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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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The evidence continues to mount that the most likely source of the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was not a wet market as was originally claimed. The evidence likewise continues to mount that the research involved in the leak was likely gain-of-function research that was funded, at least in part, with our own tax dollars.

While much of the world has only recently woken up to this reality, one man, Dr. Richard Ebright, has been warning us for 20 years that this day was coming.

For 20 years, his warnings have largely been ignored, primarily thanks to Dr. Anthony Fauci.

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To most Americans, even those who follow the news closely, Fauci was helicoptered into their consciousness out of total obscurity in early 2020, when he became the public face of the government’s pandemic response. In many ways, though, Fauci could have been yanked out of central casting to play the role of television family doctor for the whole country — an image he carefully cultivated to project an air of competence and confidence to a shaken nation.

What most people did not know, though, was that for years, Fauci had been dogged by a very different sort of doctor — a researcher from Rutgers University who shunned the camera and preferred to keep his opinions in print. A man who made it clear with his appearance and his mannerisms that he never wanted to be an activist. A registered Democrat who supported Biden to the point of putting a Biden sign in his front yard, Ebright had always been convinced of one simple thing that he viewed to be above the petty fray of partisan politics: the government should not be spending our tax dollars to fund dangerous research on making viruses more deadly.

For years, Ebright and Fauci carried out a silent war, waged in print, visible mostly only to members of the small community of research scientists who conduct serious chemical and biological research. Over and over again the same refrain played out: Ebright warned the public that this research was making the public less safe, and Fauci insisted it was making the public more safe.

As we know now, Ebright was almost certainly right. However, it has taken four years — thanks to the concerted efforts of Fauci and his team — for the public to slowly come around to that realization.

But to understand where we are, it is first necessary to understand how we got here.

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Countless ink, both real and digital, has been spent examining Fauci’s every move taken since those fateful early days in 2020. Relatively little has been spent examining Fauci’s actions prior to 2020.

“[Dick Cheney] found one agency and one person willing to take that role… he found Anthony Fauci.”

Those actions, which are still largely shrouded in obscurity, may turn out to have been far more consequential than anything Fauci has done since he first appeared at the infamous press conference with former President Trump. You see, for the last two decades, Fauci has been by far the most important defender of what might be fairly called a bioweapons research program that the public now knows — albeit imperfectly — as “gain-of-function” research.

The U.S. government started the ball rolling on this dangerous research in the waning days of 2001. As you may recall, the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11 were followed almost immediately by a series of high-profile anthrax attacks, in which prominent individuals in the U.S. were mailed envelopes with suspicious white powder that later tested positive for anthrax.

The Bush administration, led by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, became convinced that the government’s readiness to face bioweapons threats was weak and responded by prevailing upon Congress to pass a massive funding increase to research on both anthrax and new, “designer” viruses that did not yet exist but might potentially be created by enemies of the United States.

“Cheney, even before the anthrax mailings, felt that the U.S. biodefense posture was weak and was convinced that it could only be improved by carrying out an aggressive and assertive program of biodefense research that would include components that walked right up to the red line and, arguably, crossed the red line set by the biological weapons convention,” Ebright told Blaze News.

According to Ebright, Cheney became deeply frustrated that the Department of Defense maintained a biological weapons convention compliance office that reviewed every research proposal with bioweapons agencies by the Department of Defense. This biological weapons compliance office repeatedly thwarted dangerous research projects that Cheney wanted to see come to fruition.

And so, Cheney set out in 2003 to find an agency that would not have a biological weapons conventions compliance office that could take the lead and carry out these dangerous and legally questionable projects.

“He found one agency and one person willing to take that role, and the agency was the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases… and he found Anthony Fauci. And the resources that had been part of the Department of Defense moved almost in toto to NIAID, and the authority for all U.S. biodefense research went to the new biodefense research czar, Anthony Fauci, who then received a very large salary increase, making him the highest-compensated government employee,” Ebright said.

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Fauci was an enthusiastic and frequent champion of the program under his supervision. In NIH press releases dating back to its inception, Fauci regularly asked Congress for more money for the program and defended diverting millions of dollars from other programs.

