TRIGGERnometry - Did COVID Come From a Lab？ - Bret Weinstein

00:00:00.620 Before we begin, we'd like to say that in our opinion, it is not suitable for children or for those of you who may have a nervous disposition.

00:00:15.800 Hello and welcome to a very special live episode of Trigonometry.

00:00:21.920 I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:23.640 I'm Constantine Kissen.

00:00:24.660 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:31.020 Doesn't get any more fascinating than the returning guest for you today.

00:00:34.700 He's an evolutionary biologist who's been covering the lab leak hypothesis and a lot more.

00:00:40.040 Please welcome. It's Brett Weinstein.

00:00:42.580 Brett, welcome back to the show.

00:00:44.320 Gentlemen, thanks for having me on.

00:00:46.560 It's a pleasure to have you on.

00:00:47.860 Before we get started, Francis and I have something to say to the gods of YouTube.

00:00:52.340 We here at Trigonometry believe that anyone has any wrong thoughts about anything to do with COVID is inherently evil.

00:00:59.500 We will not be talking about anything we're not allowed to by YouTube because obviously they should decide what everyone thinks and what anyone says.

00:01:06.940 That's how we approach it.

00:01:08.620 Censorship is brilliant.

00:01:10.000 We also love Xi Jinping.

00:01:11.340 He's a great guy as well.

00:01:12.840 So the World Health Organization are wonderful.

00:01:15.660 We're totally on board with all their restrictions as well.

00:01:18.720 And yeah, we definitely won't be having any problematic conversations.

00:01:22.340 Please don't cancel us.

00:01:23.900 Exactly.

00:01:25.560 And once we've got that out of the way and...

00:01:28.140 Brett, that was all humor, of course.

00:01:30.560 But the one thing we do know is you have been covering some potential alternative treatments for COVID.

00:01:37.160 And you've had things taken down from your channel for doing so.

00:01:41.180 So I think it's best that we stay away from that.

00:01:44.660 And if people want to talk about that or listen to things about that, they can go and check it out on your channel on other platforms, which we know how to find.

00:01:53.460 But they better hurry because as of yesterday, YouTube has moved even farther in the direction of hurling Dark Horse off the platform.

00:02:04.860 We had another video taken down, a strike against our Clips channel.

00:02:09.840 So it looks like YouTube is about sick of open discussion.

00:02:14.560 And anyway, it's a good moment to get yourself up to speed before there's no place left to do that.

00:02:21.720 Well, absolutely, Brett.

00:02:22.680 And the conversations you have been having are very, very interesting.

00:02:26.100 I do recommend people check them out and make up their own mind.

00:02:28.920 Obviously, we're not endorsing any particular view because we're not medical experts.

00:02:32.940 And people can go and check it out for themselves.

00:02:35.480 That's what we always recommend.

00:02:36.640 But listen, we wanted to talk to you about the censorship which you're experiencing.

00:02:42.780 But before we do that, I do think it's helpful to, first of all, having a conversation about the lab leak situation, about the oranges of COVID.

00:02:50.300 And the reason I say this is not only because that in and of itself matters, but it's a crucial example of what happens when social media companies,

00:02:58.840 the big tech companies are deciding what can and can't be talked about and then later suddenly find that actually that should have been talked about a year ago.

00:03:06.800 So can we, first of all, before we get into lab leak and the idea that COVID may have come from a lab, why does it matter where COVID came from, Brett?

00:03:16.460 Well, there are really two general reasons.

00:03:19.740 One of them is widely agreed by people who've thought about the issue.

00:03:23.640 And the other one, I seem to be one of the lone voices, maybe the only voice making this point.

00:03:28.100 But the first reason is because if this came from a lab and it was indeed a leak, then it is the result of predictable error.

00:03:39.280 And that is to say that in choosing to do this work, and in fact, what we now understand, in choosing to circumvent the ban on this work by offshoring it to China,

00:03:50.440 we effectively put the world in jeopardy of a very serious pandemic.

00:03:55.700 And the fact is, even if this somehow did come from nature, which is still a possibility, though the likelihood of it grows smaller with each week.

00:04:05.060 But even if this did come from nature, the fact is the work in question was taking place.

00:04:09.720 And it does place the world in danger of a pandemic because laboratory leaks are not rare.

00:04:14.980 In fact, they happen all the time.

00:04:16.380 So the first reason that matters is because if COVID-19 is the result of a lab leak, then we can potentially correct our behavior going forward and eliminate that hazard.

00:04:28.480 If we pretend that there's no chance it came from the laboratory, then we will presumably not only continue that work,

00:04:35.400 but COVID-19 will be used as a demonstration that that work needs to be at a much larger scale because it was not fast enough to prevent this pandemic.

00:04:44.760 So it matters a great deal, I would say, because what we do downstream of it would be potentially the opposite of what we would do if this was a natural spillover event.

00:04:55.360 And how does it reflect on the Chinese, Brett, and particularly, I say the Chinese, but really the CCP, if it's found out that it was a leak from a laboratory that started the virus?

00:05:08.580 Well, I think, frankly, this is a little bit of a dead end in terms of the analysis, because at some level, the sense that this took place in China in a Chinese lab and that the leak may have emerged from there.

00:05:23.200 And by this, I mean the research that might have led to such a pathogen and the possible leak looks most likely to have come from the Wuhan lab,

00:05:30.040 because, of course, Wuhan is the origin point of the pandemic.

00:05:34.380 On the other hand, the work in question was clearly the result of a quadrant of the international scientific community deciding that this work needed to be done and innovating the techniques with which to do it.

00:05:49.360 And so, certainly, the Chinese have a tremendous, and by the Chinese, I don't really mean the Chinese.

00:05:55.960 I mean the Chinese government.

00:05:58.000 The Chinese government bears a tremendous amount of responsibility for its lack of candor and for what, to all appearances, is a massive cover-up.

00:06:10.120 You know, that is the responsibility of the Chinese government.

00:06:12.760 On the other hand, the work in question is a much bigger failure than that, right?

00:06:17.180 It certainly appears to involve Tony Fauci.

00:06:21.220 It involves EcoHealth Alliance, whatever that is, whether that is actually a research organization or a laundering operation that allows money to circumvent a U.S. ban on gain-of-function research.

00:06:36.760 I don't think it's entirely clear, but what is clear is that there is a small cabal of people who have been pushing this work forward over the objection of scientific colleagues who were clearly right to attempt to raise the alarm and to generate a ban on gain-of-function research.

00:06:55.660 So, I think it is a mistake to focus on China because the failure is much bigger than that, and the implications are much more profound.

00:07:04.060 All right. Well, let's not focus on China.

00:07:06.740 Then I think you make a good point.

00:07:08.120 I think let's focus on the science of this.

00:07:11.220 Can we go back, though?

00:07:12.660 I realize I failed to fully answer your question, which actually probably goes to where you're headed next.

00:07:17.660 You said let's stick to the science.

00:07:18.960 The place in which I believe there is a lot to be gained from knowing where SARS-CoV-2 came from that I seem to be alone on is the belief that were we to understand, let's say that this was a lab leak, which seems highly probable.

00:07:34.260 If this was a lab leak, what are the protocols that were used to take the ancestor virus from nature, which by all appearances would not have been highly infectious of humans and almost certainly would not have been transmissible between humans.

00:07:48.440 What are the protocols of the experiments that produced a highly infectious agent in humans like SARS-CoV-2?

00:07:54.180 If we were to find out, for example, that ferrets were used in this process, we would understand a lot about why the virus behaves the way that it does, right?

00:08:05.700 Ferrets are used in the laboratory environment because they have an ACE2 receptor that looks very much like the human one.

00:08:11.000 So if you were trying to produce a coronavirus that was infectious in humans, you might serially passage the virus through ferrets.

00:08:19.900 If that happened, then we know, then we would know that ferrets are an organism in which we could study the progress of this disease and understand a great deal more about it because the disease is not normal.

00:08:31.820 The number of tissues that it impacts is incredible, the number of symptoms.

00:08:36.400 And so in essence, my point more broadly than ferrets is knowing the protocols that generated the virus, if it was generated in the laboratory, potentially gives us a tremendous leg up on fighting COVID.

00:08:50.400 It would allow us to narrow our search in understanding what the virus is and understanding what its vulnerabilities might be, predicting what it might do both epidemiologically and evolutionarily going forward.

00:09:03.680 And so my sense is, at the very least, we have the right to that information in order to see whether or not there are useful tools buried within it.

00:09:12.580 And by playing this game where we pretend that the majority of the evidence still points toward a natural origin, which is absolutely false, by playing that game, what we are effectively doing is running out the clock when, in fact, time is of the essence.

00:09:26.620 That makes perfect sense, Brett.

00:09:29.480 So let's get into the science of it from the beginning, because there will be a lot of people who are tuning into this who have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

00:09:38.180 And I'll be honest with you, to some extent, both Francis and I are two of those people, right?

00:09:42.600 What are you talking about? I understand everything, Mike.

00:09:46.400 The day you start doing biology, mate, is the day we're all screwed.

00:09:49.720 But look, Brett, seriously, though, from the very beginning, just take us through a sort of normal person's level of understanding.

00:09:59.280 What are you talking about? What do you mean lab leak?

00:10:01.740 What do you mean it was made in a lab?

00:10:04.180 Like, what on earth are you talking about?

00:10:06.180 So, first of all, there's been a game played, right?

00:10:09.820 It is implausible that human beings could have designed a virus like this.

00:10:13.920 That is true.

00:10:14.800 And so by pretending that lab leak is synonymous with a designed virus, there were, for many months, a sort of false sense that people were alleging something, you know, at the remote end of science fiction.

00:10:28.360 When, in fact, those of us who were pointing out that the evidence did, in fact, point towards a laboratory leak, were not making that claim at all.

00:10:36.280 Our point was there are things that we accomplish in the lab that we cannot say how they will look in advance.

00:10:44.240 What we do is we use evolution.

00:10:46.500 We harness evolution in the laboratory to design things that we would not know beforehand were going to work.

00:10:52.840 So, for example, the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 is spectacularly well designed to infect human tissue.

00:11:01.860 But if you took the sort of state-of-the-art knowledge before SARS-CoV-2 was known in the world, we would not have predicted if you showed somebody the sequence that it would have been a highly effective pathogen.

00:11:14.080 So we learned that from SARS-CoV-2.

00:11:16.600 And the question is, did scientists train an ancestral virus to infect humans in the laboratory by effectively forcing it to jump from one creature to the next, possibly ferrets, possibly humanized mice, or possibly the cells of human airway?

00:11:34.120 All of these things are laboratory platforms that can be used to teach a virus evolutionarily how to accomplish jumping from one cell to the next or one individual to the next.

00:11:44.200 And so the question is, we know that these experiments were being done.

00:11:50.660 They were being done primarily in North Carolina in the Ralph Baric lab and in Wuhan in the Zhijeng Li lab.

00:11:57.840 Those two labs are connected.

00:11:59.780 They are effectively Ralph Baric trained Zhijeng Li in these techniques.

00:12:05.400 And these are the two primary places in the world where this work is done.

00:12:10.500 So when the virus emerged in Wuhan, it immediately raised red flags for some of us.

00:12:16.900 Now, in my case, I didn't know that there was a BSL-4 lab in Wuhan.

00:12:21.040 And when I first looked, the story is this, Heather and I were in the Amazon working on the first draft of our upcoming book.

