00:00:00.480What no one has explained is why we went hook, line and sinker, lock, stock and barrel into these new viral vector and mRNA vaccines, rather than using the more traditional approach to vaccination.
00:00:17.140Why did we get the message that if you get the vaccine, transmission stops with you? Why were they saying that?
00:00:23.840I think they had this belief that vaccination was the only way to go to stop this pandemic.
00:00:29.700And any little bits of inconvenient information that might happen to be true, but could interfere with the vaccine rollout, you didn't need to shout about those.
00:00:37.700You know, I actually think the public's more intelligent and more interested very often than they know.
00:00:44.520And in fact, if you look at the risk benefit analysis, assuming that the risks of adverse events is around about one in a thousand, it basically doesn't add up for anyone anymore.
00:00:54.960So we've got this phenomena of excess deaths that's occurring Europe, UK, United States, probably Canada, Australia, New Zealand, all of these countries.
00:01:08.080So what we should be looking at is what do all these countries have in common?
00:01:28.820And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:34.020Our brilliant guest today is a doctor and a very successful YouTuber, not least thanks to COVID and the lockdowns, which he has been covering in great detail.
00:01:42.780Dr. John Campbell, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:46.260I've been looking forward to talking to you guys and looking forward to the conversation.
00:01:51.000And as have our audience, they've been clamoring and demanding that we get you in as soon as possible.
00:01:55.660Before we talk about all the juicy stuff that we want to talk to you about, John, just tell us who are you, how are you, where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?
00:02:07.240And by the way, you know, we're sort of thinking we're these hip, cool, young-ish YouTubers.
00:02:16.280The subscribers have picked up over time.
00:02:17.860Basically, I'm a bit of a strange eccentric guy from Carlisle in the north of England.
00:02:21.620But for a long time, I was actually a nurse.
00:02:25.040So when I was 18, I trained as a psychiatric nurse and then as a general nurse.
00:02:29.180Did quite a few academic courses after that.
00:02:31.720And then when I was, I must have been, what, about 30, 31, I went into full-time nurse education.
00:02:38.160And I put together what I knew about science, the 10 years experience I had as a clinical nurse, and put that into educating student nurses.
00:02:46.140And that blossomed out into teaching nurse practitioners and basically anyone who would listen.
00:04:02.360And then, actually, after I retired, I did some work with nurse practitioners, training registered nurses up to be nurse practitioners to diagnose it in their own right.
00:04:11.620So I'm basically an academic, but I talk all my expertise in healthcare-related material that I've done pretty well.
00:04:19.460Well, I've done it all my life, really, since I was 18.
00:04:23.540I now consider myself to be semi-retired.
00:04:26.920So I don't actually do much clinical work anymore.
00:04:30.080I did clinical work for three years part-time after I finished academic work.
00:04:34.260I worked in the local A&E department, which was absolutely brilliant.
00:04:38.240It was actually great going back to being a staff nurse again, because I was actually giving out medicines and giving people injections and putting on bandages.
00:04:52.900All the stuff from a previously senior role that I had as a senior lecturer, all that was replaced for just doing the actual honest job again.
00:05:02.060And then I've been making, actually, videos.
00:05:04.200I started making my videos back in the days of SVHS tapes.
00:05:09.740So you might just about remember those, but these huge things.
00:09:54.080It's kind of up there with the ebolers and the really nasty viruses.
00:09:57.040But again, this doesn't really spread much away from camel areas where people keep camels because, again, the transmissibility of the disease occurs when people are sick.
00:10:11.900And in fact, tragically, quite a few of the deaths from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome have been in health care workers who've contracted it from quarantined patients.
00:10:25.380So the probability that there was a new coronavirus disease with a high death rate was not absurd, not by any means.
00:10:32.220And then we had people like the World Health Organization saying the death rate might be 1% or 2%.
00:10:37.160Well, you know, if you think about that, if you think about the United Kingdom and 1% or 2% of us die, then that's a pretty big chunk out of the country.
00:10:47.380And at the early days as well, it wasn't clear who was being primarily affected.
00:10:53.420So we didn't know initially whether it was young people being affected.
00:10:57.060And if we take previous pandemics, if you take the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, what actually happened there is there was two spikes in death across the age range.
00:11:11.720So old people, of course, died more, as you would expect, because they have comorbidities and other complications.
