way or another.

According to Ebright, at the time, there were only three data points from which one could draw a conclusion.

The first was the location of the outbreak itself. As noted by Ebright, “the outbreak emerged in a location that was more than 800 miles from the closest colonies of bats thought to harbor this type of virus, but right on the doorstep of laboratories that had been the subject of discussion for five years as having conducted research on coronaviruses that might start a pandemic outbreak.”

The second was the genetic sequence of the virus itself, which was published in late January 2020. According to Ebright, the sequence of the virus “had notable features but no features which would at that time have been unambiguous features of engineering. So it did not rule in or rule out engineering.”

The third was the revelation that the closest known genetic relative to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, had been isolated and was in the collection at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Beyond that, it was impossible to say. While the pieces did not conclusively prove a lab leak, they certainly strongly suggested that it was a real possibility.

Anyone who did not, at this point, accept the possibility that the pandemic might have started as the result of a lab leak was experiencing a healthy dose of what might euphemistically be called “epistemic closure.”

Further, the DARPA project proposal had showed that the EcoHealth/WIV team was planning, in 2019, to construct “consensus viruses,” which are hybrid viruses designed to have averaged optimized sequences for highest pandemic potential.

Enter the now-disgraced Peter Daszak, who was quoted opposite Ebright as saying, “Every time there’s an emerging disease, a new virus, the same story comes out: This is a spillover or the release of an agent or a bioengineered virus. It’s just a shame. It seems humans can’t resist controversy and these myths[.]”

Daszak wasn’t just content with doing PR work to Science, however. The fact that he was confronted by a reporter who called to ask him for comment on Ebright’s claim that a lab leak was equally as likely as a zoonotic spillover event apparently started his campaign to work behind the scenes to assemble a group of conspirators — featuring prominently Anthony Fauci — to discredit the possibility of a lab leak and paint anyone who suggested it was possible as a kook or a conspiracy theorist.

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Ebright’s conversion to a firm believer in the lab-leak theory was a gradual one.

Over time the accumulation of evidence, including the 2021 release of the EcoHealth Alliance reports on the organization’s activities in Wuhan, began to make the lab-leak theory look like the stronger and stronger choice.

But the key piece of evidence, in his mind, that cemented the lab-leak theory as the overwhelmingly likely choice was the Intercept’s report, in September 2021, that Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had submitted a proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that indicated that EcoHealth Alliance was seeking funding for a project to create a virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that had numerous features that matched exactly the genetic signatures of SARS-CoV-2.

This revelation would cement the lab-leak theory as the only plausible explanation in Ebright’s mind.

Not a single one of these sarbecoviruses would have a furin cleavage site.

“These documents showed that the researchers had proposed to construct viruses that were on a trajectory to yield SARS-CoV-2. They also showed, even more importantly, that by 2018, just one year before the outbreak, they had made very substantial progress along that trajectory and had isolated viruses that were able to efficiently replicate in human cells and had 10,000 times enhanced viral growth and pathogenicity in humanized mice,” Ebright told Blaze News.

Further, the DARPA project proposal had showed that the EcoHealth/WIV team was planning, in 2019, to construct “consensus viruses,” which are hybrid viruses designed to have averaged optimized sequences for highest pandemic potential.

The proposal specifically proposed to create a coronavirus with a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction, the exact site in the SARS-CoV-2 sequence where one was indeed found — presumably the very feature that caused Kristian Andersen to declare in the early days of the pandemic that the virus looked engineered.

But perhaps the most significant evidence to Ebright was, in fact, negative evidence. At the time that SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, it was the only SARS-related coronavirus (a subgenus known as sarbecoviruses) to have a furin cleavage site. This was interesting to Ebright but not dispositive, because at that time, there were only 12 known sarbecoviruses in the world.

“It was unusual, but not extraordinarily unusual,” Ebright told Blaze News. “One in a dozen is unusual and noteworthy, but it doesn’t meet the standard for statistical significance in science.”

However, over the subsequent months of the pandemic, the hunt for a zoonotic origin for the pandemic actually ended up finding extremely concrete proof for the lab-leak theory, because it led virologists to discover and sequence hundreds of sarbecoviruses found in nature. Scientists searching for a natural ancestor to SARS-CoV-2 would eventually discover and/or sequence over 800 sarbecoviruses in the months following the outbreak of the pandemic.

And so the work of tracking down leads that were visible to all in the early days was not done by scientists or government officials, as it should have been, but by a ragtag group of internet guerillas who called themselves the Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19, or DRASTIC.

Not a single one of these sarbecoviruses would have a furin cleavage site.

To Ebright this meant that the odds that this virus had occurred naturally had dropped to one in eight hundred, or less, and he was convinced.

In his mind, the evidence had reached a standard that would have sufficed for a conviction in criminal court: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

And as month after month went on with no animal reservoir ever being found for SARS-CoV-2, his certainty hardened even further.

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As Ebright slowly wound his way to the inexorable conclusion that gain-of-function research had caused a worldwide pandemic, as he had long predicted that it would, he watched with horror as other members of the scientific community, who should have known better, issued hasty and ill-formed pronouncements designed to quash the lab-leak theory — in spite of the fact that it was clearly too early for certainty on either side.

And so the work of tracking down leads that were visible to all in the early days was not done by scientists or government officials, as it should have been, but by a ragtag group of internet guerillas who called themselves the Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19, or DRASTIC.

As these sleuths showed more curiosity and willingness to conduct research than many scientists who actually worked in the field, Ebright was gripped by one feeling: disappointment.

A person who was airlifted into Richard Ebright’s Twitter feed in the years following the outbreak of COVID-19, without the benefit of two decades’ worth of context, might be forgiven for feeling puzzled at the level of anger Ebright often displays in his Twitter feed toward Fauci in particular.

“The scientific community had this information,” Ebright told Blaze News. “There were members of the scientific community who were drafters of the DARPA proposal, and not one of them stepped forward to provide information about the proposal and their plans. It was at best cowardly, and certainly it was complicit.”

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The tone of Ebright’s Twitter certainly came to indicate that his disappointment was resolving into bitterness.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Ebright has become something of a celebrity internet presence due to his strident and sometimes over-the-top blistering broadsides against the cabal of scientists who both funded and performed the gain-of-function research he had been warning about for years, including most especially Anthony Fauci.

