Where Did COVID-19 REALLY Come From？ With Matt Ridley
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Summary
Dr. Matt Ridley is a writer, a former Lord, and the author of the new book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Pandemic Pandemic, and co-author with Alina Chan, of the book, The Pandemic Virus.
Transcript
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Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
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The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,
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including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
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Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
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April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.
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The more we looked into it, the more extraordinary it was.
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They couldn't find any evidence for a connection with the food chain
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And the more the experiments and work that was going on
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today and a returning guest at that is a writer, a former Lord,
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and the author of a new book called Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.
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Former Lord, Matt Ridley. Welcome back to Trigonometry.
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Thank you so much, Gostadine. Great to be with you.
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I co-authored this book with Alina Chan, and she's the senior author on the book,
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Fantastic. Well, we've got you to talk about it. So here you are. Before we get into it,
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just tell a little bit about your background, your areas of expertise. How are you, where you are?
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Right. Yeah. Well, I started as a scientist, wasn't very good at it. So became a journalist.
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I was quite good at that, I think. But after a while, I basically became kind of self-employed
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writer, writing books, newspaper columns, things like that. But always with a particular interest
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in science. I got into the House of Lords in 2013. That was a part-time but interesting career. I've
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dropped out of that because I think actually I can make better use of my time. Now you either
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do that properly or not at all. And so I see myself as a writer about science.
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Well, your previous book, which I really enjoyed reading as well, was about innovation.
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And what I remember of that interview, we did it during one of the lockdowns that we've had.
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And we had a great conversation about innovation.
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And at the end, as we always do, quite casually, we went,
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so Matt, what's the one thing we're not talking about
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And you said something along the lines of the fact
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So you thought, oh my God, we've had a nutter on the program.
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that there was a sea change because of various things that came together suddenly the media
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started saying actually we can't rule out the possibility that came out of a laboratory
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we need to investigate it properly even the united nation sorry the the world health organization
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and uh the u.s government particularly the biden administration said very firmly yeah that
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explanation does have to be on the table and we've got to explain it so to some extent we're we're
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there still but there's been quite a lot of pushback recently saying oh please can we just
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drop this subject we better not you know of course it was natural most pandemics are natural so this
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one must have been we I started out telling people no don't go down that rabbit hole it's not out of
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a lab it's natural I've read these papers that say so I then began to think about the arguments they
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were using in those papers began to look at the evidence a bit more and I said well I think it's
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an open question. It does need to be investigated. Alina Chan and I started writing a book. We both
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thought that within a few months, it would probably become clear that it was something to do with that
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market. But the more we looked into it, the more extraordinary it was. They couldn't find any
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evidence for a connection with the food chain or the market or anything. And the more the
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experiments and work that was going on in that one laboratory began to look odd.
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Before we get into that, let me ask you a broader question first, which I think, sadly, a lot of people will be asking themselves and people like you and people like us who want to cover this issue.
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Everyone wants to move on from COVID, I think, except the people who benefit from it massively, which is a significant portion now of people online particularly.
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Why does it matter where this virus came from is what some people might say.
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yeah i'm staggered by how many people ask that question i know you're asking it because it has
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to be asked but uh you know for me it's obvious why it matters and you're right that apathy is
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probably our biggest challenge on this topic in particular it matters i think for three reasons
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first because if we don't understand how this pandemic started we're less likely to be able
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to stop the next one second because bad actors are watching this and saying we could do a lot
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of damage with a highly transmissible virus it doesn't even need to be very virulent
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and actually the who is going to come in and say well it probably happened naturally so we
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wouldn't even get blamed you know so unless we pin down what happened we're encouraging these
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bad actors and the third reason which i think is important is that we've got between five and
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15 million people dead now. We do owe it to them in some sense, I think, morally, if not
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otherwise, to find out what happened and how this happened. It's a great point. And when you told me
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about this, that people were saying it's not important, I found it baffling. But let's actually
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now look into the virus. What makes you think that there is a good chance the virus was created in a
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lab? Well, there's two main strands to answering that question. The first is the lack of evidence
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for the alternative natural hypothesis. In the case of SARS, within a couple of months, it was
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clear that food handlers had antibodies or had the virus, that the animals in the markets,
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particularly the palm civets, had the virus, etc, etc. A very clear pattern emerged. Today,
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with much superior technology you know much better genetic testing equipment we haven't been able to
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find a single infected animal not one I mean sure cats are catching it now but they're catching it
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from people you know nobody prior to the first human infection no animal had it and no food
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handlers no chefs none of the stuff we had with SARS so the normal pattern you'd expect and this
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happened with you know with nipper too which is a virus that was found in malaysia some time ago
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you know the pigs were getting it from fruit bats you know it was very clear how it was happening
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so none of that has happened in this case and they've tested 80 000 animals in china or claimed
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to have done and they've not found a single one with it on the other hand on the positive side
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you have to take into account the fact that the laboratory that was doing the most research on
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SARS-like viruses caught in bats in the world, by a mile, was in Wuhan. The laboratory that
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published most papers on this topic is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The laboratory that
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deposited most SARS-like virus genomes into databases is in Wuhan. That's not because this
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virus is found in bats around Wuhan. They've tested over 10,000 bats around Wuhan, and they've
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never found a virus like this in the bats there. So it's not a local issue. It's thousands of miles
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away. But, you know, here's an analogy. 2007, there was an outbreak of foot and mouth on a farm
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in Surrey. It was less than 13 miles from the world's leading reference laboratory for studying
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Right, that turned out not to be a coincidence.
