Covid and the Future of Viruses: Dr. Steven Quay

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Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Naley Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is a classicist, a political and military historian, and he has a farm and works on a farm.

He writes a lot about farming.

So today is our

weekend edition, and we have a special guest, Dr.

Stephen Kway,

who is the co-founder of Atos Therapeutics, which develops therapeutics and delivery methods for oncology and infectious diseases.

He has founded six startups and invented seven FDA-approved pharmaceuticals.

His most recent books, and the reason that he's here to talk to us, is about COVID.

And the recent books are The Origin of the Virus, The Hidden Truths Behind the Microbe That Killed Millions of People,

and Stay Safe, a Physician's Guide to

survival.

Oh, sorry, it must have said survival under COVID.

Is that what it or did I miss the title there, Stephen?

That's perfect.

Great.

So we welcome Stephen.

We're going to take a break right now and we'll come back and hear

latest news on the, especially the origins of the virus.

We'll be right back.

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We're back, and I am going to turn the show over to Victor.

So, Victor, have the show.

Thank you.

And I think some of our listeners remember that kind of spectacular podcast we had with Dr.

Stephen Corey.

That was on August 1st.

So, it's been quite a while.

And if you recall that,

he was very clear and gave a very detailed exegesis why the likelihood.

He didn't say it was impossible there was a natural origins of covid but he gave uh fact after fact data point after data point that would lead one to believe that this coronavirus was engineered and leaked out of or leaked out of the virus and since that august out of the lab and now since that august first interview

Stephen's been on Fox News.

He's been on international

media.

He's testified before the U.S.

Congress.

And I don't think it's an understatement to suggest that his thesis has lent the scientific support that really influenced the Department of Energy, the FBI, to concur in what was once revolutionary and even by the left called disinformation has now become orthodoxy in large part to people like Stephen Quay.

So, Stephen, I'm so happy you're here today and you've agreed to

press on with what's happened in the last few months.

And we have some questions for you.

Obviously, it's been, I guess, seven months since we spoke.

And

what's new since we spoke last time?

What's the your

any new research on the understanding of this this crazy SARS-CoV-1 or two virus, I should say?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's great to be on, Victor.

And, you know, there, there is, it's, I sometimes feel like it's a whack-a-mole exercise where you put out all the facts,

it's sort of settled, and then there's sort of a new set of facts that come up.

So literally in the last week, 10 days,

a new animal has come into the vernacular for most people around COVID.

And it's something called a raccoon dog.

So

that would be the latest thing that's happened.

There's a lot swirling around that that we should get into.

But

just at a high level for your listeners, the two ways that a pandemic can begin

in principle, and then how did this one in practice is what's called a spillover, where there's a virus in an animal in nature, a human comes in contact with that animal, and it jumps to the human in what's called a zoonosis.

The other is a laboratory-acquired infection, where the same process is kind of going on.

It's an animal in a laboratory, or maybe cells from an animal in a laboratory.

The laboratory person gets infected, and then it becomes a laboratory-acquired infection or a lab lab leak.

Now, in the particulars of

the COVID-19 and this pandemic we've had, those two

competing sources have kind of been taken down to an actual address and a location in Wuhan.

So there's something called the Hunan Seafood Market, which is where the people who think it came from nature or spillover is.

That's kind of the only location they have in their deck of cards.

And then the data that I'm presenting and I've talked about indicates that a nearby laboratory called the Wound Institute is the source.

So, what's happened in the last 10 days is that some Western scientists have come forward with some evidence that they have, and I think we should tease into the details of it, but

the high-level version is some new evidence that there was a raccoon dog that might have been infected in the market.

It's generated a lot of kind of

was the raccoon dog for sale for meat consumption?

It is.

So raccoon dogs are,

I'm not an expert on this, but I think their sale is more for in the in the fur industry.

So they have an attractive coat

more than their meat.

But I think perhaps in China, you know,

both uses of raccoon dogs are made.

Yeah, I know you're going to get into it in a second, but because I'm still confused when I read the Atlantic article.

So we had these concurrences by state,

federal agencies,

especially the Department of Energy and FBI.

Then all of a sudden this data comes out to, I guess, reboot or recalibrate what was a somlin or sort of

Morbin thesis that it was from the meat market.

But my question is, and I know that you can get into this.

Where did the data come that the Americans had access?

Did they find it empirically on their own?

Did they go over there or was it given to them by the Chinese communist government?

You know, that's a very good, very good point.

And I think as we teach and talk about how to evaluate science, the first thing I do as a scientist, and maybe the first thing your readers do, who may be lay people but want to try to understand science, is to look at the methods.

Where did the data come from?

What was its propriety?

How did it work?

And only then look at the results.

So in this case,

there is a German-based data set, it's up in the cloud, called GSAT, capital G-I-S-A-I-D.

And it's a repository that was put in place during influenza to collect genetic information about influenza viruses, but it became the go-to place to deposit SARS-CoV-2 sequences.

And so

Yeah,

a little in the weeds from a nerdy science here, but there are 15 million patient specimens on this database right now as we speak from SARS-CoV-2.

It's the most incredible collection of genetic information that's ever been created.

