The Peter Attia Drive - #169 - Katherine Eban： COVID-19 Lab Leak： Examining all sides of the debate and discussing barriers to a full investigation

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

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00:00:41.720 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.740 here's today's episode. My guest this week is Catherine Eban. Catherine is an investigative

00:00:54.820 journalist and also a previous guest on the podcast back in September of 2019 when we spoke

00:01:01.120 about her book, Bottle of Lies, which dug into the prevalence of fraud in the generic drug

00:01:07.300 manufacturing industry. Well, Catherine's back again this time to discuss yet another controversial

00:01:12.560 topic, this time around the origins of COVID-19 or the virus responsible for COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2.

00:01:21.180 Catherine is one of a number of journalists who has written a detailed piece on this, hers in

00:01:27.120 Vanity Fair. And in this episode, we get into a lot of detail about both sides of this.

00:01:33.640 I suspect most of you are at least somewhat familiar with this, but if not, let me provide

00:01:38.160 a little bit of background. There is a brewing controversy around the origins of the virus

00:01:45.460 responsible for COVID-19. Of course, at the time of the pandemic's arrival, it was viewed as a

00:01:52.840 largely open and shut case that this was a virus of zoonotic origin, meaning this was a virus that

00:01:58.460 occurred in nature. The belief at the time was that this was a virus that originated from bats,

00:02:04.380 transferred to an intermediary, a pangolin most likely, before ultimately finding its way into

00:02:10.900 humans in the wet markets of Wuhan. While there were some rumblings about the veracity of that theory

00:02:18.960 in the early parts of 2020, they were met with the sharpest rebukes from both the scientific community

00:02:26.640 and more broadly, just the political community that was viewing such statements as xenophobic

00:02:32.680 or otherwise ill-informed and conspiratorial. Since that time, however, there has been a push for

00:02:39.560 greater transparency and basically a push to understand what the real origin of this virus

00:02:45.640 is. And I think there have been basically two factors that have driven that push. The first

00:02:49.860 is that despite the case of SARS-1 and MERS, very similar coronaviruses to the one that resulted in

00:02:58.740 COVID-19, there has yet to be any identified species of origin and or intermediary. In other words,

00:03:06.960 the bat that would have resulted in this virus ultimately going to humans and or to an intermediary,

00:03:13.040 that animal or those animals have not been identified and that has not been due to a lack

00:03:16.480 of effort. I think the second factor that has driven this push for greater transparency has been

00:03:22.740 effectively the abject lack of transparency to date. Now, part of that can be understood and explained

00:03:28.560 by understanding that in an autocratic nation like China, transparency is not the norm and therefore

00:03:35.540 would never be the norm under any circumstance, lab leak or otherwise. But I do think that there is

00:03:41.180 enough frustration on the parts of people to at least ask the question, why did we not take this

00:03:49.240 theory seriously a year ago or 18 months ago when perhaps it would have been easier to gather information

00:03:56.680 to examine both of these ideas? The idea that the virus originated in nature or the idea that the virus

00:04:04.420 actually escaped from the lab where it was presumably being manipulated for some greater good, such as

00:04:11.100 the development of vaccines or disaster preparedness or other things like that. We do not really get into

00:04:17.100 radical ideas such as that this virus was developed as a bioweapon and somehow unleashed. So regardless of

00:04:24.420 your knowledge level in this space, I think this episode will be interesting and I will allow you to

00:04:30.920 obviously draw your own conclusions. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with

00:04:36.180 Catherine Ebay.

00:04:42.440 Hey, Catherine, great to have you back on the show here.

00:04:45.120 Awesome to be with you again.

00:04:46.980 Seems we're always discussing something controversial. And by the way, I already know what our third podcast

00:04:51.600 will be about based on other controversial work you've done. So yeah, you don't like to write about

00:04:56.460 things that are simple. No, I don't seem to. It is the fate of the investigative journalist.

00:05:02.700 Well, let's start with a broad question, which is what attracted you in particular to this story?

00:05:07.980 And why did you decide that you had something to offer, especially in a story where not to let too

00:05:13.840 much out of the bag too soon, but it seems that this is not something that can truly ever be known

00:05:18.080 one way or the other. So it seems a bit of a frustrating exercise.

00:05:22.120 Yeah. Well, I've been covering the pandemic for a year for Vanity Fair. And, you know, as things have

00:05:30.700 come a little bit more under control in the U.S., at least for the time being, my editor and I were

00:05:37.340 like, what are the big unanswered questions of the pandemic? And we decided that the biggest

00:05:44.140 biggest is what its origin was. Now, one might say, well, that was settled a while ago or seemingly

00:05:51.920 settled, right? It came from nature, but we don't know exactly how or where. But it was interesting

00:05:59.500 because the head of the World Health Organization himself said, we still don't know. And all hypotheses

00:06:07.000 remain on the table. So it seemed that with Trump out of office, with the WHO head himself raising this

00:06:16.220 as a question, it was a good time to begin to look into what was the sort of, what's the debate?

00:06:24.140 What's the controversy? What are the questions? And what I uncovered was a lot more than I had

00:06:31.740 really considered or bargained for when I started my reporting. Maybe for folks, we should give a

00:06:38.460 little bit of background on what a lab leak implies. Is there a precedent for such a thing

00:06:44.440 in virology? Because at the surface, it certainly sounds nefarious, right? It sounds like, well,

00:06:52.660 that must be a deliberate thing. And it immediately falls into the realm of conspiracy theories. But in

00:06:59.340 fact, there's quite a precedent for viruses getting out of labs in the modern era. And I would define

00:07:06.280 the modern era as the era of microbiology. Obviously, there weren't lab leaks that accounted for the

00:07:10.540 Spanish flu. But are there any that come to mind as you began your work here or that you had to learn

00:07:17.560 about as a result of your investigation? Yeah. So let me say first that lab leak, as it's understood,

00:07:25.100 is not a unitary theory. It ranges all the way from field researchers went into a bat cave,

00:07:34.760 brought back natural samples into a laboratory, and that natural sample somehow leaked, or a laboratory

00:07:43.840 researcher got infected simply through, you know, aerosol transmission, which is what we're talking

00:07:50.180 about. This is not, I mean, the word leak implies like liquid gushing out of a pipe. That's not what

00:07:56.040 we're talking about. We're talking about aerosol transmission. But it could have been an infected

00:08:01.420 lab worker. It could have been an infected field researcher bringing a sample back. But the phrase lab

00:08:09.400 leak sort of runs all the way up to the possibility that someone in a laboratory was manipulating viruses,

00:08:17.000 potentially in an experiment to make them more infectious, to see if they would become more

00:08:23.340 infectious. And that that new strain, not a natural strain per se, but one that was genetically

00:08:30.700 modified, could have leaked from a laboratory. So it really runs the gamut. It's not a single thing.

00:08:39.440 This is not like, oh, how could that ever happen? In a way, it's like, how could it not happen? Because

00:08:46.060 it's happened over and over and over again. You know, you had very serious lab leak in the Soviet

00:08:53.080 Union, which finally became exposed. It was an anthrax leak. You've had SARS leaks. You've had four

00:09:01.080 SARS lab escapes since the SARS epidemic of 2002. So this actually is something that happens a lot.

00:09:10.300 And it seems that one of the most significant examples of this was this Russian flu in 1977,

00:09:17.100 which was an H1N1 flu that had been around in the 40s and 50s. It was being studied in a lab.

00:09:25.320 When it reemerged, it seemed to target disproportionately people that were younger than 25,

00:09:31.120 which at the time maybe didn't make sense. Although after it was clear that this was the same virus that

00:09:36.060 was around sooner, it made sense because obviously the people that were being afflicted were people

00:09:39.900 that did not develop natural immunity. Again, there had been no, to my knowledge, of course,

00:09:44.900 because you wouldn't have had the tools to have done so, there was no gain of function. Not that they

00:09:48.640 could have genetically edited, but I don't believe there was evidence that it had been sort of selectively

00:09:52.880 bred or anything like that. It was simply a question of, this is a virus that's being studied in a lab.

00:09:57.260 And then somehow that led to it getting out. And as you point out, at least four cases of the early

00:10:04.500 SARS-1 virus escaping. And again, when you read the stories of these, which I've read at one point,

00:10:10.820 all of them, these are mistakes that people can make. These are perhaps viruses that are not being

00:10:16.840 handled with as much care as they should be handled. Some shortcuts are being taken with respect to

00:10:21.480 how they could be handled. You know, I think it's important to point out that people talk about

00:10:27.460 BSL-4 labs that are studying these incredibly dangerous pathogens. And so those are the most

00:10:35.740 protective, highest containment labs where all the researchers are working in spacesuits with

00:10:43.960 independent oxygen. But the fact of the matter on the ground is that you have research with incredibly

00:10:51.100 dangerous pathogens taking place in laboratories across the world that have much less protection,

00:10:58.960 like BSL-2 labs, which are basically the safety standard of an American dentist's office.

00:11:06.440 So you've had live SARS viruses being studied in overcrowded laboratories in China and elsewhere

00:11:15.240 with very few protections.

00:11:17.480 So there's at least a precedent that a virus that's being studied can make its way out of the lab. In

00:11:25.240 fact, there's a great precedent for it. But of course, that alone doesn't explain what could have

00:11:30.120 happened here. It's probably worth also explaining for folks who haven't been so steeped in this story,

00:11:36.000 or at least reminding people of the typical way in which a virus can be transmitted between animal

00:11:43.840 hosts and what it means to have an intermediary hosts and how, for example, those were identified in the

00:11:50.480 cases of SARS-1 and MERS.