00:11:17.380But the other people that died in 1918-1919 were teenagers, very often 17-, 18-, 19-year-olds.
00:11:25.660The reason being, they have a very active immune system.
00:11:29.360They're able to generate a vigorous immune response.
00:11:32.340But with the immune response goes inflammation, and the lungs became inflamed, and they filled up with fluid.
00:11:38.260And there was something similar, actually, with SARS-CoV-2.
00:11:43.260So there was a few frightening things, and we didn't really know.
00:11:46.580So at the beginning, the only information we had, apart from this background science that we could learn fairly quickly, was what official organisations, like governments around the world, were telling us.
00:11:57.940And then, of course, enter organisations like the BBC.
00:12:01.400Now, what the BBC do on their reports, very often, is they'll be talking about something in general.
00:12:10.060So I remember during the Andrew Wakefield years, he was the guy, the paediatrician, that said there's a link between MMR vaccine and autism, which, of course, we now know there isn't.
00:12:20.220But the BBC actually showed someone who had the MMR vaccine, and then they say, this is little baby so-and-so, or little boy so-and-so.
00:12:30.360He had the MMR vaccine last week, and now he's got autism.
00:12:34.260Now, on a population scale, that will happen.
00:12:37.100So what they do is they home into individual cases.
00:12:40.360And that can give a completely distorted view of the nature of reality, because these cases are newsworthy.
00:12:49.200They don't look at the other 990,000, 900,000 cases where the child did not develop autism after the MMR vaccine.
00:12:57.400So the BBC started showing pictures of people, understandably, who were getting sick in Italy, and we never really quite knew what was going on in China.
00:13:08.780They were giving figures, but we knew that the Chinese figures were inaccurate.
00:13:13.200So quite what was going on in China, we didn't know.
00:13:16.260There was leaked videos of people having fits and things in the street, which, obviously, looking back, were fraudulent.
00:13:22.300But we had mainstream media picking on the people that were getting sick, and that gave a bit of a distorted picture.
00:13:31.700And the other problem in the early stages was the differentiation between the case fatality rate and the infection fatality rate.
00:13:38.180So the case fatality rate, we did work it out, and it was around about 1% or 2% of people that were being officially diagnosed were dying.
00:13:44.760But, of course, for every one person that was officially diagnosed, there was hundreds or probably thousands that got the infection that were never diagnosed.
00:13:53.880I suspect, for example, I don't know, but I suspect I had it in early 2020.
00:13:59.740And I've talked to hundreds of people who think that, even people who think they had it in 2019.
00:14:05.720But, of course, it was never officially diagnosed.
00:14:08.540And as well as that in the UK, what we didn't do in the early stages that we could have done.
00:14:13.060OK, the antigen studies, the antigen tests weren't readily available.
00:14:17.940There was government PCR testing, but the lateral flow tests weren't there for mass testing.
00:14:23.380But what we should have done at an earlier stage is do antibody testing to see who had had the infection in the past.
00:14:29.440And that was another bit of a gap, really, in the government strategy.
00:14:33.820So we're giving this information, WHO, government, mainstream media.
00:14:38.380We had to try and put this together as best as we could with these potential alarm bells from previous infections and previous pandemics.
00:14:46.380And it did look like we had a pretty serious pandemic on our hands.
00:14:51.940And in many ways it was serious, but nothing like as serious or deadly as the early intimations indicated.
00:14:58.220And then as time went on, it became clear that it was becoming the infection fatality rate and the number of people getting seriously ill weren't as many as we thought it was.
00:15:12.140And then, of course, this wonderful natural evolutionary process comes in because viruses want to survive.
00:15:18.340So it's kind of natural that viruses would become less virulent and less likely to kill their hosts as time goes on.
00:15:48.340Way less people getting sick with Omicron.
00:15:51.160Now, the fact that it's more infectious, you could argue very strongly that that's a really good thing because it's infecting lots of people really quickly.
00:16:00.980And that's generating a natural immune response in those people.
00:16:05.360And as well as that, if you give vaccine, that's just generating immunity in the body.
00:16:11.660But if you breathe the virus in, then you get immunity in your nose and your mouth and your pharynx and your trachea, what we call mucosal compartment immunity.
00:16:21.160And that can stop the virus getting into the systemic parts of the body.
00:16:24.860That's why in the Omicron days, it became much more like common cold type features.
