The Ralph Baric Interview Release
A story of a man's account of his own forgetfulness, not knowing how he ended up on pivotal Zoom calls, and his as-yet unspoken classified answers to unclassified NBACC reports
C'est en vertu de ce principe que j'ai écrit : Genet est un moraliste et "Je suis un mensonge qui dit toujours la vérité", phrase dont les ânes firent leur herbe tendre.
John Cocteau
Dr. Ralph Baric Transcribed Interview Released
Courtesy of Chairman Rand Paul
This release is the stenographic transcript before the committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs U.S. Senate in Washington D.C. on Friday, April 10, 2026 of the interview with Dr. Ralph Baric. The interview was requested by Committee Chairman Rand Paul as part of the committee’s oversight investigation on government funding of risky research1 and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For those unfamiliar with Ralph Baric and his prominent role in coronavirus research surrounding the COVID-19 “pandemic”, he is an American virologist and epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC at Chapel Hill) (William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology). He is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading coronavirus experts, and his lab’s research contributed significantly to the development of COVID-19 mRNA injectable products (including pre-clinical work supporting mRNA platforms going back to 2018–2019 when the NIH Vaccine Research Center contacted his group to evaluate them), and therapeutics such as Remdesivir.
The goal of the interview was to probe Ralph Baric’s role, knowledge and recollections regarding high-risk coronavirus research, Wuhan collaborations and SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 origins. In his testimony, he acknowledged many times that he has trouble remembering names, and has difficulty recalling how he ended up on certain Zoom calls.
A multidisciplinary scientist’s perspective on the interview
Ralph Baric is a confused man. Part of that confusion is inevitable - no one can know everything - yet he is also clearly conflicted. The conflict does not stem from the unclassified topics raised in the interview; it stems from his own ANSWERS being classified.2 It is possible that he is compromised through conflicts of interest, external pressure, incentives to protect colleagues or institutions, or other factors.
Answers as to whether he consulted on a final report for SARS-CoV-2 to the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC - DHS) that he himself claims “might be classified”.
Answers as to how he knew about - or was invited to - meetings that he attended and actively participated in.3
In the interview, Baric gives a clear affirmative answer that he was on a call around February 1st, 2020 involving Jeremy Farrar, Anthony Fauci, Kristian Andersen, Bob Garry, Eddie Holmes, Ron Fouchier, and possibly Ian Lipkin (the group associated with the Proximal Origin4 discussions). He states he does not recall who invited him, appears on no invitation lists, and could not find in his records how he ended up on the call. His account of whether he spoke at this meeting is inconsistent across the interview: at one point stating he stayed silent during the February 1st meeting; elsewhere indicating he may have introduced himself.
So which was it?
When Ms. Salazar specifically references the February 3rd, 2020 call (identified as the National Academies call arranged by Anthony Fauci according to Kristian Anderson5), Baric responds affirmatively (“That’s the National Academies, yes”), indicating he recognizes and acknowledges that call. Details about his participation or what was said are limited and hedged by his general statements about the period being a blur of many calls.
Basically, he says yes he was on that important February 1st call, but claims he has no idea who invited him and gives mixed answers about whether he actually said anything. He also admits he was aware of (or on) the February 3rd National Academies call.
Pertaining to the “calls”, the National Academies provided a formal, rapid scientific advisory channel requested by the White House (Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Fauci) supplied the core infectious-disease expertise and perspective. Intelligence and national-security participation reflected the biosecurity implications of the origin question. The February 3rd meeting was the public-facing step in a very intense few days of private (secretive) and official discussions that began with the February 1st call, with attendance and participation by Ralph Baric.
There, was that so hard Ralph?
Answers to specific questions pertaining to Ralph’s three suggested possibilities (the Slack messages of the Proximal Origins paper reveal the authors’ own unresolved conclusions as to the origin) of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 that he supplied prior to the Proximal Origins paper getting published.
Baric also claims to have been surprised as to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)’s6 presence in the the February 3rd, 2026 call and stated it “wasn’t common”. He would know. OSTP’s7 Ian Watson was also present.8
Gain-of-function (GOF) according to Ralph Baric
This is very important to understand. The GOF pause (Obama) in October 2014 stopped a defined category of research (pay very close attention to this wording while we play the game of semantics). P3CO replaced the stop with a review gate that was rarely opened.9
Does this not effectively mean that GOF was allowed to continue?
