back to indexJamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory | Lex Fridman Podcast #247
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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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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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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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That we're seeing this amplification in the market.
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And if we, let me put it this way.
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If we had all of the information,
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if the Chinese government hadn't blocked access
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to all of this, because there's blood bank information,
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there's all sorts of information,
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and based on a full and complete understanding,
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we came to believe that all of the early cases
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were at this market.
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I think that would be a stronger argument
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than what this is so far.
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But everything leads to the fact that why is it
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that the Chinese government,
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which was, frankly, after a slow start,
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the gold standard of doing viral tracking for SARS 1,
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why have they apparently done so little
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and shared so little?
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I think it asks, it begs a lot of questions.
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Okay, so let's then talk about the Chinese government.
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There's several governments, right?
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So one is the local government of Wuhan.
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And not just the Chinese government.
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Let's talk about government.
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No, let's talk about human nature.
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Let's just keep zooming out.
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Let's talk about planet Earth.
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No, so there's the Wuhan local government.
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There's the Chinese government led by Xi Jinping.
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And there's governments in general.
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I'm trying to empathize.
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So my father was involved with Chernobyl.
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I'm trying to put myself into the mind of local officials,
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of people who are like,
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oh shit, there's a potential catastrophic event
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happening here and it's my ass
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because there's incompetence all over the place.
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Yeah, human nature is such that there's incompetence
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all over the place and you're always trying to cover it up.
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And so given that context,
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I want to lay out all the possible incompetence,
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all the possible malevolence,
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all the possible geopolitical tensions here.
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All right, where in your sense did the coverup start?
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So there's this suspicious fact,
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it seems like that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
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had a public database of thousands
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of sampled bad coronavirus sequences
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and that went offline in September of 2019.
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What's that about?
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So let me talk about that specific
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and then I'll also follow your path of zooming out
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and it's a really important.
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Is that a good starting point?
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It's a great starting point, yeah, yeah.
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So but there's a bigger story
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but let me talk about that.
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So the Wuhan Institute of Virology
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and we can go into the whole history
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of the Wuhan Institute of Virology either now or later
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because I think it's very relevant to the story
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but let's focus for now on this database.
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They had a database of 22,000 viral samples
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and sequence information about viruses
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that they had collected.
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Some of which, the collection of some of which
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was supported through funding from the NIH,
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not a huge NIH through the EcoHealth Alliance.
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It's a relatively small amount, $600,000 but not nothing.
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The goal of this database
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was so that we could understand viral evolution
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so that exactly for this kind of moment
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where we had an unknown virus,
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we could say, well, is this like anything
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that we've seen before?
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And that would help us both understand what we're facing
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and be better able to respond.
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So this was a password protected public access database.
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In 2019, in September 2019,
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it became inaccessible and then the whole,
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a few months later, the entire database disappeared.
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What the Chinese have said is that because there were
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all kinds of computer attacks on this database
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but why would that happen in September 2019
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before the pandemic, at least as far as we know.
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So just to clarify.
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It went down to September 2019
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just so we get the year straight.
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January 2020 is when the virus
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really started getting the press.
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So we're talking about December 2019,
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a lot of early infections happened.
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September 2019 is when this database goes down.
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Just to clarify because you said it quickly,
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the Chinese government said
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that their database was getting hacked.
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Therefore, Xu Zhengli, the director of this part
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of the Wuhan Institute of Virology said that.
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Oh really, she was the one that said it?
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She was the one who said it.
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Oh boy, I did not even know that part.
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Well, she's an interesting character.
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We'll talk about her.
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So the excuse is that it's getting cyber attacked a lot
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so we're gonna take it down without any further explanation
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which seems very suspicious.
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And then this virus starts to emerge
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in October, November, December.
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There's a lot of argument about that, but after.
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Sorry to interrupt, but some people are saying
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that the first outbreak could have happened
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as early as September.
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I think it's more likely it's October, November,
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but for the people who are saying that the first outbreak,
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the first incident of a known outbreak,
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at least to somebody, happened in September,
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they make the argument, well, what if that also happened
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in mid September of 2019?
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I'm not prepared to go there,
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but there are some people who make that argument.
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But I think, again, if I were to put myself
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in the mind of officials,
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whether it's officials within the Wuhan Institute of Virology
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or Wuhan local officials,
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I think if I notice some major problem,
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like somebody got sick,
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some sign of, oh shit, we screwed up,
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that's when you kind of do the slow,
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there's like a Homer Simpson meme
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where you slowly start backing out,
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and I would probably start hiding stuff.
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Yeah, and then coming up with really shady excuses.
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It's like you're in a relationship
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and your girlfriend wants to see your phone,
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and you're like, I'm sorry,
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I'm just getting attacked by the Russians now.
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The cyber security issue, I can't.
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Yeah, I wish I could.
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I wish I could, it's just unsafe right now.
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So would it be okay if I give you my kind of macro view
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of the whole information space
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and why I believe this has been so contentious?
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If I had to give my best guess,
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and I underline the word guess of what happened,
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and your background, your family background with Chernobyl
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I think is highly relevant here.
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So after the first SARS, there was a recognition
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that we needed to distribute knowledge about virology
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and epidemiology around the world,
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that people in China and Africa and Southeast Asia,
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they were the frontline workers,
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and they needed to be doing a lot of the viral monitoring
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and assessment so that we could have an early alarm system.
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And that was why there was a lot of investment
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in all of those places in building capacity
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and training people
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and helping to build institutional capacity.
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And the Chinese government,
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they recognized that they needed to ramp things up.
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And then the World Health Organization
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and the World Health Assembly,
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they had their international health regulations
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that were designed to create a stronger infrastructure.
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So that was the goal.
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There were a lot of investments,
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and I know we'll talk later
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about the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
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and I won't go into that right now.
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So there was all of this distributed capacity.
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And so in the early days, there's a breakout in Wuhan.
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We don't know, is it September, October, November?
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Maybe December is when the local authorities
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start to recognize that something's happening.
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But at some point in late 2019,
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local officials in Wuhan understand that something is up.
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And exactly like in Chernobyl,
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these guys exist within a hierarchical system,
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and they are going to be rewarded if good things happen,
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and they're going to be in big trouble
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if bad things happen under their watch.
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So their initial instinct is to squash it.
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And my guess is they think,
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well, if we squash this information,
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we can most likely beat back this outbreak,
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because lots of outbreaks happen all the time,
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including of SARS 1,
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where there was multiple lab incidents
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out of a lab in Beijing.
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And so they start their coverup on day one.
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They start screening social media.
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They send nasty letters to different doctors
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and others who are starting to speak up.
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But then it becomes clear that there's a bigger issue.
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And then the national government of China,
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again, this is just a hypothesis,
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the national government gets involved.
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They say, all right, this is getting much bigger.
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They go in and they realize
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that we have a big problem on our hands.
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They relatively quickly know
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that it's spreading human to human.
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And so the right thing for them to do then
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is what the South African government is doing now
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is to say, we have this outbreak.
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We don't know everything, but we know it's serious.
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But that's not the instinct of people in most governments
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and certainly not in authoritarian governments like China.
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And so the national government,
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they have a choice at that point.
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They can do option one,
link |
which is what we would hear called the right thing,
link |
which is total transparency.
link |
They criticize the local officials for having this coverup.
link |
And they say, now we're going to be totally transparent.
link |
But what does that do in a system
link |
like the former Soviet Union, like China now?
link |
If local officials say, wait a second,
link |
I thought my job was to cover everything up,
link |
to support this alternative reality
link |
that authoritarian systems need in order to survive.
link |
Well, now I'm gonna be held accountable
link |
for if I'm not totally transparent,
link |
like your whole system would collapse.
link |
So the national government, they have that choice
link |
and their only choice according to the logic of their system
link |
is to be all in on a coverup.
link |
And that's why they block the World Health Organization
link |
from sending its team to Wuhan for over three weeks.
link |
They overtly lie to the World Health Organization
link |
about human to human transmission.
link |
And then they begin their coverups.
link |
So they begin very, very quickly destroying samples,
link |
hiding records, they start imprisoning people
link |
for asking basic questions.
link |
Soon after they establish a gag order,
link |
preventing Chinese scientists from writing
link |
or saying anything about pandemic origins
link |
without prior government approval.
link |
And what that does means that there isn't a lot of data,
link |
there's not nearly enough data coming out of China.
link |
And so lots of responsible scientists outside of China
link |
who are data driven say, well,
link |
I don't have enough information to draw conclusions.
link |
And then into that vacuum step a relatively small number
link |
of largely virologists, but also others,
link |
respected scientists.
link |
And I know we'll talk about the, I think,
link |
infamous Peter Daszak who say,
link |
well, without any real foundation in the evidence,
link |
they say, we know pretty much this comes from nature
link |
and anyone who's raising the possibility
link |
of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist.
link |
So that message starts to percolate.
link |
And then in the United States, we have Donald Trump
link |
and he's starting to get criticized for America's failure
link |
to respond, prepare for and respond adequately
link |
And so he starts saying, well, I know first
link |
after praising Xi Jinping, he starts saying,
link |
well, I know that China did it and the WHO did it
link |
and he's kind of pointing fingers at everybody but himself.
link |
And then we have a media here that had shifted
link |
from the traditional model of he said, she said journalism,
link |
so and so said X and so and so said Y
link |
and then we'll present both of those views.
link |
With Donald Trump,
link |
he would make outlandish starting positions.
link |
So he would say, Lex is an ax murderer.
link |
And then in the early days, they would say,
link |
Lex is an ax murderer, Lex's friend says
link |
he's not an ax murderer and we have a four day debate,
link |
is he or isn't he?
link |
And then at day four, someone would say,
link |
why are we having this debate at all?
link |
Because the original point is just is baseless.
link |
And so the media just got in the habit,
link |
here's what Trump said and here's why it's wrong.
link |
It's very complicated to figure out
link |
what is the role of a politician?
link |
What is the role of a leader in this kind of game
link |
But certainly in when there's a tragedy,
link |
when there's a catastrophic event,
link |
what it takes to be a leader is to see clearly
link |
through the fog and to make big bold decisions
link |
that does speak to the truth of things.
link |
And even if it's unpopular truth,
link |
to listen to the people, to listen to all sides,
link |
to the opinions, to the controversial ideas
link |
and to see past all the bullshit,
link |
all the political bullshit and just speak to the people,
link |
speak to the world and make bold, big decisions.
link |
That's probably what was needed in terms of leadership.
link |
And I'm not so willing to criticize whether it's Joe Biden
link |
or Donald Trump on this.
link |
I think most people cannot be great leaders,
link |
but that's why when great leaders step up,
link |
we write books about them.
link |
And even though, I mean, I think of myself
link |
as a progressive person, I certainly was a critic
link |
of a lot of what President Trump did.
link |
But on this particular case,
link |
even though he may have said it in an uncouth way,
link |
Donald Trump was actually, in my view, right.
link |
I mean, when he said, hey, let's look at this lab.
link |
I mean, he said, I have evidence, I can't tell you.
link |
I don't think he even had the evidence.
link |
But his intuition that this probably comes from a lab,
link |
in my view was a correct intuition.
link |
And certainly I started speaking up
link |
about pandemic origins early in 2019.
link |
And my friends, my democratic friends were brutal with me
link |
saying, what are you doing?
link |
You're supporting Trump in an election year.
link |
And I said, just because Donald Trump is saying something
link |
doesn't mean that I need to oppose it.
link |
If Donald Trump says something that I think is correct,
link |
well, I wanna say it's correct,
link |
just as if he says something that I don't like,
link |
I'm gonna speak up about that.
link |
Good, you walked through the fire.
link |
So that's, you laid out the story here.
link |
And I think in many ways it's a human story.
link |
It's a story of politics, it's a story of human nature.
link |
But let's talk about the story of the virus.
link |
And let's talk about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
So maybe this is a good time to try to talk about
link |
its history, about its origins,
link |
about what kind of stuff it works on,
link |
about biosafety levels, and about Batwoman.
link |
Yeah, Xu Zhengli, yes.
link |
So what is the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
when did it start?
link |
Yeah, so it's a great question.
link |
So after SARS 1, which was in the early 2000, 2003, 2004,
link |
there was this effort to enhance,
link |
as I mentioned before, global capacity, including in China.
link |
So the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
had been around for decades before then.
link |
But there was an agreement between the French
link |
and the Chinese governments to build the largest BSL4 lab,
link |
BSL4 lab, so biosafety level four.
link |
So in these what are called high containment labs,
link |
there's level four, which is the highest level.
link |
And people have seen that on TV and elsewhere,
link |
where you have the people in the different suits
link |
and all of these protections.
link |
And then there's level three, which is still very serious,
link |
but not as much as level four.
link |
And then level two is just kind of goggles and some gloves
link |
and maybe a face mask, much less.
link |
So the French and the Chinese governments agreed
link |
that France would help build the first
link |
and still the largest BSL4 plus some mobile BSL3 labs.
link |
And they were going to do it in Wuhan.
link |
And Wuhan is kind of like China's Chicago.
link |
And I had actually been, it's a different story.
link |
I'd been in Wuhan relatively not that long
link |
before the pandemic broke out.
link |
And that was why I knew that Wuhan,
link |
it's not some backwater where there are a bunch of yokels
link |
eating bats for dinner every night.
link |
This is a really sophisticated, wealthy, highly educated
link |
and cultured city.
link |
And so I knew that it wasn't like
link |
that even the one on seafood market
link |
wasn't like some of these seafood markets
link |
that they have in Southern China or in Cambodia,
link |
where I lived for two years.
