COVID lab leak coverup is being exposed and a UNC expert is implicated | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio and Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to vpekclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. All righty, so we got a lot of stuff going on today because it's a day that ends and why. So first, this is a story you're probably not going to see or hear really anywhere, probably, but it is a massive write up over at Real Clear Investigations by a guy named Paul Thacker, headline COVID cover up, hiding star researcher Ralph Barracks, ties to global pandemic. And when I posted this up onto the Twitter machine, I believe yesterday evening I saw it and I shared the story and almost immediately got the response from liberal who said, it's been six years. Let's just move on already. Kids have graduated, businesses are back open, everything's fine. It was six years ago, why do we need to do this? Right? So I explained, and I'll explain now why this is still relevant. Not only were people's lives destroyed, not only were businesses wiped out, not only were people prevented from being with their family members as they died alone. Right, but from a policy standpoint, from a good governance standpoint, indeed, to speak in the language of the left, if we are to achieve progress, then we have to do a post mortem on lessons learned. Right, in any disaster response, any kind of you know, like a police shooting or something, right, there's always an investigation to find out what happened. And if you can identify problems in the training, the response resources, decisions that were made right, you do that? Why do you do that? You do that so you don't do it again? Right, Like, that's the point is, so you look at the things. And I've been saying this for six years. You know, is anybody in the media and maybe we will get a question like this on the campaign trail if Roy Cooper cut him loose, Cooper, my good friend Ray, if he ever gets a question from you know, somebody who's not lapdog media, Will anybody ever ask him if he made a single bad decision during the pandemic. Is there any single thing that he did that looking back now with the benefit of twenty twenty hindsight, right, would you have done everything the same? And it's not a gotcha question, although I'm sure you know Republicans will use it against him, But the important thing is to have some accounting to say, yeah, I did this, and I did it for what I thought were the right reasons whatever, but it turns out that wasn't the best idea, like for example, oh, I don't know, closing down the schools, Like how about that? Right? Closing down the schools when you have a demographic that is like virtually unaffected by COVID? Was that the right call to make? Was it the right call to keep them closed for as long as you did, knowing that the other side of the ledger is going to be accounted for as well, which is learning loss. Although the teacher's union president said that learning loss was a myth at the time, What if anybody will ask her about that while she's out on strike on Friday. So that's why this is important, because it's taken this long to get documents out of the federal government, the scientific institutions and UNC. Yeah. UNC. You know why because the researcher, Ralph Barrick works there the like the world's eminent microbiologists or whatever. He's out of UNC, and they're not cooperating. They're not there, they're fine, they're they're looking for ways to not respond to these things and outline the work that he did and the grants that he got. So here's from the story, and I'm going to be quoting. I mean, if I were to read the whole thing, it would take forty minutes according to the you know the page when you load it up, and it'll tell you like estimated time that it takes like the normal person to read it, and it's like thirty one to forty minutes. But it goes through the timeline. So in March of twenty twenty, a couple month before the CDC reported the first confirmed case of COVID nineteen in the US, editors at the journal Nature Medicine, they amended a note or they stuck a note onto a study that was already there. Okay, so this study had been published, it was on the website. I remember this study. I read this study. I did not understand most of the study, but I read it. I remember reading it, and then there was a note stuck to it because they said, yes, this study was done five years ago, and they said, quote, we are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID nineteen was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true. Scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus. Right, Because if you were suspicious that this highly transmittable lethal contain that popped up out of Wuhan, a block away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology where they just so happened to be doing this kind of research, if you thought that sounds weird, and the Kami's in charge of China, they weren't exactly forthcoming and giving us like any information about it. I was called xenophobic and racist because I thought that their scientists had maybe unintentionally released this thing, that it broke containment out of their layup, or that they weaponized at first on their own