00:12:30.740 And so we were completely out of contact with the world.

00:12:33.060 I mean, literally no contact for a couple of weeks.

00:12:36.440 And when we came out, we were in Ecuador and we emerged from the Amazon and we're on the river at the first place where one's phone can pick up just wisps of signal.

00:12:46.080 And there was a story that's stuck out from all the rest.

00:12:51.040 The story was that the first case of what was then called novel coronavirus was in Ecuador already.

00:12:57.860 And we didn't we'd never heard of this.

00:12:59.620 And so I started to look into it.

00:13:01.940 And initially I thought and I had as a graduate student, I studied bats.

00:13:06.780 And so I looked at the story that was being distributed.

00:13:09.620 And it said that a virus appears to have jumped from horseshoe bats, probably through the bushmeat trade at the Wuhan seafood market and is now spreading in a concerning way, even outside of China.

00:13:23.540 And I looked at that and I looked at the papers in question and it all made sense to me.

00:13:27.900 And then I tweeted that it did.

00:13:30.120 I explained that I had been a bat biologist and that the story made sense and that the bushmeat trade is indeed incredibly dangerous.

00:13:37.980 It's probably the source of HIV, for example, and that it should be shut down.

00:13:43.180 And I immediately got pushback from some of my followers who said, so you think it's a coincidence that there's a BSL4 lab studying these viruses in Wuhan?

00:13:52.220 And I thought, what the hell?

00:13:55.340 That's an amazing coincidence.

00:13:56.520 And then I thought, well, maybe there are a lot more of these labs than I think.

00:14:00.260 No, there aren't.

00:14:01.660 There are only a few labs studying these viruses and one of them happens to be in Wuhan.

00:14:05.520 And then I looked into the distribution of the bats.

00:14:08.720 They're not in Wuhan.

00:14:09.760 And so it was this curiouser and curiouser phenomenon.

00:14:14.200 The deeper you dug, the more it looked anomalous that this virus had emerged in Wuhan at the location where such viruses were under manipulation.

00:14:24.200 All right.

00:14:26.120 So that, of course, was a message that some of us tried to put into the world, that there was a question to be answered.

00:14:34.160 Is this a simple coincidence?

00:14:35.380 And if so, how do we reconcile it?

00:14:37.980 And the more you look for a way to reconcile it, the less sense it makes.

00:14:41.740 And then Yuri Dagan did the first deep investigation into the genomics of SARS-CoV-2.

00:14:49.580 And in fact, Yuri, much like many of us who ended up pushing the lab leak hypothesis into the public view, Yuri was essentially trying to reassure himself that this was not a laboratory leak and that those people who were saying it was were, you know, off the deep end.

00:15:11.520 And the deeper he dug, the more he found that actually the genome sure looks like it might have been the product of laboratory experiments.

00:15:20.140 And we now know from Tony Fauci's emails that a lot of the experts in the field, when they first looked at the genome, that was their first thought, too, including Christian Anderson, who has been one of the lead proponents of the idea that lab leak is pure conspiracy theory.

00:15:36.260 And that those who are advancing it are out of their depth and that the genome could only have come from nature.

00:15:44.180 He turns out privately to have thought that the genome that he was looking at was completely inconsistent with evolutionary theory.

00:15:50.580 So anyway, there are multiple different kinds of evidence that point towards the lab.

00:15:56.380 It is not a completely closed case.

00:16:01.200 In other words, there are things that we could see that would alert us that a story had unfolded that we didn't know anything about that would explain how it got from nature to people.

00:16:10.860 But the likelihood at this point is very, very low that it came from nature.

00:16:14.820 And does that mean that the virus is more dangerous because it leaks from because it leaked from a lab?

00:16:20.960 Because in my head as a layman, I think, have they genetically altered this virus?

00:16:25.240 Does it make it more deadly, et cetera, et cetera?

00:16:27.900 Do we know the long term effects of it?

00:16:31.980 Those are good questions.

00:16:33.460 Let me try to put it in context.

00:16:35.080 Next, most so there are innumerable viruses in nature that could, in principle, infect humans.

00:16:45.360 The problem is in order for a virus to become pandemic in humans, it has to learn two tricks.

00:16:52.320 A virus that jumps from a bat to a person, for example, needs to move from cell to cell in order to be able to create enough offspring viruses to be viable in the world.

00:17:05.580 And those offspring viruses need to be produced in a way that causes them to be passed on.

00:17:12.360 Right.

00:17:12.560 So it has to learn to infect a person and it has to learn to spread between people.

00:17:18.640 Both of those are evolutionarily very difficult jobs.

00:17:22.740 It's not that it doesn't happen, but the point is the likelihood of it happening.

00:17:26.660 If you were to contact an animal in the wild and it was sick with a virus and that virus managed to get into your airway, the chances of it infecting a cell successfully and then infecting neighboring cells enough that there was a substantial population of viruses and then those viruses being capable of infecting someone else are almost zero.

00:17:49.700 So, again, it can happen, but it requires some very rare things to to all go the same direction.

00:17:56.000 So what we know in this case is that this virus is spectacularly well adapted to humans and actually very poorly adapted to bats.

00:18:05.920 Right.

00:18:06.200 So it has done a lot of learning somewhere.

00:18:08.260 And the thing that is most conspicuous about the evidence is that there is no hint that this virus learned to do what it does in the human population.

00:18:19.640 At the point we first know about it in Wuhan, it is already a spectacularly capable virus.

00:18:25.740 So can I interrupt you there just from a layman's point of view?

00:18:29.240 Is it possible for a virus to be a crappy virus in bats and a hugely effective virus in humans just by chance or accident or whatever you might describe it?

00:18:42.360 Well, it depends what you mean.

00:18:44.240 At a technical level, first of all, the virus had if we're right about what the ancestor is and I have never heard anyone challenge that.

00:18:52.180 Right. The ancestor appears to have been a virus of horseshoe bats, and there's a small subfamily of bats that essentially specializes.

00:19:00.460 There's a diversity of these these viruses.

00:19:02.500 Those viruses have to be good at infecting bats in order to stick around from one year to the next.

00:19:11.400 So we know that the ancestor was good at infecting bats, and we know that SARS-CoV-2 is good at infecting humans.

00:19:16.880 And we have zero explanation for how it got from A to B other than the possibility of the lab.

00:19:24.280 Or there's some natural population of some creature that we have yet to find in which it's circulated for a while.

00:19:30.820 Or there's some population of humans that had an epidemic that so far has not been connected.

00:19:36.960 The dots have not been connected in spite of a huge amount of search effort.

00:19:41.060 So about the pangolin? We keep being told about the pangolin.

00:19:43.800 The pangolin was nonsense.

00:19:46.600 These viruses do not inhabit pangolins.

00:19:49.120 It is inconsistent with the data.

00:19:51.000 In fact, everybody now admits that the pangolin was a dead end.

00:19:53.640 And I think, frankly, dead end isn't even the right description.

00:19:56.180 It looks like it was a cover story, right?

00:19:58.940 It doesn't make sense ecologically.

00:20:00.660 It doesn't make sense genomically.

00:20:02.120 It does not fit with the affinities of the viruses in question.

00:20:05.340 So that was a dead end.

00:20:06.840 There could be, probably more likely it would be a carnivorine, you know, so a relative of things like weasels,

00:20:18.120 which, in fact, would explain, you know, there's one of two explanations for why this virus,

00:20:23.300 which does occasionally spread to other creatures, but does not spread between members of those other species,

00:20:28.720 with two exceptions, ferrets and minks, right?

00:20:33.140 So those ferrets and minks are very closely related.

00:20:35.220 They're both weasels.

00:20:36.080 So there's a question about why this virus seems to be good in people and weasels. 0.90

00:20:40.000 But in any case, the most people are like weasels.

00:20:44.600 Sorry, I had to say that you did.

00:20:46.860 I know that.

00:20:48.640 So let me try to remember.

00:20:49.860 Oh, the question that you asked, Francis, was, is it possible for the virus to just simply have accidentally been good at infecting humans?

00:21:00.040 And the point is, is it possible to take a bucket of mechanical parts, throw them out the window and have them assemble into a robot?

00:21:09.780 And the answer is a philosopher could make a technical argument that it is possible, right?

00:21:15.640 But it is not a meaningful probability.

00:21:18.020 Their likelihood is so very low.

00:21:19.760 Now, this might be slightly higher than that.

00:21:21.640 But what you would what you would get in every case that we've seen is a virus that had maybe unusually good ability to jump between species.

00:21:31.380 It would initially have a very poor ability to jump between individuals of the new species, but it would have enough that selection could fix it.

00:21:39.740 Right.

00:21:40.420 That's what you would expect in a natural spillover event.

00:21:42.800 But that period in which natural selection fixed the virus and made it very good at jumping between individuals of a species that it did not initially inhabit, that would leave a signature.

00:21:53.780 That signature would be in the world and we would find it and we have no evidence of it.

00:21:58.380 What we have is a virus that was so incredibly well adapted at the point it first shows up in humans that it does very little evolve.

00:22:06.340 It just simply takes off across the globe.

00:22:08.720 That's a very anomalous fact, right?

00:22:11.100 It could be explained by a natural spillover event and a mystery population of either people or some other creature somewhere.

00:22:18.100 But we have not found them.

00:22:19.420 There's no hint of them.

00:22:21.120 That's why the Wuhan lab looks to be such a likely explanation.

00:22:25.920 And you say it's a likely explanation, Brett.

00:22:29.220 To me, this sounds like something out of the realms of science fiction.

00:22:33.160 You know, a manipulated virus is leaked out into the world, creates a pandemic.

00:22:37.600 If it's, as you say, has been manipulated and, you know, created in a lab, as it were, I'm using layman's language and I realize these might be technically incoherent, etc., etc.

00:22:51.860 But does that mean that it somehow it could be more deadly?

00:22:55.620 It could be more it's far more infectious.

00:22:57.980 We don't know what the long time implications of this virus are.

00:23:02.120 Surely that's terrifying, isn't it?

00:23:04.560 Absolutely terrifying.

00:23:05.700 And this is part of the problem is that the let's assume that everybody is on the up and up with respect to why they were working on these viruses.

00:23:14.700 OK, I think we had a group of scientists who really were terrified that a spillover event was going to cause a tremendous human pandemic that would be devastating.

00:23:23.040 And they were racing against the clock to prevent it.

00:23:25.300 Right.

00:23:25.600 I think they were wrong about how likely that is to happen from nature.

00:23:29.380 And we can talk about why.

00:23:30.780 But let's imagine that that was just simply what they were thinking.

00:23:34.320 And let's imagine that maybe they took humanized mice, ferrets, airway tissue, and they passaged a virus through these things in order to enhance its infectivity of humans.

00:23:46.220 Part of the problem is they are making a puzzle for the virus to evolutionarily solve that is not exactly like nature.

00:23:57.120 So imagine for a second that this virus, you know, got into a wild population of weasels.

00:24:06.400 Well, in order to spread from one weasel to the next, it has to leave those weasels healthy enough to go about and encounter each other.

00:24:15.200 Right.

00:24:15.380 It's not going to get very far if it infects a weasel and knocks it flat and no other weasel will come near it because it looks sickly.

00:24:21.980 And even if it infects other weasels in its burrow, if it doesn't get to the next burrow, it's going extinct.

00:24:27.740 So a virus typically has to leave a creature healthy enough to spread it.