Not all scientists, however, were convinced. As even the NIH concedes, the decision to divert money from other programs infuriated many in the scientific community — not only because the money was needed elsewhere but also because the money was being hastily thrown at many scientists who had little or no experience researching priority pathogens.

Ebright, for his part, raised yet another issue. “This drove a massive increase in the number of institutions and individuals with access to bioweapons agents,” Ebright told Blaze News. “This increased, rather than decreased, the risk of release of those agents.”

Ebright told everyone who would listen that it was a mistake to continue expanding funding that had the effect of increasing the number of people who handled dangerous pathogens — a refrain that made him unpopular both with the Bush administration and within the halls of NIAID.

Unfortunately, it would not be the last time that Ebright’s warnings in that 2004 article would prove to be prophetic.

In fact, Ebright was such a persistent antagonist to the Bush administration’s bioresearch program that the New York Times ran a positive profile on him in 2004 titled, “I BEG TO DIFFER: In a Lonely Stand, a Scientist Takes On National Security Dogma.” In the piece, Ebright specifically noted that the substantial majority of persons who had conducted germ attacks in recent history were not terrorists but were rather scientists who had gained access to the pathogens as part of their work.

Ebright’s concern would be wholly vindicated when the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks was discovered to be a biodefense researcher at Fort Detrick who had authorized access to the anthrax samples.

Unfortunately, it would not be the last time that Ebright’s warnings in that 2004 article would prove to be prophetic. Among other objections raised by Ebright to the proliferation of laboratories doing research on dangerous pathogens, Ebright specifically warned that laboratories “could leak” and that one day a dangerous pathogen could accidentally escape from one of these labs and cause havoc.

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Fauci and the NIH, meanwhile, were not listening to Ebright or anyone else’s objections. The scientific community as a whole, however, was growing sufficiently concerned that the National Academy of Sciences established a committee to review research that was being done on so-called “dual use” pathogens that had potential civilian use but also potential bioweapon use.

The committee issued a report in 2004 that identified seven ongoing studies of concern and recommended stringent federal oversight of these projects. These experiments today would be called “gain-of-function” research but were then known as “dual use” research of concern.

Fauci claimed that the research was necessary to improve the public health community’s response to the spread of the H5N1 avian flu in Asia.

The stringent federal oversight never materialized, but Ebright and fellow skeptics finally began to gain traction both with the public and with the government when Fauci’s NIAID and the CDC finally let their hubris get the better of them and bragged to the world that they had done something that imperiled the future of mankind.

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In October 2005, scientists from the CDC and NIAID proudly announced that they had reconstituted the H1N1 influenza virus, the same flu that was estimated to have killed 1% of the world’s population in 1918. Adjusted to today’s population, the death figures might well have topped 80 million.

Worse, because H1N1 has not been circulating in decades, the current world population has absolutely no immunity to this deadly strain of flu, meaning that it might well have been much more deadly in 2005 than it was in 1918.

The scientists responsible for the research, no doubt impressed by their own cleverness, bragged that they had reconstituted the virus by, in part, examining tissue samples from flu victims who were frozen in the tundra of Alaska.

Fauci himself personally vouched for the need for the research and defended its necessity. To explain why anyone would knowingly reconstitute a deadly virus thought to have perished from the earth, Fauci claimed that the research was necessary to improve the public health community’s response to the spread of the H5N1 avian flu in Asia. According to Fauci, “The new studies could have an immediate impact by helping scientists focus on detecting changes in the evolving H5N1 virus that might make widespread transmission among humans more likely.”

But then, in an instant, the partisan impressions of Fauci instantaneously turned a complete 180 degrees. Ebright watched it happen on live television.

Ebright disagreed. As noted in a Nature article at the time, Ebright blasted Fauci and the CDC for having “constructed, and provided procedures for others to construct, a virus that represents perhaps the most effective bioweapons agent now known.”

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These days, almost all discussion about Anthony Fauci is viewed exclusively through a partisan lens. If you criticize Fauci, you must be a Republican, and probably one of those crazy right wingers to boot. If you support Fauci, you must be a Democrat. To those who have watched Fauci’s career closely, the remarkable phenomenon is how thoroughly partisan perception of Fauci flipped, suddenly and instantaneously, in the early days of the pandemic.

