Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and the President of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He is also the winner of the 2015 Blue Planet Prize and a best-selling author, and a chairman of the Lancet's COVID-19 Commission. In this episode, Jeffrey talks about how he got involved with the co-designation of the COVID19 Commission and how he and his co-chair, Peter Daszak, came up with the idea for it. He also talks about the origins of the CoVirus19 virus, and why he thinks it may have come from a Chinese lab. Jeffrey also discusses why he believes it s likely to have been developed in China and why it s a good thing it s not coming from a lab in the United States. Jeffrey is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and is a frequent contributor to The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post. He's also the author of several books, including The Dark Side of the Urban Jungle: A Biopsychosocial Guide to the Urban Wild, which he co-authored with his late wife, Maya Angelou, and won the 2015 Nobel Prize for her work on sustainable development. This episode was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Global Change and edited by Alex Blumberg at the Centre for Applied Science and Leadership at the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Change, and edited and produced by Robert Putney at the New England Journal of the International Journal of Political Science and the London School of Economics and the Bulletin of the New Statesman, and the University of St. Johns Hopkins University, among other places in the U.S. and in Europe. It was edited by David Sidwell at Harvard University, and produced in association with The New York Public Library, and with the London, Harvard, and Columbia University, New York, and University Press, and New York University, in London, and Harvard, among many other places around the world, and at the Harvard Graduate School, and in collaboration with other offices across the world and in New York and in Los Angeles, and Toronto, Canada, and San Francisco, Canada. and in the Netherlands, and Berlin, and so much more. Thank you for listening to this episode and share it with your friends and support us on social media and everywhere else you get a chance to help spread the word about it! Thanks to Bobby and Jeffrey Sachs for being kind enough to share it.
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, I'm really delighted today to have an old friend to talk to us.
00:00:04.000Jeffrey Sachs is the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
00:00:11.000He's the president of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
00:00:17.000He's the winner of the 2015 Blue Planet Prize, a best-selling author, and a chairman of the Lancet's COVID-19 Commission.
00:00:26.000The commission was announced, as I recall, I think in June of 2020 by Richard.
00:00:32.000And then you're joining the commission, happened in November 2020, and you assembled a task force for the prestigious medical journal, 190-year-old medical journal, to determine the origins of COVID-19.
00:00:49.000You hand-selected, I think, a number of the commissioners, but most notoriously Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance.
00:01:01.000And to be chairman of the task force, Daszak was essentially forced to recuse himself in June of 2021.
00:01:08.000And then you shut down the commission altogether in September of 2021.
00:01:14.000And you did something incredibly courageous, which was to publish an article in PNAS, which has gotten a tremendous attention.
00:01:25.000I'm sure you're getting a lot of both negative and positive feedback.
00:01:29.000Blowback from that, essentially saying that your belief is that the best evidence is that the COVID-19 virus came from A Chinese lab that it was based upon US-funded technology.
00:01:47.000And I would have to agree with you on that, having done a lot of research on it myself.
00:01:52.000But let's talk about how you got involved in it in the first place.
00:01:57.000Were you approached by Richard Horton?
00:02:05.000Let me just fill out a few of the details and just correct a little bit of the detail on that, because to put it clearly, I'm chairing a commission for The Lancet called the Lancet COVID-19 Commission.
00:02:20.000It's issuing its report in mid-September.
00:02:26.000Within the Commission, I established 11 task forces.
00:02:31.000So some were on how to respond to the pandemic.
00:02:35.000Some were on the financial crisis that emerged around the pandemic.
00:02:38.000Some were on other issues about public health.
00:02:42.000But one of them, one of the task forces, was about the origins.
00:02:48.000And that's the task force where I asked Peter Daszak to chair and essentially to organize the task force.
00:02:57.000So for each of these 11 task forces, I designated a public health expert or diplomatic or financial expert and then gave them or requested of them, since this was all on volunteer time on everybody's part, to organize a group of international experts to work on this.
00:03:19.000I was chair right from the beginning of the process, which was the middle of 2020, just as the pandemic was reaching the first half year.
00:03:31.000And it was around that time Richard Horton and I talked and thought that a commission would be a good idea, by the way, not only to Review all that happened.
