A Chapel Hill Lab Faces New Threats Five Years After Covid-19

The Baric Lab doesn’t look like much from the outside. Certainly not like a central node in a once-in-a-generation global event.

At one of his laboratories, tucked away in a Gillings School of Public Health building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, the only sign is taped to the window near a notice about the trash collection schedule. A nameplate nearby is blank, minus a bumper sticker for the unincorporated community of Little Switzerland, a postcard, and a sticker of a bat just below.

Over spring break, almost five years to the day after North Carolina’s first COVID-19 shutdowns began, the hallway outside was mostly abandoned to cardboard and styrofoam boxes that once held supplies now distributed across the labs.

Humble as it may seem, this lab and its principal investigator, Ralph Baric, are central to the story of COVID-19—as well as the distrust of science that has grown in its wake. As federal research funding becomes a central issue of the Donald Trump administration, there may not be a more important, nor disputed, test case in the country.

Perhaps the world’s foremost expert on coronaviruses, Baric and his collaborators helped roll out the first FDA-approved COVID-19 treatment, the existing antiviral Remdesivir, then helped develop another, Molnupiravir. Then Baric helped develop and test the Moderna vaccine. (It was spearheaded by Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire, a Hillsborough native and one of Baric’s former Ph.D. students.)

The work earned him global praise, as well the North Carolina Award, the state’s highest civilian honor, and the University of North Carolina System’s O. Max Gardner Award, given to faculty who have “made the greatest contribution to the welfare of the human race.”

But it also brought intense scrutiny and placed Baric’s lab at the center of global investigations and congressional testimony about the origins of COVID-19, as well as conspiracy theories about the lab’s role in the pandemic.

Last year, a House Select Committee investigating COVID-19’s origins deposed Baric on his research. At a Senate hearing on National Institutes of Health funding in China, Sen. Rand Paul accused him of working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create “superviruses.” Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when the pandemic began, told podcaster Dana Parish that “there is a real possibility that the virus’s birthplace was Chapel Hill,” calling Baric “the scientific mastermind” behind it.

Now, multiple bills have been introduced in Congress that would likely ban the genetic engineering research Baric is known for. Another would prevent research contracts with labs in “countries of concern” like China, where Baric collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for years. 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is seeking to slash NIH funding for research. Baric’s lab is one of North Carolina’s largest recipients of such funding. He’s brought in millions from the NIH over his career, including a $65 million grant in 2022. A report in The Atlantic suggested that research into mRNA vaccines, like the Moderna one Baric supported, could be targeted for cuts. 

The outcome of those policy debates won’t just shape Baric’s lab. They will shape North Carolina’s biomedical industry and how the world prepares for future pandemics.

Baric and UNC-CH’s public health school declined to comment for this story. But he warned in his House deposition last year that cracking down on science could have consequences for U.S. competitiveness.

“There has to be some refinement and consideration for the long-term impact of those regulations on scientific leadership, our economy, the biosecurity field, the biosafety fields, and entrepreneurship, innovation, and discovery,” Baric said. “And if you close all that down, microbiology is gone to China, and they have a 10-year plan to be No. 1, and we’re helping them.”

From the Backwaters

Baric, 70, was raised in New Jersey but moved to North Carolina in 1972 when he accepted a full scholarship to join the North Carolina State University swim team. His CV still lists his Atlantic Coast Conference championship and records in five events.

He graduated with a zoology degree, then stayed in Raleigh to complete his Ph.D. in microbiology at N.C. State. After a postdoctoral program in California, Baric joined the UNC-Chapel Hill faculty in 1986. He’s been there ever since.

Baric was happy to spend his career in the “scientific backwater” of coronavirus research, epidemiologist and science writer Dan Werb wrote in a 2023 Time profile. “Far from the glare of public opinion, Baric could work at his own pace,” Werb wrote.

The topic became less of a backwater when the SARS epidemic hit China in 2003, then again when MERS caused another epidemic in the Middle East in 2012. Both diseases are caused by coronaviruses.

