The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 126 ｜ EcoHealth Alliance's Peter Daszak： Hero or Villain？｜ Matt Ridley

00:00:00.000 there's a meme going around um it's uh like most memes it's a mixture of fact and humor

00:00:06.320 what's the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth six months i've spent

00:00:13.380 a lot of my career inside of those six months and at times it is a really ugly place i'll just say

00:00:20.300 i can understand the uh struggle of hester prime from the scarlet letter uh not good place to be

00:00:28.540 but navigating that place is a very important task it is um it's a choice a very important choice do

00:00:39.020 you want to be truthful and enlightening or do you want to be popular today's guest has proven his

00:00:46.060 willingness to be enlightening despite what it does for his popularity among the people who refuse to

00:00:51.120 choose truth his career has been marked by bold moves and even bolder arguments he's a science

00:00:58.240 and technology editor for the economist uh he advanced the possibilities of science in journalism

00:01:05.160 he's a best-selling author he has covered topics like diseases energy genomes reproduction nature

00:01:12.240 versus nurture he wrote a book entitled the evolution of everything how new ideas emerge

00:01:19.460 uh i haven't gotten to his trophy case yet which contains all kinds of honors and awards and formal

00:01:25.860 titles sounding like there's something out of harry potter i i think he was in the house of lords

00:01:31.260 his latest book viral the search for the origin of covid 19 has cemented his status as a truthful

00:01:40.860 outsider the book which co-authored by a scientist alina chan reads like a political science fiction

00:01:47.740 like a mystery novel full of social commentary and unbelievable stories it dawns on you occasionally

00:01:55.280 while you're reading it this isn't fiction this is truth the name of the book is viral and its author

00:02:03.440 is matt ridley i find this hard to believe especially as we're talking about this subject but abortion

00:02:08.960 is the leading cause of death in the u.s and around the world as well roe versus wade 62 million babies

00:02:17.760 have been aborted aborted in the u.s since roe versus wade nearly one in four pregnancies end in abortion

00:02:25.580 there is a ministry that i just became aware of it's the ministry of pre-born and it is partnering with blaze media

00:02:32.240 to help rescue 10 000 babies this year we can help now here here what here's what pre-born is they're the direct

00:02:40.920 competition to planned parenthood they're the largest provider of free ultrasounds in the u.s

00:02:46.180 and what they discovered is that if you let a woman see a baby on ultrasound and hear the heartbeat

00:02:51.980 you bring the chances that she'll choose life for her baby up to a staggering 80 percent more

00:02:59.680 pre-born partners um with clinics at the in the highest abortion rate cities and regions and their passion

00:03:07.980 is saving babies their passion is also helping women get through this and helping them come to

00:03:13.700 christ over the past 15 years they've counseled over 340 000 women considering abortion more than

00:03:22.140 169 000 babies have been saved 51 000 women have surrendered their lives to christ will you help us

00:03:32.320 save 10 000 babies this year i know look at the calendar to donate dial pound 250 and say the

00:03:41.160 keyword baby that's pound 250 keyword baby or go to preborn.com slash glenn now through a match

00:03:50.480 your gift will be doubled saving twice as many babies lives do it now

00:03:55.580 matt welcome thank you for having me on the show you bet you bet um i i think we're going to agree

00:04:16.820 on a lot and i want to set this up that some things are speculation and we should point that out as we get

00:04:25.540 there um and make sure we know the difference between fact and speculation and fiction um because you do

00:04:34.300 that very well in in your book yeah that's what we're trying to do in virals we're trying to

00:04:40.260 to tease out what we know and not what we might know um there's quite an important distinction there

00:04:47.740 because there's a lot of speculation about where this virus came from it's a really important question

00:04:52.520 we've got to get it right and actually we can find out an awful lot more than we thought we could

00:04:57.040 a year ago so it's it's worth digging into what we know but not getting carried away right and i

00:05:03.660 answer the question first on why is it important that we find out how this happened where it came from

00:05:11.920 millions are dead it's caused by a virus that virus came from a bat we don't know how it came from a bat

00:05:20.400 when sars broke out we did know how quite quickly we we had an answer quite quickly normally we can

00:05:26.460 find who patient zero was where he got it from and so on the fact that we don't know nearly two years

00:05:34.560 exactly two years into a pandemic that has killed millions and is still killing is pretty shocking and

00:05:42.520 we need to find out because if we don't then the next pandemic will take us by surprise again we need

00:05:48.900 to be able to prevent the next pandemic were you surprised that you found villains in this story

00:05:53.940 um i think we were both alina chan and i were shocked that we found the some some people in the west

00:06:05.540 and in china who were simply not prepared to reveal what they already knew and it took us a while to work

00:06:14.060 out that they already knew more than they were letting correct and what i find um and we'll get

00:06:19.540 into those people here in a little while but i find the the willingness to cover the tracks the

00:06:28.600 willingness to not say astounding um because i really think at the beginning if people would have

00:06:37.020 just said look guys this happened and i know this and this and this i think people would have been

00:06:42.800 more forgiving and i've i've wondered has their silence caused more death did they did they keep

00:06:53.440 things from researchers did they keep things from the pharmaceutical companies that could have helped

00:07:00.280 move things faster well there's no doubt that in the early weeks of the pandemic in in early january

00:07:07.160 2020 there was a reluctance on the part of the chinese authorities to admit that human transmission

00:07:13.100 was occurring that was a real problem there was a reluctance to um admit that there was a a problem

00:07:20.300 getting out of control um there was a reluctance to share the genome of the virus which they had

00:07:26.940 uh early in january but they they were they finally released it to to the rest of the world on the

00:07:32.460 12th of january they could have done that at least a week earlier now all of these could have made an

00:07:38.200 enormous difference to nipping this pandemic in the bud so a lot of the cover-up of uh the of a lot of the

00:07:47.860 effort that went into making sure that um this was not a big story uh you know and it was under

00:07:56.460 control so called actually i think ended up making it worse yeah okay so walk us through um uh walk us

00:08:06.620 through the the origins of this book because i think it's yeah fascinating the the origin of the book is

00:08:15.400 that i uh started out thinking this was almost certainly going to be a uh market food based uh

00:08:24.100 virus or which we believed for a long time which we all believed just like sars and but i knew that

00:08:30.940 it was likely to be from a bat originally because that's where sars-like viruses had come from

00:08:35.540 i wrote an article about this for the wall street journal um then i came across a couple of papers

00:08:42.880 uh one of which said that this virus was surprisingly well adapted to human cells unlike sars in its early

00:08:49.420 months and that's your co-author and that was by my co-author right and i got in touch with her

00:08:54.300 and uh she turned out to be an extraordinarily intelligent person who was thinking very hard

00:09:01.120 about this and had suddenly had time on her hands because the lab was closed where she worked

00:09:05.840 and was was beginning to dig into this story okay so so tell me what that means when you say

00:09:12.360 easily adaptable to humans what why does that stick out well a virus that's going to jump from

00:09:19.860 one species to another has got to evolve and change in order to be good at infecting the new species

00:09:26.160 you know it's not going to be a good fit straight away and to do that it's going to change its genome

00:09:31.200 now we saw sars-1 do that in the early months of that pandemic it changed its genome very rapidly

00:09:38.360 this virus did not do that it changed surprisingly slowly and when tested against human cells and

00:09:44.740 or cells from other species it turned out to be actually very good at infecting human cells right