00:03:42.000We didn't know how long this would last, but also to make some recommendations along the way of how to try to keep this under control, how to make sure that there was health equity for desperately poor people who needed access to medicines or hospitals or protection or face masks or whatever it is.
00:04:01.000And Richard Horton asked me to head this and to organize it.
00:04:07.00040 public policy leaders from around the world, former president of the UN General Assembly, former president in a European country, several scientists, many financial experts, and so on.
00:04:23.000But for me and for us in our discussion today, One part of this assignment was, so where'd this come from?
00:04:30.000And I can tell you at the beginning of my engagement in this issue, well, even from the beginning of the pandemic itself, I assumed this came out of nature the same way that SARS apparently came out of nature in 2003, 2004.
00:04:49.000In the case of SARS, best guess is that it really was an animal sold in a wet market in China that was carrying that virus.
00:04:59.000MERS, which is another coronavirus in the Middle East respiratory syndrome, was carried by CAMEL. I assumed, okay, this is yet another one of these so-called zoonoses.
00:05:12.000And I thought, who knows a lot about that, but the guy who's looking at these viruses in the wild, Peter Daschuk.
00:05:19.000So I asked him, well, you're around this.
00:05:31.000You know, I was not in any way on the lab leak side of things at the beginning.
00:05:37.000In fact, I thought that doesn't sound right.
00:05:40.000And I remember explaining in a very learned way to a good friend of mine, no, no, no, that's not right.
00:05:46.000This is a natural sometime in the spring of 2020.
00:05:51.000So what we're talking about, Bobby, is my education also, because I got to watch this story very close up by some of the principles involved in making the case that it's from nature, from the swan, Which is the one that is featured in, say, the New York Times stories in the last few months about the scientists finding the origins and so forth.
00:06:20.000And I can tell you that over the period of two years, I was lied to so many times Daszak told me so many things that were not true, was the opposite of transparent.
00:06:36.000I had to tell him, well, you can't head this task force.
00:06:42.000And even later, soon after that, you can't even be on the commission.
00:06:46.000So I didn't disband the commission, but I did take him off of the task force.
00:06:52.000And then And it keeps coming, by the way.
00:06:56.000The task force members were dishonest to me after I was completely clear with them.
00:07:03.000I want to know what your potential conflicts of interest are.
00:07:08.000Are you involved with EcoHealth Alliance, with DASHIC? Are you involved with Wuhan Institute of Virology?
00:07:15.000Are you involved with NIH in a way that we should understand that there may be a potential conflict?
00:07:22.000And Bobby, none of them told the truth.
00:07:26.000Maybe that's not shocking, but it was surprising to me because these are some of them, people that I've known, I would say personal friends in some cases, for 20 years.
00:07:37.000They absolutely did not tell the truth when I asked them clearly, explicitly.
00:07:44.000So that was one part of the story, my growing story.
00:07:47.000Oh, dismay, consternation, that something is really, really wrong about this.
00:07:56.000And then on the other side, as those who follow this story, and you are certainly among the lead in that, the Freedom of Information Act and Leakes's One by one, were demolishing the premises of the natural spillover story,
00:08:20.000but also revealing the utter transparency and misdirection that the U.S. government was leading basically but also revealing the utter transparency and misdirection that the U.S. government was So we were not hearing the truth.
00:08:36.000But it's dismaying to see it come out step by step in this way.
00:08:42.000And what is absolutely clear to me is that there are two viable hypotheses about the origin of this.
00:08:56.000And one of them is out of a lab and there's nothing outlandish about it at all.
00:09:02.000And in fact, like you said, I think it's the odds on it.
00:09:07.000I don't speak for the whole Commission in that regard.
00:09:10.000What the Commission sees is that there are two viable explanations.
00:09:15.000But I can tell you two years into this, with all the deceit, deception, lying that I've seen the scientists on the Huanan market side vastly overstating or misdirecting.
00:09:29.000The gaze and the absolute absurd, sad, worrisome, frightening unwillingness of The U.S. government starting with NIH to look closely at the lab hypothesis.
00:09:52.000I started on the other side, but I watched very closely.
00:09:57.000And like all of us, I've been an avid reader of the drip, drip, drip Of information that has been pried out of the hands of NIH, because they're not talking, they're not forthcoming, they're not being honest, Fauci's not telling it like it is.
00:10:14.000By drip, the story's coming out, and it's a very worrisome one.
