The following is a conversation with Jamie Metzel,

author specializing in topics of genetic engineering,

biotechnology, and geopolitics.

In the past two years, he has been outspoken

about the need to investigate and keep an open mind

about the origins of COVID 19.

In particular, he has been keeping an extensive

up to date collection of circumstantial evidence

in support of what is colloquially known

as lab leak hypothesis,

that COVID 19 leaked in 2019

from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In part, I wanted to explore the idea

in response to the thoughtful criticism

to parts of the Francis Collins episode.

I will have more and more difficult conversations like this

with people from all walks of life

and with all kinds of ideas.

I promise to do my best to keep an open mind

and yet to ask hard questions,

while together searching for the beautiful

and the inspiring in the mind of the other person.

It's a hard line to walk gracefully,

especially for someone like me,

who's a bit of an awkward introvert

with barely the grasp of the English language

or any language, except maybe Python and C++.

But I hope you stick around, be patient and empathetic,

and maybe learn something new together with me.

This is the Lux Friedman podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors

in the description.

And now here's my conversation with Jamie Metzel.

What is the probability in your mind

that COVID 19 leaked from a lab?

In your write up, I believe you said 85%.

I know it's just a percentage,

we can't really be exact with these kinds of things,

but it gives us a sense

where your mind is, where your intuition is.

So as it stands today,

what would you say is that probability?

I would stand by what I've been saying

since really the middle of last year.

It's more likely and not, in my opinion,

that the pandemic stems

from an accidental lab incident in Wuhan.

Is it 90%, is it 65%, I mean, that's kind of arbitrary.

But when I stack up all of the available evidence

and all of it on both sides is circumstantial,

it weighs very significantly

toward a lab incident origin.

So before we dive into the specifics at a high level,

what types of evidence,

what intuition, what ideas are leading you

to have that kind of estimate?

Is it possible to kind of condense,

when you look at the wall of evidence before you,

where's your source,

the strongest source of your intuition?

And I would have to say,

it's just logic and deductive reasoning.

So before I make the case for why I think

it's most likely a lab incident origin,

let's just say why it could be

and still it could be natural origin.

All this is natural origin in the sense

that it's a bat virus backbone,

horseshoe bat virus backbone.

Okay, I'm gonna keep pausing you,

define stuff.

So maybe it's useful to say,

what do we mean by lab leak?

What do we mean by natural origin?

What do we mean by virus backbone?

Okay, great questions.

So viruses come from somewhere.

Viruses have been around for 3.5 billion years.

And they've been around for such a long time

because they are adaptive and they're growing

and they're always changing and they're morphing.

And that's why viruses are,

I mean, they've been very successful

and we are victims.

Sometimes we're beneficiaries.

We have viral DNA has morphed into our genomes,

but now it's certainly in the case of COVID 19,

we are victims of the success of viruses.

And so when we talk about a backbone,

so the SARS CoV2 virus has a history

and these viruses don't come out of whole cloth.

There are viruses that morph.

And so we know that at some period,

maybe 20 years ago or whatever,

the virus that is SARS CoV2 existed in horseshoe bats.

It was a horseshoe bat virus and it evolved somewhere.

And there are some people who say

there's no evidence of this,

but it's a plausible theory

based on how things have happened in the past.

Maybe that virus jumped from the horseshoe bat

through some intermediate species.

So it's like, let's say there's a bat

and that it infects some other animal.

Let's say it's a pig or a raccoon dog or a civet cat.

They're all pangolin.

They're all sorts of animals that have been considered.

And then that virus adapts into that new host

and it changes and grows.

And then according to the quote unquote

natural origins hypothesis,

it jumps from that animal into humans.

And so what you could imagine,

and some of the people who are making the case,

all of the people actually who are making the case

for a natural origin of the virus,

what they're saying is it went from bat

to some intermediate species.

And then from that intermediate species, most likely,

there's some people who say it went directly bat to human,

but through some intermediate species.

And then humans interacted with that species.

And then it jumped from that whatever it is to humans.

And that's a very plausible theory.

It's just that there's no evidence for it.

And the nature of the interaction is,

do most people kind of suggest this at the wet markets?

So the interaction of the humans with the animal

is in the form of it's either a live animal

as being sold to be eaten or a recently live animal,

but newly dead animal being sold to.

That's certainly one very possible possibility,

a possible possibility, I don't know if that's a word.

But the people who believe in the wet market origin,

that's what they're saying.

So they had one of these animals,

they were cutting it up, let's say, in a market.

And maybe some of the blood got into somebody,

maybe had a cut on their hand,

or maybe it was aerosolized.

And so somebody breathed it.

And then that virus found this new host,

and that was the human host.

But you could also have that happen in, let's say, a farm.

So it's happened in the past that let's say

that there are farms, and because of human encroachment

into wild spaces, we're pushing our farms

and our animal farms further and further

into what used to be just natural habitats.

And so it's happened in the past, for example,

that there were bats roosting over pig pens

and the bat droppings went into the pig pens.

The viruses in those droppings infected the pigs

and then the pigs infected the humans.

And that's why it's a plausible theory.

It's just that there's basically no evidence for it.

If it was the case that SARS CoV2 comes

from this type of interaction,

as in most of the at least recent past outbreaks,

we'd see evidence of that.

Viruses are messy.

They're constantly undergoing Darwinian evolution

and they're changing.

And it's not that they're just ready for prime time,

ready to infect humans on day one.

Normally you can trace the viral evolution

prior to the time when it infects humans.

But for SARS CoV2, it just showed up on the scene

ready to infect humans.

And there's no history that anybody has found so far

of that kind of viral evolution.

With the first SARS, you could track it

by the genome sequencing that it was experimenting.

And SARS CoV2 was very, very stable,

meaning it had already adapted to humans

by the time it interacted with us.

Fully adapted.

So with SARS, there's a rapid evolution

when it first hooks onto a human.

Yeah, because it's trying.

Like a virus, its goal is to survive and replicate.

Yeah, no, it's true.

It's like, oh, we're going to try this.

Oh, that didn't work.

We'll try it exactly like a startup.

And so we don't see that.

And so there are some people who say, well, one hypothesis

is you have a totally isolated group of humans,

maybe in southern China, which is more than 1,000 miles away

from Wuhan.

And maybe they're doing their animal farming

right next to these areas where there

are these horseshoe bats.

And maybe in this totally isolated place

that no one's ever heard of, they're not connected

to any other place, one person gets infected.

And it doesn't spread to anybody else

because they're so isolated.

They're like, I don't know, I mean,

I can't even imagine that this is the case.

And then somebody gets in a car and drives all night

more than 1,000 miles through crappy roads to get to Wuhan.

It doesn't stop for anything.

It doesn't infect anybody on the way.

No one else in that person's village infects anyone.