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So, you know, if foot and mouth turns up in Purbright,
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you don't say, well, that's just a coincidence.
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A SARS-like outbreak in Wuhan is much the same.
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Well, this is one of the things that I think I didn't know,
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and I think most people don't know, is actually things leak from labs regularly.
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I mean, not regularly, like every day regularly, but they do leak from labs, right?
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It would not be an out-of-this-world once-in-a-millennium occurrence, would it?
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And so, you know, smallpox in 1978 in Birmingham,
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brucellosis in 2019 in China infected 10,000 people as a result of a laboratory accident.
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Now, that's a bacterium, not a virus, but still.
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But the most striking examples are SARS, because when the SARS epidemic was over in 2003-04,
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over that winter, there were at least six, we think, cases of laboratory workers getting
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infected in the lab while studying SARS. One in Singapore, one in Taiwan, and four in Beijing.
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and in in five of those cases nobody knew how it happened so it wasn't as if there was a drop test
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tube or a punctured glove or something like that so you know it's very easy for these things to
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happen and even in the best run laboratories you know it's of course most laboratories are safe
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most of the time but there are inevitably opportunities for these particularly a thing
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as transmissible as this to be caught in a lab.
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Or in the field, you know, one of the ironies of this work,
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was let's prevent the next pandemic by going out
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and finding all the viruses that might cause it in the wild
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and bringing them back to a lab in a city to study them.
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who's looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.
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yeah but but matt and that was because there was an incident in 2012 which is key to your
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hypothesis as to why perhaps it could have leaked from a lab could you delve into that a little bit
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please yes when the virus was first described in january of 2020 it was compared by the wuhan
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scientists in a paper to a virus they'd found in their own freezer which was 96.2 percent the same
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And I spent a day and a half trying to work out where they'd found it
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The name RATG13 didn't appear anywhere on the internet before that date.
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They say they found it before, but there's no report of where they found it,
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And it was over a month later that as a result of an anonymous tip-off
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to an Italian scientist called Rosanna Segretto,
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that killed three out of six people who caught it
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while shoveling bat guano in a disused mine shaft
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in southern Yunnan, roughly 1,800 kilometres by road
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from Wuhan which had led to very strong suspicions that it was caused by a SARS-like virus and that
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had led to the Wuhan Institute of Virology sending seven expeditions over two years to this mine
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shaft to collect bats and bring back samples one of which turned out to have this sample in it
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which they renamed just before the pandemic which is a bit weird and it took another six months and
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a brilliant Spaniard on the internet called Francisco Ribeira before we were all suddenly
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able to say, hang on, didn't you find eight other viruses that are very similar in that mineshaft?
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And six months after that, they published an addendum to their nature paper saying, yeah,
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we did find eight other viruses that are very similar, but we didn't think it was important
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to tell you about that so getting information about what happened between 2012 and 2019
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was pretty difficult and one of the things that they implied that they had only sequenced the
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new the bat virus in 2020 when the pandemic started but it later emerged on the when they
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deposited the data on the genome database it had a date label on it which said that they'd sequenced
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it in 2017 and 2018 so they'd thought it a couple of years before the pandemic in order to study it
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now why what were they doing with it they've never told us it's it's important that we know this kind
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of stuff it might be irrelevant and if it is they should share all the information they've got but
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they've never shared what viral sequences they had in that lab after 2016 and that's what we need to
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know broadway's smash hit the neil diamond musical a beautiful noise is coming to toronto the true
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2026 the princess of wales theater get tickets at mirvish.com and this is a point i think because
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the chinese government have been very very secretive and you know have been obstructing
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investigations have been outright denial and you look at them and even as a casual observer you
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think to yourself there's something shady going on because you're not being completely honest
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well if it wasn't anything to do with the laboratory then the best way of convincing us
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of that is to share the database of everything that was in that lab there is a database it's
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got 22 000 entries in it samples sequences you know where things were found what they were about
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15,000 of them relate to bats it was available up until the 12th of September 2019 for outsiders
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to check although part of it was password protected since then it's been offline now the
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purpose of that database was to help prevent the next pandemic and so as Alina puts it which
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pandemic are they waiting for you know I mean this is surely the moment you produce this they
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say well you people have been trying to hack it well what does that mean were they trying to hack
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it in in 2019 in september 2019 doesn't seem very likely and um anyway what's the problem with
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someone hacking it you know it's information that you collected in order to share with the world
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to help prevent a pandemic so why would you mind if it got into the public domain uh so there's a
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there's a lot here that badly needs answering um and yes scientists were gagged right at the start
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They were told any Chinese scientist who published anything about this virus
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without permission of the state was going to be punished.
