Neither the infamous Wuhan lab nor Fort Dedrick needed to leak or release any kind of virus for the entire world to end up in a self fulfilling prophecy of a viral epidemic. What really occurred was that the Wuhan University had a research paper published in the definitive Lancet Journal (funded by Bill Gates) that provided the “standard of care” for the purported virus.
Dr. Claus Kohnlein, MD, Germany, stated this standard of care was malpractice and criminal because it was deadly. But at the onset this weaponized standard of care killed many in hospitals in Italy, Iran and New York, especially due with regard to requiring ventilators.
After 9/11, US Homeland Security sent WHO’s Pandemic Response Plan to every public health department in every state, which were posted on their websites. But this WHO Pandemic Plan was never adopted by the legislatures of each state. Nonetheless, when the so-called epidemic panic started, the WHO Plan and the deadly standard of care were jointly rolled out to an unaware public.
So Baric may be right about no gain of function research but there is ample evidence otherwise that Wuhan University, WHO, and Bill Gates funded Lancet fomented the panic.
I suppose that Baric’s definition of “gain-of-function” didn’t apply when he and Zhengli Shi wrote of their research describing the creation of chimera of the original SARS virus intentionally designed to infect human respiratory tissue:
“we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. ...
On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo.”
Of course it was precisely this research that led to the moratorium on gain-of-function research, which was instigated by scientists concerned that it was fraught with risk and offered little reward (other than government grants to GoF researchers.)
Your tax dollars at work.