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Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory | Lex Fridman Podcast #247


small model | large model

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The following is a conversation with Jamie Metzl,
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author specializing in topics of genetic engineering,
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biotechnology, and geopolitics.
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In the past two years, he has been outspoken
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about the need to investigate and keep an open mind
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about the origins of COVID 19.
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In particular, he has been keeping an extensive
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up to date collection of circumstantial evidence
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in support of what is colloquially known
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as lab leak hypothesis that COVID 19 leaked in 2019
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from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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In part, I wanted to explore the idea
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in response to the thoughtful criticism
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to parts of the Francis Collins episode.
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I will have more and more difficult conversations like this
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with people from all walks of life
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and with all kinds of ideas.
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I promise to do my best to keep an open mind
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and yet to ask hard questions
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while together searching for the beautiful
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and the inspiring in the mind of the other person.
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It's a hard line to walk gracefully,
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especially for someone like me,
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who's a bit of an awkward introvert
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with barely the grasp of the English language
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or any language, except maybe Python and C++.
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But I hope you stick around, be patient and empathetic
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and maybe learn something new together with me.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, here's my conversation with Jamie Metzl.
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What is the probability in your mind
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that COVID 19 leaked from a lab?
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In your write up, I believe you said 85%.
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I know it's just a percentage.
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We can't really be exact with these kinds of things,
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but it gives us a sense where your mind is,
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where your intuition is.
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So as it stands today, what would you say is that probability?
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I would stand by what I've been saying
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since really the middle of last year.
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It's more likely and not, in my opinion,
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that the pandemic stems
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from an accidental lab incident in Wuhan.
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Is it 90%, is it 65%, I mean, that's kind of arbitrary.
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But when I stack up all of the available evidence
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and all of it on both sides is circumstantial,
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it weighs very significantly toward a lab incident origin.
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So before we dive into the specifics at a high level,
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what types of evidence, what intuition, what ideas
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are leading you to have that kind of estimate?
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Is it possible to kind of condense,
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when you look at the wall of evidence before you,
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where's your source, the strongest source of your intuition?
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And I would have to say it's just logic
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and deductive reasoning.
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So before I make the case for why I think
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it's most likely a lab incident origin,
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let's just say why it could be,
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and still could be a natural origin.
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All of this is a natural origin in the sense
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that it's a bat virus backbone, horseshoe bat virus backbone.
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Okay, I'm gonna keep pausing you to define stuff.
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So maybe it's useful to say, what do we mean by lab leak?
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What do we mean by natural origin?
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What do we mean by virus backbone?
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Okay, great questions.
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So viruses come from somewhere.
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Viruses have been around for 3.5 billion years,
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and they've been around for such a long time
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because they are adaptive and they're growing
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and they're always changing and they're morphing.
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And that's why viruses are,
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I mean, they've been very successful and we are our victims.
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Sometimes we're beneficiaries.
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We have viral DNA has morphed into our genomes,
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but now it's certainly in the case of COVID 19,
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we are victims of the success of viruses.
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And so when we talk about a backbone,
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so the SARS CoV2 virus, it has a history
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and these viruses don't come out of whole cloth.
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There are viruses that morph.
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And so we know that at some period,
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maybe 20 years ago or whatever,
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the virus that is SARS CoV2 existed in horseshoe bats.
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It was a horseshoe bat virus and it evolved somewhere.
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And there are some people who say,
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there's no evidence of this,
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but it's a plausible theory
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based on how things have happened in the past.
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Maybe that virus jumped from the horseshoe bat
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through some intermediate species.
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So it's like, let's say there's a bat
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and that it infects some other animal.
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Let's say it's a pig or a raccoon dog or a civet cat.
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They're all pangolin.
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They're all sorts of animals that have been considered.
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And then that virus adapts into that new host
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and it changes and grows.
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And then according to the quote unquote
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natural origins hypothesis,
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it jumps from that animal into humans.
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And so what you could imagine
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and some of the people who are making the case,
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all of the people actually,
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who are making the case for a natural origin of the virus,
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what they're saying is it went from bat
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to some intermediate species.
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And then from that intermediate species, most likely,
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there's some people who say it went directly bat to human,
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but through some intermediate species.
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And then humans interacted with that species.
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And then it jumped from that, whatever it is to humans.
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And that's a very plausible theory.
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It's just that there's no evidence for it.
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And the nature of the interaction is,
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do most people kind of suggest this at the wet markets?
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So the interaction of the humans with the animal
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is in the form of it's either a live animal
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as being sold to be eaten or a recently live animal,
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but newly dead animal being sold to be eaten.
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That's certainly one very possible possibility,
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a possible possibility, I don't know if that's a word.
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But the people who believe in the wet market origin,
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that's what they're saying.
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So they had one of these animals,
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they were cutting it up, let's say, in a market
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and maybe some of the blood got into somebody's,
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maybe had a cut on their hand or maybe it was aerosolized
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and so somebody breathed it.
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And then that virus found this new host
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and that was the human host.
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But you could also have that happen in, let's say, a farm.
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So it's happened in the past that let's say
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that there are farms and because of human encroachment
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into wild spaces, we're pushing our farms
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and our animal farms further and further
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into what used to be just natural habitats.
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And so it's happened in the past, for example,
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that there were bats roosting over pig pens
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and the bat droppings went into the pig pens.
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The viruses in those droppings infected the pigs
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and then the pigs infected the humans.
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And that's why it's a plausible theory.
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It's just that there's basically no evidence for it.
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If it was the case that SARS CoV2 comes from this type
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of interaction, as in most of the at least recent
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past outbreaks, we'd see evidence of that.
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Viruses are messy.
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They're constantly undergoing Darwinian evolution
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and they're changing and it's not that they're just ready
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for prime time, ready to infect humans on day one.
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Normally you can trace the viral evolution prior
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to the time when it infects humans.
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But for SARS CoV2, it just showed up on the scene
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ready to infect humans.
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And there's no history that anybody has found so far
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of that kind of viral evolution.
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With the first SARS, you could track it
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by the genome sequencing that it was experimenting.
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And SARS CoV2 was very, very stable,
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meaning it had already adapted to humans
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by the time it interacted with us.
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It's fully adapted.
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So with SARS, there's a rapid evolution
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when it first kind of hooks onto a human.
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Yeah, because it's trying.
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Like a virus, its goal is to survive and replicate.
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Yeah, no, it's true.
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It's like, oh, we're gonna try this.
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Oh, that didn't work.
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We'll try it exactly like a startup.
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And so we don't see that.
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And so there are some people who say,
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well, one hypothesis is you have a totally isolated
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group of humans, maybe in Southern China,
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which is more than a thousand miles away from Wuhan.
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And maybe they're doing their animal farming
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right next to these areas where there are these horseshoe bats.
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And maybe in this totally isolated place
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that no one's ever heard of,
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they're not connected to any other place,
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one person gets infected.
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And it doesn't spread to anybody else
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because they're so isolated.
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They're like, I don't know.
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I can't even imagine that this is the case.
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Then somebody gets in a car and drives all night,
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more than a thousand miles through crappy roads
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to get to Wuhan, doesn't stop for anything,
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doesn't infect anybody on the way.
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No one else in that person's village infects anyone.
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And then that person goes straight
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to the Huanan seafood market,
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according to this, in my mind, not very credible theory,
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and then unloads his stuff and everybody gets infected.
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And they're only delivering those animals
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to the Wuhan market, which doesn't even sell very many
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of these kinds of animals
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that are likely intermediate species and not anywhere else.
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So that's, I mean, it's a little bit of a straw man,
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but on top of that, the Chinese have sequenced
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more than 80,000 animal samples,
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and there's no evidence of this type of viral evolution
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that we would otherwise expect.
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Let's try to, at this moment, steel man the argument
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for the natural origin of the virus.
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So just to clarify, so Wuhan is actually,
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despite what it might sound like to people,
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is a pretty big city.
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There's a lot of people that live in it.
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11 million.
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So not only is there, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
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there's other centers that do work on viruses,
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but there's also a giant number of markets.
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And everything we're talking about here
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is pretty close together.
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So when I kind of look at the geography of this,
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I think when you zoom out, it's all Wuhan,
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but when you zoom in,
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there's just a lot of interesting dynamics
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that could be happening and what the cases are popping up
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and what's being reported, all that kind of stuff.
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So I think the people that argue for the natural origin,
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and there's a few recent papers
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that come out arguing this,
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it's kind of fascinating to watch this whole thing,
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but I think what they're arguing
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is that there's this Hunan market
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that's one of the major markets, the wet markets in Wuhan,
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that there's a bunch of cases
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that were reported from there.
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So if I look at, for example,
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the Michael Warby perspective that he wrote in Science,
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he argues, he wrote this a few days ago,
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the predominance of early COVID cases linked to Hunan market,
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and this can't be dismissed as ascertainment bias,
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which I think is what people argue,
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that you're just kind of focusing on this region
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because a lot of cases came,
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but there could be a huge number of other cases.
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So people who argue against this
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say that this is a later stage already.
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So he says no, he says this is the epicenter,
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and this is a clear evidence, circumstantial evidence,
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but evidence nevertheless
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that this is where the jump happened to humans,
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the big explosion, maybe not case zero,
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I don't know if he argues that, but the early cases.
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So what do you make of this whole idea?
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Can you steel man it before we talk about the alternative?
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And my goal here isn't to attack people on the other side,
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and my feeling is if there is evidence that's presented
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that should change my view,
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I hope that I'll be open minded enough to change my view.
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And certainly Michael Warby is a thoughtful person,
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a respected scientist,
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and I think this work is contributive work,
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but I just don't think that it's as significant
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as has been reported in the press.
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And so what his argument is,
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is that there is an early cluster in December of 2019
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around the Huanan seafood market.
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And even though he himself argues
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that the original breakthrough case,
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the original case, the index case
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where the first person infected happened earlier,
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happened in October or November, so not in December.
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His argument is, well, what are the odds
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that you would have this number, this cluster of cases
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in the Huanan seafood market,
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and if the origin happened someplace else,
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wouldn't you expect other clusters?
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And it's not an entirely implausible argument,
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but there are reasons why I think
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that this is not nearly as determinative
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as has been reported.
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And I certainly had a lot of,
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I and others had tweeted a lot about this.
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And that is first, the people who were infected
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in this cluster, it's not the earliest known virus
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of the SARS CoV2, it began mutating.
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So this is, it's not the original SARS CoV2 there.
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So it had to have happened someplace else.
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Two, the people who were infected in the market
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weren't infected in the part of the market
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where they had these kinds of animals
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that are considered to be candidates
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as an intermediary species.
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And third, there was a bias,
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and actually I'll have four things.
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Third, there was a bias in the early assessment in China
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of what they were looking for.
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They were asked, did you have exposure to the market?
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Because I think in the early days
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when people were figuring things out,
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that was one of the questions that was asked.
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And fourth, and probably most significantly,
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we have so little information
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about those early cases in China,
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and that's really unfortunate.
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I know we'll talk about this later
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because the Chinese government is preventing access
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to all of that information, which they have,
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which could easily help us get to the bottom,
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at least know a ton more about how this pandemic started.
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And so this is, it's like grasping at straws
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in the dark with gloves on.
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That's right.
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But to steel man the argument,
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we have this evidence from this market,
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and yes, the Chinese government
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has turned off the lights essentially,
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so we have very little data to work with,
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but this is the data we have.
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So who's to say that this data
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doesn't represent a much bigger data set
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that a lot of people got infected at this market
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where even at the parts, or especially at the parts
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where the infected meat was being sold?
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So that could be true, and it probably is true.
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The question is, is this the source?
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Is this the place where this began?
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Or was this just a place where it was amplified?
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And I certainly think that it's extremely likely
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that the Huanan seafood market was a point of amplification.
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And it's just answering a different question.
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Basically what you're saying is it's very difficult
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to use the market as evidence for anything
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because it's probably not even the starting point.
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So it's just a good place for it to continue spreading.
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That's certainly my view.
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What Michael Warby's argument is, Marco, is that,
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well, what are the odds of that?
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00:15:53.140
That we're seeing this amplification in the market.
link |
00:15:57.000
And if we, let me put it this way.
link |
00:16:00.240
If we had all of the information,
link |
00:16:02.520
if the Chinese government hadn't blocked access
link |
00:16:06.000
to all of this, because there's blood bank information,
link |
00:16:08.480
there's all sorts of information,
link |
00:16:10.600
and based on a full and complete understanding,
link |
00:16:14.980
we came to believe that all of the early cases
link |
00:16:18.360
were at this market.
link |
00:16:19.500
I think that would be a stronger argument
link |
00:16:22.280
than what this is so far.
link |
00:16:23.980
But everything leads to the fact that why is it
link |
00:16:26.720
that the Chinese government,
link |
00:16:28.640
which was, frankly, after a slow start,
link |
00:16:31.240
the gold standard of doing viral tracking for SARS 1,
link |
00:16:36.720
why have they apparently done so little
link |
00:16:39.840
and shared so little?
link |
00:16:41.140
I think it asks, it begs a lot of questions.
link |
00:16:45.040
Okay, so let's then talk about the Chinese government.
link |
00:16:50.220
There's several governments, right?
link |
00:16:51.960
So one is the local government of Wuhan.
link |
00:16:55.560
And not just the Chinese government.
link |
00:16:56.720
Let's talk about government.
link |
00:16:59.040
No, let's talk about human nature.
link |
00:17:02.160
Let's just keep zooming out.
link |
00:17:03.480
Let's talk about planet Earth.
link |
00:17:04.920
No, so there's the Wuhan local government.
link |
00:17:08.440
There's the Chinese government led by Xi Jinping.
link |
00:17:13.840
And there's governments in general.
link |
00:17:16.480
I'm trying to empathize.
link |
00:17:18.080
So my father was involved with Chernobyl.
link |
00:17:21.440
I'm trying to put myself into the mind of local officials,
link |
00:17:25.680
of people who are like,
link |
00:17:27.120
oh shit, there's a potential catastrophic event
link |
00:17:32.280
happening here and it's my ass
link |
00:17:36.320
because there's incompetence all over the place.
link |
00:17:39.600
Yeah, human nature is such that there's incompetence
link |
00:17:41.600
all over the place and you're always trying to cover it up.
link |
00:17:44.600
And so given that context,
link |
00:17:48.320
I want to lay out all the possible incompetence,
link |
00:17:52.720
all the possible malevolence,
link |
00:17:54.980
all the possible geopolitical tensions here.
link |
00:18:01.280
All right, where in your sense did the coverup start?
link |
00:18:06.400
So there's this suspicious fact,
link |
00:18:13.280
it seems like that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:18:16.720
had a public database of thousands
link |
00:18:19.200
of sampled bad coronavirus sequences
link |
00:18:22.640
and that went offline in September of 2019.
link |
00:18:26.320
What's that about?
link |
00:18:28.220
So let me talk about that specific
link |
00:18:30.560
and then I'll also follow your path of zooming out
link |
00:18:33.600
and it's a really important.
link |
00:18:34.560
Is that a good starting point?
link |
00:18:35.400
It's a great starting point, yeah, yeah.
link |
00:18:37.080
So but there's a bigger story
link |
00:18:40.440
but let me talk about that.
link |
00:18:42.560
So the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:18:46.500
and we can go into the whole history
link |
00:18:48.080
of the Wuhan Institute of Virology either now or later
link |
00:18:50.360
because I think it's very relevant to the story
link |
00:18:52.220
but let's focus for now on this database.
link |
00:18:55.440
They had a database of 22,000 viral samples
link |
00:19:00.400
and sequence information about viruses
link |
00:19:02.840
that they had collected.
link |
00:19:05.080
Some of which, the collection of some of which
link |
00:19:07.660
was supported through funding from the NIH,
link |
00:19:10.400
not a huge NIH through the EcoHealth Alliance.
link |
00:19:12.800
It's a relatively small amount, $600,000 but not nothing.
link |
00:19:18.080
The goal of this database
link |
00:19:20.880
was so that we could understand viral evolution
link |
00:19:24.400
so that exactly for this kind of moment
link |
00:19:27.360
where we had an unknown virus,
link |
00:19:29.680
we could say, well, is this like anything
link |
00:19:31.960
that we've seen before?
link |
00:19:33.440
And that would help us both understand what we're facing
link |
00:19:35.880
and be better able to respond.
link |
00:19:39.420
So this was a password protected public access database.
link |
00:19:45.060
In 2019, in September 2019,
link |
00:19:50.060
it became inaccessible and then the whole,
link |
00:19:52.620
a few months later, the entire database disappeared.
link |
00:19:55.900
What the Chinese have said is that because there were
link |
00:20:00.060
all kinds of computer attacks on this database
link |
00:20:03.060
but why would that happen in September 2019
link |
00:20:07.060
before the pandemic, at least as far as we know.
link |
00:20:11.500
So just to clarify.
link |
00:20:13.580
Yes.
link |
00:20:14.460
It went down to September 2019
link |
00:20:17.460
just so we get the year straight.
link |
00:20:19.700
January 2020 is when the virus
link |
00:20:22.140
really started getting the press.
link |
00:20:25.980
So we're talking about December 2019,
link |
00:20:29.020
a lot of early infections happened.
link |
00:20:30.980
September 2019 is when this database goes down.
link |
00:20:34.900
Just to clarify because you said it quickly,
link |
00:20:37.260
the Chinese government said
link |
00:20:39.580
that their database was getting hacked.
link |
00:20:44.900
Therefore, Xu Zhengli, the director of this part
link |
00:20:48.660
of the Wuhan Institute of Virology said that.
link |
00:20:50.820
Oh really, she was the one that said it?
link |
00:20:53.260
She was the one who said it.
link |
00:20:54.100
Oh boy, I did not even know that part.
link |
00:20:56.420
Yeah.
link |
00:20:57.240
Well, she's an interesting character.
link |
00:20:58.620
We'll talk about her.
link |
00:20:59.460
Yeah.
link |
00:21:00.300
So the excuse is that it's getting cyber attacked a lot
link |
00:21:07.700
so we're gonna take it down without any further explanation
link |
00:21:10.820
which seems very suspicious.
link |
00:21:12.140
And then this virus starts to emerge
link |
00:21:15.620
in October, November, December.
link |
00:21:17.500
There's a lot of argument about that, but after.
link |
00:21:19.500
Sorry to interrupt, but some people are saying
link |
00:21:21.420
that the first outbreak could have happened
link |
00:21:23.220
as early as September.
link |
00:21:25.140
I think it's more likely it's October, November,
link |
00:21:27.640
but for the people who are saying that the first outbreak,
link |
00:21:31.340
the first incident of a known outbreak,
link |
00:21:34.940
at least to somebody, happened in September,
link |
00:21:37.360
they make the argument, well, what if that also happened
link |
00:21:40.440
in mid September of 2019?
link |
00:21:42.460
I'm not prepared to go there,
link |
00:21:43.800
but there are some people who make that argument.
link |
00:21:45.100
But I think, again, if I were to put myself
link |
00:21:47.980
in the mind of officials,
link |
00:21:50.060
whether it's officials within the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:21:53.740
or Wuhan local officials,
link |
00:21:58.020
I think if I notice some major problem,
link |
00:22:02.020
like somebody got sick,
link |
00:22:04.460
some sign of, oh shit, we screwed up,
link |
00:22:09.220
that's when you kind of do the slow,
link |
00:22:11.940
there's like a Homer Simpson meme
link |
00:22:13.740
where you slowly start backing out,
link |
00:22:15.580
and I would probably start hiding stuff.
link |
00:22:20.740
CYA, yeah.
link |
00:22:21.860
Yeah, and then coming up with really shady excuses.
link |
00:22:25.980
It's like you're in a relationship
link |
00:22:27.900
and your girlfriend wants to see your phone,
link |
00:22:30.020
and you're like, I'm sorry,
link |
00:22:31.400
I'm just getting attacked by the Russians now.
link |
00:22:33.540
The cyber security issue, I can't.
link |
00:22:35.340
Yeah, I wish I could.
link |
00:22:36.820
I wish I could, it's just unsafe right now.
link |
00:22:39.780
So would it be okay if I give you my kind of macro view
link |
00:22:42.820
of the whole information space
link |
00:22:44.620
and why I believe this has been so contentious?
link |
00:22:50.660
If I had to give my best guess,
link |
00:22:52.460
and I underline the word guess of what happened,
link |
00:22:56.020
and your background, your family background with Chernobyl
link |
00:22:59.540
I think is highly relevant here.
link |
00:23:02.100
So after the first SARS, there was a recognition
link |
00:23:06.340
that we needed to distribute knowledge about virology
link |
00:23:09.860
and epidemiology around the world,
link |
00:23:11.660
that people in China and Africa and Southeast Asia,
link |
00:23:14.900
they were the frontline workers,
link |
00:23:16.700
and they needed to be doing a lot of the viral monitoring
link |
00:23:20.620
and assessment so that we could have an early alarm system.
link |
00:23:25.660
And that was why there was a lot of investment
link |
00:23:28.260
in all of those places in building capacity
link |
00:23:30.980
and training people
link |
00:23:31.980
and helping to build institutional capacity.
link |
00:23:34.620
And the Chinese government,
link |
00:23:36.780
they recognized that they needed to ramp things up.
link |
00:23:40.540
And then the World Health Organization
link |
00:23:43.300
and the World Health Assembly,
link |
00:23:44.660
they had their international health regulations
link |
00:23:47.620
that were designed to create a stronger infrastructure.
link |
00:23:50.140
So that was the goal.
link |
00:23:52.540
There were a lot of investments,
link |
00:23:54.320
and I know we'll talk later
link |
00:23:55.420
about the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
00:23:56.940
and I won't go into that right now.
link |
00:23:59.420
So there was all of this distributed capacity.
link |
00:24:02.620
And so in the early days, there's a breakout in Wuhan.
link |
00:24:07.300
We don't know, is it September, October, November?
link |
00:24:10.740
Maybe December is when the local authorities
link |
00:24:14.640
start to recognize that something's happening.