00:24:32.160 Now, there are some diseases that don't work like this.

00:24:34.700 Right.

00:24:34.940 So, for example, dengue, yellow fever, malaria, which are spread by a mosquito, they can knock you flat.

00:24:41.720 And in fact, it might be a good thing to knock you flat because if you're knocked flat and you can't even swat a mosquito away, you might be more likely to transmit them.

00:24:48.240 But for something like a coronavirus, it does not want to debilitate its host because debilitating its host reduces the chances it will spread.

00:24:58.140 That's very different if you've got a cage full of ferrets, right?

00:25:03.300 A cage full of ferrets that can't get away from each other.

00:25:06.140 Right.

00:25:06.460 So one of the things that I think is likely to have happened here is that we made a much worse virus from the point of view of the damage it does to the body, because the damage that it did in the lab, if that's where it came from, wasn't critical in the story of how it spread from one creature to the next.

00:25:24.760 Right.

00:25:25.560 So I do think the chances are I have regarded COVID-19 as a very dangerous disease from the beginning.

00:25:33.560 And many people, I think, have been misled by the low case fatality rate.

00:25:38.440 Right.

00:25:38.560 It's not an especially fatal disease, but it is an extremely destructive disease and an extremely transmissible disease.

00:25:46.200 And my feeling from very early on was we have a limited amount of time to drive this virus extinct and that if we don't, it's going to become a permanent fellow traveler of humans.

00:25:59.320 And that will be a an unmeasurable tragedy, which I think we still don't know whether we're we're stuck with it.

00:26:07.200 But because of the way we've mishandled the treatment and prevention of COVID, it's a strong possibility that we won't be able to rid ourselves of it.

00:26:15.260 So what you're talking about, essentially, is every every winter we have, like with the flu, we have a wave of of this virus.

00:26:22.080 But unlike flu, it leaves lasting damage in many of the people that it infects.

00:26:26.780 Well, I also think we underrate the seriousness of flu.

00:26:29.720 And I've been bothered for many years by the fact that I think we have a model in our heads that if you get better from a disease that you got away with it.

00:26:41.340 Right.

00:26:41.560 And it may have robbed you of a couple of weeks, but, you know, whatever.

00:26:44.860 That's that's the cost.

00:26:46.120 And what we don't realize is that these things all have costs.

00:26:49.100 They destroy tissue and, you know, they rob you of future life and they cause you to age faster.

00:26:54.820 Um, so anyway, I regard the flu as serious, but this is much more serious.

00:26:59.260 Some of the kinds of damage, the number of tissues involved, um, is, um, particularly troubling.

00:27:05.700 And yes, it could become, uh, permanent.

00:27:09.480 It could, you know, it will probably have some seasonality to it on the basis that our behavior is so seasonal, uh, that, you know, it will likely,

00:27:19.500 even if it didn't have any seasonality built into it, the simple fact that we are outdoors more when it's warm in the, you know,

00:27:27.680 in the temperate zones and that it doesn't seem to transmit outdoors will give it a seasonal signature.

00:27:33.820 Um, but yeah, it could become a permanent, uh, a permanent pathogen of people.

00:27:39.520 And that will be a spectacular tragedy, um, all the greater if it has come from, uh, a laboratory and is a self-inflicted wound.

00:27:47.480 Brett, let me try and summarize, uh, very quickly some of the things you've said and do correct me at any point if I,

00:27:54.100 if I've got it wrong.

00:27:54.940 And before I do it, uh, our producer just reminded us that we've got a lot of questions flowing already.

00:27:59.980 Uh, there's some links in the bottom for PayPal and super chats, which you're free to use, send in questions.

00:28:04.760 There will be that one thing that shall not be named that we won't be asking Brett about.

00:28:08.820 Uh, but apart from that, uh, so that of course is Voldemort.

00:28:13.500 Voldemort.

00:28:14.060 Exactly.

00:28:14.800 Uh, he who shall not be.

00:28:15.780 We can't, we can't talk about it.

00:28:17.140 Uh, in euphemistic terms.

00:28:19.720 Apparently not.

00:28:20.820 Uh, but, uh, we, we, I actually, we want to talk about the censorship of it a little bit later on,

00:28:26.760 but, but just sticking to, to the virus for now.

00:28:31.660 You're saying there was the initial idea was like, it's a bioweapon.

00:28:35.760 You're saying it's not, it was not designed, uh, for that sort of purpose.

00:28:41.540 Well, if it was designed at all.

00:28:43.980 Well, so let me point us to yesterday's New York times.

00:28:47.740 So the New York times has been, uh, screwing the pooch on this story from the beginning.

00:28:53.760 Uh, there are occasional glimmers of hope like, um, Brett Stevens recent column, but, uh, yesterday,

00:29:02.140 yesterday, the New York times ran an extraordinary, uh, piece on an interview with Xi Zhang Li, uh, where the reporter almost preposterously claims she just phoned up Xi and the phone was answered.

00:29:19.060 And, uh, uh, anyway, it's a remarkable piece and it doesn't really hold together as plausible, but it does participate in this very broad scale attempt to regain control of the narrative, uh, in the aftermath of, uh, of Nicholas Wade's piece, which seemed to cause the world to wake up to what was going on in the lab league story.

00:29:44.700 Um, but the piece basically says that Xi Zhang Li is very upset, uh, that the world is, uh, looking at her with suspicion and that she can't produce the evidence because there is no evidence of something that didn't happen, which is something she has been saying for a long time.

00:30:04.600 But of course she is a citizen of China.

00:30:07.820 The interview is mostly over email.

00:30:11.780 So there's a question about what this even is other than just a sort of formal statement.

00:30:16.360 Yes, this didn't come from the Wuhan lab, which we've heard many, many, many times and does not square with the evidence.

00:30:22.260 But here's, here's the point I want to make.

00:30:23.860 The New York Times has not put together that their attempt to resurrect the idea that this did not come from the Wuhan lab leads you to an even worse possibility, which has to remain on the table, right?

00:30:38.720 But the evidence that this came from a lab is substantial and it comes in numerous different forms.

00:30:46.260 That does not go away if it didn't come from the Wuhan lab. 0.92

00:30:51.400 Let's say that the Wuhan lab threw open its doors.

00:30:54.520 Let us look in its freezers.

00:30:56.020 Let us look at its lab notebooks.

00:30:57.360 Let's say that they've preserved the evidence instead of, uh, disappearing it.

00:31:02.160 We looked at all that and there was really no evidence that this had happened in the Wuhan lab.

00:31:06.580 Then the question is, okay, then what lab did it happen?

00:31:09.640 Right?

00:31:10.040 Because the next most likely hypothesis, and I want your listeners to understand this, I am not saying that I think this happened.

00:31:18.820 I am saying there is no evidence for this.

00:31:21.220 But if we discover that the Wuhan lab is in fact innocent and the virus still appears to have been the product of laboratory activity, then the question is, who released it in Wuhan and why? 0.56

00:31:33.340 And the obvious answer would be so that people would assume it came from the Wuhan lab, right?

00:31:37.820 I don't think this happened.

00:31:40.240 There's no evidence for it.

00:31:41.700 But if the New York Times and others are so sure that Xi Zhengli is innocent because she says she is, and we can get an investigation that can establish that in one way or another, the next most likely thing becomes it was some other lab in Wuhan was the cover story.

00:31:56.340 Brett, the reason I'm asking this, if I temporarily put my tinfoil hat on and take a puff on my imaginary spliff here, is, I mean, it's a virus that's killing primarily old people in a world that feels very overpopulated to a lot of people. 0.67

00:32:13.740 Well, it's not deadly enough to, you know, certainly one can imagine, I mean, one can imagine that some diabolical force might have decided that it wanted fewer people on planet Earth.

00:32:28.100 But this is not a especially good virus from that perspective.

00:32:34.460 It doesn't kill enough people and the people it kills are more often towards the end of their lives.

00:32:42.420 So it doesn't look like an effective weapon in and of itself.

00:32:46.940 Now, if you put on the tinfoil hat and pass the spleef there, thanks very much.

00:32:53.100 It could be useful as a disruptive agent.

00:32:58.940 Or it could be useful if others did not have a remedy for it, but you knew of one.

00:33:06.760 Right.

00:33:06.880 There are ways in which it could be used as a weapon, but in and of itself, it does not look especially weaponlike.

00:33:14.320 Fair enough.

00:33:15.200 So it wasn't you're saying there's a possibility, but you don't believe that that's what happened.

00:33:19.980 So it was it was a failed experiment or a leak.

00:33:23.640 An experiment was happening and somehow it probably got out of that lab into the wild, so to speak.

00:33:31.920 Is that is that a correct summation of your point of view?

00:33:34.940 Yeah.

00:33:35.100 So back in, I guess it would have been May of 2020, I put together a flow chart of all

00:33:44.640 of the real possibilities for where this thing came from, the various natural stories that

00:33:48.880 came directly from bats.

00:33:49.900 It came through an intermediate species.

00:33:51.660 It came through the lab as a result of weapons research.

00:33:54.600 It came through the lab as the result of pandemic prevention research.

00:33:58.440 All of the things were on the table.

00:33:59.900 And I went through and I gave probabilities for each of these things based on whether there was any evidence for them, based on how many different facts that are not an evidence would have to be true in order for it to be right.

00:34:12.120 And basically, the point is, you can't knock the idea of it came from some other lab and was released in Wuhan so that Wuhan would be blamed for it.

00:34:21.660 You can't knock that off completely because the whole point of such a thing would be to leave a false impression.

00:34:28.200 On the other hand, the thing that really sticks out to me is the appearance of a massive cover up of what was going on in the Wuhan lab, which would not have occurred if the Wuhan lab was innocent.

00:34:44.240 In other words, why go around and behave like a very guilty lab if you are, in fact, an innocent lab?

00:34:49.660 Because the whole key at that point would be, look, you know, I know how this looks.

00:34:55.500 It didn't come from here.

00:34:57.260 Here's how we know.

00:34:58.820 And we're on board with figuring out where it did come from.

00:35:03.180 Right.

00:35:03.600 That would have been the right approach.

00:35:05.000 And, of course, there are things about the the government of China that might be inconsistent with that kind of openness.

00:35:11.080 But nonetheless, if they are an innocent lab, they have behaved in exactly the opposite way, including renaming samples in a way that is against scientific protocol, deleting databases that might have contained exculpatory evidence.

00:35:26.420 The whole thing looks like the behavior of guilty people who know what happened and wish to evade blame.

00:35:36.460 So I think, you know, could it be that this was dual purpose research inside the Wuhan lab, that it was partly about weapons and it was partly about pandemics?

00:35:48.640 That's possible.

00:35:49.980 We don't know.

00:35:51.180 There are slight hints of such a thing.

00:35:53.300 But I think even if this was partially weapons research, the release was still accidental.

00:35:59.020 That's the most likely thing.

00:36:00.240 And the most likely lab for it to have been released from was the lab in Wuhan.

00:36:05.720 Brett, there's a question that I really want to ask.

00:36:08.580 And it's a it's a tinfoil hat question in a way, but it just feels more and more.

00:36:15.060 How can I put this pertinent as we go on?

00:36:17.780 I see governments becoming ever more stringent with lockdown, particularly in the UK.

00:36:22.180 Yeah, at the same time, we get we get told that, you know, it's it's a virus that is, you know, not particularly dangerous, dangerous to young people.