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So there's been a, you know, far from being open and transparent,
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which they were praised by the World Health Organization
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for being at the start, ironically, they haven't been.
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And as I say, if there's nothing to hide, then don't hide it.
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it's really a question that I think is important to address is
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what is the benefit of these laboratories doing this work,
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particularly when you're talking about gain-of-function research,
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which I think a lot of people have questions about.
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Maybe can you just explain to people why are these labs doing this?
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What are the benefits of doing that, if there are any, et cetera?
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Yeah. Well, there was quite a lively debate, actually, in about 2018, between one group of
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virologists who said, this is what we've got to do. We've got to prevent the next pandemic by
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going out there and finding the threats and studying them. And another group of scientists
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who said, that ain't going to work. You're not going to be able to find the virus that's likely
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to cause the next pandemic, because you've no idea among the millions of viruses out there,
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which is the one that's really dangerous. And actually, you're playing with fire,
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you might make it worse so that you know this was a live argument in in within virology um and so
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what have they been doing they've been collecting viruses in bats in this case bringing them to the
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lab sequencing their genomes then they've been doing two other things first of all trying to
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grow one of these viruses alive in the lab which is not at all easy you know you get evidence that
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there's a virus in the sample, but it's not in a state where it can replicate in a human cell
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in the lab. But they did manage with a couple of viruses called WIV1 and WIV16 to so-called
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isolate or at least, you know, rear the virus, you know, get it to grow and reproduce,
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which is, you know, a little risky, but it's interesting. They did this at biosecurity level
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too which is basically wearing gloves and maybe a mask you know it's not much more than that
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which is probably not ideal um they they but then for the ones they couldn't grow in the lab
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they thought we want to know how dangerous these are we can sequence them we can see what the the
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sequence of the genome is but it's too fragmented to be able to grow as a creature so let's synthesize
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And let's swap that into one of these viruses we can grow,
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These are so-called chimera viruses or hybrid viruses.
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And some of those experiments resulted in viruses
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that were 10,000 times more transmissible between cells.
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and some of them resulted in ones that were three or four times more lethal to humanized mice that's
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mice with human genes so these were significant gains of function in the sense of you know have
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you made the virus more able to infect human beings and human cells and remember every time
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you put it into human cells human airway epithelial cells so cells taken from the lungs and cultured
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in labs every time you do that you're giving the virus a lesson in how to how to attack this new
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host and it's gonna not just stay the same it's gonna mutate and evolve and say hmm oh i'll try
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this you know of course it doesn't i'm not trying to pretend it's conscious but do you see what it's
00:20:00.920
called passaging yes you know and it does adapt to to the new host so it was very interesting when
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a few weeks ago we finally got hold of the content of some key emails between Anthony Fauci in
00:20:13.920
America and Jeremy Farrar in the UK and a bunch of other senior virologists in which they all
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basically said there are features of this virus that looks like it might have been passaged in
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human cells and we can't explain them any other way and this particularly relates to a thing
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called the furin cleavage site which I can get into if you want but maybe you know. I think
00:20:36.920
We can just leave that there, but the question you haven't answered is,
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what are the potential benefits of this kind of research?
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I'm sorry, you're quite right to press me on that.
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And so the purpose of the research, as I say, was to predict and prevent the next pandemic.
00:20:53.240
No, but what's the mechanism by which that happens?
00:20:54.780
The mechanism by which that was going to happen was going to be by saying,
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we've identified that this strain of virus is dangerous.
00:21:09.160
we need to go and check whether anybody's catching it
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in the forest near the cave where we found the bat
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and they even put in a proposal to the Pentagon
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I mean I can't believe they didn't get the money for that
00:21:30.220
Hey Francis, are you worried about big tech stealing your data?
00:21:36.020
I've forgotten how to switch my phone on. Why doesn't it have an on button like my Walkman?
00:21:42.280
Never mind. Those of you whose technology extends beyond the 1980s are rightly concerned about your
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They do talk in recent years particularly more and more about vaccines,
00:23:13.360
about the idea is eventually we might be able to develop a vaccine against SARS
00:23:18.580
and a vaccine against any SARS-like or indeed any coronavirus
00:23:23.280
because SARS-like viruses are only a small fraction of coronaviruses.
00:23:28.200
So, you know, the ultimate aim would have been to come up with a vaccine
00:23:34.460
that they had ready to stop a pandemic when it suddenly started.