00:11:53.100 So it was presumed early on that like other past viruses, SARS-CoV-2 had a zoonotic origin, meaning

00:12:03.260 that it spread somehow from an animal and jumped to a human or that there was an intermediary animal.

00:12:12.600 So possibly a pangolin, possibly a civet cat, and that it went from a bat reservoir to some intermediary

00:12:22.600 animal to humans. So that is believed to be the case with SARS-CoV-1. That is believed to be the case

00:12:31.060 with MERS, where there was a dromedary as an intermediate host, with the initial animal

00:12:38.820 being presumed to be some sort of bat reservoir. With Ebola, it's believed to have a zoonotic origin,

00:12:47.180 either a bat or a chimp. It's not certain yet. But that is the long history of these viruses,

00:12:55.740 that it has some kind of natural origin, and then evolves and mutates in such a way that it can

00:13:03.820 infect a human. And I think one of the questions here in the case of SARS-1, it didn't take that

00:13:10.940 long. I believe it was, you know, in the order of about six months to identify its intermediary,

00:13:16.000 which is, what's it called? Like a cavet? Like it's sort of like a little...

00:13:19.460 A civet cat. It's very cute.

00:13:21.020 A civet cat. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:13:22.260 Yes. A very cute animal.

00:13:23.880 Yeah. And obviously in MERS, as you mentioned, a camel. What's relevant about this is that the

00:13:31.620 virus can acquire additional tools in that intermediary host before making that final

00:13:37.620 leap. And then so the question is, how much of the transmission occurs between, say, the cat and

00:13:44.060 the human? Or once that transmission occurs, is most of the transmission occurring human to human?

00:13:50.220 And so as of now, which is directionally, call it a year and nine months post the first infection,

00:13:58.320 we don't yet have an identified intermediary host, which implies that it exists, but it hasn't yet

00:14:03.860 been identified or there wasn't one. And this might've traveled directly from bats to humans,

00:14:09.040 for which there's clearly a precedent based on what happened in 2012, right?

00:14:12.800 Well, let me just say that we don't yet have a designated animal host and it's not for lack

00:14:19.560 of trying to find one. So Chinese authorities have tested up to 80,000 animal samples to see if they

00:14:30.480 could find a host animal and have not been able to do so. You could think of it as an international

00:14:37.460 bat hunt to find the host animal of this virus. And none has presented itself yet.

00:14:46.080 Right. So we have, we haven't identified the potential bat source of it. We haven't identified the

00:14:53.040 intermediary of it. There is a close closest relative that has been identified, correct?

00:14:59.200 Yeah. So that is a sort of complicated question, but there is a strain RATG13, which was found in an

00:15:10.020 abandoned mine shaft in Yunnan province in 2013, which is sort of the closest viral sample to the SARS-CoV-2

00:15:23.880 sequence. So it's about 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2.

00:15:32.780 What do we know about that? I don't want to say accident, but that experience in 2013,

00:15:37.520 where the miners were exposed to it, what do we know about their illness and what does that

00:15:43.220 tell us about that virus?

00:15:45.760 So there's a couple of really interesting things about what happened in 2012. First of all,

00:15:52.060 that it happened, what happened, but also how it sort of broke into the public domain,

00:15:58.020 what happened. So just starting out in 2012, there were six miners who were given this

00:16:06.140 very unpleasant assignment, which was to go to this abandoned mine shaft and clean it out because it was

00:16:14.300 thick with bat guano, which is bat feces essentially. So they go in there and they dig for days and weeks

00:16:24.680 and they become gravely ill. So they become admitted to the hospital, Kunming University Hospital. So they

00:16:32.820 get admitted to the hospital. The question is, is it a fungus? Is it a virus? They bring in an expert

00:16:40.780 who analyzed this, says it's a virus. They have pneumonia. It's a virus. Their symptoms were

00:16:47.320 almost identical to COVID-19. So he asked, what were they doing? They were digging a bat guano.

00:16:54.600 What kind of bat? It's this Chinese rufous horseshoe bat, which is the same one that triggered SARS-CoV-1.

00:17:02.080 Three of the miners died. Three ultimately recover. So this is a case that should have triggered worldwide

00:17:12.880 alarm because it looked like the beginning of an outbreak again. But the Chinese authorities never

00:17:19.120 reported this to the World Health Organization. It sort of remained below the radar, except that this

00:17:25.460 abandoned mineshaft became a destination for virologists in Asia who were going into this mineshaft and

00:17:33.380 getting samples and bringing it back to their laboratories. Probably the most active samplers from this

00:17:40.940 mineshaft were members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan. They dug up many samples, brought it back to

00:17:50.520 their laboratories, and they sequenced a sample, which they called at the time, 4991. And that was,

00:18:00.200 as we would find out later, 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2. Except at the beginning of the outbreak,

00:18:11.820 nobody knew about this mineshaft. Nobody knew that three miners had died, and no one knew about 4991.

00:18:18.540 The only way that we ultimately found out about it is because a very curious unemployed science teacher

00:18:27.300 in Eastern India started digging into this database of Chinese master's theses and pulled up an entire

00:18:36.940 dissertation about this incident in the mineshaft. Now, to be clear, it would not have been known

00:18:46.460 based on the infection of those six mineshaft workers with basically a 50% mortality that there

00:18:54.380 was any evidence that that virus could be transmitted human to human. Correct. It could have been simply

00:18:59.680 that they acquired it from the bats, which is the most likely scenario, in the presence of an overwhelming

00:19:05.500 exposure to the virus, but that the virus would not transmit human to human. Would that have been

00:19:11.460 possible? That's right. We have no information that they infected one another. They were all exposed

00:19:19.140 to this bat guano. They went to the hospital. It doesn't appear that the hospital workers got sick,

00:19:25.440 so it doesn't appear that they spread it to other people, but they were desperately ill. And it's

00:19:33.080 interesting to note, the oldest miner died first. He was the most gravely afflicted. He was in his 60s.

00:19:40.640 So if we look back at this incident in light of COVID-19, there are a number of aspects of this

00:19:50.140 that do look like SARS-CoV-2 in 2012. Though clearly it's a different virus given that, I mean,

00:19:59.940 I think for a person listening, maybe not familiar with genetic distance, 96.2% sounds like, oh,

00:20:09.020 that's a perfect match. But of course, that's not remotely a match. You know, I've spoken with

00:20:13.880 virologists who have said, look, to try to take a virus from 96.2% to 100% would take forever. I mean,

00:20:24.340 that would be a very long period of genetic manipulation. So the point being, it seems unlikely,

00:20:30.660 at least if that's true, that that virus ultimately became SARS-CoV-2. What did your work uncover with

00:20:39.220 respect to that specific concern? The issue is, that is one sample that was taken from that mine

00:20:48.560 shaft. But we don't know the whole universe of samples that came from that mine shaft. Now,

00:20:55.780 that sample was taken to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which, you know, just to point out

00:21:02.260 is about seven miles away from what was initially identified as the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak

00:21:11.000 in this Huanan seafood market. But the issue is there were hundreds of samples that were taken

00:21:18.160 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The database that housed these samples was taken offline,

00:21:27.380 weirdly, a couple of months before the known start of the COVID-19 outbreak. So publicly,

00:21:35.320 we're not looking at the entire universe of samples that emerged from that mine.

00:21:40.660 Now, based on the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated with a number of US

00:21:47.940 institutions, most notably, presumably, the University of North Carolina, which I think

00:21:52.280 we'll get to, can we look at any of the grants or publications that came out of those jointly and

00:22:00.080 surmise just how many samples of coronaviruses were extracted from 2013 until 2019?

00:22:07.340 Yeah. I mean, well, we know that there are hundreds of samples that were extracted. And we presume that

00:22:18.760 there was, you know, deep sequencing done on these samples. But again, we don't have access to all that

00:22:26.600 information. So we don't know if any of those other samples may have closed the gap from 96.2

00:22:35.680 to 100%, basically. So again, just to ground everybody in the thought process here,

00:22:44.020 if there's an argument to be made that SARS-CoV-2 originated and its final origination came from a

00:22:51.500 lab, you basically have a couple of mechanisms that that could have happened. One would be that the

00:22:59.140 exact version of SARS-CoV-2 was identified in the wild, potentially in this mine, was brought to the

00:23:06.560 lab where it was being studied, but not altered before it infected presumably a lab worker that

00:23:12.860 ultimately led to the outbreak. Conversely, a very, very, very close cousin to SARS-CoV-2 was identified

00:23:21.300 in the wild, again, potentially in this mine, where it was brought to the lab. And research was done on

00:23:28.600 it, which we'll get to, called gain-of-function research. And that closed the genetic gap, so to

00:23:35.060 speak, from where it started to where it currently is, and what ultimately led to the outbreak through

00:23:41.660 presumably some contamination within the lab. Is that sort of a safe summation of the plausible scenarios?

00:23:49.460 That is. And, you know, let me just add that the reason those scenarios exist as questions that

00:23:59.220 remain unanswered is because there has been a fundamental lack of transparency that has essentially

00:24:07.000 been enforced by the Chinese government. And I mean there to distinguish between the motives of the

00:24:14.760 scientists and the motives of the government. We don't know whether the Chinese scientists would

00:24:22.080 like a full accounting of everything that happened and are being prevented at giving one because the

00:24:28.820 government is restricting it. So the questions can't be resolved because there hasn't been transparency

00:24:35.540 around them.

00:24:36.520 So who would be the most preeminent scientist or scientists in China with respect to viruses? There's a pretty

00:24:44.000 interesting character who leads the charge there, correct? She even has her own nickname.

