Two American virologists with former ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) argue that the lab’s recent research poses unacceptable risks — five years after the worst pandemic in a century emerged in Wuhan.
A recent opinion piece from the New York Times criticizes experiments described in the high-quality scientific journal Cell on a novel MERS coronavirus called HKU5-CoV-2. The novel virus has never spilled over into humans but the Wuhan lab helped demonstrate its ability to infect human cells. The work was conducted at a low biosafety level (BSL) without standardized safeguards against airborne viruses, according to the New York Times piece.
The article’s appeal for greater caution by scientific journals and funders publishing and supporting this work earned plaudits from some concerned about global biosafety. But the byline raised eyebrows.
The authors are Columbia University Professor of Epidemiology W. Ian Lipkin and University of North Carolina (UNC) Professor of Epidemiology, Microbiology and Immunology Ralph Baric — both of whom were involved with the Wuhan lab and the push to dampen speculation the lab could have contributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The two worked with either the Wuhan lab or one of its closest U.S. collaborators, EcoHealth Alliance — both of which are now debarred from federal funding for not sharing documents related to their coronavirus research. EcoHealth and its subcontracted lab have been deemed ineligible from federal grants for years after a congressional investigation found they were unable to produce the relevant genomic data and lab notebooks.
Despite their critique of the Wuhan lab, critics have said the pair had behind-the-scenes roles in high-impact papers in February and March 2020 that suppressed discussion of the theory that the pandemic emerged from a lab.
Evidence from congressional investigations suggests both men served as scientific advisors to the U.S. intelligence community and may have been in discussion with intelligence agencies around the same time they worked to downplay discussion of the Wuhan lab in public.
By May 2020, Baric called for transparency surrounding the lax safety standards in Wuhan and its possible connection to the pandemic. While Baric is among the Americans with the best insight into the Wuhan lab’s pre-pandemic private research plans, UNC has blocked the release of certain documents through North Carolina public records law. Major revelations about the collaboration’s work on coronaviruses have come from a whistleblower leak and FOIA requests rather than directly from Baric.
Lipkin described the safety standards at the WIV as “screwed up” in an interview with Medium in May 2021, arguing that “people should not be looking at bat viruses” in low-level labs. Meanwhile, Lipkin is also the coauthor of a highly-cited article that describes COVID lab origin scenarios as “implausible.”
“Both Lipkin and Baric have been participants in the cover-up of the origin of COVID,” said Rutgers chemical biology professor Richard Ebright in an email to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Baric also consistently has advocated for expansion of, opposed restriction of, and participated directly in, high-risk research projects on laboratory enhancement of bioweapons agents, including projects that genetically modify bioweapons agents in ways anticipated to enhance transmissibility and pathogenicity in humans.”
In a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation, Cell spokesperson Kristopher Benke defended the journal’s publication of the experiments despite the biosafety criticisms in the New York Times editorial. Benke said the paper did not violate any of the journal’s policies.
“As pointed out in the guest essay by Drs. Lipkin and Baric, ‘Decisions about what level of precaution is appropriate for research are typically made by a study’s lead scientist and an institutional biosafety committee that includes scientists, physicians, administrators and members of the local community.’ In this case, the authors of the Cell paper followed the approach described by Drs. Lipkin and Baric,” he said. “The authors did not break any rules or policies of the journal, and their paper was peer reviewed by experts in the field. We update our policies as science evolves and guidance around it changes.”
The New York Times editorial team did not respond to a request for comment. Guangzhou National Laboratory Senior Scientist and former Wuhan Institute of Virology Senior Scientist Zhengli Shi, the senior author of the Cell paper, did not respond.
Ralph Baric
Baric has been at the cutting edge of novel coronavirus virology, some of which was conducted in collaboration with the WIV.
Baric was interested in working with the WIV on viruses like SARS-CoV-2 in the years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a 2018 grant proposal titled Project DEFUSE and other documents pertaining to the grant proposal obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK). According to these documents, Project DEFUSE involved working with furin cleavage sites, a feature demonstrated in prior studies to make viruses more infectious, and viruses with spike proteins approximately 20 percent different than the SARS spike protein.
When a coronavirus emerged in Wuhan with features uncommon in nature but matching the virologists’ esoteric research interests, none of the collaborators disclosed this proposal. The grant was not funded by U.S. agencies, but could shed light on the Wuhan lab’s research interests in the years immediately preceding the pandemic. The proposal only came to light after a whistleblower leaked the documents.
