By Jim Haslam at Brownstone dot org.

Disclaimer: If Covid-19 were linked to animal vaccine research, it would be an unintended consequence, though the institutional response was anything but accidental.

The new revelation that America's top coronavirus scientist, Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC), worked with the intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the Covid-19 pandemic significantly raises the likelihood that Baric is the creator of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic.

Yet the evidence for and against this hypothesis remains incomplete because the US government is engaged in an ongoing coverup of key information. Regardless of the government's willingness to be forthcoming, Baric himself could shed copious light on a matter of major public and scientific importance by making available his lab materials from the period leading up to the pandemic.

There is strong evidence backing the following key points:

1. Baric's lab had the technical ability (reverse genetics systems, chimeric spike protein, infectious clone production) to build viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2.

2. The 2018 DEFUSE proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), led by Baric, explicitly outlined laboratory manipulations capable of producing a SARS-CoV-2–like virus.

3. Although DARPA declined to fund DEFUSE, most team members later received similar funding through other grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

4. US intelligence agencies (including CIA and ODNI) consulted Baric and other experts from 2015 onwards and even ran pandemic war games (e.g., Event 201, Crimson Contagion) just before the pandemic. The CIA now assesses, albeit with low confidence, that a lab-related incident in China is more likely than a purely natural origin.

5. This new assessment is consistent with the "lab-leak" hypothesis that Baric created the virus and "provided" it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for experiments on "wild-caught" Chinese bats.

6. Early in the pandemic, Baric omitted the furin cleavage site in his intelligence briefing. He later testified that he had seen it, and the idea of inserting such a site "was clearly mine."

7. SARS-CoV-2 remains the only known SARS-like (sarbecovirus) with such a furin cleavage site (FCS), which significantly enhances infectivity and transmissibility.

One of us (Haslam) has set forth the most detailed and likely hypothesis regarding the origin of the pandemic, in the book COVID-19: Mystery Solved: It leaked from a Wuhan lab but it's not Chinese junk (2024). No information has come to light that challenges or refutes the following sequence of events, as hypothesized in the book:

Baric's lab in North Carolina created a chimeric SARS-like virus (SARS-CoV-2 or its immediate progenitor called HKU3-Smix) using DEFUSE-style methods.

The proposed novel virus (HKU3-Smix) differed from SARS-CoV-1 by 25%; SARS-CoV-2's spike differed by 24.7%. Baric later testified, "We were within the range."

Baric used Egyptian fruit bats as a surrogate at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana (a high-containment NIH facility that conducts DARPA research). His biotechnology was designed to be portable in a small tube and usable under BSL-2 conditions.

The constructed virus was then sent to WIV for further experiments, likely at a Chinese bat colony (Rhinolophus sinicus) near the BSL-4 facility.

The virus infected a lab worker, probably asymptomatically, and spread (initially undetected) in Wuhan from the WIV, triggering the pandemic.

Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) have emerged as a non-natural reservoir host for SARS-CoV-2, and were referenced in DARPA DEFUSE.

Over the past year, we have debated this lab-leak hypothesis with the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO). That debate became public with their recent Nature paper. We reminded SAGO that they have not identified a progenitor virus with 99% genome similarity, nor have th...