Prior to 2020, Fauci was the subject of frequent and strident criticism from many of the liberal institutions that have since ruled any criticism of his actions out of bounds. In fact, if anything, Fauci (who was appointed to his post during the Reagan administration) was often seen as a creature of the Bush/Cheney administration and thus was extremely fair game for criticism by both Democrats and the media.

Ebright himself fits solidly in this camp. During Tuesday’s hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Ebright flatly stated, “I’m a registered Democrat. I voted for Biden. I had a Biden sign on my lawn.”

In fact, if anything, prior to February of 2020, Fauci was probably more well liked, to the extent that he was known at all, among Republicans than Democrats.

But then, in an instant, the partisan impressions of Fauci instantaneously turned a complete 180 degrees. Ebright watched it happen on live television.

“When he had the good fortune to share screen with Trump and facepalmed Trump when Trump was making an ignorant statement, he became a progressive icon and progressive saint,” Ebright noted.

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But back in 2005, as the public was starting to sour on the Iraq war and on the Bush administration’s conduct in the war on terror in general, Fauci and his research were getting the attention of many critics, particularly on the left. And thus the New York Times, which has largely forgotten that it is possible to criticize Fauci, ran an unflattering profile on this research titled “Why Revive a Deadly Flu Virus?”

According to Ebright, if the government had acted on the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences report, this experiment would never have taken place. “The experiments produced a new agent that had not been present on the planet in decades, that the population had no immunity to, and that, had it accidentally been released, would likely have caused a large-scale pandemic with significant, major loss of life,” Ebright told Blaze News.

In a remarkable exchange, Fauci admitted that neither the military nor the public at large was in actual, serious danger of a biological attack and that the larger danger was the freak-out over the possibility of an attack.

“There was much congressional interest at the time in why the NIH had performed this research with no risk-benefit analysis. The response from the NIH director at the time and in particular from the NIAID director at the time, Anthony Fauci, was to double down on the idea that this research was essential and that had the NIH not funded it, that would have been the mistake,” Ebright continued.

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In a fascinating twist, during this time period when Fauci was publicly defending to members of Congress the vital need for funding for this kind of risky research, he gave an interview to Margot Fromer of Oncology Today in which he struck a very different note.

There, in a publication directed at scientists, Fauci all but stated that the research he was defending to members of Congress was not really necessary at all but was merely the function of public panic. Discussing the anthrax attacks that had provided the genesis for the whole gain-of-function program, Fauci agreed with the interviewer that the attacks were a “nonevent” and further stated that “the biological impact was trivial — more people died of influenza during that period — compared with the psychological impact.”

In a remarkable exchange, Fauci admitted that neither the military nor the public at large was in actual, serious danger of a biological attack and that the larger danger was the freak-out over the possibility of an attack. According to Fromer’s summary of Fauci’s remarks, which were not directly quoted, Fauci believed that the “civilian population is more vulnerable, but judging from the reaction to the anthrax situation, they are more in danger of scaring themselves into immobility than dying from an attack that will probably never come.”

And then in 2011, scientists attempted to publish a pair of studies that were so dangerous that the resultant outcry from the scientific community forced Congress to take note again.

Why, then, was the NIH continuing this research? Well, according to Fauci, the NIAID had been obligated by Congress to prepare for the worst, even though he personally made it clear that he felt NIAID was mostly wasting its time: “It is prudent to be prepared, but as a matter of practicality, it would be almost impossible to inoculate everyone in the highly unlikely event of a smallpox attack,” Fauci said.

In other words, to Congress, Fauci was claiming that the science was vital and in desperate need of additional funding. To scientists who likely knew better, he claimed that it was Congress’ fault that his agency was doing this research.

Soon, Fauci would be forced to choose a unified public posture, and when he did, he came down solidly on the side of continuing this risky research.

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From 2005 through 2011, the issue largely lay dormant in the public’s mind. The nation had other fish to fry. The Iraq war was going poorly, the 2008 election happened, and then the financial collapse of 2008 led to a severe recession. Life moved on, and the public largely forgot that scientists were working behind closed doors to make viruses more deadly and transmissible for reasons that were not really comprehensible to most ordinary people.