link |
I mean, it was a totally different thing.
link |
I'm gonna have to talk to you about some of the,
link |
including the Wuhan market,
link |
just some of the wild food going on here.
link |
Because you've traveled that part of the world.
link |
But let's not get there.
link |
Let's not get distracted.
link |
Good, as I was telling you, Lex, before,
link |
and this is maybe an advertisement,
link |
is having now listened to a number of your podcasts
link |
when I'm doing long ultra training runs
link |
or driving in the mountains.
link |
Like the really, because in the beginning,
link |
we have to talk about whatever it is is the topic.
link |
But the really good stuff happens later.
link |
So stay tuned. So friends,
link |
you should listen to the end.
link |
I have to say, as I was telling you before,
link |
like when I heard your long podcast with Jérôme Lanier
link |
and he talked about his mother at the very end,
link |
I mean, just beautiful stuff.
link |
So I don't know whether I can match beautiful stuff,
link |
but I'm gonna do my best.
link |
You're gonna have to find out.
link |
Exactly, stay tuned.
link |
So France had this agreement
link |
that they were going to help design and help build
link |
this BSL4 lab in Wuhan.
link |
And it was going to be with French standards,
link |
and there were going to be 50 French experts
link |
who were going to work there
link |
and supervise the work that happened
link |
even after the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
in the new location started operating.
link |
But then when they started building it,
link |
the French contractors, the French overseers
link |
were increasingly appalled
link |
that they had less and less control,
link |
that the Chinese contractors were swapping out new things,
link |
it wasn't built up to French standards,
link |
so much that at the end, when it was finally built,
link |
the person who was the vice chairman of the project
link |
and a leading French industrialist named Marieau
link |
refused to sign off.
link |
And he said, we can't support,
link |
we have no idea what this is,
link |
whether it's safe or not.
link |
And when this lab opened,
link |
remember it was supposed to have 50 French experts,
link |
it had one French expert.
link |
And so the French were really disgusted.
link |
And actually when the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
and its new location opened in 2018, two things happened.
link |
One, French intelligence privately approached
link |
US intelligence saying, we have a lot of concerns
link |
about the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
about its safety, and we don't even know
link |
who's operating there,
link |
is it being used as a dual use facility?
link |
And also in 2018, the US embassy in Beijing
link |
sent some people down to Wuhan to go and look at,
link |
well, at this laboratory.
link |
And they wrote a scathing cable that Josh Rogin
link |
from the Washington Post later got his hands on saying,
link |
this is really unsafe,
link |
they're doing work on dangerous bat coronaviruses
link |
in conditions where a leak is possible.
link |
And so then you mentioned Shujing Li,
link |
and I'll connect that to these virologists
link |
who I was talking about.
link |
So there's a very credible thesis
link |
that because these pathogenic outbreaks happen
link |
in other parts of the world,
link |
having partnerships with experts in those parts of the world
link |
must be a foundation of our efforts.
link |
We can't just bring everything home
link |
because we know that viruses don't care about borders
link |
and boundaries, and so if something happens there,
link |
it's going to come here.
link |
So very correctly, we have all kinds of partnerships
link |
with experts in these labs,
link |
and Shujing Li was one of those partners.
link |
And her closest relationship was with Peter Daszak,
link |
who's a British, I think now American,
link |
but the president of a thing called EcoHealth Alliance,
link |
which was getting money from NIH.
link |
And basically, EcoHealth Alliance
link |
was a pass through organization.
link |
And over the years, it was only about $600,000.
link |
So almost all of her funding
link |
came from the Chinese government,
link |
but there's a little bit that came from the United States.
link |
And so she became their kind of leading expert
link |
and the point of contact
link |
between the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
and certainly Peter Daszak, but also with others.
link |
And that was why in the earliest days of the outbreak,
link |
I didn't mention that,
link |
I did mention that there were these virologists
link |
who had this fake certainty
link |
that they knew it came from nature
link |
and it didn't come from a lab
link |
and they called people like me conspiracy theorists
link |
just for raising that possibility.
link |
But when Peter Daszak was organizing that effort
link |
in February of 2020,
link |
what he said is we need to rally
link |
behind our Chinese colleagues.
link |
And the basic idea was
link |
these international collaborations are under threat.
link |
And I think it was because of that,
link |
because Peter Daszak's basically his major contribution
link |
as a scientist was just tacking his name
link |
on work that Shujang Li had largely done.
link |
He was defending a lot,
link |
certainly for himself and his organization.
link |
So you think EcoHealth Alliance and Peter
link |
is less about money,
link |
it's more about kind of almost like legacy
link |
because you're so attached to this work?
link |
Is it just on a human level?
link |
I mean, I've been criticized for being actually,
link |
I'm certainly a big critic of Peter Daszak,
link |
but I've been criticized by some for being too lenient.
link |
I mean, it's so easy to say,
link |
oh, somebody they're like an evil ogre
link |
and just trying to do evil
link |
and cackling in their closet or whatever.
link |
But I think for most of us,
link |
even those of us who do terrible, horrible things,
link |
the story that we tell ourselves
link |
and we really believe is that we're doing the thing
link |
that we most believe in.
link |
I mean, I did my PhD dissertation
link |
on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
link |
They genuinely saw themselves as idealists.
link |
They thought, well, we need to make radical change
link |
to build a better future.
link |
And what they described as,
link |
that they felt was radical change
link |
was a monstrous atrocities by us.
link |
So the criticism here of Peter
link |
is that he was a part of an organization
link |
that was kind of, well, funding an effort
link |
that was an unsafe implementation
link |
of a biosafety level four laboratory.
link |
Well, a few things.
link |
So what he thought he was doing was,
link |
and then what he thought he was doing
link |
is itself highly controversial
link |
because there's one there that in 2011,
link |
there were, I know you've talked about this
link |
with other guests, but in 2011,
link |
there were the first published papers
link |
on this now infamous gain of function research.
link |
And basically what they did,
link |
both in different labs and certainly in the United States,
link |
in Wisconsin and in the Netherlands,
link |
was they had a bird flu virus
link |
that was very dangerous, but not massively transmissive.
link |
And they had a gain of function process
link |
through what's called serial passage,
link |
which means basically passing advice,
link |
like natural selection, but forcing natural selection
link |
by just passing a virus through different cell cultures
link |
and then selecting for what it is that you want.
link |
So relatively easily, they took this deadly,
link |
but not massively transmissive virus
link |
and turned it into, in a lab,
link |
a deadly and transmissive virus.
link |
And that showed that this is really dangerous.
link |
And so there were, at that point,
link |
there was a huge controversy.
link |
There were some people, like Richard Ebright
link |
and Mark Lipsitch at Harvard,
link |
who were saying that this is really dangerous.
link |
We're in the idea that we need to create monsters
link |
to study monsters.
link |
I think maybe even you have said that in the past.
link |
It doesn't make sense
link |
because there's an unlimited number of monsters.
link |
And so what are we gonna do?
link |
Create an unlimited number of monsters.
link |
And if we do that,
link |
eventually the monsters are going to get out.
link |
Then there was the Peter Daszak camp,
link |
and he got a lot of funding,
link |
particularly from the United States,
link |
who said, well, and certainly Collins and Fauci
link |
were supportive of this.
link |
And they thought, well, there's a safe way
link |
to go out into the world
link |
to collect the world's most dangerous viruses
link |
and to poke and prod them
link |
to figure out how they might mutate,
link |
how they might become more dangerous
link |
with the goal of predicting future pandemics.
link |
And that certainly never happened
link |
with the goal of creating vaccines and treatments.
link |
And that largely never happened,
link |
but that was, so Peter Daszak kind of epitomized
link |
that second approach.
link |
And as you've talked about in the past,
link |
in 2014, there was a funding moratorium
link |
in the United States, and then in 2017, that was lifted.
link |
It didn't affect the funding
link |
that went to the EcoHealth Alliance.
link |
So when this happened in the beginning,
link |
and again, coming back to Peter's motivations,
link |
I don't think, here's the best case scenario for Peter.
link |
I'm gonna give you what I imagine he was thinking,
link |
and then I'll tell you what I actually think.
link |
So I think here's what he's thinking.
link |
This is most likely a natural origin outbreak.
link |
Just like SARS one, again, in Peter's hypothetical mind,
link |
just like SARS one, this is most likely a natural outbreak.
link |
We need to have an international coalition
link |
in order to fight it.
link |
If we allow these political attacks
link |
to undermine our Chinese counterparts
link |
and the trust in these relationships
link |
that we've built over many years,
link |
we're really screwed because they have
link |
the most local knowledge of these outbreaks.
link |
And even though, and this guy gets a lot more complicated,
link |
even though there are basic questions
link |
that anybody would ask and that Shujing Li herself did ask
link |
about the origins of this pandemic,
link |
even though Peter Daszak, and I'll describe this
link |
in a moment, had secret information that we didn't have,
link |
that in my mind massively increases the possibility
link |
of a lab incident origin, I, Peter Daszak,
link |
would like to guide the public conversation
link |
in the direction where I think it should go
link |
and in support of the kind of international collaboration
link |
that I think is necessary.
link |
That's a strong, positive discussion
link |
because it's true that there's a lot of political BS
link |
and a lot of kind of just bickering and lies
link |
as we've talked about.
link |
And so it's very convenient to say, you know what?
link |
Let's just ignore all of these quote unquote lies
link |
and my favorite word, misinformation.
link |
And then because the way out from this serious pandemic
link |
is for us to work together.
link |
So let's strengthen our partnerships
link |
and everything else is just like noise.
link |
Yeah, so let's, and so then now I wanna do
link |
my personal indictment of Peter Daszak
link |
because that's my view, but I wanted to fairly.
link |
Because I think that we all tell ourselves stories
link |
and also when you're a science communicator,
link |
you can't in your public communications
link |
give every doubt that you have or every nuance,
link |
you kind of have to summarize things.
link |
And so I think that he was, again,
link |
in this benign interpretation trying to summarize
link |
in the way that he thought the conversations should go.
link |
Here's my indictment of Peter Daszak.
link |
And I feel like a Brutus here,
link |
but I have not come here to praise Peter Daszak
link |
because while Peter Daszak was doing all of this
link |
and making all of these statements about,
link |
well, we pretty much know it's a natural origin.
link |
Then there was this February, 2020 Lancet letter
link |
where it turns out, and we only knew this later
link |
that he was highly manipulative.
link |
So he was recruiting all of these people.
link |
He drafted the infamous letter calling people like me,
link |
conspiracy theorists.
link |
He then wrote to people like Ralph Barak and Linfa Wang,
link |
who are also very high profile virologists saying,
link |
well, let's not put our names on it.
link |
So it doesn't look like we're doing it,
link |
even though they were doing it.
link |
He didn't disclose a lot of information that they had.
link |
It was a strategic move.
link |
So just in case people are not familiar,
link |
February, 2020, Lancet letter was TLDR,
link |
is a lab leak hypothesis, is a conspiracy theory.
link |
So like with the authority of science,
link |
not saying like it's highly likely,
link |
saying it's obvious, duh, it's natural origin.
link |
Everybody else is just,
link |
everything else is just misinformation.
link |
And look, there's a bunch of really smart people
link |
that signed this, therefore it's true.
link |
Yeah, not only that, so there were the people
link |
who, 27 people signed that letter.
link |
And then after President Trump cut funding
link |
to EcoHealth Alliance, then he organized 77 Nobel laureates
link |
to have a public letter criticizing that.
link |
But what Peter knew then that we didn't fully know
link |
is that in March of 2018, EcoHealth Alliance,
link |
in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
and others, had applied for a $14 million grant to DARPA,
link |
which is kind of like the VC side of the venture capital
link |
side of the Defense Department.
link |
They're kind of, where they do kind of big ideas.
link |
By the way, as a tiny tangent,
link |
I've gotten a lot of funding from DARPA.
link |
They fund a lot of excellent robotics research.
link |
And DARPA is incredible.
link |
And among the things that they applied for
link |
is that we, meaning Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
is gonna go and it's gonna collect
link |
the most dangerous bat coronaviruses in Southern China.
link |
And then we, as this group,
link |
are going to genetically engineer these viruses
link |
to insert a furin cleavage site.
link |
So I think when everyone's now seen the image
link |
of the SARS CoV2 virus, it has these little spike proteins,
link |
these little things that stick out,
link |
which is why they call it a coronavirus.
link |
Within that spike protein are these furin cleavage sites,
link |
which basically help with the virus
link |
getting access into our cells.
link |
And they were going to genetically engineer
link |
these furin cleavage sites into these bat coronaviruses,
link |
the serbicoviruses.
link |
And then, and so then a year and a half later,
link |
We see a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site
link |
unlike anything that we've ever seen before
link |
in that category of SARS like coronaviruses.
link |
That, well, yes, I mean, the DARPA very correctly
link |
didn't support that application.
link |
Well, let's actually, let's like pause on that.
link |
So for a lot of people, that's like the smoking gun.
link |
Okay, let's talk about this 2018 proposal to DARPA.
link |
So I guess who's drafted the proposal?
link |
Is it EcoHealth, but the proposal is to do research.
link |
EcoHealth is technically a US funded organization.
link |
And then the idea was to do work
link |
at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
With, yeah, so it was.
link |
Yes, so EcoHealth, basically the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
was gonna go and they were gonna collect these viruses
link |
and store them at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
But they're also gonna do the actual task.
link |
According, it's a really important point.
link |
According to their proposal, the actual work
link |
was going to be done at the lab of Ralph Barak
link |
at the University of North Carolina,
link |
who's probably the world's leading expert on coronaviruses.