00:16:29.960So we had all of these changes making the condition less severe.
00:16:35.560And that meant the risk benefit analysis for interventions changed dramatically because the risks went down.
00:16:41.820But the problem, I think, was that government thinking didn't change quickly.
00:16:46.280I'm not sure mainstream media thinking has changed that quickly yet.
00:16:50.720And so we have a less serious condition.
00:17:41.600But at the time, given the information that we had, it looked like there would be queues of people with severe illness outside of hospitals waiting to get in who couldn't because those hospitals were full.
00:17:54.520That looked like a possibility at the time.
00:17:57.420And to be fair, during the early waves, during the Wuhan wave and during the Alpha wave, there were a lot of people getting really quite sick.
00:18:06.320And if we hadn't had those lockdown measures, a lot more people would have got sick all at the same time.
00:18:13.200You know, this flatten the curve, flatten the sombrero idea.
00:18:17.120There is some, I believe there is some reality to that.
00:18:20.040So many people would have got sick all at the same time.
00:18:23.300The health service would have been essentially overwhelmed by that.
00:18:27.580And that means that people that could have been saved with relatively simple interventions, such as giving oxygen or giving antibiotics or giving these steroid drugs, these dexamethasone type drugs, some of those could well have died.
00:18:44.060So in the early stages, lockdowns were draconian, but there was a good rationale for them.
00:18:52.320In the later stages, of course, when you're talking about restrictions in the time of Omicron, it became patently absurd.
00:18:58.960But specifically in those early stages, yeah, I could see where they were coming from.
00:19:04.400And John, do you still support the first lockdown or do you think it was an overreaction with the benefit of hindsight?
00:19:10.120I think with the benefit of hindsight, knowing everything that we do now, it was necessary to reduce the rate at which people were getting sick.
00:19:19.280Now, whether that's a lockdown measure, yes, that did do it.
00:19:25.000You know, our intensive care units were not overwhelmed.
00:19:27.380They were remarkably busy for quite some time, but they weren't overwhelmed.
00:19:30.300Or whether you could have taken the alternative strategy, the sort of great Barrington Declaration type strategy, where you just took strenuous measures to protect those that were most at risk.
00:19:42.240So those with comorbidities, those with obesity, hypertension, diabetes, immunosuppression, the elderly.
00:19:51.220Could we have protected those effectively?
00:19:53.760It would have been difficult, but it probably could have been done.
00:19:57.180But given the uncertainties at the time, the very first lockdown, it's still possible to make a case for it.
00:20:10.160But in the early stages, it's still possible that it saved lives.
00:20:14.660And of course, we're going to move on to the most controversial part of the whole COVID debate, which is, of course, the vaccine.
00:20:23.440Now, I listened to some of your interviews and you were saying that you had the vaccine, you had two vaccines, and then you had the third vaccine, which you hesitated over.
00:20:35.520So talk to us about your journey with the vaccine, your thinking and the way it evolved.
00:20:39.860I mean, vaccination is such a fundamental part of health care.
00:21:00.580You know, measles still kills thousands and thousands of children a year that aren't vaccinated in poorer countries, particularly, especially if it's combined with malnutrition.
00:21:10.920So vaccination is an absolutely essential part of health care.
00:21:14.420So when we had a new viral disease, it made perfect sense that we would develop a vaccine.
00:21:24.340And when the vaccines came along, I believe that these vaccines would protect us against severe disease, which in the early stages, they did.
00:21:32.540I believe they did protect us against severe disease in the early stages.
00:21:35.920Now, how much someone at me was at risk from severe disease, of course, is open to some question and debate.
00:21:43.060What I'm curious about, what I'm really curious about is what we've always done with vaccines in the past is you brew up lots of virus and you can easily do that.
00:21:52.860We used to do it in the old days in eggs.
00:22:29.500What I don't understand, and no one's ever explained this to me, is people had invented these adenovirus vector vaccines and people had invented these messenger ribonucleic acid, these mRNA vaccines.
00:22:45.680What no one has explained is why we went hook, line and sinker, lock, stock and barrel into these new viral vector and mRNA vaccines, rather than using the more traditional approach to vaccination.
00:23:02.740Because given that we had what looked like a really potentially quite dangerous pandemic, I would have thought that the safest thing to do is do that which is tried and tested and we know works.
