 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds one reason. Today we're going to talk about some important new revelations in the ongoing mystery around the origins of COVID-19, although maybe it's not such a mystery anymore. Liz Wolf is off this week, by the way, so it'll be just me talking with two people who've done way more than most in advancing our understanding of how the virus that changed everything originated. It's an important question that I've thought at many times we'd never get a satisfactory answer to, but this new information is pretty revealing and remarkable, and I think tips the scales quite far in favor of an explanation involving a lab accident in Wuhan, China. The new information was brought to light by Emily Kopp, a science and health reporter with a non-profit public health watchdog group U.S. Right to Know who's been doggedly pursuing and obtaining documents related to this question for years now. Emily, thank you for joining us today. Emily, I think you're muted. Thanks for having me. All right. Great. Also here is Alex Washburn, a mathematical biologist who's applied his training and expertise to study and publish about the evolution and spread of COVID, and who co-authored a paper that we'll talk about that had some of its predictions seemingly validated by some of these new documents Emily recently published. Alex, thank you for joining us as well. Thank you for having me here. Sure. I want to start with a discussion of these new documents you obtained and published on January 18th, Emily. Under the headline, let me pull this up here, U.S. scientists proposed to make viruses with unique features of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan. First off, Emily, just tell us exactly what these new documents are and why you were seeking them in the first place. Sure. So this all started back in 2021 when the independent research group Drastic obtained a leaked copy of this diffuse grant proposal to DARPA proposing to do controversial viral experimentation. And in the years since that major revelation, there's been a lot of debate between people who favor the Zoonosis theory and people who favor the lab leak theory about what exactly these documents mean. The language in that proposal was highly technical, and so there was a lot of nitpicking about whether this revelation was truly relevant to the origins of COVID. And I just wanted to learn more about it, and it just so happened that a public institution, USGS, was a collaborator on this grant, and so I submitted a FOIA to USGS just hoping to learn more information. And it took one and a half years or so of nagging USGS to finally get them to turn over the documents. And so we obtained them in December. I think the first major revelation out of those documents is that in a draft of this proposal, there were comments in the margins suggesting that the work would not be conducted in the US under a BSL3, relatively rigorous biosafety standard, but instead would be exported to Wuhan and be conducted under a BSL2, which is just inadequate for airborne viruses. So that was sort of the major revelation, and we wanted to get that out as soon as possible because Congress was deliberating whether to continue to allow EcoHealth Alliance to obtain funds from the Pentagon. And then we took about another month for the other remaining 1200 documents, which were essentially minutes and drafts of the proposal that were a bit more candid about the work that they intended to do. And so it cleared up a lot of the confusion about the more technical language in the formal proposal and just included more details about the intended research. And you mentioned this, the organization that you were writing to to request these documents was USGS. What is that and what do they have to do with virology? Yeah, it's the US Geological Survey, and their participation on the proposal had to do with immunizing bats with some of these chimeric spike proteins. I consider that to be sort of ancillary to the core questions about the origins of COVID. Really, it was just my way of trying to be creative and get the documents in a roundabout way, given that it's a public institution and given our ongoing struggles to get documents out of Barracks Lab at UNC. Yeah, it's just always strange when these seemingly random government organizations are somehow involved. I mean, I guess the US Geological Survey bats live in caves is that like the connection here to the issue at hand. I don't know. But I do want to bring up this document that, you know, this is the proposal that you're investigating. It's known as Project Diffuse. And it's essentially a proposal to DARPA, the Defense Agency, to collect and manipulate bat viruses ostensibly for the purpose of predicting what kind of viruses might jump from bats to humans and cause future pandemics. And you summarize one of their proposals this way, that the scientists sought to insert fur and cleavage sites at the S1, S2 junction of the spike protein, to assemble synthetic viruses in six segments, to identify coronaviruses up to 25% different from SARS, and to select for receptor binding domains adept at infecting human receptors. And then you go with these bullet points and you list kind of one by one the characteristics that SARS-CoV-2, the ways in which it matches the viruses that are described in this proposal. So SARS-CoV-2 has a fur and cleavage site, which has been discussed at length. And we can talk about a little bit more later. SARS-CoV-2 can be divided into six contiguous genomic pieces by the restriction enzymes BSAL and BSMBL. And orders for one of those enzymes, BSML, can be found in the documents. And the receptor binding domain appeared finally tuned for human ACE-2 receptor. And then the genome has the genetic differences from SARS. So here's where I want to bring in Alex to help explain the significance of their plans to assemble the viruses specifically in those six segments using some very specific enzymes. Could you explain that for us a little bit more deeply, Alex? Absolutely. And one kind of interesting backstory is that the diffuse grant was proposed to the DARPA preempt call in 2018, and I had submitted or helped write in ACE-7 as well. So this call is very intimately familiar to me. And in that context, what was distinct about diffuse was their search for this motif that never been seen in the SARS coronavirus before the fear and cleavage site. And their proposal to insert this thing that had never been seen before in the SARS coronavirus. And so the proposal to insert the fear and cleavage site instantly puts them down a particular laboratory path. So how do