00:36:30.300 It's dangerous to old people. 1.00

00:36:31.900 It feels at times that we're not being told the truth about this virus and the impact it's having on the body.

00:36:39.600 Is that a tinfoil hat question or am I asking something particularly valid?

00:36:45.920 Well, first of all, I don't know how we all should be dealing with the question of tinfoil hat questions, right?

00:36:57.620 At some level, we've been frightened off of talking about collusion, even though every human being should be aware that collusion is a very common feature of civilization that doesn't you know, most hypotheses of collusion are definitely going to be false.

00:37:16.420 However, there's an awful lot of collusion in the world.

00:37:19.880 And the the idea that we should be timid at all about asking the question about collusion when there is anomalous behavior and obvious lying, we shouldn't be embarrassed about it at all.

00:37:32.640 And in fact, the right tools to use when collusion is the question are scientific tools.

00:37:37.060 So what I would say is there's a reason and I was nearly alone in this.

00:37:42.800 There's there's a reason that I was quite inflexible about the idea that the only right way to refer to this was the lab leak hypothesis and that the word theory was in and of itself a problem.

00:37:56.760 Because, you know, if you think about evolutionary theory, we call evolutionary theory because it is the presumed right answer based on a tremendous amount of work.

00:38:07.940 Right. So to call this a lab leak theory is an error to call it.

00:38:11.700 A hypothesis tells you exactly what the rules of engagement are, what the legitimate tools are, what the standards of evidence are.

00:38:17.620 And so my feeling is we should address all of these questions of collusion with that same toolkit.

00:38:23.120 That's the right way to do it. And it doesn't involve putting on a tinfoil hat.

00:38:27.300 So. Are we being lied to?

00:38:31.600 At a level that is almost impossible to fathom, and that's one of the things about the entire story of covid, really.

00:38:41.080 Right. And this starts, I see the lab leak hypothesis as one leg of a three legged stool of places where the very same people are trying to control what it is we are allowed to discuss.

00:38:55.480 They are trying to shape a narrative that a small amount of investigation reveals is nonsense.

00:39:00.400 And we have to figure out how, given that all of our institutions seem to be participants in this lie, whether they know that they're lying or not, we have to figure out how to make sense of what we are facing and plan for how we are going to escape it with the minimal amount of damage.

00:39:20.860 We're going to have to figure out how to do that at the moment, going around the institutions.

00:39:25.060 The institutions are simply an obstacle to civilization's well-being and even knowing what's taking place.

00:39:34.640 I mean, that's not exactly the answer that I wanted. I'm going to be honest with you.

00:39:40.580 Why is it what? No, carry on.

00:39:43.000 I was going to suggest if, you know, if if you wanted a happier answer, I mean, you could have got a different guest for one thing.

00:39:50.860 But, yeah, go on.

00:39:55.740 No. So that being the case, why is it that big tech, all of these particular, you know, institutions have decided what is and what isn't acceptable?

00:40:11.460 At one point, we I mean, we could still get kicked off, but we could still have a strike against our channel for this particular interview.

00:40:19.060 Why is it all of a sudden that big tech has deemed it acceptable that we can have this conversation now, whereas two months down the line, it was deemed that it was unacceptable two months ago?

00:40:29.140 Well, I think the way to understand this is to keep multiple conversations in mind simultaneously.

00:40:39.380 So it is now perfectly acceptable anywhere you want to have a proper conversation about the lab leak hypothesis.

00:40:48.460 As you point out, that was not true several months back.

00:40:51.860 And what changed was not the evidence.

00:40:56.340 It is not that some piece of evidence emerged that caused people to wake up.

00:41:01.100 It was somehow a social decision.

00:41:03.180 And for those of us who have been demonized as conspiracy theorists for saying what most people now regard as self-evident, the the whole thing is rather strange. 0.78

00:41:15.500 It's like we against the odds managed to turn the heat up high enough on the garbage story that this obviously came from nature and anybody who thinks otherwise is crazy.

00:41:27.500 We turned the heat on it.

00:41:29.540 There were enough people with enough different skill sets to surface the evidence that eventually that story just wasn't tenable.

00:41:37.660 And, you know, you remember the what is it, Colin Ray song?

00:41:42.940 That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

00:41:45.500 Right. Where the dude comes home and his wife asks him where he's been.

00:41:50.320 And he said he fell asleep in the hammock in the yard.

00:41:52.220 And she tells him, actually, I threw the hammock in the attic a week ago.

00:41:55.360 And he says, well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

00:41:58.880 This is that. Right.

00:42:00.800 This is for months. There has been clear nonsense being distributed as if as if it were scientific consensus and fact based on scientific work.

00:42:12.440 And then eventually the the contradiction became so glaring that whoever was trying to maintain it decided to back off.

00:42:20.700 Not all the way. It's not like they've come clean.

00:42:23.120 It's not like they've admitted that a laboratory leak is the most likely explanation, which it clearly is.

00:42:28.260 That what they've done is they've decided to adjust the story so that the contradictions are less obvious and then to staunch the bleeding by establishing a new false story, which we are now battling over.

00:42:42.980 But that is taking place.

00:42:44.980 We are now allowed to talk about the lab leak.

00:42:46.880 Facebook says it's no longer going to take down posts on this topic.

00:42:50.680 Well, thanks, Facebook. Right.

00:42:53.100 But we've got other topics that have the exact same profile.

00:42:56.920 Right. The exact same profile where those who talk about them are morally defective.

00:43:03.520 They are getting in the way of our, you know, collective human campaign to fight off covid.

00:43:11.880 It's the same battle.

00:43:13.160 The censors are the same people.

00:43:14.700 And the answer is, if you watched the lab leak thing happen, why are you not saying to yourself, gee, I wonder if the people who got the lab leak right.

00:43:25.320 But we're revealing something about what the censorship is really for.

00:43:31.160 Right. And whether or not where I see that censorship still taking place, there might be something that I desperately need to know about.

00:43:39.720 And there is.

00:43:41.760 Brett, do you think this is really the level of sophistication of the thinking about this?

00:43:46.860 And this is a question that I really want to talk to you about.

00:43:49.420 And we've we've been talking for nearly an hour and we haven't even got to the censorship part of it properly.

00:43:53.680 But the the the idea that we live in a world now where essentially four people in hoodies in Silicon Valley control the entirety of the mass communication that occurs.

00:44:09.440 And they are making decisions about what we can and can't talk about.

00:44:14.080 And it just seems inconceivable to me that YouTube has a scientifically sufficiently educated team to even make this decision on a scientific basis.

00:44:23.180 It seems far more likely to me that the big tech companies simply get a note from the presidential administration or from whoever, which says this is, you know, evil, lying propaganda that's undermining our efforts to tackle a deadly pandemic.

00:44:38.080 It must be suppressed.

00:44:39.640 And the hooded billionaire in Silicon Valley goes, well, you know, the government is telling me this.

00:44:45.980 So I don't have a clue.

00:44:47.080 So I'm not a biologist.

00:44:48.220 I'm not a epidemiologist.

00:44:50.060 I'm not a virologist.

00:44:51.060 You know, so I'm going to do what the government tell me because I don't want to kill people.

00:44:56.280 Well, but I mean, think about what you're saying.

00:44:59.380 I mean, I don't agree.

00:45:00.900 I rarely do.

00:45:01.760 I don't think it's it's for people in hoodies.

00:45:04.140 In fact, one of the strong possibilities here is that we have a I don't want to call it artificially intelligent.

00:45:12.680 It's more like artificially stupid set of algorithms that are on autopilot and that the folks in Silicon Valley who feel that they are in control actually would discover that they weren't if they tried to change course. 0.84

00:45:27.300 Right. 0.99

00:45:27.760 That this is a process.

00:45:29.080 You've got people staffing a process that is out of control.

00:45:33.380 And, yes, it does seem to be taking direction from the CDC and the who and we don't know who else.

00:45:41.000 But, you know, in the U.S. to have the government telling tech companies to silence individuals is a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment.

00:45:52.960 I would say the defense of censorship has been these are private concerns and they have a right to have on their platform who they want and to not have others.

00:46:05.180 Now, that's a very shaky defense, but it falls apart completely if what they are doing is taking directives from a government that is absolutely forbidden in our top amendment not to silence its citizens.

00:46:17.320 So there's a big question here.

00:46:19.320 We don't know how it works, but anybody who does even a little bit of looking into this will discover something absolutely ghastly.

00:46:27.200 And even if you disagree on the content, maybe you think natural origin is the most likely explanation for the virus.

00:46:34.020 Maybe.

00:46:34.720 Well, I guess I got to skip the other topic so we don't put your channel in jeopardy.

00:46:38.760 But maybe you think I'm just wrong on the evidence on these other things.

00:46:43.020 You still have to ask yourself if I'm wrong.

00:46:45.340 Why is it so necessary to silence me?

00:46:47.900 Can't we just have this out in public and find out that I'm wrong because the evidence will go against me?

00:46:53.980 And what does that say about our society, Brett, that we silence people who disagree with the narrative?

00:46:59.680 It says that the it says that something that has its own incentives has taken over and that we are effectively passengers on a ship headed to a destination we do not know.

00:47:15.140 Hmm. And Brett, I want to come back to the point about these decisions not being made scientifically, because I come from a family of scientists.

00:47:23.320 Both my parents were biochemists in the Soviet Union.

00:47:27.060 My dad actually worked on viruses and vaccines for the Soviet Union at the time.

00:47:31.900 And yet in our family, conversations about alternative hypotheses, about various explanations for various events were not only regular.

00:47:40.580 They were actively encouraged because I understood and I think my parents understood who were very kind of classically educated in science.

00:47:47.680 That is the scientific method, right?

00:47:51.680 It's it's a discussion and a debate and a series of investigations and experiments about what the truth may be, which produces a working theory that is the best theory available until the next one comes along.

00:48:03.660 By a process of other people coming up with other quote unquote conspiracy theories about why that established theory is now wrong.

00:48:10.680 So how have we got to a place where the more science advances and moves forward?

00:48:15.600 We're now almost unable to discuss the next potential hypothesis that can explain something that is, as you say, currently unexplained.

00:48:24.460 There are two two important answers here, I think.

00:48:28.820 One is we are confused as a a as a society about what science is.

00:48:36.920 Those of us who have dedicated our life to it and who are very serious about it in its detail understand that science is a process.

00:48:44.000 It is not a collection of answers that we have arrived at through that process.

00:48:49.400 It is not a social system of people and their beliefs.

00:48:52.740 It is a process by which you find out where your perceptual biases have misled you and you find out what is true in spite of those biases.

00:49:00.980 That's the purpose of science.

00:49:02.620 And the only way it can work is in a system that is open to entertaining all possibilities and then engaging in very serious falsification.

00:49:12.380 So to have this kind of mind numbing follow the science, you know, hashtag mentality where people think that following the science is, you know, rebroadcasting the bullet points in the, you know, the press release is to invert science.

00:49:31.180 This is anti-scientific.

00:49:32.800 That said, people, I think, especially in an emergency are prone to just want to know what they're supposed to do.

00:49:41.240 And so anybody who wants to give false certainty about what the virus is, how it transmits, what one should do to protect themselves, anybody who wants to tell the right kind of story has a huge and willing audience.

00:49:55.680 And those people, you know, people want to feel, for example, all right, we've just got to get ourselves to a vaccine.

00:50:04.220 OK, vaccine showed up earlier than anybody was expecting.

