Ep 126 | EcoHealth Alliance's Peter Daszak: Hero or Villain? | Matt Ridley | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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What's the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth?

Six months.

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Today's guest has proven his willingness to be enlightening despite what it does for his popularity among the people who refuse to choose truth.

His career has been marked by bold moves and even bolder arguments.

He's a science and technology editor for The Economist.

He advanced the possibilities of science in journalism.

He's a best-selling author.

He has covered topics like diseases, energy, genomes, reproduction, nature versus nurture.

He wrote a book entitled The Evolution of Everything, How New Ideas Emerge.

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His latest book, Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, has cemented his status as a truthful outsider.

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Matt, welcome.

Thank you for having me on the show.

You bet.

You bet.

I think we're going to agree on a lot, and I want to set this up, that some things are speculation, and we should point that out as we get there

and make sure we know the difference between fact and speculation and fiction.

Because you do that very well in your book.

Yeah, that's what we're trying to do in Viral, is we're trying to tease out what we know and not what we might might know.

There's quite an important distinction there because there's a lot of speculation about where this virus came from.

It's a really important question.

We've got to get it right.

And actually, we can find out an awful lot more than we thought we could a year ago.

So it's worth digging into what we know, but not getting carried away.

Right.

And I

answer the question first on why is it important that we find out how this happened, where it came from.

Millions are dead.

It's caused by a virus.

That virus came from a bat.

We don't know how it came from a bat.

When SARS broke out, we did know how quite quickly.

We had an answer quite quickly.

Normally, we can find who patient Zero was, where he got it from, and so on.

The fact that we don't know nearly two years, exactly two years into a pandemic that has killed millions and is still killing, is pretty shocking.

And we need to find out, because if we don't, then the next pandemic will take us by surprise again.

We need to be able to prevent the next pandemic.

Were you surprised that you found villains in this story?

I think we were, both Alina Chan and I were shocked that we found

some people in the West and in China who were simply not prepared to reveal what they already knew.

And it took us a while to work out that they already knew more than they were letting off.

Correct.

And what I find,

and we'll get into those people here in a little while, but I find

the

willingness to cover the tracks, the willingness to not say

astounding.

Because I really think at the beginning, if people would have just said, look, guys, this happened and I know this and this and this, I think people would have been more forgiving.

And I've wondered: has their silence

caused more death?

Did they keep things from researchers?

Did they keep things from the pharmaceutical companies that could have helped move things faster?

Well, there's no doubt that in the early weeks of the pandemic, in early January 2020, there was a reluctance on the part of the Chinese authorities to admit that human transmission was occurring.

That was a a real problem.

There was a reluctance to admit that there was a problem getting out of control.

There was a reluctance to share the genome of the virus, which they had early in January, but

they finally released it to the rest of the world on the 12th of January.

They could have done that at least a week earlier.

Now, all of these could have made an enormous difference to nipping this pandemic in the bud.

So, a lot of the cover-up of

a lot of the effort that went into making sure that

this was

not a big story

and it was under control, so-called, actually, I think ended up making it worse.

Yeah.

Okay.

So

walk us through the origins.

of this book, because I think it's

fascinating.

The origin of the the book is that I

started out thinking this was almost certainly going to be a market food-based

virus originally.

Which we believed for a long time.

Which we all believed, just like SARS.

But I knew that it was likely to be from a bat originally, because that's where SARS-like viruses had come from.

I wrote an article about this for the Wall Street Journal.

Then I came across a couple of papers,

one of which said that this virus was surprisingly well adapted to human cells, unlike SARS in its early months.

And that's your co-author of that.

And that was by my co-author.

Right.

And I got in touch with her, and

she turned out to be an extraordinarily intelligent person who was thinking very hard about this and had suddenly had time on her hands because the lab was closed where she worked and was beginning to dig into this story.

Okay, so tell me what that means when you say easily adaptable to humans.

Why does that stick out?

Well,

a virus that's going to jump from one species to another has got to evolve and change in order to be good at infecting the new species.

You know, it's not going to be a good fit straight away.

And to do that, it's going to change its genome.

Now, we saw SARS-1 do that in the early months of that pandemic.

It changed its genome very rapidly.

This virus did not do that.

It changed surprisingly slowly.

And when tested against human cells or cells from other species it turned out to be actually very good at infecting human cells.

Now one possible explanation for that was that it had already been in human cells for a number of months or years in a laboratory.

And so

is it common

for something that has not been in a laboratory or humans to transmit like it was?

No, it's unusual for an animal that not

to be really good at spreading from human to human.

Not unheard of for the first time

at the first shot.

We don't know enough to know quite how unusual it is, but we do know it's unusual.

Okay.

Let's go into

the spread of it is unusual.

It adapts to humans quickly.

Let's go into a kind of a dicey topic as we go go into it.

Do you believe it's man-made?

No,

in the sense that this is clearly a natural virus.

It's got close cousins in bats, but

it might have features that have been altered by human beings.

We can't rule that out, and the more evidence that's come to light,

the more possible that looks.

But let's be clear.

We don't know for sure what happened.

We think it's still possible that it was a natural event.

We started out thinking that was a very likely possibility.

We've come to think that it's a much less likely possibility, and we think this was probably a laboratory accident or a research-related event, if that's what it was.

I think that's the most logical thing.

And when I say, is it man-made?

I want to separate.

Because some people, when they hear man-made, they think bioweapon.

And I just don't think this was a bioweapon.

It could be, but is there any evidence for that?

We found no evidence that it was a bioweapon.

We certainly know it wasn't made from scratch.

You know, it is a natural virus, but it might have been engineered.

There's a couple of pieces of quite strong evidence that

it might be one of the many viruses that we know they were manipulating in the laboratory

in order to understand them better.

So the motivation for this research that was going on in Wuhan, much more than anywhere else in the world, by the way, but the motivation for this research was to predict and prevent the next pandemic.

Okay, so

it's not about trying to cause a pandemic.