link |
00:24:16.700
But at some point in late 2019,
link |
00:24:19.260
local officials in Wuhan understand that something is up.
link |
00:24:23.580
And exactly like in Chernobyl,
link |
00:24:26.060
these guys exist within a hierarchical system,
link |
00:24:29.220
and they are going to be rewarded if good things happen,
link |
00:24:32.340
and they're going to be in big trouble
link |
00:24:34.000
if bad things happen under their watch.
link |
00:24:36.280
So their initial instinct is to squash it.
link |
00:24:39.580
And my guess is they think,
link |
00:24:42.200
well, if we squash this information,
link |
00:24:44.340
we can most likely beat back this outbreak,
link |
00:24:47.180
because lots of outbreaks happen all the time,
link |
00:24:49.380
including of SARS 1,
link |
00:24:51.500
where there was multiple lab incidents
link |
00:24:53.980
out of a lab in Beijing.
link |
00:24:56.860
And so they start their coverup on day one.
link |
00:24:59.820
They start screening social media.
link |
00:25:02.620
They send nasty letters to different doctors
link |
00:25:06.180
and others who are starting to speak up.
link |
00:25:08.660
But then it becomes clear that there's a bigger issue.
link |
00:25:12.120
And then the national government of China,
link |
00:25:14.820
again, this is just a hypothesis,
link |
00:25:17.500
the national government gets involved.
link |
00:25:19.700
They say, all right, this is getting much bigger.
link |
00:25:21.920
They go in and they realize
link |
00:25:24.100
that we have a big problem on our hands.
link |
00:25:26.200
They relatively quickly know
link |
00:25:28.340
that it's spreading human to human.
link |
00:25:30.680
And so the right thing for them to do then
link |
00:25:32.900
is what the South African government is doing now
link |
00:25:35.380
is to say, we have this outbreak.
link |
00:25:37.860
We don't know everything, but we know it's serious.
link |
00:25:40.820
We need help.
link |
00:25:41.680
But that's not the instinct of people in most governments
link |
00:25:44.780
and certainly not in authoritarian governments like China.
link |
00:25:48.340
And so the national government,
link |
00:25:50.980
they have a choice at that point.
link |
00:25:52.820
They can do option one,
link |
00:25:55.060
which is what we would hear called the right thing,
link |
00:25:57.540
which is total transparency.
link |
00:25:59.620
They criticize the local officials for having this coverup.
link |
00:26:03.460
And they say, now we're going to be totally transparent.
link |
00:26:05.860
But what does that do in a system
link |
00:26:07.980
like the former Soviet Union, like China now?
link |
00:26:10.740
If local officials say, wait a second,
link |
00:26:12.460
I thought my job was to cover everything up,
link |
00:26:15.940
to support this alternative reality
link |
00:26:18.340
that authoritarian systems need in order to survive.
link |
00:26:22.280
Well, now I'm gonna be held accountable
link |
00:26:23.860
for if I'm not totally transparent,
link |
00:26:26.740
like your whole system would collapse.
link |
00:26:29.420
So the national government, they have that choice
link |
00:26:32.580
and their only choice according to the logic of their system
link |
00:26:37.260
is to be all in on a coverup.
link |
00:26:39.020
And that's why they block the World Health Organization
link |
00:26:41.620
from sending its team to Wuhan for over three weeks.
link |
00:26:45.520
They overtly lie to the World Health Organization
link |
00:26:48.580
about human to human transmission.
link |
00:26:51.280
And then they begin their coverups.
link |
00:26:53.580
So they begin very, very quickly destroying samples,
link |
00:26:56.900
hiding records, they start imprisoning people
link |
00:26:59.860
for asking basic questions.
link |
00:27:02.900
Soon after they establish a gag order,
link |
00:27:05.780
preventing Chinese scientists from writing
link |
00:27:08.060
or saying anything about pandemic origins
link |
00:27:10.600
without prior government approval.
link |
00:27:12.200
And what that does means that there isn't a lot of data,
link |
00:27:16.180
there's not nearly enough data coming out of China.
link |
00:27:19.300
And so lots of responsible scientists outside of China
link |
00:27:22.860
who are data driven say, well,
link |
00:27:25.040
I don't have enough information to draw conclusions.
link |
00:27:29.300
And then into that vacuum step a relatively small number
link |
00:27:35.180
of largely virologists, but also others,
link |
00:27:39.220
respected scientists.
link |
00:27:40.820
And I know we'll talk about the, I think,
link |
00:27:43.220
infamous Peter Daszak who say,
link |
00:27:47.060
well, without any real foundation in the evidence,
link |
00:27:52.780
they say, we know pretty much this comes from nature
link |
00:27:56.780
and anyone who's raising the possibility
link |
00:28:00.300
of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist.
link |
00:28:03.420
So that message starts to percolate.
link |
00:28:07.940
And then in the United States, we have Donald Trump
link |
00:28:11.620
and he's starting to get criticized for America's failure
link |
00:28:15.440
to respond, prepare for and respond adequately
link |
00:28:17.680
to the outbreak.
link |
00:28:19.060
And so he starts saying, well, I know first
link |
00:28:22.900
after praising Xi Jinping, he starts saying,
link |
00:28:25.160
well, I know that China did it and the WHO did it
link |
00:28:28.620
and he's kind of pointing fingers at everybody but himself.
link |
00:28:33.020
And then we have a media here that had shifted
link |
00:28:36.140
from the traditional model of he said, she said journalism,
link |
00:28:40.760
so and so said X and so and so said Y
link |
00:28:43.220
and then we'll present both of those views.
link |
00:28:45.860
With Donald Trump,
link |
00:28:47.460
he would make outlandish starting positions.
link |
00:28:50.600
So he would say, Lex is an ax murderer.
link |
00:28:53.460
And then in the early days, they would say,
link |
00:28:55.380
Lex is an ax murderer, Lex's friend says
link |
00:28:59.180
he's not an ax murderer and we have a four day debate,
link |
00:29:01.340
is he or isn't he?
link |
00:29:02.580
And then at day four, someone would say,
link |
00:29:04.660
why are we having this debate at all?
link |
00:29:06.820
Because the original point is just is baseless.
link |
00:29:11.780
And so the media just got in the habit,
link |
00:29:13.860
here's what Trump said and here's why it's wrong.
link |
00:29:16.660
It's very complicated to figure out
link |
00:29:20.020
what is the role of a politician?
link |
00:29:21.620
What is the role of a leader in this kind of game
link |
00:29:23.900
of politics?
link |
00:29:25.580
But certainly in when there's a tragedy,
link |
00:29:29.620
when there's a catastrophic event,
link |
00:29:32.060
what it takes to be a leader is to see clearly
link |
00:29:35.300
through the fog and to make big bold decisions
link |
00:29:38.760
that does speak to the truth of things.
link |
00:29:41.180
And even if it's unpopular truth,
link |
00:29:44.300
to listen to the people, to listen to all sides,
link |
00:29:48.100
to the opinions, to the controversial ideas
link |
00:29:51.780
and to see past all the bullshit,
link |
00:29:54.660
all the political bullshit and just speak to the people,
link |
00:29:59.220
speak to the world and make bold, big decisions.
link |
00:30:02.700
That's probably what was needed in terms of leadership.
link |
00:30:04.860
And I'm not so willing to criticize whether it's Joe Biden
link |
00:30:09.140
or Donald Trump on this.
link |
00:30:11.300
I think most people cannot be great leaders,
link |
00:30:15.780
but that's why when great leaders step up,
link |
00:30:18.620
we write books about them.
link |
00:30:20.260
And I agree.
link |
00:30:21.220
And even though, I mean, I think of myself
link |
00:30:24.740
as a progressive person, I certainly was a critic
link |
00:30:27.940
of a lot of what President Trump did.
link |
00:30:33.420
But on this particular case,
link |
00:30:36.160
even though he may have said it in an uncouth way,
link |
00:30:39.420
Donald Trump was actually, in my view, right.
link |
00:30:43.620
I mean, when he said, hey, let's look at this lab.
link |
00:30:46.660
I mean, he said, I have evidence, I can't tell you.
link |
00:30:48.640
I don't think he even had the evidence.
link |
00:30:51.300
But his intuition that this probably comes from a lab,
link |
00:30:55.440
in my view was a correct intuition.
link |
00:30:58.140
And certainly I started speaking up
link |
00:31:00.000
about pandemic origins early in 2019.
link |
00:31:04.420
And my friends, my democratic friends were brutal with me
link |
00:31:08.740
saying, what are you doing?
link |
00:31:09.740
You're supporting Trump in an election year.
link |
00:31:11.780
And I said, just because Donald Trump is saying something
link |
00:31:15.460
doesn't mean that I need to oppose it.
link |
00:31:17.980
If Donald Trump says something that I think is correct,
link |
00:31:21.820
well, I wanna say it's correct,
link |
00:31:22.940
just as if he says something that I don't like,
link |
00:31:25.260
I'm gonna speak up about that.
link |
00:31:26.880
Good, you walked through the fire.
link |
00:31:28.540
So that's, you laid out the story here.
link |
00:31:31.920
And I think in many ways it's a human story.
link |
00:31:36.520
It's a story of politics, it's a story of human nature.
link |
00:31:40.380
But let's talk about the story of the virus.
link |
00:31:45.740
And let's talk about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
00:31:48.340
So maybe this is a good time to try to talk about
link |
00:31:51.940
its history, about its origins,
link |
00:31:53.540
about what kind of stuff it works on,
link |
00:31:55.920
about biosafety levels, and about Batwoman.
link |
00:32:00.780
Yeah, Xu Zhengli, yes.
link |
00:32:02.820
Xu Zhengli.
link |
00:32:03.780
So what is the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
00:32:06.540
when did it start?
link |
00:32:07.540
Yeah, so it's a great question.
link |
00:32:09.060
So after SARS 1, which was in the early 2000, 2003, 2004,
link |
00:32:15.820
there was this effort to enhance,
link |
00:32:20.100
as I mentioned before, global capacity, including in China.
link |
00:32:23.820
So the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:32:25.520
had been around for decades before then.
link |
00:32:29.220
But there was an agreement between the French
link |
00:32:32.100
and the Chinese governments to build the largest BSL4 lab,
link |
00:32:37.100
BSL4 lab, so biosafety level four.
link |
00:32:39.940
So in these what are called high containment labs,
link |
00:32:42.380
there's level four, which is the highest level.
link |
00:32:44.500
And people have seen that on TV and elsewhere,
link |
00:32:47.340
where you have the people in the different suits
link |
00:32:50.780
and all of these protections.
link |
00:32:51.900
And then there's level three, which is still very serious,
link |
00:32:56.900
but not as much as level four.
link |
00:32:58.820
And then level two is just kind of goggles and some gloves
link |
00:33:03.220
and maybe a face mask, much less.
link |
00:33:05.700
So the French and the Chinese governments agreed
link |
00:33:10.300
that France would help build the first
link |
00:33:13.500
and still the largest BSL4 plus some mobile BSL3 labs.
link |
00:33:20.140
And they were going to do it in Wuhan.
link |
00:33:22.220
And Wuhan is kind of like China's Chicago.
link |
00:33:24.980
And I had actually been, it's a different story.
link |
00:33:26.740
I'd been in Wuhan relatively not that long
link |
00:33:30.660
before the pandemic broke out.
link |
00:33:32.920
And that was why I knew that Wuhan,
link |
00:33:34.900
it's not some backwater where there are a bunch of yokels
link |
00:33:37.380
eating bats for dinner every night.
link |
00:33:40.260
This is a really sophisticated, wealthy, highly educated
link |
00:33:44.260
and cultured city.
link |
00:33:45.840
And so I knew that it wasn't like
link |
00:33:48.420
that even the one on seafood market
link |
00:33:50.340
wasn't like some of these seafood markets
link |
00:33:52.820
that they have in Southern China or in Cambodia,
link |
00:33:55.060
where I lived for two years.
link |
00:33:57.140
I mean, it was a totally different thing.
link |
00:33:59.300
I'm gonna have to talk to you about some of the,
link |
00:34:01.340
including the Wuhan market,
link |
00:34:02.660
just some of the wild food going on here.
link |
00:34:04.660
Because you've traveled that part of the world.
link |
00:34:06.340
But let's not get there.
link |
00:34:07.180
Let's not get distracted.
link |
00:34:08.860
Good, as I was telling you, Lex, before,
link |
00:34:11.100
and this is maybe an advertisement,
link |
00:34:13.780
is having now listened to a number of your podcasts
link |
00:34:18.020
when I'm doing long ultra training runs
link |
00:34:20.380
or driving in the mountains.
link |
00:34:22.260
Like the really, because in the beginning,
link |
00:34:23.660
we have to talk about whatever it is is the topic.
link |
00:34:26.080
But the really good stuff happens later.
link |
00:34:28.340
So stay tuned. So friends,
link |
00:34:29.180
you should listen to the end.
link |
00:34:31.340
I have to say, as I was telling you before,
link |
00:34:34.900
like when I heard your long podcast with Jérôme Lanier
link |
00:34:37.780
and he talked about his mother at the very end,
link |
00:34:41.140
I mean, just beautiful stuff.
link |
00:34:42.740
So I don't know whether I can match beautiful stuff,
link |
00:34:45.500
but I'm gonna do my best.
link |
00:34:47.980
You're gonna have to find out.
link |
00:34:49.140
Exactly, stay tuned.
link |
00:34:52.700
So France had this agreement
link |
00:34:54.900
that they were going to help design and help build
link |
00:34:57.900
this BSL4 lab in Wuhan.
link |
00:35:01.060
And it was going to be with French standards,
link |
00:35:04.900
and there were going to be 50 French experts
link |
00:35:07.540
who were going to work there
link |
00:35:09.420
and supervise the work that happened
link |
00:35:12.700
even after the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:35:16.060
in the new location started operating.
link |
00:35:22.140
But then when they started building it,
link |
00:35:24.460
the French contractors, the French overseers
link |
00:35:28.540
were increasingly appalled
link |
00:35:31.500
that they had less and less control,
link |
00:35:33.420
that the Chinese contractors were swapping out new things,
link |
00:35:37.140
it wasn't built up to French standards,
link |
00:35:39.620
so much that at the end, when it was finally built,
link |
00:35:44.180
the person who was the vice chairman of the project
link |
00:35:47.860
and a leading French industrialist named Marieau
link |
00:35:51.380
refused to sign off.
link |
00:35:52.980
And he said, we can't support,
link |
00:35:55.620
we have no idea what this is,
link |
00:35:58.220
whether it's safe or not.
link |
00:36:00.220
And when this lab opened,
link |
00:36:02.980
remember it was supposed to have 50 French experts,
link |
00:36:05.980
it had one French expert.
link |
00:36:07.900
And so the French were really disgusted.
link |
00:36:11.340
And actually when the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:36:14.740
and its new location opened in 2018, two things happened.
link |
00:36:19.460
One, French intelligence privately approached
link |
00:36:22.100
US intelligence saying, we have a lot of concerns
link |
00:36:25.100
about the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
00:36:27.260
about its safety, and we don't even know
link |
00:36:29.220
who's operating there,
link |
00:36:30.380
is it being used as a dual use facility?
link |
00:36:34.020
And also in 2018, the US embassy in Beijing
link |
00:36:38.540
sent some people down to Wuhan to go and look at,
link |
00:36:42.220
well, at this laboratory.
link |
00:36:44.500
And they wrote a scathing cable that Josh Rogin
link |
00:36:48.500
from the Washington Post later got his hands on saying,
link |
00:36:52.540
this is really unsafe,
link |
00:36:54.140
they're doing work on dangerous bat coronaviruses
link |
00:36:58.740
in conditions where a leak is possible.
link |
00:37:02.700
And so then you mentioned Shujing Li,
link |
00:37:05.660
and I'll connect that to these virologists
link |
00:37:08.620
who I was talking about.
link |
00:37:11.100
So there's a very credible thesis
link |
00:37:14.220
that because these pathogenic outbreaks happen
link |
00:37:17.780
in other parts of the world,
link |
00:37:19.740
having partnerships with experts in those parts of the world
link |
00:37:24.660
must be a foundation of our efforts.
link |
00:37:28.020
We can't just bring everything home
link |
00:37:29.980
because we know that viruses don't care about borders
link |
00:37:32.940
and boundaries, and so if something happens there,
link |
00:37:34.980
it's going to come here.
link |
00:37:36.180
So very correctly, we have all kinds of partnerships
link |
00:37:41.660
with experts in these labs,
link |
00:37:43.980
and Shujing Li was one of those partners.
link |
00:37:47.260
And her closest relationship was with Peter Daszak,
link |
00:37:51.380
who's a British, I think now American,
link |
00:37:53.980
but the president of a thing called EcoHealth Alliance,
link |
00:37:57.580
which was getting money from NIH.
link |
00:37:59.220
And basically, EcoHealth Alliance
link |
00:38:01.780
was a pass through organization.
link |
00:38:03.420
And over the years, it was only about $600,000.
link |
00:38:06.580
So almost all of her funding
link |
00:38:07.980
came from the Chinese government,
link |
00:38:09.260
but there's a little bit that came from the United States.
link |
00:38:11.780
And so she became their kind of leading expert
link |
00:38:15.140
and the point of contact
link |
00:38:17.620
between the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:38:20.220
and certainly Peter Daszak, but also with others.
link |
00:38:25.900
And that was why in the earliest days of the outbreak,
link |
00:38:28.860
I didn't mention that,
link |
00:38:30.340
I did mention that there were these virologists
link |
00:38:32.860
who had this fake certainty
link |
00:38:34.940
that they knew it came from nature
link |
00:38:36.620
and it didn't come from a lab
link |
00:38:38.860
and they called people like me conspiracy theorists
link |
00:38:41.340
just for raising that possibility.
link |
00:38:43.860
But when Peter Daszak was organizing that effort
link |
00:38:46.820
in February of 2020,
link |
00:38:50.020
what he said is we need to rally
link |
00:38:52.460
behind our Chinese colleagues.
link |
00:38:54.100
And the basic idea was
link |
00:38:56.820
these international collaborations are under threat.
link |
00:38:59.660
And I think it was because of that,
link |
00:39:01.300
because Peter Daszak's basically his major contribution
link |
00:39:06.340
as a scientist was just tacking his name
link |
00:39:09.180
on work that Shujang Li had largely done.
link |
00:39:12.940
He was defending a lot,
link |
00:39:14.420
certainly for himself and his organization.
link |
00:39:16.820
So you think EcoHealth Alliance and Peter
link |
00:39:20.620
is less about money,
link |
00:39:21.980
it's more about kind of almost like legacy
link |
00:39:24.740
because you're so attached to this work?
link |
00:39:26.660
Is it just on a human level?
link |
00:39:27.860
I think so.
link |
00:39:29.060
I mean, I've been criticized for being actually,
link |
00:39:31.860
I'm certainly a big critic of Peter Daszak,
link |
00:39:34.780
but I've been criticized by some for being too lenient.
link |
00:39:38.460
I mean, it's so easy to say,
link |
00:39:39.940
oh, somebody they're like an evil ogre
link |
00:39:43.140
and just trying to do evil
link |
00:39:45.460
and cackling in their closet or whatever.
link |
00:39:49.700
But I think for most of us,
link |
00:39:51.140
even those of us who do terrible, horrible things,
link |
00:39:55.460
the story that we tell ourselves
link |
00:39:57.620
and we really believe is that we're doing the thing
link |
00:40:01.060
that we most believe in.
link |
00:40:02.540
I mean, I did my PhD dissertation
link |
00:40:04.540
on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
link |
00:40:06.780
They genuinely saw themselves as idealists.
link |
00:40:09.940
They thought, well, we need to make radical change
link |
00:40:13.860
to build a better future.
link |
00:40:15.660
And what they described as,
link |
00:40:17.740
that they felt was radical change
link |
00:40:19.100
was a monstrous atrocities by us.
link |
00:40:21.900
So the criticism here of Peter
link |
00:40:26.980
is that he was a part of an organization
link |
00:40:31.820
that was kind of, well, funding an effort
link |
00:40:36.460
that was an unsafe implementation
link |
00:40:39.020
of a biosafety level four laboratory.
link |
00:40:42.060
Well, a few things.
link |
00:40:43.340
So what he thought he was doing was,
link |
00:40:47.980
and then what he thought he was doing
link |
00:40:49.580
is itself highly controversial
link |
00:40:51.700
because there's one there that in 2011,
link |
00:40:56.340
there were, I know you've talked about this
link |
00:40:57.860
with other guests, but in 2011,
link |
00:41:00.620
there were the first published papers
link |
00:41:04.020
on this now infamous gain of function research.
link |
00:41:07.500
And basically what they did,
link |
00:41:10.540
both in different labs and certainly in the United States,
link |
00:41:14.620
in Wisconsin and in the Netherlands,
link |
00:41:18.660
was they had a bird flu virus
link |
00:41:21.980
that was very dangerous, but not massively transmissive.
link |
00:41:28.540
And they had a gain of function process
link |
00:41:31.620
through what's called serial passage,
link |
00:41:33.660
which means basically passing advice,
link |
00:41:35.620
like natural selection, but forcing natural selection
link |
00:41:39.260
by just passing a virus through different cell cultures
link |
00:41:42.500
and then selecting for what it is that you want.
link |
00:41:46.340
So relatively easily, they took this deadly,
link |
00:41:49.500
but not massively transmissive virus
link |
00:41:51.900
and turned it into, in a lab,
link |
00:41:53.940
a deadly and transmissive virus.
link |
00:41:57.380
And that showed that this is really dangerous.
link |
00:41:59.580
And so there were, at that point,
link |
00:42:01.220
there was a huge controversy.
link |
00:42:03.060
There were some people, like Richard Ebright
link |
00:42:07.140
and Mark Lipsitch at Harvard,
link |
00:42:09.580
who were saying that this is really dangerous.
link |
00:42:12.500
We're in the idea that we need to create monsters
link |
00:42:16.900
to study monsters.