So

what apparently happened, because I have to say apparently, because we don't know the truth about it, but 17 Western virologists happened to be scanning this 15 million virus database, which I scan every day, but.

not in the way they must have done it by accident.

And they found, deposited some raw data from about two years earlier

on you know on the on this site and they got all excited and they downloaded it and they analyzed it and they called the who and had a meeting now when they reached out to the chinese generators of this data to say hey we'd like to analyze this and you know do we have your permission uh it was taken down from gsat it was no longer available to the western scientists uh but they went ahead anyway uh in kind of a uh an unusual

bridge of the guardrails around the ethics of science taking someone else's data

that's not public and analyzing it and publishing about it before you have permission to do so.

They went in and did that.

But that's where this Atlantic article came from, which was one could even say could use the term stolen data

for this analysis.

Did they take it?

Did the Chinese government or the people who were operatives of the Chinese government, did they take the data away from them because they wanted to have the first priority in exposing it, publishing it?

Or were they embarrassed, you think, that the data would be further examined by other Western scientists and

it would be problematic about how it appeared there or whether you could further investigate it?

Or was it just a proprietary interest of Rice of first publication?

Yeah, so this is going to be a little nuanced conversation because there was a six hour ago update.

So, you know, Victor, you're hearing from someone in the weeds of this and maybe for the first one in the world.

So, what happened six hours ago was the Chinese did release the data set.

So, I believe

the way I would put that together, putting myself in the shoes of Dr.

George Gao, who's the former head of the CDC.

He was in charge of this.

He's a Western-trained virologist.

He was contacting Robert Redfield over the weekend of New Year's Eve, 2019.

There's some very interesting backstory on that particular conversation.

But anyway, this is George's data.

It was effectively taken and analyzed by these Western scientists, newsworthy, news articles were published.

And he was annoyed, I guess, by them taking his data because seven days later, he has now published his own analysis, which is much more detailed than the Western scientists, probably because he's had a year to put it together.

It challenges some of that.

So there's a bit of a difference in the actual data itself.

But I think it was taken down because he was very close to putting it out himself.

He now has put it out himself.

So we have these very interesting competing analyses of stolen data by the Western virologists and the actual data by the Chinese virologists that show some very significant differences in the raw data and especially then in the conclusions you can draw from that.

Would it affect the ultimate analysis or conclusion that it came from a natural rather than a lab source?

Well, see, that's a very important higher question.

And again, we've gotten into the weeds now.

It's impossible that this, no, I misspoke, too strong.

It is very

highly unlikely that anything in these specimens is probative about the origin because they are all taken in January of 2020.

And we know from the,

you know, the State Department has a council in Wuhan.

We know, for example, that the Western, you know, the State Department head of that council

has publicly talked about the fact that schools were closed in Wuhan in the month of December because of an infectious disease that was spreading.

We now know it was SARS-CoV-2.

So it really is immaterial about what was going on in January in a market if throughout a city of 11 million people, the schools are closed and the kids are not.

So what you're saying, Stephen, is that the conventional wisdom that there is no prior animal carrier known before the first human-infected person is unchanged and that this raccoon dog could have gotten it from a human rather than given it to a human.

Is that it?

Well,

that's exactly what the raw data looks like.

Why did they make such a big deal?

It doesn't seem to be changing what you explained to our audience in August of last year.

What was behind the Atlantic?

Was it a political idea that they didn't like the idea that anybody who had said the Wuhan lab was going to be vindicated and there was a revisionist something?

But it doesn't seem like it's a very strong argument.

You know,

I certainly, I don't want want to get into motivation because

I don't read minds, but there is a consistent pattern of a half dozen to,

there's a hardcore of a half dozen Western virologists who seem to be hell-bent on making this a natural spillover

despite scientific data,

not because of it.

And they

for example, again, this is kind of in the weeds, but they published a paper showing that, in their opinion, there were two spillovers.

In order for them to do that, they had to ignore

20 virus sequences in humans that would blow up that hypothesis.

And now Steve Quay and his colleagues have gotten a peer-reviewed paper published showing that the censorship of those 20 genomes was completely unwarranted.

And that if you include those, there is no scientific evidence for two spillovers.

It's a one spillover event.

And yet, you know, they put themselves out there with sort of a crazy hypothesis.

And we spent a lot of time disproving it, but it was kind of something that you'd probably, you know, you'd give a D to a college student if he proposed it

in a term paper in virology.

Yeah, I always look at the contradictory, sequential contradictory statements of Ante Fauci.

And I went back

preparing for this, and he's gone from no chance.

to if you really want to speculate, there may be a chance until most recently, we'll never know.

So I don't want to go down on one side or the other.

so the devil the evidence must be affecting him of all people

because he's radically changed his insistence that it was only and could only be a natural origin

but I think that I get the impression just as a lay person when I look at the argument in the media in the media and I look but that's synonymous with the left-wing media that the argument is moving over to your group's natural origins and that this this doesn't seem like it's going to change it.

No, this certainly won't change it.

I think one of the issues that Dr.

Fauci's had to deal with is Freedom Information lawsuits have generated

reams of emails that are now

belying their public statements that it couldn't come from a market.