It's about trying to prevent one.

That's why I say if those involved would have come out, if Fauci would have come out and said, look,

We were doing gain of function research because we believe that stopping this, finding these things, and stopping them and having

the antidote

is much better than just being surprised by something.

He would have had more sympathy, because I don't think they weren't doing it for a bioweapon.

I agree with you.

It's not, of course, we can't completely rule out that there weren't bioweapon researchers interested in this, but we found no evidence of that.

We think it's much more likely that they were doing what it says on the tin, in other words, trying to understand these viruses so that they could predict and prevent the next pandemic.

And one way to do that was to get them into the laboratory, test their ability to infect human cells.

And to do that, you needed to manipulate their genes because some of these viruses simply couldn't infect humans.

And so you needed to swap bits in and out.

They were making chimera hybrid viruses.

Now, is that a risky thing to have been doing with viruses that can cause pandemics?

I think it probably is.

And that may may be true whether or not this one actually resulted from such an accident or whether it came about as a result of a natural event.

Aaron Ross Powell,

let's be clear on the bioweapon.

I think you're really clear in the book, and it's important to me that we separate, again, fact from fiction.

And

it's not worth...

People will hear it's a bioweapon.

There's a possibility it's a bioweapon, and they'll concentrate on that.

That's not the important thing at this point.

The important thing is where did it come from?

How did it start?

Then once you have that information, you'll know the rest, right?

But it's easy to make it into a conspiracy theory, which is then it dismisses the whole chain of events.

Well, early on, a lot of virologists in the West said we can rule out a bioweapon, an engineered virus, and any other lab-based scenario.

Now, that's where we come in and say, hang on a minute, there's a big difference there between an engineered bioweapon, which I agree we can probably rule out, and it's a pretty bad one if it is.

Well, exactly.

And you wouldn't do it in Wuhan if that's, you know,

you would go and do it in a secret location somewhere in a desert if you were trying to test a bioweapon.

Or indeed if you were trying to test a novel vaccine, which is another possibility people have raised.

But

ruling that out does not rule out

that a natural virus might have been in a sample in a laboratory that was being studied, and by accident one of the researchers picked it up, either in the lab or when they were collecting it in

a bat cave in the wild.

And so

the idea that all lab-based scenarios were ruled out early in the pandemic and that anything like that was a conspiracy theory, I'm afraid is just not borne out by the evidence.

Those are still very much possibilities.

Did you see the documentary from the Chinese government that played on national TV in November over in China of them collecting?

the bat samples hundreds of miles away, exactly the kind of bats and the samples that you would need.

I mean, just that alone alone opens the possibility of someone getting it there in the cave and then it growing out of control.

I mean, there are so many different ways that this could have happened.

Well, for more than 10 years, scientists in China were sampling bats in caves in southern China in order to try and find SARS-like viruses.

The most active research group doing this was from Wuhan.

The site they were doing it in is a long way from Wuhan.

The sites are over a thousand miles from Wuhan, so it's a very long way away.

It's not like it's next door.

The bats that they sampled near Wuhan do not have these viruses in them generally.

There's been one or two SARS-like viruses found, but very, very few, and certainly none of these kind of viruses.

So it's almost certainly the case that a virus made its way from somewhere in southern Yunnan or northern Laos or somewhere like that to the city of Wuhan, okay, and started the pandemic.

The question is, how did it make that long journey?

The only people we know

who went to bat caves in southern Yunnan and then went straight to Wuhan were the scientists.

Nobody else has been doing that.

So

we do have to take seriously the possibility that when they were in those bat caves, they picked up a virus.

Now, the second question is: were they wearing sufficient protective gear every time they went into these caves?

And the answer is no.

I mean, they've, as you said, shown films of themselves, they've given accounts of the work

in which,

yes, they do try and wear protective gear, but quite often it's too hot, or they take their gloves off, or take their goggles off.

You know, so

we now know that's probably too risky a thing to be doing.

The whole Wuhan

lab

seems a little sketchy to be doing things at this level there.

Well,

the

most active bat coronavirus research program in the world was in the city of Wuhan.

The biggest collection of bat coronaviruses in the world was in Wuhan.

The database of those samples, 22,000 samples of which 15,000 were from bats and the rest mostly from rodents, is in Wuhan.

That went offline and they still won't share it with us.

Now that seems to us to be simply unpardonable because

If, as we have been assured by

a scientist in the West who says he knows what's in that sample, that it's irrelevant, there's nothing of any relevance there,

then why take it offline?

Why not show us what's in that thing and say, look here, there's nothing relevant in this database.

But it went offline on the 12th of September 2019,

which is

well before the first cases were announced, probably before we think the first cases occurred.

So

it's a bit odd that it did that.

And the excuse for taking it offline is that, oh, people are trying to hack it.

Well, not before the pandemic, they weren't.

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What does your research show the first

patients were?

Because there's reports that

researchers from the lab got sick.

went with the symptoms,

not known to be COVID-19 at that time.

They went early in the fall or even late summer.

What does your research show?

The official Chinese position was that the first case was on the 1st of December.

They later revised that to the 8th of December when working with the World Health Organization.

But documents leaked to the South China Morning Post showed that they definitely thought there was a case on the 17th of November.

Those are the first sort of three dates we know about.

But U.S.

intelligence sources, as you say,

have alleged that three workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were ill in November and that they had symptoms, including so-called ground glass opacities in the lungs, that

are consistent with COVID-19.

Now, we haven't been able to verify that independently, so we can't confirm that.

Any idea?

Any idea?

The one thing that you think that that is reliable or not?

The one thing that's odd here is that there is no decent information on the professions and activities of the first cases coming out of China.

So when the SARS epidemic happened, they quickly discovered that the first cases were often food handlers.

They were chefs and other people who were handling food.

And that enabled them to pin down the fact that civet cats were infected and were infecting people in restaurants and other food handling places.

So clearly finding out who the people picking up this virus to start with were would be useful information.