00:24:48.260 Yeah. I mean, she does. And, you know, it's one of these stories where as a journalist, you feel like you

00:24:56.020 can't even make this stuff up, right? She Zhengli is the lead coronavirus researcher, the foremost

00:25:04.140 coronavirus researcher in China. She is a sort of nationally revered, very well-known figure. So she is the

00:25:15.000 lead coronavirus researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And she has this nickname, Batwoman. And that comes from

00:25:24.020 her fearless exploration of these bat caves in Southern China. So, you know, when you see her image,

00:25:32.400 she's often shown wearing this space suit in the BSL-4 lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And she's,

00:25:42.500 you know, she's like among these sort of sparkling firmament of internationally renowned scientists.

00:25:48.460 She's, nobody disputes that she's earned her place there. And she's particularly well-known for a key

00:25:57.260 discovery from the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak, which is she was the first researcher to figure out the mechanism

00:26:06.340 by which humans were infected by that virus, which is through the ACE2 receptors, human lung cells.

00:26:13.760 So she identified the mechanism for transmission. How long has the Institute been doing gain-of-function

00:26:23.480 research? And maybe even before we answer that question, we could take a moment to explain what

00:26:29.460 gain-of-function is. It's actually not perfectly, there isn't an exceptional definition for it, but

00:26:36.200 I think we can loosely describe it. Sure. So first of all, there are some people who say that,

00:26:43.740 all of virology is gain-of-function research, which is basically when you study a virus,

00:26:50.160 you are seeing sort of what functions it gains and what functions it loses. You know, how does it

00:26:57.680 infect? Is it going to become more infectious? And by what mechanism is it going to become more

00:27:03.700 infectious? So gain-of-function research put simply is this idea that you are trying to test

00:27:13.440 whether the pathogen can become more infectious? You're trying to give it attributes that it

00:27:20.840 doesn't possess in nature as a way to gauge its infectiousness to humans.

00:27:27.120 Look at the surface. I think if you're listening to this and you don't dabble in this world,

00:27:32.280 that sounds a bit absurd, right? We're going to take a virus that may have a certain level of either

00:27:40.120 virulence or lethality or transmissibility, you know, some feature that makes a virus

00:27:46.540 undesirable, and we're going to enhance that. So what's the argument for doing that? What's the

00:27:52.700 argument for making a bad virus worse or making a good virus bad? First of all, let me say this is

00:28:00.120 hugely controversial and has sort of divided the field of virology because there are people who say

00:28:08.300 this is absolutely crazy. As one source said to me, it's like looking for a gas leak with a lighted

00:28:15.860 match. And there are other people who say this is absolutely essential. So the argument for why to do

00:28:22.400 it is that in order to gauge the risk from viruses that exist in nature, you have to experiment with how

00:28:35.100 they become infectious to humans. And one of the ways to do that is essentially to soup up that virus.

00:28:42.680 You can, through genetic editing, you can make it more infectious and see if it is, you know, one of

00:28:50.520 these things that it's a determination of where we should put our resources. You know, what do we need

00:28:56.840 to protect against? There are other people who say, all right, we're going to these very remote areas

00:29:04.800 where these viruses are tucked inside these caves. We're taking back samples to laboratories in crowded

00:29:11.120 urban areas. We are then altering these pathogens to make them more infectious, right? That is, as one

00:29:20.600 person said to me, the definition of insanity. Is there any evidence that gain-of-function research

00:29:27.320 has produced victories in the past? And we can even just keep SARS-CoV-2 off the list at the moment,

00:29:34.080 because I don't think there's any evidence that's benefited our fight against this virus. But is there

00:29:38.680 any evidence that has aided with the creation of flu vaccines or other vaccines?

00:29:44.240 So the people who defend it say that you actually do need to do this kind of research in order to

00:29:52.780 help with vaccine development. That this is the way that you figure out how to create resistance,

00:30:00.520 is to look at, to experiment with how viruses might mutate. So that, for example, if you wanted to

00:30:10.060 kind of forecast what the variants of SARS-CoV-2 would be like, as I'm sure the audience has heard of

00:30:18.400 the fearsome Delta variant, which is so afflicting many countries in the world and now increasingly our

00:30:24.920 own, part of what gain-of-function research can help do is forecast the mutations. But, you know,

00:30:32.220 there are people who say that there is a lot of other ways to do this kind of research without

00:30:38.320 running the risk of unleashing deadly pathogens that you can't control once they're out in the

00:30:44.620 world. Now, what's the U.S. government's position been on gain-of-function research?

00:30:50.200 Yeah. So this is, let me just say, as a journalist and as an investigative journalist,

00:30:56.500 I had been reporting on the pandemic for a year. And once I got into this question that you just asked,

00:31:04.080 I was like, wow, I can't believe how controversial and yet how under the radar this whole question

00:31:13.440 has been. So just to back up, in 2011, a scientist named Ron Fauchier did gain-of-function research with

00:31:23.900 the H1N1 virus and created a pathogen that he said was the most dangerous and infectious the world has ever

00:31:33.460 known through manipulations. So that sparked this outcry in the scientific community. A group called

00:31:41.440 the Cambridge Working Group was formed, which was basically stood in opposition to this kind of

00:31:47.500 research. And their expressions of concern led the U.S. government to impose a moratorium on funding of

00:31:58.040 any kind of gain-of-function research of SARS and MERS pathogens. So then began a period of review,

00:32:08.080 task forces, reports, analysis. And interestingly, in the very beginning of the Trump administration in

00:32:18.060 January of 2017, that moratorium was lifted. But it was replaced with this framework, which had pretty

00:32:28.120 much enough loopholes to drive a truck through. But it basically said, any agency in the U.S.

00:32:35.260 government that wants to fund this kind of research needs to have its own review process in place and needs

00:32:41.860 to ensure that the entities that are getting U.S. taxpayer dollars are proceeding safely.

00:32:50.720 I know that one of the things that has allowed people to sort of lose faith in the government has

00:32:58.280 been statements that both Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci have made with respect to this when asked.

00:33:03.740 Both of them have been asked if the United States government, or specifically NIH, has funded

00:33:07.960 gain-of-function research. Both have emphatically denied it. I believe the direct quote from Francis

00:33:16.560 Collins, neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported gain-of-function

00:33:22.760 research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.

00:33:28.280 Also, in May of 2021, Anthony Fauci told the Senate hearing that NIH and NIAID categorically have not

00:33:37.400 funded gain-of-function research to be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Can you evaluate

00:33:44.420 the veracity of those statements? So here is where we enter this true semantic marshland,

00:33:52.940 because the feeling of, and I'm not talking about sort of wingnuts who want to fire Fauci,

00:34:01.540 credible people who have evaluated this say that there is some sort of rhetorical gray area here.

00:34:12.220 First of all, while they haven't funded research, while the government hasn't funded research at the

00:34:18.160 Wuhan Institute of Virology directly, they have funded basically an intermediary non-profit called

00:34:25.700 EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has given subgrants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So yeah,

00:34:33.200 no direct funding, but yeah, indirect funding. Now, part of the obligation of EcoHealth Alliance

00:34:40.200 was to report back to the NIH and say, here's our progress reports. Here is what the Wuhan Institute

00:34:49.180 of Virology was doing with some of your grant money, and we ensure that they've been doing this

00:34:56.420 safely. We don't know what's in those progress reports because NIH has not released them.

00:35:02.840 That smells like a FOA waiting to happen.

00:35:04.800 Oh, the NIH now is like being buried up to their eyeballs in FOIAs. Absolutely. People want to know,

00:35:13.040 what did they know about this research? There are numerous investigations ongoing into that very

00:35:18.820 question right now, including from the HHS inspector general. So there's a lot of questions around this.

00:35:26.300 And let me just say, part of the reporting effort for me was disentangling conspiracy theories. And

00:35:37.400 there's, you know, they're wall-to-wall conspiracy theories out there, disentangling the ones that have

00:35:42.540 no basis in reality, and then trying to evaluate the credible questions. So in my investigation,

00:35:50.320 there are credible questions, you know, about that funding. I mean, why were we giving taxpayer,

00:35:59.320 why were we allowing taxpayer dollars to a high-level Chinese laboratory where we now believe there was

00:36:09.080 actually military scientists working in there? They're obviously an adversary. As one person said to me,

00:36:16.500 hey, what's wrong with the Louis Pasteur Institute? I mean, maybe we should make more of an effort to

00:36:23.120 restrict our research dollars to the science laboratories of allies and not adversaries.

00:36:31.400 Tell me a little bit about EcoHealth Alliance. Why are they acting as an intermediary? What's their

00:36:36.100 mission? What does this organization exist to do?

00:36:38.400 So EcoHealth Alliance is a nonprofit, which is run by a fellow, a zoologist named Peter Daszak,

00:36:46.560 and has a very laudable goal, which is basically to map the viruses in the natural world and use that

00:36:56.400 information in part to preserve wild spaces. If we continue on the path of habitat destruction,

00:37:03.360 and we end up sort of cheek by jowl close to these viruses like Ebola, it's, you know,

00:37:12.840 we're both extinguishing the natural world and endangering our own health and safety on this

00:37:18.580 planet. So that is the goal of EcoHealth Alliance. But the organization was pushing very,

00:37:26.620 very hard for big funding dollars, not just to fund this research on a small scale, but had their eyes

00:37:35.620 on something called the Global Virome Project, which was basically a massive mapping of the world's

00:37:42.120 viral strains. And as one of my sources said, then it's not just looking for a gas leak with a lighted

00:37:50.180 match, it's looking for a gas leak with a blowtorch, right? If you going into all of these wild spaces,

00:37:56.580 and you're pulling back, bringing back all of these dangerous viruses, and potentially unleashing

00:38:03.120 pathogens, the scientific question here is, do we need to know all the answers to this? Or can we just

00:38:10.940 kind of leave the caves to themselves and make sure that we closely regulate all of this activity?