link |
And so we know that DARPA didn't fund that work.
link |
We know, I think quite well that Ralph Barak's lab,
link |
in part because it was not funded by DARPA,
link |
they didn't do that specific work.
link |
What we don't know is, well, what work was done
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
because WIV was part of this proposal.
link |
They had access to all of the plans.
link |
They had done, they had their own capacity
link |
and they had already done a lot of work
link |
in genetically altering this exact category of viruses.
link |
They had created chimeric mixed viruses.
link |
They had mastered pretty much all of the steps
link |
in order to achieve this thing that they applied
link |
for funding with EcoHealth to do.
link |
And so the question is, did the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
go through with that research anyway?
link |
And in my mind, that's a very, very real possibility.
link |
It would certainly explain
link |
why they're giving no information.
link |
And as you know, I've been a member
link |
of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee
link |
on Human Genome Editing, which Dr. Tedros created
link |
in the aftermath of the announcement
link |
of the world's first CRISPR babies.
link |
And it was just basically the first time
link |
and it was just basically the exact same story.
link |
So Ho Chiang Kui, a Chinese scientist,
link |
it was not a first tier scientist,
link |
but a perfectly adequate second tier scientist,
link |
came to the United States, learned all of these capacities,
link |
went back to China and said,
link |
well, there's a much more permissive environment.
link |
I'm gonna be a world leader.
link |
I'm gonna establish both myself and China.
link |
So in every scientific field, we're seeing this same thing
link |
where you kind of learn a model and then you do it in China.
link |
So is it possible that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
with this exact game plan was doing it anyway?
link |
We have no clue what work was being done
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
It seems extremely likely
link |
that at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
and this is certainly the US government position,
link |
there was the work that was being done in Dr. Hsu's lab,
link |
but that wasn't the whole WIV.
link |
We know, at least according to the United States government,
link |
that there was the Chinese military,
link |
that PLA was doing work there.
link |
Were they doing this kind of work, not to create a bioweapon,
link |
but in order to understand these viruses,
link |
maybe to develop vaccines and treatments?
link |
It seems like a very, very logical possibility.
link |
And then, so we know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
had all of the skills.
link |
We know that they were part of this proposal.
link |
And then you have Peter Daszak, who knows all of this,
link |
that at that time, in February of 2020, we didn't know.
link |
But then he comes swinging out of the gate,
link |
saying anybody who's raising this possibility
link |
of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist.
link |
I mean, it really makes him look, in my mind,
link |
And yet, not to at least be somewhat open minded on this,
link |
because he knows all the details.
link |
He knows that it's not 0%.
link |
I mean, there's no way in his mind could you even argue that.
link |
So it's potential because of the bias,
link |
because of your focus.
link |
I mean, it could be the Anthony Fauci masks thing,
link |
whereas he knows there's some significant probability
link |
that this is happening.
link |
But in order to preserve good relations
link |
with our Chinese colleagues,
link |
we want to make sure we tell a certain kind of narrative.
link |
So it's not really lying.
link |
It's doing the best possible action at this time
link |
to help the world.
link |
Not that this already happened.
link |
But that's how like...
link |
I think it's quite likely that that was the story
link |
that he was telling himself.
link |
But it's that lack of transparency, in my mind,
link |
is fraudulent, that we were struggling
link |
to understand something that we didn't understand.
link |
And that I just think that people who possess
link |
that kind of information, especially when the existence,
link |
like the entire career of Peter Daszak
link |
is based on US taxpayers,
link |
there's a debt that comes with that.
link |
And that debt is honesty and transparency.
link |
And for all of us, and you talked about
link |
your girlfriend checking your phone.
link |
For all of us, being honest and transparent
link |
in the most difficult times is really difficult.
link |
If it were easy, everybody would do it.
link |
And I just feel that Peter was the opposite of transparent
link |
and then went on the offensive.
link |
And then had the gall of joining,
link |
I know we can talk about this,
link |
this highly compromised joint study process
link |
with the international experts
link |
and their Chinese government counterparts.
link |
And used that as a way of furthering
link |
this, in my mind, fraudulent narrative
link |
that it almost certainly came from natural origins
link |
and a lab origin was extremely unlikely.
link |
Just to stick briefly on the proposal to wrap that up,
link |
because I do think, in a kind of John Stewart way,
link |
if you heard that a bit yet,
link |
sort of kind of like common sense way,
link |
the 2018 proposal to DARPA from EcoHealth Alliance
link |
and Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
just seems like a bit of a smoking gun to me, like that.
link |
So there's this excellent book that people should read
link |
called Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID 19.
link |
Matt Ridley and Alena Chan, I think Alena is in MIT.
link |
Probably. At the Broad, yeah.
link |
At Broad Institute, yeah, yeah.
link |
So she, I heard her in an interview
link |
give this analogy of unicorns.
link |
And where basically somebody writes a proposal
link |
to add horns to horses, the proposal is rejected.
link |
And then a couple of years later or a year later,
link |
a unicorn shows up.
link |
In the place where they're proposing to do it.
link |
I mean, that's so, I had.
link |
And then everyone's like, it's natural origin.
link |
It's like, it's possible it's natural origin.
link |
Like we haven't detected a unicorn yet.
link |
And this is the first time we've detected a unicorn.
link |
Or it could be this massive organization
link |
that was planning, is fully equipped,
link |
has like a history of being able to do this stuff,
link |
has the world experts to do it, has the funding,
link |
has the motivation to add horns to horses.
link |
And now a unicorn shows up and they're saying, nope.
link |
Definitely natural.
link |
That connects to your first question
link |
of how do I get to my 85%?
link |
And here's a summary of that answer.
link |
And so it's what I said in my 60 Minutes interview
link |
a long time ago, of all the gin joints
link |
and all the towns and all the world,
link |
the quote from Casablanca.
link |
And so of all the places in the world
link |
where we have an outbreak of a SARS like bat coronavirus,
link |
it's not in the area of the natural habitat
link |
of the horseshoe bats.
link |
It's the one city in China
link |
with the first and largest level four virology lab,
link |
which actually wasn't even using it.
link |
They were doing level three and level two for this work,
link |
where they had the world's largest collection
link |
of bat coronaviruses,
link |
where they were doing aggressive experiments
link |
designed to make these scary viruses scarier,
link |
where they had been part of an application
link |
to insert a furin cleavage site,
link |
able to infect human cells.
link |
And when the outbreak happened,
link |
we had a virus that was ready for action to infect humans.
link |
And to this day, better able to infect humans
link |
than any other species, including bats.
link |
And then from day one, there's this massive coverup.
link |
And then on top of that,
link |
in spite of lots of efforts by lots of people,
link |
there's basically no evidence
link |
for the natural origin hypothesis.
link |
Everything that I've described just now is circumstantial,
link |
but there's a certain point
link |
where you add up the circumstances
link |
and you see this seems pretty, pretty likely.
link |
I mean, if we're getting to 100%,
link |
we are not at 100% by any means.
link |
There still is a possibility of a natural origin.
link |
And if we find that, great.
link |
But from everything that I know,
link |
that's how I get to my 85.
link |
And we'll talk about why this matters
link |
in the political sense, in the human sense,
link |
in the science, in the realm of science,
link |
all of those factors.
link |
But first, as Nietzsche said, let us look into the abyss
link |
and the games we'll play with monsters.
link |
That is colloquially called gain of function research.
link |
Let me ask the kind of political sounding question,
link |
which is how people usually phrase it.
link |
Did Anthony Fauci fund gain of function research
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
I mean, I've obviously been very closely monitoring this.
link |
I've spoken a lot about it.
link |
I've written about it.
link |
And it depends on, I mean, not to quote Bill Clinton,
link |
but to quote Bill Clinton, it depends on what
link |
the definition of is is.
link |
And so if you use a common sense definition of gain of function,
link |
and by gain of function, there are lots of things
link |
like gene therapies that are gain of function.
link |
But here, what we mean is gain of function
link |
for pathogens potentially able to create human pandemics.
link |
But if you use the kind of common sense language,
link |
well, then he probably did.
link |
If you use the technical language from a 2017 NIH
link |
document, and you read that language very narrowly,
link |
I think you can make a credible argument that he did not.
link |
There's a question, though, and Francis Collins
link |
talked about that in his interview with you.
link |
But then there's a question that we know from now
link |
that we have the information of the reports submitted
link |
by EcoHealth Alliance to the NIH, and some of which
link |
were late or not even delivered, that some of this research
link |
was done on MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome virus.
link |
And if that was the case, there is, I think,
link |
a colorable argument that that would be considered
link |
gain of function research even by the narrow language
link |
of that 2017 document.
link |
But I definitely think, and I've said this repeatedly,
link |
that Rand Paul can be right, and Tony Fauci can be right.
link |
And the question is, how are we defining gain of function?
link |
And that's why I've always said the question in my mind
link |
isn't, was it or wasn't it gain of function,
link |
as if that's like a binary thing, if not, grade,
link |
and if yes, guilty.
link |
The question is just, what work was being done at the Wuhan
link |
Institute of Virology?
link |
What role, if any, did US government funding
link |
play in supporting that work?
link |
And what rights do we all have as human beings
link |
and as American citizens and taxpayers
link |
to get all of the relevant information about that?
link |
So let's try to kind of dissect this.
link |
So who frustrates you more, Rand Paul or Anthony
link |
Fauci in his discussion or the discussion itself?
link |
So for example, gain of function is
link |
a term that's kind of more used just
link |
to mean playing with viruses in the lab
link |
to try to develop more dangerous viruses.
link |
Is this kind of research a good idea?
link |
Is it also a good idea for us to talk about it in public,
link |
in the political way that it's been talked about?
link |
Is it OK that US may have funded gain of function research
link |
I mean, it's kind of assumed, just like with Bill Clinton,
link |
there was very little discussion of, I think,
link |
correct me if I'm wrong, but whether it's
link |
OK for a president, male or female,
link |
to have extramarital sex or is it
link |
OK for a president to have extramarital sex
link |
with people on his staff or her staff?
link |
It was more the discussion of lying, I think.
link |
It was, did you lie about having sex or not?
link |
And in this gain of function discussion,
link |
what frustrates me personally is there's not
link |
a deep philosophical discussion about whether we
link |
should be doing this kind of research
link |
and what are the ethical lines, research on animals at all.
link |
Those are fascinating questions.
link |
Instead, it's a gotcha thing.
link |
Did you or did you not fund research on gain of function?
link |
And did you fund, it's almost like a bioweapon.
link |
Did you give money to China to develop this bioweapon that
link |
now attacked the rest of the world?
link |
So I mean, all those things are pretty frustrating,
link |
but is there, I think, the thing you
link |
can untangle about Anthony Fauci and gain of function
link |
research in the United States and the EcoHealth Alliance
link |
and Wuhan Institute of Virology that's clarifying.
link |
What were the mistakes made?
link |
So on gain of function, there actually
link |
has been a lot of debate.
link |
I mentioned before in 2011, these first papers,
link |
there was a big debate.
link |
Mark Lipsitch, who's formerly at Harvard now
link |
with the US government working in the president's office,
link |
he led a thing called the Cambridge Group that
link |
was highly critical of this work,
link |
basically saying we're creating monsters.
link |
They had the funding pause in 2014.
link |
They spent three years putting together a framework,
link |
and then they lifted it in 2017.
link |
So we had a thoughtful conversation.
link |
Unfortunately, it didn't work.
link |
And I think that's where we are now.
link |
So I absolutely think that there are real issues
link |
with the relationship between the United States government
link |
and EcoHealth Alliance, and through that,
link |
the EcoHealth Alliance with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
And one issue is just essential transparency,
link |
because as I see it, it's most likely the case
link |
that we transferred a lot of our knowledge and plans and things
link |
to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
And again, I'm sure that Xiaojiang Li is not herself
link |
I'm sure of that, even though I've never met her.
link |
But there are just a different set of pressures
link |
on people working in an authoritarian system
link |
than people who are working in other systems.
link |
That doesn't mean it's entirely different.
link |
And so I absolutely think that we shouldn't give $1
link |
to an organization, and certainly a virology institute,
link |
where you don't have full access to their records,
link |
to their databases.
link |
We don't know what work is happening there.
link |
And I think that we need to have that kind of full examination.
link |
So I understand what Dr. Fauci is doing is saying,
link |
hey, what I hear Dr. Fauci saying,
link |
what I hear from you, Rand Paul, is
link |
you're accusing me of starting this pandemic.
link |
And you're using gain of function as a proxy for that.
link |
And we have, when there are Senate hearings,
link |
every senator gets five minutes.
link |
And the name of the game is to translate your five minutes
link |
into a clip that's going to run on the news.
link |
And so I get that there is that kind of gotcha.
link |
But I also think that Dr. Fauci and the National
link |
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the NIH
link |
should have been more transparent.
link |
Because I think that in this day and age, where
link |
there are a lot of people poking around
link |
and this whole story of COVID origins,
link |
we would not be where we are if it
link |
wasn't for a relatively small number of people.
link |
And I'm part of, there are two, as I know, two groups.
link |
One is these internet sleuths known as Drastic.
link |
And a number of them are part of a group
link |
that I'm part of called, it's not our official name,
link |
but called the Paris Group.
link |
It's about two dozen experts around the world,
link |
but centered around some very high level French academics.
link |
So we've all been digging and meeting with each other
link |
regularly since last year.
link |
And our governments across the board, certainly China,
link |
but including the United States, haven't
link |
been as transparent as they need to be.