00:10:18.000My approach to this was different than yours because I approach with this enormous skepticism that I've cultivated that basically has grown unwillingly in me since 2005, watching Fauci very carefully and watching the journals and how they've devolved.
00:10:38.000And in fact, in 2004, Richard Horton made the statement that the scientific journals, particularly the Lancet, had devolved into propaganda vessels for the pharmaceutical industry.
00:10:52.000And Marsha Engel, at the same time, published her book, who was a longtime publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, basically saying there's nothing in the journals that you can believe anymore.
00:11:04.000So much of our revenue comes from pharma.
00:11:09.000And now The Lancet is owned by Elsevier, which is a very, very wealthy company that's getting basically Pharma as its partner and China.
00:11:20.000And throughout the pandemic, we watched Horton do all of these kind of underhanded things where he had to retract articles.
00:11:30.000They published the article on remdesivir that allowed them, even the World Health Organization was saying, this stuff is poison, it doesn't work, it has no efficacy.
00:11:41.000And he published the article for Fauci that allowed Fauci to then go get approval for this very, very deadly drug.
00:11:50.000He had to do the retraction on the surrogosphere studies.
00:11:55.000He tried to discredit hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in any kind of early treatment.
00:12:33.000And that gets us in so much trouble when people are unwilling to change their minds.
00:12:37.000So I know that most people who come from here and my background assume that the government was and the pharmaceutical industry were kind of doing their best.
00:12:48.000And it was hard to believe that, you know, and I've watched people, I had to come to my own set of revelations, and over time, I know you had to come to yours.
00:12:59.000How many people were on the Wuhan Commission, essentially, the Origins Commission?
00:13:24.000We're the same virologists and immunologists and biologists who had signed on to the Lancet letter, which it turns out Daszak had secretly orchestrated.
00:13:35.000Yeah, so let me just give you the background on that.
00:13:40.000I asked each of the task force chairs to organize their task forces under a broad rubric, which was international diversity, gender diversity, professional background diversity and so on.
00:13:57.000By and large, out of 11 task forces, 10 did so.
00:14:02.000And Daszak surrounded himself by his colleagues, basically.
00:14:07.000As time went on, and people immediately attacked me, and I said, by the way, And I meant it from the first moment.
00:15:17.000And you can count on me to make sure that we look at everything.
00:15:21.000And, of course, from the first moment, that was my intention.
00:15:25.000And then people started to explain some basic facts to me about what was going on, what the research underway in the U.S. and in Wuhan were, the research that was so dangerous, so potentially the source of all of this.
00:15:43.000And so at one point early in 2021, I said to Daszak, look, I need to see your research proposals to NIH because I'm hearing a lot of things.
00:15:55.000And Daszak said to me, no, no, I can't give those to you.
00:15:59.000My lawyers say I can't give those to you.
00:17:05.000And one of them was a friend of mine for, as I said, for probably about 25 years, who ripped into me personally, like I don't usually experience, but saying how...
00:17:26.000Let me just mention the bottom line, though, which was hilarious to me, although a little sad, which was, as he was absolutely furious with my anti-science, out comes one of the FOIA documents, which is one of Daschig's NIH grants.
00:18:46.000I'd say there are three sides of this story that are absolutely fascinating.
00:18:52.000One is this kind of web of Connection, conflict, pretty much all of them around NIH grants, around Tony Fauci and his group that he has supported.
00:19:09.000That's really, really an unpleasant part of this.
00:19:14.000The second thing that we learn Is from the FOIA releases themselves that, and you know it, but it's amazing to see, actually.
00:19:29.000I don't expect more of government in general, but when it is in the scientific side, I kind of still hoped that there was more integrity there.
00:19:39.000But from the first day that we know of NIH Taking its hand on the public response, which I put it, February 1, 2020.
00:19:53.000It may predate that, but February 1, 2020 is a now notorious secret phone call that Francis Collins and Tony Fauci organized with Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome Trust and a group of virologists.
00:20:10.000And that group Pretty much all of them said on February 1, hmm, that looks a lot like a lab creation.
00:20:20.000Not just a lab release, a lab creation.
00:20:23.000And it's interesting and important for people to understand why.
00:20:31.000This SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is like SARS-1.
