One the world’s most prominent gain-of-function researchers — whose methods were adapted by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for work on chimeric viruses — and one of the scientists who helped furnish Anthony Fauci with what he needed to downplay the lab-leak theory are now sounding the alarm about dangerous new coronavirus experiments conducted by the Chinese.
Criticism may have been easier this time around, given that the critics and their friends do not appear to be directly linked to the dangerous research in question.
Ralph Baric and W. Ian Lipkin expressed concern in a March 3 New York Times op-ed that Chinese scientists “are experimenting with viruses in ways that could put all of us in harm’s way.”
Baric, a professor in the departments of epidemiology and microbiology at the University of North Carolina, is a leading proponent of gain-of-function research who successfully fought for an exemption from the Obama administration’s moratorium on the dangerous practice in order to keep manufacturing artificial SARS-like viruses. He became an especially controversial figure during the pandemic, which has claimed the lives of over 7 million people worldwide.
Hellbound and Down 