And then that person goes straight to the Huanan seafood

market, according to this, in my mind, not very credible

theory, and then unloads his stuff

and everybody gets infected.

And they're only delivering those animals

to the Wuhan market, which doesn't even

sell very many of these kinds of animals that

are likely intermediate species and not to anywhere else.

So that means a little bit of a straw man.

But on top of that, the Chinese have sequenced more than 80,000

animal samples.

And there's no evidence of this type of viral evolution

that we would otherwise expect.

Let's try to, at this moment, steal

man the argument for the natural origin of the virus.

So just to clarify, so Wuhan is actually,

despite what it might sound like to people,

is a pretty big city.

There's a lot of people that live in it.

11 million.

So not only is there the Wuhan Institute of Virology,

there's other centers that do work on viruses.

But there's also a giant number of markets.

And everything we're talking about here

is pretty close together.

So when I look at the geography of this,

I think when you zoom out, it's all Wuhan.

But when you zoom in, there's just

a lot of interesting dynamics that could be happening

and where the cases are popping up

and what's being reported, all that kind of stuff.

So I think the people that argue for the natural origin,

and there's a few recent papers that come out arguing this,

it's kind of fascinating to watch this whole thing.

But I think what they're arguing is

that there's this Hunan market, that's

one of the major markets, the wet markets in Wuhan,

that there's a bunch of cases that were reported from there.

So if I look at, for example, the Michael Warraby

perspective that he wrote in Science,

he argues, he wrote this a few days ago,

the predominance of early COVID cases linked to Hunan

market, and this can't be dismissed as ascertainment

bias, which I think is what people

argue that you're just kind of focusing on this region,

because a lot of cases came.

There could be a huge number of other cases.

So people who argue against this say

that this is a later stage already.

So he says no.

He says this is the epicenter, and this

is a clear circumstantial evidence,

but evidence, nevertheless, that this

is where the jump happened to humans, the big explosion.

Maybe not K0, I don't know if he argues that,

but with the early cases.

So what do you make of this whole idea?

Can you steel man it before you talk about the other?

And my goal here isn't to attack people on the other side,

and my feeling is if there is evidence that's presented

that should change my view, I hope

that I'll be open minded enough to change my view.

And certainly Michael Warraby is a thoughtful person,

a respected scientist, and I think this work

is contributive work, but I just

don't think that it's as significant as has

been reported in the press.

And so what his argument is is that there

is an early cluster in December of 2019

around the Huanan seafood market.

And even though he himself argues

that the original breakthrough case, the original case,

the index case where the first person infected

happened earlier, happened in October or November.

So not in December.

His argument is, well, what are the odds

that you would have this number, this cluster of cases

in the Huanan seafood market?

And if the origin happened someplace else,

wouldn't you expect other clusters?

And it's not an entirely implausible argument.

But there are reasons why I think

this is not nearly as determinative as has been reported.

And I certainly had a lot of, I and others,

had tweeted a lot about this.

And that is first, the people who

were infected in this cluster, it's not

the earliest known virus of the SARS CoV2.

It began mutating.

So it's not the original SARS CoV2 there.

So it had to have happened someplace else, too.

The people who were infected in the market

weren't infected in the part of the market

where they had these kinds of animals

that are considered to be candidates

as an intermediary species.

And third, there was a bias, actually, I'll have four things.

Third, there was a bias in the early assessment in China

of what they were looking for.

But they were asked, did you have exposure to the market?

Because I think in the early days when people were figuring

things out, that was one of the questions that was asked.

And fourth, and probably most significantly,

we have so little information about those early cases in China.

And that's really unfortunate.

And we'll talk about this later because the Chinese government

is preventing access to all of that information, which they

have, which could easily help us get to the bottom, at least

know a ton more about how this pandemic started.

And so it's like grasping at straws in the dark with gloves on.

That's right.

But to steal man the argument, we have this evidence

from this market.

And yes, the Chinese government has turned off the lights,

essentially.

So we have very little data to work with.

But this is the data we have.

So who's to say that this data doesn't represent a much bigger

data set that a lot of people got infected at this market

with it, even at the parts, or especially at the parts

with the meat, the infected meat was being sold?

So that could be true.

And it probably is true.

The question is, is this the source?

Is this the place where this began?

Or was this just a place where it was amplified?

And I certainly think that it's extremely likely

that the Huanan seafood market was

an at point of amplification.

And it's just answering a different question.

Basically, what you're saying is it's

very difficult to use the market as evidence for anything

because it's probably not even the starting point.

So it's just a good place for it to continue spreading.

That's certainly my view.

What Michael Warraby's argument is that, well,

what are the odds of that?

That we're seeing this amplification in the market.

And let me put it this way.

If we had all of the information, if the Chinese government

hadn't blocked access to all of this,

because there's blood bank information,

there's all sorts of information, and based

on a full and complete understanding,

we came to believe that all of the early cases

were at this market.

I think that would be a stronger argument than what

this is so far.

But everything leads to the fact that, why is it

that the Chinese government, which was, frankly,

after a slow start, the gold standard

of doing viral tracking for SARS 1,

why have they apparently done so little and shared so little?

I think it begs a lot of questions.

OK, so let's then talk about the Chinese government.

There's several governments, right?

So one is the local government of Wuhan.

And not just the Chinese government.

Let's talk about government.

No, let's talk about human nature.

Let's just keep zooming out.

Let's talk about planet Earth.

No.

So there's the Wuhan local government.

There's the Chinese government led by Xi Jinping.

And there's governments in general.

I'm trying to empathize.

So my father was involved with Chernobyl.

I'm trying to put myself into the mind of local officials,

of people who are like, oh, shit, there's

a potential catastrophic event happening here.

And it's my ass because there's incompetence all over the place.

Human nature is such that there's incompetence all over the place.

And you're always trying to cover it up.

And so given that context, I want

to lay out all the possible incompetence,

all the possible malevolence, all the possible geopolitical

tensions here.

All right.

Where in your sense did the cover up start?

So there's this suspicious fact.

It seems like that the Wuhan Institute of Virology

had a public database of thousands

of sampled bad coronavirus sequences.

And that went offline in September of 2019.

What's that about?

So let me talk about that specific.

And then I'll also follow your path of zooming out.

And it's a really important.

Is that a good starting point?

It's a great starting point.

Yeah, yeah.

So but there's a bigger story.

But let me talk about that.

So the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And we can go into the whole history of the Wuhan

Institute of Virology, either now or later,

because I think it's very relevant to the story.

But let's focus for now on this database.

They had a database of 22,000 viral samples and sequence

information about viruses that they had collected,

some of which, the collection of some of which

was supported through funding from the NIH.

Not a huge NIH through the EcoHealth Alliance.

It's a relatively small amount, $600,000, but not nothing.