00:23:17.080And we know these vaccines have some level of efficacy.
00:23:23.960I think they made a few in Cuba as well, in virtually no time at all, just from brewing up huge amounts of the virus.
00:23:30.700Why was it we went for the mRNA vaccine, which is not giving the antigen, it's not giving the dead virus, it's giving the genetic instruction to make the virus.
00:23:42.880And the adenovirus vector vaccines are also giving the genetic instruction to make the virus.
00:23:47.920It's just that it's getting into the cells of the body via, in the case of the Oxford vaccine, an attenuated chimpanzee adenovirus.
00:23:56.700Whereas the mRNA vaccines were giving the mRNA in these lipid nanoparticles.
00:24:02.640Why did we do that rather than going down the traditional route?
00:24:05.800That's the big question that hasn't really been answered.
00:24:08.740John, I suppose a pushback would be, and look, if I may, if I, I'm just a comedian on the internet, so you could argue.
00:24:15.940You're absolutely entitled to have an opinion about COVID, mate.
00:24:56.080It's pretty hard to get good data from China.
00:24:58.360The data we have got from China is largely filtered through the World Health Organization.
00:25:03.760And what that seems to show with the Sinovac vaccine is it's not particularly good at preventing infection in the first place.
00:25:11.500But when you actually compare it to, and, but, you know, who really care?
00:25:15.700Who do you want to prevent infection in the first place?
00:25:17.860You know, if you get a bit of a sniffle, that doesn't matter too much.
00:25:20.960Plus, if you get the infection, you're going to produce what we said before, this mucosal compartment immunity.
00:25:26.420So you could argue that that is a good thing.
00:25:28.380But when you actually look at the data, the reason I took these vaccines is I thought there was a chance of me dying if I got this infection.
00:25:36.020So that would be bad or getting very ill.
00:25:42.740But when you look at the actual data for the Sinovac vaccine and the, what we would call the sophisticated Western vaccines, in actually preventing death, the difference between the two is not, is not that great.
00:25:55.320So if you want to stop people getting seriously ill and dying, there's a good argument to be made that the Sinovac probably would have been just about as good as the mRNA vaccines.
00:26:04.780And of course, remember that the initial trials on the mRNA vaccines were on preventing infection, preventing infection.
00:26:13.160Now, I used to have a sign behind me that said, stop, stop COVID-19, because we thought we could stop it.
00:26:29.300Like, we are, you and me, us three, are going to, and everyone watching, is going to be re-exposed to this virus innumerable times over the next, who knows, decade, two decades.
00:26:40.160You know, probably for the rest of you guys' lives, you're going to be continuously re-exposed.
00:26:52.700We wanted to stop getting people, people, stop getting people really sick.
00:26:56.900Now, if you look at the British Heart Foundation guidelines, they actually say that the reason that we've stopped using the AstraZeneca, adenovirus vector vaccine in the UK, is because we have better ones, mRNA vaccines.
00:27:10.660To tell you the truth, I'm not that convinced.
00:27:13.600I'm not that convinced by that argument.
00:27:16.200Because, as you correctly say, Francis, the AstraZeneca vaccine can cause myocarditis and pericarditis, but actually not that much.
00:27:24.880Mostly what it caused was blood clotting.
00:27:28.140So we had this, what we call thromboembolic problems.
00:27:31.100We have blood clots in the blood vessels, and it was the thromboembolic complications of the AstraZeneca vaccine that were particularly problematic.
00:27:39.500So I'm just wondering if the reason that the British government stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine were because they thought it was causing too many side effects.
00:27:46.420If that's why they stopped using it, because they thought it was causing too many adverse reactions, I'd quite like to hear them say that.
00:27:54.540But the official guideline now is that we're using the mRNA vaccines because they're better.
00:27:59.920But, of course, we've gradually gone away from it.
00:28:02.140So initially, in the spring 2023 campaign, basically, we're only vaccinating those over the age of 75 now and those with comorbidities.
00:28:15.480In the autumn 2022 campaign, basically, it was over 55 that we're vaccinating.
00:28:21.640So it does sound to me like the government is sort of quietly moved away from the AstraZeneca to the mRNAs.
00:28:29.000Now I kind of get the impression it's actually moving away from the mRNAs now.
00:28:34.640So, you know, even at my great age, I don't qualify.