Now, the joint study between the Chinese authorities and the World Health Organization was not shown any raw data about these first cases, citing patient confidentiality.

That doesn't make sense.

How could you possibly try to track something if you don't know anything about the person other than they're sick?

Well the one thing of course that they did emphasize in the early weeks of the pandemic was that a lot of the early cases had connections to one particular market, the Huanan seafood market.

And then in May 2020 very quietly the head of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, Dr.

Gao Fu said,

actually we think that's a red herring.

About a third of the cases had no connection with that market and we've tested all the animals in that market, and they were negative.

And although we found the virus in so-called environmental samples in the market, i.e., you know, countertop sewage, things like that, we think they're human, they're cases of the human virus.

They're not a particular different animal version of the virus.

So, the market was pretty well exonerated by the Chinese authorities a year and a half ago.

And yet, that was the only hypothesis that the Chinese authorities had put forward as to where it might have started.

So what's the most likely

scenario?

How did this happen?

Well, Alina Chan and I are reluctant to speculate.

We try and stick to what we do know.

And what we do know is that sometime in the fall of 2019,

some people got infected in Wuhan.

There's no evidence that it came from elsewhere.

The Chinese authorities kept trying to say that it might have come in from some other country on frozen food.

Well if so the place where the food was getting slaughtered and frozen would have picked up this virus first and also other cities where the food went to, you know.

So

sometime in the fall of 2019, people got infected.

A A very strong possibility is that those first cases were people who were working in the laboratory, which we know they were doing on SARS-like coronaviruses and doing

experiments.

And the fact that they were very slow to release information about the experiments they'd been doing, for example, they said of the bat virus that's most closely related to the virus causing the pandemic, they said, oh, we've just sequenced it and found that it's similar.

Well, how come the labels on the sequence say 2018?

Oh, yeah, right.

Okay, we sequenced it in 2018.

Sorry, we forgot to mention that.

You know, so this is the kind, and by the way, we changed the name,

but we didn't say we changed the name.

And so it took me

several weeks to figure out, you know, they said we'd previously found this virus, this bat-like virus that's very similar.

So I immediately went to say, okay, where did you find it?

When?

And I looked through the literature.

I couldn't find any mention of its name.

And it was two months later that they admitted that they had changed the name.

Now, this is not helpful.

And at that, that was...

But that doesn't necessarily make it coordinated, planned, cover-up.

Well, I think what you have to remember is that in those early first few months, nobody expected this to go global.

We thought we were reading about a little local problem in China, like SARS, which was apart from the fact that there were cases in Canada and elsewhere, but it was a relatively short-lived epidemic.

So I think in those early months,

the Chinese authorities thought they could get away with

being slightly economical with the facts about this, not telling us as much as they wanted to.

And there was actually, we think, some evidence that they wanted to keep a hold of some of this information so so that they could patent and invent the tests themselves and

get a lead on that.

Because some of the information was shared with

what you might call crony firms that are well connected with the Chinese regime.

That didn't ⁇ that doesn't ⁇ I mean, they were welding people in their own homes.

They were coming in and welding doors shut.

And I mean, it was pretty draconian.

I mean, beforehand, when you were watching just how they were dealing with it in Wuhan,

I don't think this is a movie pandemic.

If I'm writing a movie script, I'm not picking COVID.

I mean, it's killed a lot of people, but it is not the one that's going to wipe out humanity.

You know what I mean?

And yet that was almost the impression we were getting there in early January when you were starting to see see them

the way they were treating this.

It was terrifying.

It was.

But I vividly remember

the feeling,

wow, that's pretty extreme what they're doing.

They must be quite frightened.

But I rather doubt that it'll come over here and cause a major global pandemic.

We'll know.

I had a lot of faith in the fact that genomics has advanced so far far since uh sars that you know we'll be able to detect and test and prevent the spread of this thing relatively easily once it gets going i was wrong about that i've been wrong about a lot of things in the pandemic and that that was one of them but uh but you but didn't you you wrote um a while back about cities and how crowded we are on on cities and well it's certainly true that humankind is

ripe for something like this.

We are living at very high densities in cities.

We are traveling a lot.

An ambitious virus that spreads easily should be able to exploit that.

But on the whole, it needs to stay mild.

if it's going to do that, like all the colds that we catch.

If it's going to kill you very quickly, like Ebola, it generally struggles

to develop a whole whole epidemic.

Because the host dies.

Because people get too sick, they stop meeting people, they die, you know, so it doesn't spread.

So I was fairly sanguine that if a pandemic did start, it would either be mild or it would peter out pretty quickly.

I've sort of half-proved right on that, because this virus, horrible though it is,

doesn't have a particularly high death rate.

One of its crucial features that enables it to be so threatening is that pre-symptomatic individuals can spread it.

So people who are not yet sick and therefore still going around their daily business are likely to be spreading it.

Aaron Powell, is this going to be like the flu of 1918, be with us forever, just forever changing?

Or is there an end to this?

Aaron Powell, well, I'm no epidemiologist, so I don't necessarily have the answer to that, but I think there is every chance that it will become endemic in the human species.

There are four other coronaviruses that are already endemic in the human species.

They cause the common cold.

I mean they are one of the causes of the common cold.

The rhinoviruses and adenoviruses are also causes of the common cold.

But the four coronaviruses that cause common cold, one of them called OC43,

looks like it arrived in our species late in the 19th century from cattle.

It might have been, although the evidence for this is very uncertain.

We discuss it in the book.

It might have been the cause of a really nasty pandemic in 1889, 1890, which started in Russia and spread around the entire world using railways and killed a lot of people and killed probably a million people at least, which was a lot in those days.

And then came back in a couple of waves and then gradually settled down.

And now, you and I have probably had it.

It doesn't tend to kill people.

It's become mild.

I'm pretty sure that's what this one will do.

It'll turn into a version of the common cold,

but

not without doing horrible damage, not just physical damage to people, but social and economic damage too.