00:20:40.000But it's got one little bit of its genome that makes it really infective and very dangerous, and that is what's called the furin cleavage site or the proteolytic cleavage site.
00:20:57.000And four amino acids in this long or 12 nucleotides in this 30,000 nucleotide virus make it far more dangerous than SARS-CoV-1.
00:21:13.000What happened at the beginning when this virus was sequenced and people looked at it, they said, oh, this thing has a furin cleavage site.
00:21:23.000And they said, whoa, where'd that come from?
00:21:27.000And one of the immediate hypotheses is, well, someone stuck it in there because the furin cleavage site is an intense object of scientific research interest because it was known Actually,
00:21:43.000since SARS-1, that if you take a SARS-like virus and you stick in a furin cleavage site at what's called the S1-S2 junction, boy, you make that virus potentially a lot more lethal, a lot more pathogenic, a lot more transmissible.
00:22:01.000So it was an object of scientific interest that went back to SARS, the original outbreak.
00:22:08.000And it was a real intensive object of interest of The NIH-funded group from 2015 onward.
00:22:17.000So the point is, on February 1, 2020, the virologists looked at this and said, whoa, whoa, furin cleavage site, that's the only FCS, the only furin cleavage site in a sarbicovirus that is a SARS-like virus that we know of, and boy, that really suggests maybe someone stuck that in there.
00:22:41.000Now, as you know, by February 3, the official story was, this is out of nature.
00:22:49.000And by February 4, the first draft of what became a very influential paper called The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2, which was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, This is absolutely a natural spillover.
00:23:09.000And by the way, it was that paper that I read that said, yeah, look, the scientists say it's a natural spillover.
00:23:51.000What was going on in science in the years leading up to this pandemic?
00:23:59.000What we know is that there was a lot of focus on manipulating SARS-CoVs or sarbicoviruses and looking at whether they had furin cleavage sites or proteolytic cleavage sites and doing experiments to insert furin cleavage sites, what is called gain-of-function research, which we hear so much about.
00:24:29.000That was a quite extensive program, and it was a program in which American really ingenious, though a bit terrifying science, with a lot of ingenuity,
00:24:47.000was stitching together chimeric viruses, that is taking different parts to make a new virus, Or consensus viruses, building viruses by their genetic code, basically kind of as an average of known viruses, and inserting genes into existing viruses to change their, or to test their so-called spillover potential.
00:25:15.000And that research program is just, NIH has done everything to keep it hidden from view, and we should thank groups like US Right to Know and The Intercept, which have done fantastic work to let us see what that's all about.
00:25:36.000And as you know, Bobby, the shocker of all is a particular proposal called the DEFUSE proposal that was made by this partnership of EcoHealth Alliance, that's Dashix Group, University of North Carolina in the lab led by Ralph Baric,
00:25:55.000and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so the three groups, to take Previously unreported strains of Sarbico viruses, and the grant proposal says that they have, this team has more than 180 previously unreported strains, and to test them for their spillover potential.
00:26:21.000And what makes one's hair stand on end, at least mine, is that on the next page after saying we've got this whole portfolio of previously unreported viruses, it says, we're going to examine these viruses for whether they have a proteolytic cleavage site, and where there is a mismatch, we're going to insert one.
00:26:45.000Well, at that point, the red blaring lights should go on because that's basically what SARS-CoV-2 is.
00:26:55.000So if you needed a cookbook opened up to say, how do you make SARS-CoV-2, the DEFUSE grant actually does that.
00:27:07.000Oh, well, they didn't fund that, as if that's an answer.
00:27:11.000What we know is there was a recipe, there was a desire, there was a large scientific program, there was a technical capability, and one day there was a furin cleavage site that has never been seen before in a Sarbico virus.
00:27:39.000Well, we don't find any animals there.
00:27:41.000We couldn't find any infected animals.
00:27:43.000We don't have any idea how a fur and cleavage site could have come in.
00:27:47.000Oh, there were two spillovers to make the timing work right.
00:27:51.000But don't look over here, which is a...
00:27:54.000Rather straightforward, parsimonious explanation that there was a large research program backed by Fauci, by the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Disease, NIAID, part of NIH, that planned, that hoped To insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-CoVs and to test for their spillover potential.
00:28:26.000One of the problems, you mentioned that February 1st meeting, that teleconference that they had with Fauci and Perrar and Rambo and a couple of the other virologists, Chris Anderson.