00:23:40.440
now you can imagine if you were in charge of that kind of research how horrifying it would be
00:23:49.780
to be accused of starting the pandemic instead of preventing it so no wonder they have a very
00:23:57.120
strong incentive to resist that explanation but even on its own terms you know remember the purpose
00:24:03.060
of this research over the last 10 years was to prevent the next pandemic well it didn't do that
00:24:07.460
did it so but matt how is it and again you're talking to an absolute layman here you get this
00:24:14.160
virus right you make it more lethal more transmissible by over 10 000 times 12 times
00:24:20.640
more lethal three to four or three to four times more lethal whatever it is are you just not you're
00:24:26.240
not playing with fire here well um if you read the papers that are coming out of the wuhan
00:24:34.280
Institute of Virology, you don't get the impression that they are particularly worried about that.
00:24:44.060
With one exception, there's a paper in 2015 co-authored with Ralph Baric of the University
00:24:50.800
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is the sort of godfather of this kind of research. He started
00:24:55.340
that kind of work, but mostly on other kinds of coronaviruses. He only got into SARS-like ones
00:25:06.660
and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:25:25.760
which was started by some influenza experiments.
00:25:30.980
and another team in Wisconsin had done these experiments
00:25:35.760
in which they turned a bird flu into a mammal flu, effectively.
00:25:38.880
They made it possible for ferrets to give flu to other ferrets,
00:25:44.420
a flu that previously could only be transmitted from bird to bird,
00:25:52.580
The experiment was done in incredibly safe conditions,
00:25:55.560
a huge amount of preparation to make sure that it was safe.
00:25:58.540
and the the answer it gave was it's much easier for this virus to turn into a mammal
00:26:05.300
flu than we thought so that's a warning and we're glad we did the experiment so that we know that
00:26:12.520
but there was a bunch of other scientists who said should you really be doing this i mean didn't we
00:26:18.800
know it was possible for this to happen what if it were to escape you know how dangerous would
00:26:25.400
that be you've basically trained a virus to attack mammals which it wasn't expecting to do
00:26:33.140
so that's what the gain of function pause was all about a pause in federal funding between 2014 and
00:26:41.740
2017 saying let's not fund these kinds of experiments and let's not publish the details
00:26:46.740
of how we did them so that other people can't pick up on them and then in 2017 under donald
00:26:52.980
Trump but was it Anthony Fauci who wanted it changed because he'd always argued against the
00:26:57.660
pause we don't know that the pause was ended but meanwhile during the pause some American money
00:27:07.120
had gone to fund similar experiments in Wuhan. This is something I'm Francis I'm just sorry I
00:27:14.620
just want to pick up on this one point which is I know this isn't strictly about the virus
00:27:18.460
but it is about the other stuff can you again to the layman and me why why are the united states
00:27:30.420
funding research of this kind in china how does this why is this this thing happening
00:27:36.800
aren't countries like do you show i'm getting that yes and and the answer which is superficially
00:27:43.680
sensible um is that emerging pandemics are not going to come out of north carolina yeah they
00:27:51.280
might but you know not necessarily there's every chance they're going to come out of tropical
00:27:55.840
regions particularly forested regions places lots of bats the bats as a source of dangerous
00:28:02.300
viruses has clearly come up the agenda in the last 20 years because ebola is in bats nipa's in bats
00:28:07.040
hendra's from bats rabies is from bats you know there's a bats bats seem to carry a lot of diseases
00:28:12.320
that might spark pandemics um so let's go to where they're where these viruses live and let's
00:28:20.640
study them and let's fund researchers in those countries to uh to work on them so there's an
00:28:29.180
organization called eco health alliance which is a new york-based foundation which grew out of a
00:28:34.100
wildlife charity founded by gerald durrell funnily enough and very entrepreneurially a guy called
00:28:40.320
Peter Daszak, spotted this opportunity and said, in the wake of SARS, there's suddenly a lot of
00:28:44.740
money for this project of going out and looking for infected animals in the wild. And so he started
00:28:54.900
getting huge American government grants and distributing them to partners in other parts
00:29:02.140
of the world. And his biggest partner was the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And one of his best
00:29:06.620
friends was Shi Zhengli the head of the key laboratory there and they went on many expeditions
00:29:11.180
together to bat caves and don protective equipment and caught bats and things like that so it's very
00:29:17.160
much a collaboration and remember scientists love international collaborations and you know they
00:29:22.720
think it's a good idea but the the paper that describes some of these chimeric virus experiments
00:29:45.920
Most of the money came from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
00:29:53.440
Not, I think, necessarily to get around the pause
00:29:59.740
might have been a bit of that but just because everyone is making an argument this is stuff we
00:30:05.180
should be funding because we're going to prevent the next pandemic and I don't think they'd really
00:30:09.100
thought it through myself you know I personally think I'm a huge fan of science I'm a big pro
00:30:14.660
