Fauci's 2013 meeting laid out plans to make coronaviruses more lethal

FPI / April 20, 2024

On June 24, 2013, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) hosted a meeting featuring Ralph Baric who is considered by many to be the world’s top coronavirus researcher.

Baric gave a presentation titled “Destroying the world in order to save it.” A photo from the presentation shows an interested onlooker in the front row. That would be Anthony Fauci.

So why did Fauci in 2022 testimony deny knowing Baric?

After earning a PhD in microbiology from North Carolina State University in 1982, Baric turned to infectious disease research.

“He became known for his ability to handle coronaviruses, which can be hard to grow in labs, as well as in making genetic modifications to them,” Alex Berenson noted in his April 15 Unreported Truths blog on Substack. It was the second of two parts on the subject, with the first running on April 12.

“Because coronaviruses have a relatively large genome — the nucleotides that encode the information necessary for them to replicate themselves — they are harder to genetically modify than some other viruses. But Baric and his researchers did so with relative ease.”

During his presentation, Baric laid out three potential ways for coronaviruses to broaden their “host range” — that is, infect different species of animals, including humans. Baric acknowledged that two of the three “have only been identified using in vitro models, although the potential exists for similar mutants to emerge naturally in nature.”

Why do this work at all?

“Baric and other scientists at the 2013 conference explained their work as necessary both to understand the potential threat from coronaviruses and to defuse it by helping research on antiviral drugs and vaccines,” Berenson noted.

“Never mind that despite the publicity the SARS and MERS outbreaks had garnered a combined global death toll equaled roughly to one day of flu deaths,” Berenson added. “

“Never mind that vaccines for flu, the closest counterpart to coronaviruses, appeared mostly useless and that decades of research had not brought the world closer to better ones.

“By making stickier spikes and fitter, more dangerous viruses, Baric would enable the development of better vaccines and antivirals. He would create an arms race, in order to win it.”

Baric wasn’t just outlining potential research pathways at the June 2013 meeting hosted by Fauci.

“He intended to do the work, and he did,” Berenson noted.

In November 2015, Baric and Chinese virologist named Shi Zhengli <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985">published</a> what became a notorious paper in Nature Medicine: “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence”.

Baric, Shi, and the other authors explained they had “generated” a “virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.”

“In other words,” Berenson noted, “Baric had combined multiple coronaviruses to make one better at infecting humans.”

Baric’s co-author Shi was head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab from which Covid likely leaked in 2019.

Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance was also at the 2013 meeting. Fauci has also claimed under oath to not know Daszak.

“In 2018, Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance attempted to get federal funding for a new project where the Wuhan lab and Baric would again collaborate on work to make coronaviruses more dangerous,” Berenson noted.

The Trump administration rejected the request as too risky; “but whether Shi’s group went ahead with the research anyway and accidentally created Sars-Cov-2 is the most important question about Covid’s origins,” Berenson wrote. “The second most important is what Baric, Daszak, and other American researchers knew or suspected about Shi’s research as Covid exploded worldwide.”

In a deposition in 2022, Fauci said of Baric, “I doubt if I've ever met him.” He characterized Daszak as not even an “acquaintance.”

“Yet Daszak and other officials in his group EcoHealth Alliance are present at the (2013) meeting, which Fauci opened with a speech. Nine months later, Fauci would again cross paths with Daszak, when Fauci spoke on a panel in Washington about emerging infectious diseases, part of a two-day conference that Daszak had moderated and helped create,” Berenson wrote.

“But as the world’s preeminent coronavirus researcher, Baric was even more important to Fauci. As he opened the June 2013 meeting, Fauci spoke openly of wanting to be sure he constantly had new viral threats that would ensure his research budget would continue to grow.”

In February 2020, as Covid exploded out of China, Fauci brought Baric into his offices for a private meeting to discuss the new epidemic and its possible origins.

Under oath in 2022, “Fauci claimed not to remember anything about that meeting either, though it had taken place barely two years before,” Berenson noted.

So just why would Fauci go so far out of his way to deny knowing Baric? Why make such an implausible claim?

Video from the June 24, 2013 meeting “offers as good an explanation as any, showing just how far Baric was willing go in trying to bring coronaviruses to heel — even if doing so raised the risk of a lab-created epidemic far deadlier than one that any natural coronavirus had ever caused.”

(A complete video of the 2013 meeting is <a href="https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=12908">publicly available here</a>.)

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