00:28:41.000The problem they had was that As you said, the COVID-19 virus was the same as existing viruses that they had.
00:28:53.000In fact, it was 96.2% identical to another virus that they had from China.
00:29:01.000And the entire difference, the entire 3.8% difference It was accounted by that fur and cleave site and the spike protein.
00:29:11.000And as you say, that feature did not exist in previous coronaviruses of this family, but it did exist elsewhere.
00:29:20.000It existed in some MERS viruses, etc., other types of coronavirus.
00:29:24.000You could theoretically evolve that feature through mutations.
00:29:30.000However, 100% of the mutations in coronavirus are on that cleave site, on that spike protein.
00:29:39.000And if it was the product of natural evolution, you would see an equal number of mutations throughout the entire virus.
00:29:48.000Oh, it makes it almost conclusive that all the mutations are just on that.
00:29:54.000I actually was not that impressed by that diffuse proposal because I've been looking at the proposals going back to 2013 and they were doing Ralph Baric who is Tony Fauci's most favored fundee, he's received, I think, 187 grants, totaling probably $44 million or more from NIH. And he's the one that invented that technology.
00:30:23.000He's the one that discovered how you could engineer, take the spike protein, Either create it from scratch or take it off an existing infectious virus and put it into a non-infectious virus and taught that to Shi Zhengli The Bat Lady from Wuhan and her boss, Lin Fan Wang.
00:30:45.000And they were doing it back and forth since 2013, and they were describing it very openly.
00:30:52.000So not only that, but Barrick taught her something even more sinister because there's no conceivable good purpose to it, which is a technique called seamless legation.
00:31:04.000Which is a way of then hiding the human engineering of that virus.
00:31:10.000Now there's no reason to do that unless you want to create mischief.
00:31:17.000Of what you'd want to do if you were actually interested in public health.
00:31:21.000You'd want to put red flags all over the human insertions.
00:31:26.000But here they were weaponizing a virus, and then they were fingering out, they devised a way to hide the tampering that had weaponized them.
00:31:37.000And Bobby, there's another thing that really, I know you know, and again, it was one of the things I did not know and should have known.
00:31:47.000And that is that part of Fauci's responsibility is biodefense.
00:31:53.000So after 9-11, DOD, Defense Department, moved in its biodefense, whatever that entails, whatever bioweaponry or whatever else it entails, but the biodefense department Into an IAID. So a lot of this work is around the biodefense, highly classified environment.
00:32:16.000And of course, that means that the transparency, the understanding of what is going on here is so much less indeed than it might otherwise have been.
00:32:30.000And I was rather shocked because I went back...
00:32:34.000Again, I was very friendly with Fauci.
00:32:38.000More than 20 years ago, I headed a commission for the World Health Organization in 2000, 2001, pressing to get antiretroviral drugs to poor Africans who were dying of HIV-AIDS. And Fauci was very helpful on that, and I helped to conceive of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.
00:34:21.000And the extent of that research, which you're right, goes back all the way to SARS-1 because it wasn't so soon after the first SARS outbreak that a A very clever scientist put in the FCS into SARS-CoV-1 and said, whoa, that increased the effectiveness a lot.
00:34:43.000And then Barrett, as you say, created this so-called reverse genetic system, which made it possible to manipulate these viruses.
00:34:53.000And as you say, the seamless ligation, he calls it the no-see-um method.
00:34:58.000It's the artist that doesn't sign his name to the painting, the virologist that doesn't put his signature into the virus to let us know whether or not it is produced naturally or emerging naturally or whether it is produced in a laboratory.
00:35:15.000All of it says, my God, there was really a big, very risky research agenda underway.
00:35:24.000And what's amazing to me Again, I'm sorry to say it because amazing sounds so naive in this context, but, you know, that's how I came to it.
00:36:55.000But I, the author, or we, the group of authors, don't know because we're not privy to the information of what was actually going on in the labs.
00:37:05.000That would have been a scientific statement.
00:37:29.000Whole cloth or whole viruses or something to tell us, don't look in that direction.
00:37:34.000And when you go to look back at that article, it's absurd, even on its face.
00:37:42.000You don't have to be a virologist to look and say, that's ridiculous.