So, why is it that we

keep hearing about the booster shots?

Because it's only going to get worse and worse and worse.

You're killing off the easy ones, and the harder ones are

if you say that we've evolved these other old viruses

well I think there is a tendency for not all but some viruses to start out virulent and then evolve into mild cases particularly ones that are transmitted by respiratory means

and I suspect that is happening with this.

Whether or not using vaccines

helps or hinders that process is a difficult question, and I don't think biology has good answers to that yet.

But it would be wrong not to try and use vaccines, I think, because they do undoubtedly save lives on a huge scale.

They're doing so today.

So I think it's right to try and do something about this.

I would agree with you.

And I don't think that will prevent the virus becoming milder if that's what it's going to do anyway.

You,

in the book, expose

crimes committed by China.

Well, you say that, but

I don't think we would quite use that term because we don't really know.

Well, no, let me put it another way.

The research that was going on that might have led to the origin of this pandemic,

Most of it was not secret.

Most of it was approved by the Chinese authorities, funded by the Chinese government, funded to some extent by the US government too through programs that funneled money to that, and was approved by authorities who thought it was the right thing to be doing.

There were some virologists who are saying, I don't think this is wise.

I think we should be preparing for pandemics without going and looking for dangerous viruses in the wild, bringing them into laboratories and manipulating their genes

and growing them in human cells.

Because if we do that, we might start a pandemic.

So people were advising against this work, but that doesn't make it a crime in the sense of being against the law.

The

United States had the same argument.

And under Barack Obama, it was illegal.

And then under Trump, it was legal again.

And this goes to the whole thing of gain of function.

And Fauci forever has been a fan of let's go out and hunt these things down.

First of all, can you tell me how you hunt down viruses, who these virus hunters are and how you hunt them down?

Yeah, well,

what you do is

you go to bat colonies, horseshoe bats.

There's one particular genus of bats that you've got to focus on if you're interested in SARS and SARS-like viruses.

And all this starts from the SARS epidemic.

Back in 2003, the SARS epidemic, they eventually realized it was in horseshoe bats.

So they start sampling horseshoe bat colonies all around southern China.

Now, horseshoe bats live in caves in large colonies.

They don't tend to live in the roofs of buildings, for example.

So you go to remote caves, you find these very large colonies, very dense colonies of these bats where they're spreading these viruses among themselves.

You

trap some of the bats in nets, you swab their nose and their anus,

you spread a sheet on the floor and collect their droppings, and you take these samples in test tubes, put them in liquid nitrogen at minus 80 degrees, and take them back to Wuhan to study them.

That's essentially

what was going on on a massive scale.

I mean, tens of thousands of bats being sampled in this way.

They also took some live bats back to the laboratory.

Again, we had denials of that for many months.

It eventually became clear that, yes, they had kept some live bats for experiments in Wuhan.

So that's what virus hunting involves.

And when you get those samples back in the laboratory, you defrost them and you then test them for the presence of genes that are characteristic of SARS-like coronaviruses.

And

if you find them, you then

try to grow a live virus out of one of these samples.

And the Wuhan Institute of Virology achieved this about five years ago for the first time with a virus called WIV-1.

It's not easy to actually grow a live virus.

You can say, look, there's definitely coronaviruses in this sample, but

they're not in a state where they can infect cells because their genomes are broken up.

They haven't enjoyed the journey in the liquid nitrogen or something like that.

But they did manage to start what they call isolating.

And in this

context, the word isolate means to grow new copies of a live virus.

And then you put them in humanized animals.

Can you explain

humanized animals?

Well first of all you put them in human cells and one of the breakthroughs achieved in North Carolina was to create a kind of tissue in the laboratory that is based on human lungs.

It's called human airway epithelial cell culture.

So that's a sort of petri dish with a bit of effectively like the lining of a human lung in it.

But then, as you say, humanized mice, humanized animals.

And what a humanized mouse is, is a mouse in which you have either added the human ACE2 gene to its genome, or you've replaced the mouse ACE2 gene with a human ACE2.

Now, the ACE2 is the receptor on our cells that the virus uses to get into our cells.

It's the lock which it unlocks with its spike key, as it were.

So these mice

are then identical to other mice, except that with respect to the ACE2 gene, this one gene, they are like human beings and not like mice.

And by

doing that, you've then got what you'd call an experimental model for testing whether this virus can infect a human being.

You test it in the mouse.

Now you can see what's happening here is that if you succeed and the mouse catches it and dies, then this virus is getting trained on human

genes, on human receptors.

And some of the experiments, we only found this out very recently, but some of the experiments that were done

did see increases in the infectivity of these viruses on human cells of up to 10,000 times.

They got much better at

infecting human cells.

So

one of the risks here is that simply by using that experimental technique, you're giving the virus a crash course in how to be infective in human beings.

Now,

I was unaware this kind of thing was going on.

I've covered...

genomics, molecular biology,

medicine as a reporter and as a writer and author of books for many years.

And I have to say, I was pretty gobsmacked by how close to the edge some of these experiments have been.

Above board.

I mean, if you knew where to look, you know, these experiments are described in the scientific journals.

You know, they're not being secretive about this.

And not just in China, but in the United States and in Europe, too.

Those humanized mice came from the United States.

That's right, although separate lines of them were also developed in Beijing.

Okay.

So

this is the thing that we were arguing about, and gain of function is what

Fauci is saying.

I didn't do it.

However, it appears as though he just changed the meaning of gain of function.

Was gain of function being done and funded by the NIH?

Well, this is a very difficult question to answer.

It's a very simple question.

It ought to be a very easy question to answer.

But the definition of exactly what gain of function is has been changed and has been is a little grey.

Okay.

So

if you it

was, there was a moratorium on gain of function, as you said, between 2014 and 2017.

But not if you were already doing the experiments.

And not, and it didn't apply to animal viruses that could not infect human beings.

