CIA Met With Ralph Baric In 2015 To Discuss “Coronavirus Evolution And Possible Human Adaptation”: Emails

New documents released Oct. 30 by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) offer a potential smoking gun regarding American complicity in the creation of COVID-19. 

As the Daily Caller‘s Emily Kopp writes: 

New documents show that intelligence risked implicating ODNI’s own bioengineering advisor — University of North Carolina professor Ralph Baric.

Baric, who engineered novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), advised ODNI four times a year on biological threats, according to documents released Oct. 30 by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

…

The professor’s ties to American intelligence may run even deeper, the documents reveal, as ODNI facilitated a meeting between the CIA and Baric about a project on coronaviruses in September 2015.

The email exchange with the subject line “Request for Your Expertise” shows an unnamed government official with a CIA-affiliated email address pitching a “possible project” to Baric relating to “[c]oronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.”

The new documents add to the growing body of evidence that our own intelligence agencies knew more about the threat posed by manipulating bat COVID in a lab than they told the public.

Sen. Paul is seeking more documents from ODNI regarding potential ties between US intelligence and the Wuhan lab as part of an ongoing investigation, and will hold public hearings in the coming months. 

Of note, current DNI Tulsi Gabbard disbanded the ODNI biological threats office earlier this year following questions by the Caller regarding its suppression of COVID origins intel in August. 

In January of 2020, Baric gave a presentation to the ODNI in which he advised US intelligence that COVID-19 may have emerged from a lab, and that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had sequenced thousands of SARS-like coronaviruses - including strains that could cause an epidemic. 

Baric, who created special ‘humanized mice’ for the lab to test COVID on lung tissue, noted that WIV works under low biosafety levels. 

He did not tell ODNI that he had applied for a grant in 2018 to conduct research that could lead to the creation of COVID-19, ‘jotting in the margins of a draft of the grant application that Americans would “freak out” if they knew about the shoddy standards.’

And in January 2021, when the State Department pushed to declassify certain US intelligence regarding the lab leak, ODNI raised concerns that it would “call out actions that we ourselves are doing.”

Former ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) Director Kathryn Brinsfield, a medical doctor, also dismissed a January 2021 presentation by government officials about a plausible lab origin of COVID as “misinformation,” two sources told the DCNF. Her top aide Zach Bernstein, who possesses a master’s degree in security studies but no scientific credentials, also dismissed the presentation, according to three sources. -Daily Caller

The report notes that the precise nature of the CIA’s interest in Baric’s COVID work remains unknown - as the documents don’t elaborate on work that the CIA and Baric may or may not have undertaken. 

Interesting, USAID funded the discovery of novel coronaviruses - and shipped samples to WIV through a 2009-2020 program called PREDICT. Kopp also notes that “USAID sometimes acted as a CIA front before Trump dismantled it earlier this year — but no evidence exists that the CIA directed PREDICT.”

An unnamed FBI special agent was in communication with Baric about responding to public requests for his research and emails with the Wuhan lab through the North Carolina Freedom of Information Act, according to a 2024 congressional letter, but details about the contact between the FBI and Baric also remain uncertain.

The CIA was slow to acknowledge that a lab was the pandemic’s most likely source, an assessment that the CIA made public more than five years after the pandemic emerged and well after the FBI and the Department of Energy. -Daily Caller

Meanwhile, outlets like ZeroHedge were demonetized, censored, and treated to MSM hit pieces for suggesting that the virus came from the WIV.