Authored by Paul D. Thacker via The DisInformation Chronicle,
“DLA Piper wants to get you,” I was told, from a source in DC over the weekend.
“Well, what can they do to me?” I asked.
“They can’t really do anything,” she said. “But they are pissed off.”
Well, they should be. DLA Piper is one of the largest law firms on the planet, with over 90 offices scattered across more than 40 countries. A week back, I took a shot at one of DLA Piper’s top lobbyists, former Republican North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, and one of DLA Piper’s major clients, the University of North Carolina (UNC).
As I reported last month for RealClearInvestigations, The National Institutes of Health removed UNC virologist, Ralph Baric, from all his NIH grants. And UNC put Baric on administrative leave. This all took place last year, but remained hidden until I exposed it all in a sprawling investigation that delved into Baric’s career, his past lobbying efforts of the federal government to keep taxpayer money pouring into his UNC lab, and Baric’s manipulations of public opinion to shut down speculation that the pandemic started because of the dangerous virus research that he pioneered in collaboration with Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That’s right. Baric’s main collaborators to create experimental pandemic viruses were virologists working in the same city where the COVID pandemic started in 2019.
Neither Baric nor UNC would respond to my repeated inquiries. However, when a reporter sent them questions about my article, UNC said that they couldn’t discuss Baric “citing the university’s policy on personnel matters.” Another reporter who sent UNC questions, received this reply: “Thanks for reaching out. Under the North Carolina State Human Resources Act, the University of North Carolina does not comment on personnel matters.”
But the pressure became overwhelming and the dam finally burst on Tuesday, when UNC administrators sent out an email saying that Baric was retiring. (That email was then leaked to a local North Carolina paper.) Baric also collaborated with Science Magazine’s Jon Cohen, providing him all the details about my prior reporting that NIH removed Baric from grants last year and UNC placed him on leave. Cohen’s editor, John Travis, then tried to sell this repeat of my reporting from last month as an “exclusive backstory” to readers of Science.
Journalism can be a sleazy business. Since the pandemic’s beginning, Jon Cohen has distinguished himself as a soft touch for Tony Fauci-financed virologists who downplayed evidence that the pandemic began at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, earning himself the moniker: “Crooked Cohen”.
UNC’s Biodefense Lobby Hustle
Baric got away with shenanigans for years because, while he was in an elected official and purportedly serving voters, North Carolina Senator Richard Burr helped to protect Baric and sponsored legislation that poured tens of billions of taxpayer cash into biodefense research that paid Baric’s UNC lab, as well as a North Carolina company Baric founded. And let’s not forget all the biopharmaceutical companies that work with Baric and other virologists to suck down taxpayer-financed federal contracts to stockpile government warehouses with biomedical products.
One of Baric’s major sponsors was Tony Fauci, who ran the biodefense program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Trump officials now tell me that Baric’s cutting-edge biodefense studies led to virus experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that caused the COVID pandemic.
“Baric designed the gun,” I was told by a senior health official. “But the Chinese built it, and then they pulled the trigger.”
A senior Trump official at one of the intelligence agencies refers to this multi-billion dollar biodefense complex as a “contract racket.” Here’s how he said it works:
NIH and other taxpayer-funded federal agencies give grants and contracts to university virologists to find viruses hidden throughout the world, and bring them back to labs for experiments, including dangerous gain-of-function studies that make viruses more deadly;
Academic virologists then partner with Big Pharma and biotech companies to create profitable therapeutics and vaccines to these experimental viruses, with universities getting a cut of the deal;
Biotech executives, academics, and universities make a windfall after these therapeutics and vaccines get sold back to the very taxpayers who paid for all this research in the first place.
I wrote about some of this back in 2023, the year in which President Biden began drowning the academic/biodefense industry in an historic amount of cash: $88.2 billion. That same year, Senator Burr left federal office to catch some of that deluge in dollars as a biodefense lobbyist. However, in 2023 this was all so new, and far too complicated to understand.
