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 Ireported 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 asprawling 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 theycouldn’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 thatNIH 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 themoniker: “Crooked Cohen”.

Source: ZeroHedge News