A person who was airlifted into Richard Ebright’s Twitter feed in the years following the outbreak of COVID-19, without the benefit of two decades’ worth of context, might be forgiven for feeling puzzled at the level of anger Ebright often displays in his Twitter feed toward Fauci in particular.

His invective is generally short and to the point. In perhaps his most infamous tweet, he responded to an announcement that Case Western Reserve University was honoring Fauci by musing, “You may have missed the chance to hobnob with Pol Pot, but, for $300 to $50,000, you could hobnob with Fauci, whose policy violations on gain-of-function research likely killed 20 million.”

Only history will tell who is viewed more favorably: the person who likely bore a significant amount of blame for the destruction caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, or the person who was a bit impolite while pointing that out.

Ebright’s continual haranguing of the signatories of the various early papers that jumped the scientific gun on COVID-19 origins finally led them to send a whingeing letter to Ebright’s bosses, complaining that Ebright and his Rutgers colleague Bryce Nickels have “repeatedly engage[d] in behavior that not only disrespects the values of the scientific enterprise, but also poses a direct threat to the well-being and safety of us and our colleagues in the scientific community.”

Although the letter was summarily ignored by the Rutgers University administration, it was dutifully amplified by prominent liberal columnist Michael Hiltzik, who found Ebright’s comparison of Fauci to Pol Pot to be completely beyond the pale. Hiltzik, notably, did not find it beyond the pale to pen a column openly advocating for public humiliation of unvaccinated people who died of COVID-19.

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Ebright’s anger, which is admittedly palpable at times, would be well understood by anyone who honestly put themselves in Ebright’s shoes.

Here he was, having told anyone who would listen for 20 years that a lab leak was possible and that someday, gain-of-function research might well cause a global pandemic.

At every step along the way, his warnings had been pooh-poohed by the man who was almost solely responsible for the explosion and proliferation of this research, Anthony Fauci.

And now, in a twist fit for a dystopian Hollywood thriller, the very person who was probably most responsible for the pandemic was immediately made the hero of it and looked upon by many as being the only person who could save us from it.

The injustice of it would break the equanimity of even the calmest of people.

Given this, one would have expected that the gain-of-function research community might have felt compelled to pump the brakes on further risky research in order to ensure that nothing like the COVID-19 pandemic would happen again.

But beyond this, Ebright believes that if the scientific community had been more honest and forthcoming from the beginning, things might have been different. People who died might not have had to die.

Viewed in this light, Ebright’s reactions to the people he feels are responsible can only be considered the natural and appropriate response of someone who feels that another person has been responsible for a large number of deaths and untold economic destruction.

Only history will tell who is viewed more favorably: the person who likely bore a significant amount of blame for the destruction caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, or the person who was a bit impolite while pointing that out.

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For 14 seasons, FX’s long-running animated spy spoof series, “Archer,” followed the hilariously inept antics of its comically self-absorbed titular character, who bumbled through a series of espionage debacles.

The show featured a long-running gag about Archer’s inability to learn from his mistakes. Whenever one of Archer’s many character flaws caused a situation to go tragically sideways, Archer would say, “I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned here, but …” and then he would either trail off, uninterested, or be interrupted and forget that he was supposed to be learning a lesson.

In the weeks and months following the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 into the global population, as millions of people died and trillions of dollars were lost to economic devastation, the gain-of-function research community did their best impression of Archer: If there was a lesson to be learned, they sure didn’t know what it was.

The question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a zoonotic event or a lab leak is well-trod ground at this point, and this is not the space to relitigate it.

At this point, however, only the most foolhardy and willfully blind continue to absolutely rule out the possibility that the most devastating event in modern history was caused by a research accident. Even Anthony Fauci and Ralph Baric have conceded that it’s a real possibility.

Given this, one would have expected that the gain-of-function research community might have felt compelled to pump the brakes on further risky research in order to ensure that nothing like the COVID-19 pandemic would happen again.

One would be wrong.

On June 18, 2024, a final shoe dropped that should have been a wake-up call to the world that the risks being undertaken with our tax money are completely out of control.

In fact, according to Ebright, the pace of gain-of-function research has not slowed; it has in fact tripled, due mostly to the vastly increased number of projects concerning coronaviruses.

In short, the lesson the gain-of-function research community took away from a pandemic that was at least possibly started by gain-of-function research on coronaviruses was that we need much more gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.

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A few notable examples deserve mention.

In 2022, an NIAID pox virologist named Dr. Bernard Moss inadvertently provoked congressional and public ire when he blithely admitted to Science magazine that the NIH was doing in-house experiments involving endowing the West African variant of monkeypox with genes from a far more deadly strain, for reasons.

This experiment resulted in the creation of a mutant virus that would likely have been as much as ten times deadlier than the monkeypox strain that circulated in 2022-2023.

According to a congressional report released in 2024, when Congress began to investigate this study and what oversight was being performed on it, the NIH and NIAID — which claimed that the experiment never actually took place in spite of Moss’ comments — “repeatedly obstructed and misled” the committee about Moss’ experiment.

In January 2024, Chinese scientists in Beijing revealed that they had created a coronavirus variant called GX_P2V that killed 100% of humanized mice in a study. The study claimed that the creation of the virus was necessary to “underscore[] a spillover risk of GX_P2V into humans.” Left unsaid was that the risk would have been considerably lower if they had not created GX_P2V in the first place.

And on and on.

On June 18, 2024, a final shoe dropped that should have been a wake-up call to the world that the risks being undertaken with our tax money are completely out of control.

He was plunked down at a table only a few feet away from Robert Garry, one of the signatories of the largely discredited “Proximal Origins” paper and a frequent target of Ebright’s pointed online barbs.

Having failed to provide reasonable oversight of this risky research for 20 years, Congress finally mustered the courage in late 2023 to at least require the Department of Defense to tell lawmakers how much taxpayer money has been spent just by the Department of Defense funding gain-of-function research in China.

The response, which amounted to “we have no idea,” was no less alarming for having been completely expected by Ebright and others who have watched this sad debacle unfold.

After all, the government has been trying to hide how much money is being spent on these projects since the institution of the Obama-era moratorium in 2014. Why should officials stop now?

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A few days after my first conversation with Richard Ebright, he took a morning off from his duties at Rutgers. The reason was both simple and significant: He had been called before the Senate.

The Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was holding a hearing titled, “Origins of Covid-19: An examination of available evidence,” but it was understood that a significant portion of the hearing would be dedicated not only to this but to the dangers of gain-of-function research.

As the circus unfolded around him, he made his point, as he had made it so many times before: Research designed to make pathogens more dangerous and more transmissible serves no legitimate purpose and makes us all less safe.

The fact that such a hearing would be called at all in a Senate controlled by Democrats was evidence of the fact that finally, after a catastrophic pandemic followed by four years of playing ostrich with the threat of risky virus research, people were understanding that Ebright had been right all along.

The setting was a little awkward. Ebright arrived in an open-throated button-down striped shirt and sport coat, unadorned with a tie. He wore a set of wire-rimmed glasses that seem to form part of the unofficial uniform of the research scientist.

He was plunked down at a table only a few feet away from Robert Garry, one of the signatories of the largely discredited “Proximal Origins” paper and a frequent target of Ebright’s pointed online barbs.

This was not the first time Ebright had testified in front of Congress, but still it was obvious that Ebright spends his time day in and day out thinking about science, not about oratory or political causes.

Nonetheless, he acquitted himself well, speaking clearly and forthrightly about the dangers of lab-created pandemics in language that is understandable to ordinary people. He sat impassively as Garry awkwardly squirmed through his defense of the “Proximal Origins” paper.

Ebright believes that even within the scientific community, support for the status quo is virtually nonexistent.

As the circus unfolded around him, he made his point, as he had made it so many times before: Research designed to make pathogens more dangerous and more transmissible serves no legitimate purpose and makes us all less safe.

After a few hours, the cameras were turned off, the senators and their staffers filed out of the room, and at the end, one might say that nothing was changed, only the topic for the latest dog-and-pony show put on by an increasingly ineffectual Congress.

Ebright does not see it that way.

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After 24 years of beating the same drum without satisfactory results, it may surprise you to learn that Ebright’s primary feeling about his lifelong biosafety crusade is one of optimism.

Ebright believes that even within the scientific community, support for the status quo is virtually nonexistent.

When asked what percent of scientists support the current regulatory regime (or lack thereof) for these dangerous experiments, Ebright offered a blunt assessment: “Less than 1%. It’s very simple: If you’re one of the people who is receiving one of those three dozen [gain-of-function] grants, you’re going to be a strong supporter of it. If you’re not, you’re not. It’s as simple as that.”

But moreover, Ebright is optimistic that the political will finally exists, in a bipartisan fashion, to address this issue with meaningful legislation that has teeth, as opposed to meaningless policy guidance that the less than 1% will be free to ignore with impunity.

I didn’t mind. With one minor exception, he was pretty much always right. There was no point in stopping him from saying what he wanted to say.

Beyond that, there are pieces of evidence that the bipartisan political winds have shifted permanently in the direction of some legislative fix for the issue. The existence of a Democrat-chaired hearing that would call Richard Ebright as a witness is one of them.

Although he is clearly loath to let Fauci off the hook, he understands that the immediate political solution most likely involves decoupling this issue from holding the people who created it accountable — mostly including Fauci. It may not make sense, but then, nothing about Washington, D.C., does.

For his part, Ebright has no interest in letting Fauci off the hook, no matter his age or retirement status.

Twenty million people are dead. Trillions of dollars of damage has been caused to innocent people. Fauci cannot say that no one could see this coming, because Richard Ebright has been telling everyone for over 20 years that it was.

If there is no accountability for this, what can there be accountability for?

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Coda

Interviewing Richard Ebright is an interesting experience. For this series of pieces, Ebright graciously granted me two separate interview sessions, during which I asked him a total of about 50 questions.

I am pretty sure I actually got to finish fewer than ten of those questions. Like many brilliant scientists, Ebright has a brain that processes at a different speed from most of us. And so even though I am a relatively fast talker, Ebright almost always saw where I was going with a question before I was halfway through asking it and just butted in with his answer.

I didn’t mind. With one minor exception, he was pretty much always right. There was no point in stopping him from saying what he wanted to say.

Only once during the course of our interviews did I ask him a question that caused him to actually stop and think before he answered: I asked him whether he would change anything he’s done or said on Twitter since the start of the pandemic.

If you want navel-gazing over people’s feelings and sensitivities, you should probably consult a songwriter or a poet, not a research biochemist.

After a pause of about four seconds — which is a very long pause for Richard Ebright — he offered an answer, which is revealing. While many might have taken the opportunity to allow that they might have been less bombastic on Twitter with the benefit of hindsight, Ebright had a different response entirely.

“Well, yes, but it’s not what you’d expect,” Ebright said. “As the pandemic unfolded, I had forceful views not only on origin but also on the response. And some of the views on response did not stand the test of time well.”

Ebirght continued, “Most epidemiologists discussing the outbreak and particularly epidemiologists who wanted to point toward that the pandemic’s impact would be limited, and therefore that response measures could be limited, pointed to past outbreaks as being episodic and having waves … and I was very dismissive of that notion. I had very much thought that if it had been possible to suppress the early stages of the outbreak that we would not see recurrences, or if we saw recurrences they would be on a very small scale.

“And here I was looking to the experience of what had happened with SARS-CoV-1, which had a rapid outbreak, but it was contained. And there were subsequent small outbreaks, but all contained. After a one-and-a-half-year period, SARS-CoV-1 ended. And as we well know, that is not what has happened with SARS-CoV-2. It is still with us, and there continue to be waves followed by periods of lower incidence. So there I definitely was incorrect.”

In other words, his only concern was that he might have gotten the science wrong on a particular point.

This is, though, Richard Ebright to a T. If you want navel-gazing over people’s feelings and sensitivities, you should probably consult a songwriter or a poet, not a research biochemist.

Thirty years from now, when the COVID-19 pandemic will have hopefully ceased being an open wound caused by the greatest disaster to befall mankind in decades, the work of assembling the history of the pandemic for posterity will begin in earnest.

It seems far-fetched at this point that history will remember Richard Ebright as this story is told, although it should. Perhaps it isn’t the worst thing in the world: After all, history remembers Pol Pot and Stalin, while Dietrich Bonhoeffer is mostly a footnote.

