Thread by @SenRandPaul

1/ Dr. Ralph Baric sat for a transcribed interview with HSGAC staff. He's the scientist who designed the furin cleavage site work for the DEFUSE proposal. Today I'm releasing the transcript. Here's what he admitted. 🧵

2/ On DARPA's PREEMPT solicitation, which asked researchers to learn what makes a virus jump species "down to the nucleotide level,” Baric said there's only one honest answer: "That's a gain-of-function experiment. There's no other way to think about it."

3/ On DEFUSE, the proposal he submitted with EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, and Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Baric confirmed the step of inserting a furin cleavage site into a viral backbone would be done by him, directly admitting: "That part would be done by me."

4/ The furin cleavage site is the exact feature of SARS-CoV-2 that first drew lab-origin scrutiny.

5/ Here's the part that should worry every scientist who called lab origin a "conspiracy theory:” the “Proximal Origin” paper argued COVID wasn't engineered because the virus doesn't grip human cells in the “idea” way an engineer would design it to.

6/ Baric had already run an experiment, as far back as 2010-2011, showing that assumption was wrong. A virus that grips too efficiently gets stuck and spreads worse. A knowledgeable designer would deliberately avoid the “ideal” grip… meaning the very thing “Proximal Origin” called proof of nature is something an expert engineer might purposefully choose.

7/ Baric said he reported the experiment to the NIH. He then destroyed the materials.

8/ Baric was on the February 1, 2020 call with Fauci, Francis Collins, Jeremy Farrar, and the Proximal Origin authors. But he's not on the invitation list, nor could he recall who invited him: "I couldn't find how I knew about the meeting."

9/ Two participants on that call told my Committee they didn't even know Baric was there. Baric gave contradictory accounts of whether he spoke — first saying he stayed silent, then saying he introduced himself and was "surprised that they didn't know I was there."

10/ Baric served for over a decade as a paid member of the ODNI-backed Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG) – and confirmed that his taxpayer-funded work for the BSEG included a mouse model that was used in risky research at the WIV.

11/ On the money trail: in 2015, Daszak sent a marked urgent, asking Baric and Shi to acknowledge USAID and NIAID funding on a WIV paper. He acknowledged that only “90 percent” of the research associated with the 2015 paper was completed before the 2014 gain-of-function pause.

12/ NIH officials requested Baric’s personal research records during his February 2020 meeting with Fauci, the same documents that the NIH had supposedly reviewed years earlier. During that meeting, by Baric’s account, they requested those documents again because the NIH "didn't know where the documents were."

The full transcript is live now on my website, paul.senate.gov/readingroom?re…