This folk, it couldn't come from a laboratory,

et cetera.

There's some pretty revealing emails about the fact that, wow, this thing really looks bioengineered.

I really see no way this could have come from nature.

And yet these same people are saying, you know, publicly soon afterwards, well, you know, the genetics, you know, it's consistent with a natural origin.

I mean, it's just, I don't know how these people can look at themselves in the mirror

and study this and do this.

We're going to take a quick break and we get back.

I think we should get into this topic of the collapse of ethics in scientific and peer-reviewed papers because it's central to the issue of the origin of this virus that affects us all.

And we'll be right back.

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And we're back with Dr.

Stephen Quay.

We're talking about the recent news of a raccoon dog, a very strange story that was an attempt to bring back the conversation to a natural or an animal source of the COVID.

I don't think from what we can tell, it's going to be convincing, but it brings up a larger question that

tell us somebody about these peer reviews.

You keep mentioning peer review.

I know as a classicist, I've written maybe 20 or 30 peer reviews.

I've always thought

you can,

if they liked you, they would get a peer review that would not be favorable.

If they, you know,

would be favorable.

If you didn't like you, the editors, I'm not being entirely cynical, but it seems like in the medical field, you have pharmaceutical leverage, you have this multi-billion, $50 billion grant industry that Fauci and Collins control,

and then you've got

academic concerns about do you want to contradict somebody powerful?

And all of them kind of converge and make it very difficult for us to believe that there is something that's completely disinterested blind peer review.

Is that too much to to say

you know i think that's probably the where we should end up after this conversation but i mean if i can just give a little history of my own experience yeah i'd like to hear it let's hear it how science

because science is in some ways one of the most powerful truth-finding activities you know of of civilization the the invention of the thinking process of science was is kind of one of the touchstones about that you know that led us to the this kind of amazing advanced technology world we're in.

But so I have 390 uh publications that have been peer-reviewed and the process is that you send a manuscript to a journal that you want to have published it's anonymously sent to two or three experts in the field they anonymously provide feedback both

spelling errors or grammatical errors i don't understand the sentence and also detailed work and and sometimes you actually they send you back into the laboratory uh i like the peer review it you know you sweat bullets to get through it but the paper always comes out better for the process and it's been uh it's it's been one of the one of the the tools that has been useful yes there's a political aspect to it yes there's documentation that um you know a harvard a harvard generated manuscript gets gets better um gets is more favorably reviewed than a community college manuscript but then maybe maybe they're at harvard and not a community college for other reasons so it's a confounding you know exercise but but it's it's a it's a generally a good process The amazing thing that I had never had before in, I guess, over 40 years of science

was

what became called the peer-reviewed process in coronavirus research, which is not the peer-reviewed process.

You send a manuscript to a journal and literally a secretary at the journal sends you back not an analysis of the manuscript, nothing about the science and just basically says, this is not appropriate for our journal.

We're not going to review it.

Good luck.

And then

the

people have the audacity to say, well, you know,

Quay's papers aren't peer-reviewed, and so therefore they can't be be taken with,

you know, need to be taken with a grain of salt.

I'm part of a group that,

you know, I can't speak for the Paris group, but there's 26 of us.

I've gone off into biotech, so perhaps I'm corrupted because of that.

But the other 25 folks in this group are hard-caring academics, you know, no industrial ties, hardcore scientists, and we all have exactly the same experience.

If you write about a lab, if you write about evidence

on the SARS-CoV-2, evidence inside the virus, for example, it's not he said, she said, but it's the virus speaking.

If you write papers about what's going on inside the virus sequence, you can't get them published in a peer-reviewed process.

Where does it start?

If you trace that, if I could just ask, so they have a boilerplate response where a particular paper is sent to them.

And if it's on a topic of subjects that I guess we'd use the word taboo.

or incorrect or whatever, who is doing this?

Is there some central command internationally, Western, European, American?

Is it spelled out, you think, in writing?

Or is it just

because it sounds like almost

there's a boilerplate somewhere that suggests that peer-reviewed journals should not go into these particular areas because they would give ammunition to people we don't want to give ammunition to.

Is there somebody, is there a hierarchy somewhere?

Well,

it's possibly that.

I mean, and I'm going to get...

So one of the challenges for peer-reviewed process in the modern scientific journals is that,

you know, journals are not a great money-making business.

So, they take support from various directions.

And there's a lot of evidence that some of the most important Western

journals, you know, the journals that we would want to be published in, the ones that a single paper for a young academic can get you tenure,

are receiving financial support

from

corporations corporations or entities associated with China.

And so without knowing what's going on behind the scenes, that certainly looks like a conflict of interest.

And it certainly is consistent with some sort of

central censorship based on

their financial

support.

So when we had the Peter Dasek

investigation, when they had that team, as you remember, and I think we talked about it earlier, that supposedly went over over to China, and I don't think they got very full disclosure.

And then they published the findings that it was a natural origins.

At that time,

were there stories that were out in the public that Lancet, for example, at Take One Prestigious Journal, had received some help from concerns that were affiliated with the Chinese government?

Yes, that's correct.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

I thought.