But today it’s no longer hard to follow once you take a look at Burr’s 18 lobbying clients:
Academic Research Centers: University of North Carolina, Duke University, Duke University Health System, Wake Forest University, Association of American Universities.
Pharma/Biotech in BioDefense Sector: Biogen, Biotechnology Innovation Organization Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America PhRMA, Novartis AG, REGENEX BIO, AdvaMed, Avalyn Pharma, Lazarus AI, Defence Security and Resilience Bank Development Group.
It’s quite something.
Burr laid the foundation for his lobbying career by sponsoring most of the major pieces of legislation that fund and regulate the biomedical and biodefense industry during his three decades in office. And he’s not shy about trumpeting these accomplishments, because he advertises them to potential clients in academia and corporate America on his bio at DLA Piper.
Burr helped pass the 1997 FDA Modernization Act which regulates pandemic products, and he was a primary architect of the 2006 Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) which provided new authorities for companies to develop medical countermeasures which the government then buys from them. The PAHPA also created BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority). BARDA spends billions every year to subsidize pandemic research, with a big portion of that money buying vaccines and other pandemic products that fill up government warehouses, in case a crazy virus (maybe leaked from a lab!) starts sweeping across the planet, killing people.
But there’s more money. So much money.
In his final year as a United States Senator, Burr introduced a bill to create ARPA-H inside the NIH, providing billions more in taxpayer spending for biodefense companies. As the Republican leader of the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), he then published a report on COVID origins that placed sole blame for the pandemic on Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, while ignoring extensive published evidence of the research ties between UNC’s Ralph Baric and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“With COVID-19 still in our midst, it is critical that we continue international efforts to uncover additional information regarding the origins of this deadly virus,” Burr wrote in the report’s forward. “I hope this report will guide the World Health Organization and other international institutions and researchers as they proceed with planned work to continue investigating the origins of this virus.”
To give this report’s distorted conclusions some added media juice with liberals, Burr co-opted reporter Katherine Eban to promote his misdirection from Baric’s lab in North Carolina to focus on the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Wittingly or not, that’s exactly what Eban did with an “exclusive” she co-published with ProPublica and Vanity Fair. Eban’s involvement was my first clue that this Burr’s report was a misdirection. As Politico reported in 2012, Eban has a habit of allowing her journalism to serve as “demonstrably false” propaganda for sources who dump documents in her lap. [SEE BELOW: “Katherine Eban Tells You What Power Tells Her”]
Spotlight on Ralph Baric
My investigation for RealClearInvestigations runs for several thousand words and the details of Senator Burr, his 2022 report, and Katherine Eban is only one section. But none of it has been told before.
And my reporting created waves in DC that washed down into North Carolina.
The day before the investigation went live, I sent Richard Burr details about my reporting via his email at DLA Piper. I wrote to Burr that I was a former Senate investigator, telegraphing to him that I understood how Committees put together reports. I then detailed all the problems I found in the 2022 report he released before leaving the Senate to become a biodefense lobbyist.
In my email to Burr, I included a set of facts that we were reporting at RealClearInvestigations and asked him to comment, correct, or clarify.
1) In your final year as Ranking on HELP, you released a 2022 report on the pandemic’s origin. That report pointed the finger solely at China as the purported origin of the virus.
2) That report made no mention of gain-of-function research funded by the NIH, nor any mention of gain-of-function research conducted in the United States.
3) The most notable researcher in the world for generating gain-of-function coronaviruses is Ralph Baric, professor at UNC, who is funded by the NIH.
4) Sources who Committee staff interviewed for your report said that Bob Kadlec removed any mention of gain-of-function research in the United States. Others said you made this decision.
4) After you left office, you joined DLA Piper as a lobbyist on pandemic preparedness, taking with you staff from the HELP Committee.
5) You then joined the board of the company Baric set up for pandemic preparedness, which had also received NIH money.
