North Carolina’s second-highest court will consider a public records lawsuit involving the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s possible role in the origin of COVID-19. A group seeking access to university records filed its opening brief Tuesday with the North Carolina Court of Appeals.
Plaintiff US Right to Know, “a nonprofit investigative public health research group, has been investigating the origins of COVID-19 and the virus that causes it,” according to the court filing. “Its investigation led them to request public records from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (‘UNC’) regarding the work of Dr. Ralph Baric and his association with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
“The subject matter of this case is of great public interest, since more than one million American lives have been lost because of COVID-19,” the plaintiff’s lawyers wrote. “This case is also of significant public interest in that the National Institutes of Health reports … that Dr. Baric has been awarded grants or other funding for projects and sub-projects in an amount exceeding $200 million since 1986.”
The request for UNC’s public records began in July 2020, according to the court filing. After initially reporting that the requests involved more than 336,000 pages of documents, the university eventually pulled 86,934 pages in response to the request. “Defendant provided only 6 pages of responsive documents from a critical time period concerning the origins of COVID-19, namely from March 20, 2019 to January 9, 2020,” the brief explained.
The university withheld pages subject to a “research exemption” spelled out in NC Gen. Stat. § 116-43.17: “Research data, records, or information of a proprietary nature, produced or collected by or for state institutions of higher learning in the conduct of commercial, scientific, or technical research where the data, records, or information has not been patented, published, or copyrighted are not public records as defined by G.S. 132-1.”
From November 2020 through October 2021, US Right to Know filed a half dozen additional records requests with UNC-Chapel Hill involving Baric and others. The university continued to cite the research exemption in blocking the release of some documents.
The plaintiffs filed suit in April 2022. Superior Court Judge Alyson Adams Grine issued an order in October 2024 accepting UNC’s interpretation of the research exemption.
“Rather than applying the narrowest possible definition to the statute, the trial court instead erroneously applied the broadest possible interpretation of the research exemption,” the plaintiff’s lawyers argued.
“The scheme of the Public Records Act is that the records produced by our government, with our money and our employees, elected officials, or appointed officials, belong to the people and unless it is absolutely certain that the record should not be produced pursuant to a narrowly-defined exemption or exception, it must be produced,” the court filing added.
“The proper reading of N.C. Gen. Stat. § 116-43.17 is that it excludes only ‘research data of a proprietary nature, research records of a proprietary nature, or research information of a proprietary nature,’” the plaintiff’s brief argued. “Treating the word ‘proprietary’ to be defined as a trade secret is an appropriate and straightforward reading that would advance the dual purposes of the legislature to have access to records as broad as possible while reading exclusions as narrow as possible.”
“The broad interpretation given by the trial court to the word ‘proprietary’ nearly, if not completely, causes the exception to swallow the rule, making almost all university records relating in any way to research not subject to disclosure,” the brief argued.
“Given the default nature of the statutory scheme of the Public Records Act (that all records are subject to disclosure), and our appellate courts’ admonitions that exceptions and exemptions to that broad statutory language are to be interpreted narrowly, the General Assembly could not have intended to exclude such a vast number of records from the Act’s purview,” US Right to Know’s lawyers wrote. “It is much more likely that the General Assembly recognized the competitive nature of scientific research among the nation’s universities and simply sought to shield and protect against disclosure information that was akin to a trade secret in the commercial context.”
“Accordingly, the trial court erred in not treating the term ‘proprietary’ to be synonymous with ‘trade secret.’ This Court should hold that the most narrow definition applies to the term, and reverse the decision of the trial court,” the brief concluded.
Carolina Journal reported in November 2024 that Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, claimed in a podcast interview that COVID-19 was started in a lab at UNC-Chapel Hill. Redfield called Baric the “scientific mastermind behind the research.”
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