But if, at that time, half the human race hasn’t been wiped out by a lab-created disease, Ebright will be high on the list of people who should be thanked. And perhaps, to those who know it, that will be enough.

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In late 2017, U.S. State Department officials in Beijing were treated to an alarming presentation by the Chinese government. There, a group of scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology gave a presentation on a new study they were about to release entitled “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses Provides New Insights into the Origin of SARS Coronavirus.”

What alarmed the diplomats about the presentation was that the researchers claimed they had discovered three new viruses that contained a “spike protein” that was especially effective at grabbing on to ACE2 receptors in human lung cells — which meant these particular viruses were extremely dangerous to humans and that they were being handled in a laboratory the diplomats knew almost nothing about.

The diplomats presciently asked if they could tour the lab and were happily obliged by the proud Chinese government.

Anyone who attempts to definitively determine how many gain-of-function projects were funded by the United States government during the period from 2014 through 2020 can only arrive at the most horrifying answer of all: No one knows.

What they saw on their tour horrified them, and they promptly cabled back to Washington a laundry list of concerns about inadequate equipment and training at the facility that they now knew housed extremely dangerous viruses. The lab’s shortcomings were not hidden — in fact, the technicians frankly admitted them to the visiting diplomats in an apparent bid for funding help from Washington.

Among other things that the diplomats said, however, was their estimation that the WIV was conducting gain-of-function research “on a much larger scale than was publicly disclosed.”

Although much of what has happened at the WIV is shrouded in secrecy, controversy, and active deceit, the most likely explanation for this explosion in undisclosed risky research is simple.

Our government failed, beginning in 2014 and continuing through 2020, to enforce the rules it placed on NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins — rules that were designed to ensure that gain-of-function research was slowed or stopped altogether.

In fact, thanks to Fauci and Collins, anyone who attempts to definitively determine how many gain-of-function projects were funded by the United States government during the period from 2014 through 2020 can only arrive at the most horrifying answer of all: No one knows.

The reason for that is simple: Fauci and Collins designed a system that obscured the number of such projects from anyone who might provide meaningful oversight over their work.

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After the string of debacles that plagued the community conducting research on dangerous viruses in 2014, the action taken by the Obama administration could not have been clearer — although you would not know it from watching Fauci answer questions in front of Congress.

More — much more — deserves to be said about Baric later. But his frank admission in the waning days of 2014 indicates that there was no real mystery to anyone about what the Obama administration officials wanted — and thought they were getting — when the moratorium was instituted.

In a policy announced October 17, 2014, by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, the administration declared, “Following recent biosafety incidents at Federal research facilities, the U.S. Government has taken a number of steps to promote and enhance the Nation’s biosafety and biosecurity, including immediate and longer-term measures to review activities specifically related to the storage and handling of infectious agents.”

The policy was expressly designed to encompass all “gain-of-function” studies, which were defined simply and broadly enough as studies that “aim to increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility.”

To be even clearer, the announced policy went on to state, “U.S. Government will institute a pause on funding for any new studies that include certain gain-of-function experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses. Specifically, the funding pause will apply to gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.”

To any scientist of even modest intelligence, it cannot have been a mystery what sorts of studies were supposed to be paused while this moratorium was in place.

In a fatal mistake, the Obama administration “concluded it had addressed the subject and turned its attention elsewhere,” according to Dr. Richard Ebright. “Collins and Fauci were able to use the lack of attention to undermine and nullify the policy.”

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The policy was certainly clear enough to perhaps the most prominent “gain-of-function” researcher in the world, Dr. Ralph S. Baric. Baric is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina and one of the central figures in the controversy over the origins of COVID-19.

In this regard, the Obama administration appears to have completely misunderstood Collins’ and Fauci’s nature.

Baric has authored hundreds of scientific papers, and since 1986, his lab has received over $93 million from the NIAID to fund his research projects. A 2014 NPR profile of Baric described him as “probably the foremost coronavirus biologist in the United States and one of the best in the world.”

Baric certainly understood immediately that the announced policy ought to apply to all of his work. As he told NPR at the time, “It took me 10 seconds to realize that most [of my lab’s research projects] were going to be affected.”

More — much more — deserves to be said about Baric later. But his frank admission in the waning days of 2014 indicates that there was no real mystery to anyone about what the Obama administration officials wanted — and thought they were getting — when the moratorium was instituted.

Perhaps the only person who believed there was wiggle room was, of course, Anthony Fauci.

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The fatal flaw in the moratorium was a clause granting the heads of agencies the ability to make exemptions to it “if head of funding agency determines research is urgently necessary to protect public health or national security.”

In this regard, the Obama administration appears to have completely misunderstood Collins’ and Fauci’s nature or their apparent belief that all such research was “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security,” because by all accounts, virtually every gain-of-function study that applied for an exemption during this time period received one.

By Ebright’s count, this means that dozens of studies were fully funded and approved in spite of the alleged pause.

Ebright believes that the reason Fauci and Collins acted this way was because of a posture that anyone who has watched them on television is familiar with: They believed they knew better than the dumb old policymakers who were trying to constrain them. “They made that clear many times that these are ignorant people calling for second-guessing of scientists.”

Fauci demonstrated this just weeks ago. At his most recent session of congressional testimony, Fauci faced a series of increasingly incredulous questions from members of Congress who sought to understand why Fauci has repeatedly claimed under oath that his agency did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Fauci retreated to a familiar refrain. Said Fauci, “According to the regulatory and operative definition of [Proposed Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens], the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” In other words, according to Fauci’s own understanding of the regulations governing gain-of-function research, the research funded by now-suspended NIH contractor EcoHealth Alliance did not qualify.

The Washington Post reporters got a taste of what it’s like to try to nail Fauci down on this question when they asked Fauci and Collins a fairly simple question: How many gain-of-function research studies has your agency approved since 2012?

Of course, Fauci’s habit of defining regulations that would constrain his power out of existence is not a new phenomenon for him.

As even the Washington Post was forced to admit in a lengthy 2021 piece, scientists who have worked for and with Fauci since the pause was initiated in 2014 have sounded the same refrain: When faced with a ban on funding “gain-of-function” research, Fauci simply by default resorted to a definition of “gain of function” that would not entail whatever research he wanted to fund.

