TRIGGERnometry - Where Did COVID-19 REALLY Come From？ With Matt Ridley

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00:00:30.000 The more we looked into it, the more extraordinary it was.

00:00:33.960 They couldn't find any evidence for a connection with the food chain

00:00:37.340 or the market or anything.

00:00:39.360 And the more the experiments and work that was going on

00:00:44.260 in that one laboratory began to look odd.

00:00:53.020 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:55.540 I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:56.840 I'm Constantine Kissinger.

00:00:57.980 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:03.260 Our brilliant guest today and a returning guest at that is a writer, a former Lord,

00:01:08.860 and the author of a new book called Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.

00:01:13.280 Co-author, I should say, with Alina Chan.

00:01:14.980 Very important, yeah.

00:01:16.000 Former Lord, Matt Ridley. Welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:01:19.500 Thank you so much, Gostadine. Great to be with you.

00:01:21.300 I co-authored this book with Alina Chan, and she's the senior author on the book,

00:01:25.980 but it's a double effort.

00:01:27.980 Fantastic. Well, we've got you to talk about it. So here you are. Before we get into it,

00:01:33.140 just tell a little bit about your background, your areas of expertise. How are you, where you are?

00:01:37.880 Right. Yeah. Well, I started as a scientist, wasn't very good at it. So became a journalist.

00:01:43.880 I was quite good at that, I think. But after a while, I basically became kind of self-employed

00:01:49.440 writer, writing books, newspaper columns, things like that. But always with a particular interest

00:01:55.520 in science. I got into the House of Lords in 2013. That was a part-time but interesting career. I've

00:02:02.340 dropped out of that because I think actually I can make better use of my time. Now you either

00:02:06.960 do that properly or not at all. And so I see myself as a writer about science.

00:02:13.060 Well, your previous book, which I really enjoyed reading as well, was about innovation.

00:02:17.280 And what I remember of that interview, we did it during one of the lockdowns that we've had.

00:02:21.880 I think it was the first lockdown.

00:02:23.000 It might have been the first lockdown.

00:02:24.180 You're right.

00:02:24.600 And we had a great conversation about innovation.

00:02:26.360 And at the end, as we always do, quite casually, we went,

00:02:29.180 so Matt, what's the one thing we're not talking about

00:02:31.420 that we really should be?

00:02:32.440 And you said something along the lines of the fact

00:02:34.360 that this virus probably came from a lab

00:02:36.240 or something along those lines.

00:02:37.840 And we both went, oh shit,

00:02:40.400 because this was part of the time

00:02:41.760 when that was still being censored.

00:02:43.760 So you thought, oh my God, we've had a nutter on the program.

00:02:46.280 No, I didn't actually.

00:02:47.460 I thought, oh my God, we had a person

00:02:48.820 who has quite a reasonable point of view

00:02:50.400 that I think should be explored

00:02:51.960 for which we'll be punished.

00:02:53.360 That's what I actually thought.

00:02:54.460 Well, it is staggering looking back

00:02:56.780 how very much you weren't allowed

00:02:59.920 to talk about that topic

00:03:02.380 in the early part of the pandemic.

00:03:05.080 It was shut down very quickly

00:03:06.400 in February, March 2020

00:03:08.280 as a conspiracy theory akin to,

00:03:11.340 you know, it's caused by 5G

00:03:12.940 or something like that.

00:03:15.200 And it's only really in the May of 2021

00:03:19.700 that there was a sea change because of various things that came together suddenly the media

00:03:25.320 started saying actually we can't rule out the possibility that came out of a laboratory

00:03:29.120 we need to investigate it properly even the united nation sorry the the world health organization

00:03:34.160 and uh the u.s government particularly the biden administration said very firmly yeah that

00:03:39.700 explanation does have to be on the table and we've got to explain it so to some extent we're we're

00:03:44.920 there still but there's been quite a lot of pushback recently saying oh please can we just

00:03:48.840 drop this subject we better not you know of course it was natural most pandemics are natural so this

00:03:53.980 one must have been we I started out telling people no don't go down that rabbit hole it's not out of

