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Newly released documents detailing Dr. Anthony Fauci’s long-running relationship with the CIA reveal that Americans may have a very big problem in their intelligence community.
As we previously reported , newly obtained records showed that Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had a long-running relationship with the CIA.
The latest Fauci documents dump brings up the name of a coronavirus “expert” whose research has been called the “smoking gun” that the COVID-19 virus was made in a lab.
As earlier revealed, there was an agreement for unclassified virus research to be conducted by the NIAID to “augment and complement” CIA research and development.
Now, investigative reporter Emily Kopp is raising another explosive possibility from the latest Fauci document dump: The CIA may have effectively blessed coronavirus-engineering research involving University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric years before COVID-19 erupted in Wuhan.
“We can't say for sure, but the latest Fauci document dump includes evidence that Ralph Baric's coronavirus engineering research with the Wuhan lab was blessed by the CIA,” Kopp reported .
The latest Fauci docs illustrate something very disturbing about Congressional oversight of the intelligence community (or lack thereof). In July 2021, Fauci recommended that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) speak to his chosen clique of virologists,… pic.twitter.com/BM21CCon8b
That possibility becomes considerably more interesting when Baric’s background and his connections to both U.S. intelligence and the Wuhan Institute of Virology are put together.
According to Kopp, Baric served on the Biological Sciences Experts Group, or BSEG, an advisory group providing scientific expertise to the U.S. intelligence community.
Then, in September 2015, the CIA commissioned a paper through the BSEG examining how a bioterrorist might engineer Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, into a pandemic virus.
Kopp argues that Baric would have been a natural candidate for such work.
We can't say for sure, but the latest Fauci document dump includes evidence that Ralph Baric's coronavirus engineering research with the Wuhan lab was blessed by the CIA. That may sound conspiratorial, but consider: - Baric serves on an advisory group to U.S. intel called the… pic.twitter.com/oqsH8rOfC9
“As a member of the BSEG and the world's top expert (the ‘big cheese’ in coronaviruses, as one colleague called him) Baric would be the natural choice for this project,” she wrote.
The timing is particularly noteworthy because Baric was simultaneously working at the cutting edge of coronavirus engineering with Shi Zhengli — the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist famously known as China's “Bat Lady.”
Baric and Shi were among the authors of a major 2015 study involving a chimeric SARS-like coronavirus. The research involved inserting the spike protein of a bat coronavirus identified by Shi's team into a SARS virus backbone and testing its ability to infect human airway cells and mice.
And this was not the end of Baric's involvement with research that would later become central to the COVID origins controversy.
Documents uncovered through Freedom of Information Act litigation have since revealed previously undisclosed details surrounding the 2018 DEFUSE proposal, a $14 million research proposal led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak that sought Pentagon funding for experiments involving SARS-like bat coronaviruses.
Those documents showed that Baric and researchers associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology discussed experiments bearing striking similarities to distinctive features that would later appear in SARS-CoV-2.
Among the most important was the proposed insertion of furin cleavage sites into SARS-like coronaviruses. SARS-CoV-2 subsequently emerged with a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction of its spike protein — a feature that became one of the central points of debate surrounding the virus's origins.
Notes associated with the proposal also indicated that Baric had already generated SARS-like chimeras using receptor-binding domains from bat viruses, including work that apparently did not appear in the public scientific literature.
"Five years after SARS-CoV-2…emerged in…Wuhan, the evidence thus far makes a convincing case for a laboratory-origin of the virus, indicting…researchers…for a pandemic…that sickened over 770 million people and killed over 7 million." https://t.co/96cSzQssI6
Matt Ridley, co-author with molecular biologist Alina Chan of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,” reacted bluntly when those documents emerged.
“Game over,” Ridley said .
“The latest revelations provide precise confirmation that all the many suspicious features of sars-cov-2 which imply it was man-made were set out in exhaustive detail in the DEFUSE proposal to which Wuhan Institute of Virology was a partner,” he added.
The Pentagon ultimately rejected the DEFUSE proposal. But the newly released CIA material potentially adds another layer to the story because it raises questions about what other coronavirus-engineering work U.S. intelligence agencies knew about — or encouraged — years earlier.
According to Kopp, the classified 2015 paper examining the engineering of MERS into a pandemic virus was approved by the “NCPC,” referring to the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center.