Right, but does it apply to animal viruses that are just in the process of working out how to infect human beings?

Do you see what I mean?

That's where the sort of the

ambiguity comes in.

Now, look, I'm from the UK.

I'm not here to

join a fight between Rand Paul and Tony Fauci

on this.

There was a mechanism for trying to decide whether something

broke this rule or not.

But one of the things that's kind of...

I'm not even concerned if he broke the rule or not.

I'm tired of the word games.

Were they trying to...

Was this kind of stuff

going on?

Because it was legal except for those periods, but highly controversial.

You know, people act as though, oh, no, we've done that.

No, that's very controversial among scientists.

Well, the reason this phrase gain of function entered the language in 2014 was because there was a big row about this.

You know, half the scientists said, we shouldn't be doing this work.

Let's have a moratorium on it.

And the other half said, no, no, we've got to do this, otherwise we can't find out the risks of viruses.

And so, you know, it's not as if all scientists think this is fine and the rest of the world thinks it's bad.

Right.

People like Richard Ebright and others have been arguing for years that these experiments shouldn't be happening and are too risky.

And I think there is no doubt, whether you want to call it gain of function or call it something else, that viruses have been made more

capable of infecting human beings and made more virulent in human beings in experimental situations in the laboratory.

And was that happening in Wuhan?

And this kind of thing was definitely happening in Wuhan.

In fact, this was one of the leading centers for this.

For SARS-like coronaviruses, it was the leading center in the world for this.

And by the way, it's quite important here to describe what

level of biosecurity laboratory where it was being done.

Right.

Because you know the pictures you see where they're dressed in a sort of inflated space suit with air pumped into it.

That's not this.

That's biosecurity level four.

Right.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is the only biosecurity level four lab in China, but it's only

they do have four there.

It's a relatively new laboratory.

But that's not where these experiments I'm talking about were being done.

These were being done on the old Wuhan Institute of Virology campus at biosecurity level two and three.

Quite a lot of the experiments on bat-like coronaviruses, which they didn't think were very good at infecting human beings, but they were putting them in humanized mice and things like that, were done at biosecurity level two and three, right?

Now three is quite secure because you're working in sealed cabinets and there's sort of gloves built into the cabinets that you reach into.

But two is basically just goggles and gloves.

Now if a virus with the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 was in a sample, in a biosecurity level 2 lab, then it's not guaranteed that the researchers using that lab and the people cleaning it in the evening would catch it, but it's jolly likely.

All right, so tell me the

EcoHealth Alliance.

How are they involved?

The EcoHealth Alliance is a New York-based foundation which came out of wildlife research but repurposed itself about 10 years ago as

a funder of

wildlife surveillance and sampling for virus threats.

So they're going out and they're looking

for those threats that then could or may not be taken into a lab for gain of function.

And they figured out that there's a lot of money suddenly available for this.

In the wake of SARS and Ebola, suddenly there's significant sums of money available for this.

So they put themselves in a position where they are the the contractor funded by the US government or the subcontractor

who distributes the money to overseas work on this.

They're the intermediary between the US government and overseas research teams.

And they collaborate closely with it themselves and their people go on these expeditions with the Wuhan Institute of Virology people and so on.

And by

2019 the EcoHealth Alliance is handling some $17 million a year, significant significant quantities of money here, most of which comes from the Overseas Development Administration and the Pentagon,

some of the Department of Defence funding.

So

they're a

conduit for money, but they also put their names on the research papers,

they collaborate, they go into the labs and they talk about and

make claims about the research that's being done.

You know, so they say, we are very proud of the fact that we've found hundreds of viruses, that we've done experiments with them in the laboratory, that we've sequenced their genomes, that we've altered their genomes, that we've made hybrids between these viruses.

And they're on the record.

They use we, you know,

meaning the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other partners in the US.

And, you know, they're also tweeting about having great karaoke parties with chums in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

So, you know, they're very close to

the people doing the experiments.

They're part of the team.

And part of the team is also Dr.

Xi, who they're very close with, right?

That's right.

So Dr.

Xi Zheng Li and Dr.

Peter Dazak, who's head of the EcoHealth Alliance, are good friends and close collaborators on this work.

And

how do these two people implicate at all Dr.

Fauci in any way?

Well,

Dr.

Fauci is funding some of the work of the EcoHealth Alliance.

There is an email trail between Peter Dazak and

Tony Fauci discussing

this kind of work, including, and this has only come out in recent days,

an exchange

not with Fauci directly, but with the National Institutes of Health, in which the NIH says, Well, doesn't that sound like gain of function?

And EcoHealth Alliance says, Not if you describe it this way.

And NIH said, Oh, I see, you're right, so we'll describe it that way.

So

there's a very cozy relationship here to make sure that

the funds do flow,

but they don't necessarily

break the rules.

They might bend them just a bit.

What is

7896 project?

Well, this is a fascinating little wrinkle that

came to light during the research we were doing for this book.

When they sequenced the

genome of the bat virus most closely related to

SARS-CoV-2,

some of the

pieces of the sequence had this number on them, 7896.

And a very diligent, brilliant Spanish technology consultant called Francisco de Ribera

started digging into where this number had come from.

And I won't go into all the details, but he basically eventually worked out that there was a bunch of eight viruses very closely related to the pandemic virus that had been collected from the same mine shaft as this other one that they had sequenced, one of which was called 7896

and that had never been published.

And he asked Peter Dazak, he said, can you explain why this number 7896 crops up in this one other virus and in the sequence of the one closely related?

And he was simply blocked on Twitter for asking that question.

So that gives you a sort of hint of what's going on here.

And eventually he said, look, I think there's there's eight viruses that they collected from this mine shaft in 2015, not in 2013.

And I think we should see what's in their genomes.

They might be relevant.

They might be useful.