00:37:46.000And then there's a new, a next article in 2021 in Cell, which is another very esteemed journal.
00:37:53.000It's another game because in 2021, even at After the revelations of these dangerous experiments, this one says, well, this virus is not like The three or so reported viruses that were under research at WIV and then they have the audacity to say in that cell article in 2021 and
00:38:24.000it would be illogical to use an untested virus They actually say that as if grown-ups are going to read this and say, oh, well, that puts any concern to rest.
00:38:43.000Almost 18 million people dead from this pandemic, according to solid estimates.
00:38:52.000What's amazing about this is that we know that they should have been curious about all of this and never showed one moment of curiosity.
00:39:07.000And the specific point, I lost my train of thought for a moment, was that Barrick actually said, he explained the opposite of what was claimed in Cell, where the Cell article said, why would you use something new?
00:39:23.000And Barrick, in a fascinating interview, by the way, in 2015, explains, oh, if you want a really powerful vaccine or drug, you need something that's really broad based.
00:39:39.000So you have to hit it with every virus you can find.
00:39:42.000He explains precisely the opposite of what is said in Cell as supposedly the reason why it's not a lab release.
00:39:55.000I want to have every virus that I can get my hands on to test my drugs and my vaccines against because we know that nature is going to mix up all of this stuff.
00:40:06.000So we have to get something that is quite general in its efficacy, not specific to one particular strain.
00:40:13.000So Barrick was especially interested In that whole library approach, let's look at a whole big range of viruses.
00:40:24.000He was also absolutely keen on the furin cleavage site because, oh, that's what makes this really dangerous.
00:40:32.000So stick it in there, and then we'll see whether my drug works or my vaccine works, because he's trying to make antidotes or biodefense or whatever it is that he's actually trying to do.
00:40:46.000So he wants the FCS, the fur and cleavage site, in there to be able to see whether his drugs work.
00:40:52.000And there's another fascinating editorial by Beric, I think in 2017 or 2018, written as an editorial in a biomedical journal.
00:41:04.000And Bobby, in that editorial by Barak, he says, why are they doing all of this control over our research?
00:41:11.000UNC invested a lot of money in my BSL-3 facility and all this red tape.
00:41:17.000Don't they understand how essential this work is for drug development?
00:41:22.000And then he touts the fact that he's working with Gilead on remdesivir.
00:41:26.000And he says, so, you know, we need to know.
00:41:30.000We need to do all these experiments because of all of this.
00:41:34.000So there's a lot of fascinating stuff to learn that we have not even begun to have a serious look at in this country because we've been told very simply, look the other way.
00:41:47.000Yeah, and one of the things you didn't mention was that Barrick also developed a humanized mouse that he bred to have the ACE2 receptors in their lungs to test not only whether you could give them the disease, but then induce them to cough and sneeze and pass it through respiratory vectors to other animals in the colony.
00:42:10.000And he took those mice and he shared them with Xingzhen Li so that she had her own colony.
00:42:16.000To do these terrible experiments on, which, you know, of course, there's no evidence that any of these experiments have ever done anything to develop a vaccine or avoid the pandemic.
00:42:27.000I want to just fill in some of the history, which I'm sure you know about, so our listeners will know.
00:42:34.000We had a huge bioweapons program in this country until 1969.
00:42:40.000And Richard Nixon did something extraordinary, which he needs to get a lot of historical credit for, which is he stood up and said, we're getting rid of all of our biological weapons.
00:42:49.000He didn't believe in them, and he thought they actually put us at disadvantage because America had nuclear weapons, and biological weapons could be made so cheaply, and they had nuclear efficacy.
00:43:05.000So they were kind of a poor man's nuke.
00:43:57.000One of the things that people don't understand is when they passed the Patriot Act, which they did directly because of the anthrax attacks, In the Patriotite, buried in those 1,300 pages, is a provision that essentially repudiates the Bioweapons Treaty.
00:44:13.000It doesn't actually say the treaty no longer is operative, but it says no government official who is doing these kind of weapons development, U.S. government official, can be prosecuted for it.
00:44:26.000So it gave the whole U.S. government immunity.
00:44:30.000So the military, the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies wanted to get back into it, but they were nervous because under the original treaty, you could do vaccine development and defensive weapon development.