The goal of this database was so that we could understand

viral evolution so that, exactly for this kind of moment

where we had an unknown virus, we

could say, well, is this like anything

that we've seen before?

And that would help us both understand what we're facing

and be better able to respond.

So this was a password protected public access database.

In 2019, in September 2019, it became inaccessible.

And then the whole, a few months later,

the entire database disappeared.

What the Chinese have said is that because there were

all kinds of computer attacks on this database,

but why would that happen in September 2019

before the pandemic, at least as far as we know?

So just to clarify.

Yes.

It went down to September 2019, just

so we get the year straight.

January 2020 is when the virus really

started getting the press.

So we're talking about December 2019.

A lot of early infections happened.

September 2019 is when this database goes down.

Just to clarify, because you said it quickly,

the Chinese government said that their database

was getting hacked, therefore the director of this part

of the Wuhan Institute of Virology said that.

Oh, she was the one that said it.

She was the one who said it.

Oh, boy.

I did not even know that part.

Yeah.

Well, she's an interesting character.

We'll talk about her.

Yeah.

So the excuse is that it's getting cyberattacked a lot.

So we're going to take it down without any further explanation,

which seems very suspicious.

And then this virus starts to emerge in October, November,

December.

There's a lot of argument about that, but after.

Sorry to interrupt, but some people

are saying that the first outbreak could have

happened as early as September.

I think it's more likely it's October, November.

But for the people who are saying that the first outbreak,

the first incident of a known outbreak, at least to somebody,

happened in September, they make the argument, well,

what if that also happened in mid September of 2019?

I'm not prepared to go there, but there are some people

who make that argument.

But I think, again, if I were to put myself

in the mind of officials, whether it's officials within the Wuhan

Institute of Virology or Wuhan local officials,

I think if I notice some major problem,

like somebody got sick, some sign of, oh, shit, we screwed up.

That's when you kind of do the slow,

there's like a Homer Simpson meme,

where you slowly start backing out.

And I would probably start hiding stuff.

CYA, yeah.

Yeah, and then coming up with really shady excuses.

It's like you're in a relationship

and your girlfriend wants to see your phone.

And you're like, I'm sorry, I'm just getting

attacked by the Russians now.

The cybersecurity issue.

I can't.

Yeah, I wish I could.

I wish I could.

It's just unsafe right now.

So would it be OK if I give you my kind of macro view

of the whole information space and why I believe

this has been so contentious?

So here's if I had to give my best guess,

and I underline the word guess of what happened.

And your background, your family background with Chernobyl,

I think is highly relevant here.

So after the first SARS, there was a recognition

that we needed to distribute knowledge about virology

and epidemiology around the world.

The people in China and Africa and Southeast Asia,

they were the frontline workers.

And they needed to be doing a lot of the viral monitoring

and assessment so that we could have an early alarm system.

And that was why there was a lot of investment

in all of those places in building capacity and training

people and helping to build institutional capacity.

And the Chinese government, they recognized

that they needed to ramp things up.

And then the World Health Organization

and the World Health Assembly, they

had their international health regulations

that were designed to create a stronger infrastructure.

So that was the goal.

There were a lot of investments.

And I know we'll talk later about the Wuhan Institute

of Virology.

I won't go into that right now.

So there was all of this distributed capacity.

And so in the early days, there's a breakout in Wuhan.

We don't know is it September, October, November.

Maybe December is when the local authorities

start to recognize that something's happening.

But at some point in late 2019, local officials in Wuhan

understand that something is up.

And exactly like in Chernobyl, these guys

exist within a hierarchical system.

And they are going to be rewarded if good things happen.

And they're going to be in big trouble if bad things happen

under their watch.

So their initial instinct is to squash it.

My guess is they think, well, if we squash this information,

we can most likely beat back this outbreak,

because lots of outbreaks happen all the time,

including of SARS 1, where there was multiple lab incidents

out of a lab in Beijing.

And so they start their cover up on day one.

They start screening social media.

They send nasty letters to different doctors and others

who are starting to speak up.

But then it becomes clear that there's a bigger issue.

And then the national government of China.

Again, this is just a hypothesis.

The national government gets involved.

They say, all right, this is getting much bigger.

They go in and they realize that we

have a big problem on our hands.

They relatively quickly know that it's

spreading human to human.

And so the right thing for them to do then

is what the South African government is doing now

is to say, we have this outbreak.

We don't know everything, but we know it's serious.

We need help.

But that's not the instinct of people in most governments,

and certainly not in authoritarian governments

like China.

And so the national government, they have a choice at that point.

They can do option one, which is what we would hear

called the right thing, which is total transparency.

They criticize the local officials

for having this cover up.

And they say, now we're going to be totally transparent.

But what does that do in a system like the former Soviet

Union, like China now?

If local officials say, wait a second,

I thought my job was to cover everything up,

to support this alternative reality that authoritarian systems

need in order to survive, well, now

I'm going to be held accountable for if I'm not totally

transparent, like your whole system would collapse.

So the national government, they have that choice.

And their only choice, according to the logic of their system,

is to be all in on a cover up.

And that's why they block the World Health Organization

from sending its team to Wuhan for over three weeks.

They overtly lie to the World Health Organization

about human to human transmission.

And then they begin their cover up.

So they begin very, very quickly destroying samples,

hiding records.

They start imprisoning people for asking basic questions.

Soon after, they establish a gag order,

preventing Chinese scientists from writing or saying anything

about pandemic origins without prior government approval.

And what that does means that there isn't a lot of data,

there's not nearly enough data coming out of China.

And so lots of responsible scientists

outside of China who are data driven say, well,

I don't have enough information to draw conclusions.

And then into that vacuum, step a relatively small number

of largely virologists, but also others, respected

scientists, and I know we'll talk about the, I think,

infamous Peter Dezak, who say, well,

without any real foundation in the evidence,

they say, we know pretty much this comes from nature.

And anyone who's raising the possibility of a lab incident

origin is a conspiracy theorist.

So that message starts to percolate.

And then in the United States, we have Donald Trump.

And he's starting to get criticized for America's

failure to respond, prepare for, and respond adequately

to the outbreak.

And so he starts saying, well, I know, first,

after praising Xi Jinping, he starts saying, well,

I know that China did it, and the WHO did it,

and he's kind of pointing fingers at everybody but himself.

And then we have a media here that

had shifted from the traditional model of,

he said, she said, journalism.

So and so said X, and so and so said Y,

and then we'll present both of those views.

With Donald Trump, he would make outlandish,

starting positions.

So he would say, Lex is an axe murderer.

And then in the early days, they would say,

Lex is an axe murderer.

Lex's friend says he's not an axe murderer.

We'd have a four day debate, is he or isn't he?

And then at day four, someone would say,

why are we having this debate at all?