00:09:49.780 now one possible explanation for that was that it had already been in human cells for a number of

00:09:55.120 number of months or years in a laboratory and so is that is it is it common for something that has

00:10:04.580 not been in a laboratory or uh or humans to transmit like like it was is that no it's unusual

00:10:12.780 for an animal but not to to be really good at spreading okay from human to human not unheard of for the

00:10:19.180 first time unusual at the first shot it's it's unusual we don't know enough to know quite how unusual

00:10:24.380 it is okay we do know it's unusual okay um uh let's go into um the spread of it is unusual it adapts to

00:10:37.080 humans um quickly um let's go into a kind of a dicey topic as we go into it do you believe it's man-made

00:10:47.300 uh no in the sense that this is clearly a natural virus it's got close cousins in bats but it might

00:10:57.640 be it might have features that have been altered by human beings we can't rule that out and the more

00:11:05.720 evidence that's come to light uh the more possible that looks but let's be clear we don't know for sure

00:11:14.120 what happened we think it's still possible that it was a natural event we started out thinking that

00:11:19.080 was a very likely possibility we've come to think that it's a much less likely possibility and we

00:11:25.220 think this was probably a laboratory accident or a uh a research related event if that's what it was

00:11:32.640 i think that's the most logical thing and when i say is it man-made i want to separate because some

00:11:39.420 people when they hear man-made they think bioweapon and i just don't think this was a bioweapon right

00:11:45.000 it could be but is there any evidence for that we found no evidence that it was a bioweapon

00:11:49.940 we certainly know it wasn't made from scratch you know it is a natural virus but it might have been

00:11:55.960 engineered there's there's a couple of pieces of quite strong evidence that it it might be one of

00:12:02.620 the many viruses that we know they were manipulating in the laboratory um in order to understand them

00:12:09.840 better uh so the motivation for this research that was going on in wuhan much more than anywhere else

00:12:16.040 in the world by the way but the motivation for this research was to predict and prevent the next

00:12:21.940 pandemic okay so it's not it's not about trying to cause a pandemic it's about trying to prevent one

00:12:28.820 that's why i say if those involved would have come out if fauci would have come out and said look

00:12:34.740 we were doing gain of function research because we believe that stopping this finding these things

00:12:42.580 and stopping them and having uh you know the antidote is is is is much better than just being

00:12:51.440 surprised by something he would have had more sympathy because i don't think they they weren't doing it

00:12:57.200 for a bioweapon i agree with you um it's not of course we can't completely rule out that there

00:13:04.540 weren't uh bioweapon researchers interested in this but we found no evidence of that we think it's much

00:13:10.960 more likely that they were doing what it says on the tin in other words trying to understand these

00:13:15.600 viruses so that they could predict and prevent the next pandemic and one way to do that was to get

00:13:20.660 them into the laboratory test their ability to infect human cells and to do that you needed to

00:13:26.320 manipulate their genes because some of these viruses simply couldn't infect humans and so you needed

00:13:31.280 to swap bits in and out they were making chimera hybrid viruses um now is that a risky thing to have

00:13:38.600 been doing with viruses that can cause pandemics i think it probably is and that may be true whether or not

00:13:46.340 this one actually resulted from such an accident or whether it came about as a result of a natural event

00:13:52.700 let's be clear on the bioweapon i think you're really clear in the book and it's important to me

00:14:01.560 that we separate again fact from fiction and it's not worth um people will hear it's a bio there's a

00:14:13.060 possibility it's a bioweapon and they'll concentrate on that that's not the important thing at this point

00:14:18.840 the important thing is where did it come from how did it start then you once you have that information

00:14:26.380 you'll know the rest right but it's easy to make it into a conspiracy theory which is then it dismisses

00:14:33.320 the whole chain of events well early on a lot of virologists in the west uh said we can rule out

00:14:42.480 a bioweapon an engineered virus uh and any other lab-based scenario now that's where we come in

00:14:50.920 and say hang on a minute there's a big difference there between an engineered bioweapon which i agree

00:14:56.700 we can probably rule out and it's a pretty bad one if it is and well exactly and you wouldn't do it in

00:15:03.560 wuhan if that's yeah you you would you would go and do it in a secret location somewhere in a desert

00:15:10.040 yeah if you were trying to test a bioweapon or indeed if you were trying to test a novel vaccine

00:15:15.340 which is another possibility people have raised but um that ruling that out does not rule out

00:15:23.020 that a natural virus might have been in a sample in a laboratory that was being studied and by accident

00:15:30.500 one of the researchers picked it up either in the lab or when they were collecting it in in a a

00:15:36.280 a bat cave in in the wild um and so uh the idea that all lab-based scenarios were ruled out early

00:15:47.520 in the pandemic and that anything like that was a conspiracy theory i'm afraid is is just not borne

00:15:53.300 out by the evidence um those are still very much possibilities did you see the documentary from the

00:15:59.240 chinese government that played on national tv in november uh over in china of them collecting

00:16:05.900 the bat samples hundreds of miles away exactly the kind of bats and the samples that you would need

00:16:13.160 i mean just that alone opens the possibility of someone getting it there in the cave and then it

00:16:21.420 growing out of control i mean there are so many different ways that this could have happened

00:16:26.460 well for more than 10 years scientists in china were uh sampling bats in caves uh in southern china

00:16:34.360 in order to try and find uh stars like viruses the people the most active research group doing this

00:16:42.400 was from wuhan the site they were doing it in is a long way from wuhan the sites are over a thousand

00:16:49.740 miles from wuhan so it's a very long way away it's not like it's next door the the bats that they

00:16:55.780 sampled near wuhan do not have these viruses in them generally uh there's been one or two

00:17:01.540 uh stars like viruses found but very very few and certainly none of these kind of viruses so it's it's

00:17:08.260 almost certainly the case that a virus made its way from somewhere in southern unan or northern laos

00:17:15.440 or somewhere like that to the city of wuhan okay and started the pandemic the question is how did it

00:17:22.000 make that long journey the only people we know who went to bat caves in southern unan and then went

00:17:30.560 straight to to wuhan were the scientists nobody else has been doing that so uh the we do have to take

00:17:39.080 seriously the possibility that when they were in those bat caves they picked up a virus now the second

00:17:44.740 question is were they wearing sufficient protective gear every time they went into these caves and the

00:17:51.500 answer is no i mean they've as you said shown films of themselves they've uh given accounts of the

00:17:57.040 work uh in which yes they do try and wear protective gear but quite often it's too hot or they uh take

00:18:06.080 their gloves off or take their goggles off you know so we now know that's probably too risky a thing to be

00:18:13.780 doing uh the whole wuhan um lab seems a little sketchy to be doing things at this level there well

00:18:26.580 the most active bat coronavirus research program in the world was in the city of wuhan the biggest

00:18:36.080 collection of bat coronaviruses in the world was in wuhan the database of those samples 22 000 samples of

00:18:46.440 which 15 000 were from bats and the rest mostly from rodents is in wuhan that went offline and they

00:18:53.820 still won't share it with us now that seems to us to be uh simply unpardonable because if as we have

00:19:03.100 been assured by a scientist in the west who says he knows what's in that sample that it's irrelevant

00:19:09.480 there's nothing of any relevance there then why why take it offline why not show us what's in that

00:19:15.600 that thing and say look here there's nothing relevant in this in this uh um database but it went offline on