you insert a fear and cleavage site into a SARS coronavirus? The SARS coronavirus has this RNA genome, which you can think of this really flimsy film of a genetic strand of RNA, and it breaks very easily. It's very hard to insert motifs inside of an RNA genome. So if you want to insert a fear and cleavage site, you have to build this much sturdier DNA copy of the virus. And in order to build this sturdy DNA copy of the virus, you have to build it one block at a time. We looked into the pre-COVID, well, I guess not, not we, but Valentin Brutel and Tony Van Dongen had looked, these are bioengineers Valentin and University of Pittsburgh and Tony at Duke University. They're bioengineers. They build these DNA blocks from scratch. So they looked into the methods for how people did this in coronaviruses pre-COVID and found that one of the most common methods for building these full-length DNA clones of a virus was to order these blocks and nip them at the end with these restriction sites that allow you to attach them one at a time until eventually you have that full-length DNA clone. And one of the diffuse PIs really popularized this technique. Ralph Barrick wrote a paper on efficient reverse genetic systems. Well, that's a lot of words. It just means reverse genetics is you have this DNA clone that you're tinkering with to make these different RNA viruses and in the process experimenting with the role between these genes and the manipulations of these genes like if you're in cleavage site on the function of the virus. So that was kind of the context. We looked into this diffuse proposal and asked, okay, if they're inserting fear in cleavage site, they need a full-length DNA clone. If you're building a full-length DNA clone, they're probably using methodologies like those that Ralph Barrick popularized. Is there any evidence for this in the SARS-2 genome? We studied, we ran a meta analysis of all these infectious clones and reverse genetic systems made before COVID and found that they all had this characteristic manner of manipulation. The researchers would look at the genome of the virus on the computer screen, look at where these cutting sites are, and they move them around a little bit to make it easier to assemble these blocks. And they would move these cutting sites around with these mutations called silent mutations that change the genetic sequence without changing the resulting virus. So researchers before COVID would make these full-length DNA clones by using silent mutations to move these cutting sites that form these little notches that you can use to attach chunks of DNA together to build that full-length clone. We looked into that and found that SARS-2 had this very unusual pattern of evenly spaced cutting sites that was consistent with how people built reverse genetic systems before COVID. And that when you look closer at these cutting sites, yeah, this is the figure here, those cutting sites BSMB1 and BSA1 typically are randomly spaced throughout the genome. When you have randomly spaced things, they don't often come with fragments of this similar size. But when you look at this visually, Valentin and Tonya just screamed at them, this is unusual, and they had much, they have a lot of experience seeing what you see the other, so SARS-CoV-2 is the top row here. All the other viruses, you know, from now 20, 247 to SARS-1, their BSMB1 and BSA1 sites are randomly scattered. And that's what you typically see when you upload a genome into this software that helps you see the cutting sites. Valentin and Tonya uploaded SARS-2, saw this unusual pattern and thought, wow, this is like an Ikea virus. You know, this is something you could just order right from scratch and get this Allen wrench of BSMB1 and this screwdriver of BSA1 and stitch it together. So the question then was, what are the odds of this occurring in nature? And that's where I came in as a mathematical biologist to study the evolution of coronaviruses and try to get an estimate on the odds of this appearing in nature, given that it is so consistent with a reverse genetic system. We found those odds were really low. So when you, the way we estimated it was looking at this longest fragment length, so this top figure here, the y-axis is the length of the longest fragment from cutting up a virus with any one or any pair of these enzymes. And then the x-axis is the number of fragments. When Ralph Berwick wrote his paper on efficient reverse genetic systems, he proposed that red box as this idealized range for an efficient reverse genetic system. Some are between five to eight fragments and ideally less than 8,000 base pairs long for the longest fragment because when you order these chunks of DNA online, 8,000 base pairs is a common cutoff. Now that said, the longer the fragment is, the more likely it is to either contain a toxic element that prevents your ability to replicate it and clone it and make a lot of it. And it also reduces the odds of faithful assembly. When you have a really long, wiggly piece of DNA, it may not attach as faithfully or at high of rate as shorter fragments. So there's a preference to have smaller fragments in general and that's what really was the lurking lab protocol constraints that led to this pattern of unusually even spacing in these restriction sites. So we looked at, we qualified the odds of seeing something as or more extreme as SARS-2, just in the pattern of the spacing of these sites. And that was about a 1 in 1400 event. So 1 out of 14,000 is actually the most extreme case of a coronavirus that we've seen for these enzymes that can be used for the assembly of these reverse genetic systems. Then we look further at the silent mutations. That's where we found hotspots like glowing genetic dust right on these specific sites and wherever they were moved around, they were moved around exclusively with the mutations bioengineers use. And that was our most significant finding. And so this is what, you know, the title of your paper is endonucleus fingerprint, indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2. So the fingerprint that you're referring to there is essentially the fact that there are, let me pull up that figure one more time, these rather evenly spaced, like somewhat regularly length segments as opposed to in a naturally occurring virus, you would get much, you'd get much more variation in the length. You'd get some really short ones and some really long ones. And so it's just mathematically unusual for that or, you know, maybe even mathematically impossible or highly improbable that that would occur in nature. So would this be, so this would be different from, we've heard