Because the original point is baseless.

And so the media just got in the habit.

Here's what Trump said, and here's why it's wrong.

It's very complicated to figure out

what is the role of a politician,

what is the role of a leader in this kind of game of politics.

But certainly when there's a tragedy,

when there's a catastrophic event,

what it takes to be a leader is to see clearly through the fog

and to make big, bold decisions

that does speak to the truth of things.

And even if it's unpopular truth,

to listen to the people, to listen to all sides,

to the opinions, to the controversial ideas,

and to see past all the bullshit,

all the political bullshit,

and just speak to the people,

speak to the world and make bold, big decisions.

That's probably what was needed in terms of leadership.

And I'm not so willing to criticize

whether it's Joe Biden or Donald Trump on this.

I think most people cannot be great leaders,

but that's why when great leaders step up,

we write books about them.

And I agree.

And even though, I think of myself as a progressive person,

I certainly was a critic of a lot of what President Trump did.

But on this particular case,

even though he may have said it in an uncouth way,

Donald Trump was actually, in my view, right.

I mean, when he said, hey, let's look at this lab,

I mean, he said, I have evidence, I can't tell you,

I don't think he even had the evidence.

But his intuition that this probably comes from a lab,

in my view, was a correct intuition.

And certainly I started speaking up

about pandemic origins early in 2019.

And my friends, my Democratic friends,

were brutal with me saying, what are you doing?

You're supporting Trump in an election year.

And I said, just because Donald Trump is saying something

doesn't mean that I need to oppose it.

If Donald Trump says something that I think is correct,

well, I wanna say it's correct

just as if he says something that I don't like,

I'm gonna speak up about that.

Good, you walked through the fire.

So that's, you laid out the story here.

And I think in many ways it's a human story.

It's a story of politics, it's a story of human nature.

But let's talk about the story of the virus.

And let's talk about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

So maybe this is a good time to try to talk about

his history, about his origins,

about what kind of stuff it works on,

about biosafety levels, and about that woman.

Yeah, Xu Zhengli, yes.

Xu Zhengli.

So what is the Wuhan Institute of Virology

when did it start?

Yeah, so it's a great question.

So after SARS 1, which was in the early 2000, 2003, 2004,

there was this effort to enhance,

as I mentioned before, global capacity,

including in China.

So the Wuhan Institute of Virology

had been around for decades before then.

But there was an agreement between the French

and the Chinese governments to build

the largest BSL4 lab, so biosafety level four.

So in these, what are called high containment labs,

there's level four, which is the highest level.

And people have seen that on TV and elsewhere,

where you have the people in the different suits

and all of these protections.

And then there's level three,

which is still very serious but not as much as level four.

And then level two is just kind of goggles and some gloves

and maybe a face mask, much less.

So the French and the Chinese governments

agreed that France would help build the first

and still the largest BSL4,

plus some mobile BSL3 labs.

And they were going to do it in Wuhan.

And Wuhan is kind of like China's Chicago.

And I had actually been, it's a different story,

I'd been in Wuhan relatively not that long

before the pandemic broke out.

And that was why I knew that Wuhan is,

it's not some backwater where there are a bunch

of yokels eating bats for dinner every night.

This is a really sophisticated, wealthy,

highly educated and cultured city.

And so I knew that it wasn't like

that even the Huanan seafood market

wasn't like some of these seafood markets

that they have in Southern China or in Cambodia

where I lived for two years.

I mean, this, it was a totally different thing.

I'm gonna have to talk to you about some of the food,

including Wuhan market,

just some of the wild food going on here

because you've traveled that part of the world.

Well, let's not get there, let's not get distracted.

Good, as I was telling you Lex before,

and this is maybe an advertisement,

is having now listened to a number of your podcasts

and I'm doing long, ultra training runs

or driving in the mountains.

Like the really, because in the beginning,

we have to talk about whatever it is, is the topic,

but the really good stuff happens later, so.

So friends, you should listen to the end.

I have to say, as I was telling you before,

like when I heard your long podcast with Geron Lanier

and he talked about his mother at the very end,

I mean, just beautiful stuff.

So I don't know whether I can match beautiful stuff

but I'm gonna do my best.

You're gonna have to find out.

Exactly, stay tuned.

So France had this agreement

that they were going to help design and help build

this BSL4 lab in Wuhan.

And it was going to be with French standards

and there were going to be 50 French experts

who were going to work there

and supervise the work that happened

even after the Wuhan Institute of Virology

in the new location started operating.

But then when they started building it,

the French contractors, the French overseers

were increasingly appalled

that they had less and less control,

that the Chinese contractors were swapping out new things,

it wasn't built up to French standards,

so much that at the end when it was finally built,

the person who was the vice chairman of the project

and a leading French industrialist named Mario

refused to sign off.

And he said, we can't support, we have no idea

what this is, whether it's safe or not.

And when this lab opened,

remember we were supposed to have 50 French experts,

it had one French expert.

And so the French were really disgusted.

And actually when the Wuhan Institute of Virology

in its new location opened in 2018, two things happened.

One, French intelligence privately approached US intelligence

saying we have a lot of concerns

about the Wuhan Institute of Virology,

about its safety, and we don't even know

who's operating there, is it being used

as a dual use facility.

And also in 2018, the US embassy in Beijing

sent some people down to Wuhan to go and look at,

well, at this laboratory.

And they wrote a scathing cable that Josh Rogan

from the Washington Post later got his hands on

saying this is really unsafe,

they're doing work on dangerous bat coronaviruses

in conditions where a leak is possible.

And so then you mentioned Xuejing Li,

and I'll connect that to these virologists

who I was talking about.

So there's a very credible thesis

that because these pathogenic outbreaks happen

in other parts of the world,

having partnerships with experts

in those parts of the world

must be a foundation of our efforts.

We can't just bring everything home

because we know that viruses don't care

about borders and boundaries.

And so if something happens there,

it's going to come here.

So very correctly, we have all kinds of partnerships

with experts in these labs.

And Xuejing Li was one of those partners.

And her closest relationship was with Peter Dezak,

who's a British, I think now American,

but the president of a thing called EcoHealth Alliance,

which was getting money from NIH.

And basically EcoHealth Alliance was a pass through

organization and over the years,

it was only about $600,000.

So almost all of her funding came from the Chinese government,

but there's a little bit that came from the United States.

And so she became their kind of leading expert

and the point of contact

between the Wuhan Institute of Virology

and certainly Peter Dezak, but also with others.

And that was why in the earliest days of the outbreak,

I didn't mention that,

and I did mention that there were these virologists

who had this fake certainty that they knew it came from nature

and it didn't come from a lab.

And they called people like me conspiracy theorists

just for raising that possibility.

But when Peter Dezak was organizing that effort

in February of 2020, what he said is,

we need to rally behind our Chinese colleagues.