00:19:21.280 the 12th of september 2019 which is well before the first cases were announced probably before we think

00:19:31.280 the first cases occurred so it's it's it's it's a bit odd that it did that and the excuse for taking

00:19:37.320 it offline is that oh people are trying to hack it well not before the pandemic they weren't if you've

00:19:44.680 tried purchasing a firearm or better yet ammunition in the last year there has been i don't know what

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00:21:47.300 slash beck use the code beck at checkout additional 25 off anything site wide what is your research show

00:21:55.420 the first um patients were because there's there's reports that um uh researchers from the lab got sick

00:22:07.900 went with the symptoms uh not known to be covet 19 at that time they went early in the fall or even late

00:22:17.800 summer what does your research show um the official chinese position was that the first case was on the

00:22:26.260 first of december they later revised that to the 8th of december when working with the world health

00:22:31.740 organization but documents leaked to the south china morning post showed uh that they definitely thought

00:22:38.680 there was a case on the 17th of november those are the first sort of three dates we know about

00:22:43.620 but u.s intelligence sources as you say have alleged that three workers at the wuhan institute of

00:22:52.540 virology were ill in november and that they had symptoms including so-called ground glass opacities in the

00:23:00.500 lungs that um uh are consistent with uh covet 19 now we haven't been able to verify that independently

00:23:09.680 so we can't confirm that any idea any idea that that you think that that is reliable or not the one

00:23:17.280 thing that's odd here is that there is no decent information on the professions and activities of the

00:23:24.940 first cases coming out of china so when the sars epidemic happened they quickly discovered that

00:23:32.140 the first cases were often food handlers they were chefs and other people who are handling food and

00:23:38.320 that enabled them to uh pin down the fact that civet cats were infected and were infecting people in

00:23:44.040 restaurants and and other food handling places so so clearly finding out who the people picking up this

00:23:52.260 virus virus to start with were would be useful information now the joint study between the chinese

00:23:59.520 authorities and the world health organization was not shown any raw data about these first cases

00:24:06.500 citing patient confidentiality how that doesn't make sense how could you possibly try to track something

00:24:14.700 if you don't know anything about the person other than they're sick well the one thing of course that

00:24:20.120 they did emphasize in the early weeks of the uh pandemic was that a lot of the early cases had

00:24:27.200 connections to one particular market the huanan seafood market and then in may 2020 very quietly the head

00:24:34.160 of the chinese centers for disease control dr gao fu said uh actually we think that's a red herring

00:24:40.640 uh about a third of the cases had no connection with that market and we've tested all the uh animals in

00:24:47.280 that market uh and they were negative and although we found the virus in so-called environmental samples

00:24:54.100 in the market i.e you know countertop sewage things like that we think they're human uh their cases of

00:24:59.960 the human virus they're not a particular different animal version of the virus so uh the market was

00:25:05.880 pretty well exonerated by the chinese authorities uh a year and a half ago um uh and yet that was the only

00:25:14.600 hypothesis that the chinese authorities had had put forward as to where where it might have started

00:25:22.360 so what's the most likely scenario how did this happen well alina chan and i are reluctant to speculate

00:25:34.400 we try and stick to what we do know okay and what we do know is that sometime in the fall of 2019

00:25:43.640 some people got infected in wuhan there's no evidence that it came from elsewhere you know the

00:25:52.180 chinese authorities kept trying to say that it might have come in from uh some other country on frozen food

00:25:58.200 well if so the place where the food was getting slaughtered and frozen would have picked up this

00:26:03.760 virus first uh and also other cities where the food went to you know so um sometime in the fall of

00:26:12.040 2019 people got infected a very strong possibility is that those first cases were people who are working

00:26:19.340 in the laboratory which we know they were doing on SARS-like coronaviruses and doing uh experiments

00:26:27.280 and the fact that they were very slow to release information uh about the experiments they'd been

00:26:34.420 doing for example they said of the bat virus that's most closely related to uh the virus causing the

00:26:42.420 pandemic they said oh we've just sequenced it and uh found that it's similar well how come the labels

00:26:49.180 on the sequence say 2018 oh yeah right okay we sequenced it in 2018 sorry we forgot to mention that

00:26:56.380 you know so this is the kind and by the way we changed the name uh but we didn't say we changed

00:27:02.300 the name and so it took it took me um several weeks to figure out uh you know they said we'd

00:27:09.700 previously found this virus this bat-like virus that's very similar um uh so i immediately went to

00:27:16.840 say okay where did you find it when you know and i looked through the literature i couldn't find any

00:27:20.460 mention of its name and it was two months later that they admitted that they had changed the name

00:27:25.380 now you know this is not helpful and at that that was so that doesn't that doesn't necessarily make

00:27:32.340 it coordinated planned cover-up well i think what you have to remember is that in those early

00:27:38.280 first few months nobody expected this to go global we thought we were reading about a little local

00:27:45.980 problem in china like SARS which was apart from you know the fact that there were cases in canada and

00:27:51.380 elsewhere but it was a relatively short-lived epidemic so i think in those early months uh the

00:27:58.820 chinese authorities thought they could get away with being slightly economical with the facts about this

00:28:06.880 not telling us as much as they wanted to and there was actually we think some evidence that they wanted

00:28:12.980 to keep a hold of some of this information so that they could uh patent and invent the tests uh themselves

00:28:20.820 and get off uh get a lead on that uh because some of the information was shared with um what you

00:28:29.300 might call crony firms that are well connected with the chinese regime uh that didn't that doesn't

00:28:37.460 i mean they were they were welding people in their own homes they were coming in and welding doors shut and

00:28:44.980 i mean it was pretty draconian uh i mean beforehand when you were watching just how they were dealing

00:28:53.360 with it in wuhan i don't think this is a movie pandemic if i'm writing a movie script i'm not

00:29:00.540 picking covid i mean it's killed a lot of people but it is not the one that's going to wipe out humanity

00:29:05.620 you know what i mean um yeah and yet that that was almost the impression we were getting there

00:29:11.800 uh in early january when you were starting to see them the way they were treating this it was terrifying

00:29:18.540 it was and uh but i i vividly remember the the the feeling wow that's pretty extreme what they're

00:29:31.280 doing they must be quite frightened um but i rather doubt that it'll uh come over here and cause a

00:29:38.020 major global pandemic we'll we'll know and we you know i i had a lot of faith in the fact that

00:29:43.080 genomics has advanced so far since uh sars that you know we'll be able to detect and test and prevent

00:29:50.340 the spread of this thing relatively easily once it gets going i was wrong about that uh i've been wrong

00:29:56.020 about a lot of things in the pandemic and that that was one of them but uh but you but didn't you

00:30:01.660 you wrote um a while back about cities and how crowded we are on on cities and well it's certainly

00:30:10.940 true that humankind is ripe for something like this um we are living at very high densities in cities

00:30:21.660 we are traveling a lot an ambitious virus that spreads easily should be able to exploit that

00:30:29.100 but on the whole it needs to stay mild if it's going to do that like all the colds that we catch

00:30:37.280 if it's going to kill you very quickly like ebola it generally struggles to to to develop a whole

00:30:45.020 epidemic because the host dies because people get too sick they stop meeting people they die you know

00:30:51.940 so so it doesn't spread so i was fairly sanguine that if a pandemic did start it would either