A few years later, Baric began to sound the alarm about the threat of a global coronavirus pandemic. He had already discovered that the virus family was able to mutate and jump between species, so he began looking at whether some strains present in bats and other animals might soon be able to infect humans. The result was a 2015 paper in Nature arguing that a “SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.” 

To prove the point, Baric pushed the genetic engineering of viruses forward. For the Nature paper, Baric took the genetic code that enables some coronaviruses to infect humans—the spike protein—and spliced it into strains that didn’t have it. When the resulting viruses, called chimeras, infected human cells, Baric had proof that there was a pool of coronaviruses that were only one mutation away from jumping to humans and creating a deadly outbreak. 

That strategy was immediately controversial. Baric’s work is often described as “gain-of-function” research. The precise meaning of the term is widely contested, but generally it means altering organisms to give them abilities they don’t have in nature, like engineering them to grow faster or become more contagious

Baric has said that the study didn’t qualify as gain-of-function research under NIH definitions, but other scientists still felt the benefits weren’t worth the risks of creating a potential pandemic pathogen. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” virologist Simon Wain-Hobson told Nature at the time.

Baric disagreed. In his congressional deposition last year, he argued that not only is gain-of-function research, broadly defined, necessary to understand emerging viral threats, but also to develop drugs to combat them. Because viruses often weaken when they jump across species, they can be less virulent in lab mice than in humans, making drug and vaccine candidates look more effective than they would actually be in humans. Engineering a stronger version of the virus may allow for more accurate testing.

“I would ask critics if they had identified any broad-spectrum coronavirus drugs prior to the pandemic” like his lab did, Baric told MIT Technology Review. “Can they point to papers from their laboratories documenting a strategic approach to develop effective pan-coronavirus drugs that turned out to be effective against an unknown emerging pandemic virus?”

Leaks and Lies

As soon as evidence of a concerning new respiratory disease emerged in late 2019, global health leaders reached out to Baric. He was part of the group that named the virus that causes COVID-19, now officially referred to as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2. In February 2020, he met with Anthony Fauci, then director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the head of the United States’ COVID-19 response, to discuss “the outbreak and chimeras,” according to one of his collaborators.

When Duane Caneva, the Department of Homeland Security’s chief medical officer, added Baric to an email thread where national experts discussed the emerging crisis, he wrote, “It does contain some attempts at humor, so, for example Ralph, don’t be surprised to references that you belong on the Mt Rushmore of Coronavirus experts.”

“I luv humor,” Baric responded.

Initial reports stated that the virus originated in a wet market selling live animals in Wuhan, China. But concerns were increasing among some scientists and U.S. officials that COVID-19 may have leaked from a virological research lab—possibly the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

Zhengli-Li Shi, a researcher there, was a coauthor with Baric of the 2015 Nature paper. She and Baric had also collaborated on a 2018 grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for studies on the specific genetic element making SARS-Cov-2 so infectious. 

Though the proposal was denied, and both Baric and the principal investigator, Peter Daszak, said the research was never completed, its existence fueled debate. “This definitely tips the scales for me” toward the likelihood that COVID-19 leaked from a lab, the biologist Alina Chan told The Intercept. “And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”

Baric is notoriously rigorous with biosafety measures—“I kind of set the standard in the United States,” he said in his deposition—equipping his most secure labs with two fans with redundant power systems to ensure no air flow in or out, handling viruses in specialized cabinets with back-up battery power, and requiring staff to wear full body suits with double gloves, hoods, and shields with pumps moving air through filters. The Wuhan lab operated with fewer precautions, as outlined in their published papers and internal discussions.

Baric noted the different safety levels at the time of the proposal, and complained about it in a 2021 email to Daszak. “You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it,” he wrote to Daszak.

