What Role Did UNC play with COVID?
Don Brown – The recent indictment of former senior NIAID official David Morens has ripped the lid off the COVID-era corruption machine. Now, against the backdrop of the United States Senate investigation on COVID origins, North Carolina taxpayers and families also deserve to know whether their flagship public university played any role in the research that may have sparked the entire disaster.
Ralph Baric, a world-renowned virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, by all accounts collaborated for years with Shi Zhengli at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology on bat coronaviruses capable of infecting humans. NIH grants under Anthony Fauci helped fund that work — including controversial gain-of-function experiments that many experts now believe helped create the conditions for the pandemic.
As a state-supported institution — with Chapel Hill as North Carolina’s flagship campus — UNC owes its citizens full transparency. There are reports of public information requests being either ignored or stonewalled. Who was paid what, and why? Where did the money flow in from, and where did it finally land? What was the actual result of the research conducted in Chapel Hill — a scientific breakthrough in a bottle, or harm to millions?
Leaving the investigation in the hands of the United States Senate is not enough.
The North Carolina attorney general, as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, has both the authority and the duty to investigate any potential money trail, grant misuse, or dangerous research conducted on state property that may have contributed to the worst public-health crisis in a century.
Even as Republican voter registration now eclipses Democrat registration for the first time in state history, even as North Carolinians have voted Republican in all but two presidential elections since 1968, and even as the GOP now holds veto-proof majorities in the state Senate, a Republican House majority, a Republican Supreme Court, and a Republican Court of Appeals — the attorney general’s office remains a Democrat stronghold.
The results have been disastrous.
When then-governor Roy Cooper imposed a myriad of unconstitutional mandates during the COVID era, the Democrat attorney general at the time — now-governor Josh Stein — not only turned a blind eye, but he actively defended those mandates in court.
Businesses suffered terribly. Thousands of North Carolina restaurants and small businesses have permanently closed. Families and schools endured devastating learning loss — studies showed North Carolina students fell behind by as much as a full year in math and reading — along with a surge in mental-health crises among children. Instead of protecting the Constitution and the people, the attorney general’s office enabled the very government overreach that wrecked lives and livelihoods.
The same office presided over a State Crime Lab so dysfunctional that many counties were forced to hire private contractors to process rape kits, fingerprints, and other critical forensic evidence.
When Democrat governor Cooper decided to release thousands of inmates during the COVID panic — including repeat offenders later linked to horrific crimes such as the 2025 stabbing death of Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska on the Charlotte light rail — the attorney general’s office again looked the other way.
From 1872 until 2016, Democrats also controlled the treasurer’s office. That 144-year stranglehold ended only when Republican Dale Folwell was elected. It is long past time for North Carolinians to break the attorney general’s office monopoly as well.
The attorney general is supposed to be the people’s lawyer — first and foremost to defend the Constitution, to protect North Carolina businesses and families from unconstitutional government edicts, and to root out graft and wrongdoing wherever it occurs, including at our public universities.
The experimental mRNA shots were relentlessly pushed as “safe and effective” while cheap, repurposed drugs like ivermectin — safe, available, and off-patent — were ridiculed and suppressed. That was never about public health. It was about power, money, and control.
In 2028 — and in every election cycle going forward — North Carolinians must demand a Republican attorney general who will finally investigate what happened at UNC-Chapel Hill, follow the money between Fauci, NIAID grants, and dangerous coronavirus research, and hold every responsible party accountable.
The people of North Carolina have already voted for change everywhere else in state government. Now it is time to finish the job.
SF Source American Thinker May 2026