WASHINGTON — A War Department program requested proposals for so-called “gain of function” experiments that could make viruses more infectious nearly two full years before the COVID-19 pandemic began, a top US virologist told Congress earlier this year.
Dr. Ralph Baric, a prominent coronavirus researcher, told the Senate Homeland Security Committee in a closed-door interview April 10 that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had solicited proposals in January 2018 to understand “what drives cross-species jumping” in viruses.
“Now, if you want to know, down to the nucleotide level, what drives a cross-species jumping event, you are talking gain-of-function experiments,” Baric told committee staffers, according to an interview transcript obtained by The Post.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-Paul.) is making Baric’s full testimony available at a Reading Room webpage that is dedicated to providing Americans full transparency about the decisions surrounding viral research leading up to the global outbreak.
US public health officials like former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci have maintained that the research — which can involve the enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens — is safe and useful for developing vaccines or other drugs to fight emerging viruses.
Critics have argued that there are no civilian applications for what they deem risky viral research — and that one of the proposals DARPA received included identical characteristics to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
That proposal, known as Project DEFUSE, has since been cited by scientists as “smoking gun” evidence that COVID-19 was engineered in a Wuhan, China lab because the same furin cleavage site later discovered in the virus itself.
It had been submitted by Baric; Shi Zhengli, a top scientist working with bat coronaviruses at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV); and Dr. Peter Daszak, the president of since-debarred nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance that took millions of dollars in federal grants to fund research meant to prevent pandemics.
“We’ve never dropped a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus like that,” Baric acknowledged in his Senate interview, adding that he “hadn’t remembered the grant” from 2018 even as he and other scientists were furiously debating the origins of COVID in early 2020.
The draft proposal was first made public by The Intercept in 2021. Daszak wrote that he would “downplay” the involvement of Chinese researchers when asking for federal funding, according to drafts also published by US Right To Know.
DARPA asked for the research plans through its Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) program in order to study at least 15 pathogens that could infect US troops abroad, said Baric, adding the experiments were supposed to be conducted in a “controlled” laboratory setting.
When questioned by committee chief counsel Christina Salazar about who was supposed to perform the actual gain-of-function experiment on the resulting virus, Baric responded, “That part would be done by me.”
“Do you think that Dr. Shi and WIV had the technical capability of doing the work proposed in DEFUSE on their own?” Salazar also asked.
“Absolutely,” Baric responded.
Ultimately, Project DEFUSE was never funded. However, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield noted during an October 2024 biosecurity panel that even unfunded projects and proposals can be tested under other research grants.
“Research grants are always written in the context of being more fluid than contracts,” Baric confirmed in his testimony, adding that due to sub-standard lab conditions, “you cannot ever conclusively say that there was not a laboratory leak” that started the pandemic, though he claimed that a natural origin was still the “most likely” theory.
“I never ruled out lab leak possibility,” Baric said. “I don’t see how anyone can. And the reason that is, is that they’ve published papers saying that they did their work at BSL-2. Biological Safety Level 2 is less stringent than Biological Safety Level 3. So there are many more laboratory-acquired infections at BSL-2 than at BSL-3.”
Baric also shared details from private meetings in January 2020 and February 2020 that showed Fauci and other top US scientists debated whether gain-of-function research could have started the pandemic — despite the then-NIAID head’s repeated denials to Congress of that possibility in subsequent years.
Those meetings included phone calls with scientists whom Fauci later prompted to write a paper debunking the lab leak theory.
In a previously undisclosed interaction, Fauci also took interest in a paper that Baric had authored that stemmed from NIH-funded research that involved “potential gain-of-function related experiments,” the latter testified.
Fauci “got called away for a phone call in a SCIF [Secure Compartmented Information Facility], and so he left pretty early in the meeting,” claimed Baric, adding that the other National Institutes of Health officials couldn’t locate documents associated with the study, titled, “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.”
At least “90%” of the research for that paper was completed before the Obama administration instituted a pause on all gain-of-function research, Baric said, but some of the work that Shi performed at WIV wasn’t acknowledged — at the behest of Daszak — until five years after it was published in 2015.
“Is it something that typically happens five years later?” Salazar asked Baric.
“Not typically, but it does happen,” he replied.
EcoHealth Alliance, now disbanded, was barred from receiving US funding until 2030 for not providing evidence that its research abided by the Obama-era gain-of-function pause and submitted to timely reviews as required.
Paul will have the opportunity to ask Fauci about Baric’s testimony during a public committee hearing July 29, as well as findings from the senator’s investigation that he claims show the ex-White House COVID czar “destroyed government records and recommended that other members of government delete emails and then delete them from their deleted files.”
“Dr. Fauci and his virologist allies privately believed that the pandemic may have come from a lab leak but publicly argued that a lab leak was implausible,” Paul said in a statement. “They conspired to condemn and demean anyone who argued that the pandemic could have leaked from the Wuhan Lab and never, ever accepted responsibility for the terrible decision to fund this dangerous research in China.”
A former senior adviser to Fauci, Dr. David Morens, was indicted in April for concealing and destroying records critical to uncovering the origins of COVID-19.