00:30:59.000 be mild or it would peter out pretty quickly um i've sort of half proved right on that because

00:31:05.040 this this this virus horrible though it is uh it doesn't have a particularly high death rate one of

00:31:11.520 one of its crucial features that enables it to be so threatening uh is that pre-symptomatic

00:31:17.660 individuals can spread it so people who are not yet sick and therefore still going around their daily

00:31:22.980 business are likely to be spreading it is this going to be like the flu of 1918 be with us forever

00:31:29.260 just forever changing or is there an end to this well i'm no epidemiologist so i don't necessarily

00:31:37.460 have the answer to that but i think there is every chance that it will become endemic in the human

00:31:43.260 species there are four other coronaviruses that are already endemic in the human species they cause the

00:31:49.560 common cold i mean they they are one of the causes of the common cold the rhino viruses and adenoviruses

00:31:54.740 are also causes of the common cold but the four coronaviruses that cause common cold one of them

00:32:00.720 called oc43 looks like it arrived in our species late in the 19th century from cattle um it might have

00:32:09.640 been although the evidence for this is is very uncertain we discuss it in the book it might have been the

00:32:15.220 cause of a really nasty pandemic in 1889 1890 which started in russia and spread around the entire

00:32:23.180 world using railways and killed a lot of people and killed probably a million people at least which was

00:32:29.360 a lot in in those days um so uh and then came back in a couple of waves and then gradually settled down

00:32:36.440 and now you and i've probably had it uh it doesn't tend to kill people it's become mild i'm pretty sure

00:32:42.360 that's what this one will do it'll turn into a version of the common cold um uh but uh not without

00:32:49.720 doing horrible damage not just physical damage to people but uh social and economic damage too

00:32:56.820 so why is it that we keep hearing about the um booster shots because it's only going to get worse

00:33:06.200 and worse and worse it's you're killing off the easy ones and the harder ones are uh

00:33:13.280 if you say that we've evolved these other old viruses well i think there is a tendency

00:33:21.680 for not all but some viruses to start out virulent and then evolve into mild cases particularly

00:33:30.040 uh ones that are transmitted by respiratory means um and i suspect that is happening with this

00:33:39.120 whether or not using vaccines uh helps or hinders that process is a difficult question and i don't

00:33:47.780 think biology has good answers to that yet but it would be wrong not to try and use vaccines i think

00:33:54.380 because they do undoubtedly save lives on a huge scale they're doing so today so i think it's right

00:34:01.440 to try and do something about this i would agree with and i don't think that will prevent the virus

00:34:06.600 becoming milder if that's what it's going to do anyway um you uh in the book expose crimes committed by

00:34:17.540 china well you say that but uh i think i don't think we would quite use that term because we don't

00:34:26.980 really know uh well no let me put it another way the research that was going on that might have led to

00:34:35.020 the origin of this pandemic um most of it was not secret most of it was approved by the chinese

00:34:43.380 authorities funded by the chinese government funded to some extent by the u.s government too through

00:34:48.900 uh programs that funneled uh money to that and was approved by authorities who thought it was the

00:34:57.300 right thing to be doing there were some virologists who were saying i don't think this is wise i think

00:35:03.820 we should be preparing for pandemics without going and looking for dangerous viruses in the wild

00:35:09.960 bringing them into laboratories and manipulating their genes uh and growing them in human cells

00:35:16.500 because if we do that we might start a pandemic so people were advising against this work but that

00:35:22.760 doesn't make it a crime in the sense of being against the law um the uh united states had the same

00:35:31.360 argument and uh under barack obama it was illegal and then under trump it was legal again um and this

00:35:39.620 goes to the whole thing of gain a function and fauci forever has been a fan of let's go out hunt these

00:35:48.620 things down first of all can you tell me how you hunt down virus who these virus hunters are and how

00:35:54.940 you hunt them down yeah yeah well um what you do is uh you go to uh bat colonies horseshoe bats there's

00:36:02.780 one particular genus of bats that you've got to focus on if you're interested in SARS and SARS-like

00:36:07.980 viruses and all this starts from the SARS epidemic back in 2003 the SARS epidemic they eventually

00:36:13.540 realized it was in horseshoe bats so they start sampling horseshoe bat colonies all around uh

00:36:19.200 southern china now horseshoe bats live in uh caves in large colonies they don't tend to live in the

00:36:25.220 roofs of buildings for example so you go to remote caves you find these very large colonies very dense

00:36:31.140 colonies of these bats where they're spreading these viruses among themselves you um trap some

00:36:36.800 of the bats in nets uh you swab their nose and their anus uh you spread a sheet on the floor and

00:36:44.020 collect their droppings and you take these samples in test tubes put them in liquid nitrogen at minus 80

00:36:50.500 degrees and take them back to wuhan to study them that's essentially what was what was going on on a

00:36:55.480 massive scale i mean tens of thousands of bats being sampled in this way they also took some live

00:37:00.800 bats back to the laboratory again we had denials of that for many months it eventually became clear that

00:37:06.720 uh yes they had kept some live bats for experiments in wuhan um so uh so so that's what virus hunting

00:37:14.260 involves and when you get those samples back in the laboratory you defrost them and you then test them

00:37:21.760 for the presence of genes that are characteristic of sars-like coronaviruses okay and uh if you find

00:37:30.660 them you then try to grow a live virus out of one of these uh samples and uh the wuhan institute of

00:37:40.800 virology achieved this about five years ago for the first time with a virus called wiv1 uh it's not easy

00:37:47.960 to to actually grow a live virus you know you can say look there's definitely coronaviruses in this

00:37:52.560 sample but they're you know they're not in a state where they can infect cells because they've

00:37:58.020 genomes are broken up they haven't enjoyed the journey you know in the liquid nitrogen or something

00:38:03.000 like that but uh they did manage to start what they call isolating and this in this um context the

00:38:09.700 word isolate means to grow new copies of a live virus and then you put them in humanized animals

00:38:17.800 can you explain human humanized animals well first of all you put them in human cells and one of the

00:38:23.600 breakthroughs achieved in north carolina was to to create a kind of tissue in the laboratory that is

00:38:31.100 based on human lungs it's called human airway epithelial cell culture so that's a sort of petri

00:38:38.260 dish with a bit of effectively uh like the lining of a human lung in it but then as you say humanized

00:38:44.260 mice humanized animals and what a humanized mouse is is a mouse in which you have either added the

00:38:51.880 human ace2 gene to its genome or you've replaced the mouse ace2 gene with a human ace2 now the ace2

00:39:00.680 is the receptor on our cells that the virus uses to get into our cells it's the lock which it unlocks

00:39:08.020 with its spike key as it were uh so these mice are then identical to other mice except that with

00:39:18.220 respect to the ace2 gene this one gene they are like human beings and not like mice and by doing that

00:39:27.880 you've then got what you'd call a an experimental model for testing whether this virus can infect a

00:39:35.080 human being you test it in the mouse now you can see what's happening here is that if you succeed

00:39:41.400 and the mouse catches it and dies then this virus is getting trained on human genes on human receptors

00:39:50.780 and some of the experiments we only found this out very recently but some of the experiments

00:39:56.200 that were done did see increases in the infectivity of these viruses on human cells of up to 10 000 times

00:40:10.060 they got much better at infecting human cells so um the the risk one of the risks here is that simply by

00:40:22.360 using that experimental technique you're giving the virus a crash course in how to be infective in human