link |
00:42:17.900
I think maybe even you have said that in the past.
link |
00:42:21.180
It doesn't make sense
link |
00:42:22.340
because there's an unlimited number of monsters.
link |
00:42:24.660
And so what are we gonna do?
link |
00:42:25.820
Create an unlimited number of monsters.
link |
00:42:27.500
And if we do that,
link |
00:42:28.460
eventually the monsters are going to get out.
link |
00:42:31.460
Then there was the Peter Daszak camp,
link |
00:42:33.660
and he got a lot of funding,
link |
00:42:35.460
particularly from the United States,
link |
00:42:37.260
who said, well, and certainly Collins and Fauci
link |
00:42:40.340
were supportive of this.
link |
00:42:42.020
And they thought, well, there's a safe way
link |
00:42:44.660
to go out into the world
link |
00:42:46.380
to collect the world's most dangerous viruses
link |
00:42:49.620
and to poke and prod them
link |
00:42:52.180
to figure out how they might mutate,
link |
00:42:54.260
how they might become more dangerous
link |
00:42:56.420
with the goal of predicting future pandemics.
link |
00:43:01.580
And that certainly never happened
link |
00:43:03.660
with the goal of creating vaccines and treatments.
link |
00:43:07.980
And that largely never happened,
link |
00:43:11.180
but that was, so Peter Daszak kind of epitomized
link |
00:43:14.380
that second approach.
link |
00:43:18.180
And as you've talked about in the past,
link |
00:43:20.980
in 2014, there was a funding moratorium
link |
00:43:24.100
in the United States, and then in 2017, that was lifted.
link |
00:43:27.940
It didn't affect the funding
link |
00:43:29.100
that went to the EcoHealth Alliance.
link |
00:43:33.380
So when this happened in the beginning,
link |
00:43:37.020
and again, coming back to Peter's motivations,
link |
00:43:40.060
I don't think, here's the best case scenario for Peter.
link |
00:43:44.020
I'm gonna give you what I imagine he was thinking,
link |
00:43:47.100
and then I'll tell you what I actually think.
link |
00:43:49.740
So I think here's what he's thinking.
link |
00:43:51.740
This is most likely a natural origin outbreak.
link |
00:43:56.340
Just like SARS one, again, in Peter's hypothetical mind,
link |
00:44:00.420
just like SARS one, this is most likely a natural outbreak.
link |
00:44:04.540
We need to have an international coalition
link |
00:44:06.980
in order to fight it.
link |
00:44:08.700
If we allow these political attacks
link |
00:44:11.980
to undermine our Chinese counterparts
link |
00:44:14.180
and the trust in these relationships
link |
00:44:16.220
that we've built over many years,
link |
00:44:18.500
we're really screwed because they have
link |
00:44:20.660
the most local knowledge of these outbreaks.
link |
00:44:23.780
And even though, and this guy gets a lot more complicated,
link |
00:44:27.700
even though there are basic questions
link |
00:44:30.700
that anybody would ask and that Shujing Li herself did ask
link |
00:44:34.700
about the origins of this pandemic,
link |
00:44:37.700
even though Peter Daszak, and I'll describe this
link |
00:44:40.900
in a moment, had secret information that we didn't have,
link |
00:44:44.980
that in my mind massively increases the possibility
link |
00:44:48.340
of a lab incident origin, I, Peter Daszak,
link |
00:44:52.340
would like to guide the public conversation
link |
00:44:55.860
in the direction where I think it should go
link |
00:44:58.860
and in support of the kind of international collaboration
link |
00:45:03.580
that I think is necessary.
link |
00:45:04.660
That's a strong, positive discussion
link |
00:45:06.260
because it's true that there's a lot of political BS
link |
00:45:11.940
and a lot of kind of just bickering and lies
link |
00:45:16.940
as we've talked about.
link |
00:45:18.940
And so it's very convenient to say, you know what?
link |
00:45:21.100
Let's just ignore all of these quote unquote lies
link |
00:45:24.080
and my favorite word, misinformation.
link |
00:45:27.140
And then because the way out from this serious pandemic
link |
00:45:31.780
is for us to work together.
link |
00:45:33.420
So let's strengthen our partnerships
link |
00:45:36.260
and everything else is just like noise.
link |
00:45:38.460
Yeah, so let's, and so then now I wanna do
link |
00:45:41.020
my personal indictment of Peter Daszak
link |
00:45:43.460
because that's my view, but I wanted to fairly.
link |
00:45:46.380
That's nice.
link |
00:45:47.220
Because I think that we all tell ourselves stories
link |
00:45:51.700
and also when you're a science communicator,
link |
00:45:56.380
you can't in your public communications
link |
00:45:59.220
give every doubt that you have or every nuance,
link |
00:46:03.300
you kind of have to summarize things.
link |
00:46:05.820
And so I think that he was, again,
link |
00:46:07.580
in this benign interpretation trying to summarize
link |
00:46:10.780
in the way that he thought the conversations should go.
link |
00:46:14.100
Here's my indictment of Peter Daszak.
link |
00:46:16.700
And I feel like a Brutus here,
link |
00:46:20.940
but I have not come here to praise Peter Daszak
link |
00:46:26.060
because while Peter Daszak was doing all of this
link |
00:46:29.260
and making all of these statements about,
link |
00:46:31.660
well, we pretty much know it's a natural origin.
link |
00:46:34.380
Then there was this February, 2020 Lancet letter
link |
00:46:38.140
where it turns out, and we only knew this later
link |
00:46:40.940
that he was highly manipulative.
link |
00:46:42.820
So he was recruiting all of these people.
link |
00:46:45.260
He drafted the infamous letter calling people like me,
link |
00:46:48.940
conspiracy theorists.
link |
00:46:50.620
He then wrote to people like Ralph Barak and Linfa Wang,
link |
00:46:54.500
who are also very high profile virologists saying,
link |
00:46:57.180
well, let's not put our names on it.
link |
00:46:59.060
So it doesn't look like we're doing it,
link |
00:47:01.900
even though they were doing it.
link |
00:47:04.500
He didn't disclose a lot of information that they had.
link |
00:47:09.380
It was a strategic move.
link |
00:47:10.820
So just in case people are not familiar,
link |
00:47:13.700
February, 2020, Lancet letter was TLDR,
link |
00:47:20.100
is a lab leak hypothesis, is a conspiracy theory.
link |
00:47:24.900
Essentially, yes.
link |
00:47:26.620
So like with the authority of science,
link |
00:47:29.580
not saying like it's highly likely,
link |
00:47:32.300
saying it's obvious, duh, it's natural origin.
link |
00:47:37.300
Everybody else is just,
link |
00:47:40.780
everything else is just misinformation.
link |
00:47:42.780
And look, there's a bunch of really smart people
link |
00:47:44.900
that signed this, therefore it's true.
link |
00:47:46.380
Yeah, not only that, so there were the people
link |
00:47:49.540
who, 27 people signed that letter.
link |
00:47:51.700
And then after President Trump cut funding
link |
00:47:54.380
to EcoHealth Alliance, then he organized 77 Nobel laureates
link |
00:47:58.980
to have a public letter criticizing that.
link |
00:48:01.700
But what Peter knew then that we didn't fully know
link |
00:48:06.420
is that in March of 2018, EcoHealth Alliance,
link |
00:48:10.980
in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:48:13.660
and others, had applied for a $14 million grant to DARPA,
link |
00:48:19.340
which is kind of like the VC side of the venture capital
link |
00:48:23.300
side of the Defense Department.
link |
00:48:25.540
They're kind of, where they do kind of big ideas.
link |
00:48:29.380
By the way, as a tiny tangent,
link |
00:48:31.180
I've gotten a lot of funding from DARPA.
link |
00:48:33.940
They fund a lot of excellent robotics research.
link |
00:48:36.340
And DARPA is incredible.
link |
00:48:37.700
And among the things that they applied for
link |
00:48:39.940
is that we, meaning Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
00:48:42.420
is gonna go and it's gonna collect
link |
00:48:44.980
the most dangerous bat coronaviruses in Southern China.
link |
00:48:49.420
And then we, as this group,
link |
00:48:52.340
are going to genetically engineer these viruses
link |
00:48:56.620
to insert a furin cleavage site.
link |
00:48:59.780
So I think when everyone's now seen the image
link |
00:49:02.620
of the SARS CoV2 virus, it has these little spike proteins,
link |
00:49:06.320
these little things that stick out,
link |
00:49:07.940
which is why they call it a coronavirus.
link |
00:49:09.900
Within that spike protein are these furin cleavage sites,
link |
00:49:12.400
which basically help with the virus
link |
00:49:14.840
getting access into our cells.
link |
00:49:18.060
And they were going to genetically engineer
link |
00:49:20.140
these furin cleavage sites into these bat coronaviruses,
link |
00:49:24.180
the serbicoviruses.
link |
00:49:26.380
And then, and so then a year and a half later,
link |
00:49:30.700
what do we see?
link |
00:49:31.720
We see a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site
link |
00:49:36.740
unlike anything that we've ever seen before
link |
00:49:39.840
in that category of SARS like coronaviruses.
link |
00:49:44.200
That, well, yes, I mean, the DARPA very correctly
link |
00:49:49.060
didn't support that application.
link |
00:49:50.900
Well, let's actually, let's like pause on that.
link |
00:49:53.140
So for a lot of people, that's like the smoking gun.
link |
00:49:56.100
Okay, let's talk about this 2018 proposal to DARPA.
link |
00:50:02.240
So I guess who's drafted the proposal?
link |
00:50:04.180
Is it EcoHealth, but the proposal is to do research.
link |
00:50:09.260
EcoHealth is technically a US funded organization.
link |
00:50:14.660
Primarily.
link |
00:50:15.500
And then the idea was to do work
link |
00:50:18.500
at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
00:50:20.860
With, yeah, so it was.
link |
00:50:22.340
With EcoHealth.
link |
00:50:23.160
Yes, so EcoHealth, basically the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:50:26.980
was gonna go and they were gonna collect these viruses
link |
00:50:29.900
and store them at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
00:50:31.860
But they're also gonna do the actual task.
link |
00:50:33.660
According, it's a really important point.
link |
00:50:35.500
According to their proposal, the actual work
link |
00:50:38.580
was going to be done at the lab of Ralph Barak
link |
00:50:41.780
at the University of North Carolina,
link |
00:50:43.420
who's probably the world's leading expert on coronaviruses.
link |
00:50:47.860
And so we know that DARPA didn't fund that work.
link |
00:50:54.080
We know, I think quite well that Ralph Barak's lab,
link |
00:50:59.080
in part because it was not funded by DARPA,
link |
00:51:04.080
they didn't do that specific work.
link |
00:51:06.200
What we don't know is, well, what work was done
link |
00:51:10.200
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:51:12.400
because WIV was part of this proposal.
link |
00:51:15.600
They had access to all of the plans.
link |
00:51:18.280
They had done, they had their own capacity
link |
00:51:21.000
and they had already done a lot of work
link |
00:51:23.520
in genetically altering this exact category of viruses.
link |
00:51:28.760
They had created chimeric mixed viruses.
link |
00:51:33.240
They had mastered pretty much all of the steps
link |
00:51:37.680
in order to achieve this thing that they applied
link |
00:51:39.920
for funding with EcoHealth to do.
link |
00:51:42.720
And so the question is, did the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:51:47.720
go through with that research anyway?
link |
00:51:50.320
And in my mind, that's a very, very real possibility.
link |
00:51:53.760
It would certainly explain
link |
00:51:54.600
why they're giving no information.
link |
00:51:57.000
And as you know, I've been a member
link |
00:51:59.920
of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee
link |
00:52:02.520
on Human Genome Editing, which Dr. Tedros created
link |
00:52:06.000
in the aftermath of the announcement
link |
00:52:07.720
of the world's first CRISPR babies.
link |
00:52:10.160
And it was just basically the first time
link |
00:52:11.760
and it was just basically the exact same story.
link |
00:52:14.320
So Ho Chiang Kui, a Chinese scientist,
link |
00:52:16.720
it was not a first tier scientist,
link |
00:52:18.160
but a perfectly adequate second tier scientist,
link |
00:52:21.240
came to the United States, learned all of these capacities,
link |
00:52:23.840
went back to China and said,
link |
00:52:25.180
well, there's a much more permissive environment.
link |
00:52:28.160
I'm gonna be a world leader.
link |
00:52:30.560
I'm gonna establish both myself and China.
link |
00:52:33.280
So in every scientific field, we're seeing this same thing
link |
00:52:37.280
where you kind of learn a model and then you do it in China.
link |
00:52:41.540
So is it possible that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:52:45.640
with this exact game plan was doing it anyway?
link |
00:52:49.920
Do we, possible?
link |
00:52:51.800
We have no clue what work was being done
link |
00:52:55.080
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
00:52:56.880
It seems extremely likely
link |
00:52:59.840
that at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
00:53:02.080
and this is certainly the US government position,
link |
00:53:04.520
there was the work that was being done in Dr. Hsu's lab,
link |
00:53:08.320
but that wasn't the whole WIV.
link |
00:53:10.320
We know, at least according to the United States government,
link |
00:53:12.600
that there was the Chinese military,
link |
00:53:14.180
that PLA was doing work there.
link |
00:53:17.560
Were they doing this kind of work, not to create a bioweapon,
link |
00:53:22.140
but in order to understand these viruses,
link |
00:53:25.120
maybe to develop vaccines and treatments?
link |
00:53:28.280
It seems like a very, very logical possibility.
link |
00:53:33.160
And then, so we know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
00:53:36.280
had all of the skills.
link |
00:53:37.600
We know that they were part of this proposal.
link |
00:53:40.640
And then you have Peter Daszak, who knows all of this,
link |
00:53:43.760
that at that time, in February of 2020, we didn't know.
link |
00:53:47.360
But then he comes swinging out of the gate,
link |
00:53:49.560
saying anybody who's raising this possibility
link |
00:53:52.600
of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist.
link |
00:53:57.000
I mean, it really makes him look, in my mind,
link |
00:54:00.480
very, very bad.
link |
00:54:01.400
And yet, not to at least be somewhat open minded on this,
link |
00:54:04.480
because he knows all the details.
link |
00:54:06.080
He knows that it's not 0%.
link |
00:54:08.960
I mean, there's no way in his mind could you even argue that.
link |
00:54:12.040
So it's potential because of the bias,
link |
00:54:14.160
because of your focus.
link |
00:54:16.120
I mean, it could be the Anthony Fauci masks thing,
link |
00:54:20.240
whereas he knows there's some significant probability
link |
00:54:23.280
that this is happening.
link |
00:54:24.200
But in order to preserve good relations
link |
00:54:28.680
with our Chinese colleagues,
link |
00:54:30.120
we want to make sure we tell a certain kind of narrative.
link |
00:54:33.000
So it's not really lying.
link |
00:54:34.720
It's doing the best possible action at this time
link |
00:54:39.200
to help the world.
link |
00:54:40.400
Not that this already happened.
link |
00:54:42.160
But that's how like...
link |
00:54:43.760
I think it's quite likely that that was the story
link |
00:54:47.480
that he was telling himself.
link |
00:54:49.440
But it's that lack of transparency, in my mind,
link |
00:54:55.280
is fraudulent, that we were struggling
link |
00:54:59.320
to understand something that we didn't understand.
link |
00:55:02.520
And that I just think that people who possess
link |
00:55:05.280
that kind of information, especially when the existence,
link |
00:55:10.040
like the entire career of Peter Daszak
link |
00:55:12.280
is based on US taxpayers,
link |
00:55:14.320
there's a debt that comes with that.
link |
00:55:16.760
And that debt is honesty and transparency.
link |
00:55:19.040
And for all of us, and you talked about
link |
00:55:21.000
your girlfriend checking your phone.
link |
00:55:22.880
For all of us, being honest and transparent
link |
00:55:26.280
in the most difficult times is really difficult.
link |
00:55:29.240
If it were easy, everybody would do it.
link |
00:55:31.360
And I just feel that Peter was the opposite of transparent
link |
00:55:37.400
and then went on the offensive.
link |
00:55:39.800
And then had the gall of joining,
link |
00:55:44.400
I know we can talk about this,
link |
00:55:46.080
this highly compromised joint study process
link |
00:55:51.560
with the international experts
link |
00:55:54.360
and their Chinese government counterparts.
link |
00:55:56.640
And used that as a way of furthering
link |
00:55:59.960
this, in my mind, fraudulent narrative
link |
00:56:05.040
that it almost certainly came from natural origins
link |
00:56:09.040
and a lab origin was extremely unlikely.
link |
00:56:12.760
Just to stick briefly on the proposal to wrap that up,
link |
00:56:15.920
because I do think, in a kind of John Stewart way,
link |
00:56:22.000
if you heard that a bit yet,
link |
00:56:25.440
sort of kind of like common sense way,
link |
00:56:30.480
the 2018 proposal to DARPA from EcoHealth Alliance
link |
00:56:35.400
and Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
00:56:38.240
just seems like a bit of a smoking gun to me, like that.
link |
00:56:43.680
So there's this excellent book that people should read
link |
00:56:46.800
called Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID 19.
link |
00:56:50.280
Matt Ridley and Alena Chan, I think Alena is in MIT.
link |
00:56:54.480
Probably. At the Broad, yeah.
link |
00:56:55.760
At Broad Institute, yeah, yeah.
link |
00:56:57.800
So she, I heard her in an interview
link |
00:57:00.840
give this analogy of unicorns.
link |
00:57:04.040
And where basically somebody writes a proposal
link |
00:57:09.200
to add horns to horses, the proposal is rejected.
link |
00:57:14.520
And then a couple of years later or a year later,
link |
00:57:17.800
a unicorn shows up.
link |
00:57:19.920
In the place where they're proposing to do it.
link |
00:57:23.240
I mean, that's so, I had.
link |
00:57:24.080
And then everyone's like, it's natural origin.
link |
00:57:26.800
It's like, it's possible it's natural origin.
link |
00:57:29.000
Like we haven't detected a unicorn yet.
link |
00:57:31.000
And this is the first time we've detected a unicorn.
link |
00:57:33.720
Or it could be this massive organization
link |
00:57:36.800
that was planning, is fully equipped,
link |
00:57:39.520
has like a history of being able to do this stuff,
link |
00:57:42.840
has the world experts to do it, has the funding,
link |
00:57:45.120
has the motivation to add horns to horses.
link |
00:57:48.600
And now a unicorn shows up and they're saying, nope.
link |
00:57:52.160
Definitely natural.
link |
00:57:54.360
That connects to your first question
link |
00:57:56.800
of how do I get to my 85%?
link |
00:57:59.160
And here's a summary of that answer.
link |
00:58:03.080
And so it's what I said in my 60 Minutes interview
link |
00:58:06.280
a long time ago, of all the gin joints
link |
00:58:07.960
and all the towns and all the world,
link |
00:58:09.240
the quote from Casablanca.
link |
00:58:11.800
And so of all the places in the world
link |
00:58:14.600
where we have an outbreak of a SARS like bat coronavirus,
link |
00:58:19.600
it's not in the area of the natural habitat
link |
00:58:23.320
of the horseshoe bats.
link |
00:58:25.400
It's the one city in China
link |
00:58:28.920
with the first and largest level four virology lab,
link |
00:58:33.080
which actually wasn't even using it.
link |
00:58:34.680
They were doing level three and level two for this work,
link |
00:58:38.160
where they had the world's largest collection
link |
00:58:39.840
of bat coronaviruses,
link |
00:58:41.960
where they were doing aggressive experiments
link |
00:58:45.200
designed to make these scary viruses scarier,
link |
00:58:49.760
where they had been part of an application
link |
00:58:52.960
to insert a furin cleavage site,
link |
00:58:56.040
able to infect human cells.
link |
00:58:59.920
And when the outbreak happened,
link |
00:59:02.960
we had a virus that was ready for action to infect humans.
link |
00:59:07.120
And to this day, better able to infect humans
link |
00:59:09.800
than any other species, including bats.
link |
00:59:13.440
And then from day one, there's this massive coverup.
link |
00:59:17.400
And then on top of that,
link |
00:59:19.080
in spite of lots of efforts by lots of people,
link |
00:59:21.880
there's basically no evidence
link |
00:59:24.680
for the natural origin hypothesis.
link |
00:59:27.280
Everything that I've described just now is circumstantial,
link |
00:59:29.920
but there's a certain point
link |
00:59:31.760
where you add up the circumstances
link |
00:59:34.240
and you see this seems pretty, pretty likely.
link |
00:59:37.520
I mean, if we're getting to 100%,
link |
00:59:39.560
we are not at 100% by any means.
link |
00:59:42.160
There still is a possibility of a natural origin.
link |
00:59:45.320
And if we find that, great.
link |
00:59:46.840
But from everything that I know,
link |
00:59:48.920
that's how I get to my 85.
link |
00:59:50.600
And we'll talk about why this matters
link |
00:59:53.960
in the political sense, in the human sense,
link |
00:59:56.320
in the science, in the realm of science,
link |
00:59:59.040
all of those factors.
link |
01:00:00.120
But first, as Nietzsche said, let us look into the abyss
link |
01:00:04.040
and the games we'll play with monsters.
link |
01:00:06.040
That is colloquially called gain of function research.
link |
01:00:12.240
Let me ask the kind of political sounding question,
link |
01:00:14.680
which is how people usually phrase it.
link |
01:00:16.840
Did Anthony Fauci fund gain of function research
link |
01:00:24.120
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
01:00:26.800
So it depends.
link |
01:00:27.800
I mean, I've obviously been very closely monitoring this.
link |
01:00:31.560
I've spoken a lot about it.
link |
01:00:32.800
I've written about it.
link |
01:00:34.680
And it depends on, I mean, not to quote Bill Clinton,
link |
01:00:37.800
but to quote Bill Clinton, it depends on what
link |
01:00:39.920
the definition of is is.