Ralph is currently waiting to hear about a pending NIH grant with his friend Fang Li that has potential as a GOF experiment.
GOF - as defined by Ralph - involves finding out what drives cross-species jumping events.
DARPA PREEMPT were all in on GOF.
Here’s the reality. The practical effect of the GOF pause and P3CO replacement was that most of the research that had been under the “pause cloud” moved forward without the independent, high-level review many expected. This gap is a major reason bills like the Risky Research Review Act were later introduced, but as shown above, the gap allowed Baric - via a waiver - to continue his [MERS coronavirus countermeasure] research (GOF?) with many likely pending grants that may also involve GOF.
The real question that requires asking
After reading the transcript, I am no longer sure that the most important question to ask concerns Baric’s role in creating, or co-creating a chimeric SARS-CoV-2 virus with an out-of-frame PRRA furin-cleavage site.
I think the real, more pressing question is this:
Why did the relevant authorities - who likely possessed far more knowledge and information than any of the individual scientists or agencies involved,10 based on intelligence assessments that reached figures like Anthony Fauci - not act differently?
Why did events instead unfold as a large-scale cover-up under the guise of “national security”, rather than an immediate, transparent reconciliation? Had the latter path been taken, I can imagine a world where SARS-CoV-2 never became a household name, where far fewer lives were ruined by the subsequent “countermeasures” imposed to fight SARS-CoV-2.
The experimental injection countermeasure
Baric had more than a hand in the creation, pre-clinical development and evaluation of the modified mRNA-LNP “vaccines”, so my question here is:
Was Baric placed under any form of duress to continue to work on these “vaccines” because of what certain authorities might have known about his prior research and any possible connection to the origin of SARS-CoV-2?
Was he under threat? Is he under threat? Is this the reason why he is so cautious in his answers during the interview?
There is nothing to be confused about
It was not a virus, but what followed - imposed by humans, on humans - that decimated the population. The widespread subjugation of us all under the banner of “safety and protection” that included:
Forced isolation
Imposed lockdowns when people needed each other most
Withholding of early treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine known to be effective against SARS-CoV-2
A coercive gas-lighting campaign that pressured billions of individuals to accept experimental gene-based injections encoding the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein - itself the subject on ongoing debate over possible laboratory engineering
The persecution of doctors, scientists, lawyers, parents and others who challenged the official “safe and effective” narrative of these experimental gene-based prodrugs
Censorship of reputable researchers who questioned the established Anthony Fauci Science, with defamatory labels slung upon them like “fringe” and “conspiracy theorist”
Denial of millions of injured individuals due to the experimental gene-based prodrugs
A continuance of the “safe and effective” narrative pertaining to the nucleoside-modified mRNA-LNP platform to [potentially] enable it’s plug and play use for all future vaccines.
All of this was imposed on us, with repercussive damages bleeding well into the future. And all the while, the real reason for it all was never disclosed to us: it lay dormant and hidden - shielded by bureaucracy, pardons and denials, all in the name of national security, safety and protection.
I will always maintain that this COVID-era persecution of humanity had nothing to do with genuine national security. It is clear to me that was not about protecting or securing any nation. It was about shielding secrets, and the shameless individuals who controlled them. That protection enabled what amounted to a coordinated global effort to control both information and populations that resulted in the decimation of the middle class, and the devolution of the lower class to tent class.
It also resulted (as previously stated) in millions of yet-to-be-acknowledged injuries from the injection countermeasures.
Deep throat
Perhaps amid the confusion created by the tangled, secrecy-laden web of countless independent groups operating behind our backs - none of which seem to know everything about any single topic (I would say this is by design) - we should demand that they be dismantled. This might alleviate “the confusion and frustration”.
What function are these secret groups actually serving? Are they protecting us, or the nation? Are they serving the people, or are they serving an agenda set by unaccountable parties hiding in dark smoky rooms going by the name “Deep Throat”?
I say we disband them all, and start a new band.
The anonymous email to Jon Cohen
One of the focal points of the interview was to find out if Baric wrote - or at least knew about - the anonymous July 25, 2020 email sent to Science magazine reporter Jon Cohen that opens with “Hello Jon”.