00:40:29.560 beings now i was unaware this kind of thing was going on i've covered genomics molecular biology uh medicine

00:40:38.920 uh as a reporter and as a writer and author of books for for many years uh and i have to say i was pretty

00:40:48.040 gobsmacked by how close to the edge some of these experiments have been above board i mean if you

00:40:54.600 knew where to look you know these experiments are described in the scientific journals you know they're

00:40:59.320 not being secretive about this and not just in china but in the united states and in europe too

00:41:04.360 those humanized mice came from the united states that's right all those separate lines of them were also

00:41:09.640 developed in beijing okay so um uh this is the thing that we were arguing about and gain of function

00:41:20.040 is what um fauci is saying i didn't do it uh however it appears as though he just changed the meaning of

00:41:30.680 gain of function was gain of function being done and funded by the nih well this is a

00:41:39.800 very difficult question to answer it's a very simple question it ought to be a very easy question to

00:41:43.560 answer but the definition of exactly what gain of function is has been uh changed and uh has been

00:41:52.760 is a little gray okay so uh if you it why there was a moratorium on gain of function as you said between

00:42:01.560 2014 and 2017 but not if you were already doing the experiments and not and it didn't apply

00:42:09.800 to animal viruses that could not infect human beings right but does it apply to animal viruses that

00:42:18.200 are just in the process of working out how to infect human beings do you see what i mean that's that's

00:42:23.560 where the sort of the the the the the um ambiguity comes in um now look i'm from the uk i'm not here to

00:42:34.920 join a fight between rand paul and tony fauci on this um uh we there was a mechanism for

00:42:45.320 trying to decide whether something broke uh broke this rule or not but one of the things that's not

00:42:52.120 even i'm not even concerned if he broke the rule or not i'm tired of the word games were they trying

00:42:59.960 to was this kind of stuff going on um because it was legal except for those periods but highly

00:43:09.800 controversial you know um people act as though oh no we've done that no that's very controversial

00:43:16.360 among scientists well the reason this phrase gain of function entered the language in 2014 was because

00:43:21.960 there was a big row about this uh you know half the scientists said we shouldn't be doing this work

00:43:28.440 let's have a moratorium on it and the other half said no no we've got to do this otherwise we can't

00:43:33.000 find out uh the risks of viruses and uh so you know it's not as if all scientists think this is fine and

00:43:40.600 the rest of the world thinks it's bad right um people like richard ebright and others have been arguing for

00:43:45.640 years that these experiments shouldn't be happening uh and are too risky um and i think there is no doubt

00:43:53.320 whether you want to call it gain of function or call it something else that viruses have been made more

00:44:01.400 capable of infecting human beings and made more virulent in human beings in experimental situations

00:44:09.000 in the laboratory and was it happening in wuhan and this kind of thing was definitely happening in wuhan

00:44:14.280 in fact this was one of the leading centers for this for sars like coronaviruses it was the leading

00:44:19.400 center uh in the world for this and by the way it's quite important here to to describe what level

00:44:27.560 of biosecurity laboratory where it was being done right because you know the pictures you see where

00:44:33.320 they're dressed in a sort of inflated space suit with uh with air pumped into it yeah that's not this

00:44:39.160 that's biosecurity level four right uh the wuhan institute of virology is the only biosecurity

00:44:44.200 level four lab in china uh but it's only years but it's only they do have four there it's a uh

00:44:52.280 it's a relatively new laboratory but that's not where these experiments i'm talking about were being

00:44:56.920 done these were being done on the old wuhan institute of virology campus at biosecurity level two and three

00:45:06.200 quite a lot of the experiments on bat like coronaviruses which they didn't think were very

00:45:11.000 good at infecting human beings but they were putting them in humanized mice and things like

00:45:15.480 that were done at biosecurity level two and three right now this now three is quite uh secure because

00:45:22.600 you're working in sealed cabinets and the sort of gloves built into the cabinets that you reach into

00:45:28.360 but two is basically just goggles and gloves

00:45:31.480 um now if a virus with the infectivity of sars cov2 was in a sample in a biosecurity level two lab

00:45:42.120 then it's not guaranteed that the researchers using that lab and the people cleaning it in the evening

00:45:47.800 would catch it but it's jolly likely all right so tell me the um eco health alliance how is how are they

00:46:00.600 involved the eco health alliance is a new york based foundation which came out of wildlife research but repurposed

00:46:09.160 itself about 10 years ago as a uh a funder of um uh wildlife surveillance and sampling for

00:46:21.000 virus threats so they're going out and they're looking

00:46:25.160 for those threats that then could or may not be taken into a lab for gain of function and they

00:46:33.160 figured out that there's a lot of money suddenly available for this in the wake of sars and ebola

00:46:37.240 suddenly there's there's uh significant sums of money available for this so they put themselves in

00:46:43.240 a position where they are the contractor funded by the u.s government or the subcontractor

00:46:49.000 um who distributes the money to overseas work on this they're the intermediary between the u.s

00:46:56.040 government and overseas uh research teams and they collaborate closely with it themselves and

00:47:01.960 their people go on these expeditions with the wuhan institute of virology people and so on and

00:47:09.000 by 2019 the eco health alliance is handling some 17 million dollars a year significant quantities of

00:47:15.960 money here most of which comes from uh the overseas development administration uh and the pentagon um

00:47:24.920 some of the department of defense funding so they're they're a conduit for conduit for money

00:47:32.120 but they also put their names on the research papers um they collaborate they go into the labs and they talk

00:47:40.600 about and uh um uh make claims about the research that's being done uh you know so they say we are

00:47:51.720 very proud of the fact that we found hundreds of viruses that we've done experiments with them in the

00:47:57.880 laboratory that we've sequenced their genomes that we've altered their genomes that we've made hybrids

00:48:02.680 between these viruses and they're on record they use they use we you know yeah meaning the wuhan

00:48:08.520 institute of virology and other partners in the u.s uh and you know they're also tweeting about having

00:48:14.760 great karaoke parties with uh chums in the wuhan institute of virology so you know they're very close

00:48:19.960 to um uh the people doing the experiments that they're part of the team and part of the team is

00:48:26.280 also dr xi who they're very close with right that's right so dr xi zhang li uh and dr peter daszak

00:48:33.240 who's head of the ecohealth alliance are uh good friends and close collaborators on this work and how

00:48:42.120 does how do these two people implicate at all dr fauci in any way well um uh dr fauci is funding some

00:48:53.560 of the work of the ecohealth alliance there are there is an email trail between uh peter daszak and

00:49:00.760 and uh uh tony fauci discussing um uh this kind of work including and this has only come out in

00:49:08.920 recent days uh an exchange not with fauci directly but with the national institutes of health in which

00:49:17.880 the nih says well doesn't that sound like gain of function and ecohealth alliance says not if you

00:49:24.280 describe it this way and nih said oh i see you're right so we'll describe it that way so you know

00:49:30.920 there's a very cozy relationship here to make sure that um the the the fund funds do flow uh uh but they

00:49:39.560 don't necessarily uh uh break the rules they might bend them just a bit what is seven eight nine six

00:49:48.120 project well this is a fascinating little wrinkle that uh it came to light um during uh the research we

00:49:59.080 were doing for this book when they sequenced the genome of the bat virus most closely related to um

00:50:09.560 sars cov2 some of the pieces of the sequence had this number on them seven eight nine six and a very