And then in 2011, scientists attempted to publish a pair of studies that were so dangerous that the resultant outcry from the scientific community forced Congress to take note again. Two different groups, with NIH funding, genetically modified a version of the extremely dangerous H5N1 avian flu, which had demonstrated a 60% fatality rate in humanized mice.

The scientists genetically modified this deadly version of the flu to make it transmissible via respiratory droplets among ferrets, which were the best simulation for human transmissibility. It was the first time this deadly bird flu was able to cause airborne infections in mammals.

When the study was submitted for peer review, the results were so obviously dangerous that one of the peer reviewers immediately sought out officials in the Obama administration in an attempt to prevent the study results from being published, raising concerns that publishing the research would provide a recipe for terrorists to create what would likely have been the most deadly bioweapon known to mankind.

The internal pushback was so significant that newly installed NIH director Francis Collins submitted the results of the research to the NIH’s biosecurity board to finally — after the research was already done — assess the risk from these experiments.

The New York Times editors thundered, “We nearly always champion unfettered scientific research and open publication of the results. In this case it looks like the research should never have been undertaken because the potential harm is so catastrophic and the potential benefits from studying the virus so speculative.”

The board unanimously recommended that only the “general conclusions” of the research should be published without “details that could enable replication of the experiments by those who would seek to do harm.”

Unbelievably, Fauci and Collins rejected even this modest imposition of oversight on their research, as well as growing anger and frustration from Congress over what was widely perceived in Congress as disregard for the safety of the public in conducting these experiments. They instead began a public relations campaign to defend their research, co-authoring an op-ed with NIAID colleague Gary Nabel entitled, “A flu virus risk worth taking,” which ran in the Washington Post on December 30, 2011.

Their op-ed, in retrospect and in light of everything that has happened since, is laughably unpersuasive. Fauci and his co-authors conceded at the outset that the mutant virus they had created “does not exist in nature” and furthermore that “we cannot predict whether it or something similar will arise naturally, nor when or where it might appear.” However, the authors asserted, there was “concern” that such a mutation “could evolve naturally.”

In other words, to guard against the admittedly remote or at least unknown possibility that such a deadly virus could come into existence on accident, these scientists had created it on purpose.

In a refreshing moment of honesty, Fauci and his co-authors included a vital paragraph that should have been a fatal blow to the program entirely, admitting, “The question is whether benefits of such research outweigh risks. The answer is not simple. A highly pathogenic bird flu virus transmissible in humans could arise in ways not predicted by laboratory studies. And it is not clear whether this laboratory virus would behave in humans as it does in ferrets.”

Nonetheless, the authors insisted that creating these mutant viruses would help them identify the “Achilles’ heel” of these viruses in the event that they did break out into the public and further proclaimed that “safeguarding against the potential accidental release or deliberate misuse of laboratory pathogens is imperative. The engineered viruses developed in the ferret experiments are maintained in high-security laboratories.”

Having thus satisfied themselves (and apparently Congress and the public) that they were doing everything they could to ensure safety, they persuaded the review board, incredibly, to publish the entirety of this dangerous study without any redactions at all and went back to work on their risky experiments.

Unfortunately for Fauci and Collins, the glaring danger inherent in their work was too large to be ignored, and the Obama administration was beginning to take notice of the growing chorus of voices in the scientific community who were raising the alarm about gain-of-function research. Even the New York Times published a blaring editorial entitled “An Engineered Doomsday” in January 2012 condemning the “frightening” ferrets experiments and summarily rejecting the weak arguments mustered by Fauci and Collins in favor of their continuation and publication.

Speaking probably for everyone who was not directly receiving research funding to conduct this work, the New York Times editors thundered, “We nearly always champion unfettered scientific research and open publication of the results. In this case it looks like the research should never have been undertaken because the potential harm is so catastrophic and the potential benefits from studying the virus so speculative.

“Unless the scientific community and health officials can provide more persuasive justifications than they have so far, the new virus, which is in the Netherlands, ought to be destroyed.”