link |
So definitely mistakes were made on all sides.
link |
And that's why for me from day one,
link |
I've been calling for a comprehensive investigation
link |
into this issue that certainly obviously looks at China,
link |
but we have to look at ourselves.
link |
We did not get this right.
link |
So do you, I'm just gonna put Rand Paul aside here.
link |
Politician playing political games, it's very frustrating,
link |
but it is what it is on all sides.
link |
Anthony Fauci, you think should have been more transparent
link |
and maybe more eloquent in expressing the complexity
link |
of all of this, the uncertainty in all of this.
link |
Yeah, and I get that it's really hard to do that
link |
because let's say you have one, you speak a paragraph
link |
and it's got four sentences.
link |
And one of those sentences is the thing
link |
that's going to be turned into Twitter.
link |
All right, let me put it back.
link |
I get really, so I'll try not to be emotional about this,
link |
but I've heard Anthony Fauci a couple of times now
link |
say that he represents science.
link |
I know what he means by that.
link |
He means in this political bickering,
link |
all that kind of stuff that for a lot of people,
link |
he represents science, but words matter.
link |
And this isn't just clips.
link |
I mean, maybe I'm distinctly aware of that
link |
doing this podcast.
link |
Yeah, I talked for hundreds of hours now,
link |
maybe over a thousand hours,
link |
but I'm still careful with the words.
link |
I'm trying not to be an asshole
link |
and I'm aware when I'm an asshole
link |
and I'll apologize for it.
link |
If the words I represent science left my mouth,
link |
which they very well could,
link |
I would sure as hell be apologizing for it
link |
and not because I got in trouble,
link |
I would just feel bad about saying something like that.
link |
And even that little phrase, I represent science.
link |
No, Dr. Fauci, you do not represent science.
link |
I love science, the millions of scientists
link |
that inspired me to get into it.
link |
To fall in love with the scientific method
link |
in the exploration of ideas through the rigor of science,
link |
that Anthony Fauci does not represent.
link |
He's one, I believe, great scientist of millions.
link |
He does not represent anybody.
link |
He's just one scientist.
link |
And I think the greatness of a scientist
link |
is best exemplified in humility
link |
because the scientific method basically says,
link |
you're standing before the fog, the mystery of it all,
link |
and slowly chipping away at the mystery.
link |
And it's embarrassing, it's humiliating
link |
how little you know, that's the experience.
link |
So the great scientists have to have humility to me.
link |
And especially in their communication,
link |
they have to have humility.
link |
And I mean, I don't know,
link |
and some of it is also words matter
link |
because great leaders have to have the poetry of action.
link |
They have to be bold and inspire action
link |
across millions of people.
link |
But you also have to, through that poetry of words,
link |
express the complexity of the uncertainty
link |
you're operating under.
link |
Be humble in the face of not being able
link |
to predict the future or understand the past,
link |
or really know what's the right thing to do,
link |
but we have to do something.
link |
And through that, you have to be a great leader
link |
that inspires action.
link |
And some of that is just words.
link |
And he chose words poorly.
link |
I mean, so I'm all torn about this.
link |
And then there's politicians, they're taking those words
link |
and magnifying them and playing games with them.
link |
And of course, that's a disincentive
link |
for the people who do, the scientific leaders
link |
that step into the limelight to say any more words.
link |
So they kind of become more conservative
link |
with the words they use.
link |
I mean, it just becomes a giant mess.
link |
But I think the solution is to ignore all of that
link |
and to be transparent, to be honest, to be vulnerable.
link |
And to express the full uncertainty
link |
of what you're operating under,
link |
to present all the possible actions
link |
and to be honest about the mistakes they made in the past.
link |
I mean, there's something, even if you're not
link |
directly responsible for those mistakes,
link |
taking responsibility for them is a way to win people over.
link |
I don't think leaders realize this often
link |
in the modern age, in the internet age.
link |
They can see through your bullshit.
link |
And it's really inspiring when you take ownership.
link |
So to do the thought experiment in public,
link |
do a thought experiment if there was a lab leak
link |
and then lay out all the funding, the EcoHealth Alliance,
link |
all the incredible science going on at the Wuhan Institute
link |
of Virology and the NIH.
link |
Lay out all the possible ethical problems.
link |
Lay out all the possible mistakes that could have been made
link |
and say like, this could have happened.
link |
And if this happened, here's the best way to respond to it
link |
and to prevent it in the future.
link |
And just lay all that complexity out.
link |
I wish we would have seen that.
link |
And I have hope that this conversation,
link |
conversations like it, your work,
link |
and books on this topic will inspire young people today
link |
when they become in the Anthony Fauci's role
link |
to be much more transparent and much more humble
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
That this is just a relic of the past
link |
when there's a person, no offense to me,
link |
in a suit that has to stand up and speak
link |
with clarity and certainty.
link |
I mean, that's just a relic of the past.
link |
Do you mind if I...
link |
I agree with a great deal of what you said.
link |
And it's really unfortunate that our,
link |
certainly the Chinese government, as I said before,
link |
our government wasn't as transparent
link |
as I feel they should have been,
link |
particularly in the early days of the pandemic
link |
and particularly with regard to the issue
link |
of pandemic origins.
link |
I mean, we know that Dr. Fauci was on calls
link |
with people like Christian Anderson and Scripps and others
link |
in those early days, raising questions.
link |
Is this an engineered virus?
link |
There were a lot of questions.
link |
And it's kind of sad.
link |
I mean, as I mentioned before, I've been one,
link |
I mean, and certainly there were others,
link |
but there weren't a lot of us,
link |
of the people who from the earliest days of the pandemic
link |
were raising questions about, hey, not so fast here.
link |
And I launched my website on pandemic origins
link |
in April of last year, April, 2020.
link |
It got a huge amount of attention.
link |
And actually my friend, Matt Pottinger,
link |
who is the deputy national security advisor,
link |
when he was reaching out to people in the US government
link |
and in allied government saying,
link |
hey, we should look into this,
link |
what he was sending them was my website.
link |
It wasn't some US government information.
link |
And by the way, people should still go to the website.
link |
You keep updating it and it's an incredible resource.
link |
Thank you, thank you, jamiemetzel.com.
link |
And it's really unfortunate that our governments
link |
and international institutions for pretty much all of 2020
link |
weren't doing their jobs of really probing this issue.
link |
People were hiding behind this kind of false consensus.
link |
And I'm critical of many people,
link |
even when I heard Francis Collins interview with you,
link |
I just felt, well, he wasn't as balanced
link |
on the issue of COVID origins.
link |
Certainly Dr. Fauci could have in his conversation
link |
with Rand Paul, it wasn't even a conversation,
link |
but in some process in the aftermath,
link |
could have laid things out a bit better.
link |
He did say, and Francis Collins did say
link |
that we don't know the origins and that was a shift
link |
and we need to have an investigation.
link |
So now, but having said all of that,
link |
I do kind of one, I have tremendous respect for Dr. Fauci
link |
for the work that he's done on HIV AIDS.
link |
I mean, I have been vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine.
link |
Dr. Fauci was a big part of the story
link |
of getting us these vaccines
link |
that have saved millions and millions of lives.
link |
And so I don't think, I mean, there's a lot to this story.
link |
And then the second thing is it's really hard
link |
to be a public health expert
link |
because you have your mission is public health.
link |
And so, and you have to, if you are leading
link |
with all of your uncertainty,
link |
it's a really hard way to do things.
link |
And so like, even now, like if I go to CVS
link |
and I get a Tylenol, somebody has done a calculation
link |
of how many people will die from taking Tylenol
link |
and they say, well, all right, we can live with that.
link |
And that's why we have regulation.
link |
And so all of us are doing kind of summaries.
link |
And then we have people in public health who are saying,
link |
wow, we've summed it all up and you should do X.
link |
You should get your kids vaccinated for measles.
link |
You should not drive your car at a hundred miles an hour.
link |
You should, don't drink lighter fluid,
link |
whatever these things are.
link |
And we want them to kind of give us broad guidelines.
link |
And yet now our information world is so fragmented
link |
that if you're not being honest about something,
link |
something material, someone's going to find out
link |
and it's going to undermine your credibility.
link |
And so I agree with you that there's a greater requirement
link |
for transparency now.
link |
Maybe there always has been,
link |
but there's an even greater requirement for it now
link |
because people want to trust that you're speaking honestly
link |
and that you're saying, well, here's what I know.
link |
And this is based on what I know,
link |
here are the conclusions that I draw.
link |
But if it's just, and again, I don't think the words,
link |
I'm science or whatever it was are the right words.
link |
But if it's just, trust me because of who I am,
link |
I don't think that flies anywhere anymore.
link |
Can I just ask you about the Francis Collins interview
link |
that I did, if you got a chance to hear that part.
link |
I think in the beginning we talk about the lab leak.
link |
What are your thoughts about his response,
link |
basically saying it's worthy of an investigation,
link |
but I mean, I don't know how you would interpret it.
link |
I see, it's funny because I heard it in the moment
link |
as it's great for the head of NIH
link |
to be open minded on this.
link |
But then the internet and Mr. Joe Rogan
link |
and a bunch of friends and colleagues told me that,
link |
yeah, well, that's too late and too little.
link |
Yeah, so first let me say, I've been on Joe's podcast twice
link |
and I love the guy, which doesn't mean that I agree
link |
with everything he does or says.
link |
And on this issue, and I'm normally a pretty calm
link |
and measured guy, and when you're just out running
link |
with your AirPods on and you start yelling
link |
into the wind in Central Park,
link |
nobody else knows why you're yelling, but well.
link |
So that you had such a moment?
link |
I had a moment with Collins.
link |
And again, Francis Collins is someone I respect enormously.
link |
I mean, I live a big chunk of my life living in the world
link |
of genetics and biotech and my book, Hacking Darwin
link |
is about the future of human genetic engineering
link |
and his work on the Human Genome Project
link |
and so many other things have been fantastic.
link |
And I'm a huge fan of the work of NIH.
link |
And he was right to say that the Chinese government
link |
hasn't been forthcoming and we need to look into it.
link |
But then you asked him, well, how will we know?
link |
And then his answer was,
link |
we need to find the intermediate host.
link |
Remember I said before, and so that made it clear
link |
that he thought, well, we should have an investigation,
link |
but it comes from nature and we just need to find
link |
that whatever it is, that intermediate animal host
link |
in the wild, and that'll tell us the story.
link |
So he already had the conclusion in mind
link |
and they're just waiting for the evidence
link |
to support the conclusion.
link |
That was my feeling.
link |
I felt like he was open in general, but he was tilting.
link |
And again, your first question was where do I fall?
link |
He was like, I'm 85% or whatever it is, 80, 75, 90,
link |
whatever it is in the direction of a lab incident.
link |
It made it feel that he was 90, 10 in the other direction,
link |
which is still means that he's open minded
link |
about the possibility.
link |
And that's why, in my view, every single person
link |
who talks about this issue,
link |
I think the right answer in my view is,
link |
we don't know conclusively.
link |
In my, then this is my personal view,
link |
the circumstantial evidence is strongly in favor
link |
of a lab incident origin,
link |
but that could immediately shift
link |
with additional information.
link |
We need transparency, but we should come together
link |
in absolutely condemning the outrageous coverup
link |
carried out by the Chinese government,
link |
which to this day is preventing any meaningful investigation
link |
into pandemic origins.
link |
We have, if you use the economist numbers,
link |
15 million people who are dead as a result of this pandemic.
link |
And I believe that the actions of the Chinese government
link |
are disgracing the memory of these 15 million dead.
link |
They're insulting the families and the billions of people
link |
around the world who have suffered
link |
from this totally avoidable pandemic.
link |
And whatever the origin, the fact the criminal coverup
link |
carried out by the Chinese government,
link |
which continues to this day, but most intensely
link |
in the first months following the outbreak,
link |
that's the reason why we have so many dead.
link |
And certainly, as I was saying before,
link |
I and a small number of others have been carrying this flame
link |
since early last year, but it's kind of crazy
link |
that our governments haven't been demanding it.
link |
And we can talk about the World Health Organization process,
link |
which was deeply compromised in the beginning.
link |
Now it's become much, much better.
link |
But again, it was the pressure of outsiders
link |
that played such an important role in shifting
link |
our national and international institutions.
link |
And while that's better than nothing,
link |
it would have been far better if our governments
link |
and international organizations
link |
had done the right thing from the start.
link |
If I could just make a couple of comments about Joe Rogan.
link |
So there's a bunch of people in my life
link |
who have inspired me, who have taught me a lot,
link |
who I even look up to, many of them are alive,
link |
most of them are dead.
link |
I wanna say that Joe said a few critical words
link |
about the conversation with Francis Collins,
link |
most of it offline, with a lot of great conversations
link |
about it, some he said publicly.
link |
And he was also critical to say that me asking hard questions
link |
in an interview is not my strong suit.
link |
And I really want to kind of respond to that,
link |
which I did privately as well, but publicly,
link |
to say that Joe is 100% right on that.
link |
But that doesn't mean that always has to be the case.
link |
And that is definitely something I wanna work on.
link |
Because most of the conversations I have,
link |
I wanna see the beautiful ideas in people's minds.
link |
But there's some times where you have to ask
link |
the hard questions to bring out the beautiful ideas.
link |
And it's hard to do.
link |
And Joe is very good at this.
link |
He says the way he put it in his criticisms,
link |
and he does this in his conversations,
link |
which is, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
link |
There's a kind of sense like,
link |
did you just say what you said?