00:04:02.540 a lab it's natural I've read these papers that say so I then began to think about the arguments they

00:04:08.260 were using in those papers began to look at the evidence a bit more and I said well I think it's

00:04:13.320 an open question. It does need to be investigated. Alina Chan and I started writing a book. We both

00:04:19.540 thought that within a few months, it would probably become clear that it was something to do with that

00:04:24.020 market. But the more we looked into it, the more extraordinary it was. They couldn't find any

00:04:29.500 evidence for a connection with the food chain or the market or anything. And the more the

00:04:36.140 experiments and work that was going on in that one laboratory began to look odd.

00:04:42.000 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.

00:04:54.560 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.

00:05:03.140 Why does it matter where this virus came from is what some people might say.

00:05:07.400 yeah i'm staggered by how many people ask that question i know you're asking it because it has

00:05:14.320 to be asked but uh you know for me it's obvious why it matters and you're right that apathy is

00:05:20.400 probably our biggest challenge on this topic in particular it matters i think for three reasons

00:05:26.700 first because if we don't understand how this pandemic started we're less likely to be able

00:05:30.860 to stop the next one second because bad actors are watching this and saying we could do a lot

00:05:37.080 of damage with a highly transmissible virus it doesn't even need to be very virulent

00:05:40.440 and actually the who is going to come in and say well it probably happened naturally so we

00:05:47.120 wouldn't even get blamed you know so unless we pin down what happened we're encouraging these

00:05:53.900 bad actors and the third reason which i think is important is that we've got between five and

00:05:59.800 15 million people dead now. We do owe it to them in some sense, I think, morally, if not

00:06:06.700 otherwise, to find out what happened and how this happened. It's a great point. And when you told me

00:06:14.200 about this, that people were saying it's not important, I found it baffling. But let's actually

00:06:18.980 now look into the virus. What makes you think that there is a good chance the virus was created in a

00:06:25.060 lab? Well, there's two main strands to answering that question. The first is the lack of evidence

00:06:30.560 for the alternative natural hypothesis. In the case of SARS, within a couple of months, it was

00:06:36.480 clear that food handlers had antibodies or had the virus, that the animals in the markets,

00:06:42.780 particularly the palm civets, had the virus, etc, etc. A very clear pattern emerged. Today,

00:06:49.740 with much superior technology you know much better genetic testing equipment we haven't been able to

00:06:57.480 find a single infected animal not one I mean sure cats are catching it now but they're catching it

00:07:03.200 from people you know nobody prior to the first human infection no animal had it and no food

00:07:10.700 handlers no chefs none of the stuff we had with SARS so the normal pattern you'd expect and this

00:07:16.660 happened with you know with nipper too which is a virus that was found in malaysia some time ago

00:07:22.220 you know the pigs were getting it from fruit bats you know it was very clear how it was happening

00:07:26.480 so none of that has happened in this case and they've tested 80 000 animals in china or claimed

00:07:31.380 to have done and they've not found a single one with it on the other hand on the positive side

00:07:36.800 you have to take into account the fact that the laboratory that was doing the most research on

00:07:43.360 SARS-like viruses caught in bats in the world, by a mile, was in Wuhan. The laboratory that

00:07:52.780 published most papers on this topic is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The laboratory that

00:07:58.520 deposited most SARS-like virus genomes into databases is in Wuhan. That's not because this

00:08:08.540 virus is found in bats around Wuhan. They've tested over 10,000 bats around Wuhan, and they've

00:08:13.800 never found a virus like this in the bats there. So it's not a local issue. It's thousands of miles

00:08:19.280 away. But, you know, here's an analogy. 2007, there was an outbreak of foot and mouth on a farm

00:08:27.540 in Surrey. It was less than 13 miles from the world's leading reference laboratory for studying

00:08:34.600 foot and mouth disease at Purbright.

00:08:37.220 Right, that turned out not to be a coincidence.

00:08:40.100 There was a leaking pipe at the Purbright lab,

00:08:42.640 the contractor had come in to mend it,

00:08:44.160 had gone straight to a farm nearby

00:08:45.980 and the cattle caught it there.

