Baric Transcribed Interview (Redacted) — page 1

research records -- the documents the documents were. iim! Chairman Rand Paul, M.D. U.S. SENATE COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS Transcribed Interview of Dr. Ralph Baric On April 10, 2026, Dr. Ralph Baric participated in a voluntary transcribed interview with Chairman Rand Paul's sta! as part of the Committee's ongoing investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and risky taxpayer-funded life sciences research. K E Y F I N D I N G S : PA R T O N E DARPA Solicited Gain-of-Function Research Proposals Under PREEMPT Program Dr. Baric testified that the DARPA PREEMPT solicitation -- which called on researchers to learn what makes a virus jump between species "down to the nucleotide level" -- could be answered only one way: "That's a gain-of-function experiment. There's no other way to think about it." As for DEFUSE, the proposal he submitted with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, he confirmed that the step of inserting a furin cleavage site into a viral backbone was his to perform: "That part would be done by me." The furin cleavage site is the very feature of SARS-CoV-2 that first drew lab-origin scrutiny. Undisclosed Baric Experiment Undercuts Key Argument in Proximal Origins Paper That COVID Wasn't Engineered One of the main scientific papers arguing COVID arose naturally, "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2," leaned on a simple assumption: if someone had engineered the virus, they would have built it to latch onto human cells as tightly as possible. Because the real virus doesn't grip in that "ideal" way, the paper treated that as a sign no one designed it. But years earlier, Dr. Baric had actually run an experiment and found the assumption was wrong. When a virus grips too tightly, it gets stuck and can't spread as well. So, a knowledgeable designer would deliberately avoid the "ideal" grip the paper assumed they'd use -- meaning the very feature the Proximal Origin paper called proof of natural origin is something an engineer might choose on purpose. Dr. Baric said he reported the experiment to NIH and destroyed the materials. On the Secret Feb. 1 Call -- Unexplained Presence, and Conflicting Accounts of Whether He Spoke Dr. Baric confirmed he was on the February 1, 2020, call with Dr. Fauci, Francis Collins, Jeremy Farrar, and the authors of "Proximal Origins" -- yet he appears on no invitation list, could not recall who invited him, and said "I couldn't find how I knew about the meeting." Two participants have confirmed to the Committee they were unaware he was even on the call. Dr. Baric also gave conflicting accounts of whether he spoke at all. He first said he stayed silent to avoid "chang[ing] the direction of the conversation" -- then, asked if he introduced himself, said "I think so ... we went around and introduced everybody in the room" and that he was "surprised that they didn't know I was there." Paid U.S. Intelligence Community Biodefense Advisor Sent a Taxpayer-Funded Mouse Model to Wuhan Dr. Baric -- who served for more than a decade as a paid member of the intelligence community's Biological Science Expert Group (BSEG) -- confirmed he sent his U.S. taxpayer-funded mouse model to Dr. Shi at WIV. When China later tried to sell that model back to American scientists, Dr. Baric said, "What kind of crap is this? This is not ethical behavior." He cast the sharing as compelled -- "I'm required to share ... with people who request it" -- and added that if Congress objects, "you all should write regulations that prevent that." Five Years to Disclose EcoHealth's USAID Funding on the 2015 WIV Paper with Dr. Shi On November 7, 2015, Peter Daszak sent an email marked urgent -- "Please acknowledge USAID PREDICT and our NIAID grant in the paper with Ralph Baric" -- and Dr. Shi asked Dr. Baric to add it. The acknowledgment was not added until 2020 -- five years later. Asked whether the delay was an attempt to conceal the USAID funding, Dr. Baric answered, "I don't know why I would have any interest in doing that." He acknowledged that only "90 percent" of the research associated with the 2015 paper was completed before the pause. Then-USAID Administrator Samantha Power testified before Congress in 2022 that the agency had "no evidence" it funded -- and had "not authorized" -- gain-of-function research -- a claim the five-year delay and the eventual USAID acknowledgment cut against. NIH Could Not Locate Its Own Gain-of-Function Review Records During Dr. Baric's February 2020 meeting with Dr. Fauci, NIH o!cials requested copies of his research records -- the documents NIH allegedly reviewed years earlier. By Dr. Baric's account, NIH o!cials "didn't know where the documents were." He also testified that the DARPA DEFUSE proposal was not raised in his conversation with Dr. Fauci.