UNC Attempts to Shut Down Inquiry into Virus Research that May Have Started the Pandemic
And for good reason: Questionable research on bat viruses resulted in either worthless results or catastrophic disaster, with no middle ground
“Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”
—Isaiah 49:16
Today, a court will hear a request for a Special Master and in camera (private, non-public) review over a public records case against the University of North Carolina. The central dispute? Records that may pertain to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of particular interest are the records of a scientist named Ralph Baric who published a research paper in 2015 in Nature Medicine in which he and Shi Zhengli-Li of the Wuhan Institute of Virology “generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.”
This is what’s called Gain of Function research, which artificially enhances a virus to increase infectiousness in order to study…well…something. In this case, the stated goal — but by no means a realistic goal — was to better understand cross-species transmission that leads to outbreaks in humans. And what do you know, the conclusion of the 2015 paper was that the team’s findings suggest “a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.”
That tends to happen when you’re engineering coronaviruses to infect humans, but I digress.
The public records suit has been brought by US Right To Know, which has been running into problem after problem with UNC withholding certain research documents that UNC claims are exempted by the North Carolina Public Records Act.
The case raises questions about the right of public universities to skirt public information requests. Does UNC, which claims to be the oldest public university in the United States, really have a right to withhold information that is in the public’s best interest to know when it works so closely with the government through grants and international scientific research endeavors with less-than-friendly foreign state-controlled institutions like the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
In UNC’s motion to dismiss that was filed earlier this year, they say that they have released 130,000 pages so far in response to US Right To Know’s public records requests, and that this shows — despite the thousands of documents they have withheld — that they have been painstakingly compliant up to this point and that it’s really time to dismiss this whole case once and for all.
US Right to Know, however, says that when it comes to records pertaining to the critical time period marking the lead-up to, and beginning of, the pandemic (from March 20, 2019 to January 9, 2020), UNC released just 6 pages. UNC provided an addition ZERO pages when it came to requests for NIH-related grant and program records. Oops…
Ralph Baric’s gain of function work on chimeric viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology was itself an exercise in dangerous futility. They concluded in their 2015 paper: “Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein.”
In other words, We made this new virus, and we have no way of stopping it using available medicine. Does that sound like a productive use of time and research funding to you? There are, of course, latent questions of unstated biowarfare interest in this kind of research under the guise of preventing bioweapon use. Nevertheless, we now have former CDC Director Robert Redfield on record expressing his opinion that this research resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic and calling for a moratorium on such research.
WENSTRUP: “Has gain-of-function stopped a pandemic in your opinion?”
REDFIELD: “No, on the contrary, I think it probably caused the greatest pandemic our world has seen.”
Is it time yet for Nature Medicine to delete its Orwellian editorial note at the top of Ralph Baric and Shi Zheng-Li’s paper that they placed back in March 2020 to coincide with another infamous, and now disgraced Nature article known as “Proximal Origin” that was crafted under Fauci’s influence?
At best, Baric’s research produced chimeric viruses that showed we don’t really know how to stop these engineered monstrosities, and at worse, he helped start a global pandemic that the University of North Carolina is now helping to suppress. Let us see how this unfolds.