Virologist accused of starting COVID-19 will fight U.S. ban on funding

From ScienceMag:

Alleging a “pattern of deception” in virus studies done more than a decade ago, the U.S. government has proposed a ban on federal funding to a prominent coronavirus researcher whose more recent work has incited unproven accusations that he helped start the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already suspended Ralph Baric, a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, from receiving further money for his virology studies. Now it has begun formal debarment proceedings, which could cut off his funding for 3 years or more. As this story was being finalized, UNC announced that Baric,72, was retiring, but he told Science he plans to appeal the recommended debarment, likely with legal help from the school.

Baric received details of the allegations in a 7 May email from HHS, one of several documents he shared with Science. HHS accuses him of deception in communications with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which has provided his lab and collaborators with awards that total more than $200 million over the past 40 years.

Most of the charges center on mouse experiments done with bat coronaviruses in 2014, which HHS contends created a virus that had a “gain of function” (GOF), becoming more dangerous and potentially posing serious risks to human health. On an unrelated charge, HHS says Baric was “not forthcoming” about a 2017 grant on noroviruses from the Wellcome Trust, a private biomedical funder, that the department says overlapped with one he received from NIAID and should have been declared to the agency.

Baric has a succinct response to HHS’s debarment accusations. “They’re bullshit,” he tells Science. Baric contends they’re a direct result of allegations that the coronavirus behind COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, was engineered with his help and leaked from a lab. Baric, who like many scientists believes the pathogen probably had a natural origin, says he has nothing to hide in his emails or lab records.

Baric, who is among the most-cited coronavirus researchers in the world, says his lab’s work played pivotal roles in helping companies bring COVID-19 drugs and vaccines to market, saving millions of lives. “My payment for this is to be debarred?” he asks. “I’m being strung out for being a scientist.”

The contested coronavirus experiments, he says, were not GOF research and used viruses distant from SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, there was no U.S. ban on GOF work, or even a formal review process for it, when NIAID approved his study, although he had to pause the work because of an effort by then-President Barack Obama’s administration to develop the first GOF policy. He appealed, and NIAID gave him a green light to proceed. Stanford University biologist David Relman recalls discussing the experiments back in 2014, saying Baric disclosed the work to NIH and honored the pause despite frustration over it. “I do not think Ralph was deceptive… Ralph did what was required, expected, and appropriate at that time.”

On the Wellcome grant, Baric says UNC made the mistake of not linking it to his NIAID award, and there was little overlap between the proposed work. The infraction, he says, “is very minor.”

Gigi Kwik Gronvall, an immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who specializes in biosecurity issues, says it’s “absolutely ridiculous” for HHS to suspend Baric and initiate debarment proceedings against him. “HHS is punishing a world-class scientist who was working to protect people against pandemics, and if he had been listened to more thoroughly, we might have been better prepared for SARS-CoV-2,” Gronvall says. “It sounds to me like this is political.”

HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. And its suspension letter does not mention SARS-CoV-2, let alone allege that Baric helped create it. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his 2023 book The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race attempted to link Baric’s work to the origin of the pandemic because he collaborated with researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on the 2014 experiments. The first outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in Wuhan, and Kennedy and others argue SARS-CoV-2 escaped from WIV—and may have been created there rather than being a natural virus (Editors’ note: The book repeatedly criticizes COVID-19 origin reporting by Science and this reporter.)

Kennedy’s view has increasingly gained traction with Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration despite a lack of direct evidence and other data suggesting the virus jumped into people from an animal host at a Wuhan food market. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has frequently referred to a “lab-leak coverup.” And President Donald Trump has publicly championed the theory as well.

Virologist Robert Redfield, who was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during Trump’s first term and the start of the pandemic, has gone further still with regard to Baric. “I think there is a real possibility that the virus’ birthplace was Chapel Hill,” Redfield said on a podcast in 2024. He has called Baric “the scientific mastermind” of a Chinese government project to engineer the virus. Reflecting the lack of evidence around the possible lab-leak scenario, another camp asserts Baric did not create the virus, but taught the WIV scientists the methods they used to make it.  

The unproven accusations have upended Baric’s life. He frequently receives death threats, forcing UNC to tighten security at his lab. In 2024, he voluntarily participated in a daylong interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about his work and whether it related to the origin of the pandemic. A nonprofit, U.S. Right to Know, has doggedly pursued litigation against UNC for not releasing Baric’s related records. A member of the North Carolina House of Representatives similarly requested records from UNC and says he received “a ton of documents.”

In April 2025, not long after Trump returned to office and named Bhattacharya NIH director, the agency froze Baric’s ability to receive pay from his multiple grants to conduct a “compliance review.” The next month, it asked for clarifications about the 2015 Nature Medicine paper reporting the 2014 work, the Wellcome Trust grant, and potential conflicts of interest with companies that collaborate with his lab. UNC put him on administrative leave that May, barring him from campus for many months, before reinstating him in January.

In February, NIH notified UNC it had “additional concerns” because of the school’s unsatisfying responses to earlier requests. “NIH continues to seek clarity related to all communications that Dr. Baric had with UNC officials between January 1, 2014 and January 1, 2025, along with communications with NIH staff in the same timeframe,” the letter states. After receipt of the suspension letter last week, UNC once again put Baric on administrative leave.