And the basic idea was these international collaborations

are under threat.

And I think it was because of that,

because Peter Dezak's basically his major contribution

as a scientist was just tacking his name on work

that Xu Zhengli had largely done.

He was defending a lot certainly for himself

and his organization.

So you think EcoHealth Alliance and Peter

is less about money.

It's more about kind of almost like legacy

because you're so attached to this work.

Is it just on a human level?

So I think so.

I mean, I've been criticized for being actually,

I'm certainly a big critic of Peter Dezak,

but I've been criticized by some for being too lenient.

I mean, it's so easy to say, oh, somebody,

they're like an evil ogre and just trying to do evil

and cackling in their closet or whatever.

But I think for most of us, even those of us

who do terrible, horrible things,

the story that we tell ourselves

and we really believe is that we're doing the thing

that we most believe in.

I mean, I did my PhD dissertation

on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

They genuinely saw themselves as idealists.

They thought, well, we need to make radical change

to build a better future.

And what they described is that they felt

was radical change was a monstrous atrocity by us.

So the criticism here of Peter is that

he was part of an organization that was kind of,

well, funding an effort that was an unsafe implementation

of a biosafety level for laboratory.

Well, a few things.

So what he thought he was doing was,

and then what he thought he was doing

is itself highly controversial

because there's one that in 2011,

there were, I know you've talked about this

with other guests, but in 2011,

there were the first published papers

on this now infamous gain of function research.

And basically what they did,

both in different labs,

and certainly in the United States,

in Wisconsin and in the Netherlands,

was they had a bird flu virus that was very dangerous

but not massively transmissive.

And they had a gain of function process

through what's called serial passage,

which means basically passing advice

like natural selection, but forcing natural selection

by just passing a virus through different cell cultures

and then selecting for what it is that you want.

So relatively easily, they took this deadly

but not massively transmissive virus

and turned it into in a lab,

a deadly and transmissive virus.

And that showed that this is really dangerous.

And so there were, at that point,

there was a huge controversy.

There were some people like Richard Ebright

and Mark Lipsitch at Harvard

who were saying that this is really dangerous.

We're in the idea that we need to create monsters

to study monsters.

I think maybe even you have said that in the past,

it doesn't make sense

because there's an unlimited number of monsters.

And so what are we gonna do?

Create an unlimited number of monsters.

And if we do that, eventually the monsters

are going to get out.

Then there was the Peter Desick camp

and he got a lot of funding,

particularly from the United States,

who said, well, and certainly Collins and Fauci

were supportive of this.

And they thought, well, there's a safe way

to go out into the world,

to collect the world's most dangerous viruses

and to poke and prod them to figure out

how they might mutate,

how they might become more dangerous

with the goal of predicting future pandemics.

And that certainly never happened

with the goal of creating vaccines and treatments.

And that largely never happened.

But that was, so Peter Desick kind of epitomized

that second approach.

And as you've talked about in the past, in 2014,

there was a funding moratorium in the United States.

And then in 2017, that was lifted.

It didn't affect the funding

that went to the EcoHealth Alliance.

So when this happened in the beginning,

and again, coming back to Peter's motivations,

I don't think, here's the best case scenario for Peter.

I'm gonna give you what I imagine he was thinking,

and then I'll tell you what I actually think.

So I think here's what he's thinking.

This is most likely a natural origin outbreak.

It just like SARS 1, again, in Peter's hypothetical mind,

just like SARS 1, this is most likely a natural outbreak.

We need to have an international coalition

in order to fight it.

If we allow these political attacks

to undermine our Chinese counterparts

and the trust in these relationships

that we've built over many years,

we're really screwed because they have

the most local knowledge of these outbreaks.

And even though, and this gets a lot more complicated,

even though there are basic questions

that anybody would ask,

and that Xu Zhengli herself did ask

about the origins of this pandemic,

even though Peter Dezak, and I'll describe this in a moment,

had secret information that we didn't have,

that in my mind massively increases the possibility

of a lab incident origin,

I, Peter Dezak, would like to guide

the public conversation in the direction

where I think it should go,

and in support of the kind of international collaboration

that I think is necessary.

That's a strong positive discussion

because it's true that there's a lot of political BS

and a lot of kind of just bickering

and lies as we've talked about.

And so it's very convenient to say, you know what?

Let's just ignore all of these quote unquote lies

and my favorite word, misinformation.

And then because the way out from this serious pandemic

is for us to work together.

So let's strengthen our partnerships

and everything else is just like noise.

Yeah, so let's,

and so then now I wanna do my personal indictment

of Peter Dezak because that's my view,

but I wanted to fairly,

because I think that we all tell ourselves stories

and also when you're a science communicator,

you can't in your public communications

give every doubt that you have or every nuance.

You kind of have to summarize things.

And so I think that he was, again,

in this benign interpretation,

trying to summarize in the way

that he thought the conversations should go.

Here's my indictment of Peter Dezak.

And I feel like Brutus here,

but I've not come here to praise Peter Dezak

because while Peter Dezak was doing all of this

and making all of these statements

about, well, we pretty much know it's a natural origin,

then there was this February 2020 Lancet letter

where it turns out, and we only knew this later,

that he was highly manipulative.

So he was recruiting all of these people.

He drafted the infamous letter

calling people like me conspiracy theorists.

He then wrote to people like Ralph Barrick and Linfa Wang

who are also very high profile virologists saying,

well, let's not put our names on it.

So it doesn't look like we're doing it

even though they were doing it.

He didn't disclose a lot of information that they had.

It was a strategic move.

So just in case people are not familiar,

February 2020 Lancet letter was TLDR

is a lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory.

Essentially, yes.

So like with the authority of science,

not saying like it's highly likely,

saying it's obvious duh, it's natural origin,

everybody else is just,

everything else is just misinformation.

And look, there's a bunch of really smart people

that sign this, therefore it's true.

Yeah, not only that, so there were the people

who's 27 people signed that letter.

And then after President Trump cut funding

to EcoHealth Alliance, then he organized 77 Nobel laureates

to have a public letter criticizing that.

But what Peter knew then that we didn't fully know

is that in March of 2018, EcoHealth Alliance,

in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology

and others had applied for a $14 million grant to DARPA,

which is kind of like the VC side of the venture capital side

of the Defense Department.

They're kind of where they do kind of big ideas.

Oh, by the way, as a tiny tangent,

I've gotten a lot of funding from DARPA.

They fund a lot of excellent robotics research.

And DARPA is incredible.

And among the things that they applied for is that we,

meaning Wuhan Institute of Virology is gonna go

and it's gonna collect the most dangerous

bat coronaviruses in Southern China.

And then we, as this group,

are going to genetically engineer these viruses

to insert a furan cleavage site.