00:50:07.960 That's kind of great.

00:50:09.140 Maybe the answer is I've just simply got to go get myself vaccinated.

00:50:12.540 I can relax for the first time in more than a year.

00:50:15.240 Right.

00:50:15.940 I get that.

00:50:16.960 I understand why that's comforting.

00:50:18.620 Such a person, though, does not want to hear the nuances.

00:50:22.520 They don't want to hear what we don't know about the implication of those vaccines.

00:50:27.060 Right.

00:50:27.520 They don't want to hear about the fact that you have multiple novel phenomena being deployed at once in a process that has been shortened in order to bring it to the public more quickly.

00:50:38.220 And that that means we know even less than we would know ordinarily.

00:50:41.780 Right.

00:50:42.220 They don't want to know these things because, frankly, it makes it hard to sleep.

00:50:47.240 So, you know, lots of people are lying to themselves because what they want is a comforting story.

00:50:51.800 And they'd like to just cross their fingers and hope it's right.

00:50:54.400 And the problem is those of us who don't sleep very well until we've actually looked into these things are not comforted by the story.

00:51:01.900 And we are not comforted by the official powers that be handing down what's absolute nonsense.

00:51:10.580 Right.

00:51:10.820 And this has been clear from the beginning.

00:51:12.280 Heather and I have been shouting for much more than a year about the fact that this virus does not appear to transmit outdoors, that it does appear that people who have more vitamin D are better off than people who have less vitamin D, that you should go outdoors.

00:51:26.480 You should not wear a mask, except in maybe very unusual circumstances outdoors.

00:51:31.280 And that for the powers that be to tell us that effectively you need a mask at all times because the entire world is suddenly dangerous is wrong.

00:51:40.700 More than 99 percent of the world is not dangerous because it's not inside a building or a car or an airplane.

00:51:46.680 Right.

00:51:46.840 All of that space is safe.

00:51:48.120 And for the last year and a half, we should have been using that fact to take a break from COVID and go talk about what's really going on outside in comparative safety.

00:51:57.520 Right.

00:51:57.700 But we haven't been doing it because something is very interested in us listening to its dictates about what we should do.

00:52:04.200 And that is a very alarming fact.

00:52:05.980 Do you think the governments have been using this as a power grab in a very cynical sense?

00:52:13.420 The problem is.

00:52:16.620 So.

00:52:18.640 We have a composite of two things that are almost certain both to be present.

00:52:24.540 On the one hand, there is collusion behind the scenes of people who have objectives that we don't know about.

00:52:32.180 Right.

00:52:32.440 There are meetings in which people decide what to do and the reasons that they decide what we should do are not necessarily about our well-being.

00:52:40.160 You know that, Brett.

00:52:41.660 We also have.

00:52:44.040 No, I'm serious.

00:52:44.820 How do you know that those meetings are happening?

00:52:47.420 Well, for one thing, you can detect the way that the lab leak hypothesis suddenly became mainstream.

00:52:54.940 Involved a series of acknowledgements over the course of days.

00:53:02.920 In other words, some email chain or Zoom call or meeting resulted in a conclusion, which is, okay, that story is not going to work.

00:53:14.780 The new story is going to look like this.

00:53:16.940 And so the people who were in on it started repositioning themselves.

00:53:21.160 And in the course of two weeks, everything was different.

00:53:23.980 And you had a whole new set of people championing the lab leak hypothesis who had been mum or had been demonizing it up until right before.

00:53:31.640 And so the point is, you can detect that something unnatural has caused a shift in the narrative.

00:53:37.000 And there are many such things.

00:53:39.460 But anyway, my point about this is you have collusion and you have emergence, right?

00:53:45.800 There's also a certain organic phenomenon that happens.

00:53:49.860 The WHO and the CDC are not scientific organizations.

00:53:54.160 They're about public health.

00:53:55.580 And public health involves stories that are simple enough to get people to do what we need them to do, right?

00:54:02.280 And the problem is that's in conflict with knowing what's actually happening.

00:54:05.480 And it's especially dangerous to allow the thing that licenses itself to lie in order to get the public to do what it needs to do, to allow those lies to start interfering with scientific inquiry is especially dangerous.

00:54:19.140 It's like, you know, putting on blinders before you run down the stairs.

00:54:23.880 So you've got emergence, right?

00:54:26.340 Natural processes that are set in motion for one reason and then evolve into something else.

00:54:30.960 And you've got collusion, people actually having meetings and deciding to shut down some line of inquiry or whatever.

00:54:36.600 We never know the admixture, right? 0.99

00:54:39.340 So it could be that this is 99% emergence and 1% collusion.

00:54:45.460 Or it could be reversed.

00:54:46.680 Or it could be somewhere in the middle.

00:54:48.140 And if you're going to think about these issues, it's very important, I believe, to enter into them with the sense of, in a complex story like this, both things are going to be there.

00:55:00.100 And the question is, what's the ratio, right?

00:55:03.140 Is this mostly a story of collusion or is this mostly a story of emergence or is it divided between them in some, you know, haphazard fashion?

00:55:11.080 The thing that I find, you know, we talk about this.

00:55:17.380 The thing that I find very worrying is that when I speak to most people, they want an end to this.

00:55:23.760 They want this to end.

00:55:25.120 They want to return to normal.

00:55:28.040 I don't think we're ever going to return to normal as it was.

00:55:31.940 I think this is for the long term.

00:55:34.960 Do you share my pessimism?

00:55:37.720 Well, it's two questions, really.

00:55:39.700 I said back in probably it would have been February of 2020, we're never going back to normal.

00:55:47.520 I don't think we're ever going back to normal.

00:55:49.020 Doesn't mean I don't think we could drive COVID extinct.

00:55:51.440 In fact, what I have come to understand recently is that probably we could have driven COVID extinct months ago and that we are not doing it for reasons that are mysterious.

00:56:04.860 Right.

00:56:05.340 You would imagine that everybody given the opportunity to drive COVID to extinction would be interested in doing that.

00:56:12.620 And that were that were there a question about whether that was really possible.

00:56:17.560 And I believe honest brokers who have looked at all the information reasonable people could disagree over whether or not it is possible to drive COVID to extinction with the tools we presently have in short order.

00:56:30.340 But if you even think that that's possible and the tools are the right ones to bring to bear whether or not we're stuck with COVID, then you should certainly bring them to bear.

00:56:40.840 And our failure to do that is utterly alarming.

00:56:45.940 I really cannot emphasize enough how strange our behavior is in light of the tools at our disposal.

00:56:52.500 And Brett, I take it that if I ask you what those tools are, you're going to give me an answer that will get us banned from YouTube.

00:56:58.900 Is that correct?

00:56:59.960 Well, how about we, I mean, you know, personally, my feeling is, you know, how can I say this?

00:57:09.540 It'd be great.

00:57:11.460 It'd be great if you guys just grew a pair.

00:57:14.680 It doesn't have to be two pairs.

00:57:15.920 We're getting called out live on air.

00:57:18.020 One pair between you is enough, I think.

00:57:20.680 Right.

00:57:21.340 And the fact is, look, I'm probably going to lose my channel over this.

00:57:24.380 But from what I've seen, if it takes losing my channel in order to make the point about what we're doing wrong, then so be it, even though my channel is the bulk of my family's income.

00:57:35.160 So I understand that not everybody's in that position.

00:57:38.700 But I'll tell you what the difficulty is for us.

00:57:40.840 And I actually think it's important for us to discuss this.

00:57:43.060 The difficulty for us is that we are not scientists.

00:57:45.800 And so the stuff that, and the reason we wanted to have this conversation with you is we know you, we've met you, like we both consider you a friend and we trust that you wouldn't be doing what you're doing if there wasn't a good reason for it.

00:57:59.000 But nonetheless, we don't have the ability to independently verify the stuff that you're talking about.

00:58:05.040 So we're delighted that you've joined us.

00:58:07.260 And, you know, you're right to call us out to some extent.

00:58:09.420 I don't want to be sitting here going, bro, you can't talk about this where you can, I don't.

00:58:14.660 No, no, I don't, I don't even, I don't even know.

00:58:17.720 I know you don't.

00:58:18.280 I know the concern for us is that we are not able to independently verify it.

00:58:22.680 So we want to bring the conversation to people's attention.

00:58:26.100 Right.

00:58:26.580 And we want to make people aware that you've talked about some of this other stuff elsewhere and they're welcome to seek it out.

00:58:32.040 Okay.

00:58:32.340 So I'm not going to put you guys in danger.

00:58:34.720 I understand what you're protecting and I agree with you that my responsibility here is far greater than yours because I am in a position to look at the evidence and evaluate it with at least some of the right tools.

00:58:47.660 And I'm in contact with people who have the other tools and the picture is quite clear to me in a way I wouldn't expect it to be clear to you.

00:58:53.760 But I would point out that there are two questions on the table.

00:58:57.400 Okay.

00:58:57.620 There are a series of topics that are scientific and technical in nature and there's the censorship issue, which is not.

00:59:03.500 And the point is the technical ones require the censorship one to be solved.

00:59:09.180 And so my concern is that a legitimate fear that you're not in a position to evaluate the scientific questions is going to result in too much timidity on too many channels with respect to the censorship, censorship issue, which is clearly out of control.

00:59:26.260 For them to come after me when I've had clinicians on who have saved many people from COVID, people who have actually innovated the current standard of care, people who are important players in the story of how we have medically addressed COVID are saying there's something that we're not doing and there's no good reason for it.

00:59:50.840 I've had them on my channel.

01:00:20.820 Voldemort is pretty unambiguously bad.

01:00:24.820 You know, you have to be pretty postmodern to not see him as sort of a negative character.

01:00:30.400 And so my sense is if we use that euphemism, that it gives the wrong impression about the things that we are not saying.

01:00:38.020 And so I was going to suggest that maybe we could do something we could refer to the things that we can't talk about in a more sympathetic and appealing way.

01:00:49.300 Like, you know, could we refer to the central tool that we are not using in the fight against COVID as Jodie Foster in the movie Contact or something like that?

01:01:00.880 Could we refer to some of the other tools as maybe Sigourney Weaver in Alien?

01:01:06.500 And for people who don't swing that way, could we refer to the other tools that we're not using as Matt Damon in The Born Under a Bad Sign?

01:01:16.900 Is there some way that we could make these things approachable so that we could discuss them?

01:01:22.140 I think the best thing to do is maybe for you before we go to the Q&A is for you to tell people who you've had the conversations with and they can go and find that information.

01:01:32.640 Sure. So the conversations that I think are most salient are I had a conversation that has now been removed by YouTube with Pierre Corey, Pierre Corey of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance,

01:01:49.460 which are a group of doctors that got together when COVID began in order to figure out how you treat these patients who had this brand new disease.

01:01:57.440 And they worked very hard to figure out what worked, what didn't work.

01:02:02.180 They followed the evidence and they have settled on some alarmingly good treatments that are now being hidden for reasons that are unfortunately becoming quite apparent, right?

01:02:16.360 There are financial reasons that we are not using our best tools.

01:02:20.380 Are there other reasons? I don't know, but the financial ones are clear enough.

01:02:23.820 They can be demonstrated pretty easily.

01:02:25.640 So I had Pierre on and it was a great conversation.

01:02:31.580 YouTube removed it.

01:02:33.160 I should point out they also, and I think as shocking as it is that they removed a conversation between a biologist and a doctor about a pandemic and its potential treatment.