00:08:48.640 So, you know, if foot and mouth turns up in Purbright,

00:08:51.400 you don't say, well, that's just a coincidence.

00:08:55.700 It's pretty similar.

00:08:57.220 A SARS-like outbreak in Wuhan is much the same.

00:09:01.440 Well, this is one of the things that I think I didn't know,

00:09:04.260 and I think most people don't know, is actually things leak from labs regularly.

00:09:10.260 I mean, not regularly, like every day regularly, but they do leak from labs, right?

00:09:13.460 It would not be an out-of-this-world once-in-a-millennium occurrence, would it?

00:09:18.580 Correct.

00:09:18.940 And so, you know, smallpox in 1978 in Birmingham,

00:09:24.700 brucellosis in 2019 in China infected 10,000 people as a result of a laboratory accident.

00:09:31.660 Now, that's a bacterium, not a virus, but still.

00:09:34.260 But the most striking examples are SARS, because when the SARS epidemic was over in 2003-04,

00:09:43.380 over that winter, there were at least six, we think, cases of laboratory workers getting

00:09:51.440 infected in the lab while studying SARS. One in Singapore, one in Taiwan, and four in Beijing.

00:09:57.820 and in in five of those cases nobody knew how it happened so it wasn't as if there was a drop test

00:10:05.980 tube or a punctured glove or something like that so you know it's very easy for these things to

00:10:11.300 happen and even in the best run laboratories you know it's of course most laboratories are safe

00:10:18.460 most of the time but there are inevitably opportunities for these particularly a thing

00:10:25.860 as transmissible as this to be caught in a lab.

00:10:29.240 Or in the field, you know, one of the ironies of this work,

00:10:33.760 what the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing

00:10:36.180 was let's prevent the next pandemic by going out

00:10:41.140 and finding all the viruses that might cause it in the wild

00:10:44.620 and bringing them back to a lab in a city to study them.

00:10:47.060 How could that go wrong?

00:10:49.920 Well, it's been described by someone

00:10:51.660 who's looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.

00:10:53.780 yeah but but matt and that was because there was an incident in 2012 which is key to your

00:11:00.360 hypothesis as to why perhaps it could have leaked from a lab could you delve into that a little bit

00:11:05.240 please yes when the virus was first described in january of 2020 it was compared by the wuhan

00:11:12.520 scientists in a paper to a virus they'd found in their own freezer which was 96.2 percent the same

00:11:19.360 And that was very interesting.

00:11:21.340 It was called RATG13.

00:11:23.760 And I spent a day and a half trying to work out where they'd found it

00:11:27.600 because they said it's been found in Yunnan.

00:11:29.420 There was no reference, no link, nothing.

00:11:32.120 The name RATG13 didn't appear anywhere on the internet before that date.

00:11:36.420 So I said, what's going on here?

00:11:37.380 They say they found it before, but there's no report of where they found it,

00:11:41.060 how they found it.

00:11:41.760 And it was over a month later that as a result of an anonymous tip-off

00:11:46.280 to an Italian scientist called Rosanna Segretto,

00:11:49.860 Rosanna Secret, her name is,

00:11:52.780 that we were able to link it to the outbreak

00:11:58.660 of a pneumonia-like viral illness

00:12:03.060 that killed three out of six people who caught it

00:12:06.200 while shoveling bat guano in a disused mine shaft

00:12:10.980 in southern Yunnan, roughly 1,800 kilometres by road

00:12:15.800 from Wuhan which had led to very strong suspicions that it was caused by a SARS-like virus and that

00:12:23.340 had led to the Wuhan Institute of Virology sending seven expeditions over two years to this mine

00:12:30.480 shaft to collect bats and bring back samples one of which turned out to have this sample in it

00:12:35.380 which they renamed just before the pandemic which is a bit weird and it took another six months and

00:12:43.500 a brilliant Spaniard on the internet called Francisco Ribeira before we were all suddenly

00:12:50.480 able to say, hang on, didn't you find eight other viruses that are very similar in that mineshaft?

