Juno News - On C2C： Was the pandemic caused by science？

00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show

00:00:05.880 welcome back to the andrew lawton show well what has been one of the most common refrains

00:00:14.560 of the last few years some variation of trust the science or follow the science as though science is

00:00:21.720 this universal and clear oracle that we can all take our cues from on anything and everything well

00:00:27.700 was science itself the problem in a way there was a fascinating essay from the c2c journal written by

00:00:36.060 public policy analyst margaret kapala that makes that very point the essay is called a pandemic

00:00:42.720 caused by science with a i've tried to do the inflection there so as to indicate the question

00:00:48.300 mark at the end of the uh piece's title there but it was a fascinating read and i thought i would dig

00:00:53.220 into it with margaret herself who joins me now margaret wonderful to talk to you thanks so much

00:00:57.420 for coming on today my pleasure now let's refer to let's talk first off about what it is you're

00:01:04.500 referring to and you say or suggest that science itself may have been to blame what are you getting

00:01:09.480 at the crux of the argument boils down to the use of a technology called gainer function science and

00:01:19.900 what gainer function is it involves the pulling together of different viruses and taking out

00:01:26.760 different bits of them splicing and dicing them so that you come up with the worst and worst of

00:01:33.080 each virus so you end up with a synthetic virus that has the attributes of the of the other two

00:01:41.080 now in this case it does look uh it is near certainty that gain-of-function technology was involved

00:01:48.760 involved in the whatever was going on at the wuhan of labs uh uh and between american and and chinese

00:01:59.720 scientists um in in wuhan um working on this mysterious virus which turned out in the end to have all the

00:02:08.440 properties of of sars cov2 uh which of course as we know is the final cause of covid19 that i mean let's

00:02:20.120 talk about that lab for a moment because at the beginning we were all told that the culprit was a

00:02:25.080 bat or a pangolin basically was uh some you know horrendous twist of fate that led to a very unfortunate

00:02:31.880 situation at one of the wet markets in wuhan and very early on people were skeptical of that and

00:02:38.360 suggested that this could have been a creation of a lab intentionally or unintentionally leaked and

00:02:44.440 what was fascinating with that argument is that as more and more evidence mounted this thing that was

00:02:50.440 a conspiracy theory at some point in 2022 or 2020 has effectively become an accepted fact or at least

00:02:58.520 the most plausible scenario here now do we do we know anything beyond that as far as was this

00:03:06.200 carelessness was it perhaps intentional difficult to say everybody is erring on the side of giving the

00:03:16.600 chinese you know giving the chinese a lot of leeway that is that it was an accidental release or an 0.99

00:03:23.560 accidental leak uh release implies it wasn't accidental accidental leak and um i mean certainly you know

00:03:32.600 whether this is done in in the name of a prudent geopolitical uh maneuvering or whether it's it's it's a

00:03:40.760 it's a kind another kind of cover-up we we won't ever know my my sense is that both the chinese and

00:03:50.200 the americans are caught in a in a stalemate of mutual culpability that is in the sense that

00:03:58.680 we knew know for certain that the americans funded the the the work that was going on in wuhan uh

00:04:07.160 through a series of elaborate on arcane roundabout ways of getting money to wuhan um uh through a

00:04:15.400 uh uh an intermediary called echo health alliance um an ngo that an ngo so so a the americans financed

00:04:26.200 it there are people coming out and saying that boldly although not everybody the official word from

00:04:32.600 the american government is that they hadn't that they had nothing to do with it but there are some who

00:04:38.120 are being intellectually honest like for instance robert redfield who was the former um former director of

00:04:44.760 the uh center for disease control of one of the arch agencies within the american government on the

00:04:51.640 health side who was saying out out loud and in your face we funded it um and then on the other hand you

00:05:00.120 had the work that was going on in wuhan which is not being denied by by the chinese xi jeng li who's the

00:05:06.680 chief scientist again a geneticist of mary uh an accomplished geneticist again the tech who's good

00:05:14.840 at the splicing and the dicing of genes um and she's not denying that they did the work there but

00:05:20.840 she is denying that it was their fault or that it was ever leaked and she's saying no no no it came from

00:05:27.480 it came from the bats over in this mine and and uh that's that was the real source at least that's the

00:05:33.640 last excuse i've heard from her on this one so but but yes now in all fairness you know it made a lot

00:05:42.680 of sense to think in the first instance that it might have come from an animal or animal or bat host

00:05:49.160 um this is where a lot of pandemics have come from this is what the what the spanish the spanish flu

00:05:55.880 was originated with you know flea infested rodents and they jumped to that then jumped to the to

00:06:04.520 humans uh so this is not abnormal for this kind of thing to happen i mean just even thinking in terms

00:06:11.000 of rabies i mean that's virus that jumps to a human from an animal so i mean it made sense for a lot of

00:06:16.280 people to think that right away so fair enough but you know getting down to brass tacks and getting into the

00:06:25.000 science of the actual virus itself and the fact that it has certain genetic components which now

00:06:32.760 other scientists have sliced and diced and said hey wait a minute uh this looks like it was pretty