That name matters.
Kopp previously reported that the center strongly opposed the lab-leak hypothesis during the government's investigation of COVID-19's origins. Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard later shut the center down.
Kopp said she had also heard an extraordinary account from inside the intelligence community that she did not include in her original report.
“I didn't include this in my report, but I heard one official burst into tears when presented with evidence for a lab leak,” she wrote .
The emerging picture therefore raises an obvious question: What exactly did the intelligence community know about American scientists' coronavirus-engineering work before the pandemic?
Baric's connections place him at an extraordinary intersection of the story. He was one of the world's leading coronavirus researchers. He collaborated with Shi Zhengli. He participated in experiments creating chimeric SARS-like viruses. His name appears throughout the history of the controversial DEFUSE research proposal. And according to Kopp's reporting, he also served on a scientific advisory group to the U.S. intelligence community at a time when the CIA was specifically interested in how coronaviruses might be engineered into pandemic pathogens.
This becomes even more significant in light of what we now know about Fauci's own relationship with the intelligence community.
The newly disclosed interagency documents showed that NIAID was not operating solely as a conventional public-health agency. Its civilian scientific programs were intertwined with the government's post-9/11 biodefense apparatus, including CIA programs involving biological threats.
Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright told the Daily Caller News Foundation that this relationship stretched back to the early years of the War on Terror.
“Vice President Cheney assigned Fauci to head US biodefense research programs in 2002, including bioweapons-agents-development and bioweapons-agents-characterization research programs that approached, and arguably crossed, red lines set by the Biological Weapons Convention,” Ebright said.
“The documents show early steps in the process of transferring funding for, and direction of, CIA and DoD biodefense projects to Fauci’s agency, NIAID.”
Fauci's agency would later fund EcoHealth Alliance's “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” project beginning in 2014. That project included work involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology and experiments using reverse genetics, receptor-binding assays and humanized mice to examine whether bat coronaviruses could cross species barriers.
Baric, meanwhile, was collaborating directly with Shi.
Then COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan.
What happened afterward makes the pre-pandemic relationships even more important.
Kopp highlighted another revelation from the Fauci documents involving the intelligence community's 2021 investigation into the pandemic's origins.
In July 2021, Fauci recommended that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence consult a group of virologists that included authors of the influential “Proximal Origin” paper, which had been used to dismiss the laboratory-origin hypothesis early in the pandemic.
Two months later, according to Kopp, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee asked ODNI during a classified briefing which scientists intelligence officials had consulted.
ODNI refused to tell them.
“Now we know why!” Kopp wrote.
The episode takes on added significance because questions had already emerged about the private views of the “Proximal Origin” scientists. Some of the researchers had privately expressed serious concerns about the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered before publicly arguing that a laboratory origin was implausible.
There have also been allegations from inside the CIA itself concerning how the agency reached its COVID origins assessment.
Congressional investigators previously disclosed allegations from a senior CIA whistleblower who claimed that six of seven members of a CIA team examining COVID's origins initially believed the evidence supported a laboratory origin with low confidence. According to the whistleblower, the six analysts were subsequently offered a “significant monetary incentive” to change their position so that the agency could publicly remain uncertain.
That allegation has taken on even greater significance as the CIA itself has since shifted toward assessing a research-related origin as more likely.
Long before COVID-19, the CIA was cultivating relationships with biological scientists because it feared engineered pathogens could become a major national-security threat. Fauci's NIAID was incorporated into that biodefense architecture.
Baric was advising the intelligence community while conducting cutting-edge coronavirus research. Baric and Shi were collaborating on SARS-like bat coronaviruses. Fauci's agency was funding EcoHealth Alliance research connected to Wuhan.
And the CIA was apparently asking scientists how a coronavirus could be engineered into a pandemic virus.
Then, when a novel coronavirus with highly unusual characteristics erupted in Wuhan, some of the same institutions and scientists inhabiting that pre-pandemic biodefense network became deeply involved in furthering a “natural origins” narrative.
The major question is what the broader American biodefense and intelligence establishment knew about coronavirus engineering before SARS-CoV-2 appeared — what research it funded, what research it encouraged, what classified work was being performed, and which scientists were involved.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and congressional investigators have spent years trying to unravel those relationships.
The latest Fauci documents suggest there is considerably more left to uncover.