link |
Let's make sure we get to the bottom,
link |
we'll clarify what you mean.
link |
Because sometimes really big negative or difficult ideas
link |
can be said as a quick aside in a sentence,
link |
like it's nothing, but it could be everything.
link |
And you wanna make sure you catch that
link |
and you talk about it.
link |
And not as a gotcha, not as a kinda way
link |
to destroy another human being,
link |
but to reveal something profound.
link |
And that's definitely something I wanna work on.
link |
I also want to say that, as you said,
link |
you disagree with Joe on quite a lot of things.
link |
So for a long time, Joe was somebody
link |
that I was just a fan of and listened to.
link |
He's now a good friend.
link |
And I would say we disagree more than we agree.
link |
And I love doing that.
link |
But at the same time, I learned from that.
link |
So it's like dual, like nobody in this world
link |
can tell me what to think.
link |
But I think everybody has a lesson to teach me.
link |
I think that's a good way to approach it.
link |
Whenever somebody has words of criticism,
link |
I assume they're right and walk around with that idea
link |
to really sort of empathize with that idea
link |
because there's a lesson there.
link |
And oftentimes, my understanding of a topic
link |
is altered completely or it becomes much more nuanced
link |
or much richer for that kind of empathetic process.
link |
But definitely, I do not allow anybody
link |
to tell me what to think, whether it's Joe Rogan
link |
or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or my parents
link |
or the proverbial girlfriend, which I don't actually have.
link |
But she's still busting my balls.
link |
In my imagination, I have a girlfriend in Canada
link |
that I have imagined, exactly, imagining conversations.
link |
So I want to mention that.
link |
But also, I don't know if you've gotten a chance
link |
to see this, but I'd love to also mention
link |
this Twitter feud between two other interesting people,
link |
which is Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris
link |
or Sam Harris and others in general.
link |
And it kind of breaks my heart that these two people
link |
I listen to that are very thoughtful about a bunch of issues.
link |
Let's put COVID aside because people are very emotional
link |
I mean, I think they're deeply thoughtful and intelligent,
link |
whether you agree with them or not.
link |
And I always learn something from their conversations.
link |
And they are legitimately or have been
link |
for a long time friends.
link |
And it's a little bit heartbreaking to me
link |
to see that they basically don't talk in private anymore.
link |
And there's occasional jabs on Twitter.
link |
And I hope that changes.
link |
I hope that changes in general for COVID,
link |
that COVID brought out the, I would say,
link |
the most emotional sides of people, the worst in people.
link |
And I think there hasn't been enough love
link |
and empathy and compassion.
link |
And to see two people from whom I've learned a lot,
link |
whether it's Eric Weinstein, Brett Weinstein, Sam Harris,
link |
you can criticize them as much as you want,
link |
their ideas as much as you want.
link |
But if you're not sufficiently open minded
link |
to admit that you have a lot to learn
link |
from their conversations, I think you're not being honest.
link |
And so I do hope they have those conversations.
link |
And I hope we can kind of,
link |
I think there's a lot of repairing to be done post COVID
link |
of relationships, of conversations.
link |
And I think empathy and love can help a lot there.
link |
This is also just a, I talked to Sam privately,
link |
but this is also a public call out
link |
to put a little bit more love in the world.
link |
And for these difficult conversations to happen.
link |
Because Brett Weinstein could be very wrong
link |
about a bunch of topics here around COVID,
link |
but he could also be right.
link |
And the only way to find out
link |
is to have those conversations.
link |
Because there's a lot of people listening
link |
to both Sam Harris and Brett Weinstein.
link |
And if you go into these silos
link |
where you just keep telling each other
link |
that you are the possessors of truth
link |
and nobody else is the possessor of truth,
link |
what starts happening is you both lose track
link |
or the capability of arriving at the truth.
link |
Because nobody's in the possession of the truth.
link |
So anyway, this is just a call out
link |
that we should have a little bit more conversation,
link |
a little bit more love.
link |
And both of those guys are guys who I respect.
link |
And as you know, Brett, and again, as I mentioned,
link |
they're just a handful of us,
link |
who were the early people raising questions
link |
about the origins of this.
link |
Of this pandemic, right.
link |
He was there also talking.
link |
So people have heard him speak quite a bit
link |
about any viral drugs and all that kind of stuff.
link |
But he was also raising concerns about lab leak early on.
link |
And so, but I completely agree with you
link |
that we don't have to agree with everybody,
link |
but it's great to have healthy conversations.
link |
That's how we grow.
link |
And absolutely, we live in a world where we're kind of,
link |
if we're not careful,
link |
pushed into these little information pockets.
link |
And certainly on social media,
link |
I have different parts of my life.
link |
One is focusing on issues of COVID origins.
link |
And then I have genetics and biotechnology.
link |
And then I have, which maybe we'll talk about later,
link |
one shared world, which is about
link |
how do we build a safer future?
link |
And when I say critical things like the Chinese government,
link |
we'd have to demand a full investigation
link |
into pandemic origins.
link |
This is an outreach.
link |
Then it's really popular.
link |
When I say, let's build a better future
link |
for everyone in peace and love,
link |
it's like, wow, three people liked it.
link |
And one was my mother.
link |
And so I just feel like we need to build,
link |
we used to have that connectivity just built in
link |
because we had these town squares
link |
and you couldn't get away from them.
link |
Now we can get away from them.
link |
So engaging with people who are of a different background
link |
is really essential.
link |
I'm on Fox News sometimes three, four times a week.
link |
And I wouldn't, in my normal life,
link |
I'm not watching that much of Fox News
link |
or even television more generally.
link |
But I just feel like if I just speak to people
link |
who are very similar to me, maybe it'll be comfortable.
link |
But what have I contributed?
link |
So I think we really have to have
link |
those kinds of conversations and recognize
link |
that at the end of the day, most people want to be happy.
link |
They want to live in a better world.
link |
They maybe have different paths to get there.
link |
But if we just break into camps
link |
that don't even connect with each other,
link |
that's a much more dangerous world.
link |
Let's dive back into the difficult pool.
link |
Just like you said, in the English speaking world,
link |
it seems popular, almost easy to demonize China.
link |
The Chinese government, I should say.
link |
But even China, like there's this kind of gray area
link |
that people just fall into.
link |
And I'm really uncomfortable with that.
link |
Perhaps because in my mind, in my heart, in my blood
link |
are echoes of the Cold War and that kind of tension.
link |
But it feels like we almost desire conflict.
link |
So we see demons when there is none.
link |
So I'm a little cautious to demonize.
link |
But at the same time, you have to be honest.
link |
So it's like honest with the demons that are there
link |
and honest when they're not.
link |
This is kind of a geopolitical therapy session of sorts.
link |
So let's keep talking about China
link |
a little bit from different angles.
link |
So let's return to the director of the Center
link |
of Emerging Infectious Disease
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Xi Zhengli,
link |
colloquially referred to as Batwoman.
link |
So do you think she's lying?
link |
Do you think she's being forced to lie?
link |
I've known a bunch of virologists
link |
in private and public conversation
link |
that respect her as a human being, as a scientist.
link |
I respect her as a human being.
link |
Sorry, as a scientist, not a human being.
link |
Because I think they don't know the human.
link |
They know the scientists.
link |
And they respect her a lot as a scientist.
link |
Yeah, I respect her.
link |
I've never met her.
link |
We had one exchange, which I'll mention in a second
link |
in a virtual forum.
link |
But I do respect her.
link |
I actually think that she is somebody
link |
who has tried to do the right thing.
link |
She was one of the heroes of tracking down
link |
the origins of SARS 1.
link |
And that was a major contribution.
link |
But as we talked about earlier,
link |
it's a different thing living, being a scientist,
link |
or really kind of anything.
link |
It's different being one of those people
link |
in an authoritarian society
link |
than it is being in a different type of society.
link |
And so when Xi Zhengli said that the reason
link |
the WIV database was taken offline in September 19
link |
was because of computer hacks,
link |
I don't think that's the story.
link |
I don't think she thinks that's the story.
link |
When I asked her in March of 2021, March of this year,
link |
in a Rutgers online forum,
link |
when I asked her whether the Chinese military
link |
had any engagement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
in any way, and she said, absolutely not, paraphrasing,
link |
I think she was lying.
link |
Do I think that she had the ability to say,
link |
well, either one, yes, but I can't talk about it,
link |
or I know there are a lot of things
link |
that are happening at this institute
link |
that I don't know about, and that could be one.
link |
Could she have said that the personnel
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
have all had to go through classification training
link |
so that they can know about what can and can't be said?
link |
Like she could have said all those things,
link |
but she couldn't say all of those things.
link |
And I think that's why so many, at least in my view,
link |
so many people certainly in the Western world
link |
got this story wrong from the beginning,
link |
because if your only prism was the science,
link |
and you just assumed this is a science question
link |
to be left to the scientists,
link |
should Zhengli is just like any scientist
link |
working in Switzerland or Norway,
link |
the Chinese government isn't interfering in any way,
link |
and we can trust them, that would lead you down one path.
link |
In my view, the reason why I progressed as I did
link |
is I felt like I had two keys,
link |
and I had one key as I live in the science world
link |
through my work with WHO and my books and things like that.
link |
But I also have another part of my life
link |
in the world of geopolitics as an Asia quote unquote expert
link |
and former National Security Council official
link |
And I felt for me, I needed both keys to open that door.
link |
But if I only had the science key,
link |
I wouldn't have had the level of doubt and suspicion
link |
But if my starting point was only doubt and suspicion,
link |
well, it's coming from China,
link |
it must be that the government is guilty,
link |
like that wouldn't help either.
link |
I wonder what's in her mind,
link |
whether it's fear or habit,
link |
because I think a lot of people in the former Soviet Union,
link |
it's like Chernobyl, it's not really fear,
link |
it's almost like a momentum.
link |
It's like the reason I showed up to this interview
link |
wearing clothes, as opposed to being naked.
link |
It's like, all right.
link |
It's like, it's just all of us are doing the clothes thing.
link |
Although there was a startup years ago called Naked News.
link |
Did you ever hear about that?
link |
They just would read the exact news.
link |
No, after each story, they'd take something off
link |
until the end, I don't think.
link |
It's a good idea for a podcast.
link |
Stay tuned, next time I'm with Michael Miles.
link |
So what do you think,
link |
I mean, because the reason I asked that question is,
link |
how do we kind of take steps to improve
link |
without any kind of revolutionary action?
link |
You could say, we need to inspire the Chinese people
link |
to elect, to sort of revolutionize the system
link |
from within, but like, who are we to suggest that?
link |
Because we have our flaws too.
link |
We should be working on our flaws as well.
link |
And so, but at the individual scientist level,
link |
what are the small acts of rebellion that could be done?
link |
How can we improve this?
link |
Well, so I don't know about small acts of rebellion,
link |
but I'll try to answer your question
link |
from a few different perspectives.
link |
So right now, actually, as we speak,
link |
there is a special session
link |
of the World Health Assembly going on.
link |
And the World Health Assembly is the governing authority
link |
over the World Health Organization,
link |
where it's represented by states and territories,
link |
194 of them, tragically not including Taiwan,
link |
because of the Chinese government's assistance.
link |
But they're now beginning a process
link |
of trying to negotiate a global pandemic treaty
link |
to try to have a better process
link |
for responding to crises exactly like we're in.
link |
But unfortunately, for the exact same reasons
link |
that we have failed, I mean, we had a similar process
link |
after the first SARS, we set up what we thought
link |
was the best available system,
link |
and it has totally failed here.
link |
And it's failed here because of the inherent pathologies
link |
of the Chinese government system.
link |
We are suffering from a pandemic that exists
link |
because of the internal pathologies of the Chinese state.
link |
And that's why on one hand, I totally get this impulse.
link |
Well, we do it our way, they do it their way.
link |
Who's to say that one way is better?
link |
And certainly right now in the United States,
link |
we're at each other's throats.
link |
We have a hard time getting anything meaningful done.
link |
And I'm sure there are people who are saying,
link |
well, that model looks appealing.
link |
But just as people could look to the United States
link |
and say, well, because the United States
link |
has such a massive reach, what we do domestically
link |
has huge implications for the rest of the world,
link |
they become stakeholders in our politics.
link |
And that's why I think for a lot of years,
link |
people have just been looking at US politics,
link |
not because it's interesting,
link |
but because the decisions that we make
link |
have big implications for their lives.
link |
The same is true for ours.
link |
You could say that the lack of civil and political rights
link |
in China is, I mean, it's up to the Chinese,
link |
not even people, because they have no say,
link |
but to their government.
link |
And they weren't democratically elected,
link |
that they are recognized as the government.
link |
But some significant percentage of the 15 million people
link |
now dead from COVID are dead
link |
because in the earliest days following the outbreak,
link |
whatever the origin, the voices of people
link |
sounding the alarm were suppressed,
link |
that the Chinese government had an,
link |
just like in Chernobyl, the Chinese government
link |
had a greater incentive to lie
link |
to the international community than to tell the truth.
link |
And everybody was incentivized
link |
to pretty much do the wrong thing.
link |
And so that's why I think one of the big messages
link |
of this pandemic is that all of our fates
link |
are tied to everybody else's fates.
link |
And so while we can say and should say,
link |
well, let's focus on our own communities and our countries,
link |
we're all stakeholders in what happens elsewhere.
link |
Can I ask you a weird question?
link |
So I'm gonna do a few podcast interviews
link |
with interesting people in Russia, in the Russian language,
link |
because I could speak Russian.
link |
And a lot of those people have,
link |
are not usually speaking in these kinds of formats.