And

it was six months later that in a seminar,

the Wuhan Institute of Virology head, Xi Zheng Li,

did in passing show a slide that admitted, yes, they do have these eight viruses, and yes, they are from the Mojiang mine, like like the other one

so this was a clue that people like Francisco Ribeira were on the right track in terms of finding out stuff about what these scientists had been up to that they were not admitting to themselves and I should say that in researching this book we came to rely on people like Francisco Ribeira people like a wonderful Indian called The Seeker, who was helpful in this story as well, and others, who are open source analysts.

They're amateurs who are digging into websites that are not secret websites.

They're just very hard to find and piecing together information in ingenious ways.

These people were more useful to us and to the world in finding out what went on than the mainstream media,

the WHO, than the scientific establishment, and even than the official intelligence agencies.

So they are the heroes of

Facebook.

Why?

Because the intelligence agencies tend to depend upon human intelligence, you know, having a spy in the right lab or something like that.

Whereas these guys are just saying somewhere in China there will be a thesis, a paper, a grant application, a document, a database.

which actually tells us what's been going on here.

And they probably haven't scrubbed all of them.

and if we get hold of a few logins and we just keep looking we might find them.

Now it's it's grotesque that we have to rely on this.

It's also kind of beautiful.

It's also kind of beautiful, you're right.

But if

this was happening in, I don't know, Belgium or Kenya or somewhere, we would just go to the government and say, look, please can we have a drains up

you know, transparent look at everything you know that might help us track down the origin of this virus.

Instead of which, we're confronted with a regime which keeps getting praised for its transparency by the World Health Organization, but which actually

simply has to have the information dragged out of it by these amateur people.

And that's why we felt it important to write a book, to try and put together everything these guys were finding out and stuff we were finding out.

And, you know, some, I don't want to make the impression that all journalists and all scientists have been hopeless, some have been great,

but piecing together the information and working out what was going on in Wuhan in the months up to this pandemic is very important.

It might be a red herring.

It might all have started with somebody buying a civet cat to eat for his lunch in a market.

But you don't think that at this point, do you?

Well, we lean towards the view that no, it's likely to have come out of a laboratory and people say well come on we've never had a pandemic from a laboratory that's probably not true actually there was a 1977 flu epidemic that almost certainly began with a with a vaccine that was leaked from a laboratory it wasn't a it wasn't a very severe one but uh and uh laboratory leaks happen all the time I mean they are quite common with lots of different viruses.

They've happened with smallpox, with foot and mouth disease and with SARS.

I mean SARS leaked from laboratories at least four times, twice in Beijing, once in Taiwan, once in Singapore.

This virus is probably leaking from laboratories fairly regularly, but we wouldn't know because there's so much background infection that you wouldn't be able to tell.

So you cannot rely on,

oh, but laboratories are quite secure, people don't have leaks in them.

Can you describe the WHO's visit to the laboratory?

What made it strange?

The WHO went to Wuhan in January 2021.

The team that went was approved by

the Chinese government.

There was only one American representative on it.

That was Peter Dazak, the close friend of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and close collaborator.

That's honestly I well, you're not an American, so you remember there was this old show in the 70s called Columbo, and he was...

Remember Colombo, you weren't.

Okay.

And the murderer murderer was always the one that was helping him try to figure it all out.

It kind of seems like that's the role of the WHO with Peter Dadzek.

Well,

Peter Dazzak argued that

you need me on this team because I know these guys and I know this field of research and I'd be ideal for you.

But he then But he had orchestrated a letter to the Lancet Journal, although he had

not revealed how he had orchestrated it, by 28 scientists saying

it cannot possibly be a lab leak.

Unbelievable.

So he wasn't open-minded.

He would be the first to admit that.

He was absolutely convinced that it couldn't be a lab leak.

Or had reason to make sure that people...

Yeah.

And they go to the Wuhan Institute of Virology during their visit in Wuhan.

They spend three hours there.

they talked to the people in the lab and they,

when asked afterwards, did you ask to see

the coronavirus database, the 22,000 samples that they had taken offline in September, Peter Dazak said in a seminar

after the visit, no we didn't ask to see them because

I know what's in it and it's of no relevance.

Well, I'm sorry.

Why should we take your word for it?

Right.

And why should you take their word for it?

That's not good enough in a situation where millions have died.

Is the WHO

should we be a part of the WHO?

Does it play

a fair role at all?

Is it something we can trust?

Well, I don't think the WHO has behaved very well in this pandemic.

It allowed itself to

effectively be a mouthpiece for the Chinese government.

It refused to take any notice of the alarm bells that were rung by the Taiwanese government, because Taiwan is not allowed to be a member of the WHO at China's request.

The head of the WHO was very much Xi Jinping's candidate.

So

it has undoubtedly been

much less open-minded and fair than it should have been.

That said, it doesn't have power to force a member country to divulge information.

But in the SARS epidemic, its director general then, Grohalen Brundland, the former Prime Minister of Norway, she was pretty tough on the Chinese.

And she said, it is not acceptable that you took so long to tell us about this outbreak.

You should have been more forthcoming, etc., etc.

Now, after the visit to Wuhan, the WHO team gave a press conference in which they said it probably came on frozen food.

It's very unlikely to come from a laboratory.

The reaction in the West was so

incredulous, thank you, that's the word, to this, you know, not just observers and media commentators, but Western governments said, that doesn't sound good enough.

Come on.

And Dr.

Tedros, the director general, did then row back and say, okay, sorry, we didn't mean to imply we're not going to look into the lab leak.

We would like to look into a lab leak.

We'll get another team to do that.

It took them many months.

They've only now recently announced the team.

It's still got lots of people on it who are very chummy with Chinese laboratories.

So it's not filling us with confidence.

And just think, you know, the fact that it took them six months to negotiate terms of entry for this inquiry, and then they went went there for only two weeks, and then they gave this press conference, which was a farce.

That means that the rest of the world didn't get to investigate.

You know, the WHO, everyone was pinning their hopes on, you know, the British government, I keep asking them about this, and they keep saying, well, we've just got to help the WHO do this right.