After years of stonewalling and hair-splitting, NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak finally admitted last month what Fauci would not: that under the “generic” definition of the term, the NIH had, in fact, funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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The Washington Post reporters got a taste of what it’s like to try to nail Fauci down on this question when they asked Fauci and Collins a fairly simple question: How many gain-of-function research studies has your agency approved since 2012?

As characterized by the Washington Post, “Asked to provide the number of projects funded, Collins and Fauci suggested the answer would hinge on how the work was defined in a given year.”

Not being satisfied with that answer, the reporters asked an NIH spokesperson to provide the answer, whereupon they were told that “relevant information could be found in an agency database that archives tens of thousands of grants each year.”

However, the reporters noted, the database they were pointed to did not, in fact, designate which grants were for gain-of function research at all.

Their experience confirmed what Ebright told Blaze News: that it is simply not possible for even a well-informed and savvy citizen to ascertain what gain-of-function research is being conducted with his tax dollars at all, and thus it is impossible to know how many research projects were improperly continued during the period of the ostensible pause.

The federal database listing research grants contains over 50,000 entries at any given time, of which Ebright estimates only a couple dozen pertain to gain-of-function research — and those gain-of-function research studies are not labeled as such in any way.

In fact, it is safe to say, given the current controversy, that grant writers do their best to avoid making their grants appear to fund gain-of-function research, making the task of searching for them even more impossible for a layperson.

That is not to say, however, that it would have been impossible, or even difficult or unusual, to set up a system that would allow for tracking of gain-of-function studies. In fact, such categorical tracking is the norm in the scientific grant-writing world, due to legislative and regulatory requirements that require reporting back to Congress or other entities regarding activities undertaken with various categories of funding.

“There are what are referred to as NIH spending categories,” Ebright explained. “There are searchable spending categories for all different terms. For example, search on biodefense, you can find a total portfolio for biodefense. You can do the same on any pathogen or any disease or even protein or nucleic acid.”

In spite of the moratorium (and later the P3CO framework), however, no such category was ever created for gain-of-function research. Ebright views this, quite reasonably, as a deliberate choice.

“The reason these categories do not exist is that the NIH declines to identify projects as involving those, because if it identified projects as involving those, you could not nullify the P3CO policy and fail to provide the proposals to the HHS secretary for review,” Ebright told Blaze News.

In fact, it is safe to say, given the current controversy, that grant writers do their best to avoid making their grants appear to fund gain-of-function research, making the task of searching for them even more impossible for a layperson.

Finding those few needles in such an enormous haystack is a task that frankly no one can undertake. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the system is deliberately designed to hide this research from the public and regulators alike.

Beginning on January 20, 2017, Donald Trump would become at least the third consecutive president to fail to understand the need to exercise proper oversight over Fauci and Collins.

As the Post was forced to admit, many studies that appear to have clearly met the definition of “gain-of-function” research announced in the pause were funded and continued even after the pause was announced. More, they noted that former HHS official Dr. Robert Kadlec admitted, “Frankly, we didn’t have the scientific wherewithal” to even evaluate which studies should be subjected to the pause.

The best we can do, therefore, is guess. Ebright estimates that around a dozen or so projects would have been active in any given year prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, which comports with the Washington Post’s investigation.

This was the same pace at which studies were conducted prior to the institution of the pause, which means that the so-called “pause” did not even slow down the pace of gain-of-function studies, much less actually pause them.

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Beginning on January 20, 2017, Donald Trump would become at least the third consecutive president to fail to understand the need to exercise proper oversight over Fauci and Collins.

In this regard, Trump was hampered by rampant instability in the Department of Health and Human Services, particularly at the top of the agency. His first nomination for HHS secretary, Tom Price, resigned about six months into the job. Price was replaced by two interim directors who lasted a combined four months. A permanent HHS secretary was really not found until Alex Azar was confirmed in late January 2018.

During the instability of 2017, Fauci and Collins prevailed upon HHS officials to replace the moratorium — which they were ignoring anyway — with the “HHS Framework for Guiding Funding Decisions about Proposed Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” which would come to be known as the P3CO framework.

In theory, the P3CO framework relaxed the rules imposed by the 2014-2017 moratorium, which was supposed to have prevented this research from going forward at all.

In actuality, if the P3CO framework had been followed, it would have made Fauci and Collins’ life much more difficult, because it required secretary-level review of all research that fit within its framework. It also, at least in theory, required a stringent risk-benefit analysis of all projects before funding began.

During a period when it can be safely assumed that dozens of projects were funded that increased the transmissibility or pathogenicity of viruses covered by the P3CO framework, a grand total of one of these projects was ever submitted for review to the committee.

However, by all accounts, the P3CO framework was an even greater failure as a check on gain-of-function research than the moratorium had been. There were two principal reasons for this.

First, the P3CO framework narrowed the definition of what constituted gain-of-function research. The previous three years had shown that Anthony Fauci did not need help narrowing the definition of gain-of-function research, but courtesy of Trump’s HHS, he got it anyway.

Second, and more importantly, both Fauci and Collins were committed to entirely avoiding the independent review the P3CO research called for.

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“Although [the P3CO framework] looked effective on paper, in practice, it never even came into existence,” Ebright told Blaze News. “It didn’t come into existence because Collins and Fauci deliberately nullified the P3CO policy … by not identifying projects and forwarding them to the HHS secretary to review.”

Ebright’s contention is borne out by the evidence. In the entire three-year period between the institution of the P3CO framework and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, only three projects were ever even submitted for review, two of which were simply grandfathered in based on previous approvals.

In other words, during a period when it can be safely assumed that dozens of projects were funded that increased the transmissibility or pathogenicity of viruses covered by the P3CO framework, a grand total of one of these projects was ever submitted for review to the committee.

One staffer, expressing amazement that only two projects had ever actually gone through P3CO review, stated openly, “I’ll just probably be more frank than may be appropriate — I think [our definition of gain of function] is too narrow.”

If you were curious as to what that review entailed, how thorough it was, or what it concluded, you are out of luck. As noted by the Washington Post in 2021, all of the work the committee has “performed” is confidential, and the government has refused to release even the names of the people who have served on the committee, much less any minutes of meetings they may have had.