link |
Do you think it's possible to interview Xi Jinping?
link |
Do you think it's possible to interview somebody like her
link |
or anyone in the Chinese government?
link |
And I think the reason is
link |
because I think they would, one,
link |
be uncomfortable being in any environment
link |
where really unknown questions will be asked.
link |
And I actually, so as you know, on this topic,
link |
the Chinese, as I mentioned earlier,
link |
the Chinese government has a gag order on Chinese scientists.
link |
They can't speak without prior government approval.
link |
Xu Zhengli has been able to speak.
link |
And she's spoken at a number of forums.
link |
I mentioned this Rutgers event.
link |
What was the nature of that forum, the Rutgers event?
link |
All of them were kind of science conversations
link |
about the pandemic, including the origins issue.
link |
But I think that she, in her response to my question,
link |
it was kind of this funny thing.
link |
So they had this event organized by Rutgers.
link |
And I went on, there was an online event on Zoom,
link |
but I got on there and I just realized
link |
it was very poorly organized.
link |
Like normally the controls that you would have
link |
about who gets to chat to who, who gets to ask questions,
link |
none of them were set.
link |
And so I kind of couldn't believe it.
link |
I was just sitting at home in my neon green fleece
link |
and I just started sending chat messages to Xu Zhengli.
link |
So you could, anybody could send any.
link |
Anybody could, it was insane.
link |
But I thought, wow, this is incredible.
link |
And so then it was unclear who got to ask questions.
link |
And so I was like posting questions
link |
and then I was sending chats to the organizers
link |
of the event saying, I really have a question.
link |
And first they said, well, you can submit your questions
link |
and we'll have submitted questions.
link |
And then if we have time, we'll open up.
link |
So I just, I mean, I just thought, well, what the hell?
link |
I just sent messages to everybody.
link |
And then the event was already done.
link |
They were 15 minutes over time.
link |
And then they said, all right,
link |
we have time just for one question.
link |
And it's Jamie Metzl.
link |
And like, as I'm sitting there in my running clothes,
link |
like I wasn't, I was like multitasking and I heard my name.
link |
And so I went diving back and I asked this question
link |
about, did you know all of the work that was happening
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not just your work?
link |
And can you confirm that US intelligence has said
link |
that the military played a role,
link |
was engaged with the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
Do you deny that the Chinese military was involved
link |
in any way with the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
And as I said before, she said, this is crazy.
link |
It got, it actually got,
link |
that one question got covered in the media
link |
because it was like, I think an essential question.
link |
But I just think that since then, to my knowledge,
link |
she's not been in any public forums,
link |
but that's why most people would be shocked
link |
that to date there has been no comprehensive
link |
international investigation into pandemic origins.
link |
There is no whistleblower provision.
link |
So if you're, my guess is there are at least tens,
link |
maybe hundreds of people in China
link |
who have relevant information
link |
about the origins of the pandemic who are terrified
link |
and don't dare share it.
link |
And let's just say somebody wanted
link |
to get that information out, to send it somewhere.
link |
There's no official address.
link |
The WHO doesn't have that, nobody has that.
link |
And so I would love, I mean, you may as well ask.
link |
I don't think it's likely that there'll be a yes,
link |
but it could well be that there are defectors
link |
who will want to speak.
link |
So let me also push back on this idea.
link |
So one, I want to ask if the language barrier is a thing.
link |
Because I've talked to,
link |
so I understand Russian culture, I think,
link |
or not understand, this is the thing.
link |
I don't understand basically anything in this world.
link |
But I mean, I hear the music that is Russian culture
link |
I don't hear that music for Chinese culture.
link |
It's just not something I've experienced.
link |
So it's a beautiful, rich, complex culture.
link |
And from my sense, it seems distant to me.
link |
Like whenever I look, even like we mentioned offline Japan
link |
and so on, I probably don't even understand
link |
I believe I kind of do because I did martial arts
link |
my whole life, but even that, it's just so distant.
link |
People who've lived in Japan, foreigners for like 20 years
link |
say the exact same thing, yeah.
link |
This makes me sad.
link |
It makes me sad because I will never be able
link |
to fully appreciate the literature, the conversations,
link |
the people, the little humor and the subtleties.
link |
And those are all essential to understand
link |
even this cold topics of science.
link |
Because all of that is important to understand.
link |
So that's a question for me if you think
link |
language barriers a thing.
link |
But the other thing I just want to kind of comment on
link |
is the criticism of journalism that somebody like
link |
Shi Zhengli or even Shi Zhengpeng, just anybody in China,
link |
very skeptical to have really conversations
link |
with anybody in the western media.
link |
Because it's like what are the odds that they will try
link |
to bring out the beautiful ideas in the person.
link |
And honestly, this is a harsh criticism.
link |
I apologize, but I kind of mean it, is the journalists
link |
that have some of these high profile conversations
link |
often don't do the work.
link |
They come off as not very intelligent.
link |
And I know they're intelligent people.
link |
They have not done the research.
link |
They have not come up and like read a bunch of books.
link |
They have not even read the Wikipedia article.
link |
Meaning put in the minimal effort to empathize,
link |
to try to understand the culture of the people,
link |
all the complexities, all the different ideas in the spaces.
link |
Do all the incredible, not all,
link |
but some of the incredible work that you've done initially.
link |
Like that, you have to do that work to earn the right
link |
to have a deep real conversation with some of these folks.
link |
And it's just disappointing to me
link |
that journalists often don't do that work.
link |
Yeah, so on that, just first I completely agree with you.
link |
I mean, there is just an incredible beauty
link |
in Chinese culture and I think all cultures,
link |
but certainly China has such a deep and rich history,
link |
amazing literature and art and just human beings.
link |
I mean, I'm a massive critic of the Chinese government.
link |
I'm very vociferous about the really genocide in Xinjiang,
link |
the absolute effort to destroy Tibetan culture,
link |
the destruction of democracy in Hong Kong,
link |
incredibly illegal efforts to seize
link |
basically the entire South China Sea.
link |
And I could go on and on and on.
link |
But Chinese culture is fantastic.
link |
And I mean, I can't speak to every technical field,
link |
but just in terms of having journalists,
link |
and I'll speak to American journalists,
link |
people like Peter Hessler who have really invested the time
link |
to live in China, to learn the language, learn the culture.
link |
Peter himself, who is maybe one of our best journalists
link |
covering China from a soul level,
link |
he was kicked out of China.
link |
So it's very, very difficult.
link |
Yeah, it's really, and so for me,
link |
you talked about my website on pandemic origins.
link |
So when I launched it, I had it,
link |
I'm not a Chinese speaker,
link |
but I had the entire site translated into Chinese
link |
and I have it up on my website just because I felt like,
link |
well, if somebody, I mean, the great firewall
link |
makes it very, very difficult for people in China
link |
to access that kind of information.
link |
But I figured if somebody gets there
link |
and they wanna have it in their own language.
link |
But it's hard because the Chinese government
link |
is represented by these quote unquote wolf warriors,
link |
which is, it's like these basic ruffians.
link |
And I personally was condemned by name
link |
by the spokesman of the Chinese foreign ministry
link |
from the podium in Beijing.
link |
And so it's really hard because I absolutely think
link |
the American people and the Chinese people,
link |
I mean, maybe all people, but we have so much in common.
link |
I mean, yes, China is an ancient civilization,
link |
but they kind of wiped out their own civilization
link |
in the great leap forward and cultural revolution.
link |
They burned their scrolls, they smashed their artworks.
link |
And so it's a very young society,
link |
kind of like America is a young society.
link |
So we have a lot in common.
link |
And if we just kind of got out of our own ways,
link |
we could have a beautiful relationship,
link |
but there's a lot of things that are happening.
link |
Certainly the United States feels responsible
link |
to defend the post war international order
link |
that past generations helped build.
link |
And I'm a certain believer in that
link |
and China is challenging that and the Chinese government
link |
and they've shared that with that view
link |
with the Chinese people feel
link |
that they haven't been adequately respected.
link |
And now they're building a massive nuclear arsenal
link |
and all these other things to try to position themselves
link |
in the world with an articulated goal
link |
of being the lead country in the world.
link |
And that puts them at odds with the United States.
link |
So there are a lot of real reasons
link |
that we need to be honest about for division.
link |
But if that's all we focus on,
link |
if we don't say that there's another side of the story
link |
that brings us together,
link |
we'll put ourselves on an inevitable glide path
link |
to a terrible outcome.
link |
What do you make of Xi Jinping?
link |
So one in general and two more on lab leak
link |
and his meeting with our president Biden
link |
in discussion of lab leak.
link |
So I feel that Xi Jinping has a very narrow goal
link |
articulated of establishing China
link |
as the lead country in the world
link |
by the 100th anniversary of the founding
link |
of the modern Chinese state.
link |
And it's ruthless and it's strategic.
link |
There's a great book called The Long Game by Rush Doshi
link |
who's actually now working in the White House
link |
about this goal and our pretty clearly articulated goal
link |
to subvert the post war international order
link |
and in China's interest.
link |
And maybe every leader wants to organize the world
link |
around their interest.
link |
But I feel that his vision of what that entails
link |
is not one that I think is shareable
link |
for the rest of the world.
link |
I mean, the strength of the United States
link |
with all of our flaws is particularly
link |
in that post war period,
link |
we put forward a model that was desirable
link |
to a lot of people.
link |
Certainly it was desirable to people in Western Europe
link |
and then Eastern Europe and Japan and Korea.
link |
Doesn't mean it's perfect.
link |
The United States is deeply flawed.
link |
As articulated to date,
link |
I don't think most people and countries
link |
would like to live in a Sinocentric world.
link |
And so I certainly, as I mentioned before,
link |
I'm a huge critic of what Xi Jinping is doing,
link |
the incredible brutality in Xinjiang,
link |
in Tibet and elsewhere.
link |
Yeah, the censorship one gives me a lot of trouble
link |
on the science realm and just in journalism
link |
and just the world that prevents us
link |
from having conversations with each other.
link |
Do you know about the Winnie the Pooh thing?
link |
Yes, I mean, it's ridiculous.
link |
So to me, that's such a good illustration
link |
of censorship being petty.
link |
But censorship has to be petty
link |
because the goal of censorship,
link |
maybe you experienced in the Soviet Union,
link |
is to get into your head.
link |
Like if it's just censorship,
link |
like you say down with the state
link |
and like you can't say that,
link |
but you can say all the other things up to that point,
link |
eventually people will feel empowered
link |
to say down with the state.
link |
And so I think the goal
link |
of this kind of authoritarian censorship
link |
is to turn you into the censor.
link |
Yeah, because they almost have to have you think,
link |
well, if I'm gonna make any criticism,
link |
maybe they're gonna come and get me.
link |
So it's safer to not do it.
link |
I mean, I've traveled through North Korea
link |
pretty extensively and I've seen that in its ultimate form,
link |
but that's what they're trying to do in China too.
link |
Yeah, so for people who are not familiar,
link |
it's such a clear illustration
link |
of just the pettiness of censorship
link |
and leaders, the corrupting nature of power.
link |
But there's a meme of Xi Jinping
link |
with, I guess, Barack Obama.
link |
And the meme is that he looks like Winnie the Pooh
link |
And that was the President Xi Jinping
link |
looks like Winnie the Pooh.
link |
And I guess that became, because that got censored,
link |
like mentions of Winnie the Pooh got censored
link |
Winnie the Pooh became the unknowing revolutionary hero
link |
that represents freedom of speech and so on.
link |
But it's just such a absurd...
link |
Because we spend so much time in this conversation
link |
talking about the censorship
link |
that's a little bit more understandable to me,
link |
which is like, we messed up.
link |
And it wasn't, maybe it's almost understandable errors
link |
that happen in the progress of science.
link |
I mean, you could always argue
link |
that there's a lot of mistakes along the way
link |
and the censorship along the way caused the big mistake.
link |
You can argue that same way for the Chernobyl.
link |
But those are sort of understandable and difficult topics.
link |
Like Winnie the Pooh.
link |
But in your message, it shows both sides of the story.
link |
I mean, one, how petty authoritarian censors have to be.
link |
And that's why the messaging from the Chinese government
link |
No matter who you are,
link |
you have to be careful what you say.
link |
And that's why it's the story of Peng Shui,
link |
the tennis player.
link |
She dared raise her voice in an individual way.
link |
Jack Ma, the richest man in China,
link |
had a minor criticism of the Chinese government.
link |
He had basically disappeared from the public eye.
link |
Fan Bingbing, who's like one of the leading
link |
Chinese movie stars,
link |
she was seen as not loyal enough and she just vanished.
link |
And so the message is no matter who you are,
link |
no matter what level,
link |
if you don't mind everything you say,
link |
you could lose everything.
link |
I'm pretty hopeful, optimistic about a lot of things.
link |
And so for me, if the Chinese government stays
link |
with its current structure,
link |
I think what I hope they start fixing
link |
is the freedom of speech.
link |
I mean, the thing is if they open up freedom of speech
link |
really in a meaningful way,
link |
they can't maintain their current form of government.
link |
And it's connected, as I was saying before,
link |
to the origins of the pandemic.
link |
I mean, if my hypothesis was right,
link |
that was the big choice that the national government had.
link |
Do we really investigate the origins of the pandemic?
link |
Do we deliver a message that transparency is required,
link |
public transparency is required from local officials?
link |
If they do that, the entire system collapsed.
link |
Pretty much everybody in China has a relative
link |
who has died as a result of the actions
link |
of the Communist Party,
link |
particularly in the Great Leap Forward.