Although the editorial did not single out Fauci or Collins by name, it likewise blasted their failure to exercise oversight over the program before its details came to light. “In the future, it is imperative that any such experiments be rigorously analyzed for potential dangers … not after the fact, as is happening in this case,” the editors wrote.

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Finally in 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services began to impose at least some half-hearted attempts at oversight over Fauci’s and the NIAID’s work. That year, HHS established an oversight committee that was supposed, in theory, to have imposed a before-the-fact review of risky research like the ferret experiments.

The report also found, astoundingly, that “select agent materials” had been transported throughout the building using, of all things, Ziploc bags.

The oversight program, such as it was, was immediately subverted by both Fauci and Collins, who demonstrated their contempt for the committee’s work by dismissively dubbing it the “Ferrets Committee.”

According to Ebright, whose contention is supported by multiple scientists who spoke anonymously to the Washington Post in 2021, Fauci and Collins subverted the committee’s oversight work by essentially defining “gain-of-function” out of existence. If you have ever found yourself wondering how Fauci has been able to repeatedly tell Rand Paul with a straight face that his agency does not fund gain-of-function research, it is because he has over a decade of experience doing it.

This might have continued forever, had a series of embarrassing accidents in 2014 not made it abundantly clear that Fauci’s and Collins’ protestations regarding “rigorous safety precautions” were wholly and completely empty.

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The first major accident to embarrass the small community that had been defending these experiments occurred in June 2014, when dozens of workers at the CDC were exposed to live anthrax in a debacle so thorough that then-CDC director Tom Frieden was forced to admit, “I will say that I’m just astonished that this could have happened here.”

A shamefaced Frieden was dragged before Congress, where he admitted that he was “angry” and “upset” and promised that he was working “around the clock” to make sure it would never happen again.

If anything, Frieden was understating the extent of embarrassment the incident brought on the CDC and in particular on its bioterrorism laboratory. A USDA inspector investigating the leak found a number of grievous and obvious violations of protocol that dated back to 2011, back when Fauci and Collins were confidently assuring the public that risky virus research was only happening in the very safest of facilities.

Instead, the USDA found, among other things, that some anthrax containers were summarily missing. Others were found stored in unlocked refrigerators in an “unregistered hallway” that was accessible to anyone in the building. The report also found, astoundingly, that “select agent materials” had been transported throughout the building using, of all things, Ziploc bags.

The USDA’s report found that the exposure had occurred because the researchers “failed to follow a scientifically derived and reviewed protocol that would have assured the anthrax was deactivated,” leading a number of scientists to work on anthrax without any protective equipment at all. The researchers could perhaps be forgiven for not following proper protocol, however, because the inspector found that the researchers had “limited knowledge” of what the protocol was even supposed to be and further stated that the label “did not have a standard operating procedure that would make sure the transfer of the material would be safe.”

It is worth remembering at this point that three short years earlier, Fauci and Collins had assured the public that research on a virus that killed 60% of humanized mice was safe because it was being conducted in laboratories they assured the public were safe.

By way of explanation for how one of the agency’s scientists could accidentally have mailed a package that might have released one of the deadliest viruses known to man into the general public and then failed to report it for over six weeks, the CDC’s own report condemned many of its own employees for “a lack of sound professional judgment.”

A shamefaced Frieden was dragged before Congress, where he admitted that he was “angry” and “upset” and promised that he was working “around the clock” to make sure it would never happen again.

Almost immediately, it happened again.

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In July 2014 it was revealed that a worker for the CDC had “rushed through” safety procedures in order to get to a meeting in a timely fashion and had inadvertently sent samples of a highly deadly strain of avian flu to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

USDA researchers only realized something was wrong when the strain, which was supposed to be mild and non-lethal, promptly killed an entire flock of chickens. The USDA researchers sequenced the virus and discovered to their very great surprise that it was not the mild H9N2 strain of avian flu, as it was labeled, but instead was the deadly H5N1 strain.

The time was finally ripe for the Obama administration to attempt to rein in Fauci and Collins

Worse, subsequent investigation revealed that the incident had happened in March, had been reported to the CDC in May, but had not been reported to the public or to anyone else until July.