A few hours later, I got a text message from Douglas Heye, a former speechwriter for the Republican National Committee, and former Republican Hill staffer. According to one bio, Heye is from Burr’s home state of North Carolina and runs a PR firm called “Douglas Media.”
Heye wanted to talk to me about Senator Burr, but I wasn’t interested. He then called me, but I didn’t pick up. I then texted Heye back that Senator Burr could call me himself or email me to answer my questions.
Burr later emailed me that he couldn’t discuss the matter as DLA Piper represents UNC. What he didn’t tell me is that he, Richard Burr, is the person at DLA Piper who lobbies for UNC.
I now know that Burr is deeply embedded within the academic biomedical and biodefense industry that he helped to create with all the legislation he passed during three decades in Congress. Again, just look at his DLA Piper bio explaining all this, and check out Burr’s list of clients in academia and biodefense.
Between two laws he sponsored—BARDA and ARPA-H—taxpayers shovel several billions of dollars down the gaping maw of academic research centers and private companies in grants and contracts every year. Most of BARDA money has gone to big pharma companies such as Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, Janssen (Johnson & Johnson), AstraZeneca, and Sanofi/GSK.
That’s apparently why Burr put out a report in his final months as a United State Senator that pointed the finger at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the sole problem in dangerous virus research. He couldn’t shine a spotlight on UNC and other American universities, as well as their corporate partners in biomedical and biodefense and then expect these same people to hire him as their man in DC.
Katherine Eban Tells You What Power Tells Her
When Katherine Eban partnered with Senator Burr and his staff in 2022, she understood that, in exchange for access to inside information, her role in this alliance was to promote the Senator’s report, not question the conclusions.
Renowned investigative reporter Dean Starkman laid out the problems inherent in Eban’s type of journalism many years ago in a critique of “access” versus “accountability” reporting—the latter being my preference. Access reporting tells you what the powerful said, Starkman explained, while accountability reporting tells you what they did.
And Eban has long snuggled up to the powerful for access, which inescapably hides what they did. It’s a fatal flaw in the scribblings of all stenographers to power.
In 2011, Special Agent John Dodson with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) blew the whistle on the Fast and Furious gun walking scandal. This federal operation allowed over 2,000 firearms to be illegally purchased and then trafficked to Mexican drug cartels in order to track those weapons back to drug smugglers. The tactic was known as “gunwalking.” However, agents lost track of most weapons, which were later used in crimes, including the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
This inept operation drew a target on the back of Agent Dodson’s superiors and U.S. Attorneys who supervised the Fast and Furious Operation. And they retaliated against him by leaking sensitive internal government documents to reporters in a smear campaign. One of those reporters who got inside access to government documents and then smeared agent Dodson was Katherine Eban.
In a June 2012 “exclusive” for Fortune, Katherine Eban made a series of false allegations against Dodson, claiming that his whistleblowing was just a “grudge” against his superiors.
Dodson hired an attorney and sued Eban’s publisher Time Inc. for defamation, noting that Eban’s reporting was “dubious” and filled with falsehoods. A spokesperson for the Senate Committee investigating the Fast and Furious scandal told Politico, “This kind of misleading and highly opinionated narrative masquerading as objective mainstream journalism is an example of why many Americans distrust what they’re told by the media.”
Eban tried to defend hersefl, but Time Inc. later settled with Dodson.
The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General later released a report that found a United States Attorney leaked internal government documents “motivated by a desire to undermine Special Agent Dodson’s public criticisms of Operation Fast and Furious.” The ACLU then protested the ATF’s attempt to censor Agent’s Dodson’s 2013 memoir on this gun trafficking scandal, “The Unarmed Truth: My Fight to Blow the Whistle and Expose Fast and Furious.”
That same year, ATF cleared Agent Dodsons of all false allegations made against him by his superiors.