link |
It's nearly 50 million people died
link |
as a result of Mao's disastrous policies.
link |
And yet why is Mao's picture still on Tiananmen Square
link |
and it's on the money?
link |
Because maintaining that fiction
link |
is the foundation of the legitimacy of the Chinese state.
link |
If people were allowed, just say what you want.
link |
Do you really think Mao was such a great guy,
link |
even though your own relatives are dead as a result?
link |
Do you really buy even on this story
link |
that China did nothing wrong,
link |
even though in the earliest days of the pandemic,
link |
these two, at least Chinese scientists themselves,
link |
courageously issued a preprint paper
link |
that was later almost certainly forcibly retracted,
link |
saying, well, this looks like this comes
link |
from one of the Wuhan labs that we're studying.
link |
Like if you opened up that window,
link |
I think that the Chinese government
link |
would not be able to continue in its current form.
link |
And that's why they cracked down at Tiananmen Square.
link |
That's why with Feng Shui, the tennis player,
link |
if they had let her accuse somebody
link |
from the Communist Party of sexual assault,
link |
and they said, okay, now people,
link |
you can use social media
link |
and you can have your me too moment
link |
and let us know who in the Chinese Communist Party
link |
or your boss in a business has assaulted you.
link |
Just like in every society,
link |
I'm sure there's tons of women
link |
who've been sexually assaulted, manipulated, abused by men.
link |
And so I certainly hope
link |
that there can be that kind of opening.
link |
But if I were an authoritarian dictator,
link |
that's the thing I would be most afraid of.
link |
Yeah, dictator perhaps,
link |
but I think you can gradually increase the freedom of speech.
link |
So I think you can maintain control over the freedom
link |
So control the press more,
link |
but let the lower levels sort of open up YouTube, right?
link |
Open up like where individual citizens can make content.
link |
I mean, there's a lot of benefits to that.
link |
And then from an authoritarian perspective,
link |
you can just say that's misinformation,
link |
that's conspiracy theories, all those kinds of things.
link |
But at least I think if you open up that freedom of speech
link |
at the level of the individual citizen,
link |
that's good for entrepreneurship,
link |
for the development of ideas,
link |
of exchange of ideas, all that kind of stuff.
link |
I just think that increased the GDP of the country.
link |
So I think there's a lot of benefits.
link |
I feel like you can still play,
link |
we're playing some like dark thoughts here,
link |
but I feel like you could still play the game of thrones,
link |
still maintain power while giving freedom to the citizenry.
link |
Like I think just like with North Korea is a good example
link |
of where cracking down too much
link |
can completely destroy your country.
link |
Like there's some balance you can strike in your evil mind
link |
and still maintain authoritarian control over the country.
link |
Obviously, it's not obvious,
link |
but I'm a big supporter of freedom of speech.
link |
I mean, it seems to work really well.
link |
I don't know what the failure cases
link |
for freedom of speech are.
link |
Probably we're experiencing them with Twitter
link |
and like where the nature of truth
link |
is being completely kind of flipped upside down.
link |
But it seems like on the whole,
link |
ability to defeat lies with more,
link |
not through censorship, but through more conversations,
link |
more information is the right way to go.
link |
Can I tell you a little story, true stories
link |
about North Korea?
link |
So a number of years ago, I was invited
link |
to be part of a small six person delegation
link |
advising the government of North Korea
link |
on how to establish special economic zones
link |
because other countries have used these SEZs
link |
as a way of building their economies.
link |
And when I was invited, I thought,
link |
well, maybe there's an opening.
link |
And I certainly believe in that.
link |
So we flew to China across the border into North Korea.
link |
And then we were met by our partners
link |
from the North Korean Development Organization.
link |
And then we zigzagged the country for almost two weeks
link |
visiting all these sites for where they were intended
link |
to create these special economic zones.
link |
And in each site, they had their local officials
link |
and they had a map and they showed us where everything
link |
that was going to be built.
link |
And the other people who were like really technical experts
link |
on how to set up a special economic zone,
link |
they were asking questions, well, like,
link |
should you put the entrance over here
link |
or shouldn't you put it over there
link |
and what if there's flooding?
link |
And I kept asking just these basic questions,
link |
like, what do you think you're going to do here?
link |
Why do you think you can be competitive?
link |
Do you know anything about who you're competing against?
link |
Are you empowering your workers to innovate
link |
because everybody else is innovating?
link |
So at the end of the trip, they flew us to Pyongyang
link |
and they put us in this,
link |
it looked kind of like the United Nations.
link |
They probably had 500 people there
link |
and I gave a speech to them.
link |
I obviously was in English and it was translated
link |
and I figured, you know, I've come all this way,
link |
I'm just going to be honest.
link |
If they arrest me for being honest, that's on them.
link |
And I said, I'm here because I believe
link |
we can never give up hope,
link |
that we always have to try to connect.
link |
I'm also here because I think that North Korea
link |
connecting to the world economy is an important first step.
link |
But having visited all of your special economic zone sites
link |
and having met with all of your, or many of your officials,
link |
I don't think your plan has any chance of succeeding
link |
because you're trying to sell into a global market,
link |
but you need to have market information that,
link |
and I gave examples of GE and others
link |
that the innovation can't only happen at one place.
link |
And if you want innovation to happen
link |
from the people who are doing this,
link |
you have to empower them, they have to have access,
link |
they have to have voice.
link |
I mean, nobody, I mean, the people after,
link |
they kind of had to condemn me
link |
because what I was saying was challenging.
link |
So I certainly agree with you.
link |
And then just one side story of then that night,
link |
and it was just kind of bizarre
link |
because North Korea is, it's so desperately poor,
link |
but they were trying to impress us.
link |
And so we had these embarrassingly sumptuous banquets.
link |
And so for our final dinner that night,
link |
really it looked like something from Beauty and the Beast.
link |
I mean, it was like China and waiters and tuxedos,
link |
and they had this beautiful dinner.
link |
And then afterwards,
link |
because we'd now spent two weeks
link |
with our North Korean partners,
link |
they brought out this karaoke machine
link |
and our North Korean counterparts,
link |
they sang songs to us in Korean.
link |
And so I said, well, we want to reciprocate.
link |
Do you have any English songs on your karaoke machine?
link |
It's North Korea, obviously they didn't.
link |
But there was, I said, well, I have an idea.
link |
And so there was one of the women
link |
who'd been part of the North Korean delegation.
link |
She was able just to play the piano,
link |
just like you could hum a tune
link |
and she could play it on the piano.
link |
And so I said, all right, here's this tune,
link |
which I whispered in her ear.
link |
When I give you the signal,
link |
just play this tune over and over.
link |
And so I got these, I mean, there were the six of us
link |
and maybe 20 North Koreans,
link |
and we were all in a circle,
link |
so everybody hold hands and then put your right,
link |
just try to put your right foot in front of your left
link |
and then left foot in front of the right, going sideways.
link |
And I said, all right, hit it.
link |
And she played a North Korean version of Hava Nagila.
link |
And I think it was the first
link |
and only horror that they've ever done in North Korea.
link |
Was this recorded or no?
link |
Yeah, if they had free YouTube,
link |
this would have been a big one.
link |
Let's return to the beginning
link |
and just patient zero.
link |
It's kind of always incredible to think
link |
that there's one human at which it all started.
link |
Who do you think was patient zero?
link |
Do you think it was somebody that worked
link |
at Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
Do you think there was a leak of some other kind
link |
that led to the infection?
link |
Because there's this December 8th slash December 16th case
link |
of maybe you can describe what that is.
link |
And then there's like, what's his name?
link |
Michael Warobey has a nice timeline.
link |
I'm sure you have a timeline.
link |
But he has a nice timeline that puts the average
link |
at like November something, like 18th and November 16th
link |
as the average estimate for when the patient zero
link |
got infected, when the first human infection happened.
link |
Yeah, so just two points.
link |
One is it may be that there's infectee zero
link |
It could be that the first person infected was asymptomatic
link |
because we know there's a lot of people
link |
who are asymptomatic.
link |
And then there's the question of, well, who is patient zero?
link |
Meaning the first person to present themselves
link |
in some kind of health facility
link |
where that diagnosis could be made.
link |
So can we actually linger on that definition?
link |
So is that to you a good definition of patient zero?
link |
Okay, there's a bunch of stuff here
link |
because this virus is weird.
link |
So one is who gets infected, one who is infectious
link |
or the first person infect others.
link |
And who shows up to a hospital.
link |
Yeah, so I think that's why I'm calling the first person
link |
to show up to a hospital who's diagnosed with COVID 19.
link |
I'm calling that person patient zero.
link |
There's also, there's somewhere the first person
link |
And that person maybe never showed up in a hospital
link |
because maybe they were asymptomatic and never get sick,
link |
So let me start with what I'm calling infectee zero.
link |
Here are some options.
link |
I talked before about some person who was a villager
link |
and some remote village.
link |
It's almost impossible to imagine, but possible to imagine
link |
because strange things happen.
link |
And that person somehow gets to Wuhan.
link |
By the way, just to still make that argument,
link |
there's not an argument, it's a statement,
link |
but strange things happen all the time.
link |
It doesn't mean that logic doesn't apply
link |
and probabilities don't apply, but we all,
link |
I mean, in general principle, everyone, if we were honest,
link |
should be agnostic about everything.
link |
Like I think I'm Jamie, but is there a 0.01% chance
link |
or 0.001% chance that I'm not?
link |
I mean, how would I know?
link |
But there's a large number of people arguing
link |
about the meaning of the word I
link |
and that I'm Jamie.
link |
What is consciousness?
link |
So we could spend another three hours going into that one.
link |
So one possibility is there's some remote villager.
link |
Another possibility is there's somehow bizarrely,
link |
there are these infected animals
link |
that come from Southern China most likely.
link |
They all, maybe there's only one of them that's infected,
link |
which how could that possibly be?
link |
And it's only sent to Wuhan.
link |
It's not sent anywhere else,
link |
to any of the markets there or whatever.
link |
And then maybe somebody in a market is infected.
link |
That's one remote possibility, but a possibility.
link |
Another is that researchers
link |
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
go down to Southern China.
link |
We didn't, we haven't talked about it yet,
link |
but in 2012, there were six miners were sent
link |
into a copper mine in Southern China and Yunnan province.
link |
All of them got very sick
link |
with what now appear like COVID 19 like symptoms.
link |
Half of them died.
link |
Blood samples from them were taken
link |
to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere.
link |
And then after that, there were multiple site visits
link |
to that mine, collecting viral samples
link |
that were brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
included among those samples were,
link |
was this now infamous RETG 13 virus,
link |
which is among the genetically closest viruses
link |
There were other nine other or eight other viruses
link |
that were collected from that mine
link |
that were presumably very similar to that.
link |
And again, we have no access to the information
link |
about those and many of the other,
link |
most, almost all of the other viruses.
link |
So could it be that one of the people
link |
who was sent from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
or the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control,
link |
they went down there to collect
link |
and they got infected asymptomatically and brought it back?
link |
Could it be that they were working on these viruses
link |
in the laboratory and there was an issue
link |
with waste disposal?
link |
And we know that the Wuhan CDC had a major problem
link |
with waste disposal.
link |
And just before the pandemic,
link |
one, they put out an RFP to fix their waste disposal.
link |
And in early 2019, they moved to their new site,
link |
which was basically across the street
link |
from the Huanan Seafood Market.
link |
So could there have been issue of somebody infected
link |
in the lab of waste disposal?
link |
Could a laboratory animal, their experiences
link |
in China, actually China just recently passed a law
link |
saying it's illegal to sell laboratory animals
link |
in the market because there were scientists,
link |
or one scientist who was selling laboratory animals
link |
in the market and people would just come and buy.
link |
So there's so many, there are so many scenarios,
link |
but if I, again, connect it to my 85% number,
link |
I think in the whole category of laboratory related incidents,
link |
whether it's collection, waste,
link |
something connected to the lab,
link |
I think that's the most likely,
link |
but there are other credible people
link |
who would say they think it's not the most likely
link |
and I welcome their views
link |
and we need to have this conversation.
link |
So in your write up, but what's the URL?
link |
Because I always find it by doing Jamie Metzl lab leak.
link |
It's probably the easiest, just Google that.
link |
No, no, but if you just go to jamiemetzl.com,
link |
J A M I E M E T Z L dot com,
link |
then they're just a thing, it's COVID origins.
link |
It's COVID origins.
link |
Or you could just Google Jamie Metzl lab leak.
link |
Google search engine is such a powerful thing.
link |
You mentioned in that write up that you don't think,
link |
this could be just me misreading it
link |
or it's just slightly miswritten,
link |
but you don't think that the virus
link |
is from that 2012 mind, which is fascinating,
link |
could be the backbone for SARS COVID too.
link |
So what I mean, just the specific virus,
link |
which I mentioned, RATG13,
link |
and there's a whole history of that
link |
because it had a different name and it looked,
link |
and Xiaojiang Li provided wrong information
link |
about when it had been sequenced.
link |
I mean, there was a whole issue connected to that.
link |
But the genetic difference,
link |
even though it's 96.2% similar to the SARS COVID2 virus,
link |
that's actually a significant difference,
link |
even though that and a virus called Banal 52
link |
that was collected in Laos are the two most similar,
link |
there still are differences.
link |
So I'm not saying RATG13 is the backbone,
link |
but is there, I believe there is a possibility
link |
that other viruses that were collected
link |
either in that mine in Yunnan in Southern China
link |
or in Laos or Cambodia,
link |
because that was with the EcoHealth Alliance
link |
proposals and documents.