00:28:37.920I don't qualify for a spring booster now because it seems like the government are moving away quietly.
00:28:43.700So I don't think we can expect any great mea culpa, oh, no, we picked the wrong vaccines, which they may or may not have done from the government.
00:28:54.580And I suppose there could be a dramatic change in politicians where they all stand up and say, sorry, got it wrong, completely wrong, got it wrong.
00:29:04.420I think we'll just sort of gradually move on to a new way of living with the virus, a new sort of acceptance of endemicity and a gradually waning down of the vaccination campaigns.
00:29:19.680And, John, how safe was the technology in the, I can't remember the names of the other vaccines now, not the AstraZeneca, but the ones that use this novel mRNA technology?
00:29:30.680The Pfizer and Moderna use the messenger RNA technology.
00:29:33.660Yeah, well, first of all, it's strange why they do that.
00:29:38.460And let me tell you what we normally do is, so there was clinical trials done on this, and it did show that there were some risks.
00:29:46.100Now, when there's been a paper published a few months ago, which actually reanalyzed the risks from these vaccines,
00:29:53.620and actually found out that the risk of serious adverse events from this reanalysis paper are probably about one in 800.
00:29:59.980So perhaps more than we were being given the impression of up to this point.
00:30:04.820So these vaccines are probably causing more issues.
00:30:08.240And what we always have to do in healthcare is look at the risk benefit for the individual.
00:30:13.060Now, we know that these vaccines aren't transmitting, aren't preventing the transmission of disease effectively.
00:30:18.820So we had famous figures in the United States who we won't mention, but, you know, heads of various this, that, and the other in the United States.
00:30:26.340And indeed, in this country, we're saying, look, if you get the vaccine, the infection stops with you.
00:30:35.860Now, to be quite honest, I can't see that that was ever going to happen.
00:30:40.240Because if you give the vaccine, as we said before, that can prevent systemic infection to the degree that it does for a limited amount of time.
00:30:48.660But it's never going to prevent the mucosal compartment infection.
00:30:52.940So the idea that giving a systemic vaccine was going to stop dead the spread, and therefore young children had to be vaccinated to protect their grandmother, I don't think that was ever based on sound science.
00:31:13.340But if you, as a medical expert, have the opinion that it was never going to be the case, presumably government has plenty of people like you advising them, who are also medical experts, who would also have been telling them this.
00:31:25.900So why did we get the message that if you get the vaccine, transmission stops with you?
00:31:32.000Why were they saying that, in your opinion?
00:31:34.700I think, and you'll have to ask the politicians and the chief medical officer.
00:31:39.280That's why I say it's an unfair question.
00:31:40.680That's why I say it's an unfair question.
00:31:42.060But I think they didn't want to do anything that was going to inhibit the vaccine rollout.
00:31:48.040I think they had this belief that vaccination was the only way to go to stop this pandemic.
00:31:53.840And any little bits of inconvenient information that might happen to be true, but could interfere with the vaccine rollout, you didn't need to shout about those.
00:32:01.960Let's just point out the good bits and any complications.
00:32:04.560Let's just maybe keep those quieter, because they saw vaccination as the only way to stop the pandemic.
00:32:12.320Now, it looks like they've turned out to be less than accurate in that, but I suspect that's what it was.
00:32:18.000They were just trying to make it look good and not confuse the issue.
00:32:21.180This is one of the things that really gets on my nerves, actually, with governments and chief medical, this, that, and chief scientific, this, that, and the other, is they don't always give us the full information.
00:32:31.060They kind of give us the edited highlights.
00:32:33.400You know, I actually think the public's more intelligent and more interested very often than they know.
00:32:39.740They have to give us this very simplified message, not give us a for and against that we can somehow evaluate, because they think if they do that, we'll become confused.
00:32:50.320This simplified message, so we'll all comply with this and just say to them, thank you, sir.
00:33:09.300Well, so come back to what you were talking about before, which is they were saying the transmission will not occur if you're vaccinated, and that was part of the way they approached this.
00:33:53.740How do these vaccines, the Pfizer and the Moderna in particular that we've used so extensively here,
00:33:59.300how do they compare in terms of that, in terms of how quickly they stop working, in terms of how ineffective they are after a period of time,
00:34:07.600to a typical normal vaccine that you would encourage anyone watching this to take or to give to their children?
00:44:05.120So it's all about risk-benefit analysis for the individual.
