Glenn and Matt talk about the new Omicron variant of the Ebola virus, and why they don't think it's going to become as deadly as Ebola. Plus, a new book from Matt Ridley about the origins of the new strain and where it may come from.
00:12:47.980So, Matt, I want to talk about the book, but can we lead here with the Omicron variant?
00:12:56.760We know very little about it, and I want to make sure I understand the way viruses generally work.
00:13:06.600They don't want to kill the host because then they die.
00:13:10.380So, they generally become less virulent, more transmissible, correct?
00:13:18.080Well, correct for respiratory viruses, yes.
00:13:21.980There are 200 kinds of virus that cause the common cold, coronaviruses, adenoviruses, rhinoviruses, and none of them kill the host, at least very, very, very rarely.
00:13:33.380And that's not true of sexually transmitted viruses, insect transmitted viruses, and some waterborne diseases, one or two others.
00:13:42.480So, the key is anything spread by sneezes, you know, and coughs does not want you even to feel sick because then you'll stay at home and you won't go and meet people and you won't spread it.
00:13:53.380Now, when I say want to, I'm using a kind of shorthand.
00:14:39.120But it's going to do so in a way that replaces it with a much milder version, if these early reports from South Africa about it being very mild turn out to be true.
00:14:48.660We can't be absolutely certain yet, because it might just be in young people where COVID is pretty mild anyway.
00:14:56.340Why is everybody freaking out around the world?
00:15:13.560Well, the UN had a meeting in a panic, because they realized that they'd got to mu in the Greek alphabet.
00:15:22.040And the next one was new, which didn't quite make sense, because everybody would think it was just the new variant.
00:15:27.660The one after that was GXI, which is the same name as the president of China.
00:15:33.340So they thought, let's leave out new and G, and let's just go straight to Omicron, which is the next letter, because we don't want to offend the Chinese.
00:16:38.780This thing was going to be around the world, whether we whatever we did to flights, I suspect, because you you can't seal countries off these days.
00:16:47.520But I think they what the politicians wanted to be seen to be doing something fast.
00:16:52.540But it was tough on the South Africans because they were doing really good work identifying these variants that, you know, they've got good molecular surveillance going on.
00:17:02.600And they, you know, they put their hand up in a very transparent way and said, look, we found a new one.
00:18:27.860Yeah. Well, what we found was that the more we looked, the harder it got to explain how it got to the city of Wuhan in particular by natural means.
00:18:39.640And the easier it got to come up with an explanation of how it got there in the hands of scientists, because if it was like SARS, we'd have a pattern of infection in food handlers.
00:18:51.600We'd have a pattern of infected animals being sold in markets.
00:19:55.440Well, the Chinese authorities said it's not from the wet market.
00:19:58.700Now, we know better than to trust the Chinese authorities, so we don't necessarily believe that.
00:20:03.140But they did test animals in that market and they found no infected animals.
00:20:10.220Now, they might have missed one, of course, it's true, but they tested the surfaces, the sewage, the doorknobs, the countertops, et cetera, in the market, and they did find the virus.
00:20:20.820But the one they found was not the ancestral strain because there were two strains in existence by then, and only one of the strains was in the market.
00:20:29.980So, you know, that market evidence shows very clearly that what happened there was a super spreader event, as far as we can tell.
00:20:38.120Of course, more data may come to light at any time.
00:20:41.860And therefore, we've got to look seriously at the other possibility, which is that the bats that are infected with these viruses, and by the way, no bats or pangolins were on sale in that market.
00:21:07.300Who goes to these remote caves and then goes north to Wuhan?
00:21:13.800Nobody, as far as we know, except one group, and that is the scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology who've been doing this for 10 years on an intensive scale.
00:21:23.480And the reason is because they're trying to track down all SARS-like viruses, catalog them, get to know them, do experiments on them, and so on.
00:21:29.640And where do they take the samples they get from bats?
00:21:32.880They take them back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:21:35.100And that's why when the pandemic began, the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 was found in a freezer at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:21:44.340It's called RATG-13, since a slightly more close one has been found in Laos.
00:21:49.020But we also know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists were going to Laos and bringing viruses back from there.
00:21:56.500So we need to know all the viruses they collected and brought to Wuhan, and they won't tell us.
00:22:02.920They won't tell us any of the viruses they've collected since 2016.
00:22:06.160And that doesn't seem to me good enough, with at least 5 million people dead.
00:22:11.220What do you take from their shutting down of the vault, the website?
00:23:01.740We're dealing with sketchy information.
00:23:05.480The U.S. intelligence community says that there were three researchers from the lab who were hospitalized in November.
00:23:13.220I can't verify that, so I don't know whether that's the case or not.
00:23:17.580And obviously, the Chinese authorities have not admitted that.
00:23:21.080But if you look at the genomics of the virus and work out its ancestry, you come to a date somewhere around the middle of November, but it could be as early September.
00:23:33.220It could be as late as early December.
00:23:35.980Okay, so you get a range when it's likely to be the first infection of a human being.
00:23:41.000So we've got, you know, we've got the whole of that autumn.
00:23:42.920We've got a strange thing that there's the World Military Games in Wuhan in October, and they do an exercise, a security exercise, as to what to do if a coronavirus breaks out, which seems a slightly unusual thing to be suddenly talking about.
00:23:57.380But then you have to remember SARS was on their mind from 10 years earlier or whatever.
00:24:01.420And as for those events in September that you mentioned, the taking down of the website, not the website, the database, which with 22,000 samples from bats and rodents in it, very, very useful database that we'd love to see.
00:24:23.940It seems unlikely that it was necessarily because an accident had happened or because they knew that there would be an outbreak or something like that.
00:24:31.600It's more likely that it was something to do with the end of one grant and the beginning of another, a review of the samples that they were going to do, transferring the leadership of the program from one group to another, moving the lab from one location to another, which we know was happening around that time.
00:24:48.260So there's quite a lot of stuff going on, and that could explain some of the new equipment, et cetera.
00:24:52.220But, of course, all that movement, all that reviewing of samples and things could lead to an accidental exposure.
00:24:59.860And one of the things we know, because this happened with SARS three times, is that sometimes people get infected without knowing it.
00:25:08.580You know, there is no accident in the lab.
00:25:19.440So sometime after September, because of something that happened then, it's possible that there was enough activity in the lab that led to an incidental infection or something like that.
00:25:33.180But we can't tell until we get more information.
00:25:36.700And as I say, the Chinese authorities will not release the names and serial numbers of the viruses that they collected after 2016.
00:26:57.860What is it that they know that we don't know?
00:26:59.920Or is this just another grab for power or is this our sainted, wonderful people in Washington that are just like, we want to keep America safe?
00:38:18.400Glenn Beck contends that the American way of life may not undergo the Great Reset and cautions us to prevent it earlier than it is beyond the factor in which it's miles viable to replace course.
00:38:56.420Lewis writes in a voice that could be heard by every class of readers.
00:39:00.980Well, that's not, that's a Marxist dog whistle there.
00:39:06.800She says, the following key points adequately captured in all encompassing summary, the agenda behind the COVID-19 lockdowns, the true agenda of the meeting held by the World Economic Forum, countries, the Great Reset has started manifesting itself in.
00:39:26.620And what would happen if the agenda of the Great Reset becomes a reality in this world?
00:39:33.100That actually sounds like somebody who is thinking, that doesn't sound like a computer.