link |
01:00:41.800
And so if you use a common sense definition of gain of function,
link |
01:00:46.640
and by gain of function, there are lots of things
link |
01:00:48.680
like gene therapies that are gain of function.
link |
01:00:50.640
But here, what we mean is gain of function
link |
01:00:52.680
for pathogens potentially able to create human pandemics.
link |
01:01:00.280
But if you use the kind of common sense language,
link |
01:01:04.040
well, then he probably did.
link |
01:01:05.640
If you use the technical language from a 2017 NIH
link |
01:01:10.680
document, and you read that language very narrowly,
link |
01:01:14.880
I think you can make a credible argument that he did not.
link |
01:01:19.400
There's a question, though, and Francis Collins
link |
01:01:22.800
talked about that in his interview with you.
link |
01:01:25.640
But then there's a question that we know from now
link |
01:01:28.760
that we have the information of the reports submitted
link |
01:01:31.760
by EcoHealth Alliance to the NIH, and some of which
link |
01:01:36.320
were late or not even delivered, that some of this research
link |
01:01:40.440
was done on MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome virus.
link |
01:01:45.920
And if that was the case, there is, I think,
link |
01:01:49.160
a colorable argument that that would be considered
link |
01:01:53.640
gain of function research even by the narrow language
link |
01:01:58.040
of that 2017 document.
link |
01:01:59.360
But I definitely think, and I've said this repeatedly,
link |
01:02:02.960
that Rand Paul can be right, and Tony Fauci can be right.
link |
01:02:08.080
And the question is, how are we defining gain of function?
link |
01:02:12.120
And that's why I've always said the question in my mind
link |
01:02:14.480
isn't, was it or wasn't it gain of function,
link |
01:02:17.680
as if that's like a binary thing, if not, grade,
link |
01:02:22.280
and if yes, guilty.
link |
01:02:23.960
The question is just, what work was being done at the Wuhan
link |
01:02:27.200
Institute of Virology?
link |
01:02:28.760
What role, if any, did US government funding
link |
01:02:33.480
play in supporting that work?
link |
01:02:36.920
And what rights do we all have as human beings
link |
01:02:41.320
and as American citizens and taxpayers
link |
01:02:43.680
to get all of the relevant information about that?
link |
01:02:47.120
So let's try to kind of dissect this.
link |
01:02:51.200
So who frustrates you more, Rand Paul or Anthony
link |
01:02:55.160
Fauci in his discussion or the discussion itself?
link |
01:02:57.720
So for example, gain of function is
link |
01:03:00.760
a term that's kind of more used just
link |
01:03:06.600
to mean playing with viruses in the lab
link |
01:03:11.640
to try to develop more dangerous viruses.
link |
01:03:16.240
Is this kind of research a good idea?
link |
01:03:22.200
Is it also a good idea for us to talk about it in public,
link |
01:03:26.840
in the political way that it's been talked about?
link |
01:03:29.920
Is it OK that US may have funded gain of function research
link |
01:03:38.000
elsewhere?
link |
01:03:39.040
I mean, it's kind of assumed, just like with Bill Clinton,
link |
01:03:43.600
there was very little discussion of, I think,
link |
01:03:46.760
correct me if I'm wrong, but whether it's
link |
01:03:49.680
OK for a president, male or female,
link |
01:03:54.120
to have extramarital sex or is it
link |
01:03:58.760
OK for a president to have extramarital sex
link |
01:04:04.000
with people on his staff or her staff?
link |
01:04:08.920
It was more the discussion of lying, I think.
link |
01:04:12.320
It was, did you lie about having sex or not?
link |
01:04:16.240
And in this gain of function discussion,
link |
01:04:18.360
what frustrates me personally is there's not
link |
01:04:21.240
a deep philosophical discussion about whether we
link |
01:04:23.720
should be doing this kind of research
link |
01:04:25.760
and what are the ethical lines, research on animals at all.
link |
01:04:32.360
Those are fascinating questions.
link |
01:04:33.640
Instead, it's a gotcha thing.
link |
01:04:36.480
Did you or did you not fund research on gain of function?
link |
01:04:40.440
And did you fund, it's almost like a bioweapon.
link |
01:04:43.720
Did you give money to China to develop this bioweapon that
link |
01:04:47.920
now attacked the rest of the world?
link |
01:04:49.760
So I mean, all those things are pretty frustrating,
link |
01:04:52.800
but is there, I think, the thing you
link |
01:04:56.000
can untangle about Anthony Fauci and gain of function
link |
01:04:59.160
research in the United States and the EcoHealth Alliance
link |
01:05:01.720
and Wuhan Institute of Virology that's clarifying.
link |
01:05:07.440
What were the mistakes made?
link |
01:05:08.800
Sure.
link |
01:05:09.280
So on gain of function, there actually
link |
01:05:11.600
has been a lot of debate.
link |
01:05:14.360
I mentioned before in 2011, these first papers,
link |
01:05:18.000
there was a big debate.
link |
01:05:20.120
Mark Lipsitch, who's formerly at Harvard now
link |
01:05:22.640
with the US government working in the president's office,
link |
01:05:26.960
he led a thing called the Cambridge Group that
link |
01:05:29.840
was highly critical of this work,
link |
01:05:32.600
basically saying we're creating monsters.
link |
01:05:35.720
They had the funding pause in 2014.
link |
01:05:39.200
They spent three years putting together a framework,
link |
01:05:42.720
and then they lifted it in 2017.
link |
01:05:45.280
So we had a thoughtful conversation.
link |
01:05:47.200
Unfortunately, it didn't work.
link |
01:05:48.760
And I think that's where we are now.
link |
01:05:50.880
So I absolutely think that there are real issues
link |
01:05:54.880
with the relationship between the United States government
link |
01:05:58.600
and EcoHealth Alliance, and through that,
link |
01:06:01.600
the EcoHealth Alliance with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
01:06:05.280
And one issue is just essential transparency,
link |
01:06:08.240
because as I see it, it's most likely the case
link |
01:06:10.960
that we transferred a lot of our knowledge and plans and things
link |
01:06:14.440
to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
01:06:16.640
And again, I'm sure that Xiaojiang Li is not herself
link |
01:06:22.120
a monster.
link |
01:06:23.000
I'm sure of that, even though I've never met her.
link |
01:06:26.160
But there are just a different set of pressures
link |
01:06:29.080
on people working in an authoritarian system
link |
01:06:31.360
than people who are working in other systems.
link |
01:06:33.360
That doesn't mean it's entirely different.
link |
01:06:36.480
And so I absolutely think that we shouldn't give $1
link |
01:06:40.640
to an organization, and certainly a virology institute,
link |
01:06:44.000
where you don't have full access to their records,
link |
01:06:47.800
to their databases.
link |
01:06:49.000
We don't know what work is happening there.
link |
01:06:52.480
And I think that we need to have that kind of full examination.
link |
01:06:57.360
So I understand what Dr. Fauci is doing is saying,
link |
01:07:01.440
hey, what I hear Dr. Fauci saying,
link |
01:07:03.120
what I hear from you, Rand Paul, is
link |
01:07:05.160
you're accusing me of starting this pandemic.
link |
01:07:08.760
And you're using gain of function as a proxy for that.
link |
01:07:11.400
And we have, when there are Senate hearings,
link |
01:07:13.320
every senator gets five minutes.
link |
01:07:15.280
And the name of the game is to translate your five minutes
link |
01:07:18.520
into a clip that's going to run on the news.
link |
01:07:22.080
And so I get that there is that kind of gotcha.
link |
01:07:25.920
But I also think that Dr. Fauci and the National
link |
01:07:31.720
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the NIH
link |
01:07:35.160
should have been more transparent.
link |
01:07:37.080
Because I think that in this day and age, where
link |
01:07:41.160
there are a lot of people poking around
link |
01:07:42.880
and this whole story of COVID origins,
link |
01:07:45.320
we would not be where we are if it
link |
01:07:47.720
wasn't for a relatively small number of people.
link |
01:07:51.080
And I'm part of, there are two, as I know, two groups.
link |
01:07:54.720
One is these internet sleuths known as Drastic.
link |
01:07:57.960
And a number of them are part of a group
link |
01:08:00.520
that I'm part of called, it's not our official name,
link |
01:08:03.160
but called the Paris Group.
link |
01:08:04.280
It's about two dozen experts around the world,
link |
01:08:08.400
but centered around some very high level French academics.
link |
01:08:13.320
So we've all been digging and meeting with each other
link |
01:08:16.600
regularly since last year.
link |
01:08:19.520
And our governments across the board, certainly China,
link |
01:08:22.200
but including the United States, haven't
link |
01:08:23.880
been as transparent as they need to be.
link |
01:08:27.320
So definitely mistakes were made on all sides.
link |
01:08:31.400
And that's why for me from day one,
link |
01:08:33.640
I've been calling for a comprehensive investigation
link |
01:08:37.040
into this issue that certainly obviously looks at China,
link |
01:08:40.760
but we have to look at ourselves.
link |
01:08:41.880
We did not get this right.
link |
01:08:43.440
So do you, I'm just gonna put Rand Paul aside here.
link |
01:08:50.400
Politician playing political games, it's very frustrating,
link |
01:08:53.280
but it is what it is on all sides.
link |
01:08:56.400
Anthony Fauci, you think should have been more transparent
link |
01:08:59.960
and maybe more eloquent in expressing the complexity
link |
01:09:10.000
of all of this, the uncertainty in all of this.
link |
01:09:12.760
Yeah, and I get that it's really hard to do that
link |
01:09:16.520
because let's say you have one, you speak a paragraph
link |
01:09:21.160
and it's got four sentences.
link |
01:09:23.120
And one of those sentences is the thing
link |
01:09:25.720
that's going to be turned into Twitter.
link |
01:09:27.080
All right, let me put it back.
link |
01:09:28.280
I get really, so I'll try not to be emotional about this,
link |
01:09:32.480
but I've heard Anthony Fauci a couple of times now
link |
01:09:39.800
say that he represents science.
link |
01:09:43.680
I know what he means by that.
link |
01:09:45.560
He means in this political bickering,
link |
01:09:48.920
all that kind of stuff that for a lot of people,
link |
01:09:52.120
he represents science, but words matter.
link |
01:09:56.440
And this isn't just clips.
link |
01:09:58.600
I mean, maybe I'm distinctly aware of that
link |
01:10:00.400
doing this podcast.
link |
01:10:01.880
Yeah, I talked for hundreds of hours now,
link |
01:10:05.120
maybe over a thousand hours,
link |
01:10:07.200
but I'm still careful with the words.
link |
01:10:11.520
I'm trying not to be an asshole
link |
01:10:13.160
and I'm aware when I'm an asshole
link |
01:10:14.840
and I'll apologize for it.
link |
01:10:17.640
If the words I represent science left my mouth,
link |
01:10:21.360
which they very well could,
link |
01:10:23.680
I would sure as hell be apologizing for it
link |
01:10:26.040
and not because I got in trouble,
link |
01:10:29.120
I would just feel bad about saying something like that.
link |
01:10:31.480
And even that little phrase, I represent science.
link |
01:10:36.160
No, Dr. Fauci, you do not represent science.
link |
01:10:39.120
I love science, the millions of scientists
link |
01:10:42.480
that inspired me to get into it.
link |
01:10:45.160
To fall in love with the scientific method
link |
01:10:48.080
in the exploration of ideas through the rigor of science,
link |
01:10:53.080
that Anthony Fauci does not represent.
link |
01:10:55.520
He's one, I believe, great scientist of millions.
link |
01:10:59.880
He does not represent anybody.
link |
01:11:02.600
He's just one scientist.
link |
01:11:04.080
And I think the greatness of a scientist
link |
01:11:07.160
is best exemplified in humility
link |
01:11:10.320
because the scientific method basically says,
link |
01:11:13.960
you're standing before the fog, the mystery of it all,
link |
01:11:19.200
and slowly chipping away at the mystery.
link |
01:11:22.640
And it's embarrassing, it's humiliating
link |
01:11:27.000
how little you know, that's the experience.
link |
01:11:29.360
So the great scientists have to have humility to me.
link |
01:11:33.000
And especially in their communication,
link |
01:11:34.880
they have to have humility.
link |
01:11:36.200
And I mean, I don't know,
link |
01:11:37.600
and some of it is also words matter
link |
01:11:39.560
because great leaders have to have the poetry of action.
link |
01:11:45.640
They have to be bold and inspire action
link |
01:11:49.640
across millions of people.
link |
01:11:52.720
But you also have to, through that poetry of words,
link |
01:11:58.920
express the complexity of the uncertainty
link |
01:12:02.800
you're operating under.
link |
01:12:04.280
Be humble in the face of not being able
link |
01:12:06.680
to predict the future or understand the past,
link |
01:12:09.640
or really know what's the right thing to do,
link |
01:12:11.600
but we have to do something.
link |
01:12:13.320
And through that, you have to be a great leader
link |
01:12:16.680
that inspires action.
link |
01:12:17.960
And some of that is just words.
link |
01:12:20.120
And he chose words poorly.
link |
01:12:22.000
I mean, so I'm all torn about this.
link |
01:12:25.440
And then there's politicians, they're taking those words
link |
01:12:28.200
and magnifying them and playing games with them.
link |
01:12:31.680
And of course, that's a disincentive
link |
01:12:34.360
for the people who do, the scientific leaders
link |
01:12:37.760
that step into the limelight to say any more words.
link |
01:12:41.640
So they kind of become more conservative
link |
01:12:43.520
with the words they use.
link |
01:12:45.360
I mean, it just becomes a giant mess.
link |
01:12:47.080
But I think the solution is to ignore all of that
link |
01:12:52.320
and to be transparent, to be honest, to be vulnerable.
link |
01:12:56.800
And to express the full uncertainty
link |
01:13:01.600
of what you're operating under,
link |
01:13:03.600
to present all the possible actions
link |
01:13:05.880
and to be honest about the mistakes they made in the past.
link |
01:13:08.360
I mean, there's something, even if you're not
link |
01:13:10.340
directly responsible for those mistakes,
link |
01:13:13.000
taking responsibility for them is a way to win people over.
link |
01:13:18.020
I don't think leaders realize this often
link |
01:13:20.360
in the modern age, in the internet age.
link |
01:13:23.200
They can see through your bullshit.
link |
01:13:24.920
And it's really inspiring when you take ownership.
link |
01:13:29.160
So to do the thought experiment in public,
link |
01:13:32.680
do a thought experiment if there was a lab leak
link |
01:13:35.320
and then lay out all the funding, the EcoHealth Alliance,
link |
01:13:38.960
all the incredible science going on at the Wuhan Institute
link |
01:13:43.600
of Virology and the NIH.
link |
01:13:46.380
Lay out all the possible ethical problems.
link |
01:13:48.480
Lay out all the possible mistakes that could have been made
link |
01:13:53.600
and say like, this could have happened.
link |
01:13:56.160
And if this happened, here's the best way to respond to it
link |
01:13:59.520
and to prevent it in the future.
link |
01:14:00.880
And just lay all that complexity out.
link |
01:14:02.880
I wish we would have seen that.
link |
01:14:06.040
And I have hope that this conversation,
link |
01:14:09.400
conversations like it, your work,
link |
01:14:11.800
and books on this topic will inspire young people today
link |
01:14:15.840
when they become in the Anthony Fauci's role
link |
01:14:19.760
to be much more transparent and much more humble
link |
01:14:22.200
and all those kinds of things.
link |
01:14:23.620
That this is just a relic of the past
link |
01:14:26.120
when there's a person, no offense to me,
link |
01:14:28.000
in a suit that has to stand up and speak
link |
01:14:31.200
with clarity and certainty.
link |
01:14:33.000
I mean, that's just a relic of the past.
link |
01:14:34.720
Is my hope.
link |
01:14:39.360
But...
link |
01:14:40.200
Do you mind if I...
link |
01:14:41.040
Yeah, please.
link |
01:14:41.880
I agree with a great deal of what you said.
link |
01:14:46.200
And it's really unfortunate that our,
link |
01:14:49.760
certainly the Chinese government, as I said before,
link |
01:14:51.840
our government wasn't as transparent
link |
01:14:55.540
as I feel they should have been,
link |
01:14:56.920
particularly in the early days of the pandemic
link |
01:14:59.600
and particularly with regard to the issue
link |
01:15:02.000
of pandemic origins.
link |
01:15:03.400
I mean, we know that Dr. Fauci was on calls
link |
01:15:06.760
with people like Christian Anderson and Scripps and others
link |
01:15:10.680
in those early days, raising questions.
link |
01:15:13.440
Is this an engineered virus?
link |
01:15:15.680
There were a lot of questions.
link |
01:15:17.480
And it's kind of sad.
link |
01:15:19.560
I mean, as I mentioned before, I've been one,
link |
01:15:23.520
I mean, and certainly there were others,
link |
01:15:25.640
but there weren't a lot of us,
link |
01:15:27.740
of the people who from the earliest days of the pandemic
link |
01:15:30.800
were raising questions about, hey, not so fast here.
link |
01:15:34.960
And I launched my website on pandemic origins
link |
01:15:38.560
in April of last year, April, 2020.
link |
01:15:41.160
It got a huge amount of attention.
link |
01:15:42.580
And actually my friend, Matt Pottinger,
link |
01:15:44.960
who is the deputy national security advisor,
link |
01:15:46.880
when he was reaching out to people in the US government
link |
01:15:50.440
and in allied government saying,
link |
01:15:51.840
hey, we should look into this,
link |
01:15:54.360
what he was sending them was my website.
link |
01:15:56.760
It wasn't some US government information.
link |
01:16:00.240
And by the way, people should still go to the website.
link |
01:16:02.720
You keep updating it and it's an incredible resource.
link |
01:16:07.360
Thank you, thank you, jamiemetzel.com.
link |
01:16:10.760
And it's really unfortunate that our governments
link |
01:16:13.440
and international institutions for pretty much all of 2020
link |
01:16:18.320
weren't doing their jobs of really probing this issue.
link |
01:16:22.520
People were hiding behind this kind of false consensus.
link |
01:16:26.520
And I'm critical of many people,
link |
01:16:28.480
even when I heard Francis Collins interview with you,
link |
01:16:32.440
I just felt, well, he wasn't as balanced
link |
01:16:35.280
on the issue of COVID origins.
link |
01:16:37.400
Certainly Dr. Fauci could have in his conversation
link |
01:16:41.480
with Rand Paul, it wasn't even a conversation,
link |
01:16:43.380
but in some process in the aftermath,
link |
01:16:46.600
could have laid things out a bit better.
link |
01:16:48.280
He did say, and Francis Collins did say
link |
01:16:50.880
that we don't know the origins and that was a shift
link |
01:16:54.320
and we need to have an investigation.
link |
01:16:56.120
So now, but having said all of that,
link |
01:17:00.600
I do kind of one, I have tremendous respect for Dr. Fauci
link |
01:17:04.940
for the work that he's done on HIV AIDS.
link |
01:17:06.880
I mean, I have been vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine.
link |
01:17:10.920
Dr. Fauci was a big part of the story
link |
01:17:14.000
of getting us these vaccines
link |
01:17:15.640
that have saved millions and millions of lives.
link |
01:17:19.440
And so I don't think, I mean, there's a lot to this story.
link |
01:17:23.200
And then the second thing is it's really hard
link |
01:17:26.480
to be a public health expert
link |
01:17:28.440
because you have your mission is public health.
link |
01:17:32.120
And so, and you have to, if you are leading
link |
01:17:35.100
with all of your uncertainty,
link |
01:17:37.800
it's a really hard way to do things.
link |
01:17:40.480
And so like, even now, like if I go to CVS
link |
01:17:43.680
and I get a Tylenol, somebody has done a calculation
link |
01:17:47.960
of how many people will die from taking Tylenol
link |
01:17:51.520
and they say, well, all right, we can live with that.
link |
01:17:54.040
And that's why we have regulation.
link |
01:17:55.960
And so all of us are doing kind of summaries.
link |
01:17:59.120
And then we have people in public health who are saying,
link |
01:18:00.920
wow, we've summed it all up and you should do X.
link |
01:18:04.880
You should get your kids vaccinated for measles.
link |
01:18:09.480
You should not drive your car at a hundred miles an hour.
link |
01:18:12.920
You should, don't drink lighter fluid,
link |
01:18:15.240
whatever these things are.
link |
01:18:17.360
And we want them to kind of give us broad guidelines.
link |
01:18:20.960
And yet now our information world is so fragmented
link |
01:18:25.200
that if you're not being honest about something,
link |
01:18:29.760
something material, someone's going to find out
link |
01:18:33.220
and it's going to undermine your credibility.
link |
01:18:35.000
And so I agree with you that there's a greater requirement
link |
01:18:41.000
for transparency now.
link |
01:18:43.400
Maybe there always has been,
link |
01:18:44.480
but there's an even greater requirement for it now
link |
01:18:48.520
because people want to trust that you're speaking honestly
link |
01:18:53.640
and that you're saying, well, here's what I know.
link |
01:18:56.040
And this is based on what I know,
link |
01:18:58.080
here are the conclusions that I draw.
link |
01:19:00.520
But if it's just, and again, I don't think the words,
link |
01:19:03.440
I'm science or whatever it was are the right words.
link |
01:19:06.920
But if it's just, trust me because of who I am,
link |
01:19:10.840
I don't think that flies anywhere anymore.
link |
01:19:14.720
Can I just ask you about the Francis Collins interview
link |
01:19:18.040
that I did, if you got a chance to hear that part.
link |
01:19:20.000
I think in the beginning we talk about the lab leak.
link |
01:19:23.720
What are your thoughts about his response,
link |
01:19:25.880
basically saying it's worthy of an investigation,
link |
01:19:28.800
but I mean, I don't know how you would interpret it.
link |
01:19:33.480
I see, it's funny because I heard it in the moment
link |
01:19:39.640
as it's great for the head of NIH
link |
01:19:44.360
to be open minded on this.