00:44:07.860So the idea that you would give a young man an mRNA vaccine for a disease which, for them, is very, very likely to be trivial.
00:44:18.540Never guaranteed, but very, very likely that a fit 18-year-old is not going to get very sick from COVID,
00:44:25.280especially a young, fit man who are more prone to these conditions.
00:44:29.160The idea that you would expose them to that risk of pericarditis or myocarditis, the risk-benefit analysis for them, to me, just simply doesn't add up.
00:44:40.640And in fact, if you look at the risk-benefit analysis, assuming that the risks of adverse events is around about one in a thousand,
00:44:48.700it basically doesn't add up for anyone anymore from a much less serious Omicron infection.
00:54:25.800Now, the key thing is, we have to be open to all possibilities.
00:54:31.760So if you take, in 1948, a guy called Austin Bradford Hill and Sir Richard Doll,
00:54:37.640they wanted to know why so many people were dying of lung cancer.
00:54:41.980They suspected it might be caused by air pollution and motor cars.
00:54:46.940But when they actually drilled down into the data, they found out that the people that were dying of lung cancer were smokers.
00:54:53.560So they actually were open to that possibility.
00:54:56.300And then what they actually tried to do after that was they tried to disprove their data.
00:55:02.140And they examined, I think it was about 40,000 British doctors over a 20-year period to try and disprove the idea that smoking was caused by lung cancer.
00:55:10.120And of course, then it became completely obvious that it was.
00:55:13.980So what we had there was honest, open investigation.
00:59:19.760But what I'm interested in, because of the way that this whole thing was approached, because I think, as you allude to, public health became almost, on certain occasions, sort of a public health became in conflict with truth.
00:59:36.200It became in conflict with medical evidence.
00:59:39.040And in the pursuit of trying to get people to, quote, unquote, do the right thing, the governments often, as you alluded to, again, told us things that weren't entirely true, encouraged us to do things that may have been, in their eyes, to the benefit of the population, but were not to the benefit of us as individuals.
00:59:54.000These are all problems, to me, that I hope we address going forward.
00:59:58.240And so, I suppose the real question that both Francis and I are trying to get at with you is, let's say we're in spring of 2023.
01:00:08.480Let's say towards the winter of this year, or perhaps the early months of next year, we get SARS-CoV-3, which is very similar in profile to COVID that we've just been through.
01:00:20.180What should we do as a society in that eventuality going forward, and what should we not do?
01:00:26.760You know, you've actually hit on one of the things that's been worrying me for some time there, Constantine, because there will be another pandemic.
01:01:11.300And, you know, various scenarios you can imagine, such as a lab leak scenario, which you could imagine, that a virus could come along with a fatality rate of, I hate to pick a number, 50% or more.
01:01:27.060You know, the virus could come along with a situation where no one trusts the government or medical experts.
01:01:34.700So September 2023, there could be a situation where we need vaccines in an emergency, where we need lockdowns, where we need all these emergency measures, because we could be dealing with a virus that's an existential threat to the existence of humanity.
01:01:50.240Now, God willing, this is not going to happen, you know, but there will be other pandemics.
01:01:57.320So if there was a really bad pandemic that was killing, say, 10% of people that got it, or just think of another, I don't even want to like to think about it, but, you know, let's suppose we're in a 1918-1919 situation, where, okay, losing old people is tragic.
01:02:14.040You know, I've lost a parent recently, it's part of life, but it's still difficult, but I've also lost a brother who is younger than me, and that is devastating, it's totally tragic.
01:02:28.300Just imagine we had a virus that was selectively killing children because of their immune naivety.
01:04:14.580But thankfully, that virus has not been transmitted human to human.
01:04:20.580But it's possible because what could happen if there's a co-infection situation?
01:04:24.760So you could have, say, a poultry worker in Cambodia who is infected with this very virulent avine virus, who has a normal influenza at the same time, which is very transmissible.
01:04:36.180And you could get a rejigging of the viral RNA inside an individual cell.
01:04:40.800So you could end up with a virus which is very pathogenic with a high death rate and transmissible.
01:05:10.840And I really just hope that biosecurity around that, that people stop this academic, largely pointless gain-of-function research on viruses.
01:06:00.920And we need something to control the funding or some audit processes on that because the next lab leak could be dramatically more pathogenic
01:06:14.820and even more transmissible than COVID.