people, which seemed kind of odd to me. But their commis so they might very well kill their own people and I was called a racist for thinking these things and saying these things. Yet the counter argument or theory was that, no, no, it comes from those Chinese people eating bad soup. Okay, that's not racisty, Like, how is it? How does that work? The prestigious journal appears to have taken the extraordinary action for two reasons. First, the study described a cutting edge gain of function research that I'm sure we have all heard about by now, which mixes different viruses together to create a man a man made version, or a hybrid of both viruses, experiments that some suspected, like me, were the origin of the SARS CoV to virus that caused the pandemic. So that's one reason, okay, that it described this process. And look, I understood at the time that you know, you could make a justification for doing this because like, hey, if we want to see how let's say the flu might mutate over multiple generations, right, so maybe if we do a controlled experiment and we mutate it, and then we'll be able to come up with a vaccine for the further mutations. Right. I can understand that argument. Okay, But the other thing going on here was that they this type of research that has been to kind of speed up the mutations. This was controversial to begin with, and it had been shut down under Obama. The other reason why they stuck this note onto the paper. The studies authors were she Zengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Ralph Barrick, the world's leading expert on coronaviruses from the University of North Carolina. They were the ones who wrote this article five years prior. By the way, she Zenglie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or as I call it, the WIV that's the bat Lady like. She was literally the subject of news stories that would follow her into these bat caves where she would scrape up the bat poo and then you know, do all sorts of experiments on mutating their these coronaviruses and such. There's another virologist renowned. His name is Simon Wayne Hobson. He said that the note was an early sign of what would become a year's long effort by the scientific establishment to distract the public and obscure the link between lab studies to create dangerous viruses and the COVID pandemic. During a March twenty twenty Talk or Sorry twenty twenty six talk at the National Institutes of Health, Wayne Hobson blasted the former NIH leader Francis Collins, the guy who would play guitar and do parody songs. You know some day after the pandemic. I've got the audio, I will I will, well, maybe I will play it. I don't know. Blasted Collins, as well as Saint doctor Anthony Fauci for funding the lab studies and then misleading the public about their dangers. Nearly two thirds of Americans now actually believe that the virus came from a lab. Although the question can be debated, there's no doubt that scientists at the highest level worked to dismiss the lab league theory and shut down their connections to the work in Wuhan. Efforts by Collins and Fauci to delegitimize dissenting voices have been reported, but the central role that Barrick played has been obscured until now. The unc researcher's work on coronaviruses and his connection to the Wuhan lab are now receiving renewed attention after real clear investigations learned that the federal government has quietly removed Barrick from all of his NIH grants, and Real Clear Investigations has learned that UNC placed Barrick on leave. UNC has also refused to cooperate with NIH officials as they have attempted to gather more facts and emails about Barrack's coronavirus research, which evidence leads them to believe led to the coronavirus pandemic, and both Barrick and UNC and the Chancellor Lee Roberts everybody is refusing to comment. Nobody wants to talk to OURCI Real Clear Investigations. I wonder why you know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in nineteen ninety seven and Minhill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories, all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot com. All right, So, the University of North Carolina has blocked both private individuals and federal agencies that are trying to get documents to you know, they're blocking transparency, shall we say. A researcher whose security clearance allowed him to view still classify documents told this is a congressional researcher told Real Clear Investigations or RCI, that there's no doubt the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. This is a good view of what happened to virology sort of as a profession. He says, they started willy nilly mute viruses and then got upset when this led to twenty million deaths. Barreck Ralph Barracks's virus research has been controversial for a while. He pioneered gain of function studies, which designed viruses with unique genetic features that make them either more deadly to humans or more likely to cause infection. This line of research posits that generating deadly viruses in labs allows scientists to create treatments before a similar pathogen evolves in the wild and starts killing humans. Right, That was the initial argument for doing the research, But then some stuff happened. There was in