link |
01:19:46.800
But then the internet and Mr. Joe Rogan
link |
01:19:51.040
and a bunch of friends and colleagues told me that,
link |
01:19:55.040
yeah, well, that's too late and too little.
link |
01:19:58.640
Yeah, so first let me say, I've been on Joe's podcast twice
link |
01:20:03.240
and I love the guy, which doesn't mean that I agree
link |
01:20:06.380
with everything he does or says.
link |
01:20:10.200
And on this issue, and I'm normally a pretty calm
link |
01:20:13.800
and measured guy, and when you're just out running
link |
01:20:17.160
with your AirPods on and you start yelling
link |
01:20:21.120
into the wind in Central Park,
link |
01:20:23.960
nobody else knows why you're yelling, but well.
link |
01:20:27.600
So that you had such a moment?
link |
01:20:28.960
I had a moment with Collins.
link |
01:20:30.600
And again, Francis Collins is someone I respect enormously.
link |
01:20:34.040
I mean, I live a big chunk of my life living in the world
link |
01:20:38.480
of genetics and biotech and my book, Hacking Darwin
link |
01:20:42.480
is about the future of human genetic engineering
link |
01:20:45.160
and his work on the Human Genome Project
link |
01:20:47.200
and so many other things have been fantastic.
link |
01:20:49.240
And I'm a huge fan of the work of NIH.
link |
01:20:53.320
And he was right to say that the Chinese government
link |
01:20:56.080
hasn't been forthcoming and we need to look into it.
link |
01:20:58.720
But then you asked him, well, how will we know?
link |
01:21:01.920
And then his answer was,
link |
01:21:03.700
we need to find the intermediate host.
link |
01:21:06.120
Remember I said before, and so that made it clear
link |
01:21:09.240
that he thought, well, we should have an investigation,
link |
01:21:13.080
but it comes from nature and we just need to find
link |
01:21:16.480
that whatever it is, that intermediate animal host
link |
01:21:20.240
in the wild, and that'll tell us the story.
link |
01:21:22.480
So he already had the conclusion in mind
link |
01:21:25.640
and they're just waiting for the evidence
link |
01:21:27.320
to support the conclusion.
link |
01:21:28.400
That was my feeling.
link |
01:21:29.680
I felt like he was open in general, but he was tilting.
link |
01:21:33.200
And again, your first question was where do I fall?
link |
01:21:36.480
He was like, I'm 85% or whatever it is, 80, 75, 90,
link |
01:21:42.000
whatever it is in the direction of a lab incident.
link |
01:21:45.000
It made it feel that he was 90, 10 in the other direction,
link |
01:21:49.720
which is still means that he's open minded
link |
01:21:52.320
about the possibility.
link |
01:21:54.000
And that's why, in my view, every single person
link |
01:21:58.000
who talks about this issue,
link |
01:21:59.520
I think the right answer in my view is,
link |
01:22:02.560
we don't know conclusively.
link |
01:22:04.080
In my, then this is my personal view,
link |
01:22:06.040
the circumstantial evidence is strongly in favor
link |
01:22:08.760
of a lab incident origin,
link |
01:22:10.120
but that could immediately shift
link |
01:22:11.760
with additional information.
link |
01:22:13.920
We need transparency, but we should come together
link |
01:22:18.760
in absolutely condemning the outrageous coverup
link |
01:22:23.400
carried out by the Chinese government,
link |
01:22:25.360
which to this day is preventing any meaningful investigation
link |
01:22:30.640
into pandemic origins.
link |
01:22:31.760
We have, if you use the economist numbers,
link |
01:22:35.400
15 million people who are dead as a result of this pandemic.
link |
01:22:39.920
And I believe that the actions of the Chinese government
link |
01:22:44.600
are disgracing the memory of these 15 million dead.
link |
01:22:50.160
They're insulting the families and the billions of people
link |
01:22:54.840
around the world who have suffered
link |
01:22:56.480
from this totally avoidable pandemic.
link |
01:23:00.000
And whatever the origin, the fact the criminal coverup
link |
01:23:03.800
carried out by the Chinese government,
link |
01:23:06.480
which continues to this day, but most intensely
link |
01:23:09.080
in the first months following the outbreak,
link |
01:23:11.640
that's the reason why we have so many dead.
link |
01:23:16.320
And certainly, as I was saying before,
link |
01:23:18.640
I and a small number of others have been carrying this flame
link |
01:23:22.480
since early last year, but it's kind of crazy
link |
01:23:26.560
that our governments haven't been demanding it.
link |
01:23:29.320
And we can talk about the World Health Organization process,
link |
01:23:33.080
which was deeply compromised in the beginning.
link |
01:23:35.560
Now it's become much, much better.
link |
01:23:38.440
But again, it was the pressure of outsiders
link |
01:23:42.520
that played such an important role in shifting
link |
01:23:44.960
our national and international institutions.
link |
01:23:48.840
And while that's better than nothing,
link |
01:23:50.400
it would have been far better if our governments
link |
01:23:53.320
and international organizations
link |
01:23:55.000
had done the right thing from the start.
link |
01:23:56.400
If I could just make a couple of comments about Joe Rogan.
link |
01:24:04.920
So there's a bunch of people in my life
link |
01:24:08.600
who have inspired me, who have taught me a lot,
link |
01:24:11.720
who I even look up to, many of them are alive,
link |
01:24:17.240
most of them are dead.
link |
01:24:19.000
I wanna say that Joe said a few critical words
link |
01:24:22.640
about the conversation with Francis Collins,
link |
01:24:24.680
most of it offline, with a lot of great conversations
link |
01:24:28.720
about it, some he said publicly.
link |
01:24:32.680
And he was also critical to say that me asking hard questions
link |
01:24:45.200
in an interview is not my strong suit.
link |
01:24:48.600
And I really want to kind of respond to that,
link |
01:24:53.240
which I did privately as well, but publicly,
link |
01:24:56.720
to say that Joe is 100% right on that.
link |
01:25:01.280
But that doesn't mean that always has to be the case.
link |
01:25:04.560
And that is definitely something I wanna work on.
link |
01:25:06.680
Because most of the conversations I have,
link |
01:25:08.760
I wanna see the beautiful ideas in people's minds.
link |
01:25:13.240
But there's some times where you have to ask
link |
01:25:15.920
the hard questions to bring out the beautiful ideas.
link |
01:25:20.640
And it's hard to do.
link |
01:25:23.000
It's a skill.
link |
01:25:24.040
And Joe is very good at this.
link |
01:25:26.480
He says the way he put it in his criticisms,
link |
01:25:29.880
and he does this in his conversations,
link |
01:25:31.640
which is, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
link |
01:25:34.760
There's a kind of sense like,
link |
01:25:36.520
did you just say what you said?
link |
01:25:38.640
Let's make sure we get to the bottom,
link |
01:25:42.520
we'll clarify what you mean.
link |
01:25:44.320
Because sometimes really big negative or difficult ideas
link |
01:25:54.840
can be said as a quick aside in a sentence,
link |
01:25:59.080
like it's nothing, but it could be everything.
link |
01:26:02.720
And you wanna make sure you catch that
link |
01:26:04.600
and you talk about it.
link |
01:26:06.360
And not as a gotcha, not as a kinda way
link |
01:26:10.760
to destroy another human being,
link |
01:26:12.400
but to reveal something profound.
link |
01:26:14.840
And that's definitely something I wanna work on.
link |
01:26:16.960
I also want to say that, as you said,
link |
01:26:22.160
you disagree with Joe on quite a lot of things.
link |
01:26:24.480
So for a long time, Joe was somebody
link |
01:26:26.480
that I was just a fan of and listened to.
link |
01:26:28.080
He's now a good friend.
link |
01:26:30.920
And I would say we disagree more than we agree.
link |
01:26:34.560
And I love doing that.
link |
01:26:38.160
But at the same time, I learned from that.
link |
01:26:41.680
So it's like dual, like nobody in this world
link |
01:26:46.560
can tell me what to think.
link |
01:26:48.720
But I think everybody has a lesson to teach me.
link |
01:26:54.240
I think that's a good way to approach it.
link |
01:26:57.080
Whenever somebody has words of criticism,
link |
01:27:00.320
I assume they're right and walk around with that idea
link |
01:27:05.240
to really sort of empathize with that idea
link |
01:27:07.360
because there's a lesson there.
link |
01:27:09.120
And oftentimes, my understanding of a topic
link |
01:27:18.400
is altered completely or it becomes much more nuanced
link |
01:27:22.480
or much richer for that kind of empathetic process.
link |
01:27:27.160
But definitely, I do not allow anybody
link |
01:27:31.440
to tell me what to think, whether it's Joe Rogan
link |
01:27:35.040
or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or my parents
link |
01:27:39.120
or the proverbial girlfriend, which I don't actually have.
link |
01:27:47.920
But she's still busting my balls.
link |
01:27:49.880
Exactly, exactly.
link |
01:27:51.280
In my imagination, I have a girlfriend in Canada
link |
01:27:55.000
that I have imagined, exactly, imagining conversations.
link |
01:28:00.000
So I want to mention that.
link |
01:28:01.440
But also, I don't know if you've gotten a chance
link |
01:28:04.000
to see this, but I'd love to also mention
link |
01:28:06.360
this Twitter feud between two other interesting people,
link |
01:28:12.760
which is Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris
link |
01:28:15.800
or Sam Harris and others in general.
link |
01:28:18.480
And it kind of breaks my heart that these two people
link |
01:28:22.120
I listen to that are very thoughtful about a bunch of issues.
link |
01:28:25.560
Let's put COVID aside because people are very emotional
link |
01:28:29.160
about this topic.
link |
01:28:30.520
I mean, I think they're deeply thoughtful and intelligent,
link |
01:28:37.520
whether you agree with them or not.
link |
01:28:39.040
And I always learn something from their conversations.
link |
01:28:42.080
And they are legitimately or have been
link |
01:28:44.480
for a long time friends.
link |
01:28:46.560
And it's a little bit heartbreaking to me
link |
01:28:49.400
to see that they basically don't talk in private anymore.
link |
01:28:53.320
And there's occasional jabs on Twitter.
link |
01:28:57.080
And I hope that changes.
link |
01:29:00.080
I hope that changes in general for COVID,
link |
01:29:02.240
that COVID brought out the, I would say,
link |
01:29:06.120
the most emotional sides of people, the worst in people.
link |
01:29:10.080
And I think there hasn't been enough love
link |
01:29:14.280
and empathy and compassion.
link |
01:29:16.600
And to see two people from whom I've learned a lot,
link |
01:29:20.720
whether it's Eric Weinstein, Brett Weinstein, Sam Harris,
link |
01:29:23.720
you can criticize them as much as you want,
link |
01:29:25.520
their ideas as much as you want.
link |
01:29:27.360
But if you're not sufficiently open minded
link |
01:29:31.160
to admit that you have a lot to learn
link |
01:29:33.080
from their conversations, I think you're not being honest.
link |
01:29:37.720
And so I do hope they have those conversations.
link |
01:29:40.520
And I hope we can kind of,
link |
01:29:42.040
I think there's a lot of repairing to be done post COVID
link |
01:29:45.840
of relationships, of conversations.
link |
01:29:49.600
And I think empathy and love can help a lot there.
link |
01:29:53.880
This is also just a, I talked to Sam privately,
link |
01:29:58.480
but this is also a public call out
link |
01:30:01.040
to put a little bit more love in the world.
link |
01:30:08.000
And for these difficult conversations to happen.
link |
01:30:14.160
Because Brett Weinstein could be very wrong
link |
01:30:19.160
about a bunch of topics here around COVID,
link |
01:30:25.480
but he could also be right.
link |
01:30:27.440
And the only way to find out
link |
01:30:29.080
is to have those conversations.
link |
01:30:31.200
Because there's a lot of people listening
link |
01:30:32.760
to both Sam Harris and Brett Weinstein.
link |
01:30:35.480
And if you go into these silos
link |
01:30:39.520
where you just keep telling each other
link |
01:30:44.960
that you are the possessors of truth
link |
01:30:46.680
and nobody else is the possessor of truth,
link |
01:30:48.800
what starts happening is you both lose track
link |
01:30:53.520
or the capability of arriving at the truth.
link |
01:30:56.080
Because nobody's in the possession of the truth.
link |
01:30:58.440
So anyway, this is just a call out
link |
01:30:59.920
that we should have a little bit more conversation,
link |
01:31:01.560
a little bit more love.
link |
01:31:02.400
I totally agree.
link |
01:31:04.240
And both of those guys are guys who I respect.
link |
01:31:08.000
And as you know, Brett, and again, as I mentioned,
link |
01:31:11.560
they're just a handful of us,
link |
01:31:13.760
who were the early people raising questions
link |
01:31:16.320
about the origins of this.
link |
01:31:17.640
Of this pandemic, right.
link |
01:31:19.520
He was there also talking.
link |
01:31:21.160
So people have heard him speak quite a bit
link |
01:31:24.000
about any viral drugs and all that kind of stuff.
link |
01:31:26.920
But he was also raising concerns about lab leak early on.
link |
01:31:30.600
Yeah, exactly.
link |
01:31:31.440
And so, but I completely agree with you
link |
01:31:33.680
that we don't have to agree with everybody,
link |
01:31:37.440
but it's great to have healthy conversations.
link |
01:31:40.720
That's how we grow.
link |
01:31:42.120
And absolutely, we live in a world where we're kind of,
link |
01:31:46.680
if we're not careful,
link |
01:31:47.680
pushed into these little information pockets.
link |
01:31:49.840
And certainly on social media,
link |
01:31:51.720
I have different parts of my life.
link |
01:31:53.960
One is focusing on issues of COVID origins.
link |
01:31:58.560
And then I have genetics and biotechnology.
link |
01:32:00.920
And then I have, which maybe we'll talk about later,
link |
01:32:02.960
one shared world, which is about
link |
01:32:04.200
how do we build a safer future?
link |
01:32:06.680
And when I say critical things like the Chinese government,
link |
01:32:10.320
we'd have to demand a full investigation
link |
01:32:12.880
into pandemic origins.
link |
01:32:14.120
This is an outreach.
link |
01:32:15.080
Then it's really popular.
link |
01:32:16.640
When I say, let's build a better future
link |
01:32:19.000
for everyone in peace and love,
link |
01:32:20.520
it's like, wow, three people liked it.
link |
01:32:22.920
And one was my mother.
link |
01:32:24.960
And so I just feel like we need to build,
link |
01:32:27.960
we used to have that connectivity just built in
link |
01:32:32.000
because we had these town squares
link |
01:32:33.960
and you couldn't get away from them.
link |
01:32:35.960
Now we can get away from them.
link |
01:32:37.640
So engaging with people who are of a different background
link |
01:32:41.120
is really essential.
link |
01:32:42.400
I'm on Fox News sometimes three, four times a week.
link |
01:32:47.960
And I wouldn't, in my normal life,
link |
01:32:49.640
I'm not watching that much of Fox News
link |
01:32:53.440
or even television more generally.
link |
01:32:56.120
But I just feel like if I just speak to people
link |
01:32:58.840
who are very similar to me, maybe it'll be comfortable.
link |
01:33:03.840
But what have I contributed?
link |
01:33:05.640
So I think we really have to have
link |
01:33:07.600
those kinds of conversations and recognize
link |
01:33:11.640
that at the end of the day, most people want to be happy.
link |
01:33:15.800
They want to live in a better world.
link |
01:33:17.280
They maybe have different paths to get there.
link |
01:33:20.160
But if we just break into camps
link |
01:33:22.600
that don't even connect with each other,
link |
01:33:24.680
that's a much more dangerous world.
link |
01:33:28.920
Let's dive back into the difficult pool.
link |
01:33:32.680
Just like you said, in the English speaking world,
link |
01:33:36.800
it seems popular, almost easy to demonize China.
link |
01:33:43.920
The Chinese government, I should say.
link |
01:33:46.920
But even China, like there's this kind of gray area
link |
01:33:50.160
that people just fall into.
link |
01:33:52.320
And I'm really uncomfortable with that.
link |
01:33:54.920
Perhaps because in my mind, in my heart, in my blood
link |
01:33:58.480
are echoes of the Cold War and that kind of tension.
link |
01:34:01.120
But it feels like we almost desire conflict.
link |
01:34:09.160
So we see demons when there is none.
link |
01:34:12.040
So I'm a little cautious to demonize.
link |
01:34:15.680
But at the same time, you have to be honest.
link |
01:34:18.120
So it's like honest with the demons that are there
link |
01:34:22.320
and honest when they're not.
link |
01:34:25.360
This is kind of a geopolitical therapy session of sorts.
link |
01:34:29.280
So let's keep talking about China
link |
01:34:31.760
a little bit from different angles.
link |
01:34:33.000
So let's return to the director of the Center
link |
01:34:37.840
of Emerging Infectious Disease
link |
01:34:39.240
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Xi Zhengli,
link |
01:34:44.120
colloquially referred to as Batwoman.
link |
01:34:47.520
So do you think she's lying?
link |
01:34:51.440
Yes.
link |
01:34:52.280
Do you think she's being forced to lie?
link |
01:34:54.720
Yes.
link |
01:34:55.560
I've known a bunch of virologists
link |
01:34:58.240
in private and public conversation
link |
01:35:00.200
that respect her as a human being, as a scientist.
link |
01:35:03.520
I respect her as a human being.
link |
01:35:05.080
Sorry, as a scientist, not a human being.
link |
01:35:07.080
Because I think they don't know the human.
link |
01:35:08.640
They know the scientists.
link |
01:35:09.520
And they respect her a lot as a scientist.
link |
01:35:11.360
Yeah, I respect her.
link |
01:35:12.720
I've never met her.
link |
01:35:13.960
We had one exchange, which I'll mention in a second
link |
01:35:16.160
in a virtual forum.
link |
01:35:17.640
But I do respect her.
link |
01:35:18.800
I actually think that she is somebody
link |
01:35:20.560
who has tried to do the right thing.
link |
01:35:23.120
She was one of the heroes of tracking down
link |
01:35:25.240
the origins of SARS 1.
link |
01:35:27.440
And that was a major contribution.
link |
01:35:31.160
But as we talked about earlier,
link |
01:35:34.120
it's a different thing living, being a scientist,
link |
01:35:38.520
or really kind of anything.
link |
01:35:40.640
It's different being one of those people
link |
01:35:43.960
in an authoritarian society
link |
01:35:47.240
than it is being in a different type of society.
link |
01:35:50.520
And so when Xi Zhengli said that the reason
link |
01:35:54.200
the WIV database was taken offline in September 19
link |
01:36:00.320
was because of computer hacks,
link |
01:36:02.280
I don't think that's the story.
link |
01:36:03.960
I don't think she thinks that's the story.
link |
01:36:07.560
When I asked her in March of 2021, March of this year,
link |
01:36:12.640
in a Rutgers online forum,
link |
01:36:15.480
when I asked her whether the Chinese military
link |
01:36:18.280
had any engagement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
01:36:22.200
in any way, and she said, absolutely not, paraphrasing,
link |
01:36:26.480
I think she was lying.
link |
01:36:27.720
Do I think that she had the ability to say,
link |
01:36:30.720
well, either one, yes, but I can't talk about it,
link |
01:36:34.440
or I know there are a lot of things
link |
01:36:36.560
that are happening at this institute
link |
01:36:38.160
that I don't know about, and that could be one.
link |
01:36:42.080
Could she have said that the personnel
link |
01:36:46.440
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
01:36:48.160
have all had to go through classification training
link |
01:36:52.880
so that they can know about what can and can't be said?
link |
01:36:57.600
Like she could have said all those things,
link |
01:36:59.520
but she couldn't say all of those things.
link |
01:37:01.920
And I think that's why so many, at least in my view,
link |
01:37:07.080
so many people certainly in the Western world
link |
01:37:11.080
got this story wrong from the beginning,
link |
01:37:13.600
because if your only prism was the science,
link |
01:37:17.640
and you just assumed this is a science question
link |
01:37:20.680
to be left to the scientists,
link |
01:37:22.680
should Zhengli is just like any scientist
link |
01:37:26.000
working in Switzerland or Norway,
link |
01:37:29.280
the Chinese government isn't interfering in any way,
link |
01:37:33.360
and we can trust them, that would lead you down one path.
link |
01:37:37.280
In my view, the reason why I progressed as I did
link |
01:37:40.680
is I felt like I had two keys,
link |
01:37:42.280
and I had one key as I live in the science world
link |
01:37:45.960
through my work with WHO and my books and things like that.
link |
01:37:50.120
But I also have another part of my life
link |
01:37:52.280
in the world of geopolitics as an Asia quote unquote expert
link |
01:37:57.680
and former National Security Council official
link |
01:38:00.400
and other things.
link |
01:38:01.240
And I felt for me, I needed both keys to open that door.
link |
01:38:06.360
But if I only had the science key,
link |
01:38:08.960
I wouldn't have had the level of doubt and suspicion
link |
01:38:11.960
that I have.
link |
01:38:12.920
But if my starting point was only doubt and suspicion,
link |
01:38:16.000
well, it's coming from China,
link |
01:38:17.520
it must be that the government is guilty,
link |
01:38:20.600
like that wouldn't help either.
link |
01:38:24.120
I wonder what's in her mind,
link |
01:38:26.600
whether it's fear or habit,
link |
01:38:30.880
because I think a lot of people in the former Soviet Union,
link |
01:38:35.760
it's like Chernobyl, it's not really fear,
link |
01:38:38.720
it's almost like a momentum.
link |
01:38:40.600
It's like the reason I showed up to this interview
link |
01:38:45.200
wearing clothes, as opposed to being naked.
link |
01:38:48.000
It's like, all right.
link |
01:38:51.120
It's like, it's just all of us are doing the clothes thing.
link |
01:38:55.760
Although there was a startup years ago called Naked News.
link |
01:38:59.600
Did you ever hear about that?
link |
01:39:00.440
They just would read the exact news.
link |
01:39:02.520
With naked.
link |
01:39:03.360
No, after each story, they'd take something off
link |
01:39:06.160
until the end, I don't think.