When Fast and Furious first blew up, I had left my job as a Senate investigator so I did not deal with Agent Dodson and the smear campaign orchestrated against him. However, I was friends with the Senate staffer who ran the Dodson investigation alongside a Secret Service Agent who was on detail to the Committee that I had left.
I was appalled at the Eban’s shoddy reporting and defamation of Agent Dodson, and I have never trusted her since.
Eban viciously attacked an American hero, who risked his career and reputation to protect the United States and federal law officers. When I spoke to Agent Dodson a couple years ago about what happened to him, he said he couldn’t discuss the details of his settlement with Eban’s publisher. He did tell me that ATF punished him by never giving him a promotion after he went public about the scandal.
Eban did not return repeated requests to explain her defamation of Agent Dodson, and why she has never apologized publicly. Lionsgate studio picked up the rights to Dodson’s book in 2015 and chose “World War Z” writer Matthew Carnahan to adapt the memoir into a movie. However, plans for a movie on Agent Dodson appear to have been shelved.
Eban reprised her role as unquestioning sidekick to the powerful when she rode shotgun with Senate Burr to promote his 2022 report in co-published stories that ran in ProPublica and Vanity Fair. The articles provided intimate details of the Committee staffers she had grown close to, including colorful highlights of one with “very blue-collar” roots in Greenville, South Carolina.
Just like North Carolina’s Senator Burr, Eban ignored mountains of evidence, available at the time, that NIH-funded scientists like Ralph Baric of North Carolina were partnering with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And just like Senator Burr, Eban focused solely on China as the problem with dangerous virus experiments.
In fact, this laser-like focus on Wuhan, China, is right there in the title of Eban’s ProPublica article.
Propublica later published an editor’s note to Eban’s regurgitation of Senator Burr’s report, adding context and corrections that stretches on for over 2,500 words. I’m not joking. The editor’s note is longer than this article that you are reading now.
Eban pulled a second stunt like this in 2023, shielding Ralph Baric and other corrupt virologlists from scrutiny, when she appeared at a University of Pennsylvania event discussing the origins of the COVID pandemic alongside virologist Susan Weiss. “There is no field where there is more need for clear communication than on the subject of the COVID origins debate,” said the event organizer, professor Claire Finkelstein. “We decided to get five of the smartest, most interesting, and level headed people that we could find together, to rise above the fray to have a serious intelligent discussion.”
Surprise: Event organizer Claire Finkelstein is Katherine Eban’s sister!
Years prior to her sister hosting a university event for Eban to rub shoulders with Weiss, emails spilled out showing that Weiss had allowed Ralph Baric to ghostwrite a 2020 essay she co-authored downplaying the possibility of a lab accident.
Weiss’s 2020 commentary was titled “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2” and appeared in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections. Taylor and Francis later congratulated Weiss and her co-authors as their commentary became one of the most widely read pieces published in 2020. Media outlets such as The Week, Buzzfeed, and Baric’s local newspaper, the Raleigh News & Observer, cited the article in passages that dismissed a possible lab accident.
Emails show that both Baric and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology provided secret edits to Weiss’s manuscript. After one of the Weiss’s co-authors sent Baric a draft, asking for his input, Baric responded, “Sure, but don’t want to be cited in as having commented prior to submission.”
After then submitting alterations to the text in track changes, Baric added, “I think the community needs to write these editorials and I thank you for your efforts.”
But sitting on the stage next to Weiss, Eban didn’t ask a single question about this unethical incident. Even though the story and supporting emails had been made public years prior. Now why is that?
Here’s what I reported for RealClearInvestigations about this tawdry research episode involving Ralph Baric and Susan Weiss:
Although failing to disclose authors on a paper is considered a form of research misconduct, the journal failed to take action. Five years after publication, the journal added a disclosure in January 2025 that acknowledged Ralph Baric’s contribution to the commentary.
This is partly why we’re still trying to figure out today what happened during COVID coverup. Much of the dirt kicked up with these media deceptions is still floating in the air. But let’s keep blowing that dust away.