Did they retract just often?

This is a, we're just

for an exception before we get back to the topic.

Did they retract that formal investigation?

So

didn't some people disown or say that they did not want to maintain or continue their findings with the group?

Yeah, let me, there's, it's a little bit more complicated.

So there were

early in the process, within the first six months of 2020, two proposed investigations were made.

One was by the WHO

and one was by the Lancet Commission in which Jeff Sachs was the head of the Lancet Commission one.

Effectively, you know, Dr.

Tedros at the WHO was the head of that particular exercise.

It was the WHO team that went to Wuhan in January 2021, spent two weeks there.

you know, were shepherded around.

It was a curated tour of various facilities.

And then that report, which was written and is published under the WHO umbrella, was the one in which they said it was most likely to have come from nature, least likely to come from a laboratory.

And that final vote was, of course,

a raise your hand in a room where

all of the Chinese folks there had CCP minders.

So there were military folks in the room with you.

I think

the other Lancet commission,

which

literally blew up on takeoff,

was Jeff Sachs' effort where he was made chairman of a committee.

Peter Dasik and others were on the commission.

And he, I think, has been very public about the fact that he began asking for simple things from some of the people who were on that commission,

simple things with respect to data or findings or these sorts of things.

And when he got stonewalled,

he went public with that.

And so

that particular committee, I'm not sure, still has a charter to do an investigation.

That I'm unclear of.

But in any case, he's been very public about the fact that the conflict of interests of the folks that were put on that

made it impossible for it to go forward

in a good fashion.

He was unaware of the conflicts and when he appointed people because

he's a brilliant man, but not a virologist.

So he realized

too late in the game that some of the folks he put on there had pretty strong conflict of interests.

They expressed that by not being helpful in his casual inquiries behind the scenes.

And he went forward, went public.

And I think Dr.

Dasik had to step off the commission.

And as I said, I think he's done other things.

And I think basically they've shut down that endeavor.

It did, though, seem

that old Roman idea that a rumor crosses the world before the correction,

you know, Churchill paraphrase it before the correction puts its pants on or the truth.

But it did seem that for, I don't know, four or five weeks, it did a lot of damage to the conversation or the debate because it was stamped with, at least in the American media, that this is is the Lancet and this is,

and then it, and then when we found out these things that you just detailed, it didn't seem to get the same publicity as the original findings.

I just say that because when I had been talking to people in the universities, and when I speak, people will always cite that.

So, Victor, you're wrong.

The Lancet proved it.

It's conclusive.

And you say, no, no, it's under revision now.

It didn't really, the revisionism and the truth didn't really, hasn't fully caught up, I think with their with the flawed analysis yeah I mean as I as I like to say it you know the mistaken sensational headlines is on page one and the corrections you know on page page 20.

They are

we want to get in because we're going to in our last third, we're going to get into

I think it's going to be a little scary.

We're going to talk to Dr.

Corey about some of the research that continues that I guess we could say legitimate is very dangerous.

And I think we've seen him in Congress and on Laura Ingram and other

venues warn us about it.

So we're going to take a break and we'll be right back.

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And we're right back with Dr.

Stephen Quay.

Stephen, is there anything else you want to talk about?

This esoteric, for us, it's esoteric.

process of how the inner workings of international

immunology and biology work as far as publication and dissemination of knowledge.

My only suggestion is, or my curiosity, I should say, is how much money roughly

does the NIH or the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease or CDC, how many billions of dollars is it?

You hear these fabulous sums of 40 or 50 billion that are dispersed by a very small coterie of people in Washington.

Is that approximately true?

Yeah, that's approximately true.

And in fact, if you look at the timeline of it,

really, actually, the 911 event and scientists stepping forward to say, hey, well, you know,

there's a bioweapon

possibility for the next thing here, and we need money to prevent it.

Biodefense became a big part.

Part

of

Dr.

Fauci's budget looked extraordinary from just the context of, well, where is infectious infectious disease in the scheme of things in American medicine, you know, vis-a-vis cancer or heart disease or the others, which are massively greater than infectious diseases.

But behind the scenes, his programs were in the biodefense area with DOD, you know, funding and those sorts of things.

So that was kind of the

stimulus was the 9-11.

And, you know, then we had the anthrax problem.

And he took great advantage of that to try to become the savior of the next pandemic, which is kind of ironic.

One of the things, and that was sort of the gain of function engineering, both either to, I don't want to impugn anybody's wellness, but either to create a bioweapon or in the process of creating it to learn how not to use it, but to learn how to defend against it.

Was that the rationale?

Well,

the public justification for gain of function research has always been,

you know, there could be a virus that could end civilization.

So let's try to make it in the lab, figure out how it would possibly work if it came from nature, develop therapeutics and vaccines against it

in the context of, you know, saving humanity.

I haven't figured out quite how to put forward an analysis, but actually all of my work in terms of quantification but all of my work shows that nature is not nearly as as vicious in this space as the humans are.

The last two coronavirus spillovers from animals to humans infected about 10,000 people, killed under 1,000.

They were truly from nature, and that's truly the level of natural impact in the human population.

And now we have a virus that's killed 20 plus million, infected 2 billion.

