A prominent U.S. virologist who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID-19 pandemic privately informed the U.S. intelligence community in January 2020 that the Chinese lab may be responsible for the outbreak. But in his public remarks to congressional staffers one month later, and after meeting with former White House health adviser Anthony Fauci, the researcher stayed mum about the Wuhan lab and lent credence to the discredited wet market theory.
Early Warning and Subsequent Silence
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill virologist Dr. Ralph Baric warned the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during a closed-door presentation with the agency's Biological Sciences Experts Group on or around Jan. 29, 2020, that the Wuhan lab, which was conducting risky gain-of-function experiments on bat viruses similar to the one that causes COVID-19, may have accidentally released the virus into the human population. This warning was significant, given that Baric had experimented with coronaviruses in 2015 with the Wuhan Institute of Virology's top researcher, Shi Zhengli.However, Baric's private presentation to the intelligence community in January 2020 was almost identical to a public briefing he delivered to the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus the following month on Feb. 26, 2020. For the public presentation, however, Baric removed the slides referencing the possibility that the virus could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This omission has raised questions about the potential influence of Fauci and other officials on Baric's public statements.
Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright said it was no coincidence that Baric omitted his references to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in his public presentation. Ebright noted that Baric held a "highly unusual one-on-one meeting" with Fauci on Feb. 11, 2020, an appointment reflected in a copy of Fauci's schedule obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request.
At the time, Fauci was quietly coordinating efforts to cast the lab leak theory as a baseless conspiracy. Fauci and former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins were also warned about the Wuhan lab's potential role in the outbreak during a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call. But instead of heeding those warnings, Collins and Fauci, who led the federal agencies that funded gain-of-function research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, set out to cast discussions of lab origin of COVID-19 as a baseless conspiracy theory.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) called on Baric to testify publicly before Congress to clarify why he changed his tune and stayed silent on the lab leak theory. "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," Ernst told the Free Beacon.