biotech person but I think scientists need to rethink what experiments are going to damage
00:30:22.080
their own reputation if they go wrong for us at the very least don't you think it also betrays a
00:30:27.580
certain arrogance among scientists you know playing with these things playing god if you will
00:30:32.820
without realizing that you're human and being human you're going to make mistakes it doesn't
00:30:38.080
matter how many systems you put in place it doesn't matter how rigorous the systems are the
00:30:42.880
safety checks it's human beings running this they're fallible they're going to make a mistake
00:30:48.120
and if something like that gets out well we're going to be even even more problems than we are
00:30:51.880
already yeah and you know ralph barrick who as i say is the kind of godfather of this has
00:30:56.880
has been uh implicitly critical of the fact that some of these experiments were being done at low
00:31:03.660
biosecurity levels china was in the process of building its first biosecurity level four lab
00:31:10.020
during these years what does that mean okay well biosecurity level just take us through all the
00:31:16.380
levels yeah biosecurity level two you're wearing gloves probably a mask you're being a bit careful
00:31:21.940
it's like being in central london basically exactly um uh biosecurity level and that's the
00:31:29.900
level they they did experiments on cells on yeah when they went to infecting live mice with viruses
00:31:36.200
they went up a level to biosecurity level three now what that's doing is you've got a cabinet
00:31:41.340
with negative air pressure so that you know the air is sort of going in and not coming out at you
00:31:46.280
and you're working on them in with gloves that are sort of built into the cabinet yes okay so
00:31:52.040
that's pretty good yeah and you've seen that but it's good level four you're doing that but you're
00:31:57.920
also wearing a space suit and the space suit has positive air pressure in it so you're you know
00:32:03.500
you inflate like the michelin man and that's so that if you puncture your suit the air goes out
0.50
00:32:09.480
not in so nothing can get into you and you shower before you take the suit off and you shower after
00:32:17.000
you take the suit off and you then put your clothes on so your clothes have not even been in
00:32:20.960
the lab etc etc and the lab has no sharp edges and it has no corners in which you can't clean
00:32:26.580
and things like that so and and the the air handling is absolutely critical so these are
00:32:31.160
really difficult labs to build and this one was built in wuhan with french help the french agreed
00:32:38.360
to give them the technology for how to build it.
00:32:53.600
because the Chinese, having got the engineering details,
00:32:57.820
basically said, well, we're not going to involve any French firms
00:32:59.740
and we're not going to invite any French scientists after all.
00:33:05.960
um but when these when ben who's paper came out the american embassy sent some experts
00:33:16.200
to wuhan saying could we come and have a look around because you've asked for help from the
00:33:21.900
university of texas galveston medical branch to improve the functioning of this biosecurity level
00:33:29.040
four lab um we'd love we'd like to come and you know see see around and they wrote a pretty
00:33:35.140
scathing report saying the procedures are not good the training is not good the equipment is
00:33:40.280
is not as good as it should be and that was in 2018 so there were concerns but it's not necessarily
00:33:47.220
relevant to this story because the experiments that i'm talking about were done at biostecutive
00:33:51.740
level three and two and they were done on the old campus of the wuhan institute of virology which is
00:33:58.280
about 10 miles from the new campus when the world health organization team went a year ago pretty
00:34:03.500
well exactly to wuhan they only visited the new campus they didn't go to the campus where these
00:34:09.460
experiments were actually done right well i do think it's relevant actually matt because as again
00:34:14.680
as a layman it just sounds to me like you're not dealing with a counterparty in china that has the
00:34:20.860
same attitude to this level of safety that you might do elsewhere and as a russian i'm allowed
00:34:25.560
to say this, not all of the world operates on things exactly like we do here in the West, right?
00:34:31.000
And attitudes to safety, attitudes to care, attitudes to precision of engineering, not quite
00:34:38.100
the same in some countries as they are in others. So I think what it may be that it didn't happen
00:34:43.900
there, it might have happened elsewhere. But I think what it speaks to is the fact that these
00:34:48.220
are not necessarily people that can be trusted with this level of threat. Well, yes, we've got
00:34:54.620
to be careful here these are perfectly good scientists doing sure pioneering work and uh
00:35:00.480
the technology and engineering is as good as many places in the world but of course it's
00:35:05.340
may not be quite the particularly if you're if you're you know the off this is your first foray
00:35:10.340
into this kind of level of work but just going back to to to the to a russian example there was
00:35:17.840
a city called Sverdlovsk, now Ekaterinburg, where about 68 people died suddenly. And there's a
00:35:28.220
plant in the city that the West said was a biowarfare plant. Could it have been a leak of
00:35:35.300
anthrax? The Soviets said, don't be ridiculous, they died of food poisoning. And we've investigated,
0.99
00:35:41.580
forget it and so the americans said well could we send matt meselson a nobel prize winner and a
00:35:48.440
bunch of other people to to to confirm what you've said this is the this is 1979 was the incident