And that delta between

10,000 and 2 billion is kind of the quantification of the impact of what you can do in a laboratory versus what nature does on its own.

That question, that kind of begs a question, has been asked by people in the U.S.

Congress.

And that's some of that stunning testimony.

I think you were involved in some of it, both in the meeting and Congress.

When people have asked the question,

can anybody cite any major viral breakthrough that would justify the risk of gain of function research?

And it was amazing to see so many people said they doubt it.

But

the cost-benefit analysis is not worth it.

Is that true?

Yeah, I try to be very deliberate.

So I've looked at 2,200 papers that

were found via a search of the

Library of Medicine, excuse me, that are related to gain of function.

I've scanned the abstracts, scanned the titles,

and putting the entire package together.

I don't believe that there's been a contribution to health policy or pandemic preparedness.

I think the demonstration is the proof is in the pudding here, where the vaccine was perhaps imperfect, but nonetheless,

it began to be manufactured within a week of having the sequence.

So all of this anticipatory making viruses in the lab is never going to be useful for the virus that first appears in the hospital.

So I think we've answered that question pretty emphatically.

When you just to pause

and then we're going to go into this

third area that's pretty scary, as I said, when you look at your own career, when we talked to you in August,

you were starting your lone wolf views and you were adding, I think the role that you played was for other doctors who were making these arguments, immunologists, you were giving them data and sequence support that really helped it.

Do you feel that yourself, the way the medical

community, say in the United States or internationally, have they

accepted what you've done?

Do you feel like you're getting because of just the sheer weight of the evidence that people are starting to back off from criticism to agreement to inviting you more places because I don't think you're going to get an apology.

But do you see the argument going in your way and you can feel it in your own professional career?

Well, I do, Victor, and I think it's more concrete than that.

We now have had two significant papers in this space peer-reviewed and accepted for publication.

And I can tell you, again, I don't know who they are because they're anonymous, but the reviewers came back with glowing testimonies.

This has to get published.

This is really important work, etc.

So I think there's a silent majority.

Even, you know,

all populations probably have a silent majority.

And I think the scientists, the virologists in the world also do.

And I think they're fed up.

And I think they're tired of trying to pretend

things that are not scientifically sound.

I think they want to be able to be

a truth teller based on their experience.

And you just can't do it with some of the papers that have been written

in the spillover space.

They're just scientifically unsound.

They fool journalists.

They get into the New York Times and things.

But a card-carrying virologist is embarrassed by some of the findings.

And I think it's starting to show up.

So it's pretty gratifying.

When you look at the role of Dr.

Fauci with this multi-billion dollar

research grant program, basically

in his hands, and he has said things in the past as diverse as I am the science, or he testified under oath, as I remember, when asked specifically,

did you fund via Echo Health through subsidies that ended up in Wuhan gain of function?

He said, this is not gain of function.

The fact that he is now retired,

and he doesn't have the financial,

or maybe his successor does, but he doesn't have that financial leverage.

I don't think anybody's going to believe anymore that when he says that there was no gain of function research taking place in Wuhan

with some help from American expertise, is that a fair assessment?

Yeah, I think it's completely fair.

And

one of the interesting things that happens in this kind of space is

I've been looking at this for three years, and every now and then you look at something you saw, you know, in year one or in month one or that sort of thing, and you see it with new eyes.

So there's this famous set of cables that came from the U.S.

State Department in 2018.

They visited the World Institute of Virology.

They sent a cable

back to Washington, D.C., you know, with alarms going off.

And this was in the Washington Post contemporaneously at that time.

And one of the titles of the section is U.S.

Funding of Gain of Function Research at the WIV.

And, you know, that's the bold title of a whole section where they talk about the work being done there.

And so

I had forgotten that that was in the original cables from 2018, but it's just, it's so disingenuous to say we weren't funding it when

a non-scientist State Department guy is explaining in a cable back to another non-scientist why the gain of function research that is being funded is so dangerous.

Are you optimistic that because he had a 40-year,

30- or 40-year tenure, that the Fauci's retirement will allow people to

feel that they're somewhat liberated from being leveraged by their grants that go to their labs and research?

You know, I think the best way to answer that is just with a simple fact, which is the new head of

the Institute

is his longtime associate.

That has been in place for a very long time.

If there was a new, if say there was a new administration and someone was to ask you,

how do we break up this monopoly at these federal institutions that have such huge budgets so that we can

we can be more open-minded and we don't have this artificial consensus and we don't try to use federal monies to warp or massage the types of research results that are very important to all Americans.

What would you recommend?

How do you reform that?

Well, I always hate recommending making government bigger.

It's always a nightmare to do that.

But so, in atomic energy, you have the DOD funding research, and you have the Atomic Energy Agency overseeing that research.

What had happened under Obama and Trump, and now

Biden, is that the oversight is within the NIAID itself.

And so you have to separate those two because they've clearly demonstrated in spades

they don't have the ability to self-regulate.

They probably never should have given that option.

That should have been taken away in the beginning, but that would be a simple fix is to take that out of there.

You talked a lot about these new, you mentioned MERS and influenza and the NEPA.