Early drafts of that proposal included a sentence extolling the “highly cost effective” system of conducting the work in a BSL-2, documents obtained by USRTK through FOIA show. Baric countered in the margins of that proposal that American researchers would “freak out” about the low BSL while acknowledging that the research would be permitted at a BSL-2 in China, which does not typically have adequate protections against airborne viruses.
“IN the US, these recombinant SARS CoV are studied under BSL3, not BSL2, especially important for those that are able to bind and replicate in primary human cells,” he wrote. “In China, might be growing these viruses under bsl2. US researchers will likely freak out.”
Apparently in response to Baric’s concerns about a “freak out,” the sentence about the cost savings of BSL-2 work was nixed from the final proposal. Another comment on the proposal suggested the American collaborators intended to downplay the extent of the Wuhan lab’s involvement to U.S. funders, according to USRTK.
Though he would later call for an investigation into a possible lab origin of COVID-19, Baric was privy to communications about a February 2020 letter in The Lancet that dismissed speculation about a possible lab origin as an unfair attack on Chinese scientists, according to emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know.
According to the U.S. Right to Know emails, Baric left off his name publicly because of apparent concern that his link to the Wuhan lab would make the letter appear “self-serving” and it could “lose impact.”
A Senate letter in November 2024 raised questions about Baric’s membership in the Biological Sciences Expert Group, non-government experts who advise the intelligence community on biological threats, and whether he advised the intelligence community on the question of the virus’s origins despite his conflict of interest.
In a congressional transcribed interview, Baric also made reference to a January 25, 2020, meeting with “BSEC” — a likely mis-transcription of BSEG — according to a congressional aide.
“It is quite interesting that coronavirus scientist Ralph Baric informed US intel on Jan. 25, 2020, that he was worried about a lab leak origin for COVID-19 but two months later worked on a letter to Lancet describing the lab leak theory as a conspiracy theory,” Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said on Feb. 18, 2025.
A FOIA lawsuit by USRTK has attempted to bring more of Baric’s communications with the Wuhan lab into the public domain, but that lawsuit has been relentlessly challenged by UNC.
Baric did not respond to a request for comment.
W. Ian Lipkin
Lipkin was also among the virologists who coauthored a high-impact paper in Nature Medicine in March 2020 called “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” which dismissed lab origin scenarios as “implausible.” That paper later came under scrutiny for the undisclosed involvement of major scientific funders of the Wuhan lab, including former director of the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci.
Even as they drafted the piece, the authors privately discussed their concerns about the Wuhan lab’s research and massive store of coronaviruses.
“Given the scale of bat [coronavirus] research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess,” Lipkin wrote on Feb. 11, 2020, as the authors exchanged drafts, according to Vanity Fair.
Lipkin told the DCNF that the Feb. 2020 email referred to the fact that it would be “difficult to determine with certainty whether the virus originated in a market or a laboratory.”
Lipkin confirmed his prior collaboration with EcoHealth in an email to DCNF — acknowledging having received funding via a subcontract to sequence viruses collected by the group — but refuted the idea that this collaboration constitutes a conflict of interest.
“I disagree that funding in a subcontract to sequence viruses collected by EHA worldwide invalidates an editorial calling for improvements in biosecurity,” he said.
When asked about a 2017 email in which he wrote he had “active collaborations” with scientists in Wuhan, Lipkin conceded that he “had hoped to collaborate with investigators at the WIV but it never came to pass,” further adding he gave a seminar at the WIV in October 2015.
The seminar was about why emerging infectious diseases occur, according to the WIV website.
His talk included information on the “development and evolution of techniques and tactics on pathogen discovery.”
Lipkin privately told a co-author of the Nature Medicine article in 2020 that “higher ups, including intel” were concerned about the COVID-19 furin cleavage site.
In an email on March 3, he told DCNF that he believes the furin cleavage site does not constitute evidence the virus is engineered.
“What we can rule out is a deliberate design because the furin cleavage site is only one of the features that made this virus so infectious and virulent,” he said.
Lipkin maintains a natural origin is more likely.
“We will never know the origin of the virus because samples and data were not collected appropriately,” he said to DCNF. “The market hypothesis is the most plausible given that thousands of wild animals were sold in the market before the pandemic and abundant viral sequences were detected in swabs of stalls where animals were kept.”
Lipkin has served as a scientific advisor to the intelligence community and discussed the origin question with several intelligence agencies, according to a congressional transcribed interview he gave in April 2023.
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