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Even the internal staffers at the NIH privately admitted that projects that should have been reviewed under the P3CO framework were not being reviewed. The Washington Post reviewed video of a January 23, 2020, meeting (in the very earliest days of the pandemic) in which HHS staff were understandably nervous about gain-of-function research, given the recent reports of a new virus circulating in the vicinity of one of the world’s foremost virus research labs.

One staffer, expressing amazement that only two projects had actually gone through P3CO review, stated openly, “I’ll just probably be more frank than may be appropriate — I think [our definition of gain of function] is too narrow.”

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Part of the reason that Fauci and Collins felt so free to disregard both the moratorium and the P3CO framework was that they lacked the force of law. Because they were issued as sub regulatory guidance, neither Fauci, nor Collins, nor anyone else faced civil or criminal penalties for disregarding them. Worst-case scenario, if someone found out, was that they could be fired.

“There are laws for research with fissile materials, research that produces hazardous waste. But remarkably, the research category that is the most dangerous of all, the only one that has a truly existential risk, has only advisory guidelines.”

“All of the oversight that has existed for biosafety has been advisory only. None has involved a law or a rule; everything has been guidance or policy frameworks. That means that when one nullifies the policy, one is not breaking the law; one simply is failing to follow policy guidance,” Ebright told Blaze News.

Bizarrely, there is a more stringent and enforceable set of laws on the books with respect to animal cruelty in research than there is with respect to experimentation on viruses that could potentially wipe out the human population on earth.

“We don’t handle vertebrate research this way,” Ebright continued. “There are laws. We don’t handle human subjects research that way. There are laws. There are laws for research with fissile materials, research that produces hazardous waste. But remarkably, the research category that is the most dangerous of all, the only one that has a truly existential risk, has only advisory guidelines.”

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We know now that during the period between 2017 and 2020, Fauci and Collins took advantage of this situation to ensure that all research dollars continued to flow uninterrupted and without meaningful oversight, including of course one specific set of research that deserves our special attention: the research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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The research conducted at the WIV with taxpayer dollars may or may not have started the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is certainly a compelling case study in the ways Fauci, Collins, and the NIAID funding apparatus used subterfuge, willful ignorance, and bureaucratic indifference to fund research that even the world’s leading gain-of-function researcher called “irresponsible” in testimony to congressional investigators.

In real life, no one from the NIH or NIAID appears to have been checking to see if EcoHealth was actually doing any of these things until its involvement with the WIV and possible connection to the pandemic became the subject of intense public scrutiny.

Some of the research conducted at the WIV was funded by NIH grantee EcoHealth Alliance, which is headed by one of the world’s foremost purveyors of actual disinformation, Peter Daszak. Prior to the company’s suspension, EcoHealth received millions of dollars per year from the NIAID to distribute for virus research.

On paper, EcoHealth Alliance was supposed to supervise its subgrantees to ensure compliance with all HHS regulations and guidance, which would have included both the 2014 moratorium and the 2017 P3CO framework.

In real life, no one from the NIH or NIAID appears to have been checking to see if EcoHealth was actually doing any of these things until its involvement with the WIV and possible connection to the pandemic became the subject of intense public scrutiny.

EcoHealth Alliance now faces debarment for, among other things, failing to supervise research at the WIV and failing to immediately stop the research that was occurring at the WIV when it became clear that the lab was conducting gain-of-function research in violation of the terms of its grant, which was issued during the moratorium.

The NIH might submit the case of EcoHealth as proof of the fact that its system worked, except for one problem: No one at the NIH knew it was occurring for years after it began. The NIH did not even notice that EcoHealth had failed to submit its annual report for two years until congressional investigators brought it up.

Had the COVID-19 pandemic never occurred, it seems highly likely that no one would ever have noticed that the money passed by EcoHealth to the WIV was being used for gain-of-function research. Even the alarming cables from the State Department in 2017 did not motivate EcoHealth, the NIH, or the NIAID to intervene and demand accountability from the WIV scientists.

Although, as noted above, Baric immediately realized in 2014 that almost all of his research should be subject to the pause, he perhaps unsurprisingly was not content to let his millions of dollars in federal funding dry up without a fight.

Any oversight program that merely locks the barn door after the horse has already escaped is at best a cold comfort when dealing with deadly infectious pathogens, as over 20 million dead people can now attest.

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To understand how the research could have progressed to the point that it did in the WIV without intervention, one of the most unlikely sources of insight is Dr. Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina researcher who is perhaps the foremost coronavirus researcher in the world and a leading proponent of gain-of-function research.

Baric has been one of the most enigmatic figures in the debate over the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. As emails unearthed by U.S. Right to Know in 2020 revealed, Baric was one of the small group of scientists, including Fauci, Collins, Britain’s Jeremy Farrar, and the now-disgraced Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, who understood that they would be at the epicenter of blame if it were discovered that gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible for the emerging COVID-19 pandemic.

However, while others (including most notably Daszak) responded to this threat by orchestrating a dishonest public smear campaign against proponents of the lab-leak theory, Baric instead has mostly, as the saying goes, “gone turtle.” Baric has consistently refused comment to any and all members of the media, including, on numerous occasions, Blaze News.

While there can be no doubt that Baric was one of many scientists who worked behind the scenes to shape the scientific community’s messaging about the lab-leak theory, in public he has been as impassive and silent as a sphinx.

Even though on its face this research fell squarely within the definition of the moratorium announced by the Obama administration, Baric was inexplicably granted an almost immediate exemption to the moratorium, and his research resumed with full federal funding.

There’s good reason for Baric’s reticence, and that traces back to his relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s head coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli.

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Although, as noted above, Baric immediately realized in 2014 that almost all of his research should be subject to the pause, he perhaps unsurprisingly was not content to let his millions of dollars in federal funding dry up without a fight.

He wrote a letter to the NIH’s biosecurity board protesting that gain-of-function research was a “documented, powerful tool” and arguing specifically that his research, which he claimed was aimed at developing a universal SARS vaccine, should be allowed to continue.

Baric specifically stated that his lab was creating artificial SARS-like viruses that would explore how coronaviruses in the wild might evolve to attack human cells, ostensibly to study how vaccines might be developed that could teach human immune cells to fend off SARS-like diseases.

Even though on its face this research fell squarely within the definition of the moratorium announced by the Obama administration, Baric was inexplicably granted an almost immediate exemption to the moratorium, and his research resumed with full federal funding.