Well, if the WHO doesn't do its job,

then not only does it have to, then, yeah, then they are preventing others from doing their job.

So I want to go back to something you said earlier.

You talked about

that the Pentagon was involved.

And I want you to tell the story of Peter Dasek and the $14 million request

from him to the Pentagon in DARPA.

Can you explain?

Yeah.

Well, this was a story that emerged just as we were putting the finishing touches to the book, and we were able to squeeze in a mention to it.

It's a little shocking.

It came out through these open source analysts again, a group called Drastic, who developed it.

It was a proposal to DARPA, the

Pentagon research agency, from the EcoHealth Alliance.

The proposal was called DeFuse,

and it was asking for $14 million

to

do work on viruses in China, bat SARS-like coronaviruses.

It went in in 2018.

It was refused, so they didn't get the money.

But it gives gives a glimpse of the kind of things A they were already doing and B they were wanting to do.

It had some wacky ideas in it, like developing an app that soldiers could have on their mobiles so that when they were fighting a war, they could tell whether they were in an area with dangerous viruses or not.

Well, you know, that's not going to be very helpful, is it?

Hang on, put your gun down.

Let's look at the app.

They were talking about blowing misting bat caves with vaccines to try and and cure the bats of these viruses.

Well, that's a pretty long shot that that's going to be effective.

So

there was some really far-fetched stuff in there.

But what was particularly interesting was it did confirm that bats are kept in the laboratory at the Wuhan Insta Virology, which had been denied up until that point.

And it also confirmed that they had plans to put something called a furin cleavage site into a bat SARS-like coronavirus.

Explain what a furin cleavage is.

This is something that had been hotly denied up until that point.

A furine cleavage site is a small chunk of genetic text, 12 letters long, that is found in this virus and no other closely related virus.

So no other SARS-like virus has been found with this chunk of text in it.

Now that chunk of text makes

the virus very infectious.

It's sort of the biggest reason we're having a pandemic.

Without that chunk of text, the virus would not be able to infect so many cells in our body, would not be so quick to do so.

And where does that chunk of text come from?

Well where does that chunk of text come from?

That's the question.

A lot of people looked at that and said that looks odd.

That looks like someone put it there deliberately.

And other scientists said, don't be so ridiculous.

It could have arisen naturally.

Other coronaviruses, not bat, SARS-like ones, but other ones do have it.

MERS has it, for example.

And we were prepared to be completely sort of ambiguous about this.

We still are.

We don't know for sure whether it arose naturally or whether it came in.

But

there have been 11 experiments around the world to

put furine cleavage sites into viruses.

Sounds like a bad idea.

And one of them involved the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

It was a MERS-like virus.

And yeah, I mean, it's, you know,

most of these experiments were safe because they were just doing it with the protein, not the whole virus, so it's not infectious, you know, etc.

But some of them were using live viruses, particularly one that involved a pig.

Peter Desik's group, that

DARPA said, no, we don't want to fund it.

The DARPA proposed, DARPA said, we don't want to fund this.

And

why would you do that?

Why would you put a fear in cleavage site into a virus?

The answer is to make it easier to study in the laboratory because then you can grow the virus.

If you find a virus in the wild, in a bat, and it's not very good at infecting human cells, putting a furion cleavage site will juice it up a bit so that it can infect human cells.

And then you would study that.

Because you want to study it.

What you want to do is get the Nobel Prize for catching a virus

in the act of starting a pandemic and stopping it.

I think that's one of the motivations.

Sorry, I don't mean to say that was sort of deliberately what they're doing, but

if you get into this field, it's very frustrating not to be able to grow these viruses and study them.

So you want to make it just that little bit easier and you want to check whether they can infect human beings.

And half the time you can't tell because the virus can't infect human beings at all.

So you need to make it just a little bit easier.

And then you can say, okay, this one's dangerous, that one's not.

That's what they're trying to do.

But as I can't remember who said this first, but one scientist said this recently, that's a bit like looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.

This here in America has become all about politics.

And

I'm shocked at how Americans have reacted

to these lockdowns.

It's just bizarre.

And I I think at the beginning, we were afraid we didn't know, and I think it was reasonable to do the things that we did at the beginning.

Now, there's just too many weird things that are going on with the government, you know, saying mandatory max, you know, vaccines, etc., when we were on the road to 90%

vaccinations here in America.

And

it has become all about

politics.

And anyone who,

like, I don't question the vaccine.

Vaccine's great.

Good.

Good for us.

Me too.

But I do think you have a right to say,

I don't want that.

But if you have any,

anything that disagrees, like maybe it was in a lab, they will shut you down

so hard, which I think makes this

the vaccine even harder for some people to understand or want because they're like, wait a minute,

this is unusual activity.

Does that make sense to you?

Yes, I think I see where you're going.

I mean, I agree with you that I'm pro-vaccine.

I want to persuade people to have the vaccine.

I worry that forcing them to have the vaccine backfires in some cases.

Especially in America.

Almost certainly in America especially.

But muddled up in this is, as you say, there were some ridiculous conspiracy theories out there at the start, that it was all got up by Bill Gates, that

it was a hoax,

or even that it was you know, there was an early idea that it was something to do with the HIV virus or something like that.

And that was nonsense.

So those are nutty conspiracy theories.

The possibility that this virus came from an accident in a laboratory was not and never should have been labeled a conspiracy theory.

But it was explicitly labeled as such by

Peter Dazak, by other scientists,

by Dr.

Fauci.

And that seems to me wrong, because I think you need to distinguish between

possibilities that you might think are unlikely,

but can't be ruled out and we haven't yet got good enough evidence for, and possibilities that are completely ridiculous and

akin to saying the moon landings were faked or whatever.

Because otherwise, if you throw them all in together, then you're only encouraging the

conspiracy theorists to say, well, if you called that a conspiracy theory and you're now saying it's not, then what about my mad idea?

That's exactly right.

