WASHINGTON — A Pentagon-linked research program sought proposals for what critics call “gain-of-function” experiments that could increase a virus’s ability to infect hosts nearly two years before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, a leading US virologist told Congress earlier this year.
Dr. Ralph Baric, a widely recognized coronavirus expert, told the Senate Homeland Security Committee during a closed-door interview on April 10 that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, issued a January 2018 solicitation aimed at determining “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 staff, according to a transcript of the interview obtained by The Post.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is publishing Baric’s full testimony through a Reading Room webpage intended to give the public greater access to records about viral research decisions made in the years before the global outbreak.
Public health officials, including former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, have long argued that such research — which may involve studying or enhancing potential pandemic pathogens — can be conducted safely and can help scientists develop vaccines, treatments and other tools against emerging viruses.
Opponents counter that the work carries unacceptable risks and offers little civilian benefit. They have also pointed to one DARPA proposal that they say contained features later associated with SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.
That proposal, called Project DEFUSE, has been cited by some scientists and lab-leak proponents as “smoking gun” evidence in claims that COVID-19 may have been engineered at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, because it discussed a furin cleavage site similar to the one later identified in the virus.
The proposal was submitted by Baric; Shi Zhengli, a leading bat coronavirus researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; and Dr. Peter Daszak, president of the now-debarred nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which received millions of dollars in federal grants for research intended to help prevent future 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.