00:06:40.040 well man-made and now even since the writing of my article there has been additional information has come

00:06:46.840 out you'll remember in the article i refer to two key key scientific papers nobody was hiding

00:06:54.760 this by the way that this science was going on uh papers dating way back to 2005 and you know they

00:07:01.160 were looking for viruses in bats and and and the genui and and a um a renowned geneticist uh located in

00:07:11.720 the university of north carolina ralph barrick they had been working together for quite some time

00:07:16.440 on stuff like this um so uh you know nobody was being untoward or or or uh you know trying to hide

00:07:25.880 anything here uh there were two papers that were absolutely devastating one that said hey we've

00:07:34.520 created this great thing a chimera we've come we figured out how to put two viruses together to come up

00:07:40.040 with a virus that's even worse um and in this case it was pulling together the elements of the

00:07:46.440 sars virus which caused the pandemic in 2002 to 2004. they took that virus and then spliced and diced it 0.99

00:07:54.440 with another virus we're not sure where that one came from and lo and behold um it came out looking

00:08:01.720 an awful lot like sars covi-2 or at least became so so it's covi-2 i i want to just go back to the

00:08:07.640 fundamentals here because i mean it's easy when you're talking about a term that's not familiar

00:08:12.120 to people which i think gain of function is is certainly or a few years ago was not familiar to a

00:08:17.160 lot of people and you're describing the function very very calmly and very accurately but a lot of

00:08:21.720 people would hear this and be like what on earth would you expect to happen if you're mucking around

00:08:26.920 in the engine room like that and i'm wondering what are the noble intentions of this if there

00:08:32.200 if there were to be any or is it about uh trying to understand uh the the virulence of these things

00:08:38.200 to protect against them because certainly it's easy to understand in a military context or a

00:08:43.160 bio-warfare context what the value of this is what's their defense for why they're doing this research

00:08:49.000 in the first place and why it justifies the alliance between united states scientists and chinese

00:08:54.360 scientists well ostensibly it was to create the gain of function is is justified by the argument that

00:09:04.440 if you create a a virus then you can create the vaccine that will address it if it ever whatever

00:09:11.720 reason becomes you are willing the virus into existence that might never have appeared in doing

00:09:17.400 that yeah what's you know the point is here here we are dealing with the virus that never would have

00:09:22.440 existed unless these scientists have put it together in the first place so hey reading the uh the the

00:09:29.080 second paper the diffuse paper i refer to two papers the second paper that came out and actually new

00:09:33.960 information has just come out since it was since um uh since i wrote the article and again what they

00:09:40.760 were apparently trying what they argued that they were trying to do is they were trying to put together a

00:09:45.880 a virus that would reinfect bats and make them uh in turn immune and unable to then pass on the virus okay

00:09:58.600 there was some sort of immunological thing that they were trying to hoping to achieve where bat populations

00:10:04.520 were concerned because bats are the largest amount largest uh population of mammals that harbor this the

00:10:13.960 coronavirus and i mean and there are all kinds of coronaviruses that are done over 200 have been

00:10:19.080 recognized but i mean apparently there are estimates they're in the thousands of kinds of coronaviruses that

00:10:23.880 are out there and some with varying degrees of of lethality so so that was one argument about why it

00:10:32.040 was necessary to do this um the second argument and the more common one is that um that it is there to

00:10:40.760 create you know you create something so that you can create a vaccine to deal with it and now you can

00:10:46.520 see how this would make sense in a military set in in a military context i mean if if you've got people

00:10:53.160 out there enemies um enemies uh who are uh developing their own biological uh warfare you know biological

00:11:03.400 weapons and you've got to try to anticipate what the heck they are trying to going to hit you with and so

00:11:09.880 you want to come up with a vaccine that's actually going to um to deal with it all that makes some

00:11:17.000 sense um the but there was a point but the bigger risk is in all of that is you know in the course of

00:11:26.360 doing this you end up with what we ended up with with covid well and also just to jump in there margaret if

00:11:33.880 i may i mean the idea of developing that to protect against what your enemies may do with

00:11:39.800 china who maybe we don't call an enemy but is certainly not a friend does not strike me as the 0.99

00:11:45.560 wisest course of that and i mean in canada we've certainly seen front and center about what happens

00:11:49.720 when you let people affiliated with the chinese regime into our top security labs absolutely absolutely 0.68

00:11:57.160 so no and none of this makes any sense whatsoever i mean and there are various theories about why and

00:12:03.240 how this might have taken place that it was a cia covert operation of some kind we were trying to

00:12:08.280 figure out what was going on in their labs and they they could talk on us they ended up as usual with

00:12:15.080 our technology right yeah so now they have all this this gain of function technology with which and

00:12:20.840 i'm sure they're underway you know the gain of function technology xi zhang li knows everything

00:12:27.160 that ralph barrett knows and hey uh and she's the she's the coronavirus authority she can actually go

00:12:34.840 out i mean she's got immediate access to all kinds of bats there are a prodigious number of bat caves in

00:12:42.280 in china so the um so you know none of it really makes a lot of sense and and and and which is all

