Baric Transcribed Interview (Redacted) — page 133

DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com It was a global protease knockout. And that's what a loss- of-function experiment does. The only way to really prove it is to take a virus that doesn't have a furin cleavage site and stick it in. That's gain-of-function. It's causality. You know for a fact. I can make the argument in this room, and I can argue it in front of scientists, that the introduction of the furin cleavage site in SARS-2 attenuated its pathogenesis and increased its transmissibility, and that was to its benefit. And that's not what you hear. I've looked at a bunch of these different protease studies that people did, where they knocked out the sequence. They were making global proteolytic cleavage knockouts on the spike. And if you don't cleave S1/S2 efficiently, you knock down replication and pathogenesis. I also say that SARS-coronavirus-2 had the same R rate that SARS coronavirus 2003 had, early in the pandemic. They both transmitted efficiently. The difference was one transmitted very late only, after severe disease occurred - - that was 2003 -- and in 2019, that strain transmitted before you got disease. And that's why it's a pandemic and the other one was not. Sorry, I know that went long. You're probably mad at me. MS. SALAZAR: No, I'm mad at him.