Ten years ago, microbiologist Ralph Baric told Tony Fauci and the world he would make coronaviruses more lethal. Then - with Fauci's backing - he did

(SECOND OF TWO PARTS; PART ONE IS HERE)

Questioned under oath in 2022, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci largely denied knowing Dr. Ralph S. Baric, a North Carolina scientist and the world’s top coronavirus researcher.

Fauci’s claim came though he met one-on-one with Baric as Covid raced around the globe in early 2020 - and though he had funded Baric’s work and hosted Baric at a day-long coronavirus research conference in 2013. (I wrote about Fauci’s unlikely memory lapses here, in Part One of this piece.)

Why did Fauci try so hard to insulate himself from Baric 18 months ago - even at the cost of giving nonsensical answers while under oath?

Baric’s role and the plans he outlined in the conference on June 24, 2013 may help answer that question.

As I explained in Part One, the National Institutes of Health put the day-long event together during an outbreak of a novel coronavirus called MERS-Cov, which was highly lethal but not very transmissible.

A complete video of the conference is publicly available here. For anyone interested in understand the science - and the scientists - that may have led to Covid, it is a six-hour must-watch.

About 50 people attended the event. They included leading coronavirus researchers, as well as Peter Daszak and members of his EcoHealth Alliance, and federal officials concerned about infectious diseases. But Baric was without doubt the star of the show.

He made the first presentation, then another after lunch. He rarely went more than a few minutes without asking questions. He had earned the role. After earning a PhD in microbiology from North Carolina State University in 1982, Baric turned to infectious disease research.

He became known for his ability to handle coronaviruses, which can be hard to grow in labs, as well as in making genetic modifications to them. Because coronaviruses have a relatively large genome - the nucleotides that encode the information necessary for them to replicate themselves - they are harder to genetically modify than some other viruses. But Baric and his researchers did so with relative ease.

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