00:38:19.740 So fast forward to the Trump administration. In the middle of the COVID outbreak, Trump gets

00:38:26.360 asked at a news conference by a journalist from a right-wing media outlet called Newsmax,

00:38:33.320 why is the U.S. government giving money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Which was inaccurate,

00:38:41.220 but Trump answered, we know about that and we're going to shut it down. About a week later,

00:38:46.720 the NIH is forced by the White House to sever or to stop the grant to EcoHealth Alliance.

00:38:55.720 So at that moment, it looked very much like, wow, the Trump administration is really interfering with

00:39:01.220 the science. This is critically important research in a time of COVID-19. But as the story has evolved,

00:39:08.400 you know, there are real questions about what was going on in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,

00:39:16.260 what our taxpayer dollars was funding there. And because of the lack of transparency, it's very

00:39:22.820 hard to evaluate that. So let's go back to sort of January 2020, when the virus was identified,

00:39:32.080 sequenced, I think it still looked somewhat contained, at least contained to China, they had shut down

00:39:38.920 Wuhan. You mentioned that in September, I believe, of 2019, the database of all viruses extracted from

00:39:50.300 the mine, presumably the database would have contained all viruses that they had been working on as well,

00:39:57.120 that had been taken down.

00:39:58.300 That is right. And we don't know why. And it hasn't been put up since then. So what was presumably

00:40:06.540 this transparent hub of international science with Shenzhen Li doing these research experiments and

00:40:15.880 collaborating with scientists around the world, suddenly it was like the steel doors in front of

00:40:22.000 this institute just were shut tight. And nobody can see into what strains they had.

00:40:31.400 What, I mean, there was a Lancet paper that came out in February of 2020, that very aggressively made

00:40:38.860 the case that any suggestion that this didn't originate in nature was ridiculous. Was that a peer

00:40:48.780 reviewed paper? Was it, was it an editorial? What, what was the nature of that paper? Was it an opinion

00:40:53.300 piece?

00:40:53.540 Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's important to note, it was not a peer reviewed paper. It was a statement,

00:40:59.640 which was published by 27 scientists who said, basically anybody who is saying that this could

00:41:08.580 have had a lab origin is siding with, is trafficking in conspiracy theories. And we stand with our fellow

00:41:17.140 scientists in China to say that this had a natural origin. So it was a big piece of branding that

00:41:26.500 suddenly raising the question of the lab leak was aiding and abetting Donald Trump's xenophobic agenda,

00:41:34.720 aiding and abetting conspiracy theorists. And as one of my sources said, it was like it was nailed

00:41:41.260 to the church door. It became the orthodoxy and it really shut down debate, but there was something

00:41:48.160 more consequential that emerged from that Lancet statement. The scientists who signed it asserted

00:41:54.960 that they had no conflicts of interest. The problem was the person who had sort of designed and

00:42:02.460 orchestrated the statement was Peter Daszak, who was the president of EcoHealth Alliance.

00:42:08.200 A number of the scientists who also signed were either employees of him or had received grant money.

00:42:15.660 And even though he's saying that he has no conflicts of interest, he was providing money to the Wuhan

00:42:21.360 Institute of Virology. So it was not a kind of neutral value free assertion. He has a stake in this.

00:42:29.840 He definitely has a stake in this. As somebody pointed out, if it turns out to have been a lab

00:42:36.800 leak, it could do to the field of virology what Chernobyl did to the world of nuclear science

00:42:44.340 research, right? Transform the whole thing, shutdowns, restrictions, moratoriums. So Peter Daszak as the

00:42:52.920 recipient of million, well, not personally, but EcoHealth Alliance as the recipient of millions

00:42:59.440 of dollars in grant money, definitely had a horse in this race. Besides NIH, who else would be funding

00:43:07.860 this type of research? Would the DOD be funding any of this research? It has. DOD gave grants to

00:43:14.500 EcoHealth Alliance. So as I spoke with investigators inside the U.S. government who were looking at COVID

00:43:24.420 origins over the last year, what they found is that there is a big, they called it gain of function

00:43:32.500 bureaucracy inside the federal government. There are a lot of people who are invested in this kind of

00:43:38.440 research who are giving grant money for this kind of research. So they have committed to this kind of

00:43:45.740 very aggressive viral research. And so they have an interest in the outcome of this question. And

00:43:54.020 as these investigators told me, it had an enormous impact on their ability to just

00:44:01.360 neutrally evaluate the question of origin. This is more of a question of speculation,

00:44:07.560 but do you think that had all of this taken place in a world where it had not been politicized,

00:44:14.200 in other words, if politicians, including the president of the United States, had never weighed

00:44:18.060 in on this, if this were a discussion that were only going to take place in the scientific community,

00:44:24.520 do you think the reaction would have been as polarizing?

00:44:27.720 It would have made a huge difference. I mean, partly this became so polarized because

00:44:37.560 President Trump, at that point, lacking a lot of evidence in April, 2020, announced it was a lab leak,

00:44:47.580 that he was certain it was a lab leak. Is there any evidence that he had intelligence

00:44:52.640 to suggest that? Or was this simply an off the cuff statement?

00:44:57.720 Right. So according to my sources, the most significant information that the U.S. government

00:45:05.600 obtained came in the fall of 2020, late summer or fall of 2020. So April of 2020 really predates

00:45:16.520 a lot of the significant information that the government collected. Couple that with the fact

00:45:22.320 that on the same day that he declared he was certain it was a lab leak, hours earlier, his own intelligence

00:45:30.000 agencies put out a statement saying, we are certain that this was not genetically modified. As it turns out,

00:45:38.820 they didn't particularly have evidence for that either. But, you know, it's clear that elements of the U.S.

00:45:47.040 government were sort of ping ponging off of these xenophobic declarations that President Trump was making.

00:45:56.920 Not necessarily as a good faith effort to get to the bottom of it, but more as a way to bludgeon China.

00:46:06.340 And as you know, he, he labeled the COVID-19 kung flu. He made a lot of very sort of negative assertions

00:46:16.100 and it had this tremendous effect. It created, as one source told me, an antibody response within the

00:46:24.940 federal government to the idea that it was a lab leak.

00:46:28.380 So was there censoring for these ideas or questions on social media? I wasn't particularly paying

00:46:34.480 attention in the spring of 2020 to this, but was this the type of thing that if you had posted

00:46:41.860 something about this on Facebook, where is it going to be taken down? I mean, what was the,

00:46:45.400 what was the level of curiosity around this and how much was, was, was being explored?

00:46:51.780 Well, it's interesting because some social media sites, I believe, including Facebook were labeling

00:46:58.520 posts like this as conspiracy theories. And there has been some reversal since then, you know, also

00:47:04.640 in the media where you have now sites like Vox that were posting disclaimers about conspiracy theories

00:47:13.400 are now lifting those statements as the idea of a lab leak has gained in some credibility.

00:47:20.200 So let's march through the government a little bit more here in terms of the efforts that were made

00:47:27.940 to sort of try to get to the bottom of this, because really everything we're talking about

00:47:33.320 is not really front and center, right? I mean, front and center is containing this virus,

00:47:37.980 vaccine development. I mean, there are real crises going on here and presumably one could argue,

00:47:45.020 we'll look at this point. And by this point, I mean, say in the spring and early summer of 2020,

00:47:49.620 2020, it doesn't as much matter what the origin of this virus is as what our response is going to be.

00:47:56.820 And obviously a year, over a year ago, there was great uncertainty about that. Is the window missed

00:48:03.120 even by that point? Do we have evidence that things that records were destroyed, were attempts made

00:48:08.820 to go and do site visits, collect antibodies? Because to me, it seems like the most interesting

00:48:15.300 thing you'd want to do is gather serum samples and understand the seropositivity of people within

00:48:22.540 that vicinity and try to get a signature that way. Any efforts made by the WHO or others to do that or

00:48:28.900 the CDC in China? You know, this is very interesting because I interviewed Dr. Robert Redfield for this

00:48:35.680 story and he was the head of the US CDC. He said to me that from minute one of his learning of this

00:48:45.720 virus, he began thinking about the Wuhan Institute of Virology because he knew of this risky gain of

00:48:53.700 function research they were doing and wanted to rule them out as a potential source. And he offered to

00:49:01.780 send in a team of experts to do exactly what you're saying, you know, to do this widespread testing,

00:49:07.420 to do antibody testing of all the researchers there. As he said to me, had we sent in a team of

00:49:15.440 experts, I could have presumably, if the laboratory was not a source, I could have ruled it out in a

00:49:21.120 couple of weeks. But China, whether they were covering up a lab leak or because they were just reacting

00:49:27.800 the way an authoritarian government does, they immediately circled the wagons, they refused to

00:49:33.520 let in a team of experts, and they did start destroying records. That is absolutely part of

00:49:39.500 what they did. So there is no question that we have lost massive ground in our ability to understand

00:49:46.800 the origin. And has the Chinese government allowed anyone to go back to the caves in Wuhan where the

00:49:54.840 original samples were identified, where RATG13 was found to continue bioprospecting?