Some people who think a lab leak might have caused the pandemic, like sociologist (and former UNC-Chapel Hill faculty member) Zeynep Tufekci, look at Baric as a voice of reason pushing for better safety precautions. Others, like Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and founder of the anti-gain-of-function advocacy group Biosafety Now!, claim Baric knew the Wuhan lab was the source of the outbreak and kept it from the public. The Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Energy have now all concluded a lab leak is the likely cause of the pandemic, albeit with differing confidence levels.

Scrutiny of Baric’s research has also birthed some baseless theories that COVID-19 was purposefully released as a bioweapon or as a way to profit from the drugs that helped end the pandemic. Those led to death threats that forced the Baric lab to tighten security in 2023. He has largely stayed out of the spotlight since. The Assembly contacted more than a dozen current and former researchers from his lab. None agreed to speak.

“We absolutely abhor any threats of violence against Ralph Baric or his lab or any other scientists across the world,” Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit that says it uncovers government public-health failures, told The Assembly. “At the same time, the University of North Carolina owes the public some answers.”

Ruskin has obtained tens of thousands of pages of emails, chat records, and other communications from Baric and other researchers, but UNC-Chapel Hill denied a request for additional communications between Baric and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, citing a university research exemption from public records laws. U.S. Right to Know has sued the university; the case is currently at the N.C. Court of Appeals.

“UNC-Chapel Hill takes its commitment to transparency and compliance with public records laws seriously and, accordingly, has produced more than 130,000 pages of records in response to US Right to Know requests included in the lawsuit,” a university spokesperson said in a statement.

Baric, meanwhile, has said publicly that a lab leak was possible, and signed a 2021 letter in Science urging a full investigation of COVID-19’s origins. “You can’t rule that out,” he said in his deposition last year. 

But he also said the odds that a natural mutation caused the pandemic were much greater: “No chance it’s even close.”

Weighing the Costs

One of Baric’s loudest critics is new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In his 2023 book The Wuhan Cover-Up And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race, Kennedy claimed that “twenty years of gain-of-function deviltries have yielded virtually nothing useful to humanity,” and called Baric “the archetype for how the Chinese maneuver US government-funded scientists into transferring bioweapons technology to the Chinese military.”

While running for president in 2024, Kennedy also suggested an eight-year “break” from NIH funding of infectious disease research, prioritizing chronic illnesses like obesity and diabetes instead. Since the noted vaccine skeptic has taken office, scientists have been told to remove any references to mRNA vaccines from NIH grant proposals, KFF Health News reported.

Congress hasn’t passed new restrictions, but policy changes under Trump and Kennedy are already slowing scientific research. Universities have long used government funding, especially from the NIH, to offset the enormous cost of their research. “It’s one of the reasons why both our science and technology and our research universities are the envy of the world,” said Chris Beyrer, director of Duke’s Global Health Institute. 

But the Trump administration has made clear it hopes to change that model. The administration has sought to cap so-called indirect costs—reimbursement for overhead expenses, such as the biosafety measures that Baric relies on—at 15 percent, much lower than universities have negotiated in the past. University wide, UNC-Chapel Hill’s indirect cost rate is currently 55 percent.

Though courts have blocked Trump’s attempt to pause most federal grants, science funding is still functionally frozen.

Beyrer has had NIH funding for the entirety of his 33-year career, he said, but “right now some of that funding is on pause and we don’t know when it’s going to be approved.” The only money he knows of coming out of the NIH are one-year renewals of previously awarded multi-year grants.

At the same time, other countries are building out their own biopharmaceutical research and development industries to avoid the shortages they faced in the pandemic.

“What happened in so many other countries was that there was no vaccine available,” Beyrer said. “The model that developed was essentially charity—people giving leftover vaccines, people donating vaccines that they didn’t want to use.” 

Shifting such research out of the U.S. is a risk, in Baric’s eyes, in part because of the lack of international regulations over biosafety.

In a recent New York Times op-ed coauthored with Columbia University epidemiologist Ian Lipkin, Baric lambasted his former Wuhan collaborator, Shi, for continuing to do research with the same reduced biosafety measures that launched worries of a lab leak.