00:50:19.640 diligent brilliant spanish technology consultant called francisco de ribera

00:50:25.640 uh started digging into where this number had come from and i won't go into all the details but

00:50:33.640 he basically eventually worked out that there was a bunch of eight viruses very closely related to the

00:50:41.000 pandemic virus that had been collected from the same mine shaft as this other one that they had sequenced

00:50:47.480 one of which was called seven eight nine six and that had never been published and he asked peter

00:50:55.720 daszak he said can you explain why this number seven eight nine six crops up in this one other virus and

00:51:02.440 in the sequence of the one closely related uh and he was he was simply blocked on twitter for asking that

00:51:08.280 question so that gives you a sort of hint of what's going on here um uh and eventually he said look i think

00:51:14.680 there's eight viruses that they collected from this mine shaft in 2015 not in 2013 and i think we should

00:51:21.160 see what's in their genomes they might be relevant they might be useful and um uh it was six months later

00:51:28.360 that in a uh seminar the wuhan institute of virology head xi zhang li um did in passing show a slide that

00:51:39.000 admitted yes they do have these eight viruses and yes they are from the mojiang mine like the other

00:51:45.320 one um uh so this was a clue that people like francisco ribera were on the right track in terms of finding

00:51:53.480 out stuff about what these scientists had been up to that they were not admitting to themselves and i

00:52:00.440 i should say that in researching this book we came to rely on people like francisco ribera

00:52:06.760 people like a wonderful indian called the seeker who was helpful in this story as well

00:52:12.760 and others who are open source analysts they're amateurs who are digging into websites

00:52:21.880 that are not secret websites they're just very hard to find and piecing together information in ingenious ways

00:52:29.080 these people were more useful to us and to the world in finding out what went on than the

00:52:35.240 mainstream media the who then the scientific establishment and even than the official

00:52:42.200 intelligence agencies um so they are the heroes of this book why because the intelligence agencies

00:52:50.360 tend to depend upon human intelligence you know having a spy in the right lab or something like that

00:52:57.720 whereas these guys are just saying somewhere in china there will be a thesis a paper a grant

00:53:04.520 application a document a database which actually tells us what's been going on here and they

00:53:12.600 probably haven't scrubbed all of them and if we get hold of a few logins and we just keep looking

00:53:18.440 we might find them um now it's it's grotesque that we have to rely on this i mean it's also kind of

00:53:26.360 beautiful it's also kind of beautiful you're right but if if if this was happening in i don't know

00:53:32.440 belgium or kenya or somewhere we would just go to the government and say look please can we

00:53:37.400 have a a drains up uh you know transparent look at everything you know that might help us

00:53:43.720 track down the origin of this virus instead of which we're confronted with a regime which

00:53:48.280 keeps getting praised for its transparency by the world health organization

00:53:51.560 information but which actually simply has to have the information dragged out of it by these amateur

00:53:58.520 people um and that's why we felt it important to write a book to try and put together everything

00:54:05.880 these guys were finding out and stuff we were finding out and and you know some i don't want to make

00:54:13.000 the impression that all journalists and all scientists have been hopeless some have been great

00:54:16.040 um but piecing together the information and working out what was going on in wuhan in the

00:54:23.240 months up to this pandemic is very important it might be a red herring it might all have started with

00:54:30.920 somebody buying a um civic cat to to eat for his lunch in a market but but you don't think that

00:54:39.480 at this point well we lean towards the view that no it's likely to have come out of a laboratory and

00:54:45.960 people say well come on we've never had a pandemic from a laboratory that's probably not true actually

00:54:49.960 there was a 1977 flu epidemic that almost certainly began with a with a vaccine that was leaked from a

00:54:55.320 laboratory that wasn't it wasn't a very severe one but uh and uh laboratory leaks happen all the time

00:55:01.960 i mean they are quite common uh with lots of different viruses they've happened with smallpox with

00:55:06.920 foot and mouth disease and with SARS i mean SARS leaked from laboratories at least four times twice in

00:55:12.680 beijing once in taiwan once in singapore this virus is probably leaking from laboratories fairly

00:55:19.080 regularly but we wouldn't know because there's so much background infection that you wouldn't be able

00:55:23.800 to tell um so uh you cannot rely on oh but laboratories are quite secure people don't have leaks in them

00:55:33.240 can you describe the who's visit to the laboratory what made it strange

00:55:38.360 um the who went to wuhan in january 2021 um the team that went was approved by uh the uh chinese

00:55:53.400 government right there was only one american representative on it that was peter dasak the

00:55:59.720 close friend of the wuhan institute of virology and close collaborator and that's honest i well you're not

00:56:07.240 an american so you know remember there was this old show in the 70s called colombo and he was

00:56:12.200 i remember colombo okay and the murderer was always the one that was helping him try to figure it all out

00:56:20.120 it kind of seems like that's the role of the who with peter dasak um well um uh peter dasak argued

00:56:30.600 that you need me on this team because i know these guys and i know this field of research and

00:56:37.080 i'd be ideal for you but he then but he he had orchestrated a letter to the lancet journal although

00:56:44.360 he had not revealed how he'd orchestrated it by 28 scientists saying uh the we it cannot possibly be

00:56:55.160 a lab leak so unbelievable he wasn't open-minded yeah you know he would be the first to admit that you

00:57:01.240 know he was absolutely convinced that it couldn't be a lab leak or had reason to make

00:57:06.920 make sure that people yeah and they go to the wuhan institute of virology during their visit in

00:57:12.440 wuhan they spend three hours there they talk to the people in the lab and uh they uh when asked

00:57:21.000 afterwards did you ask to see the coronavirus database the 22 000 samples that that they had

00:57:30.200 taken offline in september uh peter dasak said uh in a seminar um after the visit no we didn't ask to

00:57:38.600 see them because uh i know what's in it and it's of no relevance well i'm sorry why should we take your

00:57:45.720 word for it right and why should you take their word for it um uh that's not good enough in a situation

00:57:52.600 where millions have died is the who should we be a part of the who is it does it play a a fair role

00:58:06.360 at all is it something we can trust well i don't think the who has behaved very well in this pandemic

00:58:13.960 uh it uh it allowed itself to uh effectively be a mouthpiece for the chinese government it refused to

00:58:24.280 take any notice of the alarm bells that were rung by the taiwanese government because taiwan is not

00:58:31.720 allowed to be a member of the who at china's request um uh it the the head of the who was very much

00:58:41.160 xi jinping's candidate um uh so it it it has undoubtedly been much less open-minded and fair

00:58:52.840 than it should have been that said it doesn't have power to force a member country to divulge

00:58:59.800 information but in the sars epidemic its director general then grohal and bruntland the former

00:59:06.120 prime minister of norway she was pretty tough on the chinese and she said it is

00:59:11.080 not acceptable that you took so long to tell us about this outbreak uh you should have been more

00:59:15.880 forthcoming etc etc now after the visit to wuhan the who team gave a press conference which they

00:59:23.320 said it probably came on frozen food it's very unlikely to come from a laboratory the reaction in

00:59:27.960 the west was so uh incredulous incredulous thank you that's the word to this you know not just

00:59:36.840 observers and media commentators but western government said that doesn't sound good enough

00:59:41.720 come on and dr tedros the director general did then row back and say okay sorry we didn't mean

