 So could the furan cleavage site have been a, could it be a result of a natural mutation? Yes, it could. There's no question that that's true too. There is a case of a virus, not a very closely related one, that appeared to evolve a furan cleavage site in the laboratory. What happened was that there were some very rare variants that had it already. And you know, this is right in the middle of the spike gene. The spike gene mutates a lot, but it is an insertion. That is to say, it's a chunk of text that got put in somewhere. It's 12 base pairs long. So it's 12 letters of text in the genome. Now, that's quite a big mutation. You know, it's not a question of just changing one letter here and one letter there. You can get a furan cleavage site by changing one letter here and one letter there. But this didn't happen this way because you can see the sequence. It's exactly the same in all the closely related viruses or pretty well exactly the same up until that point. And then suddenly there's a gap in all the other ones. And there's a sequence in SARS-CoV-2. And by the way, you could put such things in without leaving any trace. I mean, genetic engineering of a seamless kind has become routine these days. So to what extent, what would somebody who thought this was a natural occurrence, what would they say to counter that? I mean, this is not because this is not obviously definitive proof that this was tinkered with. Completely right. There is no definitive dispositive proof either way. I mean, all we need is an infected animal from before the outbreak and suddenly the story changes or a laboratory experiment report that shows that this experiment was done. Either of those things would be dispositive. We haven't got either of those things. Yeah, we're now just going to say what Christian Anderson said about the furan cleavage site when it was first raised as an issue was, don't worry, we'll soon find relatives out there in the wild that have this. Come on, we only know of a few of them. Well, we now know of a whole lot more. We know these Laotian ones, we know a couple from Cambodia, we know one from Thailand, we know others from southern Yunnan. There's even one from Japan, although it's not very closely related at all. And none of them have this yet. So the more we discover that don't have this, the less good a prediction it sounds that don't worry, we'll find one with this feature. One of the things that struck me about what the evidence you presented in the book is the extent to which both the Chinese and the EcoHealth Alliance seem to resist A, providing information, B, when they provide information, it seems to be partial. And it seems like they're doing this in an almost stupid way because obviously you found out what they weren't disclosing and others have found out what they weren't disclosing. It seems like what do you think the motivation is? What is going on here, particularly for a US-based group who should be accountable, that gets obviously grants from the NIH and from other government entities, you'd think they would be accountable or somebody would hold them accountable? Well, it would be pretty devastating for their reputation, for their funding and everything. And I understand that. Just imagine, the purpose of the work they were doing was to avert the next pandemic. That was the job. They said, give us lots of money, and we will go out there and sample viruses from bats all across Southern China and Southeast Asia, and we will find the ones that threaten to start a pandemic because they're on the brink of being able to infect human beings. And that will be very useful because then we'll be able to test for them. We'll be able to tell you when an outbreak is happening that can turn into a pandemic. We'll be able to stop it in its tracks. Now at the very least, that project failed. It did not predict or prevent this pandemic. At the worst, it may have caused this pandemic. And that is something that is simply unthinkable to these people. It's not impossible that it happened, but it is unthinkable. They don't want to think it. And I understand that. But it's not our job to worry about how they feel about it. Our job is to find out what happened. But you would think that they know, right? At least the Chinese know one way or the other what causes it. If three people in the lab got sick in November, if that's true, then somebody knows that if they had been working on a virus and doing these gain-of-function research, we'll talk about that in a minute, then they would know that they had done that research and were trying to tinker with it. But we're getting nothing. Well, there's a database with 22,000 entries in it, 15,000 of them from bats. These are samples and sequences of viruses, mainly collected from bats over several years. It exists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was accessible online, although some of it was password protected until the 12th of September, 2019. And at two in the morning on that date, it went offline. And it's never been accessible since. Now, the purpose of that database, as I say, was to give us a bank of information that would help us in the event of a pandemic. Well, which pandemic are they waiting for to bring that back online and tell us? Now, when you ask Peter Dazak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, whether he has asked his close colleague and friend, Xi Jinping of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to release that database, he says, oh, I haven't asked her for that, but I know what's in it and it's of no relevance. And then all the more reason to release it. If it proves that there was no virus in that database that is at all closely related to SARS-CoV-2, fine, show us it. What are you waiting for? Is it because you want patents on the diagnostic tests for future viruses or something? Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see The Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.