Ebright and others were incensed. In a quote to Reuters at the time, Ebright said, “The matter needs to be referred for civil and/or criminal investigation.”

His anger, if anything, was understated. By way of explanation for how one of the agency’s scientists could accidentally have mailed a package that might have released one of the deadliest viruses known to man into the general public and then failed to report it for over six weeks, the CDC’s own report condemned many of its own employees for “a lack of sound professional judgment.”

As noted by Reuters at the time, the CDC’s own report further found that “there was no approved procedure for what the scientist was doing, colleagues who might have noticed a breach were frantically rushing to finish experiments ahead of a February scientific meeting, and the lab director had a ‘heavy work load’.”

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Not to be outdone, Fauci and Collins’ NIH joined the party in July 2014, when a worker who was cleaning out an unsecured storage room in a joint FDA/NIH facility discovered six vials of smallpox, as well as several other vials filled with dangerous and exotic pathogens.

Workers in the facility were not even notified of the discovery of these pathogens that had apparently been lying about for decades until reports surfaced in the media. As noted by the Washington Post at the time, “One scientist, who works in the building and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said he learned about it Tuesday when his supervisor read a media report.”

Unbelievably, rather than promptly destroying the vials, the FDA and NIH turned the vials over to the CDC, which, according to Nature, “confirmed that powder contained in the vials contained variola (smallpox) virus DNA. They are now attempting to grow the virus in cell culture under the highest level of containment to determine whether it is still viable, and expect results in two weeks.” (Emphasis added). The samples, which were indeed viable, were later allegedly destroyed in front of inspectors from the World Health Organization.

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The time was finally ripe for the Obama administration to attempt to rein in Fauci and Collins. Faced with a string of public embarrassments that demonstrated in the most graphic way that the supposedly safe laboratories that conducted risky virus research were anything but, a working group was formed featuring Ebright and other scientists, who prevailed upon Obama administration officials to institute a moratorium, or “pause,” on funding for gain-of-function research.

I asked Ebright how he was finally able to convince policymakers that Fauci’s program needed to be curtailed.

“Something you need to keep in mind is that there was a change in administration, from the Bush-Cheney administration to the Obama administration. Which meant that the policies we were talking about were not Obama’s policies, and that made them politically addressable. It was possible to interface with the Obama administration and make the case that this research was not providing public health benefit and was actually degrading rather than enhancing national security,” Ebright told Blaze News.

Given this reality, and given the cavalcade of embarrassments befalling the biodefense sector, it was possible in that time period to “gain the Obama administration’s attention through their Office of Science and Technology Policy.” Finally, Ebright and his colleagues were able to get a “pause” on the research put in place and thus end this risky research, or at least temporarily stop it.

Or so everyone thought.

The reality, of course, was that neither Fauci nor Collins had any intention of letting bureaucrats stand in the way of their work, as they would soon demonstrate to the world.

Read More

Former National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance boss Peter Daszak, and
elements of their inner circle were far from the only people in the Western medical establishment who actively downplayed the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab where the likely patients zero executed dangerous experiments on coronaviruses with American taxpayer dollars.

Early in the pandemic, multiple scientific publications ran articles decrying “conspiracy theories” that suggested the virus may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Various authors argued, instead, that it was more likely that the virus made a cross-species leap into humans, possibly at a Chinese wet market.

Now that it’s abundantly clear that the lab origin theory was all along the
most likely explanation, molecular biologist Dr. Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University and dozens of other scientists are seeking accountability for perceived efforts to cure the origins narrative. They have sent open letters to the editors of the journals Science, Emerging Microbes & Infections, and Nature Medicine, requesting the retraction of “scientifically unsound papers” concerning the origins of the virus.

“Scientists have a responsibility to science and the public to point out scientific misconduct, particularly scientific fraud, when they discover it,” Dr. Ebright told Blaze News. “This is especially true for scientific misconduct on matters of high public importance, like the origin of COVID-19.”

Emerging Microbes & Infections

The first of the four papers of interest was published online in Emerging Microbes & Infections on Feb. 26, 2020, and authored by
Shan-Lu Liu and Linda Saif of Ohio State University; Susan Weiss of the University of Pennsylvania; and Lishan Su of the University of Maryland.