00:12:56.940 And six months after that, they published an addendum to their nature paper saying, yeah,

00:13:00.400 we did find eight other viruses that are very similar, but we didn't think it was important

00:13:07.080 to tell you about that so getting information about what happened between 2012 and 2019

00:13:14.700 was pretty difficult and one of the things that they implied that they had only sequenced the

00:13:23.360 new the bat virus in 2020 when the pandemic started but it later emerged on the when they

00:13:31.800 deposited the data on the genome database it had a date label on it which said that they'd sequenced

00:13:37.680 it in 2017 and 2018 so they'd thought it a couple of years before the pandemic in order to study it

00:13:44.200 now why what were they doing with it they've never told us it's it's important that we know this kind

00:13:49.980 of stuff it might be irrelevant and if it is they should share all the information they've got but

00:13:56.900 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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00:14:29.080 2026 the princess of wales theater get tickets at mirvish.com and this is a point i think because

00:14:37.020 the chinese government have been very very secretive and you know have been obstructing

00:14:43.700 investigations have been outright denial and you look at them and even as a casual observer you

00:14:49.780 think to yourself there's something shady going on because you're not being completely honest

00:14:53.980 well if it wasn't anything to do with the laboratory then the best way of convincing us

00:15:01.200 of that is to share the database of everything that was in that lab there is a database it's

00:15:07.460 got 22 000 entries in it samples sequences you know where things were found what they were about

00:15:13.700 15,000 of them relate to bats it was available up until the 12th of September 2019 for outsiders

00:15:21.660 to check although part of it was password protected since then it's been offline now the

00:15:27.260 purpose of that database was to help prevent the next pandemic and so as Alina puts it which

00:15:33.900 pandemic are they waiting for you know I mean this is surely the moment you produce this they

00:15:38.900 say well you people have been trying to hack it well what does that mean were they trying to hack

00:15:43.060 it in in 2019 in september 2019 doesn't seem very likely and um anyway what's the problem with

00:15:50.720 someone hacking it you know it's information that you collected in order to share with the world

00:15:55.960 to help prevent a pandemic so why would you mind if it got into the public domain uh so there's a

00:16:03.180 there's a lot here that badly needs answering um and yes scientists were gagged right at the start

00:16:09.680 They were told any Chinese scientist who published anything about this virus

00:16:14.620 without permission of the state was going to be punished.

00:16:18.900 So there's been a, you know, far from being open and transparent,

00:16:23.280 which they were praised by the World Health Organization

00:16:25.460 for being at the start, ironically, they haven't been.

00:16:29.280 And as I say, if there's nothing to hide, then don't hide it.

00:16:36.660 One of the questions that this raises, Matt,

00:16:38.900 And I think for a lot of lay people like us,

00:16:42.320 it's really a question that I think is important to address is

00:16:45.600 what is the benefit of these laboratories doing this work,

00:16:51.760 particularly when you're talking about gain-of-function research,

00:16:54.240 which I think a lot of people have questions about.

00:16:56.260 Maybe can you just explain to people why are these labs doing this?

00:17:00.100 What is gain-of-function?

00:17:01.440 What are the benefits of doing that, if there are any, et cetera?

00:17:04.700 Yeah. Well, there was quite a lively debate, actually, in about 2018, between one group of

00:17:10.380 virologists who said, this is what we've got to do. We've got to prevent the next pandemic by

00:17:14.120 going out there and finding the threats and studying them. And another group of scientists

00:17:18.740 who said, that ain't going to work. You're not going to be able to find the virus that's likely

00:17:23.040 to cause the next pandemic, because you've no idea among the millions of viruses out there,

00:17:26.600 which is the one that's really dangerous. And actually, you're playing with fire,

00:17:30.060 you might make it worse so that you know this was a live argument in in within virology um and so

00:17:37.020 what have they been doing they've been collecting viruses in bats in this case bringing them to the

00:17:42.340 lab sequencing their genomes then they've been doing two other things first of all trying to

00:17:48.560 grow one of these viruses alive in the lab which is not at all easy you know you get evidence that