So I think when everyone's now seen the image

of the SARS CoV2 virus,

it has these little spike proteins,

these little things that stick out,

which is why they call it a coronavirus.

Within that spike protein are these furan cleavage sites

which basically help with the virus

getting access into our cells.

And they're going to genetically engineer

these furan cleavage sites into these bat coronaviruses,

the serbicoviruses.

And then, and so then a year and a half later,

what do we see?

We see a bat coronaviruses with a furan cleavage site

unlike anything that we've ever seen before

in that category of SARS like coronaviruses.

That, well, yes.

I mean, the DARPA very correctly

didn't support that application.

Well, that's actually, that's like a pause on that.

So for a lot of people that's like the smoking gun.

Yeah.

Okay, let's talk about this 2018 proposal to DARPA.

So I guess who's drafted the proposal?

Is it?

EcoHealth.

EcoHealth, but the proposal is to do,

so EcoHealth is technically a US funded organization.

Primarily.

And then the idea was to do work at Wuhan Institute

of Virology.

With, yeah.

So it was.

With EcoHealth.

Yeah.

So EcoHealth basically that the Wuhan Institute

of Virology was gonna go and they were gonna

collect these viruses and store them

at Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But they're also gonna do the actual.

According, it's a really important point.

According to their proposal,

the actual work was going to be done

at the lab of Ralph Barrick

at the University of North Carolina

who's probably the world's leading expert

on coronaviruses.

And so we know that DARPA didn't fund that work.

We know, I think quite well,

that Ralph Barrick's lab in part,

because it was not funded by DARPA,

they didn't do that specific work.

What we don't know is, well,

what work was done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

because WIV was part of this proposal.

They had access to all of the plans.

They had done, they had their own capacity

and they had already done a lot of work

in genetically altering this exact category of viruses

they had created, chimeric mixed viruses they had done.

They had mastered pretty much all of the steps

in order to achieve this thing

that they applied for funding with EcoHealth to do.

And so the question is,

did the Wuhan Institute of Virology

go through with that research anyway?

And in my mind, that's a very, very real possibility.

We certainly explain why they're giving no information.

And as you know, I've been a member

of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee

on Human Genome Editing,

which Dr. Tedros created in the aftermath

of the announcement of the world's first CRISPR babies.

And it was just basically the exact same story.

So Hojong Kui, Chinese scientist,

it was not a first tier scientist,

but a perfectly adequate second tier scientist

came to the United States,

learned all of these capacities, went back to China

and said, well, there's a much more permissive environment.

I'm gonna be a world leader,

I'm gonna establish both myself and China.

So in every scientific field,

we're seeing this same thing

where you kind of learn a model

and then you do it in China.

So is it possible that the Wuhan Institute of Virology

with this exact game plan was doing it anyway?

Do we possible?

We have no clue what work was being done

at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

It seems extremely likely

that at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,

and this is certainly the US government position,

there was the work that was being done in Dr. Xu's lab,

but that wasn't the whole WIV.

We know, at least according to the United States government,

that there was the Chinese military,

that PLA was doing work there.

Were they doing this kind of work,

not to create a bio weapon,

but in order to understand these viruses,

maybe to develop vaccines and treatments,

it seems like a very, very logical possibility.

And then, so we know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology

had all of the skills,

we know that they were part of this proposal.

And then you have Peter Dezak, who knows all of this,

that at that time in February of 2020, we didn't know.

But then he comes swinging out of the gate,

saying anybody who's raising this possibility

of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist.

I mean, it really makes him look, in my mind, very, very bad.

Yet not to at least be somewhat open minded on this,

because he knows all the details.

He knows that it's not 0%.

I mean, there's no way in his mind could even argue that.

So it's potential because of the bias, because of your focus.

I mean, it could be the Anthony Fauci mask thing,

whereas he knows there's some significant probability

that this is happening.

But in order to preserve good relations

with our Chinese colleagues,

we want to make sure we tell a certain kind of narrative.

So it's not really lying.

It's doing the best possible action at this time

to help the world.

Not that this already happened.

But that's how like...

Yeah, I think it's quite likely that that was the story

that he was telling himself.

But it's that lack of transparency in my mind is fraudulent,

that we were struggling to understand something

that we didn't understand.

And that I just think that people who possess

that kind of information, especially when the existence,

like the entire career of Peter Dezak,

is based on US taxpayers, there's a debt that comes with that.

And that debt is honesty and transparency.

And for all of us, and you talked about your girlfriend

checking your phone, for all of us,

being honest and transparent in the most difficult times,

it's really difficult.

If it were easy, everybody would do it.

And I just feel that Peter was the opposite of transparent

and then went on the offensive.

And then had the gall of joining,

I know we can talk about this,

this highly compromised joint study process with the international experts

and their Chinese government counterparts.

And used that as a way of furthering this, in my mind,

fraudulent narrative that it almost certainly came from natural origins

and a lab origin was extremely unlikely.

Just to stick briefly on the proposal to wrap that up,

because I do think in a kind of John Stuart way,

if you heard that a bit,

he sort of kind of like, common sense way.

The 2018 proposal to DARPA from EcoHealth Alliance

and Wuhan Institute of Virology,

just seems like a bit of a surprise to me.

It just seems like a bit of a smoking gun to me, like that.

So there's this excellent book that people should read called Viro,

The Search for the Origin of COVID 19.

Matt Ridley and Alina Chan, I think Alina is in MIT.

She's at the Broad Institute.

So I heard her in an interview, give this analogy of unicorns

and where basically somebody writes a proposal to add horns to horses.

The proposal is rejected.

And then a couple of years later, a year later, a unicorn shows up.

In the place where they're proposing to do it.

And then everyone was like, it's natural origin.

It's like, it's possible it's natural origin.

We haven't detected a unicorn yet,

it's the first time we've detected a unicorn.

Or it could be this massive organization that was planning, is fully equipped,

has like a history of being able to do this stuff,

has the world experts to do it, has the funding, has the motivation

to add horns to horses.

And now a unicorn shows up and they're saying, no, definitely natural.

That connects to your first question of how do I get to my 85%

and here's a summary of that answer.

And so it's what I said in my 60 minutes interview a long time ago

of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,

the quote from Casablanca.

And so of all the places in the world where we have an outbreak

of a SARS like bat coronavirus,

it's not in the area of the natural habitat of the horseshoe bats.

It's the one city in China with the first and largest level four

virology lab, which actually wasn't even using it.

They were doing level three and level two for this work,

where they had the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses,

where they were doing aggressive experiments designed to make these

scary viruses scarier, where they had been part of an application

to insert a furring cleavage site able to infect human cells.

And where when the outbreak happened, we had a virus that was ready

for action to infect humans and to this day better able to infect humans

than any other species, including bats.