link |
01:39:08.120
It's a good idea for a podcast.
link |
01:39:09.600
They have an IPO.
link |
01:39:10.640
Stay tuned, next time I'm with Michael Miles.
link |
01:39:13.560
Yeah.
link |
01:39:14.400
Okay.
link |
01:39:16.960
So what do you think,
link |
01:39:18.480
I mean, because the reason I asked that question is,
link |
01:39:22.360
how do we kind of take steps to improve
link |
01:39:25.680
without any kind of revolutionary action?
link |
01:39:27.960
You could say, we need to inspire the Chinese people
link |
01:39:32.760
to elect, to sort of revolutionize the system
link |
01:39:37.760
from within, but like, who are we to suggest that?
link |
01:39:42.760
Because we have our flaws too.
link |
01:39:44.760
We should be working on our flaws as well.
link |
01:39:47.320
And so, but at the individual scientist level,
link |
01:39:51.760
what are the small acts of rebellion that could be done?
link |
01:39:55.720
How can we improve this?
link |
01:39:57.960
Well, so I don't know about small acts of rebellion,
link |
01:40:01.760
but I'll try to answer your question
link |
01:40:03.920
from a few different perspectives.
link |
01:40:07.800
So right now, actually, as we speak,
link |
01:40:10.920
there is a special session
link |
01:40:12.840
of the World Health Assembly going on.
link |
01:40:14.600
And the World Health Assembly is the governing authority
link |
01:40:17.440
over the World Health Organization,
link |
01:40:19.240
where it's represented by states and territories,
link |
01:40:22.440
194 of them, tragically not including Taiwan,
link |
01:40:26.800
because of the Chinese government's assistance.
link |
01:40:29.160
But they're now beginning a process
link |
01:40:31.360
of trying to negotiate a global pandemic treaty
link |
01:40:35.320
to try to have a better process
link |
01:40:37.480
for responding to crises exactly like we're in.
link |
01:40:42.040
But unfortunately, for the exact same reasons
link |
01:40:45.440
that we have failed, I mean, we had a similar process
link |
01:40:48.680
after the first SARS, we set up what we thought
link |
01:40:50.880
was the best available system,
link |
01:40:52.480
and it has totally failed here.
link |
01:40:55.280
And it's failed here because of the inherent pathologies
link |
01:41:00.280
of the Chinese government system.
link |
01:41:02.760
We are suffering from a pandemic that exists
link |
01:41:06.600
because of the internal pathologies of the Chinese state.
link |
01:41:11.200
And that's why on one hand, I totally get this impulse.
link |
01:41:14.720
Well, we do it our way, they do it their way.
link |
01:41:17.760
Who's to say that one way is better?
link |
01:41:20.920
And certainly right now in the United States,
link |
01:41:23.320
we're at each other's throats.
link |
01:41:25.040
We have a hard time getting anything meaningful done.
link |
01:41:28.800
And I'm sure there are people who are saying,
link |
01:41:31.280
well, that model looks appealing.
link |
01:41:33.640
But just as people could look to the United States
link |
01:41:37.440
and say, well, because the United States
link |
01:41:39.200
has such a massive reach, what we do domestically
link |
01:41:41.720
has huge implications for the rest of the world,
link |
01:41:44.720
they become stakeholders in our politics.
link |
01:41:48.160
And that's why I think for a lot of years,
link |
01:41:49.880
people have just been looking at US politics,
link |
01:41:52.200
not because it's interesting,
link |
01:41:53.200
but because the decisions that we make
link |
01:41:55.320
have big implications for their lives.
link |
01:41:58.080
The same is true for ours.
link |
01:41:59.760
You could say that the lack of civil and political rights
link |
01:42:04.200
in China is, I mean, it's up to the Chinese,
link |
01:42:08.680
not even people, because they have no say,
link |
01:42:10.360
but to their government.
link |
01:42:12.640
And they weren't democratically elected,
link |
01:42:14.280
that they are recognized as the government.
link |
01:42:17.680
But some significant percentage of the 15 million people
link |
01:42:23.480
now dead from COVID are dead
link |
01:42:26.000
because in the earliest days following the outbreak,
link |
01:42:29.680
whatever the origin, the voices of people
link |
01:42:33.040
sounding the alarm were suppressed,
link |
01:42:35.280
that the Chinese government had an,
link |
01:42:37.240
just like in Chernobyl, the Chinese government
link |
01:42:39.560
had a greater incentive to lie
link |
01:42:42.560
to the international community than to tell the truth.
link |
01:42:46.640
And everybody was incentivized
link |
01:42:49.280
to pretty much do the wrong thing.
link |
01:42:51.920
And so that's why I think one of the big messages
link |
01:42:55.200
of this pandemic is that all of our fates
link |
01:42:57.600
are tied to everybody else's fates.
link |
01:43:00.280
And so while we can say and should say,
link |
01:43:02.760
well, let's focus on our own communities and our countries,
link |
01:43:06.480
we're all stakeholders in what happens elsewhere.
link |
01:43:09.960
Can I ask you a weird question?
link |
01:43:14.960
So I'm gonna do a few podcast interviews
link |
01:43:20.320
with interesting people in Russia, in the Russian language,
link |
01:43:24.360
because I could speak Russian.
link |
01:43:27.280
And a lot of those people have,
link |
01:43:30.800
are not usually speaking in these kinds of formats.
link |
01:43:36.560
Do you think it's possible to interview Xi Jinping?
link |
01:43:40.480
Do you think it's possible to interview somebody like her
link |
01:43:44.480
or anyone in the Chinese government?
link |
01:43:47.320
I think not.
link |
01:43:49.720
And I think the reason is
link |
01:43:52.520
because I think they would, one,
link |
01:43:54.640
be uncomfortable being in any environment
link |
01:43:57.640
where really unknown questions will be asked.
link |
01:44:02.080
And I actually, so as you know, on this topic,
link |
01:44:06.080
the Chinese, as I mentioned earlier,
link |
01:44:07.360
the Chinese government has a gag order on Chinese scientists.
link |
01:44:10.800
They can't speak without prior government approval.
link |
01:44:13.000
Xu Zhengli has been able to speak.
link |
01:44:15.600
And she's spoken at a number of forums.
link |
01:44:17.160
I mentioned this Rutgers event.
link |
01:44:19.960
What was the nature of that forum, the Rutgers event?
link |
01:44:23.080
All of them were kind of science conversations
link |
01:44:26.320
about the pandemic, including the origins issue.
link |
01:44:33.640
But I think that she, in her response to my question,
link |
01:44:37.080
it was kind of this funny thing.
link |
01:44:38.680
So they had this event organized by Rutgers.
link |
01:44:42.680
And I went on, there was an online event on Zoom,
link |
01:44:45.680
but I got on there and I just realized
link |
01:44:47.920
it was very poorly organized.
link |
01:44:49.480
Like normally the controls that you would have
link |
01:44:51.720
about who gets to chat to who, who gets to ask questions,
link |
01:44:54.320
none of them were set.
link |
01:44:56.760
And so I kind of couldn't believe it.
link |
01:44:58.360
I was just sitting at home in my neon green fleece
link |
01:45:02.200
and I just started sending chat messages to Xu Zhengli.
link |
01:45:06.560
So you could, anybody could send any.
link |
01:45:08.360
Anybody could, it was insane.
link |
01:45:09.720
But I thought, wow, this is incredible.
link |
01:45:11.680
And so then it was unclear who got to ask questions.
link |
01:45:16.040
And so I was like posting questions
link |
01:45:18.240
and then I was sending chats to the organizers
link |
01:45:20.680
of the event saying, I really have a question.
link |
01:45:24.400
And first they said, well, you can submit your questions
link |
01:45:27.360
and we'll have submitted questions.
link |
01:45:29.200
And then if we have time, we'll open up.
link |
01:45:31.160
So I just, I mean, I just thought, well, what the hell?
link |
01:45:33.000
I just sent messages to everybody.
link |
01:45:34.680
And then the event was already done.
link |
01:45:37.120
They were 15 minutes over time.
link |
01:45:39.400
And then they said, all right,
link |
01:45:40.440
we have time just for one question.
link |
01:45:42.400
And it's Jamie Metzl.
link |
01:45:44.880
And like, as I'm sitting there in my running clothes,
link |
01:45:47.200
like I wasn't, I was like multitasking and I heard my name.
link |
01:45:50.440
And so I went diving back and I asked this question
link |
01:45:55.920
about, did you know all of the work that was happening
link |
01:46:00.200
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not just your work?
link |
01:46:06.280
And can you confirm that US intelligence has said
link |
01:46:10.520
that the military played a role,
link |
01:46:14.240
was engaged with the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
01:46:16.720
Do you deny that the Chinese military was involved
link |
01:46:19.120
in any way with the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
01:46:21.680
And as I said before, she said, this is crazy.
link |
01:46:24.760
Absolutely not.
link |
01:46:26.240
It got, it actually got,
link |
01:46:27.200
that one question got covered in the media
link |
01:46:29.000
because it was like, I think an essential question.
link |
01:46:32.240
But I just think that since then, to my knowledge,
link |
01:46:35.200
she's not been in any public forums,
link |
01:46:38.280
but that's why most people would be shocked
link |
01:46:41.160
that to date there has been no comprehensive
link |
01:46:43.640
international investigation into pandemic origins.
link |
01:46:46.600
There is no whistleblower provision.
link |
01:46:49.000
So if you're, my guess is there are at least tens,
link |
01:46:52.760
maybe hundreds of people in China
link |
01:46:55.200
who have relevant information
link |
01:46:56.960
about the origins of the pandemic who are terrified
link |
01:47:00.120
and don't dare share it.
link |
01:47:01.840
And let's just say somebody wanted
link |
01:47:04.360
to get that information out, to send it somewhere.
link |
01:47:08.480
There's no official address.
link |
01:47:10.440
The WHO doesn't have that, nobody has that.
link |
01:47:13.920
And so I would love, I mean, you may as well ask.
link |
01:47:16.640
I don't think it's likely that there'll be a yes,
link |
01:47:21.080
but it could well be that there are defectors
link |
01:47:23.640
who will want to speak.
link |
01:47:25.360
So let me also push back on this idea.
link |
01:47:29.240
So one, I want to ask if the language barrier is a thing.
link |
01:47:33.400
Because I've talked to,
link |
01:47:34.720
so I understand Russian culture, I think,
link |
01:47:38.360
or not understand, this is the thing.
link |
01:47:40.440
I don't understand basically anything in this world.
link |
01:47:45.440
But I mean, I hear the music that is Russian culture
link |
01:47:50.440
and I enjoy it.
link |
01:47:51.840
I don't hear that music for Chinese culture.
link |
01:47:55.360
It's just not something I've experienced.
link |
01:47:57.000
So it's a beautiful, rich, complex culture.
link |
01:48:00.160
And from my sense, it seems distant to me.
link |
01:48:05.160
Like whenever I look, even like we mentioned offline Japan
link |
01:48:10.760
and so on, I probably don't even understand
link |
01:48:13.560
Japanese culture.
link |
01:48:14.440
I believe I kind of do because I did martial arts
link |
01:48:16.760
my whole life, but even that, it's just so distant.
link |
01:48:20.200
People who've lived in Japan, foreigners for like 20 years
link |
01:48:23.360
say the exact same thing, yeah.
link |
01:48:25.240
This makes me sad.
link |
01:48:26.200
It makes me sad because I will never be able
link |
01:48:29.280
to fully appreciate the literature, the conversations,
link |
01:48:34.160
the people, the little humor and the subtleties.
link |
01:48:38.120
And those are all essential to understand
link |
01:48:39.960
even this cold topics of science.
link |
01:48:43.760
Because all of that is important to understand.
link |
01:48:46.160
So that's a question for me if you think
link |
01:48:48.240
language barriers a thing.
link |
01:48:49.760
But the other thing I just want to kind of comment on
link |
01:48:52.120
is the criticism of journalism that somebody like
link |
01:48:57.120
Shi Zhengli or even Shi Zhengpeng, just anybody in China,
link |
01:49:05.880
very skeptical to have really conversations
link |
01:49:08.760
with anybody in the western media.
link |
01:49:11.400
Because it's like what are the odds that they will try
link |
01:49:16.880
to bring out the beautiful ideas in the person.
link |
01:49:19.560
And honestly, this is a harsh criticism.
link |
01:49:23.480
I apologize, but I kind of mean it, is the journalists
link |
01:49:30.360
that have some of these high profile conversations
link |
01:49:34.040
often don't do the work.
link |
01:49:36.800
They come off as not very intelligent.
link |
01:49:39.480
And I know they're intelligent people.
link |
01:49:41.360
They have not done the research.
link |
01:49:43.480
They have not come up and like read a bunch of books.
link |
01:49:46.520
They have not even read the Wikipedia article.
link |
01:49:48.880
Meaning put in the minimal effort to empathize,
link |
01:49:52.480
to try to understand the culture of the people,
link |
01:49:54.760
all the complexities, all the different ideas in the spaces.
link |
01:49:58.720
Do all the incredible, not all,
link |
01:50:00.920
but some of the incredible work that you've done initially.
link |
01:50:04.240
Like that, you have to do that work to earn the right
link |
01:50:07.120
to have a deep real conversation with some of these folks.
link |
01:50:11.240
And it's just disappointing to me
link |
01:50:13.360
that journalists often don't do that work.
link |
01:50:15.280
Yeah, so on that, just first I completely agree with you.
link |
01:50:19.640
I mean, there is just an incredible beauty
link |
01:50:22.600
in Chinese culture and I think all cultures,
link |
01:50:25.240
but certainly China has such a deep and rich history,
link |
01:50:29.160
amazing literature and art and just human beings.
link |
01:50:34.680
I mean, I'm a massive critic of the Chinese government.
link |
01:50:38.000
I'm very vociferous about the really genocide in Xinjiang,
link |
01:50:42.720
the absolute effort to destroy Tibetan culture,
link |
01:50:46.560
the destruction of democracy in Hong Kong,
link |
01:50:51.040
incredibly illegal efforts to seize
link |
01:50:54.160
basically the entire South China Sea.
link |
01:50:56.520
And I could go on and on and on.
link |
01:50:59.640
But Chinese culture is fantastic.
link |
01:51:02.680
And I mean, I can't speak to every technical field,
link |
01:51:05.720
but just in terms of having journalists,
link |
01:51:09.000
and I'll speak to American journalists,
link |
01:51:10.560
people like Peter Hessler who have really invested the time
link |
01:51:14.880
to live in China, to learn the language, learn the culture.
link |
01:51:19.480
Peter himself, who is maybe one of our best journalists
link |
01:51:22.920
covering China from a soul level,
link |
01:51:26.080
he was kicked out of China.
link |
01:51:27.920
So it's very, very difficult.
link |
01:51:30.440
His stuff.
link |
01:51:31.280
His stuff.
link |
01:51:32.120
Yeah, it's really, and so for me,
link |
01:51:32.960
you talked about my website on pandemic origins.
link |
01:51:36.640
So when I launched it, I had it,
link |
01:51:38.880
I'm not a Chinese speaker,
link |
01:51:40.520
but I had the entire site translated into Chinese
link |
01:51:44.120
and I have it up on my website just because I felt like,
link |
01:51:48.040
well, if somebody, I mean, the great firewall
link |
01:51:51.400
makes it very, very difficult for people in China
link |
01:51:53.760
to access that kind of information.
link |
01:51:56.320
But I figured if somebody gets there
link |
01:51:58.520
and they wanna have it in their own language.
link |
01:52:02.000
But it's hard because the Chinese government
link |
01:52:04.320
is represented by these quote unquote wolf warriors,
link |
01:52:08.560
which is, it's like these basic ruffians.
link |
01:52:11.840
And I personally was condemned by name
link |
01:52:15.440
by the spokesman of the Chinese foreign ministry
link |
01:52:17.560
from the podium in Beijing.
link |
01:52:20.680
And so it's really hard because I absolutely think
link |
01:52:25.160
the American people and the Chinese people,
link |
01:52:27.800
I mean, maybe all people, but we have so much in common.
link |
01:52:31.280
I mean, yes, China is an ancient civilization,
link |
01:52:36.240
but they kind of wiped out their own civilization
link |
01:52:38.880
in the great leap forward and cultural revolution.
link |
01:52:41.240
They burned their scrolls, they smashed their artworks.
link |
01:52:44.960
And so it's a very young society,
link |
01:52:47.440
kind of like America is a young society.
link |
01:52:50.600
So we have a lot in common.
link |
01:52:53.760
And if we just kind of got out of our own ways,
link |
01:52:57.040
we could have a beautiful relationship,
link |
01:52:59.640
but there's a lot of things that are happening.
link |
01:53:01.960
Certainly the United States feels responsible
link |
01:53:04.120
to defend the post war international order
link |
01:53:07.280
that past generations helped build.
link |
01:53:09.760
And I'm a certain believer in that
link |
01:53:11.800
and China is challenging that and the Chinese government
link |
01:53:16.600
and they've shared that with that view
link |
01:53:18.600
with the Chinese people feel
link |
01:53:19.680
that they haven't been adequately respected.
link |
01:53:21.760
And now they're building a massive nuclear arsenal
link |
01:53:26.000
and all these other things to try to position themselves
link |
01:53:29.120
in the world with an articulated goal
link |
01:53:31.160
of being the lead country in the world.
link |
01:53:33.040
And that puts them at odds with the United States.
link |
01:53:34.880
So there are a lot of real reasons
link |
01:53:37.560
that we need to be honest about for division.
link |
01:53:39.960
But if that's all we focus on,
link |
01:53:42.480
if we don't say that there's another side of the story
link |
01:53:45.680
that brings us together,
link |
01:53:47.680
we'll put ourselves on an inevitable glide path
link |
01:53:51.320
to a terrible outcome.
link |
01:53:53.480
What do you make of Xi Jinping?
link |
01:53:57.000
So two questions.
link |
01:53:57.920
So one in general and two more on lab leak
link |
01:54:01.280
and his meeting with our president Biden
link |
01:54:05.600
in discussion of lab leak.
link |
01:54:07.800
So I feel that Xi Jinping has a very narrow goal
link |
01:54:15.200
articulated of establishing China
link |
01:54:17.640
as the lead country in the world
link |
01:54:20.120
by the 100th anniversary of the founding
link |
01:54:22.880
of the modern Chinese state.
link |
01:54:26.360
And it's ruthless and it's strategic.
link |
01:54:29.720
There's a great book called The Long Game by Rush Doshi
link |
01:54:33.680
who's actually now working in the White House
link |
01:54:36.720
about this goal and our pretty clearly articulated goal
link |
01:54:41.360
to subvert the post war international order
link |
01:54:45.040
and in China's interest.
link |
01:54:47.200
And maybe every leader wants to organize the world
link |
01:54:50.560
around their interest.
link |
01:54:51.480
But I feel that his vision of what that entails
link |
01:54:56.320
is not one that I think is shareable
link |
01:54:59.120
for the rest of the world.
link |
01:55:00.040
I mean, the strength of the United States
link |
01:55:01.600
with all of our flaws is particularly
link |
01:55:04.480
in that post war period,
link |
01:55:06.840
we put forward a model that was desirable
link |
01:55:10.280
to a lot of people.
link |
01:55:11.120
Certainly it was desirable to people in Western Europe
link |
01:55:13.640
and then Eastern Europe and Japan and Korea.
link |
01:55:17.800
Doesn't mean it's perfect.
link |
01:55:18.800
The United States is deeply flawed.
link |
01:55:21.520
As articulated to date,
link |
01:55:23.520
I don't think most people and countries
link |
01:55:26.760
would like to live in a Sinocentric world.
link |
01:55:30.280
And so I certainly, as I mentioned before,
link |
01:55:32.400
I'm a huge critic of what Xi Jinping is doing,
link |
01:55:34.960
the incredible brutality in Xinjiang,
link |
01:55:39.240
in Tibet and elsewhere.
link |
01:55:42.560
Yeah, the censorship one gives me a lot of trouble
link |
01:55:47.880
on the science realm and just in journalism
link |
01:55:51.120
and just the world that prevents us
link |
01:55:53.440
from having conversations with each other.
link |
01:55:56.200
Do you know about the Winnie the Pooh thing?
link |
01:55:58.640
Yes, I mean, it's ridiculous.
link |
01:56:01.040
So to me, that's such a good illustration
link |
01:56:03.680
of censorship being petty.
link |
01:56:08.240
But censorship has to be petty
link |
01:56:09.720
because the goal of censorship,
link |
01:56:12.160
maybe you experienced in the Soviet Union,
link |
01:56:14.720
is to get into your head.
link |
01:56:16.560
Like if it's just censorship,
link |
01:56:17.840
like you say down with the state
link |
01:56:20.720
and like you can't say that,
link |
01:56:22.720
but you can say all the other things up to that point,
link |
01:56:26.200
eventually people will feel empowered
link |
01:56:28.520
to say down with the state.
link |
01:56:29.600
And so I think the goal
link |
01:56:30.960
of this kind of authoritarian censorship
link |
01:56:33.760
is to turn you into the censor.
link |
01:56:36.200
And so the...
link |
01:56:38.280
Like self censor.
link |
01:56:39.120
Yeah, because they almost have to have you think,
link |
01:56:41.480
well, if I'm gonna make any criticism,
link |
01:56:44.520
maybe they're gonna come and get me.
link |
01:56:45.880
So it's safer to not do it.
link |
01:56:48.560
I mean, I've traveled through North Korea
link |
01:56:50.280
pretty extensively and I've seen that in its ultimate form,
link |
01:56:53.480
but that's what they're trying to do in China too.
link |
01:56:56.760
Yeah, so for people who are not familiar,
link |
01:57:00.080
it's such a clear illustration
link |
01:57:01.680
of just the pettiness of censorship
link |
01:57:03.880
and leaders, the corrupting nature of power.
link |
01:57:07.200
But there's a meme of Xi Jinping
link |
01:57:10.880
with, I guess, Barack Obama.