00:50:02.920 Yeah. I mean, not only have they not allowed it, they have actively arrested journalists who have

00:50:07.820 tried to go there. The BBC sent a team of journalists there in December of 2020. They were tailed by Chinese

00:50:14.720 police. They found a big truck blocking access to the mineshaft. The Wall Street Journal sent a reporter

00:50:23.040 in on a bicycle, and he was detained by Chinese police and questioned for about five hours.

00:50:29.840 His notes were confiscated. So the Chinese government has been blocking access to this mineshaft.

00:50:37.060 Let's talk about some of the lines of evidence, both for and against this. I mean, I think what's clear

00:50:43.860 here is, one, there's a precedent for this happening, right? So it's an absolutely plausible scenario.

00:50:50.280 Two, unfortunately, because of the nature of the Chinese government's behavior, and by extension,

00:50:58.680 the US government's behavior, there's ample reason to believe in a conspiracy, but by no means is that

00:51:07.220 necessary. In other words, this virus could have completely occurred in nature, and the Chinese

00:51:13.740 government would probably still behave the exact way it did, and the US government would have behaved

00:51:18.480 exactly the same way it did. So, you know, unfortunately, those things don't really, I think,

00:51:24.680 move the thinking or the evidence one way or the other more than the other. But now let's talk about

00:51:31.100 some of the features of the virus, because I think this is where it gets very, I mean, not that what we've

00:51:37.900 said hasn't gotten interesting, but the biology of this is also quite interesting, right?

00:51:42.360 Yeah. So there is no information that is in the public domain, either regarding the viral sequence

00:51:53.640 and the sort of oddities of the viral sequence, or regarding other circumstantial evidence that can

00:52:00.100 answer this question one way or another. When I started reporting this, there was, you know, there were

00:52:05.600 plenty of articles that were like, well, maybe this and maybe that, but the information that is in the

00:52:11.380 public domain doesn't get you there. Some attention or a lot of attention has been focused on what is

00:52:19.380 called a furin cleavage site in the sequence. And that is part of the strain that one virologist told me

00:52:30.200 is a sort of signature of genetic editing of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that in a number of the

00:52:39.120 strains they've worked on and manipulated and published papers about, you see the insertion

00:52:45.460 of a furin cleavage site in the viral sequence. And that is the spot on the sequence that makes it

00:52:54.380 more infectious to humans. So Nick Wade, who's a former New York Times reporter, he published a long

00:53:02.980 piece sort of analyzing the question of the science and the lab leak. And he quoted, you know, this

00:53:08.440 incredibly famous scientist, David Baltimore, saying, as soon as he heard about the furin cleavage

00:53:14.360 site, he told his wife that was the smoking gun. And then he knew it was genetically edited.

00:53:21.360 Since Nick Wade's piece came out and got a lot of attention, David Baltimore sort of walked that back

00:53:26.380 and said, well, not really. And then other people have come out and said, well, you find furin cleavage

00:53:32.660 sites and sequences in nature, and it doesn't necessarily have to be reflective of genetic

00:53:37.860 editing. That's been my find as well. I mean, I've spent far more time on this than I wanted to,

00:53:44.060 because it's one of those... Everybody does.

00:53:46.540 Yeah. It's one of those things you sort of think, well, look, I'm going to just read these three

00:53:50.200 articles, but then you have to read every single reference to those articles. And truthfully,

00:53:57.820 I'm going out of my mind at this point, and I don't want to read any more on this because it's

00:54:03.120 too much. But that's one of the rabbit holes I went incredibly far down. And there's just outright

00:54:10.220 contradictory information there. Now, I haven't spoken to Nicholas Wade, but in his piece, he says,

00:54:15.420 there is no evidence of furin cleavage sites in any beta coronaviruses that are SARS-like. And yet

00:54:24.640 I actually found several references for papers that contradict that, including a paper published in

00:54:31.040 2018 that found a furin cleavage site in MERS, which is a SARS-like beta coronavirus. So to me,

00:54:41.600 the presence of the furin cleavage site, which to your point makes this much more infectious than SARS-1,

00:54:50.140 you had commented that SARS-1, it transmits through the ACE2 receptor. Well, this is on the order of

00:54:58.360 like an order of magnitude more transmissible because that S1, S2 subunit is cleaved and now it

00:55:04.240 has an enormous affinity for that ACE2 receptor. So a more interesting question to me is the nature of

00:55:11.500 the codons that exist there. So the furin cleavage site, actually, I believe it is exclusively a

00:55:18.480 proline, arginine, arginine, alanine sequence, and not to bore people with too much biochemistry,

00:55:25.380 but you have three nucleotides that make up each codon. So you have redundancy in the system because

00:55:32.200 there's only 20 amino acids, but you have 64 combinations with all of the nucleotides.

00:55:38.880 You have more than one way to get an amino acid. So what I think also got a lot of attention in

00:55:47.540 Nick Wade's piece was the, I think it's a CGG arginine. And that is a very unusual arginine. It's

00:55:57.960 only typically present in 5% of coronaviruses, meaning only 5% of the time when in a coronavirus

00:56:04.920 needs to make an arginine, does it use a, I think it's CCG or CGG. Okay. But when you go and look

00:56:13.500 more deeply in the literature, it turns out that you saw that in other furin cleavage sites of other

00:56:20.640 coronaviruses that also had very little of that. In other words, there was another coronavirus that I

00:56:26.120 saw that only had 3% of its arginines being either CCG or CGG, but it still showed up in its furin

00:56:33.660 cleavage site. And there's no ambiguity about whether that was naturally occurring or not. So

00:56:37.440 does that mean it occurred in nature? Does that mean it was manipulated in a lab? It's still very hard to

00:56:43.260 know. So I don't think really in any dimension of this, there is no smoking gun per se. What there is

00:56:56.080 is smoke coming out of a lot of windows. That's what I saw as I was reporting. There is enough smoke

00:57:05.860 coming out of enough windows that we cannot take the lab leak hypothesis off the table. And so for me,

00:57:16.420 the most credible people on this, they're not saying it was a lab leak. What they're saying is,

00:57:23.760 why can't we have a full investigation? That's what we don't have. We have not had a forensic

00:57:31.500 investigation. And so if we haven't had a forensic investigation, why are the scientists acting so

00:57:39.160 unscientific by saying it wasn't a lab leak? How do they know? They don't actually know.

00:57:46.800 Just like we don't know, we don't know that it was or it wasn't. But there's enough of a suspicious

00:57:53.920 fact pattern that it requires investigation. Yeah. Of all the things that I have read,

00:58:02.560 and I think at this point, I don't know what I haven't read. I feel like it's just so overwhelming.

00:58:09.640 Welcome to the club. Yes. Yeah. I think the most compelling

00:58:13.460 mechanistic answer. So there's lots of circumstantial reasons, right? The Occam's razor says,

00:58:20.860 in the middle of fall slash winter, so in Q4 of 2019, when there are no bats, they're all hibernating,

00:58:30.820 you have a breakout in a major population center that's doing research on it. All of those things

00:58:37.040 aside, from a purely biological mechanistic standpoint, I think the most convincing piece

00:58:42.160 of evidence for a lab leak is that for about a year post this virus being in humans, it didn't

00:58:52.040 change. We're only now seeing variants of this virus, right? Like the Delta variant you mentioned

00:58:57.700 earlier. That strikes me as interesting, given the ubiquity of this virus, so how many people were

00:59:05.120 infected? Suggesting just how stable this thing was by the time it got into humans, meaning a lot of the

00:59:13.340 tinkering got taken out of it sooner. So one argument would be if this were a virus that got

00:59:19.500 manipulated and naturally selected through humanized mice, which is to say mice that have ACE2 receptors in

00:59:27.460 their lungs, which are the exact mice you would use to do this type of research. In fact, the mice,

00:59:31.920 which we know were being used for this type of research, that makes sense to me that, you know,

00:59:38.220 you could easily have a virus that has now reached its state of maturation. It gets out now into the

00:59:46.100 wild and it takes quite a while to evolve into its new variant. What about you? Like where does that

00:59:53.220 stack up in terms of biological reasoning in favor of a lab leak versus not?

00:59:58.760 So one scientist, Alina Chan.

01:00:02.800 She's at the Broad, right?

01:00:04.620 Yeah, she's at the Broad Institute. And she has really advanced that idea and had a preprint paper

01:00:09.600 to that effect, which is the idea that this virus seemed immediately ready to infect humans

01:00:18.540 and didn't appear to undergo the sort of all the early mutations that you saw in SARS-CoV-1.

01:00:26.240 So it seemed sort of primed for human transmission, which in her view argued for a lab leak.

01:00:33.620 But then you have scientists on the other side of that who say, actually, if you look at this strain,

01:00:40.000 this is not maximized for human infectivity. If you were going to set out to create this in a laboratory

01:00:48.140 to maximize human infectivity, this isn't it. So I think those are, again, two competing versions of

01:00:57.480 this.

01:00:58.020 But they're saying very different things. Like I don't think that Elisa, is it Elisa Chen is her name?

01:01:04.020 Alina.

01:01:04.520 Alina Chen.

01:01:05.180 I don't think her argument is that it's maximized in its potential. I think if I'm understanding her

01:01:11.860 argument correctly, it's that it's reached a steady state. It's in an equilibrium. And I think

01:01:17.740 that's a very different argument to the one that's being posed in the other direction, which is that,

01:01:23.940 oh, well, if you were going to make this, you could make a much better job. I think that maybe

01:01:29.060 gives a little too much credit to scientists. That's sort of like saying, well, when those

01:01:34.500 bombs dropped on Hiroshima, I mean, they were good, but they weren't as good as they could

01:01:38.640 have been. I mean, come on. They could have been way more lethal.