twenty eleven, there were a couple of researchers that made a new and deadly flu virus that could spread through the air, and so the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked two scientific journals to delete the details of that because they feared, you know, it could be turned into a bio weapon, so they took it down. Then twenty fourteen, the federal government releases and then there's calls in the to the Obama administration for new rules on gain of function studies. So they come up with some but the rules did little too slow dangerous studies. Within weeks, the virology community was hit with a bracing setback. Dozens of CDC workers were potentially exposed to anthrax and vials of smallpox in an unsecured NIH storeroom, and that prompted the Obama White House to crack down. They put a pause on all gain of function virus research. As you might imagine if this is your field and you got millions and millions of dollars of federal grant money on the line, this is a problem for you, right. Barrick at the time told NPR that he would follow the band, that they have stopped their experiments, but in the waning days. Then there is a sort of secret lobbying effort in the final days of the Obama administration, and the band gets lifted a couple weeks before Trump gets sworn into office, about a year after the White House passed new guidance guidance. As part of the lifting of the band, they said, we put on some new guidelines and this will contain the problem. Right. About a year after the White House passes the new guidance for safer gain of function studies, Barrick and the bat Lady over in Wuhan and a slew of other researchers presented one of the first major tests of the new guidelines. In twenty eighteen, they submitted a grant application to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The existence of this proposed which many see as a blueprint for the COVID virus, remained hidden until late twenty twenty one, when a military officer leaked it to a group of online investigators. This is where you see the entrance of Peter Dajak at the NIH funded Eco Health Alliance. The grant list studies that stretch on for several pages includes research in both the lab and in the field, such as collecting bat viruses from different caves in China to study them. Back at the with, the researchers proposed taking the backbone of a bat virus and inserting a spike protein with a furin cleavage site. You remember that term mm HM that allows viruses to infect the cells of human lungs. They wanted to see whether these lab created viruses could cause SARS SARS like diseases. The researchers planned to test them in mice whose genes had been modified to make their lungs more like those of humans. The particular line of humanized mice Wuhan researchers use in such experiments was created many years ago in Barrack's lab at UNC. But here's the thing. DARPA did not fund the proposal. They wrote that its interesting could merit funding in the future, but that virologists would need a gain of function risk mitigation plan if they were to fund this study. You guys needed to tell us exactly how you're going to contain all this. A year after DARPA denied the proposal, a novel bat virus with a furre and cleavage site began infecting humans in Wuhan. I'm sure it was just a coincidence going over this this piece at real Clear Investigations are yeah, realclearinvestigations dot com and about UNC, I've been asked to clarify u NC Chapel Hill UNC Chapel Hill virologist Ralph Barrack's role in developing the technique and what became the COVID virus. And they submitted in form of a grant request to DARPA, a request, you know, for a darpative fund all of this research, and DARPA said no. And so when the public learned about this research and how it's identical to like, how you would make the COVID virus. People start saying WHOA, like this seems like connected. No, and they were like, no, no, no, because we didn't get funding from DARPA. But here's the thing. One NIH official who was not allowed to talk to the media but said it's a classic joke in side the research community. Scientists tend to write their grants based on research they've already done. Remember, Barrick said he's abiding by the ban that was put in place. Then the Obama White House gives new guidelines, they submit new research grants or applications, they don't get the money. Congressional investigators asked Barrick about the proposal, and he said, oh, I'd forgotten about that quite Frankly, the grant wasn't funded, so I moved on. Virologist and former CDC director Robert Redfield told RCI that Barrick was probably misleading Congress in that interview. He believes virologists did the research in the proposal and then submitted the grant for funding, because that's how science advances. He said, quote, I know enough about these proposals. About fifty percent of the work you pose and a grant is already done. He also has appears to have a habit of forgetting details of virus research when disclosure and transparency might cast a bad light on the scientific field. He gave a private briefing in January of twenty twenty to intelligence officials where he discussed a possible lab accident in Wuhan. He gave a public talk to congressional staff a month later, but