I hope I'm pronouncing that right and what what when you look at your field and you read journals and you have access to conversations with people what type of research is really starting to worry you because i know you've mentioned that

there are research projects i guess going on in china that have the propensity to make

this covet 19 virus look

very

i don't want to say innocuous i had long coveted for 10 months and i've had some problems problems after that.

But these things, what they're doing now, it doesn't seem like they've learned from anything.

And there's things that are going out there in research labs that are even more dangerous.

Is that what you are trying to tell us?

We have to be very careful.

Yeah, Victor.

So what I have done with a team of international scientists, and it's, you know, everything is a teamwork, and these folks are just incredible.

We're all volunteering our time.

But anyway, over the last three years, we've developed what we call forensic metagenomics analysis.

So focus on the word forensic, but basically I can sit at any computer in the world and using the software tools we developed, if a laboratory somewhere in the world has published a paper or done any sort of work in which their raw machine reads, the most basic research reads they get, have been deposited somewhere in the world in a database, I can interrogate those and I can basically jump into that laboratory and see what's going on over the last 18 months and throughout the entire building.

The reason that's possible is these machines are so sensitive, they amplify everything going on.

So

in validating this work, for example, we showed that a patient specimen from a hospital in Wuhan sent to the Wundistoverlogy had honeysuckle genes in the patient, you know, in the patient's throat.

Now, the patient obviously didn't have honeysuckle genes in their throat, but the wound isn't virology had published a paper on honeysuckle genes about a year earlier, and

the remnants of that research were still kicking around the laboratory even a year later and showing up at every specimen they ever did.

So, once those tools are validated and put in place, we've now interrogated three different kinds of data sets, all done since the pandemic.

So, you know, if I'm inside the wound in several hours and I've said, oh my gosh, we had a laboratory escape, the world survived, but maybe I should change

my direction of research.

That would be kind of thing I would do.

They didn't do that.

So post-January 2020, we found

MERS virus being manipulated in a synthetic biology fashion,

switching out major components that made it more effective.

We found influenza virus being done with the same thing, and we found Nipah virus.

Nipah and Ebola are always competing to be the most deadly virus.

So NEPA is between 60 and 90%, depending on the outbreak.

But both NEPA,

this influenza and MERS have the advantage that they're currently, without this manipulation, not very transmissible.

It's hard to transmit.

It burns out quickly in human successions.

But if this experiments

are done in the fashion that SARS-2 was created, where it was purposefully, it looks purposely to have been manipulated to increase transmissibility,

these are civilization-ending events.

Why do I say that?

Well, the Black Plague, which was a four-year process, not a virus, but a bacteria, but nonetheless, was a 30% lethal event in the Middle Ages.

And the population at the end of the four years was set back about 300 years, and it took 200 years for the population to regain where it was at the beginning.

So I'm working with a fellow in Florida to do an analysis in order to understand the potential impact of the work that's currently being done with viruses from 30 to 60% lethal.

We're doing what's called a Monte Carlo analysis, where we basically

imagine a hypothetical virus with two properties.

It has a certain transmissibility, it has a certain lethality.

And we're looking at the four pillars that we see of modern civilization: that is, the energy supply chain, the food supply chain,

police and fire services, and hospital services, those four parameters.

And we're doing an analysis of how does civilization,

how bad does the virus have to be to break civilization?

My seat of the pants is that a 10% virus with a transmissibility of SARS, COVID would do the trick.

But

what I'm trying to demonstrate to these folks in Congress is: look,

we know these people are doing this dangerous research with these viruses.

If I can demonstrate that this will set us back 500 years, 20 generations of my family, your family,

we need to be more serious about this.

I mean, I'm actually jealous of the climate change folks who can look at a 100-degree, very gradual one or two-degree excursion and get the entire world mobilized to change that.

I'm, you know,

here

we won't, we won't survive a pandemic of one of these viruses that I believe is more than about 10 or 12 percent lethal with the.

Let me ask you a question at this point.

When you look back at the SARS virus,

and I mean, 600,000 or so wasn't a great amount of money, but there were expertise and maybe even equipment transfers.

Do you think in retrospect that the Wuhan lab, the indigenous people who were working there had the ability without American or European help to create this gain of function virus?

So I'm going to try to really frame that very, very carefully.

Yes, because I know it's very controversial.

In the following sense, is the

development of the mice that had human lungs that allowed teaching it how to infect humans,

the ability to insert furin sites in a silent fashion.

It's called the nocem technology.

All of the technologies themselves are Western.

Once they're published, of course, they become accessible to anyone in the world.

I think it's obviously much better to learn at the bench side of an expert who's created technology.

So

we did train Wuhan scientists

in Galveston, Texas at a facility there and in North Carolina.

We did transfer the mice.

We gave them our mice

and we gave them a little bit of money.

So I think think hypothetically, a good scientist could learn from the publications.

There probably are little nuances that you wouldn't get.

But once something is published, it kind of becomes accessible.