This message outlined what it referred to as “the bizarre back-story” of the Proximal Origin paper. It claimed the paper’s authors had initially raised alarms that SARS-CoV-2 was human-engineered, arranged a conference call (the February 1, 2020 call involving Fauci, Farrar and others), were then thoroughly corrected by coronavirus experts on that call (Baric), and afterward published the opposite conclusion while using those experts’ arguments without credit.
Cohen received the tip, shared it with Kristian Anderson and Eddie Holmes, and the email later surfaced publicly through FOIA releases later on. The letter’s detailed knowledge of the February 1st call, and of coronavirus technical points is curious, and internal messages (Slack) among the Proximal Origin authors have clouded Baric with suspicion on related issues. No conclusive public evidence identifies Baric as an author, however.
I asked Grok to provide a writing-style analysis of the anonymous email (ofu8ledu8z@protonmail.com) sent on July 25th, 2020, to try to narrow down who might have penned it. It said this:
Given the combination of intimate knowledge of the private February 1 call, the emphasis on the two coronavirus specialists who corrected the non-coronavirus group, the focus on unacknowledged intellectual contribution, and the restrained-but-outraged tone, the style and content are most consistent with someone in (or very close to) the circle of the European/Dutch coronavirus experts who were on that call—particularly the group around Ron Fouchier (Erasmus MC).
It ranked Ron Fouchier (Ron Fouchier/other European coronavirus experts) as “Moderate-higher” in terms of writing style similarity considering a list people who were privy to that information - ie: who was present on the February 1st call. It described the “key differences” in writing style in the following way:
More direct, technically precise, and willing to be blunt about scientific quality. The tipster’s description of the “coronavirus experts” who “set them straight in great detail” and one who left for dinner guests matches the tone some of these scientists use.
This, however, is pure speculation. Gotta have some fun, right? We don’t know who owns the ofu8ledu8z@protonmail.com. All we know from the interview is that Baric denied it was his. From the email itself, we know it was suggested by the Proximal Origin authors that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, that Baric knew about this suggestion - and apparently did not deny it and might have been concerned about it11 - and the authors wrote up the Proximal Origin paper and published it anyway, even though Kristian Anderson was not comfortable with the final draft.12
Overall evaluation of Ralph Baric
I read his calculatory cautiousness during the interview as strategic self-protection rather than ordinary forgetfulness. He demonstrates a deliberate, risk-aware style when he answers questions that prioritizes limiting exposure over blatant transparency. He also demonstrates a pattern of providing [precise] technical explanations combined with carefully conveyed personal recollections, self-corrections (only when safer to do so) and redirection of sensitive details to others or to documents. This might well function as plausible deniability by limiting exposure, avoiding spontaneous statements that might later conflict with evidence and maintaining control over the narrative while still appearing cooperative.
It looks like training to me. And I don’t think it’s from his benchwork. I might be totally wrong about this, but considering his high level of situational awareness and risk-calibrated restraint under scrutiny, it seems to me that he is not a stranger to managing potential liability. By my assessment (as an unofficial profiler), he is indeed managing liability as opposed to simply struggling with recall [important] details.
In other words, he’s good at avoiding lying on record.
Waiting for July 29, 2026.
The Risky Research Review Act (formally S. 854 in the 119th Congress; earlier version S. 4667 in the 118th Congress) is a bipartisan bill primarily sponsored by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), with support from Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) and a House companion led by Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA).It aims to create stronger, independent oversight of federally funded high-risk life sciences research - especially gain-of-function research and other work that could enhance the transmissibility or virulence of dangerous pathogens - following concerns raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, lab-leak debates, and issues with existing processes like the HHS P3CO Framework.
Andersen, K.G., Rambaut, A., Lipkin, W.I. et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nat Med 26, 450–452 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9
ODNI is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a U.S. government agency that leads and integrates the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). https://www.dni.gov/
OSTP is the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a division of the White House Executive Office of the President (EOP). https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/
Baric, Daszak, Lipton, Anderson, Holmes, Farrar, Shi, Collins, Graham, Menachery, Li, Stemmy, Rambaut, Garry, etc.
Baric is knee deep in the coverup and corruption. His confusing answers are his way to respond without being totally truthful and to appear as if he is above reproach. He’s played this game of hide and seek for decades. GOF has no credibility to be used on any virus. It’s like creating a monster, then pretending it’s for our own good.
How not to lie or tell the truth under oath or otherwise is the mastered skill of most psychopaths and those who can quite; not hone it, are more than likely sociopaths.....seems the medical industry is plagued with such, imho... 🥺