- The North Carolina Court of Appeals has ruled against a group seeking public records from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The group is looking into the university's role in COVID-19's origins.
- US Right to Know had challenged a trial judge's 2024 interpretation of a research exemption in North Carolina's public records law.
- A unanimous three-judge appellate panel affirmed the trial court's ruling. The decision allowed the university to shield research-related documents from public view.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals has ruled against a group seeking public records from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The records are tied to US Right to Know’s search for the university’s role in COVID-19’s origins.
The unanimous decision Wednesday upheld a trial judge’s 2024 decision accepting UNC’s interpretation of a research exemption in the state’s public records law.
“In this case, we are presented with a question of statutory interpretation regarding an exception from the Public Records Act, section 132-1, contained in section 116-43.17,” wrote Judge Jefferson Griffin.
US Right to Know presented two arguments, Griffin explained. “First, Plaintiff argues ‘the trial court erred in concluding that the phrase “of a proprietary nature” in [section] 116-43.17 only modified the word “information” and does not modify either “data” or “records.”’ Second, Plaintiff argues ‘the trial court erred in interpreting the phrase “proprietary nature” in [section] 116-43.17 broadly “to include information in which the owner has a protectable interest.”’ We disagree.”
Griffin tackled the text of the disputed provision. “[T]he context of the plain text does not indicate the phrase ‘of a proprietary nature’ modifies any other term apart from ‘information,’” he wrote. “Here … the phrase ‘or information of a proprietary nature’ is grammatically separated by punctuation — commas — indicating that the prepositional phrase ‘of a proprietary nature’ solely modifies the noun preceding it, ‘information.’”
That interpretation means that university research data and records do not have to be “of a proprietary nature” to enjoy the protection of the public records exemption.
The “legislature’s intent, as derived from the text,” also supports that interpretation, Griffin wrote.
“[I]n section 116-43.17, the General Assembly placed ‘of a proprietary nature’ within a clause with ‘information’ separated by punctation, which by context indicated the phrase modified only ‘information,’” he explained. “However, in other exceptions and exemptions from the Public Records Act, the General Assembly used the term ‘proprietary information’ and clearly placed the term proprietary in positions at the beginning of the statutory text, indicating proprietary modified multiple terms or clauses.”
“[T]he General Assembly exempted proprietary information in other contexts from the Public Records Act and used different sentence structures than the one at issue when conveying the term ‘proprietary’ modified more than one term, supporting the General Assembly’s intent for the phrase ‘of a proprietary nature’ to only modify ‘information’ here,” Griffin wrote. “Therefore, the phrase ‘of a proprietary nature’ in section 116-43.17 solely modifies ‘information.’”
The Appeals Court also rejected US Right to Know’s argument that “proprietary information” should be defined as a “trade secret.”
“While ‘proprietary information’ includes trade secrets, ‘proprietary information’ extends beyond the definition of trade secrets,” Griffin wrote. “Thus, because the General Assembly chose to use ‘information of a proprietary nature’ and not ‘trade secret,’ we decline to, and in fact cannot, swap the definition of ‘trade secret’ for ‘proprietary information.’”
“Therefore, the trial court did not err in defining ‘proprietary information’ pertaining to research to ‘include information in which the owner has protectable interest,’” Griffin added.
“We are disappointed in today’s result,” said Gary Ruskin, US Right to Know executive director, in an email to Carolina Journal. “We believe that the public has a right to know where the Covid pandemic may have come from. We believe that the University of North Carolina, as an institution of higher learning, should help the public understand the lessons of the pandemic, and not obscure or bury them. We are evaluating our legal options and potential next steps.”
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 a May 2025 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.
In total, the university “produced over 130,000 pages of ‘responsive documents’ but withheld 5,205 documents,” according to the Appeals Court decision.
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.”