And so

when you talk about these viruses, though, that are going to have this

expotential increase in both morbidity and in transmissibility,

you almost give us the impression that

maybe China's huge program of having so many thousands of medical experts trained in American and Western universities, they've got to the point

where they can do this very sophisticated but very, very

deadly research without a lot of American input anymore because they have access to international data and they've been trained by the West and there's no controls over them as far as Western sanctions or cutting off entrance to universities or saying your graduate students cannot come here while you're engaged in this type of that it's the horses sort of left the barn.

You're pretty close to being accurate.

One small aspect that I spoke of with in Congress was to put export controls on the machines that do the sequencing or do the creation of this.

We're still probably five years ahead of them in the technology.

And so

it's like the uranium centrifuges, centrifuges,

which we don't ship into certain places.

And in my proposal, I actually talked confidentially about some things you could put on the machines that would allow forensic examination of a laboratory with probable cause, law enforcement agency.

So, had that been in place, we would have

courtroom-acceptable

evidence for some of this malfeasance.

I know that we export Abrams A1 tanks, but we don't export all of them.

We have certain classified

information that has led to superior armor.

And as I talked to one person when I had a security clearance, basically,

we have a theory that an Abrams tank that's updated with American improvements will not be destroyed by an Abrams tank that we exported.

In other words, we don't export the full protective, reactive types of ceramic armor.

It seems like that would be very wise that we have what you just said.

But it opens another question.

Do we get to the point where we're going to have to make a decision and they're a lose-lose this decision where we say, well, we're engaged with China now and we have these international conferences.

They're graduates.

I think 38% of the Stanford engineering department is international.

And by international, I mean the vast majority of those are from China.

Do we say to them,

you just can't come over here because you're doing things that we can't live with?

or do we lose influence with the hopes that one day, you know, when we keep buy these cross-fertilizations and they get to meet us, we get to meet them, we collaborate, that there will be people within that lab because of this influence that will say, don't do that, and they will have the power.

Is it better just to cut them off?

Oh, that's such a good and difficult question.

But so

a bunch of facts around it that if I could offer them.

You know, we have we have a very substantial differential tuition structure for these kinds of situations.

So, you know, Australia, I want to say 70 or 80 percent of their entire higher education budget is the foreign is supported by the foreign students.

They would go bankrupt if there was a sudden change in that.

So in some ways, we've made ourselves

addicted to

the foreign students.

That's point one.

Point two is, you know,

I think Westerners, I mean,

we're optimists.

That's why we came to this, you know, completely uncivilized

forest and decided that it was a good place to start a new home.

I think the concept that by exposing people to Western democracy and exposing them to freedoms, that we will sort of convert them in a soft way has kind of been our operation for a very long time.

I'm not sure that the facts given

what the Communist Party is capable of doing and what they're showing they are doing, I'm not sure that that's going to be successful in the face of the dictatorial powers that are being put to bear inside of China itself.

Yeah,

I've talked to a number of people in Congress

and who've listened to you and others.

And

because the People's Liberation Army has a lot of control over this lab, if not all the control, Chinese military.

And given the fact of the disaster

of the COVID-19 virus, and given the fact that they are now engaged and gain a function that would be even more dangerous and it's under control,

at least people in our government have taken the worst case scenario that this type of research,

if not applicable to COVID-19, is certainly applicable to its successors that will be continuing with the prior knowledge of what happened with COVID, the disaster, that it leads to a bioweapon, that that's what they're doing.

And if that were to be true,

it has enormous geostrategic implications.

And I don't know how you,

I don't know how, I mean,

it makes for cost, I don't want to even use the word cost-benefit analysis, but it makes nuclear weapons look sort of obsolete, given some of the viral

implications that you mentioned of increased lethality in these engineered potential viruses.

You said the end of civilization.

I mean, it's,

I'm just thinking as a historian that in 532, Justinian was pretty much 60% in Byzantium, Constantinople, had recaptured the Western Empire.

He was all the way in Italy.

He had gotten rid of the Vandals.

It was a chance to recombine the Roman Empire and then the Black Plague.

Leiske, very opportune place, Constantinople, cross-fertilization, Vosphorus, Sears, Dardanelles, Hellspond, Sia Marmora, Asia, Europe, Africa.

And it wiped out 500,000 of the 800,000 people in Constantinople.

And that was the end of it.

And then the Byzantines recovered.

They were attacked on the Fourth Crusade.

1204, they were sacked.

They thought they could still recover.

They were.

1341, the plague hit,

and it wiped out half the population.

And when the Black Tuesday of May 29th, 1453, there was only 50,000 people left in Constantinople when it fell.

And that was the end of Roman civilization in Asia.

Those two plagues really destroyed it for good.

So what you said, as soon as I heard you say that, it was, wow, this has happened before.

But these were natural.

We wouldn't dare want to tinker with something that could recreate these civilizational ending plagues.

Well, that's exactly right.

You've hit on exactly that.

And on a percentage basis, in terms of the deaths, I mean, this was not nearly

what those two events were that were civilization changing, as you so

accurately described.

In fact, I was just

to show you the full circle here, I just flew through Istanbul, which is not Constantinople for a reason, as you say.

Kind of interesting, interesting medicine.

Yeah, there was only 7,000 defenders on the wall and they held out for six weeks.

And there's contemporary descriptions in Italian and Greek.