link |
01:57:13.840
And the meme is that he looks like Winnie the Pooh
link |
01:57:18.400
in that picture.
link |
01:57:20.800
And that was the President Xi Jinping
link |
01:57:25.200
looks like Winnie the Pooh.
link |
01:57:26.400
And I guess that became, because that got censored,
link |
01:57:30.040
like mentions of Winnie the Pooh got censored
link |
01:57:32.240
all across China.
link |
01:57:33.760
Winnie the Pooh became the unknowing revolutionary hero
link |
01:57:38.200
that represents freedom of speech and so on.
link |
01:57:41.560
But it's just such a absurd...
link |
01:57:44.800
Because we spend so much time in this conversation
link |
01:57:47.800
talking about the censorship
link |
01:57:49.720
that's a little bit more understandable to me,
link |
01:57:52.400
which is like, we messed up.
link |
01:57:55.320
And it wasn't, maybe it's almost understandable errors
link |
01:57:59.680
that happen in the progress of science.
link |
01:58:02.680
I mean, you could always argue
link |
01:58:05.520
that there's a lot of mistakes along the way
link |
01:58:09.160
and the censorship along the way caused the big mistake.
link |
01:58:11.920
You can argue that same way for the Chernobyl.
link |
01:58:14.320
But those are sort of understandable and difficult topics.
link |
01:58:18.280
Like Winnie the Pooh.
link |
01:58:19.800
But in your message, it shows both sides of the story.
link |
01:58:22.160
I mean, one, how petty authoritarian censors have to be.
link |
01:58:26.280
And that's why the messaging from the Chinese government
link |
01:58:29.160
is so consistent.
link |
01:58:30.640
No matter who you are,
link |
01:58:32.480
you have to be careful what you say.
link |
01:58:33.960
And that's why it's the story of Peng Shui,
link |
01:58:37.200
the tennis player.
link |
01:58:38.600
She dared raise her voice in an individual way.
link |
01:58:42.360
Jack Ma, the richest man in China,
link |
01:58:46.840
had a minor criticism of the Chinese government.
link |
01:58:50.440
He had basically disappeared from the public eye.
link |
01:58:54.560
Fan Bingbing, who's like one of the leading
link |
01:58:57.560
Chinese movie stars,
link |
01:58:59.320
she was seen as not loyal enough and she just vanished.
link |
01:59:03.320
And so the message is no matter who you are,
link |
01:59:06.240
no matter what level,
link |
01:59:08.080
if you don't mind everything you say,
link |
01:59:11.520
you could lose everything.
link |
01:59:12.680
I'm pretty hopeful, optimistic about a lot of things.
link |
01:59:15.160
And so for me, if the Chinese government stays
link |
01:59:19.840
with its current structure,
link |
01:59:21.160
I think what I hope they start fixing
link |
01:59:24.600
is the freedom of speech.
link |
01:59:26.600
But they can't.
link |
01:59:27.440
I mean, the thing is if they open up freedom of speech
link |
01:59:32.200
really in a meaningful way,
link |
01:59:34.320
they can't maintain their current form of government.
link |
01:59:38.320
And it's connected, as I was saying before,
link |
01:59:40.320
to the origins of the pandemic.
link |
01:59:42.520
I mean, if my hypothesis was right,
link |
01:59:45.040
that was the big choice that the national government had.
link |
01:59:48.840
Do we really investigate the origins of the pandemic?
link |
01:59:51.760
Do we deliver a message that transparency is required,
link |
01:59:55.600
public transparency is required from local officials?
link |
01:59:58.840
If they do that, the entire system collapsed.
link |
02:00:02.040
Pretty much everybody in China has a relative
link |
02:00:06.600
who has died as a result of the actions
link |
02:00:09.800
of the Communist Party,
link |
02:00:10.760
particularly in the Great Leap Forward.
link |
02:00:12.600
It's nearly 50 million people died
link |
02:00:15.160
as a result of Mao's disastrous policies.
link |
02:00:18.560
And yet why is Mao's picture still on Tiananmen Square
link |
02:00:21.800
and it's on the money?
link |
02:00:23.520
Because maintaining that fiction
link |
02:00:26.040
is the foundation of the legitimacy of the Chinese state.
link |
02:00:29.880
If people were allowed, just say what you want.
link |
02:00:32.280
Do you really think Mao was such a great guy,
link |
02:00:35.160
even though your own relatives are dead as a result?
link |
02:00:39.280
Do you really buy even on this story
link |
02:00:43.840
that China did nothing wrong,
link |
02:00:45.240
even though in the earliest days of the pandemic,
link |
02:00:48.240
these two, at least Chinese scientists themselves,
link |
02:00:51.120
courageously issued a preprint paper
link |
02:00:54.960
that was later almost certainly forcibly retracted,
link |
02:00:58.600
saying, well, this looks like this comes
link |
02:01:00.360
from one of the Wuhan labs that we're studying.
link |
02:01:03.320
Like if you opened up that window,
link |
02:01:06.880
I think that the Chinese government
link |
02:01:09.640
would not be able to continue in its current form.
link |
02:01:12.400
And that's why they cracked down at Tiananmen Square.
link |
02:01:14.960
That's why with Feng Shui, the tennis player,
link |
02:01:17.840
if they had let her accuse somebody
link |
02:01:21.040
from the Communist Party of sexual assault,
link |
02:01:24.680
and they said, okay, now people,
link |
02:01:26.960
you can use social media
link |
02:01:28.560
and you can have your me too moment
link |
02:01:30.600
and let us know who in the Chinese Communist Party
link |
02:01:34.600
or your boss in a business has assaulted you.
link |
02:01:37.480
Just like in every society,
link |
02:01:38.720
I'm sure there's tons of women
link |
02:01:40.040
who've been sexually assaulted, manipulated, abused by men.
link |
02:01:45.480
And so I certainly hope
link |
02:01:48.480
that there can be that kind of opening.
link |
02:01:51.200
But if I were an authoritarian dictator,
link |
02:01:54.300
that's the thing I would be most afraid of.
link |
02:01:56.640
Yeah, dictator perhaps,
link |
02:01:58.040
but I think you can gradually increase the freedom of speech.
link |
02:02:01.240
So I think you can maintain control over the freedom
link |
02:02:04.840
of press first.
link |
02:02:06.160
So control the press more,
link |
02:02:08.320
but let the lower levels sort of open up YouTube, right?
link |
02:02:13.560
Open up like where individual citizens can make content.
link |
02:02:17.000
I mean, there's a lot of benefits to that.
link |
02:02:19.100
And then from an authoritarian perspective,
link |
02:02:22.760
you can just say that's misinformation,
link |
02:02:25.600
that's conspiracy theories, all those kinds of things.
link |
02:02:28.420
But at least I think if you open up that freedom of speech
link |
02:02:32.560
at the level of the individual citizen,
link |
02:02:35.880
that's good for entrepreneurship,
link |
02:02:38.000
for the development of ideas,
link |
02:02:39.600
of exchange of ideas, all that kind of stuff.
link |
02:02:41.440
I just think that increased the GDP of the country.
link |
02:02:44.160
So I think there's a lot of benefits.
link |
02:02:46.080
I feel like you can still play,
link |
02:02:48.360
we're playing some like dark thoughts here,
link |
02:02:50.800
but I feel like you could still play the game of thrones,
link |
02:02:54.620
still maintain power while giving freedom to the citizenry.
link |
02:03:00.120
Like I think just like with North Korea is a good example
link |
02:03:04.200
of where cracking down too much
link |
02:03:07.320
can completely destroy your country.
link |
02:03:10.360
Like there's some balance you can strike in your evil mind
link |
02:03:14.520
and still maintain authoritarian control over the country.
link |
02:03:17.400
Obviously, it's not obvious,
link |
02:03:20.960
but I'm a big supporter of freedom of speech.
link |
02:03:24.080
I mean, it seems to work really well.
link |
02:03:26.560
I don't know what the failure cases
link |
02:03:28.000
for freedom of speech are.
link |
02:03:30.420
Probably we're experiencing them with Twitter
link |
02:03:32.800
and like where the nature of truth
link |
02:03:34.320
is being completely kind of flipped upside down.
link |
02:03:38.960
But it seems like on the whole,
link |
02:03:41.640
ability to defeat lies with more,
link |
02:03:47.280
not through censorship, but through more conversations,
link |
02:03:50.780
more information is the right way to go.
link |
02:03:53.120
Can I tell you a little story, true stories
link |
02:03:54.720
about North Korea?
link |
02:03:56.000
So a number of years ago, I was invited
link |
02:03:58.560
to be part of a small six person delegation
link |
02:04:01.720
advising the government of North Korea
link |
02:04:04.800
on how to establish special economic zones
link |
02:04:07.360
because other countries have used these SEZs
link |
02:04:10.560
as a way of building their economies.
link |
02:04:13.000
And when I was invited, I thought,
link |
02:04:15.640
well, maybe there's an opening.
link |
02:04:17.900
And I certainly believe in that.
link |
02:04:19.980
So we flew to China across the border into North Korea.
link |
02:04:24.560
And then we were met by our partners
link |
02:04:27.360
from the North Korean Development Organization.
link |
02:04:30.060
And then we zigzagged the country for almost two weeks
link |
02:04:33.960
visiting all these sites for where they were intended
link |
02:04:38.060
to create these special economic zones.
link |
02:04:39.840
And in each site, they had their local officials
link |
02:04:42.680
and they had a map and they showed us where everything
link |
02:04:45.320
that was going to be built.
link |
02:04:47.080
And the other people who were like really technical experts
link |
02:04:50.320
on how to set up a special economic zone,
link |
02:04:52.120
they were asking questions, well, like,
link |
02:04:53.800
should you put the entrance over here
link |
02:04:55.760
or shouldn't you put it over there
link |
02:04:56.960
and what if there's flooding?
link |
02:04:58.480
And I kept asking just these basic questions,
link |
02:05:00.480
like, what do you think you're going to do here?
link |
02:05:02.960
Why do you think you can be competitive?
link |
02:05:05.280
Do you know anything about who you're competing against?
link |
02:05:07.880
Are you empowering your workers to innovate
link |
02:05:10.580
because everybody else is innovating?
link |
02:05:12.600
So at the end of the trip, they flew us to Pyongyang
link |
02:05:14.880
and they put us in this,
link |
02:05:15.840
it looked kind of like the United Nations.
link |
02:05:17.480
They probably had 500 people there
link |
02:05:20.240
and I gave a speech to them.
link |
02:05:22.960
I obviously was in English and it was translated
link |
02:05:26.560
and I figured, you know, I've come all this way,
link |
02:05:29.920
I'm just going to be honest.
link |
02:05:30.940
If they arrest me for being honest, that's on them.
link |
02:05:34.760
And I said, I'm here because I believe
link |
02:05:38.000
we can never give up hope,
link |
02:05:39.700
that we always have to try to connect.
link |
02:05:41.460
I'm also here because I think that North Korea
link |
02:05:45.440
connecting to the world economy is an important first step.
link |
02:05:50.240
But having visited all of your special economic zone sites
link |
02:05:52.680
and having met with all of your, or many of your officials,
link |
02:05:56.100
I don't think your plan has any chance of succeeding
link |
02:05:59.440
because you're trying to sell into a global market,
link |
02:06:03.640
but you need to have market information that,
link |
02:06:07.520
and I gave examples of GE and others
link |
02:06:10.920
that the innovation can't only happen at one place.
link |
02:06:14.640
And if you want innovation to happen
link |
02:06:17.800
from the people who are doing this,
link |
02:06:19.360
you have to empower them, they have to have access,
link |
02:06:22.400
they have to have voice.
link |
02:06:23.520
I mean, nobody, I mean, the people after,
link |
02:06:28.600
they kind of had to condemn me
link |
02:06:30.160
because what I was saying was challenging.
link |
02:06:32.600
So I certainly agree with you.
link |
02:06:33.880
And then just one side story of then that night,
link |
02:06:37.800
and it was just kind of bizarre
link |
02:06:39.040
because North Korea is, it's so desperately poor,
link |
02:06:42.400
but they were trying to impress us.
link |
02:06:44.440
And so we had these embarrassingly sumptuous banquets.
link |
02:06:49.300
And so for our final dinner that night,
link |
02:06:51.600
really it looked like something from Beauty and the Beast.
link |
02:06:54.760
I mean, it was like China and waiters and tuxedos,
link |
02:06:59.520
and they had this beautiful dinner.
link |
02:07:02.120
And then afterwards,
link |
02:07:04.240
because we'd now spent two weeks
link |
02:07:05.580
with our North Korean partners,
link |
02:07:07.060
they brought out this karaoke machine
link |
02:07:08.980
and our North Korean counterparts,
link |
02:07:11.060
they sang songs to us in Korean.
link |
02:07:15.240
And so I said, well, we want to reciprocate.
link |
02:07:18.120
Do you have any English songs on your karaoke machine?
link |
02:07:21.240
It's North Korea, obviously they didn't.
link |
02:07:23.320
But there was, I said, well, I have an idea.
link |
02:07:25.560
And so there was one of the women
link |
02:07:27.120
who'd been part of the North Korean delegation.
link |
02:07:30.200
She was able just to play the piano,
link |
02:07:32.640
just like you could hum a tune
link |
02:07:34.400
and she could play it on the piano.
link |
02:07:36.160
And so I said, all right, here's this tune,
link |
02:07:39.480
which I whispered in her ear.
link |
02:07:41.000
When I give you the signal,
link |
02:07:42.420
just play this tune over and over.
link |
02:07:45.400
And so I got these, I mean, there were the six of us
link |
02:07:48.200
and maybe 20 North Koreans,
link |
02:07:49.640
and we were all in a circle,
link |
02:07:51.080
so everybody hold hands and then put your right,
link |
02:07:54.920
just try to put your right foot in front of your left
link |
02:07:57.600
and then left foot in front of the right, going sideways.
link |
02:08:00.560
And I said, all right, hit it.
link |
02:08:02.480
And she played a North Korean version of Hava Nagila.
link |
02:08:06.840
And I think it was the first
link |
02:08:08.120
and only horror that they've ever done in North Korea.
link |
02:08:11.680
That's hilarious.
link |
02:08:12.500
I survived.
link |
02:08:13.340
Was this recorded or no?
link |
02:08:14.220
It was not.
link |
02:08:15.060
Oh, no.
link |
02:08:15.880
Yeah, if they had free YouTube,
link |
02:08:18.160
this would have been a big one.
link |
02:08:19.520
Yeah.
link |
02:08:21.520
Let's return to the beginning
link |
02:08:23.080
and just patient zero.
link |
02:08:28.520
It's kind of always incredible to think
link |
02:08:30.760
that there's one human at which it all started.
link |
02:08:33.840
Yeah.
link |
02:08:36.360
Who do you think was patient zero?
link |
02:08:38.760
Do you think it was somebody that worked
link |
02:08:42.640
at Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
02:08:47.400
Do you think there was a leak of some other kind
link |
02:08:52.440
that led to the infection?
link |
02:08:55.040
What do we know?
link |
02:08:55.920
Because there's this December 8th slash December 16th case
link |
02:08:59.800
of maybe you can describe what that is.
link |
02:09:04.400
And then there's like, what's his name?
link |
02:09:09.960
Michael Warobey has a nice timeline.
link |
02:09:12.960
I'm sure you have a timeline.
link |
02:09:14.480
But he has a nice timeline that puts the average
link |
02:09:17.880
at like November something, like 18th and November 16th
link |
02:09:22.280
as the average estimate for when the patient zero
link |
02:09:27.200
got infected, when the first human infection happened.
link |
02:09:30.360
Yeah, so just two points.
link |
02:09:32.080
One is it may be that there's infectee zero
link |
02:09:36.560
and patient zero.
link |
02:09:37.880
It could be that the first person infected was asymptomatic
link |
02:09:41.280
because we know there's a lot of people
link |
02:09:42.440
who are asymptomatic.
link |
02:09:44.240
And then there's the question of, well, who is patient zero?
link |
02:09:47.640
Meaning the first person to present themselves
link |
02:09:51.040
in some kind of health facility
link |
02:09:53.600
where that diagnosis could be made.
link |
02:09:56.400
So can we actually linger on that definition?
link |
02:09:58.640
Yeah.
link |
02:09:59.480
So is that to you a good definition of patient zero?
link |
02:10:02.600
Okay, there's a bunch of stuff here
link |
02:10:04.560
because this virus is weird.
link |
02:10:06.640
So one is who gets infected, one who is infectious
link |
02:10:11.120
or the first person infect others.
link |
02:10:14.400
Yeah.
link |
02:10:15.240
And who shows up to a hospital.
link |
02:10:17.360
Yeah, so I think that's why I'm calling the first person
link |
02:10:19.480
to show up to a hospital who's diagnosed with COVID 19.
link |
02:10:22.600
I'm calling that person patient zero.
link |
02:10:24.560
There's also, there's somewhere the first person
link |
02:10:28.480
to be infected.
link |
02:10:29.760
And that person maybe never showed up in a hospital
link |
02:10:32.800
because maybe they were asymptomatic and never get sick,
link |
02:10:36.400
so got sick.
link |
02:10:37.240
So let me start with what I'm calling infectee zero.
link |
02:10:40.560
Here are some options.
link |
02:10:41.720
I talked before about some person who was a villager
link |
02:10:46.320
and some remote village.
link |
02:10:47.720
It's almost impossible to imagine, but possible to imagine
link |
02:10:51.680
because strange things happen.
link |
02:10:54.000
And that person somehow gets to Wuhan.
link |
02:10:57.280
By the way, just to still make that argument,
link |
02:11:00.400
there's not an argument, it's a statement,
link |
02:11:01.920
but strange things happen all the time.
link |
02:11:05.440
No, I agree.
link |
02:11:06.280
It doesn't mean that logic doesn't apply
link |
02:11:09.160
and probabilities don't apply, but we all,
link |
02:11:11.400
I mean, in general principle, everyone, if we were honest,
link |
02:11:16.400
should be agnostic about everything.
link |
02:11:19.000
Like I think I'm Jamie, but is there a 0.01% chance
link |
02:11:23.520
or 0.001% chance that I'm not?
link |
02:11:27.200
But it could be.
link |
02:11:28.200
I mean, how would I know?
link |
02:11:29.040
But there's a large number of people arguing
link |
02:11:30.360
about the meaning of the word I
link |
02:11:31.880
and that I'm Jamie.
link |
02:11:33.080
So exactly.
link |
02:11:33.920
What is consciousness?
link |
02:11:34.760
Exactly, exactly.
link |
02:11:35.600
So we could spend another three hours going into that one.
link |
02:11:39.160
So one possibility is there's some remote villager.
link |
02:11:42.120
Another possibility is there's somehow bizarrely,
link |
02:11:47.600
there are these infected animals
link |
02:11:49.040
that come from Southern China most likely.
link |
02:11:52.120
They all, maybe there's only one of them that's infected,
link |
02:11:55.800
which how could that possibly be?
link |
02:11:58.080
And it's only sent to Wuhan.
link |
02:11:59.840
It's not sent anywhere else,
link |
02:12:02.840
to any of the markets there or whatever.
link |
02:12:04.160
And then maybe somebody in a market is infected.
link |
02:12:06.760
That's one remote possibility, but a possibility.
link |
02:12:10.400
Another is that researchers
link |
02:12:13.240
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
02:12:15.640
go down to Southern China.
link |
02:12:17.520
We didn't, we haven't talked about it yet,
link |
02:12:19.000
but in 2012, there were six miners were sent
link |
02:12:22.960
into a copper mine in Southern China and Yunnan province.
link |
02:12:26.360
All of them got very sick
link |
02:12:28.040
with what now appear like COVID 19 like symptoms.
link |
02:12:31.800
Half of them died.
link |
02:12:34.280
Blood samples from them were taken
link |
02:12:37.560
to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere.
link |
02:12:40.720
And then after that, there were multiple site visits
link |
02:12:45.720
to that mine, collecting viral samples
link |
02:12:49.400
that were brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
02:12:52.560
included among those samples were,
link |
02:12:55.960
was this now infamous RETG 13 virus,
link |
02:12:59.120
which is among the genetically closest viruses
link |
02:13:02.240
to SARS CoV2.
link |
02:13:03.880
There were other nine other or eight other viruses
link |
02:13:07.360
that were collected from that mine
link |
02:13:08.960
that were presumably very similar to that.
link |
02:13:11.760
And again, we have no access to the information
link |
02:13:14.720
about those and many of the other,
link |
02:13:17.920
most, almost all of the other viruses.
link |
02:13:19.760
So could it be that one of the people
link |
02:13:24.120
who was sent from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
02:13:26.280
or the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control,
link |
02:13:29.680
they went down there to collect
link |
02:13:31.160
and they got infected asymptomatically and brought it back?
link |
02:13:34.520
Could it be that they were working on these viruses
link |
02:13:37.320
in the laboratory and there was an issue
link |
02:13:40.320
with waste disposal?
link |
02:13:41.800
And we know that the Wuhan CDC had a major problem
link |
02:13:45.120
with waste disposal.
link |
02:13:46.680
And just before the pandemic,
link |
02:13:48.560
one, they put out an RFP to fix their waste disposal.
link |
02:13:53.720
And in early 2019, they moved to their new site,
link |
02:13:59.120
which was basically across the street
link |
02:14:00.800
from the Huanan Seafood Market.
link |
02:14:03.920
So could there have been issue of somebody infected
link |
02:14:06.320
in the lab of waste disposal?
link |
02:14:08.600
Could a laboratory animal, their experiences
link |
02:14:10.840
in China, actually China just recently passed a law
link |
02:14:13.200
saying it's illegal to sell laboratory animals
link |
02:14:17.120
in the market because there were scientists,
link |
02:14:19.760
or one scientist who was selling laboratory animals
link |
02:14:23.160
in the market and people would just come and buy.
link |
02:14:27.280
It's insane.