01:02:46.520 They also removed Pierre Corey's congressional testimony.

01:02:50.360 He testified in front of the Senate on the very same topic and YouTube removed it.

01:02:56.120 What?

01:02:56.360 This is absolutely factual.

01:03:00.500 He testified on this topic and YouTube removed it.

01:03:05.060 Okay, just think about that.

01:03:06.500 That's insane.

01:03:07.840 This is a highly decorated doctor.

01:03:11.720 This is somebody who saves lives for a living.

01:03:15.000 This is an ICU doc, right?

01:03:16.700 He goes to, we go and do whatever we do on YouTube.

01:03:20.520 He goes to work and saves people and he testified to Congress and it was extremely popular and it was widely circulating and YouTube took it down.

01:03:31.440 Now, my claim is even if he had been a crank, a crank testifying in front of Congress is something the public needs to be able to see.

01:03:40.140 There is no explanation for why YouTube would deem itself in a position to remove such a thing.

01:03:47.140 Agreed.

01:03:47.540 And I can tell you, I've looked at the evidence and the evidence is high quality.

01:03:53.100 There are meta-analyses that have been done that make it clear that even if you have complaints about the size of the various studies, when you compile the evidence, the signal is unambiguous.

01:04:02.460 And so, anyway, that's one of the conversations.

01:04:04.380 The other conversation was one I had more recently with Steve Kirsch.

01:04:09.780 Steve Kirsch is the inventor of the optical mouse and he has done research on the impacts of the COVID vaccines.

01:04:21.300 He is fully vaccinated.

01:04:23.380 He has done research on the impact, the medical impact of the COVID-19 vaccines.

01:04:28.320 And in that conversation, we were with Robert Malone, who is literally the inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology that is at the core of most of these vaccines.

01:04:41.040 So we had a conversation, a three-way conversation.

01:04:43.960 It is still up about the nature of these vaccines.

01:04:47.640 And I only wish I could give you a summary of it, but people should look for that conversation on the Dark Horse podcast channel.

01:04:58.460 If they want to see the conversation that YouTube removed between Pierre Corey and me, the FLCCC, that's the frontline critical COVID critical care alliance website, has the podcast still up on BitChute.

01:05:17.640 And it is also available as audio on all of the usual podcast apps.

01:05:24.100 And so one thing I would say, if you're interested in the censorship issue, then whether or not you are inclined to entertain these descriptions of heterodox thinking surrounding vaccination and other COVID treatments, you should certainly take the following to heart.

01:05:46.660 If the censors are going to lose, if the censors are going to lose, their censorship has to fail.

01:05:51.960 When somebody censors something that appears to be important, whether it's congressional testimony of a frontline COVID doctor, whether it's an evolutionary biologist talking to the inventor of a vaccine technology, when something is censored, you should probably take extra interest in it.

01:06:09.860 Right. What is it? I am not supposed to hear. And you may find that the censors are right, that certain content isn't any good.

01:06:17.780 Now, I wouldn't advise that they censor it, but it may be that what you find when you scratch the surface is, yes, there's something compromised about this discussion.

01:06:25.500 It is not informative. Or you may find that it's very informative and that some force does not want you to know the content because it has interests that run in some other direction.

01:06:34.160 And I would just invite people to look at these conversations and judge for themselves.

01:06:39.100 And it occurs to me that our lack of a pair, as you gently put it, Brett, is also a bit of a test case because we have deliberately stayed away from the one thing your video with Pierre was banned for.

01:06:52.360 And so it would be interesting whether they feel the need to censor a reference to a conversation that's now been deleted and to see how far they're willing to go in that process.

01:07:02.960 Well, my sense, having looked at this, is that you're probably safe from YouTube's hammer if you are speaking obliquely and not making claims, but simply referring to the fact that claims have been made somewhere else and inviting people to look at those things.

01:07:23.000 I, of course, don't know. But the important thing is that when somebody makes a decision like this, the important thing is that it actually amplifies rather than tamps down the investigation into the question.

01:07:42.600 Right. The fact that something is being censored shouldn't convince you that it's true.

01:07:47.460 But the fact that something is being censored should convince you that somebody doesn't want you to hear this.

01:07:53.660 And then you can quickly check and figure out whether they're acting in your interest.

01:07:57.740 And in this case, I believe it is utterly unambiguous.

01:08:01.420 They are acting in someone else's interest.

01:08:04.200 And on that rather upbeat note, we are going to cut to a commercial break and we'll be back in around three to four minutes.

01:08:12.600 And we'll be facing your questions to Brett.

01:08:16.660 So see you in three to four minutes, guys.

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01:11:22.760 All right.

01:11:23.460 Hello, everybody, and welcome back.

01:11:25.320 Anton, let's get Brett back in here so we can ask the questions.

01:11:28.400 Brett, questions are flowing in already.

01:11:31.580 Iron Shirt says,

01:11:32.720 How likely is it that the zoonotic origin would produce a virus that didn't know how to infect people out of doors?

01:11:40.760 Well, this is a great question.

01:11:42.520 I've made this point several places.

01:11:44.620 There's something conspicuous about it not transmitting at all outdoors, it seems, or almost never.

01:11:51.020 And there are really two interpretations.

01:11:52.740 I think it is highly likely that that is the result that this virus adapted to a laboratory environment, which is obviously the sort of indoor of indoors, and that that is a signature of something.

01:12:04.700 The question is, as a bat virus, how would it have normally transmitted?

01:12:11.360 And my guess is that in general, the bats in question, these horseshoe bats, are forest-dwelling bats that would not be collected in large numbers in the foraging environment.

01:12:26.600 So the place where the virus would have been most likely to transmit between them would have been inside a roost like a cave.

01:12:34.060 Is a cave more like an indoor environment or an outdoor environment?

01:12:37.140 It's not entirely clear.

01:12:38.480 But I would say my guess is when this is all over and we know the answer, it will probably turn out that the inability of the virus to transmit itself almost ever in the outdoor environment has something to do with laboratory origin.

01:12:50.860 But it is possible that it is the result of the nature of the bat roosting environment where the virus would transmit under normalcy. 1.00

01:12:59.800 Just as a follow-up from me, Brett, do we have any scientific idea of why the virus is so ineffective as transmitting itself outside?

01:13:08.120 Yeah, this is a beautiful question.

01:13:09.400 The answer is it's going to be two things, right?

01:13:12.920 We know that it is highly sensitive to UV light.

01:13:16.020 UV light destroys it.

01:13:17.200 But if it were just UV light, then it would be transmissible at night outdoors and not during the day.

01:13:21.840 And that's not what we see.

01:13:23.340 So the other factor is what I would call effective volume.

01:13:28.720 This virus is very sensitive because of the way it transmits by effectively saturating the air with particles that float, some of them for a very long time.

01:13:39.420 The virus is very sensitive to how much air there is, that is to say, how long it takes to saturate, how much flow there is, and therefore how quickly it is distributed, and basically things like aridity.

01:13:57.660 So my point would be, if you're in a car with an Uber driver who has COVID, that's a very tiny effective volume, and it will saturate very quickly.

01:14:09.480 And the likelihood that you will get it in spite of the fact that you're wearing a mask is quite high, right?

01:14:13.880 If you open the windows of that car, its effective volume jumps.

01:14:18.960 If it's standing at a stoplight, it jumps a lot.

01:14:21.780 If it's moving down the highway, it jumps astronomically.

01:14:24.800 So the effective volume is the question, and basically effective volume goes to infinity as you go outside.

01:14:30.400 So it is these two things that seem to be working in tandem that make the virus so difficult to transmit in an outdoor environment.

01:14:39.260 That's a great answer.

01:14:40.760 Thank you very much, Brett.

01:14:41.760 And we have a wonderful question from James Hogg.

01:14:45.160 He said, Brett, do you think science's actions were affected by the politics of COVID-19?

01:14:52.740 These are not Trump supporters, and the leak theory became Trump's.

01:14:56.960 Has it affected our objectivity, and how do we learn from this?

01:15:03.500 That's a good question.

01:15:04.800 There's clearly something about – you know, I hate to use these terms, and it's in fact gotten me in trouble before,

01:15:13.540 but there is something about Trump derangement syndrome that actually turns out not just to be a funny punchline.

01:15:21.740 Trump derangement syndrome has made it impossible for us to think analytically.

01:15:26.260 That is to say, I am stunned by the degree to which journalists have settled on the story that they could not possibly have been expected to see through the natural origin story

01:15:38.460 because Trump had said some things that suggested he thought the origin wasn't natural.

01:15:43.160 In what universe do you give anyone the power to get you not to look into something by them embracing it, right?

01:15:50.020 If you hand your enemy that capacity, the ability to dissuade you from investigating something by simply embracing it, they own you.

01:15:58.180 So I don't know what it is that happened to people.

01:16:00.640 I don't – you know, if Trump lied every time he opened his mouth, that would not mean that whatever came out of his mouth was the opposite of true.

01:16:09.940 It would mean there was no information in it, right?

01:16:12.660 That's the answer.

01:16:14.040 If you decide that Trump is simply a non-source of information because everything is a lie,

01:16:20.820 you don't embrace the opposite of what he thinks.

01:16:24.080 You just take it as non-information and you move on from there.

01:16:27.120 And if people had done that, they would have found that the lab leak hypothesis was the most probable from very early in 2020.

01:16:33.800 And, Brett, doesn't that also mean that you can't trust the mainstream media in that case?

01:16:42.720 Because if they're not being objective about what Trump is saying, then ultimately what are they not being objective about?

01:16:50.880 And this is really my point is this, I think, is the best chance we're ever going to get to see this because you don't usually win these battles.

01:17:01.560 We have, in a sense, a very limited sense, won the battle on the lab leak hypothesis.

01:17:07.700 We have taken it from being demonized and stigmatized as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory and gotten it to the mainstream so that we are actually now at least beginning to have a conversation about what the evidence really does suggest.

01:17:20.660 At the same time, we have not jumped that gap with several other stories related to COVID.

01:17:26.200 And that gives us the opportunity to just simply take what we learned or should have learned in the lab leak case and apply it to these other stories.

01:17:34.600 And what that says is, wow, the sources that you would just love to trust cannot be trusted.

01:17:40.600 You have to look past them.

01:17:41.880 You have to figure out who is having conversations that actually make analytical sense.

01:17:46.440 Because the other thing is just like a distribution point for propaganda, right?

01:17:52.460 We got propagandized on lab leak.

01:17:54.340 The people who told us for sure that we were crazy to worry about it coming from a lab behind the scenes looked at it and said to each other over email, you know what?

01:18:02.660 This looks like it came from a lab, right?

01:18:04.860 They're telling you something.

01:18:05.940 You shouldn't have to wait for the emails to come spilling out in order to get the sense that you need to look deeper.

01:18:10.720 But then the ultimate question for people is, if I can't trust the mainstream media to be objective, if I can't trust these traditional people who I get my information from, then who can I trust?

01:18:25.360 Well, yeah.

01:18:26.520 And, you know, you can't trust anybody at the level of just tell me what to think.

01:18:32.460 That's the bitter pill here, right?

01:18:34.560 You never could.

01:18:35.240 But what you can do is you can trust people to navigate the issue as an honest broker and to show their work, right?

01:18:41.900 That's the most you can hope for.

01:18:43.200 And when you get people who show their work and attempt to navigate the issue honestly, then you can check their track record over time, right?

