Transcript segment

Baric Transcribed Interview (Redacted), p.18 · baric_ti:utt:00085

Date: 2026-04-10 09:00 (day precision)
Type: transcript segment · interview
recipient: Christina Salazar, Harry Kazenoff, David T. Lambeth III, William Henderson, Clark Ervin, Jake Greenberg
speaker: Ralph S. Baric

No, not the Georgia guy, no. The reason they called me was that they had worked as sort of an international team to set up clinical trials for respiratory viruses, mostly focused on flu, and China -- flu or small molecule inhibitors. Sorry, I forgot the second part. And so they were very interested in initially talking about using remdisivir in their clinical trials, which they eventually did in January.

In context

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2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open

Not in any detail. I can probably give you an estimate of what we talked about, was that there was a new coronavirus that was being identified, and it would be logical for the NIH to contact me and talk to me about what it was. Although the 7th would've been a little early. I guess it was around the 7th or 8th that I actually got the sequence of the virus. Before that I'd been verbally told by the Chinese that it was 78 percent identical to the original SARS coronavirus 2003 strain.
2026-04-10 09:00 Christina Salazar open

And who told you that?
2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open

Ben Cao was on the line. It was Fred Hayden. I knew I'd eventually remember Fred's name from University of Virginia. That's going to happen a lot, by the way. And the other person on the call was Peter Horby from England.
2026-04-10 09:00 Clark Ervin open

Do you mean Georgia? DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com
2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric

No, not the Georgia guy, no. The reason they called me was that they had worked as sort of an international team to set up clinical trials for respiratory viruses, mostly focused on flu, and China -- flu or small molecule inhibitors. Sorry, I forgot the second part. And so they were very interested in initially talking about using remdisivir in their clinical trials, which they eventually did in January.
2026-04-10 09:00 Christina Salazar open

Which you were also involved in.
2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open

No. My role was to call up Gilead collaborators and say, "The Chinese want to talk to you," and that's what I did.
2026-04-10 09:00 Christina Salazar open

Did any of your research lead to --
2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open

We had a paper that was coming out in Nature Communications on January 10th, and so I called the journal and asked them if it was okay if I could share it with the Chinese and the other people on the call, so we did.

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