00:17:55.340 there's a virus in the sample, but it's not in a state where it can replicate in a human cell

00:18:00.940 in the lab. But they did manage with a couple of viruses called WIV1 and WIV16 to so-called

00:18:09.640 isolate or at least, you know, rear the virus, you know, get it to grow and reproduce,

00:18:15.220 which is, you know, a little risky, but it's interesting. They did this at biosecurity level

00:18:21.340 too which is basically wearing gloves and maybe a mask you know it's not much more than that

00:18:25.820 which is probably not ideal um they they but then for the ones they couldn't grow in the lab

00:18:35.360 they thought we want to know how dangerous these are we can sequence them we can see what the the

00:18:40.640 sequence of the genome is but it's too fragmented to be able to grow as a creature so let's synthesize

00:18:48.560 the key bit of the spike gene

00:18:51.740 that causes it to be able to get inside cells.

00:18:55.300 And let's swap that into one of these viruses we can grow,

00:18:59.900 WIV1 and WIV16.

00:19:02.220 And then let's test how dangerous that one is.

00:19:05.460 These are so-called chimera viruses or hybrid viruses.

00:19:09.040 And some of those experiments resulted in viruses

00:19:11.980 that were 10,000 times more transmissible between cells.

00:19:15.020 That's great.

00:19:15.480 and some of them resulted in ones that were three or four times more lethal to humanized mice that's

00:19:21.120 mice with human genes so these were significant gains of function in the sense of you know have

00:19:28.540 you made the virus more able to infect human beings and human cells and remember every time

00:19:36.620 you put it into human cells human airway epithelial cells so cells taken from the lungs and cultured

00:19:42.580 in labs every time you do that you're giving the virus a lesson in how to how to attack this new

00:19:49.540 host and it's gonna not just stay the same it's gonna mutate and evolve and say hmm oh i'll try

00:19:56.460 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

00:20:07.180 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

00:20:19.440 basically said there are features of this virus that looks like it might have been passaged in

00:20:25.520 human cells and we can't explain them any other way and this particularly relates to a thing

00:20:31.600 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,

00:20:42.160 what are the potential benefits of this kind of research?

00:20:45.180 I'm sorry, you're quite right to press me on that.

00:20:48.240 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,

00:20:58.560 we've identified that this strain of virus is dangerous.

00:21:05.100 and we need to start doing surveillance for it

00:21:09.160 we need to go and check whether anybody's catching it

00:21:12.660 in the forest near the cave where we found the bat

00:21:15.080 and they even put in a proposal to the Pentagon

00:21:19.280 to spray experimental vaccines into bat caves

00:21:23.420 in the hope that it would immunise the bats

00:21:25.300 which is pretty wacky stuff frankly

00:21:27.640 I mean I can't believe they didn't get the money for that

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00:23:09.360 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

00:25:02.440 with the help of the Wuhan Institute.

00:25:04.860 And what that paper says,

00:25:06.660 and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology

00:25:08.640 is a co-author on it,

00:25:10.060 says, hang on a minute,

00:25:12.160 some of these experiments are dangerous

00:25:14.320 and we do need to stop and think about

00:25:16.520 whether they're worth the risk.

00:25:18.780 And this, 2015, is key

00:25:20.640 because that's right in the middle

00:25:21.740 of a very live debate in the US

00:25:24.180 about gain of function,

00:25:25.760 which was started by some influenza experiments.

00:25:29.200 A guy called Ron Fautier in the Netherlands

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,

00:25:49.580 through the air, not an aerial infection.

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

00:29:31.600 that resulted in greater infectivity

00:29:35.000 by Ben Hu and colleagues, 2017,

00:29:38.880 clearly acknowledges an American grant.

00:29:41.980 Now, that wasn't a big part of the funding.

00:29:44.140 It was quite a small part of the funding.

00:29:45.920 Most of the money came from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

00:29:48.440 But, you know, there is no doubt

00:29:51.080 that American funding was going to this.

00:29:53.440 Not, I think, necessarily to get around the pause

00:29:57.660 on doing the work in America.