01:18:53.560 Still doesn't mean that they're right.

01:18:55.320 But it's a process that allows you to figure out, you know, on balance, where should you put your trust and where shouldn't you?

01:19:02.720 And, you know, the thing is, it would be wonderful if we had things like newspapers that accumulated people who were trustworthy to sort these things out for us so that we could go to them and find out, you know, what somebody with resources would discover if they went down some rabbit hole.

01:19:21.280 Unfortunately, somehow in 2021, there are no such papers.

01:19:26.800 That's an amazing fact.

01:19:28.800 There are no such universities.

01:19:30.760 How is that possible?

01:19:32.220 None of the places that you would like to go to just figure out what smart people who are in a good position to see the evidence conclude.

01:19:40.680 There's no institution that can do that job at this moment.

01:19:43.340 And really, that's the biggest emergency we have.

01:19:47.400 Brett, Nat is asking a question that actually I care about as well and I think is an important question to ask.

01:19:52.880 One of the narratives here in the UK, I don't know what the situation is in America,

01:19:56.260 is that everyone must take the vaccine because even if you as an individual are, let's say, a child or a young, healthy person who seems to have a lot less to fear from this virus,

01:20:10.140 by not being vaccinated, you're creating the environment which is likely to cause more variants to come about.

01:20:17.880 And he says, wouldn't a vaccinated environment produce greater selection or more mutation?

01:20:22.660 And by the way, let me add a question on my own.

01:20:24.520 Is actually mutation bad?

01:20:26.420 Because one of the narratives we had at the beginning of this virus emerging was that we needed to mutate more and more so that it can become less lethal.

01:20:34.040 Well, the question of it evolving to become less lethal effectively assumes a natural origin.

01:20:43.540 And once you discover that this is not a natural origin, the natural rules don't apply.

01:20:47.420 So how it will evolve is an open question.

01:20:50.320 So I would say, yes, for the moment, variants are bad because to the extent that people who have had COVID or have had the vaccine are immune to something,

01:20:59.760 it's to the initial variant and that will decay over time.

01:21:03.060 And I think one of the vulnerabilities of these vaccines, even if these vaccines worked exactly as we had hoped, which they do not,

01:21:11.840 but if the vaccines worked exactly as we had hoped, then they are still very narrowly focused on the spike protein.

01:21:20.120 And that means that that is an intense evolutionary pressure for the spike protein to evolve so as to become invisible to the immune system.

01:21:28.400 So that's a hazard here.

01:21:29.700 And I would say variants are bad.

01:21:33.060 As for the question about shouldn't we vaccinate people who are young and therefore not very vulnerable to COVID,

01:21:42.280 I find this the most maddening feature of this entire situation.

01:21:49.400 Young people do not need to be vaccinated to protect them.

01:21:52.920 I understand the argument that we want to have as many people immune as possible to protect others.

01:21:58.880 But what society, what society liquidates the health of young people in order to preserve the health of old people? 0.88

01:22:09.140 Right.

01:22:09.820 Now, if the vaccines were in fact safe, that would be a different question, right?

01:22:17.140 If there were no cost that we could detect in young people of having the vaccines,

01:22:22.060 then we could raise the question of whether or not the risk that there was something we didn't know downstream was worth exposing them to in order to protect older,

01:22:32.200 infirm people, infirm people.

01:22:34.160 That's not the case.

01:22:36.040 We have very strong signals.

01:22:38.320 Now we have unexplained deaths in the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands, even just here in the U.S.

01:22:45.640 We have clotting disorders.

01:22:48.280 We have heart failures.

01:22:50.200 We've got strokes.

01:22:52.340 These things one cannot establish on the basis of a very noisy system of reporting exactly where they are from.

01:23:00.580 But the point is anybody should be able to look at what is taking place and know that we don't know enough about the consequences of vaccinating people with these vaccines to expose children to it.

01:23:12.960 It makes no sense.

01:23:15.400 Right.

01:23:15.660 And if you say to yourself, well, I differ, you know, COVID is serious enough and, you know, a human life is precious no matter what age it is.

01:23:23.320 And we should we should, you know, the risk of the vaccines is small compared to the risk of COVID.

01:23:28.780 If that's what you think, then you got to ask yourself this question.

01:23:32.740 Why on earth are we vaccinating people who had COVID?

01:23:37.420 They will get the very same immunity.

01:23:39.420 There's no evidence their immunity gets better for vaccinating them.

01:23:42.000 We are exposing those people to the risks of these vaccines for no benefit.

01:23:46.700 It doesn't make anybody else immune.

01:23:48.440 It doesn't get us any closer to herd immunity.

01:23:50.660 So there is something in the environment that is hell bent on vaccinating people, whether or not it makes sense to do so.

01:23:57.460 And the proof of that is in the fact that we are vaccinating people who have already had COVID and therefore are already effectively vaccinated.

01:24:04.440 I mean, yeah.

01:24:09.440 Just ask a nice question.

01:24:10.760 Yeah.

01:24:11.980 The YouTube channel is gone.

01:24:13.520 Is this a comedy podcast?

01:24:14.800 I forgot.

01:24:15.600 Yeah.

01:24:16.360 You just crack on, mate.

01:24:17.860 This is what I used to call in teaching a sweaty back moment.

01:24:22.240 You just carry on.

01:24:23.300 Anyway.

01:24:24.180 Yeah.

01:24:24.480 This is from MB.

01:24:26.940 And he says, Brett, did your experiences at Evergreen help prime your skepticism on current issues?

01:24:32.420 Or have you been aware of underlying issues with public health?

01:24:35.600 Well, I mean, let's put it this way.

01:24:40.840 My development as a kid and as a young adult set me in motion to look behind the scenes.

01:24:49.000 And what happens when you do that is you do discover that there's an awful lot of cover story and an awful lot of ugly process behind the veil.

01:24:58.900 Now, on the public health front, I would say the most important developmental experience was my experience as a graduate student when I started looking into the evolution of telomeres, senescence, and cancer.

01:25:14.480 And what I found was that there is a flaw in our model mice that results in them being terrifically prone to cancer and terrifically resistant to toxins.

01:25:26.720 And that was alarming to me because we use those animals in drug safety testing.

01:25:34.120 And so I tried to raise the alarm and the bell wouldn't ring.

01:25:39.200 I was unable to call the attention of the professional public to this giant hazard that our mice were predisposed to tell us that toxic drugs were safe and that this would explain things like the Vioxx phenomenon, the Seldane phenomenon, Fen-Phen, Gleevec.

01:26:00.520 A whole range of drugs have shown themselves to be very dangerous when we thought they were comparatively safe.

01:26:06.980 And all of this is easily explained by the fact that the mice that we use to detect toxicity are actually prone to resist it.

01:26:15.500 But in any case, once you've seen the system refuse to engage such a hazard, it wakes you up and one loses their naivete rather quickly.

01:26:26.940 Brett, first of all, Oksana has messaged in with a PayPal just saying how much she appreciates everything you're doing and thanking you for it.

01:26:36.260 But also, we had a lot of questions about the role of the World Health Organization in all of this.

01:26:42.240 So what do you make of – because some of the stuff that has come out from that particular institution over the last year and a bit has just been mind-boggling, starting from no human-to-human transmission all the way through to all sorts of other stuff.

01:27:00.940 At one point, they were saying lockdowns are essential.

01:27:03.440 And I think at another point, they were saying lockdowns are a temporary measure that shouldn't be used to – just completely contradictory stuff over a long period of time.

01:27:13.040 What do you make of the role of the World Health Organization in all of this?

01:27:17.440 And how should we see that institution in the light of everything that's been happening?

01:27:22.460 I would say the central issue of our day is capture.

01:27:28.760 And unfortunately, capture has become synonymous with a narrow version called regulatory capture.

01:27:36.360 So regulatory capture involves a corporation or an industry gaining control over the regulators that are supposed to dictate the limits of what it can do.

01:27:46.120 But that is a small version of something that has a much larger form.

01:27:53.500 And I would say the signal is very strong that things like the WHO, the CDC, the major tech platforms, the universities, the journals, the newspapers, these things have been captured.

01:28:09.300 And their capture renders them unreliable.

01:28:12.800 Now, that's a very frightening fact to have all of those things captured.

01:28:15.300 And the way in which they were captured, I think, is not understood by anyone.

01:28:19.720 I think there are many different mechanisms afoot.

01:28:21.760 And frankly, we may be up against evolution itself.

01:28:25.180 It may be that capture evolves and has taken over each of these things in course.

01:28:30.220 And that has resulted in an environment in which they're all untrustworthy.

01:28:36.160 But yeah, I've looked at the WHO over the course of the COVID pandemic.

01:28:39.360 And I am constantly shocked by how it distributes utter nonsense as if it were a fact beyond criticism.

01:28:49.120 And anybody who looks at the series of pronouncements that have come out of the WHO can tell something's wrong.

01:28:55.340 Absolutely.

01:28:55.900 I actually want to pick up on something you said there.

01:28:58.620 And we alluded to before the Q&A.

01:29:00.760 But I want to get into it and maybe push back on something that you're talking about.

01:29:05.940 Because you'll remember in our conversation with Jordan and Heather only last week, we talked about the fact that technological change has been so rapid.

01:29:14.820 That many of the societal shifts that we now see and many of the other problems that we're now experiencing seem to be a product primarily of that more than anything else.

01:29:24.620 Do you not think that given the fact that basically in the last 10, 15 years, we've invented an uber mega nuclear printing press, which is what social media, big tech really is,

01:29:38.480 that there is some responsibility on these institutions to acknowledge the huge power that they've given to ordinary people who, some of whom, like you, are acting in good faith.

01:29:55.420 But there's also others.

01:29:56.380 You know, we had the example of David Icke making comments about the link between COVID and 5G.

01:30:01.420 And then, bang, the next day, people are burning down 5G masks.

01:30:05.000 That's a terrible thing to be happening, in my opinion.

01:30:07.640 And so, look, I'm putting this as a sort of devil's advocate argument, but I do think it needs to be put.

01:30:14.580 Do you not think there has to be some regulation of what is published, particularly in a heightened situation like this?

01:30:22.960 You know, the analogy might be made with a wartime, in wartime broadcasting, wartime publication, et cetera, where there is some restriction for the greater good, if you like.

01:30:32.580 With very few exceptions, I would say no.

01:30:38.300 And the reason is not that I don't understand the hazard you're pointing to, or I don't think it's serious.

01:30:43.200 I think it's very serious.

01:30:44.900 But I think this is a simple question of net effect, right?

01:30:49.120 Unfortunately, the novelty of the tech platforms and the way that they have created a new pattern of collective cognition, that is a very frightening and dangerous fact.

01:31:03.640 We are now linked together in not only a global industrial system, but a global proto-mind of some kind.

01:31:12.640 But I'm not saying that's safe.

01:31:15.920 What I am saying is that a mind in which something has the power to regulate what can be considered, by whom, and in what way, that mind is much more dangerous than one in which anything can be considered.

01:31:29.640 And ultimately, one hopes that the truth has power over the nonsense, right?

01:31:35.700 The danger of creating the limitation is greater than the danger of the admittedly dangerous fictions that will circulate in that environment.

01:31:45.420 We have to hope that that's true, because the other route involves a very predictable collapse of sense-making that, in the context of our industrial capacity, I think would certainly be fatal in short order.