And you also have,

for instance, one of the reasons why this was so scary at the beginning with China is because they were suppressing information.

They were taking scientists and they were disappearing.

And you're like, wait a minute, wait a minute.

Why?

Well, all he said was, I think this started two weeks beforehand.

Why is he now missing?

Right.

Well, the reprimands handed out, the fierce, you know,

tickings off that the scientists who first raised the alarm got were pretty awful.

You know,

they were

where they are, who they were.

Well,

the most famous of them, the young ophthalmologist who shared it on social media with some friends and said, we've got SARS in this, they thought it was SARS at the time, we've got SARS in our hospital, please be careful.

That was all he said.

He got the most tremendous

punishments.

And then he actually died of COVID within a month.

I mean, in early February.

So we do know what happened to him.

So

there have been some very unpleasant

reactions to

people trying to

be open and helpful with information in China.

And that is not something we should condone.

I mean, a friend of mine said, look, what do you expect?

They're a communist regime.

They do this kind of thing.

I'm sorry.

Why is that supposed to reassure me?

Right.

Right.

Especially one that is as powerful and

we're all going traveling.

And, you know,

the CDC here has been instrumental in cracking down on

people and

questions.

Is that the way it is in the rest of the world?

Well,

it's varied in different countries, but on the whole,

most

governments, until May of 2021 would not take seriously the possibility of a laboratory leak and used words like conspiracy theory and so on.

The UK government wouldn't give it any time.

The Australians called for an open inquiry, but that doesn't mean their government was thinking it was a laboratory leak or possibly could have been.

Something changed in May of this year.

There was an open letter in science organised by my co-author.

There was a very good, there were a couple of other very good essays and there was just enough accumulation of evidence for people to say, hang on a minute, have we prematurely ruled this out?

And were we

should we be taking it more seriously?

Well, if only that had happened a year earlier, because the trail is getting colder all the time.

And we...

The more time goes by, the harder it's going to be to pin down.

That said, I constantly meet people who say, we're never going to find out.

Why do you you even bother pursuing this?

And I say, well, I'm not sure.

There are people who know a lot more.

Most of them are in China, but not all.

And at some point,

they're going to realize they need

to speak more freely.

I don't think we knew about the Spanish flu for 40 years, but we found out.

Yes, it's much harder, of course, in those days because nobody really knew where it started.

You couldn't do tests, etc.

I mean, one of the bizarre things about this one, of course, is that we're doing it with our eyes wide open.

We've got genomic tests.

We know unbelievable details about how this virus works and things like that.

But it hasn't meant that we've been able to stop it.

I was surprised by that.

I thought that information that we now have at our fingertips would enable us to prevent a pandemic.

You said in Genome, the autobiography of a species,

you wrote, a true scientist is bored by knowledge.

It is the assault on ignorance that motivates him, the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.

I stand by that.

I think, you know, we teach science to kids as if it's a catalogue of facts.

It's not.

It's the search for new mysteries.

It is.

And this is a great mystery.

This is a really important.

I mean, I think it's the most important mystery of this century so far.

How many of the science?

I think science has done itself a grave disservice.

Medicine is doing itself a grave disservice now by shutting people up.

You know, you go to your doctor and he says, look,

I don't feel comfortable saying this or, you know, you can't talk about this.

Shutting these people down is

very frightening.

Well, I'm not here to throw the whole of science.

No, no, no, but I think there are other scientists that are great.

Well,

the distinction I make is that science as a philosophy is still fantastic.

I have, you know, it's the right

to try and find out about the world by experiment and hypothesis testing is the right way to go.

You know, it's an incredible achievement.

I think it's humankind's greatest achievement.

The Enlightenment.

It's a wonderful thing.

But science as an institution has got to where it tends to be dominated by

somewhat inward-looking committees of the great and the good who

are behaving more and more like a priesthood.

It's always had a bit of a tendency like that.

Say, no, no, don't you, unwashed, get involved in this.

Leave it to us.

We're the experts.

We know, and we're going to tell you what's right and what's wrong.

Well, I'm sorry.

I don't think it should be that.

I want to see science.

treated much more as a sort of democratic and open process.

And scientists to be much more humble and to say, look, actually, we don't know where this came from.

It's important we find out.

Anyone who wants to help track this down, please join us.

But don't expect us to waste our time on nutty conspiracy theories, but let's be open-minded about everything that is plausible.

Scientists are always

right until they're wrong,

until something else is discovered.

I have to ask you.

They disagree with each other.

That's how they keep themselves honest.

Yes, yes.

Okay.

Well, I have to ask you this, and then

I'll let you go.

But

what is capitalism by your definition, or better yet, what is free market anti-capitalism?

Yeah, I once called myself a free market anti-capitalist.

And what I mean by that is that I'm a huge fan of commerce, enterprise,

freedom.

You know, people going out and

taking risks and innovating and coming up with solutions that help the world.

I don't think that makes me a capitalist in the sense of the term, you know, the word coined by Marx, Because a capitalist is someone who accumulates capital.

And I think free markets are the opposite of that.

What they do is they see somebody who's got a monopoly wealth position as a result of some kind of advance and they say, hmm, I'll have a go at that.

And they come along and they use competition to

redistribute what's going on.

So I think true free enterprise is surprisingly anti-capitalist.

It produces equality, not inequality.

It produces

a sort of

network

of collaboration rather than an accumulation of bars of gold in a bank, if you see what I mean.

I mean, capitalists now are Google, Facebook, all these big corporations, Exxon, whatever.

And they force other people, they keep buying things up to force other people out, which squashes the little guy who goes, I have a better idea.

Absolutely.

And the more regulation that government imposes, often the more barriers to entry for the little guy.

And actually, big business loves it.

It's got a crony relationship with government that I think.

So

I would like to regulate in such a way as to make life harder for big businesses and easier for small businesses.

Matt, I've really enjoyed it.

Thank you so much.

Glen, thank you so much.

I've enjoyed the conversation.

Just a reminder: reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.