00:35:53.800
um meselson and co went they said the russians are right there's nothing to see here the soviet
00:36:01.360
union then collapsed and some of the scientists who worked in that bio warfare plant and it was
00:36:06.580
a bio warfare plant then came forward and said actually that was a leak it was anthrax that
00:36:12.460
killed 68 people we left a filter off an exhaust pipe and we left a note for the next shift saying
00:36:19.700
remember to put the filter back on before you do it and they didn't read the note and we sent a
00:36:23.860
bloom of anthrax over a suburb um so it took a change of regime yes before we found out what
00:36:30.560
really happened well this is my point matt i wasn't trying to insult scientists who are doing
00:36:34.620
the work or whatever i just know that kind of regime right and the chinese communist party
00:36:41.060
does not seem to me to be a million miles away from the party under which i lived the early part
00:36:45.700
of my life these are people by and large who will do everything to cover up the truth if it means
00:36:50.300
not losing face in in in the west and to avoid responsibility for things they've done that
00:36:55.720
doesn't mean they are responsible but i certainly don't have a lot of faith or trust in that kind
00:37:00.940
of institution we we tell us a slightly amusing story in our book um about a leak that happened
00:37:06.480
in may 2020 in central china and this was a leak of leopards okay there was a guy out in this field
00:37:16.320
one day on the edge of a city i can't remember which city in china and suddenly there's a leopard
00:37:21.600
sitting in his field and he goes whoa i've just seen a leopard now you can't see the leopard
00:37:25.440
there's no leopards around here yeah i saw a leopard and somebody else says i've seen a leopard
00:37:28.900
and suddenly there's all this you know people are seeing leopards and um he doesn't dare report it
00:37:35.520
because he thinks well I'll probably get told off if I report this uh but eventually the news
00:37:41.640
reaches a media organization which ring up the local zoo and said have you lost any leopards
00:37:45.760
no no we haven't lost any leopards and more sightings more leopards they ring them back
00:37:52.180
and say have you lost any leopards well actually yeah we did lose some leopards
00:37:55.360
why have you seen them you know and but the point is nobody wanted to own up yeah and under that
00:38:04.880
kind of regime that happens you know there is no uh there's no upside to blowing a whistle no
00:38:12.020
then there's no transparency as a result but that makes me think matt everything that you have said
00:38:18.060
everything that we've talked about means in my mind it's inevitable that this is going to happen
00:38:23.480
again well one thing we in our book argue is that there's not been much evidence of anyone saying
00:38:34.040
let's change our procedures as a result of this so as to make sure it doesn't happen again
00:38:41.760
that's true of the markets as well we're not seeing a huge crackdown on the sale of wildlife
00:38:47.860
in markets for traditional Chinese medicine or for food and you'd think if that was the cause
00:38:55.200
we would be seeing that and the one thing we have seen interestingly is a change in the rules in
00:39:04.180
China to make the fines for selling experimental animals in the market bigger okay so if you want
00:39:14.900
to market some if you want to take mice home at the end of your shift and and and make a little
00:39:20.540
money by selling them for food in the market i mean don't look at me like that why would you
00:39:25.880
anyway do you see what i mean yeah yeah then suddenly they've put the fines up for that
00:39:31.500
okay why would they suddenly put the fines up for that does that mean that they suspect that's what
00:39:37.120
happen? Probably not. Maybe they're just being careful. But, you know, the world needs to stop
00:39:45.500
and think which experiments, whether this came out of a lab or not, which experiments should we
00:39:51.700
revisit and say, let's not do those kind of experiments. When biotechnology started in the
00:39:57.400
mid-1970s, scientists got together at a place called Azilamar in California and said, let's
00:40:04.220
draw up some rules to reassure the world that we're not going to do crazy stuff with this new
00:40:09.020
genetic engineering and one of the rules they came up with was we shouldn't work on highly
00:40:13.500
pathogenic organisms we should don't you know we should work on e coli and which is mostly a
00:40:19.140
friendly organism and there is a disease you can get from e coli but you know they were saying don't
00:40:22.820
let's work on the pathogenic strains let's work on the safe strains well they quite in those days
00:40:29.200
all about bacteria you know it wasn't about viruses but you know when did that change and
00:40:34.760
how far did we go to the point where we're doing risky experiments with dangerous viruses i mean i
00:40:41.740
i consider myself well educated in genomics and biotechnology although i'm no great expert
00:40:48.880
i didn't know this kind of work was going on until the pandemic started and i think i'd have been
00:40:55.180
quite shocked if I'd read some of those papers and seen how much a SARS-like virus had been
00:41:01.380
increased in infectivity or virulence. And the fact that I find even more worrying is that
00:41:08.140
it seems to be business as normal. But there's another way that we can create a type of pandemic
00:41:13.720
virus. It's the way that we keep animals when we transport them, particularly things like chickens,
00:41:18.260
etc how much of a danger is that yeah well um there was a there was a crash on a freeway in
00:41:28.300
