Baric Transcribed Interview (Redacted) — page 110

DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com nearly identical to SARS2, which did not exist. It certainly did not exist in my lab. The second thing you needed to do is to explain its weird insertion into the spike of the S1/S2 boundary. And it's an out-of-frame insertion that puts in four residues, when in reality there's only three residues that need to be introduced into it if you wanted to make a furin cleavage site there. And so why are there four residues there? Why is it out of frame? That doesn't make sense. So why is there a proline residue? Prolines cause kinks in proteins, so that can be very disruptive. MS. SALAZAR: So you thought that the Proximal Origins argument was well articulated? DR. BARIC: In terms of the furin cleavage site, yes. And they argued that the most likely event was a recombination event, I think with a virus called HKU9, that had identical region. MS. SALAZAR: The paper, generally. DR. BARIC: Oh, the paper, generally, I disagreed with the idea that you could completely rule out the lab leak, and actually wrote a commentator, commentory piece -- what's the word? MR. ERVIN: Commentary. DR. BARIC: Thanks. A commentary piece that was published in Immunity, May 2020, that stated, equivocally,