00:44:44.000And the kind of science that you need to develop a vaccine is the exact science you need to develop a weapon.
00:44:51.000So they were doing this kind of backdoor weapons development the whole time.
00:44:56.000But the Pentagon was nervous about doing it themselves because they said nobody's going to believe that we're actually interested in public health.
00:45:03.000So they began funneling the money through NIH and it went to Tony Fauci.
00:45:09.000And he got $2.2 billion to do essentially weapons development.
00:47:04.000But from 2001 onward, we know where all of this work is being done, and it's troubling because it's completely intermixed, intermeshed with this issue.
00:47:17.000I don't know if you've been following this at all, but NIH was one of the big funders of the Wuhan lab, NIH and NIAID. But the much bigger funder is USAID. Yeah, yeah.
00:47:31.000The biggest is USAID, which is regarded by everybody as a CIA front.
00:47:37.000Now, Andrew Huff, Who was the vice president of EcoHealth Alliance under Dayzak, and Dayzak's close friend, and who was a former intelligence officer himself.
00:47:50.000He says that in 2015, during the Obama moratorium, when they began really laundering all of this money through Dayzak, because they wanted to get it out of this country, because Obama said, you can't do it anymore.
00:48:06.000So they began funneling it to the Wuhan lab so they could do it out of the sight, out of reach of the White House.
00:48:13.000And at that point, Huff, who was at that time the vice president, immediately the second officer, says that the CIA moved in and recruited DAZAC and EcoHealth Alliance as a CIA operation to do espionage, essentially, against says that the CIA moved in and recruited DAZAC and EcoHealth Alliance as a CIA And it's a complicated issue because you see the intelligence footprints all over this.
00:48:42.000And Catherine Eben did these incredible stories for Family Fair, really good reporting, in which she said there were five State Department agencies who were investigating the potential origins of Wuhan.
00:48:56.000And suddenly, essentially, an intelligence officer, Chris Park, shows up at one of those meetings and shuts the whole thing down and says, we cannot investigate Wuhan because U.S. intelligence agencies were funding the work over there.
00:49:12.000And Park was also one of the participants in the monkeypox simulation.
00:49:18.000And he's been involved for 20 years in all this biodefense stuff.
00:49:22.000So then Biden turns to the intelligence agency.
00:49:27.000So the State Department investigation is killed.
00:49:30.000He turns to the intelligence agencies in the spring of 2021.
00:49:34.000And he said, I want an answer within 90 days.
00:49:49.000They say it's actually even the one public page is revealing, saying, you know, it might have come out of a lab, and then not a word from there.
00:50:04.000You actually, you just can't make this up.
00:50:08.000The intelligence community said there's something to worry about here.
00:50:12.000And then mum, as if You know, as if someone let in the skunk in the room and we're not going to talk about that at all.
00:50:22.000So I read that stuff by Huff and I have no idea.
00:50:26.000No one's telling me, but it was concerning.
00:50:29.000And I found it interesting just to add another little piece to this.
00:50:34.000You know, the British side, of course, which is tied into all of this with Welcome Trust and Jeremy Farrar, even in Jeremy Farrar's book about this in Spike, the first thing he says, oh, I heard about this.
00:50:48.000So I picked up the phone and I called my deputy, who was the former head of MI5. And you say, oh, Welcome Trust's executive director is the former head of MI5. Why?
00:51:17.000Jeremy Farrar, throughout that book, is talking about how he was told by Dame, you know, Mannheim Bueller, who was the former MI5, who's his boss, that he needs to get a burner phone and He needs to destroy his contact list and they need to talk to each other through encryption from, you know, during the management of the pandemic.
00:51:40.000And you would think during a pandemic you want transparency, you want public involvement, you want democracy, you want guidance and everything was secret.
00:52:03.000This is natural for the head of Wellcome Trust.
00:52:08.000Obviously, there is an intelligence community part of this in one way or another in shutting down the discussions, or far worse, that we haven't heard about.
00:52:19.000But all of it, again, points to the essential point which we, both of us, keep coming back to, which is that the parsimonious, absolutely plausible philosophy Frightening explanation of the origin of this virus is not being looked into.
00:52:39.000We're told, do not look in that direction.
00:53:54.000I really, really want you to read my book on Fauci as a skeptic or whatever, because I think you would really be interested in the HIV section.