On at least one occasion, though, Baric was effectively made to talk, in a January 2024 interview with investigators for the House Select Committee investigating the pandemic’s origins — and what he had to say was illuminating indeed.

Although this research project was limited, and Baric claims that no actual, physical research on the project took place in Wuhan, it clearly inspired Shi and her colleagues to expand their foray into this risky research, without expanding their safety precautions in the process.

According to contemporary reports, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Baric became competitors of sorts, with WIV scientists adapting (some might say stealing) Baric’s gain-of-function methods to do research on new chimeric coronaviruses.

So when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it was natural for many to question Baric’s potential involvement with the research that may have caused it. In the face of increasingly intense scrutiny, Baric remained silent and impassive.

On at least one occasion, though, Baric was effectively made to talk, in a January 2024 interview with investigators for the House Select Committee investigating the pandemic’s origins — and what he had to say was illuminating indeed.

Almost right off the rip, Baric noted that he had concerns about the safety conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He testified that when he first read some of the papers discussing Shi’s 2012 work on coronaviruses at the WIV, the papers were “very vague about safety conditions.”

When he later learned that the lab was doing work on these viruses under BSL-2 conditions, rather than under a higher level of safety precautions, he thought that was “irresponsible” — to such a degree that he eventually signed on to a paper calling for further investigation, even though such further investigation might well implicate him and his lab.

Daszak, who had been out in the public telling anyone who would listen that the lab-leak theory was a crock only believed in by kooks, emailed Baric attempting to change his mind, leading Baric to call Daszak’s attempts at persuasion an insult to his intelligence and further summarize them as “a load of BS.”

Shi agreed, and the two began a research project that would be fully funded by NIH dollars, with the approval of Fauci, and continued after the moratorium was announced in spite of the ostensible explicit prohibition on funding of exactly this sort of research.

As to whether Baric or anyone else alerted anyone at the NIH or NIAID that gain-of-function research was occurring in a facility that the world’s leading coronavirus gain-of-function researcher called unsafe and “irresponsible,” we can only guess.

We can also only guess whether Fauci and Collins would have listened, if they had been told.

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What, exactly, was the joint Baric/WIV project that drew everyone’s attention in the early days of the pandemic?

Back before the moratorium was announced, Baric was working on a collaboration with China’s “bat woman,” Shi Zhengli, a lead researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Shi, who had been collecting coronavirus samples from bat species for years, found a coronavirus in 2012 that she called SHC014.

According to a 2021 article in the MIT technology review, Baric approached Shi in 2013 and asked her for the genetic data on SHC014. He said he wanted to take the “spike” gene from SHC014 and transplant it to a copy of the SARS virus he already possessed in his lab, in order to make a new chimeric virus that would demonstrate whether the spike protein of SHC014 was capable of attaching to human cells.

Baric refused to answer our requests for comment in 2021, but in January 2024 he finally broke his silence on this question during his interview with House investigators and made a completely different, and explosive, claim.

Shi agreed, and the two began a research project that would be fully funded by NIH dollars, with the approval of Fauci, and continued after the moratorium was announced in spite of the ostensible explicit prohibition on funding of exactly this sort of research.

The results of their study were published in 2015 under the title, “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.”

The acknowledgements of the study acknowledged that it had been funded by the NIAID and also made the following amazing admission: “Experiments with the full-length and chimeric SHC014 recombinant viruses were initiated and performed before the [gain-of-function] research funding pause and have since been reviewed and approved for continued study by the NIH.”

In other words, the study’s authors publicly admitted in their published paper that the NIH had approved the continuation of their research in spite of the pause. Other aspects of the study should have raised alarm bells inside the NIAID and the NIH but did not — including the fact that the viral sequence for the chimeric virus researchers had created was not deposited in the NIH’s genetic sequence database at the time the study was published, in contradiction of the journal’s own reporting standards and accepted scientific practice.

Five years later, several months after the pandemic started, the study’s authors finally issued a stunning correction to their piece and claimed that they had rectified the error by depositing the sequence in the NIH database.

Back in 2021, when my colleague Chris Pandolfo and I wrote a series of stories on the possible origins of COVID-19, we contacted Nature and were told at the time, “Maintaining the integrity of the scientific record is of primary importance to us as, and as soon as we became aware of this issue, we worked with the authors to publish a correction.”

In other words, according to the journal’s editors, the omission of the genetic sequence was an embarrassing error that they were happy to correct.

Baric refused to answer our requests for comment in 2021, but in January 2024 he finally broke his silence on this question during his interview with House investigators and made a completely different, and explosive, claim.

He claimed that he did not deposit the genetic sequence for SHC014 in the NIH’s public database because people at the NIH and Nature – presumably with Fauci’s blessing — asked him to help keep SHC014’s genetic sequence secret from his Chinese research partners.

These questions were not on the minds of Fauci and Collins during the course of the early days of the pandemic. Rather, according to Baric, they were focused on something else entirely.

According to Baric, they took this precaution “in collaboration with discussions with NIH, with our program officer, and the journal. And to some extent, it was a natural extension for — in response to the transmissible flu studies and whether or not the virus sequences should be made available.”

If true, this provides at least a plausible explanation for Baric’s failure to upload the genetic sequence, but it raises an even more pertinent question: If the NIH was concerned enough to literally hide the genetic sequence Baric created from his own research partner, why did the NIH not kill the research project altogether? And why had the agency funded it in the first place?

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These questions were not on the minds of Fauci and Collins during the course of the early days of the pandemic. Rather, according to Baric, they were focused on something else entirely.

Among other things Baric said during the course of the interview with House investigators, he revealed that he attended a February 11, 2020, meeting with Fauci and others in the early days of the pandemic.

As the world’s leading coronavirus researcher, Baric recalls that he was not asked about the best ways to fight this new, novel coronavirus but rather about his 2015 research with Shi and whether it should have been paused under the Obama moratorium.

“I think you have to look at it from my perspective,” Baric told investigators. “Which is, I’m being called to talk about a paper I published on the gain-of-function regulation. And I’m freaked out that perhaps I didn’t do the paperwork right. So I was focused on that.”

Among the internet sleuths who have been trying to piece together the story of the origins of COVID-19 since its early days, one email from Dr. Anthony Fauci is perhaps the most well-known part of the lore.

