The documents I released today reveal U.S. intelligence officials were in contact with Dr. Ralph Baric — a collaborator of WIV’s Dr. Zhengli Shi – years before the pandemic.
In September 2015, the CIA and ODNI reached out to Baric to discuss a “possible project” on “coronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.” Less than two months later, Baric and Shi published “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,” research funded through USAID’s PREDICT program and NIH grants, widely acknowledged as gain-of-function.
In 2018, Baric and Shi were again listed as collaborators on EcoHealth Alliance’s DEFUSE proposal to DARPA, which sought to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus, the same feature that later appeared in SARS-CoV-2.
In January 2020, Baric was summoned by ODNI’s Biological Sciences Experts Group to brief officials and later shared slides titled “Origins,” discussing a possible accidental lab release at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a hypothesis that Fauci’s circle publicly dismissed as a conspiracy.