COVID-19 Records

Transcript segment

Baric Transcribed Interview (Redacted), pp.128-129 · baric_ti:utt:01108

Page text: p.128, p.129 · original PDF

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
Topics
Vaccines
So coronavirus vaccines induce Th2 immune DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com pathology using killed vaccines plus alum. So I talked at a WHO meeting early on in the pandemic to say that alumbased vaccines, which have a tendency to -- I probably need to explain what a Th2 immune response is.

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So I talked at a WHO meeting early on in the pandemic to say that alumbased vaccines, which have a tendency to -- I probably need to explain what a Th2 immune response is. needs context uncertain explicit hedge asserts

In context

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  1. 2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open
    Will you let me look at the details of that?
  2. 2026-04-10 09:00 Christina Salazar open
    I mean, if you're not going to be able to answer it right now I don't want to waste our time.
  3. 2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open
    I'm talking about this afternoon. Yeah, please.
  4. 2026-04-10 09:00 Christina Salazar open
    Okay. I just want to make sure that we get to everything. Early in 2020, did you ever have any concerns about the safety of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines that were being developed?
  5. 2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric
    So coronavirus vaccines induce Th2 immune DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com pathology using killed vaccines plus alum. So I talked at a WHO meeting early on in the pandemic to say that alumbased vaccines, which have a tendency to -- I probably need to explain what a Th2 immune response is.
  6. 2026-04-10 09:00 Christina Salazar open
    We don't really have to. We'll look it up.
  7. 2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open
    Okay. So basically there's a massive inflammatory response that has the potential to be lifethreatening, and the SARS coronavirus vaccines, from 2003, that the NIH had purchased, were both adjuvanted with alum. And we published papers showing that that drives a strong Th2 immune response. So my concern, and I expressed this to the WHO and to other groups, was that we needed to look carefully for vaccine-induced immune pathology. Ultimately, we published a paper with the VRC. That was one of the experiments we set up to do, where we took mRNA vaccines and we took killed vaccine preparations with alum and compared them head-to-head for the ability to induced Th2 responses. The mRNA vaccines did not cause it. The recombinant protein, or the killed vaccines plus alum caused a big Th2 response. Now, the Chinese vaccines were killed vaccines with alum, which I think was inappropriate. The mRNA vaccines, though, were tested for that using homologous virus challenge. DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com
  8. 2026-04-10 09:00 Christina Salazar open
    Okay. So at this point --
  9. 2026-04-10 09:00 Ralph S. Baric open
    At that point, the downstream question is whether if you have significant amounts of virus variation and you're infecting the original Wuhan mRNA vaccine, will breakthrough infection induce an immune pathology phenotype, and those are the kinds of things we're interested in studying now.

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