america last week um and all these cardboard boxes were all over the freeway they contained monkeys
00:41:34.980
live monkeys that were being transported from a port where they'd been imported from mauritius
00:41:41.280
to be used in experiments in a lab somewhere and luckily the monkeys didn't escape or anything
00:41:48.960
like that but you're right there's there's all sorts of risks in the handling of animals
00:41:55.400
there's no question about that um uh i mean there's actually quite a significant bird flu
00:42:02.220
epidemic going on in the uk at the moment it's affecting barnacle geese in parts of scotland
00:42:09.400
and they're dying in pretty large numbers as far as we can tell that's entirely natural
00:42:14.800
it's not come because of chicken farms but if it were to get into chicken farms
00:42:20.160
it could be quite unfunny um if you see what i mean so you know we we
00:42:26.980
actually i don't want to sound too alarmist here because i think
00:42:32.160
with the technology we have for detecting things with our general high standards which are getting
00:42:40.760
higher all the time the chances of a pandemic getting going in the human race are pretty low
00:42:47.200
now that may sound a crazy thing to say in the middle of a pandemic but my point is that this
00:42:52.920
one might be a bit of an exception which was caused by something that wouldn't normally be
00:42:58.840
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and this is just a devil's advocate point of view,
00:44:23.340
where you create a much worse virus than the one you started with
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because if it's just a gigantic coincidence that this lab was in Wuhan but it had nothing to do
00:45:29.860
with the outbreak and it had the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 in its freezer but that's just a
00:45:35.800
coincidence and and it just happened to be that a bloke was importing um hog badgers from somewhere
00:45:44.160
in a farm on southern Yunnan and he stopped in a roadside cave
00:45:50.740
and there were bats in the cave and they picked it up
00:45:53.860
and he then went nowhere else and he only took his hog badgers to Wuhan,
00:45:57.260
not to Guangzhou, which is where most hog badgers are sold, interestingly, etc.
00:46:03.720
Okay, I'm making it sound a bit too implausible,
00:46:06.720
It's possible that there's a perfectly innocent explanation here
00:46:10.140
that involves the food chain and we can't rule that out.
00:46:12.880
And we actually have a chapter at the end of our book
00:46:17.480
And we say things like, of course the scientists were studying this
00:46:21.100
because they were expecting it to happen and things like that.
00:46:29.320
Well, if that's the case and it's a huge coincidence,
00:46:42.880
but we know enough to know that if this virus had been in a biosecurity level 2
00:46:49.360
lab in an experiment, and one of the researchers would be almost bound to have got infected.
00:46:58.700
You know, it's so infectious, this thing, as we know from our daily lives at the moment,
00:47:03.800
that you really shouldn't be having such a thing in a lab, whether it caused this pandemic or not.
00:47:09.500
so let's have a real hard think about how we regulate experiments and let's also have a real
00:47:19.700
hard think about how transparent we are after a pandemic starts because it's not good enough to
00:47:25.160
have all this secrecy yet again like we had with SARS when an airliner crashes
00:47:30.760
the information from the black box and other sources is shared all across the industry
00:47:37.680
everybody gets to know what happened so that you can learn the lessons it feels to us like that
00:47:43.100
ought to happen in these cases if there's an incident in a lab because somebody punctures a
00:47:49.300
glove there ought to be an automatic will every lab in the world gets to hear about how that
00:47:54.100
happened without you know wanting to send the guy to jail for puncturing his glove just saying
00:47:59.800
beware we've discovered that you know it's not sensible to have hypodermic needles
00:48:05.140
next to gloves or whatever it might be you know you know because that's what you do in the airline
00:48:10.320
industry you say we've discovered a little glitch that we didn't realize was risky but it is
00:48:14.160
let's do that but but isn't this the central flaw of the argument which is
00:48:18.520
i think we can all accept we can't trust the ccp they're not going to be honest they're not going
1.00
00:48:24.860
to be forthcoming so this is just going to happen again isn't it because we're never going to learn
00:48:30.360
these lessons well but what if america britain australia european countries japan all got
00:48:37.780
together and said here's a treaty in which we all agree to share information when this kind of thing
00:48:42.500
happens we share every incident from every lab in our countries with you everybody who signs this
00:48:49.560
treaty gets to hear about what happens at perbright when we have a leaking pipe with a foot and mouth
00:48:54.180
virus in it and more and more countries sign it eventually we shame china into signing it
1.00
00:49:02.800
now i don't know how you do that that's way above my pay grade but do you get the point you know
00:49:08.140
that a pandemic treaty that we build up in that way might be the way of making sure that even
00:49:14.560
communist regimes are shamed would the soviet union have signed a treaty like that matt that's
00:49:21.480
my question. You tell me. No. No way. There is no way a regime like that would share all of their
00:49:27.860
secrets, particularly their mess-ups. No, but it does at least put some pressure on them. It does
00:49:33.900
at least show, you know, it shines up the fact that they're not collaborating, not cooperating.