“This work was apparently approved by the local institutional biosafety committee and adhered to national biosafety standards,” Baric and Lipkin wrote. “But it is not sufficient for work with a new virus that could have significant risks for people worldwide.”

Baric and Lipkin called for global standards around biosafety, pointing to the World Health Organization as the de facto leader. But the Trump administration pulled the United States out of the WHO, limiting its ability to influence any such effort. 

U.S. funders could also place biosafety requirements on their international partners, but growing antagonism between the U.S. and China has curtailed such cooperation. The proposed DETERRENT Act would prevent U.S. researchers from signing contracts with Chinese institutions. China already imposed similar limits on its scientists in response to earlier U.S. legislative proposals, as well as the prosecution of Chinese scientists and professors accused of spying.

“It has now become all but impossible to get a collaborative research grant funded by any branch of the federal government approved in China,” Beyrer said. “There’s no question that is really a big change, and many of us perceive it to be a significant loss.”

Funding the Future

Despite all of the pressure on scientific research, the CEO of one Triangle-based company said he is hopeful about the future of biopharmaceutical innovation. James Rosen leads the Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Development Initiative, or READDI, which is a public-private partnership and an “affiliated entity” of UNC-Chapel Hill. Baric helped found it, and the $65 million NIH grant he received in 2022 went to a center that is part of READDI. The General Assembly also gave READDI $18 million in 2022. 

There are 24 families of viruses that cause human illness, Rosen explained, and eight of them have the potential to cause another pandemic, including coronaviruses, flaviviruses (like Dengue and Zika), and filoviruses (like Ebola and Marburg). READDI is trying to develop two broad-spectrum, small-molecule antiviral drugs for each. Rosen said READDI doesn’t do cutting-edge work like mRNA vaccines or gain-of-function research. 

“Just a good old-fashioned blister pack of pills,” Rosen said. “What we tell people to think about is: Wouldn’t the world have been a different place if we had Paxlovid when COVID emerged?” 

But a great deal of science has to happen before biopharmaceutical companies will step in, Rosen said. The parts of a virus that drugs could effectively target have to be identified, as do the patentable molecules that can target them without causing unwanted interactions elsewhere. Until that work is done, the financial risk is too high for companies to bother. 

That’s why university officials, scientists, and others are concerned by the Trump administration’s moves to restrict funding for research. 

A Duke University study found that the likelihood of a COVID-19-level pandemic is about 2 percent in any given year, meaning another is statistically likely to occur within the next 60 years.

A strain of bird flu, H5N1, has been spreading across the globe. It’s already caused a pandemic in wild birds, even hitting those on remote islands, Beyrer said. It infected chickens, and then jumped to cattle—a mammal that “doesn’t typically get bird flu,” Beyrer pointed out. There have already been human cases, though mostly mild. But earlier this year, the virus jumped again, this time to cats, where it has proven much more lethal. 

A UNC-CH spokesperson said the school doesn’t conduct gain-of-function research “as it is defined under current laws and regulations,” and the university will adjust as needed if those rules change.

UNC-Chapel Hill lobbyist Kelly Dockham said she believes that Baric’s work studying viruses will continue to receive support, in part because of what she said was strong backing within the state.

Dockham said she’s spoken with legislators over the past several years about the need for better antivirals. Former Sen. Richard Burr, now a lobbyist for UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke, championed multiple pandemic preparedness initiatives while in office, and current Sen. Thom Tillis has pushed for increased NIH funding over the last two Congresses.

Tillis “is very uniquely positioned and aware of the significance that this money provides for the entire state,” Dockham told The Assembly.

“I am optimistic,” she added. “Now, maybe am I too Pollyannaish? I don’t know, but I just know that the conversations that I’m having in my professional capacity, it gives me motivation and hope.”

Erin Gretzinger contributed additional reporting.