Why isn’t he an official consultant on the nature of SARS-CoV-2?
Why hasn’t he been a member of any pandemic response task force?
The authors describe their work on creating a chimeric virus, SHC014-CoV, which is similar to the SARS-CoV virus that caused the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003. They used genetic engineering techniques to insert the spike protein from SHC014-CoV into a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone, creating a virus that could infect human airway cells.
The 2015 paper published by UNC Chapel Hill Professor Ralph Baric et al. titled A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. As the authors (including Zhengli-Li Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology) state in their abstract:
Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, 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.
The purported purpose of this Gain-of-Function work—i.e., generating a chimeric virus (combining genetic material from two different viruses) capable of infecting human airway cells—was to lay the groundwork for vaccine development and testing in the event that a wild bat coronavirus were eventually to infect humans.
Under the paper’s section titled Biosafety and biosecurity, the authors wrote:
Reported studies were initiated after the University of North Carolina Institutional Biosafety Committee approved the experimental protocol (Project Title: Generating infectious clones of bat SARS-like CoVs; Lab Safety Plan ID: 20145741; Schedule G ID: 12279). These studies were initiated before the US Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses (http://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf). This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH.
So there it is. Ralph Baric and his colleague at the Wuhan Institute of Virology plainly state that they engineered a bat coronavirus, using Gain-of-Function methods, that infected the respiratory tract of humanized mice, and the NIH approved their study because it was initiated before the US Government pause on Gain-of-Function Research.
The article saying Zinc is effective against coronavirus is written by Ralph Baric in 2010
Source: Where is Ralph Baric?