It's very tragic to read.

This huge city that had this enormous, the greatest fortifications that were ever created in the Western world.

And

there was pasture and land inside the wall.

It had never recovered from the

1340 to 1350 second round of the plague that had almost destroyed it 800 years earlier.

And gosh,

scary, it really is.

And you know, I mean, when I look at the recent history, I think there's a very interesting event between 1995 and 1999 that I think China watched and they said,

you know, this was maybe the starting point of their efforts in the area of biological activities.

The WHO had come to the conclusion in 95 that smallpox was taken care of and that

the two laboratories that still had

live virus, that is the United States and Russia,

that there was a move throughout the WHO and all the member states except those two saying, hey, we need to destroy these now that the world is free of smallpox.

What China watched was that both the United States and Russia accelerated their research on smallpox in light of the fact that the WHO said maybe it should go away.

And there was actually a resolution passed in 1999, unanimous resolution, except for US and Russia, that said they should be destroyed.

And of course, neither did.

They neither did destroy it.

And I think China watched that and said, wow, if I want to play on the world stage with this new, you know, the new generation,

biological weapons needs to be the space I go into.

And that was the reason they didn't destroy them?

It was the idea that they might give further enhancements to biological weapons.

You know,

I don't have confidential documents around the reasons they weren't destroyed.

I know they weren't destroyed.

I think there's reasonable people who know have more information than I do who say that it was because both

wanted to have a defense against an offense if it became a bioweapon or created an offense, etc.

So interestingly, both countries at the CDC,

we had this incident about 10 years ago when some vials of smallpox were found in a desk drawer.

and then in September 2019 interestingly there was an explosion in fire at the Russian laboratories in which the smallpox is stored we were told I don't think any Western person was in there we were told the smallpox samples weren't ever breached they were safe in the freezer but I mean

it is interesting that that

that this particular set of events, I think triggered China's interest in this because

it's much, much cheaper than doing nuclear work.

I mean, there's a paper from 30 scientists in Switzerland.

They said, How fast and how cheap can we make SARS-CoV-2?

They got some baker's yeast that, you know, some bread yeast to make sourdough bread.

They spent $5,000 to order the pieces.

They spent seven days making it.

They said in the future,

they could make it in five days.

This paper was published in April 2020, and it's been downloaded 150,000 times, Victor.

That's this paper about how to make SARS-CoV-2 in five days for five days.

I live in a very rural community, and that's about 90% Mexican-American.

I think I know personally

10 people who died at it, heads of their families.

They were in their 50s.

A lot of people had comorbidities with some obesity and diabetes, but they were still in the prime of life.

and they got COVID.

And the idea that something way across the world in a lab could find its way all the way into the United States and very quickly and then sort of wipe out whole families and destroy people's lives.

It's just incredible this globalized interconnected world that can do that.

And then when we have these guardians in this last hour,

I know you're optimistic and that's why you're doing what you're doing, this invaluable research, but there is a note of pessimism that these people die all over the United States that had wonderful lives ahead of them, and yet the guardians of science were unable to stop it.

And they were, in fact, to this day, there are still people in the United States that suggest that this gain of function research has value

that trans

you know that it's much greater than the dangers.

I just can't believe how anybody could come to that conclusion after what this virus did when they're working on even more lethal and infectious variety.

There's something wrong, I guess, what I'm saying.

It's not just in China, Stephen, is it?

There's something wrong that that would want the United States to keep smallpox, I think.

I don't know what it is, but

you've talked on ethics so much on publication, but I don't know.

Maybe medical schools should have an ethics program or something.

I'm not a big fan of anything post the Nicomician ethics by Aristotle, because he's kind of said it all, but my God.

People have a lot of power in their hands that we don't even know what they're doing or or who's supervising it.

Yeah, I don't know.

And I'm not a psychologist or anything.

I mean, I think there is a,

I think it's exciting to be playing God.

It feels powerful to play God.

Make a virus that won't kill mice.

And then suddenly a month later, you have a virus that will kill every mouse in your laboratory.

It's a very strange mindset.

It's a very dark mindset, but I think it's unfortunately more universal among some groups of scientists than we would like to know.

Let me, we're at the end of our hour.

We've been with Dr.

Stephen Kuay, and he's

agreed very generously to come back and review.

Many of the things he said in August were very prescient.

They've been absolutely confirmed, and he's in high demand now because he was one of the first brave voices.

And I think one of the reasons that you resonated so much is that you combined it.

combined an academic background and you know so-called pure research with and and apply all these companies you've created for the benefit of mankind and i think that symbiosis really gave you a practical side that some of your colleagues that are you know as gifted as you are didn't have and that was really you've done a great service for the united states and uh i hope you'll come back in in maybe three or four months and maybe you can enlighten us that there's some good news.

Do you have good news,

Stephen?

Yeah, no, no, I would certainly like that.

There's some things going on behind the scenes that gives me a little bit of encouragement, and hopefully they can come to fruition and we can get together and

lay it out as nicely as you do.

You're a wonderful guide to these conversations.

Well, I really appreciate you coming.

And

Dr.

Stephen Quay, we're going to have him back.

Thank you for listening.

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