link |
02:14:28.120
So there's so many, there are so many scenarios,
link |
02:14:31.160
but if I, again, connect it to my 85% number,
link |
02:14:35.000
I think in the whole category of laboratory related incidents,
link |
02:14:39.880
whether it's collection, waste,
link |
02:14:42.120
something connected to the lab,
link |
02:14:43.800
I think that's the most likely,
link |
02:14:46.720
but there are other credible people
link |
02:14:49.200
who would say they think it's not the most likely
link |
02:14:52.040
and I welcome their views
link |
02:14:54.080
and we need to have this conversation.
link |
02:14:55.600
So in your write up, but what's the URL?
link |
02:14:59.560
Because I always find it by doing Jamie Metzl lab leak.
link |
02:15:03.640
It's probably the easiest, just Google that.
link |
02:15:05.640
No, no, but if you just go to jamiemetzl.com,
link |
02:15:08.120
J A M I E M E T Z L dot com,
link |
02:15:11.960
then they're just a thing, it's COVID origins.
link |
02:15:15.120
It's COVID origins.
link |
02:15:17.000
Or you could just Google Jamie Metzl lab leak.
link |
02:15:21.080
Google search engine is such a powerful thing.
link |
02:15:23.160
You mentioned in that write up that you don't think,
link |
02:15:27.440
this could be just me misreading it
link |
02:15:29.080
or it's just slightly miswritten,
link |
02:15:31.240
but you don't think that the virus
link |
02:15:34.720
is from that 2012 mind, which is fascinating,
link |
02:15:38.120
could be the backbone for SARS COVID too.
link |
02:15:40.800
So what I mean, just the specific virus,
link |
02:15:43.800
which I mentioned, RATG13,
link |
02:15:45.920
and there's a whole history of that
link |
02:15:48.120
because it had a different name and it looked,
link |
02:15:51.360
and Xiaojiang Li provided wrong information
link |
02:15:54.920
about when it had been sequenced.
link |
02:15:57.200
I mean, there was a whole issue connected to that.
link |
02:16:01.360
But the genetic difference,
link |
02:16:02.880
even though it's 96.2% similar to the SARS COVID2 virus,
link |
02:16:10.100
that's actually a significant difference,
link |
02:16:12.400
even though that and a virus called Banal 52
link |
02:16:17.600
that was collected in Laos are the two most similar,
link |
02:16:20.200
there still are differences.
link |
02:16:22.320
So I'm not saying RATG13 is the backbone,
link |
02:16:25.720
but is there, I believe there is a possibility
link |
02:16:28.780
that other viruses that were collected
link |
02:16:32.400
either in that mine in Yunnan in Southern China
link |
02:16:36.920
or in Laos or Cambodia,
link |
02:16:39.360
because that was with the EcoHealth Alliance
link |
02:16:43.600
proposals and documents.
link |
02:16:45.080
Their plan was to collect viruses
link |
02:16:48.680
in Laos and Cambodia and elsewhere
link |
02:16:51.180
and bring them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
02:16:54.260
so that there are people.
link |
02:16:55.640
As a matter of fact, just when I was sitting here
link |
02:16:57.200
before this interview,
link |
02:17:01.000
I got a message from somebody who was saying,
link |
02:17:03.600
well, Peter Daszak is telling everybody
link |
02:17:06.040
that the viral sample, the Banal 52 from Laos
link |
02:17:10.120
proves that there's not a lab incident origin
link |
02:17:13.720
of the pandemic.
link |
02:17:14.560
And it actually doesn't prove that at all
link |
02:17:17.060
because these viruses were being collected
link |
02:17:20.520
in places like Laos and Cambodia
link |
02:17:24.120
and being brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
02:17:28.400
Those are like early, early, like the prequel.
link |
02:17:32.800
So these are, they're not sufficiently similar
link |
02:17:35.760
to be a, to serve as a backbone,
link |
02:17:37.400
but they kind of tell a story
link |
02:17:38.680
that they could have been brought to the lab
link |
02:17:40.640
through several processes, including genetic modification
link |
02:17:44.980
or through the natural evolution processes,
link |
02:17:47.560
accelerated evolution, they could have arrived
link |
02:17:49.680
to something that has the spike protein
link |
02:17:52.880
and the cleavage, the foreign cleavage site
link |
02:17:56.120
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
02:17:56.960
So what I'm saying is the essential point
link |
02:18:00.200
is if we had access, if we knew everything
link |
02:18:03.440
that was being, every virus that was being held
link |
02:18:05.960
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan CDC,
link |
02:18:09.280
we had full access.
link |
02:18:10.640
We had full access to everybody's lab notes.
link |
02:18:13.840
And we did just the kind of forensic investigation
link |
02:18:16.720
that has been so desperately required since day one.
link |
02:18:21.360
We'd be able to say, well, what did you have?
link |
02:18:24.340
Because if we knew, if it should come out,
link |
02:18:26.940
that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had in its repository,
link |
02:18:30.760
prior to the outbreak, either SARS CoV2
link |
02:18:34.040
or a reasonable precursor to it,
link |
02:18:36.640
that would prove the lab incident hypothesis.
link |
02:18:39.480
In my mind, that's almost certainly why they are preventing
link |
02:18:42.920
any kind of meaningful investigation.
link |
02:18:46.140
So my hypothesis is not that what RITG13 says
link |
02:18:51.840
is because as I mentioned earlier,
link |
02:18:54.480
the genetics of virus are constantly recombinating.
link |
02:18:59.640
So that what that means is if you have,
link |
02:19:01.880
you don't have very many total outlier viruses
link |
02:19:06.080
in a bat community because these viruses
link |
02:19:08.660
are always mixing and matching with each other.
link |
02:19:11.240
And so if you have RITG13, which is relatively similar
link |
02:19:16.080
to SARS CoV2, there's a pretty decent likelihood
link |
02:19:19.160
there was other stuff that was collected
link |
02:19:22.680
at this mine called Mojang Mine in Yunnan Province,
link |
02:19:28.320
maybe in Laos and Cambodia.
link |
02:19:30.940
And that's why we need to have that information.
link |
02:19:36.300
Do you think somebody knows who patient zero is
link |
02:19:39.120
within China?
link |
02:19:39.960
So do you think that is?
link |
02:19:40.880
Well, there's two things.
link |
02:19:42.080
One is I think somebody and people probably know.
link |
02:19:45.600
And then two, it's been incredibly curious
link |
02:19:47.740
that the best virus chasers in the world are in China.
link |
02:19:52.400
And they are in Wuhan.
link |
02:19:54.520
And when we can talk about this deeply compromised,
link |
02:19:58.680
now vastly improved World Health Organization process.
link |
02:20:03.180
But when they went there, the Chinese,
link |
02:20:05.440
the local and national Chinese authorities say,
link |
02:20:07.440
oh, we haven't done, we haven't tested the samples
link |
02:20:10.640
in our blood center.
link |
02:20:11.920
We haven't done any of this tracing.
link |
02:20:13.600
And these deeply compromised people
link |
02:20:16.880
who were part of the international part
link |
02:20:20.880
of the joint study tour, when they came out with their,
link |
02:20:25.080
they had their visit earlier this year
link |
02:20:26.480
and came out with their report.
link |
02:20:28.100
They had in my mind, just an absurd letter
link |
02:20:32.200
to the editor in nature saying,
link |
02:20:34.180
well, if we don't hurry back,
link |
02:20:35.760
we're not gonna know what happened.
link |
02:20:37.480
Assuming that the people in China are like bumpkins
link |
02:20:41.460
who on their own don't know how to trace the origin
link |
02:20:44.080
of a virus and the opposite is the case.
link |
02:20:47.460
So I think there are people in China
link |
02:20:50.000
who at least know a lot.
link |
02:20:51.960
They know a lot more than they're saying.
link |
02:20:55.160
And at the best case scenario is the Chinese government
link |
02:20:59.000
wants to prevent any investigation, including by them.
link |
02:21:03.240
The worst case scenario is that there are people
link |
02:21:06.520
who already know.
link |
02:21:07.340
And that's why, again, my point from day one has been,
link |
02:21:10.320
we need a comprehensive international investigation
link |
02:21:14.800
in Wuhan with full access to all relevant records,
link |
02:21:18.280
samples and personnel.
link |
02:21:19.360
When this, again, deeply flawed.
link |
02:21:22.160
Can I give you a little history of this WHO process?
link |
02:21:27.200
Okay.
link |
02:21:28.280
Who are the, that's funny.
link |
02:21:32.360
Who's on first?
link |
02:21:33.520
Who's on first?
link |
02:21:34.440
I'm so funny with the jokes.
link |
02:21:36.400
Look at me go.
link |
02:21:38.200
Who are the WHO?
link |
02:21:39.760
So what is this organization?
link |
02:21:41.460
What is its purpose?
link |
02:21:43.080
What role did it play in the pandemic?
link |
02:21:45.920
It certainly was demonized in the realm of politics.
link |
02:21:49.520
This is an institution that was supposed to save us
link |
02:21:55.080
from this pandemic.
link |
02:21:57.080
A lot of people believe it failed.
link |
02:21:58.960
Has it failed?
link |
02:22:00.280
Why did it fail?
link |
02:22:01.680
And you said it's improving.
link |
02:22:02.960
How is it improving?
link |
02:22:04.280
Great.
link |
02:22:05.120
All right.
link |
02:22:05.940
I hope you don't mind.
link |
02:22:06.780
I'm gonna have to talk for a little bit of extra time.
link |
02:22:08.840
I love this.
link |
02:22:09.680
I love this.
link |
02:22:10.520
Good, good, good, good.
link |
02:22:12.080
So the WHO is an absolutely essential organization
link |
02:22:16.200
created in 1948 in that wonderful period
link |
02:22:20.580
after the Second World War
link |
02:22:22.200
when the United States and allied countries
link |
02:22:24.540
asked the big bold questions,
link |
02:22:27.200
how do we build a safer world for everyone?
link |
02:22:30.640
And so that's the WHO.
link |
02:22:33.340
If we, although there are many critics of the WHO,
link |
02:22:36.780
if we didn't have it, we would need to invent it
link |
02:22:39.120
because the whole nature of these big public health issues
link |
02:22:44.120
and certainly for pandemics, but all sorts of things
link |
02:22:48.280
is that they are transnational in nature.
link |
02:22:50.880
And so we cannot just build moats.
link |
02:22:54.160
We cannot build walls.
link |
02:22:55.700
We're all connected to it.
link |
02:22:56.960
So that's the idea.
link |
02:22:59.540
There's a political process because the United Nations
link |
02:23:02.760
and the WHO is part of it,
link |
02:23:06.480
it exists within a political context.
link |
02:23:08.840
And so the current director general
link |
02:23:11.640
of the World Health Organization
link |
02:23:13.120
who was just reelected for his second five year term
link |
02:23:16.880
is Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
link |
02:23:20.220
who is from Ethiopia, Tigrayan from Ethiopia.
link |
02:23:25.220
And in full disclosure, I have a lot of respect for Tedros.
link |
02:23:31.100
Tedros got his job.
link |
02:23:33.260
He was not America's candidate.
link |
02:23:35.360
He was not Britain's candidate.
link |
02:23:37.160
Our candidate was a guy named David Nabarro
link |
02:23:39.920
who I also know and have tremendous respect for.
link |
02:23:43.720
China led the process of putting Tedros in this position.
link |
02:23:50.560
And in the earliest days of the pandemic,
link |
02:23:54.520
Tedros, in my view,
link |
02:23:55.920
even though I have tremendous respect for him,
link |
02:23:57.760
I think he made a mistake.
link |
02:23:59.280
The WHO doesn't have its own
link |
02:24:02.240
independent surveillance network.
link |
02:24:04.240
It's not organized to have it
link |
02:24:05.760
and the states have not allowed it.
link |
02:24:07.200
So it's dependent on member states
link |
02:24:10.240
for providing it information.
link |
02:24:13.120
And because it's a poorly funded organization
link |
02:24:17.060
dependent on its bosses who are these governments,
link |
02:24:20.460
it's natural instinct isn't to condemn its bosses.
link |
02:24:24.680
It's to say, well, let's quietly work with everybody.
link |
02:24:28.240
Having said that,
link |
02:24:29.360
the Chinese government knowingly lied to Tedros.
link |
02:24:33.280
And Tedros, in repeating the position
link |
02:24:36.360
of the Chinese government,
link |
02:24:37.200
which incidentally I'll say Donald Trump
link |
02:24:39.400
also did the exact same thing.
link |
02:24:41.160
Donald Trump had a private conversation with Xi Jinping
link |
02:24:43.920
and then repeated what Xi had told him.
link |
02:24:48.520
Both of them were wrong.
link |
02:24:51.400
Dr. Tedros, I think when Chinese government was lying,
link |
02:24:55.840
knowingly lying,
link |
02:24:56.920
saying there's no human to human transmission,
link |
02:25:00.000
Dr. Tedros said that.
link |
02:25:01.100
And even though within the World Health Organization,
link |
02:25:04.820
there were private critiques saying
link |
02:25:07.280
China is now doing exactly what it did in SARS one,
link |
02:25:10.500
it's not providing access,
link |
02:25:11.920
it's not providing information.
link |
02:25:13.920
Tedros's instinct because of his background,
link |
02:25:16.680
because of his role and wrongly,
link |
02:25:21.000
was to have a more collaborative relationship with China,
link |
02:25:25.540
particularly by making assertions
link |
02:25:28.400
based on the information that was wrong.
link |
02:25:30.360
Don't call people liars,
link |
02:25:32.120
they're not gonna be happy with you.
link |
02:25:33.840
They're not gonna be happy.
link |
02:25:34.680
And the job of the WHO isn't to condemn states,
link |
02:25:38.880
it's to do the best possible job of addressing problems.
link |
02:25:41.920
And I think that the culture was,
link |
02:25:43.720
well, let's do the most that we can.
link |
02:25:45.840
If we totally alienate China on day one,
link |
02:25:49.260
we're in even worse shape than if we call them out for.
link |
02:25:52.600
Not exactly sure, by the way,
link |
02:25:54.280
that maybe you can also steel man that argument.
link |
02:25:58.160
Like it's not completely obvious that that's
link |
02:26:00.520
a terrible decision.
link |
02:26:02.840
Like if you and I were in that role,
link |
02:26:05.480
we wouldn't make that decision.
link |
02:26:06.880
It's complicated because like,
link |
02:26:09.240
you want China on your side to help solve this.
link |
02:26:11.760
So I would have made a different decision,
link |
02:26:14.500
which is why I never would have been selected
link |
02:26:17.560
as the director general.
link |
02:26:18.680
There's a selection criteria
link |
02:26:20.640
that everybody kind of needs to support you.
link |
02:26:24.360
And so, but let me just, this is just the beginning.
link |
02:26:27.120
Can you also just elaborate or kind of restate,
link |
02:26:30.880
what were the inaccuracies that you quickly mentioned?
link |
02:26:34.320
So human to human transmission, what were the things?
link |
02:26:36.720
So the most important, there were a few things.
link |
02:26:41.360
One, China didn't report the outbreak.
link |
02:26:46.400
Two, they had the sequenced genome
link |
02:26:49.840
of the SARS CoV2 virus,
link |
02:26:51.980
and they didn't share it for two critical weeks.
link |
02:26:55.880
And when they did share it, it was inadvertent.
link |
02:26:59.280
I mean, there was a very, very courageous scientist
link |
02:27:01.780
who essentially leaked it and was later punished
link |
02:27:04.800
for leaking it, even though the Chinese government
link |
02:27:06.500
is now saying we were so great by releasing the sequenced.
link |
02:27:09.640
Wait, I was really confused.
link |
02:27:10.840
Really?
link |
02:27:11.680
So I'm so clueless about this as most things.
link |
02:27:15.080
Because I thought, because there was a celebration of,
link |
02:27:19.340
isn't this amazing that we got the sequence,
link |
02:27:23.480
that's amazing, and then the scientific community
link |
02:27:27.200
across the world stepped up and were able to do
link |
02:27:30.120
a lot of stuff really quickly with that sharing.
link |
02:27:32.240
Because I thought the Chinese government shared it.
link |
02:27:34.500
No, no, so they sat on it for two weeks.
link |
02:27:37.000
When they shared it against their will, it was incredible.
link |
02:27:40.640
Moderna, 48 hours later after getting the information,
link |
02:27:45.440
getting the sequenced genome, they had the formulation
link |
02:27:48.200
for what's now the Moderna COVID 19 vaccine.
link |
02:27:51.960
But that's two critical weeks.
link |
02:27:55.240
In those early days, they blocked the World Health
link |
02:27:59.320
Organization from sending its experts to Wuhan
link |
02:28:03.440
for more than three weeks.
link |
02:28:04.940
I said they lied about human to human transmission.
link |
02:28:08.160
During that time, they were aggressively enacting
link |
02:28:11.160
their coverup, destroying records, hiding samples,
link |
02:28:15.880
imprisoning people who were asking tough questions.
link |
02:28:19.640
They soon after established their gag order.
link |
02:28:24.100
They fought internally in the World Health Organization
link |
02:28:27.880
to prevent the declaration of a global emergency.
link |
02:28:32.080
So China definitely, I mean, I couldn't be stronger
link |
02:28:36.120
in my critique of China, particularly what it did
link |
02:28:40.040
in those early days, but it really, what it's doing
link |
02:28:42.320
even to today is outrageous.
link |
02:28:44.520
So that was, so then there was the question of,
link |
02:28:48.080
well, how do we examine what actually happened?
link |
02:28:51.280
And the Prime Minister of Australia then and now,
link |
02:28:54.280
Scott Morrison, was incredibly courageous.
link |
02:28:57.000
And he said, we need a full investigation.
link |
02:28:59.620
And because of that, the Chinese government
link |
02:29:02.120
attacked him personally and imposed trade sanctions
link |
02:29:05.920
on Australia to try to, not just to punish Australia,
link |
02:29:09.660
but to deliver a message to every other country.
link |
02:29:12.160
If you ask questions, we're going to punish you ruthlessly.
link |
02:29:15.880
And then that certainly was the message that was delivered.
link |
02:29:21.360
The Australians brought that idea of a full investigation
link |
02:29:24.800
to the World Health Assembly in May of 2020.
link |
02:29:28.400
As I mentioned before, the WHA is the governing authority
link |
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above, of states above the World Health Organization.
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02:29:36.520
And so, but instead of passing a resolution calling
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for a full investigation, what ended up ironically
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and tragically passing with Chinese support
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was a mandate to have essentially
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a Chinese controlled joint study,
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where half of the team, a little more than half of the team
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was Chinese experts, government affiliated Chinese experts,
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and half were independent international experts
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but organized by the WHO.
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And then it took six months
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to negotiate the terms of reference.
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And again, while China was doing all this coverup,
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they delayed and delayed and delayed.
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And by the terms of reference that were negotiated,
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China had veto power over who got to be a member
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of the international group.
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And that group was not entitled to access to raw data.
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02:30:31.160
The Chinese side would give them conclusions
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based on their own analysis of the raw data,
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which was totally outrageous.
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02:30:39.880
So then, and I was a big, I and others,
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now friend of mine, although we've never met in person,
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Gilles de Manouf in New Zealand,
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he did a great job of chronicling just the letter by letter
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of the terms of reference.
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02:30:54.400
So then it took, now it's the January of this year,
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January, 2021, this deeply flawed,
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deeply compromised international group is sent to Wuhan.
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02:31:07.480
So what's the connection between this group
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and the joint study?
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02:31:10.320
So the joint study, it had the Chinese side
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and the international side.
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02:31:13.440
So these international experts,
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then part of their examination was going
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for one month to Wuhan.
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And the nature of the flaws of this international group.
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02:31:23.240
It's okay, really important point.
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And I'm sorry, I wasn't clear on that.
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Rather, the mandate of what they were doing
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was not to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
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02:31:34.920
It was to have a joint study
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02:31:37.640
into the zoonotic origins of the virus,
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which means, which was interpreted to mean
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the natural origins hypothesis.
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02:31:45.600
They weren't empowered for a single hypothesis,
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not so that they weren't empowered
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to examine the lab incident origin.
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02:31:54.080
They were there to look at the natural origin hypothesis.
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02:31:56.960
To shop for some meat at some markets.
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02:31:58.840
Yeah, so that was, so then they were there for a month.
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02:32:03.560
Yeah.
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02:32:04.400
So out of the makeup of the team, guess who was?
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02:32:09.680
So the United States government proposed three experts
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for this team.
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People who had a lot of background.
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This was the Trump administration.
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People who had a lot of background,
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including in investigating lab incidents.
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02:32:23.000
None of those people were accepted.
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02:32:24.840
The one American who was accepted.
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02:32:27.200
Don't tell me it's Peter Daszak.
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02:32:28.160
Peter Daszak.
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02:32:29.120
Peter Daszak, who had this funding relationship
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for many years with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
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02:32:35.600
whose entire basically professional reputation
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was based on his collaboration with Shujang Li,
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who had written the February, 2020 Lancet letter
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saying it comes from natural origin.
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02:32:49.520
And anybody who's suggesting otherwise
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is a conspiracy theorist.
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And who, at least according to me,
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had been at very, very least the opposite of transparent
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and at most engaged in a massive disinformation campaign.
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He is the one American who's on this.
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02:33:07.800
So they go there, they have one month in Wuhan.
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Two weeks of it are spent in quarantine
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just in their hotel rooms.
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02:33:15.960
So then they have two weeks,
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02:33:17.560
but really it's just 10 working days.
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02:33:20.120
One of the earliest, and so then they're kind of,
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we've all seen the pictures.
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They're traveling around Wuhan in little buses.
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02:33:27.520
One of the first visits they have
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is to this museum exhibition on the,
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it's basically a propaganda exhibition on the success,
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Xi Jinping and the success in fighting COVID.
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And they said, well, we had to show respect
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to our Chinese hosts.
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02:33:42.800
But I think what the Chinese hosts were saying is,
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let's just, I'm just gonna rub your noses in this.
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