What Will We See? Rand Paul Orders Deep State To Turn Over Records On COVID Origins

Americans may soon learn more about the origins of the COVID-19 virus after U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Dr. Rand Paul ordered intelligence community officials to turn over their records on research into that and other risky viruses.

The Committee reports Paul “sent a letter to the Office of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI) requesting records” which “includes new documents obtained by the Committee revealing that members of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) were in contact with Dr. Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert and collaborator of Dr. Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), well before the outbreak of the global pandemic. These documents reveal that Dr. Baric’s relationship with the Intelligence Community dates back to at least 2015.”

“In an email dated September 10, 2015, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and ODNI initiated contact with Dr. Baric to set up a meeting to discuss a ‘possible project’ related to ‘[c]oronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation. Just under two months later, Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi would publish on their joint coronavirus experiments in a paper titled, ‘A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.’ This research, which was funded with taxpayer dollars under the USAID PREDICT program and NIH grants, is largely acknowledged by the scientific community to have included gain-of-function research,” the Committee reports.

“In 2018, Dr. Baric and Dr. Shi would again appear as collaborators in a research proposal which was submitted by EcoHealth Alliance to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) PREventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) program. This proposal, known as DEFUSE, sought funding for a project that included plans to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus, strikingly similar to what would later emerge as SARS-CoV-2 that caused COVID-19. Although DARPA declined to fund the project, the research concept did not disappear. Two years later, in early 2020, COVID-19 spread from Wuhan, the same location named in the DEFUSE proposal. As the virus began to circulate globally, the same circle of scientists who had proposed risky gain-of-function experiments were suddenly advising the U.S. government on how to respond,” the Committee adds.

“The new records released by the Committee show that on January 23, 2020, Dr. Baric was summoned by ‘the Sponsor’ to present at a meeting of ODNI’s Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG), which operates under the National Counterproliferation Center (NCPC). Dr. Baric agreed to participate, replying that he would ‘put together a few slides that capture the essence of the problem.’ The response was enthusiastic: ‘[t]he Sponsor will be excited to hear that you are willing to lead this timely and important discussion,’” the Committee notes.

“Six days later, on January 29, 2020, Dr. Baric emails a copy of his PowerPoint presentation which included a slide titled ‘Origins’ that discussed the possibility of an accidental laboratory release at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A hypothesis that was later publicly dismissed, labeled a conspiracy theory, and vilified by Dr. Fauci and his inner circle,” the Committee concludes.

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