00:59:48.040 to imply we're not going to look into the lab leak we would like to look into a lab leak

00:59:52.360 um we'll get another team to do that took them many months they've only now recently announced the team

00:59:59.240 it's still got lots of people on it who are very chummy with uh chinese laboratories so it's not

01:00:06.120 filling us with confidence and just think you know the fact that it took them six months to negotiate

01:00:12.440 terms of entry for this inquiry and then they went there for only two weeks and then they gave this

01:00:16.760 press conference which was a farce um that means that the rest of the world didn't get to investigate

01:00:22.600 you know the who everyone was pinning their hopes on you know the british government i keep asking

01:00:28.280 them about this and they keep saying well we've just got to help the who do this right well if the

01:00:32.520 who doesn't do its job then not only somebody has to then yeah well then then they are preventing

01:00:39.880 others from doing their job so i want to go back to something you said earlier you talked about

01:00:45.720 um that the pentagon was involved and i want you to tell the story of peter daszak in the

01:00:55.000 14 million dollar request from the uh from him from him to the pentagon in darpa

01:01:02.040 can you explain yeah well this was a story that emerged just as we were putting the finishing

01:01:06.520 touches to the book and we were able to squeeze in a mention to it it's a little shocking it came out

01:01:10.840 through these open source analysts again a group called drastic who who developed it um it was a

01:01:16.840 proposal to darpa the um pentagon uh research agency uh from the eco health alliance um the proposal was

01:01:26.280 called defuse and it was asking for 14 million dollars to uh uh do work on viruses in china but

01:01:37.880 sounds like coronaviruses it went in in 2018 it was refused so they didn't get the money

01:01:43.800 but it gave it gives a a glimpse of the kind of things a they were already doing and b they were

01:01:49.400 wanting to do it had some wacky ideas in it like developing an app that soldiers could have on their

01:01:55.800 mobiles so that when they were fighting a war they could tell whether they were in an area with dangerous

01:02:01.800 viruses or not well you know that's not going to be very helpful right hang on put your gun down

01:02:07.720 let's look at the app they were talking about blowing uh misting bat caves with vaccines to try and cure

01:02:15.320 the bats of these viruses well that's a pretty long shot that that's gonna be effective so there was some

01:02:22.440 there was some really far-fetched stuff in there but what was particularly interesting was it did confirm

01:02:28.520 that bats are kept in the laboratory at the wuhanas to virology which had been denied up until that

01:02:34.360 point and it also confirmed that they had plans to put something called a furin cleavage site into a bat

01:02:42.360 sars-like coronavirus explain what a foreign well this is this is this is something that had been

01:02:48.760 hardly denied up until that point a furin cleavage site is a small chunk of genetic text 12 letters long

01:02:58.520 that is found in this virus and no other closely related virus right so no other sars-like virus

01:03:05.080 has been found with this chunk of text in it now that chunk of text makes the virus very infectious

01:03:13.160 it's sort of the biggest reason we're having a pandemic without that chunk of text the virus would

01:03:18.520 not be able to infect so many cells in our body would not be so quick to do so and where does that

01:03:23.560 chunk of text come from well where does that chunk of text come from that's the question a lot of people

01:03:29.000 looked at that and said that looks odd that looks like someone put it there deliberately and other

01:03:35.880 scientists said don't be so ridiculous it could have arisen naturally other coronaviruses not bat sars-like

01:03:42.360 ones but other ones do have it mers has it for example and we were prepared to be completely

01:03:49.000 sort of ambiguous about this we still are we don't know for sure whether it arose naturally or whether

01:03:54.920 it came in but there are there have been 11 experiments around the world to put furin cleavage

01:04:04.040 sites into viruses sounds like a bad idea and one of them involved the wuhan institute of virology

01:04:10.760 it was a mers-like virus um uh and yeah i mean it's you know yeah and peter most of these experiments

01:04:18.520 were safe because they were just doing it with the protein not the whole virus so it's not infectious

01:04:23.000 you know etc but some of them were using live viruses particularly ones one that involved a pig

01:04:28.280 um peter desic's group that that darpa said no we don't want this the the darpa proposed darpa said we

01:04:37.640 don't want to fund this yeah and the why would you do that why would you put us a furin cleavage

01:04:44.440 site into a virus the answer is to make it easier to study in the laboratory because then you can grow

01:04:50.680 the virus in the if you find a virus in the wild in a bat and it's not very good at infecting human

01:04:57.400 cells putting a furin cleavage site will juice it up a bit so that it can infect human cells and then

01:05:02.840 you can study that because you want to study it what you want to do is get the nobel

01:05:07.560 prize for catching a virus that you may act of starting a pandemic and stopping it i think that's

01:05:16.840 one of the motivations i'm sorry i don't mean to say that was sort of deliberately what they're doing

01:05:20.920 but if if you if you get into this field it's very frustrating not to be able to grow these viruses and

01:05:30.520 study them so you want to make it just that little bit easier and you want to check whether they can

01:05:35.560 infect human beings and half the time you can't tell because the virus can't infect human beings at

01:05:40.840 all so you need to make it just a little bit easier and then you can say okay this one's dangerous that

01:05:45.240 one's not that's what they're trying to do but as i can't remember who said this first but one

01:05:51.880 scientist said this recently that's a bit like looking for a gas leak with a lighted match

01:05:58.840 this here in america has become all about politics and i'm shocked at how americans have

01:06:08.440 reacted um to these lockdowns uh it's just bizarre and i think at the beginning we were afraid we didn't

01:06:17.000 know and i think it was reasonable to do the things that we did at the beginning now there's

01:06:24.360 just too many weird things that are going on with the government you know saying mandatory max uh you

01:06:31.800 know vaccines etc when we were on the road to 90 percent uh vaccinations here in america um

01:06:40.840 and it has it has become all about um politics and anyone who like i don't question the vaccine

01:06:52.120 quite vaccines great good good for us me too um but i do think you have a right to say

01:06:59.800 i don't i don't want that um but if you have any anything that disagrees

01:07:08.680 like maybe it was in a lab they will shut you down so hard which i think makes this um

01:07:19.160 um the vaccine even harder for some people to understand or want because they're like wait a

01:07:27.000 minute i this is unusual activity does that make sense to you yes i think i i see where you're going

01:07:34.920 i mean i i agree with you that i i'm pro vaccine i want to persuade people to have the vaccine i i worry

01:07:40.920 that forcing them to have the vaccine backfires in some cases especially in america probably almost

01:07:46.360 certainly in america especially but muddled up in this is as you say there were some ridiculous

01:07:54.360 conspiracy theories out there at the start that it was all got up by bill gates that it was uh that it

01:08:00.600 was a a hoax um uh or even that it was you know there was an early idea that it was something to do with

01:08:08.760 the hiv virus or something like that and that was that was nonsense yeah so those are nutty conspiracy

01:08:15.720 theories the possibility that this virus came from a accident in a laboratory was not and never should

01:08:23.160 have been labeled a conspiracy theory but it was explicitly labeled as such by peter daszak by other

01:08:31.320 uh scientists um uh by dr fauci and that seems to me wrong because i think you need to

01:08:38.520 to distinguish between um possibilities that you might think are unlikely but can't be ruled out

01:08:46.200 and we haven't yet got good enough evidence for and possibilities that are completely ridiculous and

01:08:52.440 uh you know akin to saying the moon landings were faked or whatever because otherwise if you throw them