01:01:42.300 You know, I have to say, it is sort of a red herring argument because, okay, so let's say it's

01:01:49.120 not like the perfect bioweapon to infect all of humanity overnight.

01:01:53.760 That wasn't its intended purpose.

01:01:55.420 Right. The credible people who talk about a lab leak are not necessarily saying it was a

01:02:00.160 bioweapon. It could be the accident of a sloppy, you know, a moment of a momentary lapse.

01:02:07.240 Yeah. So again, I've always found that argument to be completely nonsensical because one,

01:02:13.120 if we believe in the broad idea of gain of function research, it's not bioweaponry. Two,

01:02:20.340 even if you say, well, no, but if you're going to go to the trouble of doing gain of function

01:02:24.900 research, you should try to make the most virulent, deadly strain imaginable. Okay. But are you going

01:02:33.340 to make that in the first, you know, let's assume it takes a hundred steps to make that. And what

01:02:38.520 happened if we were at step 60 when this leak occurred? Does that mean we weren't on a path

01:02:44.080 to making it better? So, so again, to me, that argument is meaningless actually.

01:02:47.540 Right. There are a lot of red herrings in this debate.

01:02:51.540 On both sides. Yeah. So given all this sort of loose smoke, that's sort of diffusing from the

01:03:01.480 ground out of windows here and there, how would you think about trying to synthesize the arguments that

01:03:08.640 most favor the consensus view that this virus occurred naturally versus the contrarian view,

01:03:17.660 for lack of a better word, that this virus emerged from a lab? What would you say are the

01:03:23.460 most compelling features that favor the former? First, let me just say that I actually don't think

01:03:30.160 there is a consensus view at this time. I think the consensus has been shattered and the scientific

01:03:38.060 community is really divided. That said, I think the strongest argument for a zoonotic origin is the

01:03:48.660 precedent of previous SARS outbreaks, you know, SARS-CoV-1 and MERS. And you look at those and yeah,

01:03:57.300 those are SARS outbreaks that have a zoonotic origin that has been identified. So it would make perfect

01:04:07.600 sense that this is the big one. This has come on the heels of those outbreaks. And you add into that,

01:04:16.440 you don't have any specific smoking gun evidence to contradict that, even though a host animal has not

01:04:25.660 been found, an intermediate animal has not been found. So I think that in and of itself is sort of

01:04:32.280 the most basic argument for it. And to build on that really, SARS-1 traveled something like 900 to

01:04:41.460 1,000 miles from its original site using two intermediary hosts. So to your point, the argument

01:04:48.080 that, well, if this originated in a bat in a cave 1,000 miles away, there's no way it could make it to

01:04:54.800 this populated area. No, that's not true. It certainly happened in the past, right?

01:04:59.940 It certainly has happened in the past. But let me just say that is added to the mystery here,

01:05:04.800 because what people are saying is, well, if it started in Southern China in Yunnan province,

01:05:12.680 why don't we see a trail of infections up to Wuhan? We don't. So it looks like Wuhan in Central China

01:05:20.880 is the origin of this outbreak. Why? So the original theory was there is a host animal and

01:05:30.820 it could have been a sample at the seafood market in Wuhan, but no, you know, all of this testing has

01:05:38.840 not turned that up. So in order to account for a natural origin, you have to find a way to argue

01:05:46.940 how in the dead of winter in Central China, in a market that didn't sell bats, didn't have bats,

01:05:55.800 at a time when most bats are hibernating, how do you have this outbreak? And then Chinese scientists

01:06:02.640 themselves were like, oh, we know where it came from. It came from these labs. Two Chinese scientists

01:06:08.040 very early on in the outbreak posted a preprint paper saying, well, we surveyed the area around the

01:06:16.380 seafood market and there are these two laboratories that have all these bat samples. So we think it

01:06:22.140 came from them. And that preprint paper was immediately taken down. But you have this problem

01:06:28.140 of how to account for how it started in Wuhan. Now, again, to go back to evidence in favor of

01:06:36.340 the zoonotic origin, because I don't think anybody disputes that the bats weren't transmitting it to

01:06:41.900 people in the fall or winter. I think everybody agrees that by the time September, October,

01:06:48.400 November rolled around, the bats themselves would have been in hibernation. So the probability that

01:06:53.080 a bat directly transmitted it to a human in, say, November, December, exceedingly low. Of course,

01:07:00.360 the bats could have passed it on to intermediaries before then, and or the bats could have transmitted

01:07:06.300 it on to a person or persons before then who didn't really become that ill, but somehow managed

01:07:12.820 to make their way to Wuhan, correct? Yes. Although there is a wild card in this, which is that the

01:07:20.180 virus in many cases is asymptomatic. So there are people who are arguing for an even earlier origin than

01:07:27.680 we knew. Such as the summer of 2019. Right. They're like Dr. Redfield is one of those people who has said

01:07:34.520 that he thinks the origin is actually a lot earlier, and that it's very hard to pinpoint a date because

01:07:40.880 of the problem of asymptomatic transmission. Right. And, you know, you got to take a step back and

01:07:46.560 remember what it was like circa May of 2020, when the very first papers were coming out looking at

01:07:56.680 zero positivity, suggesting that the case fatality rate was infinitely lower than it had been previously

01:08:07.220 identified. So, you know, when we were first thinking about this as, oh my gosh, like 2% of

01:08:15.000 people or 8% of people who are getting this are dying. And it's, you know, the realization was, no,

01:08:20.360 it's, you know, 8% of people who are wildly symptomatic are dying or, and then the more we began

01:08:25.960 to test people, the more that number began to fall. But it wasn't until serology was being done on

01:08:31.620 asymptomatic people. This was done in Santa Clara, a very controversial study by John Ioannidis. It was

01:08:36.880 done in New York. You, you basically began to see, look, this has got a lethality of about one in a

01:08:42.020 thousand people infected. So if you then extract that back to China, I think there's a scenario in

01:08:48.600 which 500 people are infected, none of whom really gets sick or think anything of it beyond, you know,

01:08:57.020 it's just a, it's a regular cold, but someone threads that needle of getting up to Wuhan. So

01:09:02.640 that there's at least a plausibility of bat to human to Wuhan in that timeframe, correct?

01:09:10.160 Correct. That is right. Yes.

01:09:12.320 If that were the case, it's, would still be interesting to identify the bat of origin,

01:09:18.300 but it sounds like that's not happening yet. So let's chalk that up to first on our, our wish

01:09:23.520 list, right? So if we were creating a wish list of how one would get to the bottom of this,

01:09:27.680 it would be a full court press to identify, to do basically an amazing prospecting exercise to look

01:09:36.020 for the bat host potentially. But just to say that in a way has been done.

01:09:42.320 Right. That's potentially what's in the database that was taken out in September of 2019.

01:09:46.660 But even since the COVID outbreak, and so that is post-dating what was in the database,

01:09:53.960 there has been a huge hunt and widespread testing of wildlife samples. I mean, there has been a big,

01:10:00.680 big hunt for the host animal, which has not been found.

01:10:05.340 And has that hunt been carried out mostly by Chinese scientists or has been a worldwide effort?

01:10:10.680 I mean, it's been a worldwide effort, but you know, the Chinese authorities have tested, I mean,

01:10:15.960 the, the count and, and the WHO report talks about this, something like 80,000 animal samples have been

01:10:24.360 tested in search of a point of origin and it has not been found.

01:10:30.160 Okay. So then on the heels of that, another scenario is that a bat infected an intermediary,

01:10:40.400 which either infected humans or another intermediary, which ultimately infected humans,

01:10:45.320 several of those animals have been proposed and several of those animals could have existed at the

01:10:50.240 Wuhan market in the winter, still alive, not necessarily kept in the most sanitary conditions.

01:10:56.120 That seems like a very viable scenario. And the biggest challenge to that is that

01:11:03.720 very few stones have been left unturned in the search for what those animals might be.

01:11:10.240 And yet that has turned up empty handed. That's exactly right. That is a very logical scenario,

01:11:17.020 except that there's no evidence for it. That's the problem.

01:11:20.080 Other than precedent.

01:11:20.920 Correct. Yeah.

01:11:22.940 So I just want to make sure I'm not missing a scenario. Is there any other scenario that involves

01:11:29.900 this virus infecting people having not been to a lab first?

01:11:35.700 You know, one thing that has been talked about is the people who live around these bat caves,

01:11:43.300 who have had exposure, who have tested positive and larger numbers previously for SARS antibodies.

01:11:52.280 But you still have the same problem of if that is a possible origin, is a natural escape

01:12:01.160 in location in Southern China to villagers who live around those mines,

01:12:07.960 how does it get up to Wuhan without leaving a trail of infection that could be documented?

01:12:15.180 That's the problem.

01:12:16.940 Right.

01:12:17.280 So then on the other side, we have a scenario where researchers are identifying this virus

01:12:29.340 by identifying its original host and themselves get infected through that, bring the bats or the

01:12:39.920 virus itself into the lab. And early in their tenure with these animals or with the virus, rather,

01:12:46.460 there's a contamination. I mean, I really think of these as two sides of the same coin, which is

01:12:52.420 gain of function versus no gain of function research. But nevertheless, the virus has been

01:12:56.860 brought into the lab. I mean, that's basically the other side of this coin. The most compelling

01:13:02.480 argument for that appears to be, at least to my reading, the contrapositive of what we just said,

01:13:09.640 i.e., it's the absence of either the original bat or the intermediary host, coupled with the argument

01:13:19.160 made earlier about the relative lack of genetic drift or mutation once the virus took hold in late 2019.

01:13:32.040 The stability of the virus, basically.