And then from day one, there's this massive coverup.

And then on top of that, in spite of lots of efforts by lots of people,

there's basically no evidence for the natural origin hypothesis.

Everything that I've described just now is circumstantial,

but there's a certain point of where you add up the circumstances.

And you see, this seems pretty, pretty likely.

I mean, if we're getting to 100%, we are not at 100% by any means.

There still is a possibility of a natural origin.

And if we find that, great.

But from everything that I know, that's how I get to my 85.

And we'll talk about why this matters in the political sense

and the human sense in the science, in the realm of science, all of those factors.

But first, as Nietzsche said, let us look into the abyss

and the games we'll play with monsters that is colloquially called

gain of function research.

Let me ask the kind of political sounding question,

which is how people usually phrase it.

Did Anthony Fauci fund gain of function research

at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

So it depends.

I mean, I've obviously been very closely monitoring this.

I've spoken a lot about it.

I've written about it.

And it depends on, I mean, not to quote Bill Clinton,

but to quote Bill Clinton, it depends on what the definition of is is.

And so if you use a common sense definition of gain of function,

and by gain of function, there are lots of things like gene therapies

that are gain of function.

But here, what we mean is gain of function for pathogens

able, potentially able to create human pandemics.

But if you use the kind of common sense language,

well, then he probably did.

If you use the technical language from a 2017 NIH document,

and you read that language very narrowly,

I think you can make a credible argument that he did not.

There's a question, though, and Francis Collins

talked about that in his interview with you.

But then there's a question that we know from now

that we have the information of the reports submitted

by EcoHealth Alliance to the NIH,

and some of which were late or not even delivered,

that some of this research was done on MERS,

Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome virus.

And if that was the case, there is, I think, a colorable argument

that that would be considered gain of function research

even by the narrow language of that 2017 document.

But I definitely think, and I've said this repeatedly,

that Rand Paul can be right, and Tony Fauci can be right.

And the question is, how are we defining gain of function?

And that's why I've always said the question in my mind

isn't was it or wasn't it gain of function,

as if that's like a binary thing, if not great,

and if yes, guilty.

The question is just, what work was being done

at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

What role, if any, did U.S. government funding

play in supporting that work?

And what rights do we all have as human beings

and as American citizens and taxpayers

to get all of the relevant information about them?

So let's try to kind of dissect this.

So who frustrates you more, Rand Paul

or Anthony Fauci's discussion, or the discussion itself?

So for example, gain of function is a term

that's kind of more used just to mean

making, playing with viruses in one lab

to try to develop more dangerous viruses.

Is this kind of research a good idea?

Is it also a good idea for us to talk about it

in public, in the political way that it's been talked about?

Is it okay that U.S. may have funded

gain of function research elsewhere?

I mean, it's kind of assumed, just like with Bill Clinton,

there was very little discussion of, I think,

correct me if I'm wrong, but, you know,

whether it's okay for a president, male or female,

to have extramarital sex, okay?

Or is it okay for a president to have extramarital sex

with people on his staff or her staff?

It was more the discussion of lying, I think.

It was, did you lie about having sex or not?

And in this gain of function discussion,

what frustrates me personally is there's not

a deep philosophical discussion about whether

we should be doing this kind of research

and what kinds, like, what are the ethical lines?

Research on animals at all.

Those are fascinating questions.

Instead, it's a gotcha thing.

Did you or did you not fund research on gain of function?

And did you fund, it's almost like a bio weapon.

Did you give money to China to develop this bio weapon

that now attacked the rest of the world?

So, I mean, all those things are pretty frustrating,

but is there, I think the thing you can untangle

about Anthony Fauci and gain of function research

in the United States and equal health alliance

and Wuhan Institute of virology that's kind of,

that's clarifying, what were the mistakes made?

Sure.

So, on gain of function, there actually has been a lot

of debate, and I mentioned before in 2011,

these first papers, there was a big debate.

Mark Lipsitch, who's formerly at Harvard now

with the US government working in the president's office,

he led a thing called the Cambridge Group

that was highly critical of this work,

but basically saying we're creating monsters.

They had the funding pause in 2014.

They spent three years putting together a framework,

and then they lifted it in 2017.

So, we had a thoughtful conversation.

Unfortunately, it didn't work,

and I think that's where we are now.

So, I absolutely think that there are real issues

with the relationship between the United States government

and eco health alliance, and through that,

eco health alliance with the Wuhan Institute of virology.

And one issue is just essential transparency,

because as I see it, it's most likely the case

that we transferred a lot of our knowledge

and plans and things to the Wuhan Institute of virology.

And again, I'm sure that Xu Zhengli is not herself a monster.

I'm sure of that, even though I've never met her.

But there are just a different set of pressures on people

working in an authoritarian system

than people who are working in other systems.

That doesn't mean it's entirely different.

And so, I absolutely think that we shouldn't give one dollar

to an organization and certainly a virology institute

where you don't have full access to their records,

to their databases, we don't know what work is happening there.

And I think that we need to have that kind of full examination.

And that's why, so I understand what Dr. Fauci is doing,

is saying, hey, what I hear, Dr. Fauci saying,

what I hear from you, Rand Paul,

is you're accusing me of starting this pandemic

and you're using gain of function as a proxy for that.

And we have, when there are Senate hearings,

every Senator gets five minutes.

And the name of the game is to translate your five minutes

into a clip that's going to run on the news.

And so, I get that there is that kind of, gotcha.

But I also think that Dr. Fauci and the National Institute

of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the NIH

should have been more transparent.

Because I think that in this day and age

where there are a lot of people poking around

in this whole story of COVID origins,

we would not be where we are if it wasn't

for a relatively small number of people.

And I'm part of, there are two, as I know, two groups.

One is these internet sleuths known as drastic.

And a number of them are part of a group that I'm part of called,

it's not our official name, but called the Paris Group.

It's about two dozen experts around the world,

but centered around some very high level French academics.

So we've all been digging and meeting with each other regularly

since last year.

And our governments across the board, certainly China,

but including the United States, haven't been as transparent

as they need to be.

So there's definitely mistakes were made on all sides.

And that's why, for me, from day one,

I've been calling for a comprehensive investigation

into this issue that certainly obviously looks at China.

But we have to look at ourselves.

We did not get this right.

So to you, I'm just going to put Rand Paul aside here.

He's a politician playing political games.

It's very frustrating, but it is what it is on all sides.

Anthony Fauci, you think should have been more transparent.

And maybe more eloquent in expressing the complexity

of all of this, the uncertainty in all of this.

Yeah.

And I get that it's really hard to do that,

because let's say you have one, you speak a paragraph,

and it's got four sentences.

And one of those sentences is the thing that's going to be turned

into Twitter.

Let me put it back.