in that presentation he omitted the possibility of a lab accident. So this is right as the COVID virus is beginning to circulate in America and an Intel official asks Barrick to come and make a presentation. He emails a slideshow to this person January twenty ninth. They have a copy of the slide right here, and it says accidental release. It's got a list of origins earlier open market or origin people in rural areas who live or work in near proximity of bat caves and such or accidental release from the with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That same month, NIH officials and Barrack's academic colleagues then began an intensive campaign to discredit as a conspiracy theory any question that the pandemic started in a Wuhan lamb Fauci told a podcast hosted by Newt Gingrich that these are just conspiracy theories. Well what changed in the matter of two or three weeks? What changed? Barreck is telling the intelligence agencies that yeah, this could have come from the with then he goes to Congress, leaves that part out, and then all of a sudden, you've got this massive campaign, this pressure campaign to cast anybody bringing this up, the Lablee theory as a as a conspiracy theory. By mid February, a couple weeks later, suggestions that it could have been an accident at the lab were then being attacked in the media and guess who they were quoting, of course, same usual suspects, And by the end of that month, Barrick gave a public talk to congressional staffers about the virus and presented many of the same slides that he used to brief the intelligence officials, but he left out the slide that talked about the Wuhan Lab. Former CDC director Redfield told RCI that in the first month of the pandemic, he was given classified material that highlighted the COVID virus' furin cleavage site. He then briefed the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. He said, this is the smoking gun. This virus came from a lab. Redfield added that he believes the National Institutes of Health and allied virologists then began a full court press in February twenty twenty two smear people as conspiracy theorists about a possible lab accident, because why would they do this? They needed to protect their money and their reputations. During the first few months of the pandemic, right, we get the lockdowns, the death tolls increasing. Virologists published three scientific papers that labeled the possibility of a lab accident a conspiracy theory. These papers shut down chatter about a Wuhan accident. A widely reported February letter published at The Lancet, signed by twenty seven scientists. They cast the lab leak as a conspiracy theory. Emails show though the letter had been orchestrated by Peter Dejak of Eco Health Alliance, one of Ralph Barrack's friends and allies. While gathering the signatures, Desjach wrote to Barrick saying he should not sign the letter quote so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't work in a counterproductive way. We'll then put it out in in a way that doesn't link it back to our collaboration, so we maximize an independent voice. The Lancet later had to add a lengthy disclosure to this letter because, like Barrick, Dejak had extensive financial ties to the with but he had hidden them from the Lancet editors. When congressional investigators questioned Barrick about the Lancet statement, he testified that he had a conflict of interest due to his collaborations with the WIV, So he said, I didn't think it was appropriate to sign it. So that's why he didn't sign it. But wait, there's more. There is another connection to North Carolina. Late twenty twenty two, Republicans on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or the HELP Committee, began to finalize a report on the pandemic's origin. But that investigation also seems to have been designed to distract from the dangerous research and to insulate Barrick. In particular, while stating COVID nineteen likely resulted from a research related incident, it omitted any mention of dangerous gain of function research funded by the NIH, and it gave no notice of virus studies conducted in the United States, even though Barrick is the top researcher in the field. The report pointed the finger only at China as the sole problem with dangerous virus research. So do you know who was the chairman of the Senate Help Committee, Richard Burr? Do you know where Richard Burr went to work after he retired from the Senate? Oh, you're gonna love this. From the Real Clear Investigations Report. We have another nexus point in North Carolina besides Ralph Barrick, and that is the former US Senator, the soclest thing driving TV lawyer Hamilton murdering Richard Burr. I'm just kidding. That was Aaron Burr and Raymond Burr. They're different people, Okay. When the Senate Help Committee released its report, it omitted discussion of US actions, including the role of USAID, the NIH, and Eco Health Alliance in funding the research. One expert interviewed by the Senate said that the staff had stripped out any mention of NIH funding for gain of function research in the United States, while another pointed the finger at the Republican who ran the committee. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, who was months from retirement. I seem to recall this is not mentioned in the article, but being from North Carolina here in all, and not having the short term memory of a nat I kind of recall didn't Richard Berg get a bunch of trouble for selling off a bunch of stock or buying a bunch of stock or something? Right? Is the pandemic hit made a bunch of money on it. People were curious about what was going on there, and then he announced he was retiring, or maybe right before he announced his retirement. Yeah, not a good look. During his decades in Congress, Burr was a strong supporter of pandemic preparedness and virus research, ushering through legislation that turned on the spigot for biodefense spending, such as a two thousand and six bill that created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. In his final year in the Senate, President Biden's twenty twenty two budget asked for an historic eighty eight billion dollars for pandemic and biodefense funding spread across five years. Working to finalize the report, Burr then introduced legislation that established ARPAH within the NIH to support billions more in taxpayer spending for companies to manage pandemic preparedness companies. On his way out the door, he gets enshrined in the funding money for companies to manage pandemic preparedness. A few months after Burr sponsored the bill, the NIH awarded a sixty five million dollar grant to develop anti virals. And you'll never guess who got it. It was a company called Ready REA sorry r EA DDI, or maybe it's Ready. It's a North Carolina biotech company. It was co founded by wait for it, Ralph Barrack. After retiring, Burr became a lobbyist for DLA Piper, lobbying on biodefense and biomedicine. He took with him two of his staffers who worked on the committee. Burr also joined Barrack's company Ready as a member of the board. Well, nothing to see there again, I'm sure it's all completely coincidental. When asked to comment on the matter, former Senator Burr told RCI that UNC is a client of d LA Piper, the lobbying firm for which he works. Accordingly, he says, I am unable to comment or provide information on or off the record. Isn't that convenient? You go to work as a lobbyist for a firm that reps UNC and now you can't say anything or you totally would explain all of this. Look, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why I lobbied for all of this money. Why the Senate committee I shared stripped out any reference to these people and these entities that funded the gain of function research. Right, There's a perfectly logical explanation for why this looks. And that reason is probably that it's this bad. That is probably the reason it is exactly as it's laid out. That is probably the most logical. That probably that is the most logical explanation. A source close to the House investigation told Real Clear Investigations that emails show an FBI agent was also discussing with Ralph Barrick how to withhold emails requested by the nonprofit US Right to Know. They had filed a slew of Freedom of Information Act requests and an FBI agent was discussing how to get around them. Why would the FBI be doing that? Once hailed as the big cheese of coronavirus research. Barrack's scientific career now seems imperiled with the NIH's decision to remove him from all grants because of that very same work quote. There's a real possibility that the virus's birthplace was Chapel Hill. After all this time it started here. Redfield was he the CDC director former. He told RCI that virologists went ahead with dangerous virus experiments for money and fame. He said, this is a really big source of grant money. It's a big source of fame, a big source of science prizes. They're not thinking about whether there's a downside. But there's a huge downside, and I think we experienced it. It was called the COVID pandemic. I'm reminded of the documentary Jurassic Park where doctor Jeffrey Goldbloom he said something to the effect of you spend so much time trying to figure out how to do it, you never stopped to think whether you should do it. Redfield is not alone in assigning some blame for the pandemic to Barrack. Columbia University economics professor Jeffrey Sachs published a twenty twenty two essay that called for an open inquiry into COVID's origins and full transparency by US labs for quote independent analysis of collaborations with Wuhan scientists. At the time, again, this was four years ago, Sachs led a task force commissioned by the Lancet publication that was looking into the origins of the pandemic. Last month, Sachs pointed to Barrack as the likely creator of the COVID virus. Over a dozen Freedom of Information Act requests have been filed. UNC has never released all of its documents. For example, the year prior to the COVID outbreak, UNC released six pages of Barrack's documents. That's it, a senior official inside the Department of Health and Human Services told URCI the answer is obvious after reviewing the classified material the office. Schill said, UNC is terrified that the public will learn that they were complicit in starting the pandemic. Barreck designed the gun, the Chinese built it, and then they pulled the trigger. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecallanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.