00:49:39.460
Maybe if it came with not giving them money to do it anymore and whatever. But I guess what I'm
00:49:44.480
hearing is you're not suggesting a blanket ban on this type of research. You're saying it should be
00:49:49.920
done in a more secure lab, there should be more supervision, there should be more transparency
00:49:53.860
after the fact. That's your position? Well, I'd go a little bit further than that. I'd say let's
00:49:58.380
not do gain-of-function experiments on dangerous viruses that are related to viruses that could
00:50:04.500
cause human disease. Yeah, I mean, there's also lots of chemical and biological weapons that are
00:50:10.180
completely banned that are being researched in Russia, in China at the moment. So it's great
00:50:17.200
news all around mate yeah the future is bright the future is uh pandemic yeah your future's one
00:50:22.160
giant pathogen um yes let me make a slightly optimistic point which is that when this started
00:50:28.240
there was a lot of stuff about how this is you know our own punishment for reaping the earth
00:50:35.500
you know and there's a sort of ecological angle to this yeah um and i pointed out that actually
00:50:41.600
the one place that isn't deforesting because deforestation is the key link here um the one
00:50:47.040
place that isn't deforesting well lots of places aren't but the place that's reforesting faster than
00:50:51.740
almost anywhere on the planet is southern china actually there's an enormous growth in the amount
00:50:55.780
of green vegetation in that area people are leaving the the countryside and going into the
00:50:59.900
cities abandoning farms they're getting overgrown with vegetation etc this is a huge trend there
00:51:04.840
um so if anything the problem is too much forest and too many bats it's not that we're destroying
00:51:09.920
their habitat and they're all having to move into town these bats don't live in buildings anyway
00:51:14.020
they live in caves they horseshoe bats do mostly um so if this turns out to be an exception as a
00:51:22.420
result of a human error then in some ways it's reassuring in the sense that all we have to do
00:51:29.480
is not do the human error and we might not get a future pandemic matt isn't the problem going to
00:51:35.340
be and look you're an optimist i'm a miserable pessimist isn't the problem going to be that
00:51:41.560
we're never going to find out alina and i both take the view that we will eventually find out
00:51:49.540
we think enough people know one way or the other i mean there might be information about the market
00:51:56.900
that hasn't come out there might be information about the lab that hasn't come out but at some
00:52:02.300
point maybe after the fall of xi jinping's regime somebody's going to come forward and say here's
00:52:09.380
what happened that we've there must be people who could blow the whistle and tell us more now at the
00:52:15.760
moment it's far too difficult for them to do so and we're probably not welcoming enough for them
00:52:20.640
in the west alina makes this point quite often you know we need to as it were roll out the red carpet
00:52:25.400
for somebody who comes and talks but i think it's amazing how stuff does eventually trickle out
00:52:32.780
and we're having a constant trickle at the moment i mean we you know we had a key document break in
00:52:37.700
september another one just a few weeks ago um you know here's a little story that that happened in
00:52:45.760
uh in november there's a paper came out from a french group saying we found a very similar virus
00:52:52.720
in bats in Laos. It's slightly more similar than that one from the mine, which if it's flitting
00:52:59.640
around in bats in Laos, that slightly takes the Wuhan Institute of Virology off the hook, doesn't
00:53:04.100
it? And I pointed out that, yeah, but EcoHealth Alliance has been collecting bats in Laos and
00:53:10.360
sending them to Wuhan for analysis. And EcoHealth Alliance tweeted, you're wrong, we've never done
00:53:16.800
that and so i tweeted back well here's an entry in a genome database of a virus collected in laos
00:53:24.060
by the eco health alliance and deposited in wuhan please tell me what i'm misunderstanding here
00:53:30.740
blocked and reported pretty well not replied to um and i repeated the question several days in a row
00:53:38.560
never got an answer you know so the stuff we need to know and it's not just in the china in the west
00:53:46.280
the stuff we need to know so there's more stuff can come out the truth is out there
00:53:50.720
matt ridley it's been great having you back on the show i'm not i'm normally more on your side
00:53:57.020
optimistic but as ever you've made me much sadder about the future thank you very much for that
00:54:01.460
listen the book is called viral this the the search for the origin of covid 19 there you go
00:54:08.400
i forgot the subtitle it's it's it's a great read and very important book and i i do hope you're
00:54:12.980
right that we will eventually get to the truth maybe even before the next pandemic
00:54:17.080
matt thank you so much for coming on we've got as always questions for our locals only supporters
00:54:23.020
which we'll do in a second but before that we have a final question which is always what's the
00:54:26.920
one thing we're not talking about but we really should be i'm i i think it's very important that
00:54:36.140
we don't lose sight of the big benefits of biotech so despite everything i've said about the dangers
00:54:45.060
of of this viral research i i'm not hearing a good conversation in britain in particular about
00:54:53.260
the enormous benefits of doing gene editing on agriculture on medicine on all sorts of things
00:55:03.800
Why aren't we talking about de-extinction more?
00:55:20.460
The de-extinction is simply bringing back the mammoth
00:55:23.100
or bringing back the passenger pigeon or the great orc.
00:55:57.800
Yeah, that's what we need, some COVID-infected dinosaurs.
00:56:04.520
This is probably the last episode in the history of the world.
00:56:18.640
I should probably have said that, but there we are.
00:56:50.400
Through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.