link |
Their plan was to collect viruses
link |
in Laos and Cambodia and elsewhere
link |
and bring them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
so that there are people.
link |
As a matter of fact, just when I was sitting here
link |
before this interview,
link |
I got a message from somebody who was saying,
link |
well, Peter Daszak is telling everybody
link |
that the viral sample, the Banal 52 from Laos
link |
proves that there's not a lab incident origin
link |
And it actually doesn't prove that at all
link |
because these viruses were being collected
link |
in places like Laos and Cambodia
link |
and being brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
Those are like early, early, like the prequel.
link |
So these are, they're not sufficiently similar
link |
to be a, to serve as a backbone,
link |
but they kind of tell a story
link |
that they could have been brought to the lab
link |
through several processes, including genetic modification
link |
or through the natural evolution processes,
link |
accelerated evolution, they could have arrived
link |
to something that has the spike protein
link |
and the cleavage, the foreign cleavage site
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
So what I'm saying is the essential point
link |
is if we had access, if we knew everything
link |
that was being, every virus that was being held
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan CDC,
link |
we had full access.
link |
We had full access to everybody's lab notes.
link |
And we did just the kind of forensic investigation
link |
that has been so desperately required since day one.
link |
We'd be able to say, well, what did you have?
link |
Because if we knew, if it should come out,
link |
that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had in its repository,
link |
prior to the outbreak, either SARS CoV2
link |
or a reasonable precursor to it,
link |
that would prove the lab incident hypothesis.
link |
In my mind, that's almost certainly why they are preventing
link |
any kind of meaningful investigation.
link |
So my hypothesis is not that what RITG13 says
link |
is because as I mentioned earlier,
link |
the genetics of virus are constantly recombinating.
link |
So that what that means is if you have,
link |
you don't have very many total outlier viruses
link |
in a bat community because these viruses
link |
are always mixing and matching with each other.
link |
And so if you have RITG13, which is relatively similar
link |
to SARS CoV2, there's a pretty decent likelihood
link |
there was other stuff that was collected
link |
at this mine called Mojang Mine in Yunnan Province,
link |
maybe in Laos and Cambodia.
link |
And that's why we need to have that information.
link |
Do you think somebody knows who patient zero is
link |
So do you think that is?
link |
Well, there's two things.
link |
One is I think somebody and people probably know.
link |
And then two, it's been incredibly curious
link |
that the best virus chasers in the world are in China.
link |
And they are in Wuhan.
link |
And when we can talk about this deeply compromised,
link |
now vastly improved World Health Organization process.
link |
But when they went there, the Chinese,
link |
the local and national Chinese authorities say,
link |
oh, we haven't done, we haven't tested the samples
link |
in our blood center.
link |
We haven't done any of this tracing.
link |
And these deeply compromised people
link |
who were part of the international part
link |
of the joint study tour, when they came out with their,
link |
they had their visit earlier this year
link |
and came out with their report.
link |
They had in my mind, just an absurd letter
link |
to the editor in nature saying,
link |
well, if we don't hurry back,
link |
we're not gonna know what happened.
link |
Assuming that the people in China are like bumpkins
link |
who on their own don't know how to trace the origin
link |
of a virus and the opposite is the case.
link |
So I think there are people in China
link |
who at least know a lot.
link |
They know a lot more than they're saying.
link |
And at the best case scenario is the Chinese government
link |
wants to prevent any investigation, including by them.
link |
The worst case scenario is that there are people
link |
And that's why, again, my point from day one has been,
link |
we need a comprehensive international investigation
link |
in Wuhan with full access to all relevant records,
link |
samples and personnel.
link |
When this, again, deeply flawed.
link |
Can I give you a little history of this WHO process?
link |
Who are the, that's funny.
link |
I'm so funny with the jokes.
link |
So what is this organization?
link |
What is its purpose?
link |
What role did it play in the pandemic?
link |
It certainly was demonized in the realm of politics.
link |
This is an institution that was supposed to save us
link |
from this pandemic.
link |
A lot of people believe it failed.
link |
And you said it's improving.
link |
How is it improving?
link |
I hope you don't mind.
link |
I'm gonna have to talk for a little bit of extra time.
link |
Good, good, good, good.
link |
So the WHO is an absolutely essential organization
link |
created in 1948 in that wonderful period
link |
after the Second World War
link |
when the United States and allied countries
link |
asked the big bold questions,
link |
how do we build a safer world for everyone?
link |
And so that's the WHO.
link |
If we, although there are many critics of the WHO,
link |
if we didn't have it, we would need to invent it
link |
because the whole nature of these big public health issues
link |
and certainly for pandemics, but all sorts of things
link |
is that they are transnational in nature.
link |
And so we cannot just build moats.
link |
We cannot build walls.
link |
We're all connected to it.
link |
So that's the idea.
link |
There's a political process because the United Nations
link |
and the WHO is part of it,
link |
it exists within a political context.
link |
And so the current director general
link |
of the World Health Organization
link |
who was just reelected for his second five year term
link |
is Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
link |
who is from Ethiopia, Tigrayan from Ethiopia.
link |
And in full disclosure, I have a lot of respect for Tedros.
link |
Tedros got his job.
link |
He was not America's candidate.
link |
He was not Britain's candidate.
link |
Our candidate was a guy named David Nabarro
link |
who I also know and have tremendous respect for.
link |
China led the process of putting Tedros in this position.
link |
And in the earliest days of the pandemic,
link |
Tedros, in my view,
link |
even though I have tremendous respect for him,
link |
I think he made a mistake.
link |
The WHO doesn't have its own
link |
independent surveillance network.
link |
It's not organized to have it
link |
and the states have not allowed it.
link |
So it's dependent on member states
link |
for providing it information.
link |
And because it's a poorly funded organization
link |
dependent on its bosses who are these governments,
link |
it's natural instinct isn't to condemn its bosses.
link |
It's to say, well, let's quietly work with everybody.
link |
the Chinese government knowingly lied to Tedros.
link |
And Tedros, in repeating the position
link |
of the Chinese government,
link |
which incidentally I'll say Donald Trump
link |
also did the exact same thing.
link |
Donald Trump had a private conversation with Xi Jinping
link |
and then repeated what Xi had told him.
link |
Both of them were wrong.
link |
Dr. Tedros, I think when Chinese government was lying,
link |
saying there's no human to human transmission,
link |
Dr. Tedros said that.
link |
And even though within the World Health Organization,
link |
there were private critiques saying
link |
China is now doing exactly what it did in SARS one,
link |
it's not providing access,
link |
it's not providing information.
link |
Tedros's instinct because of his background,
link |
because of his role and wrongly,
link |
was to have a more collaborative relationship with China,
link |
particularly by making assertions
link |
based on the information that was wrong.
link |
Don't call people liars,
link |
they're not gonna be happy with you.
link |
They're not gonna be happy.
link |
And the job of the WHO isn't to condemn states,
link |
it's to do the best possible job of addressing problems.
link |
And I think that the culture was,
link |
well, let's do the most that we can.
link |
If we totally alienate China on day one,
link |
we're in even worse shape than if we call them out for.
link |
Not exactly sure, by the way,
link |
that maybe you can also steel man that argument.
link |
Like it's not completely obvious that that's
link |
a terrible decision.
link |
Like if you and I were in that role,
link |
we wouldn't make that decision.
link |
It's complicated because like,
link |
you want China on your side to help solve this.
link |
So I would have made a different decision,
link |
which is why I never would have been selected
link |
as the director general.
link |
There's a selection criteria
link |
that everybody kind of needs to support you.
link |
And so, but let me just, this is just the beginning.
link |
Can you also just elaborate or kind of restate,
link |
what were the inaccuracies that you quickly mentioned?
link |
So human to human transmission, what were the things?
link |
So the most important, there were a few things.
link |
One, China didn't report the outbreak.
link |
Two, they had the sequenced genome
link |
of the SARS CoV2 virus,
link |
and they didn't share it for two critical weeks.
link |
And when they did share it, it was inadvertent.
link |
I mean, there was a very, very courageous scientist
link |
who essentially leaked it and was later punished
link |
for leaking it, even though the Chinese government
link |
is now saying we were so great by releasing the sequenced.
link |
Wait, I was really confused.
link |
So I'm so clueless about this as most things.
link |
Because I thought, because there was a celebration of,
link |
isn't this amazing that we got the sequence,
link |
that's amazing, and then the scientific community
link |
across the world stepped up and were able to do
link |
a lot of stuff really quickly with that sharing.
link |
Because I thought the Chinese government shared it.
link |
No, no, so they sat on it for two weeks.
link |
When they shared it against their will, it was incredible.
link |
Moderna, 48 hours later after getting the information,
link |
getting the sequenced genome, they had the formulation
link |
for what's now the Moderna COVID 19 vaccine.
link |
But that's two critical weeks.
link |
In those early days, they blocked the World Health
link |
Organization from sending its experts to Wuhan
link |
for more than three weeks.
link |
I said they lied about human to human transmission.
link |
During that time, they were aggressively enacting
link |
their coverup, destroying records, hiding samples,
link |
imprisoning people who were asking tough questions.
link |
They soon after established their gag order.
link |
They fought internally in the World Health Organization
link |
to prevent the declaration of a global emergency.
link |
So China definitely, I mean, I couldn't be stronger
link |
in my critique of China, particularly what it did
link |
in those early days, but it really, what it's doing
link |
even to today is outrageous.
link |
So that was, so then there was the question of,
link |
well, how do we examine what actually happened?
link |
And the Prime Minister of Australia then and now,
link |
Scott Morrison, was incredibly courageous.
link |
And he said, we need a full investigation.
link |
And because of that, the Chinese government
link |
attacked him personally and imposed trade sanctions
link |
on Australia to try to, not just to punish Australia,
link |
but to deliver a message to every other country.
link |
If you ask questions, we're going to punish you ruthlessly.
link |
And then that certainly was the message that was delivered.
link |
The Australians brought that idea of a full investigation
link |
to the World Health Assembly in May of 2020.
link |
As I mentioned before, the WHA is the governing authority
link |
above, of states above the World Health Organization.
link |
And so, but instead of passing a resolution calling
link |
for a full investigation, what ended up ironically
link |
and tragically passing with Chinese support
link |
was a mandate to have essentially
link |
a Chinese controlled joint study,
link |
where half of the team, a little more than half of the team
link |
was Chinese experts, government affiliated Chinese experts,
link |
and half were independent international experts
link |
but organized by the WHO.
link |
And then it took six months
link |
to negotiate the terms of reference.
link |
And again, while China was doing all this coverup,
link |
they delayed and delayed and delayed.
link |
And by the terms of reference that were negotiated,
link |
China had veto power over who got to be a member
link |
of the international group.
link |
And that group was not entitled to access to raw data.
link |
The Chinese side would give them conclusions
link |
based on their own analysis of the raw data,
link |
which was totally outrageous.
link |
So then, and I was a big, I and others,
link |
now friend of mine, although we've never met in person,
link |
Gilles de Manouf in New Zealand,
link |
he did a great job of chronicling just the letter by letter
link |
of the terms of reference.
link |
So then it took, now it's the January of this year,
link |
January, 2021, this deeply flawed,
link |
deeply compromised international group is sent to Wuhan.
link |
So what's the connection between this group
link |
and the joint study?
link |
So the joint study, it had the Chinese side
link |
and the international side.
link |
So these international experts,
link |
then part of their examination was going
link |
for one month to Wuhan.
link |
And the nature of the flaws of this international group.
link |
It's okay, really important point.
link |
And I'm sorry, I wasn't clear on that.
link |
Rather, the mandate of what they were doing
link |
was not to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
link |
It was to have a joint study
link |
into the zoonotic origins of the virus,
link |
which means, which was interpreted to mean
link |
the natural origins hypothesis.
link |
They weren't empowered for a single hypothesis,
link |
not so that they weren't empowered
link |
to examine the lab incident origin.
link |
They were there to look at the natural origin hypothesis.
link |
To shop for some meat at some markets.
link |
Yeah, so that was, so then they were there for a month.
link |
So out of the makeup of the team, guess who was?
link |
So the United States government proposed three experts
link |
People who had a lot of background.
link |
This was the Trump administration.
link |
People who had a lot of background,
link |
including in investigating lab incidents.
link |
None of those people were accepted.
link |
The one American who was accepted.
link |
Don't tell me it's Peter Daszak.
link |
Peter Daszak, who had this funding relationship
link |
for many years with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
whose entire basically professional reputation
link |
was based on his collaboration with Shujang Li,
link |
who had written the February, 2020 Lancet letter
link |
saying it comes from natural origin.
link |
And anybody who's suggesting otherwise
link |
is a conspiracy theorist.
link |
And who, at least according to me,
link |
had been at very, very least the opposite of transparent
link |
and at most engaged in a massive disinformation campaign.
link |
He is the one American who's on this.
link |
So they go there, they have one month in Wuhan.
link |
Two weeks of it are spent in quarantine
link |
just in their hotel rooms.
link |
So then they have two weeks,
link |
but really it's just 10 working days.
link |
One of the earliest, and so then they're kind of,
link |
we've all seen the pictures.
link |
They're traveling around Wuhan in little buses.
link |
One of the first visits they have
link |
is to this museum exhibition on the,
link |
it's basically a propaganda exhibition on the success,
link |
Xi Jinping and the success in fighting COVID.
link |
And they said, well, we had to show respect
link |
to our Chinese hosts.
link |
But I think what the Chinese hosts were saying is,
link |
let's just, I'm just gonna rub your noses in this.