Baric’s admission was revealing. Even before the public had any awareness that gain-of-function research might potentially be implicated in the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci was certainly aware that it might become implicated and was clearly motivated to make sure that his backside was covered.

The reason for that is simple: Dr. Richard Ebright.

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Among the internet sleuths who have been trying to piece together the story of the origins of COVID-19 since its early days, one email from Dr. Anthony Fauci is perhaps the most well-known part of the lore.

That email, which was unearthed by U.S. Right to Know, was sent on February 1 by Fauci to his principal deputy, Hugh Auchincloss, telling him in almost palpable panic, “It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on. … Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward to you now. You will have tasks today that must be done.”

Most proponents of the lab-leak theory believe, with good reason, that this email signaled the beginning of Fauci’s efforts to assemble a coordinated response to the emerging lab-leak theory. What, though, was the study and accompanying email? Well, the study was Baric’s and Shi’s collaborative 2015 study on coronaviruses, which stated in its acknowledgement that it was funded by the NIAID.

The Science article that kicked off the discussion, however, contained a prominent quote by Fauci’s old antagonist, Dr. Richard Ebright. Ebright was quoted in the article as saying that the early data was “consistent with entry into the human population as either a natural accident or a laboratory accident.”

Ebright’s balanced take was followed immediately by a virtually hyperventilating self-serving denial from Daszak, who was already perfecting his technique of defending his work by insulting everyone who questioned it.

Against this, a few things should be noted that Baric deserves credit for.

It isn’t difficult, however, to put the puzzle pieces together on what kicked off the largely discredited campaign to suppress the lab-leak theory: This guy Richard Ebright was talking to the press again, and they appeared to be listening.

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But let’s revisit Dr. Baric. Some of Baric’s actions since the start of the pandemic have been subject to unflattering scrutiny, for good reason. It definitely appears that Baric, who was well aware of the conflicts of interest inherent in what he was doing, was permitted to participate in the authorship of papers that exonerated his work, even though those papers did not list him as a co-author.

This was, by all accounts, a breach of scientific publishing ethics on the part of all involved. And it is definitely appropriate to question the wisdom of Baric’s entire research career, given what has happened since 2020.

Against this, a few things should be noted that Baric deserves credit for.

First, it seems clear that his laboratory, at least, was safer than the Wuhan Institute of Virology. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, it has never yet been responsible for a leak or other accident that has imperiled the public. Whatever else might be said about the paper Baric co-authored with Shi in 2015, at the very least that research was conducted in his laboratory.

Baric’s comments to House investigators mirrored those he made in an email he sent to Daszak that was surprising in its bluntness.

Second, to his credit, he appears to have been perhaps the only scientist involved in the early coordination effort who realized the inappropriateness of the effort, led by Daszak and Fauci adviser Richard Morens, to unlawfully avoid the eventual discovery of their emails via FOIA requests.

And finally, Baric’s testimony to House investigators was almost shockingly frank in its condemnation of the research that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been doing since his collaboration with Shi, which he viewed as being done under unsafe conditions, calling the decision to continue doing work culturing pathogens in a BSL-2 laboratory “irresponsible” and admitting, even though he still believed at the time that the pandemic likely had a natural origin, that the decision to conduct these experiments under these unsafe conditions made the lab-leak theory a plausible explanation.

Baric’s comments to House investigators mirrored those he made in an email he sent to Daszak that was surprising in its bluntness.

“Your [sic] being told a bunch of BS. Bsl2 w negative pressure, give me a break… Yes china [sic] has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS,” Baric intoned.

In other words, Baric knew that during the period of the supposed moratorium, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was performing experiments that he considered to be unsafe, using federal dollars, and that no one was doing anything to stop it.

What we don’t know is how many other EcoHealth Alliance companies were out there, doling out money to unsafe labs and exercising no or little oversight over the projects they were funding.

But soon enough, the world would have reason to ask. And the answers would prove to be less than satisfying.

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Blaze News managing editor Leon Wolf, who’s usually behind the scenes, found himself on “The Glenn Beck Program” this morning.

This rare occurrence is due to an even rarer occurrence when Dr. Richard Ebright — a molecular biologist who’s long avoided the public eye, preferring to speak mostly in esoteric circles — agreed to an interview with Wolf.

His conversation with Dr. Ebright is laid out in detail in his latest article “Lab wars: Inside one Democrat’s 20-year crusade to save the world from Anthony Fauci — Part 1: 2001-2014.” Wolf appeared on Glenn’s program to talk about this article.

This Doctor Warned About Fauci 20 Years Ago. Will We Listen Before It’s Too Late?

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“There’s been a lot of discussion about gain-of-function research, and I wanted to get an understanding,” says Wolf.

For those unfamiliar with the term, gain-of-function research is the practice of tampering with organisms (i.e. viruses) to alter their biological function (i.e. increase virulence, transmissibility, etc.).

The deeper Wolf dove into the research — including reports dating all the way back to 2001 — “there was one name that continued to pop up over and over and over again.”

“His name is Dr. Richard Ebright,” and it turns out he’s been warning people about Anthony Fauci “for two decades.”

After 9/11, as the fear of bioweapons mounted, Anthony Fauci began touting gain-of-function research, claiming that it would make us safer. Dr. Ebright, however, claimed the opposite — that it would be our demise.

“Ebright’s position, which I think has been vindicated, is that the more biological agents that you put in the hands of researchers, the more dangerous — and not less dangerous — it would make it because historically (and this is true), most biological attacks have not been carried out by terrorists; they’ve been carried out by people who are researchers,” says Wolf, noting that Ebright also correctly predicted that an “authorized government researcher” was responsible for the 2001 Anthrax outbreak.

Fast forward to 2020, and Ebright’s prediction that Fauci’s obsession with gain-of-function research would culminate into a catastrophe of epic proportions came true.

And yet during the pandemic, “Fauci [convinced] the world that he’s somehow the good guy in all this,” says Wolf.

However, four years have passed since COVID swept the globe, and skepticism regarding the virus’ origins are at an all-time high.

Perhaps the world is finally ready to hear Dr. Ebright.

To learn more about Fauci’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic, check out “The Coverup,” BlazeTV’s new docuseries that deep dives into the origins of COVID-19, as well as the collusion between the government, the media, academics, and public health bureaucrats to ensure the narrative surrounding the virus remained untouchable.

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