01:08:59.480 all in together then you're only encouraging the uh conspiracy theorists to say well if you called

01:09:07.240 that a conspiracy theory you're now saying it's not then what about my mad idea exactly right and and you

01:09:13.640 also have for instance one of the reasons why this was so scary at the beginning with china is because

01:09:22.520 they were suppressing information they were taking scientists and they were disappearing and you're

01:09:29.960 like wait a minute wait a minute why well all he said was i think this started you know two weeks

01:09:37.000 beforehand why is he now missing you know right well the the reprimands handed out the fierce you know um

01:09:46.200 tickings off that the scientists who first raised the alarm got were pretty awful you know they were they

01:09:51.160 were they were they were do we know where they are who they well you know the most famous of them

01:09:56.920 the young ophthalmologist who shared it on social media with some friends and said we've got sars in

01:10:02.360 this uh they thought it was sars at the time and we've got sars in our hospital please be careful

01:10:07.400 that was all he said he got the most tremendous uh uh punishments uh and then he actually died of

01:10:14.760 covet within a month i mean in early february um uh so we do know what happened to him so there's

01:10:21.160 been there's been some some very uh unpleasant um uh reactions to people trying to be open and helpful

01:10:33.960 with information in china and that is not something we should condone i mean a friend of mine said look

01:10:39.240 what do you expect they're a communist regime they do this kind of thing i'm sorry why is that supposed

01:10:43.240 to reassure me right right especially one that is as powerful and yeah and we're all going traveling

01:10:50.680 and you know yeah um the uh the cdc here has been instrumental in cracking down on on people and

01:10:59.400 and questions is that the way it is in the rest of the world well um it's varied in different countries

01:11:08.440 but on the whole uh most governments until may of 2021 would not take seriously the possibility of

01:11:19.240 a laboratory right and used words like conspiracy theory and so on the uk government wouldn't give

01:11:25.080 it any time the australians called for a open inquiry but that doesn't mean their government was

01:11:31.720 thinking it was a laboratory leak uh or possibly could have been something changed in may of this

01:11:38.200 year there was an open letter in science organized by my uh co-author um there was a very good uh there

01:11:44.600 were a couple of other very good essays and it was just enough accumulation of evidence for people to

01:11:49.880 say hang on a minute have we prematurely ruled this out uh and where we uh should we be taking it more

01:11:58.040 seriously well if only that had happened a year earlier because the trail is getting colder all

01:12:03.080 the time yeah you know and we we the the more time goes by the harder it's going to be to pin down

01:12:09.960 that said i i constantly meet people who say we're never going to find out why do you even bother pursuing

01:12:16.120 this and i say well i'm not sure there are people who know a lot more most of them are in china but not all

01:12:24.920 and at some point they're going to realize they need to to to speak more freely i don't think we

01:12:32.520 knew about the spanish flu for 40 years but we found out yes it's much harder of course in those

01:12:39.320 days because nobody really knew where it started you couldn't do tests etc i mean one of the bizarre

01:12:44.280 things about this one of course is that we're doing it with our eyes wide open we've got we've got

01:12:48.680 genomic tests we know we know unbelievable details about how this virus works and things like that

01:12:54.120 but it hasn't been meant that we've been able to stop it i was surprised by that i thought that

01:12:59.160 information that we now have at our fingertips would enable us to prevent a pandemic you said in genome

01:13:07.400 the autobiography of a species um you wrote a true scientist is bored by knowledge it is the assault on

01:13:15.880 ignorance that motivates him the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed

01:13:20.840 i stand by that i think you know we teach science to kids as if it's a catalog of facts

01:13:27.720 it's not it's the search for new mysteries it is and this is a great mystery this is a really

01:13:33.560 i mean i think it's the most important mystery of of this century so far how many of the science i think

01:13:39.320 science has done itself a grave disservice medicine is doing itself a grave disservice now by shutting people

01:13:48.120 up you know you go to your doctor and he says look i i i don't feel comfortable saying this or

01:13:56.040 you know you can't talk about this shutting these people down is is very frightening well i'm not here

01:14:05.400 to throw the whole of science no no but i think there are other scientists that are great well the way

01:14:11.240 the distinction i make is that science as a philosophy is still fantastic i have you know it's the right

01:14:16.840 right to try and find out about the world by experiment and hypothesis testing is the right

01:14:22.040 way to go you know it's an incredible achievement i think it's humankind's greatest achievement the

01:14:26.680 enlightenment it's a wonderful thing but science as an institution has got to where it tends to be

01:14:34.280 dominated by um somewhat inward looking committees of the great and the good who are behaving more and

01:14:44.040 more like a priesthood it's always had a bit of a tendency like that um say no no don't you unwashed

01:14:51.000 get involved in this leave it to us we're the experts we know and we're going to tell you what's right

01:14:56.040 and what's wrong well i'm sorry i don't think it should be that i want to see science treated much more

01:15:01.160 as a sort of democratic and open process and scientists to be much more humble and to say look

01:15:05.560 actually we don't know where this came from it's important we find out anyone who wants to help

01:15:10.040 help track this down please join us but don't expect us to waste our time on right uh nutty

01:15:17.080 conspiracy theories but let's uh be open-minded about everything that is plausible the scientists

01:15:24.600 are always they're always right until they're wrong until they're proven until something else is

01:15:29.000 discovered um i have to ask they disagree with each other that's how they keep themselves

01:15:33.000 honest yes yes um okay well i have to ask you this and then then i'll well i'll let you go but

01:15:40.920 what is capitalism by your definition or better yet what is free market anti-capitalism

01:15:47.960 yeah i once called myself a free market anti-capitalist and uh what i mean by that is that

01:15:54.040 uh i'm a huge fan of commerce enterprise free freedom you know that people going out and uh

01:16:03.000 taking risks and uh innovating yes and coming up with solutions that help the world i don't think

01:16:09.560 that makes me a capitalist in the sense of the term you know the word coined by marx because a

01:16:15.240 capitalist is someone who accumulates capital and i think free markets are the opposite of that what

01:16:21.720 they do is they see somebody who's got a monopoly wealth position as a result of some kind of uh

01:16:28.920 advance and and they say hmm i'll have to go that and they come along and they use competition to

01:16:34.760 to um to redistribute what's going on so i think true free enterprise is surprisingly anti-capitalist it

01:16:43.640 produces equality not inequality it produces um uh a a sort of network of of of collaboration

01:16:53.720 rather than a um an accumulation of bars of gold in a bank if you see what i mean capitalists now are

01:17:03.320 google facebook all these big corporations exxon whatever and they force other people keep buying

01:17:09.480 things up to force other people out which squashes the little guy who goes i have a better idea absolutely

01:17:15.640 and the more regulation that government imposes often the more barriers to entry for the little guy

01:17:21.480 and actually big big business loves loves it it's got a crony relationship with government that i think

01:17:27.720 so i i you know i would like to regulate in such a way as to make life harder for big businesses and

01:17:32.200 easier for small businesses matt i really enjoyed it thank you so much then thank you so much i've enjoyed

01:17:37.640 the conversation just a reminder i'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on

01:17:49.000 to a friend so it can be discovered by other people

01:18:07.640 so

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The Glenn Beck Program - November 20, 2021

Ep 126 ｜ EcoHealth Alliance's Peter Daszak： Hero or Villain？｜ Matt Ridley ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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