The paper, entitled, “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2,” stated, “There are speculations, rumours and conspiracy theories that SARS-CoV-2 is of laboratory origin. Some people have alleged that the human SARS-CoV-2 was leaked directly from a laboratory in Wuhan where a bat CoV (RaTG13) was recently reported, which shared ∼96% homology with the SARS-CoV-2.”

After downplaying a number of possible lab-made culprits, including a
chimeric coronavirus that could replicate in human airway cells and possibly transmit to humans, the authors concluded, “There is currently no credible evidence to support the claim that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a laboratory-engineered CoV.”

The
June 14 open letter to the editors of the journal stated, “The authors’ and editor’s private email communications, obtained through an Ohio Public Records Act request, provide compelling evidence that there is clear basis to infer the paper may be the product of scientific misconduct, up to and including fraud.”

When Weiss, for instance, expressed uncertainty about how the
furin cleavage site could possibly end up in the virus naturally, her colleague Liu “completely agree[d]” but signaled a greater eagerness to dispel the notion that the “furin site may be engineered.”

Despite publicly suggesting there was no credible evidence of a lab origin, Weiss noted days before the publication of her paper:

Henry and I have been speculating- how can that site have appeared at S1/S2 border- I hate to think it was engineered- among the MHV strains, the cleavage site does not increaser (sic) pathogenicity while it does effect entry route (surface vs endosome). so for me the only significance of this furin site is as a marker for where the virus came from- frightening to think it may have been engineered.

Concealed doubts and persuasive counterpoints were not the only things said to have compromised the integrity of the paper.

University of North Carolina virus expert
Ralph Baric has long toyed with coronaviruses. Years ahead of the pandemic, he expressed an interest in continuing to experiment with a chimeric virus that could infect human lung cells. He even shared transgenic mice with the Wuhan lab where Chinese virologist Zhengli Shi was executing radical experiments.

In violation of publisher Taylor and Francis’ authorship policies, “Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli, despite clear conflicts of interest, made substantial contributions to the manuscript but were not credited as authors or acknowledged,” said the letter.

Besides secretly involving people with potential conflicts, Su, Liu and the journal’s editor-in-chief Shan Lu reportedly also had “privileged information about a SARS-CoV-2 infection in a Beijing lab in 2020,” but decided to keep this under wraps.

Su wrote to Lieu on Feb. 14, 2020: “Your former colleague was infected with sars2 in the lab?”

“Yes,” responded Liu. “He was infected in the lab!”

“I actually am very concerned for the possibility of SARS-2 infection by lab people. It is much more contagious than SARS-1. Now every lab is interested in get a vial of virus to do drug discovery. This can potentially [be] a big issue. I don’t think most people have a clue,” wrote Shan Lu.

Despite weighing in heavily on the paper, Lu elected not to be included in the coauthorship, stating in a Feb. 12, 2020, message, “I definitely will not be an author as you guys did everything. It can also keep things somewhat independent as the editor.”

Extra to collapsing the distance between author and editor, Lu subsequently admitted he accepted the paper with “basically no review.”

— (@)

“Taken together, the authors’ and editor’s private communications indicate the paper is a product of scientific misconduct, up to and including fraud, by the authors and by the Editor-in-Chief of
Emerging Microbes & Infections, Shan Lu,” said the open letter. “Now that these documents have come to light, we urge Emerging Microbes & Infections to issue an Expression of Editorial Concern for this paper and to initiate a retraction process.”

Taylor and Francis, the publisher of the journal, said in a statement to Blaze News, “We can confirm that the Editor of the journal forwarded the open letter to Taylor & Francis on 14th June and that our Publishing Ethics & Integrity team are investigating the concerns raised, in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines and our Editorial Policies.”

Nature Medicine

The journal Nature Medicine published the controversial paper “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” on March 17, 2020, which Fauci used on multiple occasions to suggest to the American public that COVID-19 was not a lab leak but rather an animal virus that jumped to a human.