The furin furor

Fueling suspicions that Baric is somehow connected to the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a research proposal the HHS accusations don’t mention, involving the “spike” surface protein on the virus. When an enzyme called furin, made by an animal host, cleaves the spike protein, the virus often infects cells more efficiently. Researchers have discovered many SARS-CoV-2–related coronaviruses in bats and other species, but only it has a furin cleavage site—prompting suspicions it was added through genetic engineering.

In September 2021, The Intercept reported a previously undisclosed grant proposal that Baric, a research nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, WIV researchers, and others had made to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018. (HHS last year debarred the principal investigator of the DARPA proposal, former EcoHealth director and zoologist Peter Daszak, from federal funding because of reporting irregularities about alleged GOF in coronavirus mouse research that EcoHealth did with WIV.)

The DARPA proposal called for the Baric lab to possibly introduce “proteolytic cleavage sites”—which would include the ones cleaved by furin—to bat coronaviruses, hoping to better understand what would happen. The work was not funded, in part over safety concerns, but even some of Baric’s supporters questioned why he did not make the proposal public once COVID-19 erupted and the SARS-CoV-2 genome was known.

In his January 2024 testimony to the House panel, Baric said he did not mention the DARPA proposal before it became public because he had “forgotten” about the rejected grant. He also emphasized that he didn’t know whether adding a furin cleavage site to those bat coronaviruses would have led to a gain or loss of function. “It’s not like it’s portrayed in the news where researchers were going to take furin cleavage sites and just shotgun them into every coronavirus they could find until they found something happened,” Baric said. “It was a systematic process.”

In The Wuhan Cover-Up, Kennedy writes that this experiment was “toying with insanely dangerous alchemies that precisely predicted the very laboratory alterations that could have led to the creation of COVID-19.” Baric and other scientists, however, have outlined reasons why it’s more likely SARS-CoV-2 naturally evolved its furin cleavage site.

GOF debate

The 2014 experiments at the heart of his suspension last week and proposed debarment have a loosely related focus. Their goal was to see whether a novel bat coronavirus found in China by WIV researchers posed a threat to humans. No lab could grow the virus in culture, so WIV shared its genetic sequence with Baric’s group. They inserted that strain’s gene for spike into a version of the coronavirus that emerged in China in 2003 to cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an often-fatal respiratory disease that preceded COVID-19. The team chose this particular SARS virus as a backbone to the foreign spike because NIAID researchers had already adapted the virus to grow in mice.

Baric’s team then tested the chimeric virus in mice, finding that the SARS virus with the new spike protein did not grow as well in rodents as NIAID’s mouse-adapted strain. The infected mice lost some weight but had far less severe disease. “There was no gain in function,” Baric says. Indeed, he and the other authors of the Nature Medicine paper included a graph that shows a loss of function. The study did stir some controversy at the time. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” virologist Simon Wain-Hobson said in a Nature news story.

The HHS suspension letter says Baric referred to the virus his team created as “a chimeric gain-of-function virus” at a National Academy of Sciences symposium in 2014. Baric now says he misspoke, and that it would have been more accurate to say the experiment had GOF potential.

In a separate 2014 experiment with human epithelial cells that line airways, Baric’s group compared the chimeric virus to the original SARS coronavirus. Viral levels of both rose to roughly the same levels in the human cells. “There was a retention of function,” Baric says, but no gain. That work was also reported in the Nature Medicine paper.

HHS recently asked Baric for more evidence that no gain occurred, requesting data on a head-to-head comparison in mice of the wildtype SARS and the spike-engineered mouse-adapted versions. “The NIH found that Dr. Ralph Baric failed to provide this requested data in his response, and found that he minimized the concern about a potential increase [in] infectivity in human cells,” the suspension letter states. 

Baric said he never conducted the requested study because there was no reason to do it, given that the SARS virus does not thrive in mice. But his group in 2012 had published a study that asked why the mouse-adapted strain worked well in mice, genetically tinkering its spike to mimic the natural SARS virus that mice resist. That engineered SARS virus—unlike the chimeric—did not cause weight loss in the mice. The HHS suspension letter says this meant the chimeric had a gain of function, and accused Baric of being “deceptive” on this point. (HHS also says NIAID officials concluded Baric misled the agency in 2014 when asking them to lift the Obama pause on GOF work.)

Baric says he, too, has concerns about the dangers posed by risky virology research. In the Nature Medicine article, he and his colleagues wrote: “Scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue.” Their finding, they said, represented a “crossroads” for GOF concerns: “The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens.”

Indeed, Baric signed a letter published in the 14 May 2021 issue of Science calling for more investigation into whether SARS-CoV-2 leaked from WIV or another lab in Wuhan, although he says he never believed the virus was created by scientists. And last year, Baric was a co-author with Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin on an opinion piece for The New York Times that criticized WIV for continuing to do risky experiments in labs that had “insufficient safety precautions.”

Lipkin, who has collaborated with Baric on research, says the actions against his friend will cause future harm. “Ralph Baric is a brilliant and principled scientist,” Lipkin says. “Canceling his support will decrease our ability to respond to emerging threats.”

Baric has 30 days to appeal the suspension and proposed debarment, which he intends to do. If he loses there, he could take it to federal court.

Todd Canni, an attorney at BakerHostetler who specializes in debarments but does not represent Baric, says these types of cases are typically resolved by the agencies that bring the charges, not the courts. Suspension and debarment adjudications are based on facts, Canni says, and it’s normally a transparent process. “The beautiful part of suspension and debarment is it’s a fair system,” Canni says.

But Baric’s case, tangled up in the politically fraught debate about the origin of a pandemic that killed many millions, is unusual. “You don’t see something like this every day,” he says.

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