00:12:50.920 the more worrying because if you could ascribe some clear motive to what was going on it might be easier

00:12:59.000 to deal with the one thing that is clear out of all this is what do we do about these gain of function

00:13:04.440 um uh labs because this is going on everywhere it's not just in china um as redfield pointed out

00:13:11.400 universities everywhere are playing around tinkering around with these viruses and this

00:13:16.440 this these kinds of technologies and yes there are uh root leaks are routine these are not i didn't

00:13:24.920 mention that in the article but i mean i think there's something like 200 lab leaks every you know every

00:13:29.800 few years um and okay they don't count anything but one might and all that takes is one right that's

00:13:39.240 right that's right absolutely so so yes um um now i mean the other side of the whole whole equation is

00:13:48.440 not just that this virus was created and somehow rather got out into the into the world you know

00:13:55.400 the other side of the equation is how the world reacted then and that's equally disturbing i found that

00:14:01.240 very disturbing as well well yes and and that i mean has been covered exhaustively on this show not

00:14:07.240 nearly enough by i would say legacy media sources and c2c journal and yourself have been very strong

00:14:13.080 on that and i it's easy to point the finger at you know the american government and you know the

00:14:17.960 fauci regime and all of that and certainly easy to point the finger at the chinese canada has never 0.53

00:14:22.840 been immune from this no pun intended i i mean i mentioned the the case of canada and uh china

00:14:28.520 cooperating at that bio lab in winnipeg but but canada has been a part of a lot of these you know

00:14:33.880 cross-cultural exchanges of research as well has it not yes absolutely and um i mean and it looks

00:14:40.520 like we're going to get even more if the if the who pandemic treaty goes through because they'll be

00:14:46.760 calling on everybody all the global partners to go get out there and gather up their viruses and send

00:14:55.160 them into their labs and by the way send them also to the who uh where the where the major pharmaceutical

00:15:01.960 companies will of course have a lot of fun with them as well we'll see it all over again so this

00:15:08.600 is very disturbing and i and i you know if if at one level certainly the big issue that needs to be

00:15:16.600 discussed here is whether or not we should be doing this stuff at all uh president obama uh called a

00:15:24.440 moratorium on gain-of-function research well it was at that point then that they figured out how to use an

00:15:30.040 ng-o to get the funding to another part of the world to keep doing it yeah they just start outsourcing 0.99

00:15:37.480 it at that point and it makes it worse because you lose that oversight and transparency that that

00:15:41.720 normally existed exactly so you know that that so there was that certain big big downside from from that

00:15:50.120 but but the question then becomes well how do you monitor this how do you guarantee you know

00:15:55.080 the check for safety and and what have you incidentally we had in what we do know about

00:16:01.880 wuhan is that most of the work was done in substandard biosafety securities at labs they had a fabulous

00:16:09.480 new lab a bsl highest level safety a new lab had been built um very recently but it turns out most of

00:16:18.520 the work on on the sars viruses were being done in biosafety lab two and three so again you know

00:16:27.640 how do you monitor how do you how do you keep track of all of this and how do you why are we allowing this

00:16:33.480 so there there are i mean reading and reviewing the voluminous evidence to date there are really two

00:16:40.680 paths that are facing governments i mean you could look at this and say what you're saying which is

00:16:45.160 this is a cautionary tale we should not do this type of research not put ourselves in in this

00:16:50.520 uh position again but i i fear that too many lawmakers and and so-called experts are doing the

00:16:55.640 opposites and saying ah see this is why we need to do the research this is why we need to do it and

00:17:01.240 they're looking at the same premise and and correct me if i'm wrong margaret but they're drawing the

00:17:05.560 opposite conclusion exactly and and as redfield says you know the next pandemic will come from a lab

00:17:12.520 somewhere and it'll be worse and who knows whether or not we can or will be ready for it let's hope we

00:17:19.240 are and and and heaven knows we've had a lot of salutary lessons to be obtained from our past

00:17:26.680 experience here uh not least that that individual health authorities really really need to drill down

00:17:33.320 and decide and you know take all this information in and decide really where they stand on it

00:17:39.240 because what ended up happening last time was the americans and the pharmaceutical companies

00:17:44.680 ran slipshod over everybody and uh without without offering fully tested vaccines and of course we're

00:17:54.600 still paying for that and we're likely to pay for that for a long time with our health health conditions

00:18:00.600 so there's a lot to think about here and i'm hoping that that the our health authorities are having this

00:18:07.480 discussion and our governments are having these discussions and at the at at the most local

00:18:14.120 level which is where these discussions have to take place and where decisions need to take place

00:18:18.360 and the great believer in subsidiarity you know decisions at the local level not at the global level

00:18:24.120 for sure yeah we can all agree on that i i would hope uh a pandemic caused by science is an essay in

00:18:31.080 c2c journal you could read written by margaret coppalla who's with me now margaret thank you so much for

00:18:36.200 your time on this really appreciate it good to be here thanks andrew thanks for listening to the

00:18:40.200 andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news

Juno News - February 04, 2024

On C2C： Was the pandemic caused by science？

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