I'll try not to be emotional about this,

but I've heard Anthony Fauci a couple of times now say

that he represents science.

I know what he means by that.

He means in the political bickering, all that kind of stuff,

that for a lot of people, he represents science.

But words matter.

And this isn't just clips.

I mean, maybe I'm distinctly aware of that doing this podcast.

Yeah, I talk for hundreds of hours now, maybe over 1,000 hours.

But I'm still careful with the words.

I'm trying not to be an asshole, and I'm aware when I'm an asshole

and I'll apologize for it.

If the words I represent science left my mouth,

which they very well could, I would sure as hell be apologizing

for it.

And not enough because I got in trouble.

I would just feel bad about saying something like that.

And even that little phrase, I represent science.

No, Dr. Fauci, you do not represent science.

I love science.

The millions of scientists that inspired me to get into it.

To fall in love with the scientific method in the exploration

of ideas through the rigor of science.

That Anthony Fauci does not represent.

He's one, I believe, great scientist of millions.

He does not represent anybody.

He's just one scientist.

And I think the greatness of a scientist is best exemplified

in humility because the scientific method basically says,

like, you're standing before the fog, the mystery of it all,

and slowly chipping away at the mystery.

And it's embarrassing.

It's humiliating how little you know.

That's the experience.

So the great scientists have to have humility to me.

And especially in their communication,

they have to have humility.

I don't know.

And some of it is also words matter because great leaders

have to have the poetry of action.

They have to be bold and inspire action across millions

of people.

But you also have to, through that poetry of words,

express the complexity of the uncertainty you're operating

under, be humble in the face of not being able to predict

the future or understand the past,

or really know what's the right thing to do,

but we have to do something.

And through that, you have to be a great leader

that inspires action.

Some of that is just words.

And he chose words poorly.

So I'm all torn about this.

And then there's politicians that are taking those words

and magnifying them and playing games with them.

And of course, that's a decent incentive for the people

who do the scientific leaders that step into the limelight

to say any more words.

So they kind of become more conservative

with the words they use.

I mean, it just becomes a giant mess.

And I think the solution is to ignore all of that

and to be transparent, to be honest, to be vulnerable,

and to express the full uncertainty of what you're operating under

to present all the possible actions

and to be honest about the mistakes they made in the past.

I mean, there's something, even if you're not directly responsible

for those mistakes, taking responsibility for them

is a way to win people over.

I don't think leaders realize this often in the modern age.

In the internet age, they can see through your bullshit.

And it's really inspiring when you take ownership,

sort of do the thought experiment in public,

do a thought experiment if there was a lab leak,

and then lay out all the funding, the EcoHealth Alliance,

all the incredible science going on

at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the NIH.

Lay out all the possible ethical problems.

Lay out all the possible mistakes that could have been made

and say, like, this could have happened,

and if this happened, here's the best way to respond to it

and to prevent it in the future.

And just lay all that complexity out.

I mean, I wish we would have seen it.

And I have hope that this conversation,

conversations like at your work and books on this topic

will inspire young people today

when they become in the Anthony Fauci's role

to be much more transparent and much more humble

and all of those kinds of things,

that this is just a relic of the past.

When there's a person, no offense to me,

in a suit that has to stand up and speak

with clarity and certainty.

I mean, that's just a relic of the past.

This is my hope, but...

Do you mind if I...

Because I agree with a great deal of what you said,

and it's really unfortunate

that certainly the Chinese government,

as I said before, our government wasn't as transparent

as I feel they should have been,

particularly in the early days of the pandemic

and particularly with regard to the issue of pandemic origins.

I mean, we know that Dr. Fauci was on calls

with people like Christian Anderson at Scripps and others

in those early days raising questions,

is this an engineered virus?

There were a lot of questions.

And it's kind of sad.

I mean, as I mentioned before, I've been one,

and certainly there were others,

but there weren't a lot of us of the people

who from the earliest days of the pandemic

were raising questions about, hey, not so fast here.

And I launched my website on pandemic origins

in April of last year, April 2020.

It got a huge amount of attention.

And actually, my friend Matt Pottinger,

who was the deputy national security advisor,

when he was reaching out to people in the U.S. government

and in allied government saying,

hey, we should look into this,

what he was sending them was my website.

It wasn't some U.S. government information.

And by the way, people should still go to the website.

You keep getting, you keep updating it,

and it's an incredible resource.

Well, thank you. Thank you. JamieMetall.com.

And it's really unfortunate that our governments

and international institutions,

for pretty much all of 2020,

weren't doing their jobs of really probing this issue.

People were hiding behind this kind of false consensus.

And I'm critical of many people,

even when I heard Francis Collins interview with you.

I just felt, well, he wasn't as balanced

on the issue of COVID origins.

Certainly Dr. Fauci could have,

in his conversation with Rand Paul,

it wasn't even a conversation,

but in some process in the aftermath,

could have laid things out a bit better.

He did say, and Francis Collins did say,

that we don't know the origins, and that was a shift.

And we need to have an investigation.

So now, but having said all of that,

I do kind of, one, I have tremendous respect

for Dr. Fauci for the work that he's done on HIV AIDS.

I mean, I have been vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine.

Dr. Fauci was a big part of the story

of getting us these vaccines

that have saved millions and millions of lives.

And so I don't think, I mean, there's a lot to this story.

And then the second thing is it's really hard

to be a public health expert because you have,

your mission is public health.

And so, and you have to, if you are leading

with all of your uncertainty,

it's a really hard way to do things.

And so like even now, like if I go to CVS

and I get a Tylenol, somebody has done a calculation

of how many people will die from taking Tylenol.

And they say, well, all right, we can live with that.

And that's why we have regulation.

And so all of us are doing kind of summaries.

And then we have people in public health who are saying,

well, we've summed it all up and you should do it.

You should get your kids vaccinated for measles.

You should not drive your car at 100 miles an hour.

You should don't drink lighter fluid,

whatever these things are.

And we want them to kind of give us broad guidelines

and yet now our information world is so fragmented

that if you're not being honest about something,

something material, someone's going to find out

and it's going to undermine your credibility.

And so I agree with you that there's a greater requirement

for transparency now.

Maybe there always has been,

but there's an even greater requirement for it now

because people want to trust that you're speaking honestly

and that you're saying, well, here's what I know.

And this is based on what I know.

Here are the conclusions that I draw.

But if it's just, and again, I don't think the words

I'm science or whatever it was are the right words.

But if it's just, you know, trust me because of who I am,

I don't think that flies anywhere anymore.

Can I just ask you about the Francis Collins interview

that I did?

If you got a chance to hear that part,

I think in the beginning we talk about the loud leak.

What are your thoughts about his response?

Basically saying it's worthy of an investigation,

but I mean, I don't know how you would interpret it.

See, it's funny because I heard it in the moment