Dr Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, alerted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in a closed‑door session with the agency’s Biological Sciences Experts Group on or around 29 January 2020. In that briefing he warned that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting high‑risk gain‑of‑function experiments on bat coronaviruses, might have unintentionally released the virus that later caused COVID‑19.
Baric’s concern was rooted in his own work with the Wuhan Institute. In 2015 he collaborated with the institute’s leading researcher, Shi Zhengli, on experiments involving bat viruses closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2.
A month later, on 26 February 2020, Baric delivered a public briefing to the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus. The content of that presentation was almost identical to the earlier intelligence briefing, but the slides that mentioned a possible laboratory origin were removed.
Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, said the omission was not accidental. He highlighted a “highly unusual one‑on‑one meeting” between Baric and Dr Anthony Fauci on 11 February 2020, a meeting confirmed by a copy of Fauci’s schedule obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
At the time, Fauci was reportedly coordinating efforts to portray the lab‑leak hypothesis as a baseless conspiracy. Earlier, on 1 February 2020, Fauci and former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins had been warned about the Wuhan lab’s potential involvement during a conference call, yet they later led federal agencies that funded the gain‑of‑function work to dismiss the theory.
Senator Joni Ernst (R‑Iowa) has called for Baric to appear before Congress and explain why his public statements diverged from his private warning. She said: “Americans who simply dared to ask if COVID was from a lab were labeled conspiracy theorists, and yet we now learn that evidence was shown to the intelligence community supporting that theory before our country was locked down.”
The contrast between Baric’s early private warning and his later public silence has intensified scrutiny of the influence that senior health officials may have exerted on the narrative surrounding the origins of the pandemic.