01:06:18.220It's possible that that risk is there.
01:06:22.160And, John, what is the likelihood that we're going to be in another pandemic?
01:06:25.580Is it heightened because of certain factors?
01:06:28.620I know there are people who say because the world is warming up, that means that we're more likely to get another pandemic.
01:06:36.460As some people say, the way that we treat livestock and poultry means that we've increased the chances of getting another pandemic.
01:06:43.220Higher population density, all sorts of things.
01:06:46.200But I think there's three main factors there.
01:06:50.900The first is, are people going to be jiggling around with these things in labs?
01:06:56.360So, you know, put Porton down, do this.
01:07:00.960You know, we know that people are doing virological research.
01:07:04.500Having said that, the biosecurity in the UK is pretty good.
01:07:07.900The United States, in the United States, it's also pretty good.
01:07:12.600The problems in the United States, sometimes they are offshore research that can't be done in the United States to other parts of the world,
01:07:23.080which can lead to awkward consequences.
01:07:26.880So what one is people jiggling around with viruses, that's probably the biggest risk.
01:07:33.100The second biggest risk is probably mass animal monoculture.
01:07:42.960So we grow up thousands of cows and thousands of sheep and thousands of pigs, thousands of poultry,
01:07:48.980keep them in conditions which are nothing like the natural conditions.
01:07:52.020So a virus could spread amongst them really quite quickly.
01:07:56.160We had this situation actually in ferrets, if you remember, that there was lots of ferrets called in Denmark, Netherlands, I think.
01:08:03.100Where the virus spread amongst ferrets and they had to be killed in large amounts,
01:08:10.180largely because they were genetically the similar types of ferret.
01:08:14.240They didn't have the natural variation that you get in wild populations.
01:08:20.840So there's lab leak, the way we do farming.
01:08:23.240The third one is zoonotic spillover from wild animals.
01:08:28.860So you've got the way that wild animals are marketed and kept and treated as food sources in parts of Africa, Asia, China, Vietnam,
01:08:41.580you know, a lot of countries where wild animals are still exploited for food.
01:08:47.520And the interaction there with wild animals is going to greatly increase the risk of viral infection.
01:08:54.500In terms of a warming environment, probably less so.
01:09:00.500The main risk would be that the environmental change degrades animal habitat.
01:09:06.980And when you degrade animal habitat, the animals have to look for new habitats and then the animals are more likely to come into contact with humans.
01:09:16.180Because viruses, I mean, viruses, there's probably about roughly in the woods outside my house here,
01:09:23.040there's probably about 10 to the 22 different types of viruses.
01:09:26.520That's 10 with 22 noughts on the end or one with 22 noughts on the end.
01:09:29.480But there's incalculable, incalculable amounts of viruses out there.
01:11:01.240We probably couldn't survive without them, but it's like bacteria.
01:11:04.300We can't survive without those, but we like them to be in the right place.
01:11:07.200So we like lots of nice bacteria in our colon, but in the bloodstream, of course, we like absolutely zero bacteria.
01:11:14.420It's a matter of keeping these things in the correct ecological environment where they're supposed to be rather than human interference with them.
01:14:23.540And the evidence that that causes can lead to neuroregeneration in some people is pretty good.
01:14:29.800You know, we can actually regenerate some damaged nervous systems.
01:14:33.240That's not being taken up, as far as I'm aware, by the pharmaceutical industry, because you can't patent mushrooms.
01:14:41.380You know, or, and again, I'm not making political points about the current war or anything like that.
01:14:48.780But whole economic systems are geared to make money rather than help populations.
01:14:56.580And if we just put the importance and the sanctity of human life at the center and made our macroeconomic and microeconomic decisions based on that fundamental axiom, then would we be organizing the world, organizing economies, organizing societies on the grounds that we are?
01:15:20.920And the answer to that question clearly, in my mind, is no, we wouldn't.
01:15:23.980We would be changing things dramatically.
01:15:26.900Now, that is a very good note to end on.
01:15:28.800Dr. John Campbell, thank you so much for coming on.
01:15:38.960And thank you guys for watching and listening.
01:15:40.900We'll see you very soon on Locals with some bonus questions.
01:15:43.840Or if you're not joining us there, we'll see you on another brilliant interview like this one or also all of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.
01:15:50.340And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.