Blaze News
previously reported that despite privately discussing the prospect that the natural-origins theory was rubbish, the paper’s four official authors — Kristian Andersen, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward Holmes, and Robert Garry — concluded, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist and Scripps Research Institute immunology professor, was especially doubtful in private about the conclusion he gave his name to.

On Jan. 31, 2020, Andersen
wrote to Fauci, “You have to look very closely at the genome to see features that are potentially engineered. … I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Farzan], and myself all find the genome to be inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

On Feb. 8, Andersen
stated, “Passage of SARS-like CoVs have been ongoing for several years, and more specifically in Wuhan under BSL-2 conditions. … The fact that Wuhan became the epicenter of the ongoing epidemic caused by nCoV is likely an unfortunate coincidence, but it raises questions that would be wrong to dismiss out of hand. Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered.”

Andersen also
expressed concern about a paper penned by Ralph Baric and Zhengli Shi concerning the apparent insertion of furin cleavage sites into SARS, which he and his colleagues figured for a “how-to-manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.”

Last month, Ebright and five others
wrote to Joao Montiero, the chief editor of Nature Medicine, requesting a retraction. They noted that documentation obtained through public records requests along with congressional testimony from Andersen and Garry “provide conclusive evidence of misconduct.”

The letter does not mention Fauci’s
alleged involvement in the development of the paper but instead World Health Organization scientist Jeremy Farrar’s unacknowledged role in the “paper’s development, including its prompting, organizing, editing, and approval.”

‘It is imperative that this misleading and damaging product of scientific misconduct be removed from the scientific literature.’

“This omission of a significant role played by the head of a funding agency, allegedly to maintain his ‘independence,’ represents a serious breach of publishing ethics that completely undermines the credibility of the journal and calls into question the motivation behind the paper,” said the letter. “The classification of the paper as an ‘opinion’ rather than a ‘research article’ further exacerbates the issue, as the authors’ intentional withholding of Farrar’s involvement damages public trust in the editorial process.”

Ebright and scores of other scientists
pressed Nature Medicine last year for a retraction as well, noting in an open letter dated July 26, 2023, “It is imperative that this misleading and damaging product of scientific misconduct be removed from the scientific literature. We, as STEM and STEM-policy professionals, call upon Nature Medicine to publish an expression of editorial concern for the paper and to begin a process of withdrawal or retraction of the paper.”

Blaze News reached out to Montiero for comment, but he did not respond by deadline.

Science

Ebright, Stanford University epidemiologist
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and dozens of other scientists signed another open letter on June 14 to the editors of the journal Science with regards to two papers: “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic,” and “The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2,” both of which named Jonathan Pekar of the University of California, San Diego, as an author along with Andersen, Holmes, Garry, evolutionary biologist Andrew Rambaut, and Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona.

Blurbs leading into the papers, which were both largely funded by Fauci’s NIAID — whose parent agency
supported and financed research at the Wuhan lab — and published on July 26, 2022, stated, “The precise events surrounding virus spillover will always be clouded, but all of the circumstantial evidence so far points to more than one zoonotic event occurring in Huanan market in Wuhan, China, likely during November–December 2019.”

According to the scientists seeking retractions, the analyses and the premises of “Worobey et al. 2022 and Pekar et al. 2022 are unsound,” and the papers may be “products of scientific misconduct, up to and including scientific fraud.”

“Phylogenomic evidence, epidemiological evidence, and documentary evidence all indicate that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans in July-November 2019,” says the letter. “Arguments based on data for the Huanan Seafood Market on or after mid- to late December 2019 — as in Worobey et al. 2022 and Pekar et al. 2022 — cannot, even in principle, shed light on spillover into humans that occurred one to five months earlier, in July-November, 2019.”

— (@)

The open letter noted that Andersen, Garry, Holmes, and others knew full well that the “premises and conclusions of their paper were invalid at the time the paper was drafted.”

A spokesman for American Association for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of the Science family of journals, confirmed to Blaze News that it had received the letter.

“We follow COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) processes to address any concerns raised on published papers and are doing so here,” said the spokesman.

The AAAS spokesman noted in a subsequent email, “We will follow up when we make a final decision.”

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