Senator Rand Paul(@SenRandPaul):Dr. Baric testified that the DARPA PREEMPT solicitation — which called on researchers to learn what makes a virus jump between species “down to the nucleotide level” — could only be understood one way: “That's a gain-of-function experiment. There's no other way to think about it.” As for DEFUSE, the proposal he submitted with Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, and Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Baric confirmed that inserting a furin cleavage site into a viral backbone would be done by him, directly admitting, “That part would be done by me.” The furin cleavage site is the very feature of SARS-CoV-2 that first drew lab-origin scrutiny.

2026.07.23 15:08

Dr. Baric testified that the DARPA PREEMPT solicitation — which called on researchers to learn what makes a virus jump between species “down to the nucleotide level” — could only be understood one way: “That's a gain-of-function experiment. There's no other way to think about it.” As for DEFUSE, the proposal he submitted with Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, and Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Baric confirmed that inserting a furin cleavage site into a viral backbone would be done by him, directly admitting, “That part would be done by me.” The furin cleavage site is the very feature of SARS-CoV-2 that first drew lab-origin scrutiny.