01:13:36.640 First of all, there is a lot of precedent for a lab leak, as we've seen. I mean, there is a long

01:13:42.840 history of this. There is a proximity argument, which is, why Wuhan? Well, here are these laboratories

01:13:52.720 that have the largest collection of bat samples really in the world who are doing some of the

01:14:00.780 most aggressive testing. So there's that smoke coming out of that window. We know that they were

01:14:08.260 doing aggressive gain of function research in which they were manipulating pathogens. And we also know

01:14:14.980 that they were doing it not just in a BSL-4 setting, but in a BSL-2 setting. And then you do have the

01:14:23.420 Alina Chen argument that you do not see the sort of wide range of mutations initially in transmission

01:14:33.040 that you did with SARS-CoV-1. So I think there's those arguments.

01:14:38.780 Yeah. And I guess you could almost break this down into two arguments, which is,

01:14:42.660 what's the likelihood that this virus was brought into or created in a lab versus what's the

01:14:51.160 likelihood it escaped? So you could break this down into two probabilities, probability that this

01:14:58.620 virus was brought into a lab, and then really a third one, probability that this was manipulated in

01:15:04.300 a lab, and then probability that this thing escaped or could have escaped. So if that's P1, P2,

01:15:10.180 P3, P3 is like close to one. That could be taken as a foregone conclusion, meaning the probability

01:15:17.000 that a virus in a lab can get out is very high. We know about the bad ones that have happened,

01:15:24.220 but what we don't know is how many times has research been done on a virus in a lab that is

01:15:29.960 of totally no consequence to humans and it gets out. We wouldn't know about it, but that could happen

01:15:35.960 all the time. So if you're supposed to be functioning at BSL-4, and by the way, I'm not

01:15:42.820 saying this to sort of pick on the people doing it. BSL-4 is a miserable environment. You couldn't

01:15:48.580 pay me enough to be a viral researcher working in a BSL-4 environment. I would rather be painting

01:15:56.580 roofs with tar in July than I would be working in a BSL-4 lab. So can totally understand why

01:16:05.900 there's a natural human inclination to take shortcuts with procedure there.

01:16:11.360 So I almost think of like that third step of could this have escaped the lab as of course it could

01:16:16.300 have. So it's really just a question of what's the likelihood that this thing made its way into a

01:16:21.360 lab and got tweaked. And that's where you get into these other questions of, boy, the people who

01:16:28.120 claim it didn't aren't doing themselves any favors in the way they're acting. You know, the EcoHealth

01:16:34.700 Alliance, the Lancet paper doesn't look good in the light of day. No, it does not look good,

01:16:41.260 which is back to one of the groups that I talk about in my Vanity Fair article is this group that

01:16:48.060 calls themselves drastic, which are these scientists who are independent researchers

01:16:53.780 scattered around the globe who became curious about this, obsessed by this, wanted to get to

01:17:00.800 the bottom of it. And I interviewed a number of them. How many of them are anonymous versus

01:17:05.540 identified, by the way? There's a handful who are anonymous and I did not write about any of those

01:17:11.880 who were anonymous who I didn't speak with because you really cannot assess the agenda of someone who

01:17:20.560 is anonymous and you're not interviewing. I mean, you don't know whether it's Steve Bannon hiding behind

01:17:25.360 a pseudonym. But for example, the Indian researcher who calls himself the seeker on Twitter, he's a science

01:17:33.240 teacher in Eastern India who was the one who uncovered this Chinese master's thesis. I was able to

01:17:39.700 interview him. A lot of those people I interviewed, they said the same thing to me. I got into this

01:17:47.420 because I wanted to know why the scientists were acting so unscientific. Why do you take a hypothesis

01:17:56.020 off the table without evidence? If you're having an investigation, don't you pursue all hypotheses in an

01:18:03.700 equal fashion until you have real evidence? And in fact, the World Health Organization partnered with

01:18:12.460 a group of experts who went to China and were basically sort of led on this highly restricted

01:18:19.720 tour by the Chinese authorities and issued a report in which they said, oh, the lab leak hypothesis is

01:18:27.680 highly unlikely. I obtained a U.S. government analysis of that report, which said the report

01:18:35.180 is essentially ridiculous. It concludes that on the basis of no evidence. And in fact, one of the lead

01:18:41.820 researchers on that expedition was Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. Wasn't Peter Daszak the only

01:18:47.900 American brought in? Wasn't he the only American scientist brought in? Yes, he was. So there has not been

01:18:54.480 a neutral, conflict-free, forensic evaluation of all possibilities of origin at this time.

01:19:05.280 Do you have confidence that such a thing will happen? The Biden administration recently requested

01:19:11.400 such a report to be delivered within no less than 90 days, if I'm not mistaken?

01:19:15.860 Yeah. It is going to take a huge act of political will and really unity by many, many different

01:19:27.040 countries to essentially force the Chinese to be more transparent. It's not necessarily a fight that

01:19:36.240 the Biden administration wants to have. It's really inconvenient. I think it would be a whole lot

01:19:43.460 easier to say, well, it must be zoonotic and we can't find the animal host. Bummer. So I don't know

01:19:51.100 if we're going to be able to surmount all of the political hurdles and the evidentiary hurdles

01:19:57.780 that lay in our way to have a real investigation into this.

01:20:05.180 What would be required of full transparency? What would be asked for that would demonstrate

01:20:10.260 conclusively one way or the other? Well, part of that is what probably will never happen.

01:20:17.020 China says, you know what? We're changing our minds, full transparency. We're putting back the

01:20:23.840 database. Here's a record of all the samples. Here are the lab notebooks. Come do a tour. Here's the

01:20:31.240 medical records of all the researchers who were in the laboratory. That is very, very unlikely to happen.

01:20:37.640 We, by the way, have no serology on the three people who worked in the lab who got sick in the

01:20:43.900 late summer, early fall of 2019, correct? My understanding is that we don't, or if we do,

01:20:50.400 if our intelligence agencies have something more definitive, it's definitely not in the public domain.

01:20:56.540 So that information is not available. But plan B, assuming that China is not going to be more

01:21:04.340 more forthcoming, is for the countries of the world to basically look in their own research files,

01:21:11.600 you know, that there is a lot of information that is potentially available to us if we are really to

01:21:19.000 dig into our own filing cabinets. That is essentially what Joe Biden has called for.

01:21:25.120 He's told the intelligence agencies to go back to the drawing board,

01:21:28.600 inventory, what they have, and see if they can't come to some sort of closer conclusion. You know,

01:21:38.000 there was recently an important paper put forth by Jesse Bloom, who is an esteemed virologist,

01:21:45.620 who said that there were sequences that were in an NIH database that were taken offline at the request

01:21:52.780 of Chinese scientists that had some early sequences from Wuhan. So potentially, you know, there is

01:22:00.880 information that our own government, for whatever reason, has either buried or ignored or removed,

01:22:07.740 which can be analyzed. So given all the time you've spent on this so far, how has your own

01:22:15.640 probability shifted from zoonotic versus lab origin over the past year?

01:22:25.300 Starting out, when anybody mentioned the possibility of a lab leak, I was very dismissive because it

01:22:32.300 sounded to me just like conspiracy theories. And there were a lot of conspiracy theories associated

01:22:38.040 with that. But I think what's happened is as time has gone on and no host animal has been found

01:22:46.160 and Trump has been removed. And so there is a sort of space to ask this question without necessarily

01:22:54.720 aiding a, what's viewed as a racist agenda. And China has failed to be transparent

01:23:03.600 and conflicts of interest have been exposed. And from my own reporting now, I understand that a

01:23:12.840 full investigation within the U.S. government was essentially blocked or restricted. I kind of give

01:23:21.540 it even odds at this point. I think it's a possibility. I don't have a definite conclusion. If a host animal

01:23:29.580 was found tomorrow, I would be like, okay. But I think there are just too many questions to be

01:23:36.080 ignored right now. One of the things about conspiracy theories is they require cover-ups.

01:23:42.720 One of the conspiracy theories that's always obsessed me is the Kennedy assassination ever

01:23:46.900 since I was a kid. And I don't know, probably by the time I was in my mid thirties, I'd seen enough,

01:23:54.380 read enough that I concluded there's simply no way it was anything other than Lee Harvey Oswald.

01:23:59.580 Like I really just decided, despite what Oliver Stone would have you believe,

01:24:05.460 Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. And there are many reasons I could bore you with that include

01:24:10.920 a more accurate look at the forensics of the ballistics and things like that. But a big part

01:24:16.280 of it is how hard would it be to keep everybody quiet if this were some CIA plot or some mob plot

01:24:25.040 or one of the other crazy ideas that's put forth. And I guess that's one of the things that kind of

01:24:32.200 nags at me here a little bit with this one, which is if this in fact came from a lab,

01:24:39.000 how many people have to know that? It's not the case by the way that Peter Dasher would necessarily

01:24:45.420 know that, right? He wouldn't necessarily know that. I mean, he might have a huge incentive to hope

01:24:51.520 that it's not happened, but he wouldn't necessarily know that. But presumably more than one person

01:24:57.000 would be covering this up. And I guess that speaks to the bigger that number of people,

01:25:04.160 the harder this thing becomes over time, if indeed that's the case.