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

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.

00:32:42.480 The contract for which, funnily enough,

00:32:45.140 was signed by a man called Michel Barnier

00:32:47.660 when he was French Foreign Secretary.

00:32:51.580 But the French then got very annoyed

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.

00:33:02.400 We're just going to do it ourselves.

00:33:03.760 So that doesn't sound like them.

00:33:04.960 Big row about that.

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,

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

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00:44:07.420 So, Matt, what should we take away from this?

00:44:11.400 Because here's the counter-argument, maybe,

00:44:16.500 to everything we've been saying,

00:44:17.640 and this is just a devil's advocate point of view,

00:44:19.420 but let's say that this way of doing things,

00:44:22.380 this gain-of-function thing,

00:44:23.340 where you create a much worse virus than the one you started with

00:44:26.660 and then you go, oh, let's see if we can make a vaccine for this

00:44:29.340 and then when this virus naturally occurs,

00:44:31.820 you've already got a vaccine, let's say.

00:44:33.900 Let's say this had produced a vaccine that prevented the next pandemic.

00:44:38.160 I think we'd all be in favour of that, right?

00:44:40.620 So, what is the lesson here?

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00:45:14.280 Well, that's why we need to find out.

00:45:21.100 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,

00:46:05.920 but do you see what I mean?

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

00:46:14.440 making the strongest case we can for that.

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.

00:46:25.620 Where was I going?

00:46:26.880 Well, I was saying, what is the lesson here?

00:46:28.300 Oh, yeah, what is the lesson?

00:46:29.320 Well, if that's the case and it's a huge coincidence,

00:46:35.220 then we've had a lucky escape with the labs.

00:46:39.980 It turned out not to be relevant.

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

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

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

00:55:00.800 Yeah, he'd say, okay, here's my answer.

00:55:03.800 Why aren't we talking about de-extinction more?

00:55:06.580 Do you know about de-extinction?

00:55:07.860 No.

00:55:08.360 The idea that we could...

00:55:09.500 It'd make for a far worse rebellion, I think.

00:55:11.940 The de-extinction rebellion.

00:55:15.800 Everything's fine.

00:55:16.700 There's more species again.

00:55:18.020 Yeah, that's right.

00:55:18.900 What is de-extinction?

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.

00:55:25.820 You know, something that's gone extinct.

00:55:27.620 Four steps.

00:55:28.460 read the genome

00:55:29.740 done that

00:55:30.840 in lots of these cases

00:55:31.780 you know we've got

00:55:32.500 ancient DNA

00:55:33.220 from samples

00:55:34.040 we know what the genome

00:55:35.260 of these creatures

00:55:35.840 looks like

00:55:36.340 second

00:55:37.280 take a living genome

00:55:39.480 from a related species

00:55:40.900 and edit it

00:55:41.780 so it's the same

00:55:42.560 third

00:55:43.960 somehow get that

00:55:45.160 into a living creature

00:55:46.320 turn that cell

00:55:47.560 into an embryo

00:55:49.020 and then into a creature

00:55:50.320 and fourth

00:55:51.360 release it to the world

00:55:52.180 fantastic

00:55:52.600 so not only are we

00:55:53.520 getting the pandemic

00:55:54.220 we're getting Jurassic Park

00:55:55.480 as well

00:55:55.840 that'd be great

00:55:57.080 that'd be great

00:55:57.800 Yeah, that's what we need, some COVID-infected dinosaurs.

00:56:00.700 Thanks, Matt.

00:56:01.720 Brilliant stuff.

00:56:03.060 All right.

00:56:03.660 I hope you've enjoyed.

00:56:04.520 This is probably the last episode in the history of the world.

00:56:06.940 Thank you very much for watching.

00:56:08.240 We'll see you soon.

00:56:09.140 Or not.

00:56:09.920 Bye.

00:56:18.640 I should probably have said that, but there we are.

00:56:20.400 We'll be right back.

00:56:50.400 Through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:56:54.380 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

TRIGGERnometry - February 10, 2022

Where Did COVID-19 REALLY Come From？ With Matt Ridley

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