01:32:00.580 What are you talking about, Brett?

01:32:02.920 I'm talking about the ability to prevent processes from happening, right?

01:32:12.640 We have many different existential threats that have not yet grown to a scale of being existential independently, but they are linked together in a way that puts us in great jeopardy.

01:32:26.220 The problem is the profits to be made in each of these realms from generating these things is sufficient that there is an evolutionary pressure for those who want to engage in these processes because it enriches them to do so.

01:32:39.820 They have a pressure to capture the entities that might raise the alarm about the hazard of what they're doing, right?

01:32:46.380 We have to be able to raise the hazard, but if every industry is able to frustrate discussion of the danger that flows out of the new process it has just invented, then one of those processes is going to get us soon.

01:32:57.740 And we've seen how many of these things now, right?

01:33:00.980 We've seen the financial collapse of 2008.

01:33:03.640 We've seen the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

01:33:05.920 We've seen the Fukushima triple meltdown.

01:33:09.280 We've seen the Aliso Canyon leak.

01:33:12.380 We've seen the COVID-19, which it appears probably came from the lab in Wuhan. 0.54

01:33:18.420 All of these things have the same signature.

01:33:21.580 Some industry is doing something that the public only finds out about once the accident has happened, right?

01:33:27.980 Now, so far, all of these things, including COVID-19, have been much better than they might have been.

01:33:35.320 One of these days, we're going to get unlucky, and the magnitude of the accident is going to be so great, there won't be any recovering.

01:33:41.500 So it is of the utmost importance that humanity figures out how to have the discussions about which processes are safe enough for us to engage in, what is the way in which we will engage in them so that when something goes wrong, we can reverse course.

01:33:56.940 We have to have that conversation, and it's never going to happen if there's a mechanism there that is allowed to regulate what we can talk about, and it is available to be captured by those with a financial incentive to do so.

01:34:07.140 But what you're saying, if I can rephrase it, is we essentially now have an established system of anti-transparency.

01:34:16.440 We have a system of anti-transparency where any conversation, there's a price point for shutting down a conversation.

01:34:24.620 And if you just go industry by industry, right, each of the industries that is engaged in some process with the potential for a catastrophe where the costs will be borne by humanity, not by the corporation.

01:34:36.080 In each of those cases, there is an incentive to use the levers that may have been erected nobly to prevent dangerous conversations, to prevent people from burning down 5G towers or whatever it is.

01:34:46.300 There's going to be an incentive to capture those mechanisms and make sure that they do not talk about the hazards and the public's interest.

01:34:55.980 We've seen it too many times already, and we have to get away from the idea that we are going to solve the problem by increasing the quality of speech by purging the stuff that we all agree is wrong.

01:35:06.720 You can't do that because the problem, nobody on earth has ever figured out how you sort the vast array of quackery and fringe nonsense from the heterodoxy that travels in the same layer.

01:35:25.180 Every great idea starts as a minority of one, and the problem is, if you had a magic formula for spotting which idea over in the fringe layer was actually the next great idea, and so you could throw out all of the nonsense ideas that are over there, you'd be king, right?

01:35:43.380 But it can't be done.

01:35:45.520 You can't. 0.93

01:35:46.100 There's no mechanism for sorting the really important heterodoxy that nobody believes yet but will all believe down the road from the nonsense that nobody reasonable is ever going to believe because it really is garbage, right?

01:35:56.840 You have to wait for heterodoxy to either demonstrate its power or go away, and so we can't improve the quality of the conversation unless what you want to do is say, well, we've got enough progress already, so heterodoxy is done, and if you do that, we're finished as a species.

01:36:12.480 We have to.

01:36:13.320 We can't stay here.

01:36:14.480 Our processes are not sustainable.

01:36:16.520 We have to get out of this by innovating our way to a sustainable existence on planet Earth, so you can't freeze progress here, and if you can't freeze progress here, you can't shut down heterodoxy by shutting down every idea that isn't certified by the CDC.

01:36:30.660 Brett, isn't this a symptom of late-stage capitalism in which you have four companies that have a stranglehold on the market, and therefore, because they have no competitors, they can do pretty much as they please?

01:36:45.240 No, not really, because what it is, you know, what we call late-stage capitalism, and of course, I'm not entirely sure what we mean by that, but it's effectively an instantiation of a natural process, right?

01:37:03.000 It's an evolutionary environment in which there are niches, and we discover them with the evolution of strategies.

01:37:09.480 And so those corporations, as angry as I am at them for attempting, for the hubris involved in thinking that they can regulate the conversation into a better place, they are responding to evolutionary pressures.

01:37:25.860 They are like a liquid filling a volume, right?

01:37:32.080 They are creatures filling a niche, and if we want better corporations, if we want them to stand down and stop attempting to regulate discussion, we need to create the environment where the niches are such that that process doesn't evolve.

01:37:48.860 It will happen each and every time.

01:37:51.080 So late-stage capitalism is another way of saying, you know, a political and economic version of nature's experiment, and yeah, it's red in tooth and claw, and if we don't want it to be, we have to create an environment where something better evolves.

01:38:07.540 Fantastic.

01:38:08.000 Did you have a question, or do you want me to, shall I go to another question?

01:38:10.580 You go to another question.

01:38:11.640 It's a question from Jay, who's one of our regular viewers.

01:38:13.640 He says, Brett, can you please comment on Dr. Keyes?

01:38:16.220 I think it's Dr. Keyes' article in the Wall Street Journal.

01:38:18.860 He talked about the insertion of a double CGG sequence found in COVID-19 in the exact same place as the furin cleavage site is as well.

01:38:28.260 It's a two telltale signs of artificial manipulation in the lab, according to Dr. Keyes.

01:38:32.760 Are you familiar with this?

01:38:33.900 I think that was my question, mate, to be honest with you.

01:38:36.820 I am familiar.

01:38:37.820 What's a CGG, mate?

01:38:39.160 Mate, I don't want to steal Brett's thunder.

01:38:41.400 Brett, you carry on, please, mate.

01:38:42.600 I think it is – what I want people to do in this case is to actually simplify the genomic questions.

01:38:51.720 They are tremendously complex.

01:38:54.600 To some of us, they are very interesting.

01:38:56.280 But in effect, when Ralph Baric came out in Science Magazine as co-author on an article saying that the lab leak hypothesis needed to be investigated,

01:39:08.620 here you have the world's unambiguous leader, the person who has innovated more of the techniques in question,

01:39:18.900 a person who knows more about what is possible and what it would look like than anyone else on Earth,

01:39:23.940 telling you, I have looked at this genome.

01:39:26.540 I've seen everything you've seen up to the point this paper is published.

01:39:29.520 There is nothing in this sequence that is incompatible with the idea of a laboratory origin.

01:39:34.660 And in fact, a laboratory origin is likely enough that it must be investigated, right?

01:39:38.940 You couldn't ask for a clearer signal that what is in the genome is, at the very least, consistent with a laboratory origin

01:39:47.540 and taken in conjunction with the emails that we've now seen exchanged by Christian Anderson and Anthony Fauci.

01:39:54.220 This is, it is quite clear.

01:39:57.400 Many have looked at this and they have seen the signature of a laboratory origin, that there are different techniques involved.

01:40:06.320 We're talking about, in some cases, like the fern cleavage site, potentially, in fact, very likely to be an insert that was placed in the genome.

01:40:15.160 And then we see evidence of serial passage.

01:40:18.600 So, I don't want to engage the argument specifically, but I don't think there's any reason for people to be focused on it

01:40:26.020 because what we have finally, after a year and a half of fighting over this, is a at least clear acknowledgement

01:40:33.860 that what is in that genome is consistent with laboratory origin

01:40:38.740 and that those who know the most believe we have to look in that direction.

01:40:44.880 Brett?

01:40:45.360 Well, we've got one more question if you've got another couple of minutes, Brett.

01:40:50.100 And this is probably a good one to finish on, actually, because Casey says,

01:40:54.000 are there reliable people or entities that are archiving your Darkoist videos somewhere

01:40:58.140 so YouTube isn't the only place that they can be found and so that there's a place to find them

01:41:03.860 if they're not on YouTube anymore?

01:41:06.900 Yes, we certainly have them all and we are going to make sure that they are available.

01:41:10.240 But I want the public who is interested in this to think very carefully.

01:41:15.360 There is a huge chorus of people that have been signaling at me and saying, you know,

01:41:22.380 change platforms, go somewhere else where they can't do this to you.

01:41:26.140 And the problem is the audience is on YouTube.

01:41:29.160 And the fact that I might be able to solve a problem for my channel,

01:41:34.440 the fact that I might be able to solve a problem for my family and our income stream

01:41:38.420 by taking the content and putting it somewhere else,

01:41:41.220 or the fact that I might be able to solve a problem for an interested person

01:41:44.660 who wants to know where they can go find it is not the real question.

01:41:48.900 The question is, how can the material live in some place where it reaches enough people

01:41:54.760 to wake them and to change what's going on?

01:41:57.600 Because what's going on is killing people, right?

01:42:01.700 That's a very serious claim.

01:42:03.680 I'm aware of how serious it is, but it effectively leaves me with very little choice.

01:42:09.360 I have to do what I'm doing.

01:42:11.300 The personal costs are terrible, but I don't, I just don't see that there is morally any room

01:42:18.760 not to point out what it is I'm seeing and help people try to understand it.

01:42:23.380 That makes a lot of sense.

01:42:26.980 Brett, thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:42:30.300 If, where is the best place to follow?

01:42:32.560 I mean, we've addressed it, but follow you on Twitter, et cetera, et cetera.

01:42:38.020 Yeah, follow me on Twitter at Brett Weinstein.

01:42:41.560 Check out the Dark Horse podcast, which for the moment, at least, is still on YouTube.

01:42:46.180 It is still available on all of the major podcast apps.

01:42:51.740 That's Apple, Spotify, all of those.

01:42:55.180 You can come to my Patreon and support my work.

01:43:00.040 We are generating a way that people who prefer to pay in cryptocurrency can do that.

01:43:07.980 Maybe that's about it.

01:43:10.600 Brett, thank you so much.

01:43:11.780 I should just say before we let you go that there's a tremendous number of people who are

01:43:16.380 sending messages thanking you for everything you're doing, and we really appreciate you

01:43:21.020 coming on.

01:43:21.400 I know that you would have wanted to have a more frank conversation about this, and I

01:43:28.100 feel very guilty.

01:43:29.020 I feel like I'm a disappointing son to a very good dad.

01:43:32.140 No, no, no, no.

01:43:33.000 Can I say I feel a little bad about what I said, and that had this conversation taken

01:43:39.320 place in a room full of good-natured people, that would have gotten a tremendous laugh,

01:43:44.400 and the tension over it would have been dissipated immediately.

01:43:48.560 And anyway, please don't take it personally.

01:43:50.740 No, you're very kind.

01:43:51.700 And look, I would love to live in a world that we don't have to do things this way.

01:43:56.500 And I feel like with people like you in the world, that will eventually happen.

01:44:03.180 So please keep fighting the good fight, and we'll do our best as well.

01:44:06.220 To you guys as well.

01:44:07.300 All right.

01:44:07.740 Be well.

01:44:08.040 Thanks, Brett.

01:44:08.580 And thanks, everybody, for watching.

01:44:09.860 Take care.

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TRIGGERnometry - June 16, 2021

Did COVID Come From a Lab？ - Bret Weinstein

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