01:25:08.600 So let me say a couple of things about this. First of all, the question of COVID origin

01:25:14.340 is the ultimate grassy knoll, right? This is one for the ages. I think the question of a cover-up,

01:25:22.400 you know, it's very different to consider a cover-up in the U.S. with a tradition of freedom

01:25:28.080 of speech and protection of whistleblowers and to consider a cover-up in China with an authoritarian

01:25:35.560 government that has control over everybody's lives and can absolutely wreak havoc, not just on a

01:25:44.240 whistleblower, but on a whistleblower's family. So for example, the anthrax lab leak in the Soviet

01:25:52.040 Union in the 70s only became disclosed after the fall of the Soviet Union. Once this sort of

01:26:00.320 authoritarian structure around it crumbled, then it could be disclosed. But China has incredible control

01:26:08.760 over its citizens and could, even if, let's say, Shi Zhengli thinks it was a lab leak or

01:26:16.520 knows it was a lab leak, is she free to say that? Well, certainly not while in China and not while

01:26:24.040 her family's in China. Right. So that said, I'm always mindful of this expression we have in

01:26:31.440 investigative journalism. Never assume conspiracy when incompetence is an option. In other words,

01:26:39.040 it's easy to say conspiracy, but that's always a more unlikely possibility.

01:26:47.240 Yeah. Conspiracy doesn't make a lot of sense here. And I think it detracts from an honest look at the

01:26:53.520 facts. It should really be viewed as two competing hypotheses. And one of them that got largely

01:27:01.100 ignored because it was politically inconvenient to consider. Yes, that's right. I side with that

01:27:08.240 analysis 100%. Are you optimistic that a year from now we're going to have much more insight? Because

01:27:14.780 the reality of it is if you look at what we know today versus what we knew six months ago, virtually

01:27:21.480 nothing new, right? Very little new information. There's just been more attention paid to old

01:27:27.220 information, which is always concerning when you're trying to think about this, right? Because

01:27:32.300 it's more interesting if, oh my goodness, there is more information that is emerging here. We are

01:27:38.200 learning more, but that's not really the case. We're learning more on the basis of old information.

01:27:43.020 And at some point we're going to saturate our knowledge based on that. Are you optimistic that

01:27:47.440 we're going to learn more in the next year? Or is this going to become simply more of a polarizing

01:27:52.980 discussion? Well, I have no doubt that it will be a polarizing discussion and continue to be one.

01:27:59.900 I think the real question, the way I see it, is how much political capital does the Biden

01:28:08.040 administration want to spend on this? The Biden administration and the other powerful governments

01:28:14.060 of the world. How far are they willing to push China to demand answers? Look, someone in China

01:28:22.400 knows some answer, presumably, like they know it was or wasn't a lab leak, or they can guess that.

01:28:30.960 How far are the governments of the world prepared to go to push for an answer for this?

01:28:36.340 Besides the United States, which governments would have the most persuasion?

01:28:40.100 Well, you know, a lot of this is going to be fought economically. So for example, originally,

01:28:47.940 the government of Australia, of Scott Morrison, was pushing to have the question of a lab leak as

01:28:56.020 part of one of the facets of the World Health Organization inquiry into this. They wanted to make

01:29:02.640 sure that that possibility got on the agenda. China's retaliation was very swift. And

01:29:09.800 they were immediately blocked. I believe it was import of Australian goods into China. So there is a

01:29:18.180 lot of economic retaliation that can occur in the push for answers. And as we've already kind of

01:29:26.320 identified, there's no scenario under which a lab leak occurred and the United States doesn't have

01:29:32.500 blood on its hands as well, through both direct contribution of funding and also collaboration from

01:29:38.920 a research perspective, correct? I mean, in other words, if there's a lab leak, you can't just say,

01:29:44.700 well, it's just the fault of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because it's just bad luck that it

01:29:49.380 occurred there. The reality of it is this could have easily taken place at the University of North

01:29:52.800 Carolina or the University of Galveston in Texas, where similar research goes on. The bigger issue

01:29:58.160 is this was in some ways a joint effort between the United States and China, correct?

01:30:03.840 Well, let me just say, there is one other laboratory that is right near the Huanan seafood market,

01:30:11.360 which is the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had moved right next to the

01:30:18.040 seafood market shortly before the outbreak began. They had a coronavirus researcher who was very gung-ho,

01:30:25.620 had collected a lot of viral samples. So I guess in theory, it is possible that this came from a

01:30:32.720 laboratory that had nothing to do with U.S. funding. But I would say, regardless, I still take

01:30:39.780 your point that the lab leak scenario raises a lot of thorny questions for the National Institutes of

01:30:48.440 Health, for how scientific research is funded. It would be hell to pay in the field of virology

01:30:57.360 if the effort to identify viruses ended up unleashing them. Yeah, it's interesting to think how this will

01:31:04.440 unfold over the coming decade, the economic damage, the loss of life, etc. Do you get a sense of how

01:31:12.600 this will impact gain-of-function research, at least in the United States? It's interesting because this

01:31:19.900 whole debate has spotlighted this kind of tucked away corner of scientific research that the public

01:31:29.180 really didn't know anything about. And so I certainly think that any agency now prepared to give a grant to

01:31:38.100 this research is really going to think carefully about this, going to think about who are they giving

01:31:45.320 grants to, who are the sub-grantees downstream, what are the hazards, the dangers of the kind of research

01:31:53.400 they're doing. So this really has been spotlighted, and I think it will, even without a definitive

01:31:59.520 answer, I think it will have an impact on this kind of research. Yeah, it's certainly clear that

01:32:06.160 gain-of-function research didn't help here. Even if this was of zoonotic origin, it's not like gain-of-function

01:32:11.240 did anything to prevent it or more rapidly thwart it. Let me just say this, which is, you know,

01:32:18.280 EcoHealth Alliance's whole argument for existence is, if we partner with these far-flung laboratories

01:32:25.700 and we go out to these remote bat caves and we find these samples and we bring it in and we do this

01:32:31.440 research, we are going to have a way to potentially prevent outbreaks. Okay, we spent millions, you know,

01:32:39.660 the U.S. government spent millions of dollars on that argument. What did we gain? Didn't prevent

01:32:46.360 COVID-19, right? So where's the benefit? What's the upside? What's the argument for the continuation

01:32:52.840 of this? That's a question that has not been answered. Well, I wish I had a stronger point of

01:32:59.340 view on this, but I think I'm in your camp, Catherine. I can talk myself into both of these

01:33:05.980 scenarios. And the only thing I find myself really hoping for is the open and honest evaluation of

01:33:13.560 this, which unfortunately requires getting new information. And I think the majority of that

01:33:20.220 information probably lies outside of our borders and therefore is going to be limited. So I'm not sure

01:33:27.500 if we're going to be any further along in a year. I do believe that eventually one day we will know.

01:33:35.360 Is it going to be in our lifetime? Not sure about that. Well, it's funny, right? At some point,

01:33:41.280 if no intermediary host and or species of origin is ever identified, like, is there some asymptote to

01:33:49.320 that or tale where you say, well, gosh, if it hasn't been found in like a hundred years, it really

01:33:54.800 doesn't exist. Or in theory, you would imagine even if this was all done through gain of function

01:34:01.400 research, you'd need to find something in nature that was 99.8% close to it. And then you would say

01:34:09.940 that that last 0.2% had to be done in the lab. But then you could probably equally convince yourself

01:34:16.040 that no, that 0.2, that variation of 0.2% took place in the first few people that were never

01:34:23.020 identified. So again, I go back and forth and I talk to myself in and out of this. And I'm frustrated

01:34:28.780 that this is something that should be knowable and is not known, which is generally more frustrating to

01:34:34.620 me that things that are unknown that maybe can't be knowable. For example, I have no idea if there

01:34:40.820 is life beyond earth. But I'm not as frustrated by that because that seems a lot harder to know.

01:34:47.660 This seems like something that is knowable and I probably will never know it.

01:34:51.900 Well, let's put it this way. Regardless of whether there is life beyond earth,

01:34:57.920 the answer to that didn't force you to stay inside for a year and not see friends and family.

01:35:05.180 So this one for all of us, and I'm really struck by this, feels so personal, of course, because it

01:35:11.700 is. And so people are obsessed with this question. And once you start looking into it, as you've

01:35:18.000 experienced and as I did reporting it, you just go down this rabbit hole in which like night is day

01:35:24.720 and day is night and you cannot get to the bottom of it, no matter how many rocks you turn over.

01:35:32.100 Well, Catherine, maybe the next time we get together, we can talk about the consultants that

01:35:36.340 unleashed torture upon the US government and the CIA and their efforts in Iraq. Would that be a great

01:35:43.080 follow-up discussion? Sure. I'll do that one. Yeah. My goodness. Do you ever write about things

01:35:49.320 that aren't upsetting? Do you ever write happy stories? You can guess from my silence, I have to

01:35:57.240 really think about that. It's not a lot of unicorns and rainbows over here, no. But I tend to gravitate

01:36:05.260 towards the things that fascinate me. And you're fascinated by the macabre. You really don't like good

01:36:11.820 things, do you? In my own life, I do. But I do set out to try to get to the bottom of things that

01:36:21.900 do not have easy answers. And sometimes those can be quite dark. Well, Catherine, if it wasn't bad

01:36:29.820 enough to talk about generic drugs and the corruption that goes on there, you put a bow on it this time.

01:36:37.140 Thank you. And again, I think the bow is less about whether or not this did or did not come

01:36:42.780 from a lab, but more about the fact that there has been and likely will be forever an enormous

01:36:48.780 obstruction to get to the truth about it. Yes. Unfortunately, that is absolutely true. Yep.

01:36:55.460 Well, thank you very much for your work on this and for making time to chat about it today.

01:36:59.800 Thanks. Great to talk to you as always, Peter.

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The Peter Attia Drive - July 19, 2021

#169 - Katherine Eban： COVID-19 Lab Leak： Examining all sides of the debate and discussing barriers to a full investigation

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