a lot of discussion about gain of function research where you would, one method in sort of enhancing the deadliness of a virus for humans would be to pass it through mice. So it kind of naturally, you know, not naturally, but in the lab, you're kind of forcing an evolution towards deadliness. You're positing that that is not how this virus was created in the lab. It was more of a kind of cut and paste situation. Well, in order to conduct, there's many, so yeah, some break up some terms here. The gain of function, some biologists like to kind of muddy the waters by saying, oh, well, you know, anytime you modify an organism, like add a bacillus thuringienus toxin to corn, which helps us have the corn have this natural pesticide produced in it, they would say, oh, well, that's gain of function because it gained the function that they didn't have before. So some people split hairs and say, there's a different kind of gain of function called gain of function research of concern, which is the enhancement of transmissibility and or virulence of potentially pandemic pathogens. This gain of function research of concern started in 2011 when Ron Fouchier took an avian influenza, which was very infectious in birds and had a 50% infection fatality rate. And then he passage it through a bunch of ferrets until he was he produced by this reading experiment that was intended to produce a virus that was more transmissible in mammals that didn't exist in nature. So that's his gain of function research of concern. And the DARPA, the diffuse proposal, I want to give credit to DARPA, they invented the internet and they rejected the fuse. So it's a diffuse proposal of interest. The fuse proposal reveals the intentions of these researchers who previously had conducted a lot of gain of function research of concern. They would find these bat coronaviruses lurking in nature, and they would swap around these parts of the bat coronavirus making these chimeras to then ask, oh, which chimera is the most infectious in people. And that question is modifying things found in nature to improve their transmissibility and the intention their search was for something more transmissible. So you would expect this research program to result in something more transmissible because that's what they were trying to make. And the fear and cleavage site specifically was well known before COVID that fear and cleavage sites are found in other viruses. And when they're found in other viruses, they're kind of this master key that allow the virus to unlock all sorts of different host cells and the enter into bat cells and human cells and dogs and whatever. So the fear and cleavage site was this master key. Why would you give that to a SARS coronavirus that's anticipated to improve the transmissibility of this virus possibly improve the virulence as well if the virus is able to infect more tissues within the human body? So that the assertion of the fear and cleavage site was the gain of function research of concern. And that's just to just to be really clear for our listeners who may not have been following every detail of this. The fear and cleavage site, the reason that there's so much attention on it is because A, it is this SARS-CoV-2 is the only virus in its category of these SARS-like coronaviruses that has it and B, that makes it particularly susceptible to it. It eases the entry into human cells. Is that more or less the reason why the fear and cleavage site was like the first kind of red flag for people who thought that this might have originated in a lab? That's exactly right. The fear and cleavage site had never been observed before in a SARS coronavirus. And we when we build the evolutionary tree of the SARS coronaviruses before COVID, we had a thousand years of branches in this tree. And there wasn't a single indication that the SARS coronavirus existed anywhere in that tree. Yet they were very prominent in the minds of virologists. And this is where I can speak as someone who is in that dark web preempt community of accepted grants that we all knew that the biggest crux for these jump capable quasi species, the biggest crux for host switching is binding onto the receptors of a new host. Because new hosts have very different funky receptors in their cells. So how can a virus latch onto that and enter into the cell? The fear and cleavage site assists with that process. And it was known to assist with that process. So virologists everywhere were looking for these things because they really wanted to find them. If you found a fear and cleavage site, in for instance, an influenza virus that passed through a chicken farm, which they did once in one chicken farm out of all the chicken farms that had been infected with this, that was documented and there's explosive news because virologists understood the context. So the fear and cleavage site was a motif, this master key that virologists knew about what nature didn't or nature knew about it would stumble upon it randomly, but had not stumbled upon it in the 1000 years of SARS coronavirus evolution that we've seen. Yet then we find a SARS coronavirus with this master key in Wuhan exactly where researchers proposed to give it to a SARS coronavirus. So that's the fear and cleavage site. That's the gain of function research of concern component. And our work was focused more on the laboratory protocols that they had said they wanted to find all these wildlife coronaviruses. So we usually go out and you catch a bat, you sample its poop or its mouth or whatever, and then you send that into a lab and you sequence it. When you sequence it, you get this long genetic code, 30,000 base pairs on a computer. Now how can you go from that genetic code to then saying, ah, this virus is more likely to infect people or less likely to infect people? For that, we use all these laboratory techniques to construct parts of the virus or entire viruses. And our work was focused on that, both the rescuing of viruses from a genetic sequence using these reverse genetic systems or infectious clones. And that's a really remarkable thing to think about is that most viruses go from a virus to cell to a virus to cell to virus to cell. And you can trace that back in time indefinitely to the origin of the virus. But infectious clones, they go from a virus to a cell to a poop sample in a bat to a genome on a computer screen. And then from that genome on a computer screen, we order these blocks and stitch them together. And then we make from that DNA clone, this RNA, we electrocute a cell to form these holes in it, an electroporated cell, and shove that RNA inside the cell. It starts making a virus. It's this sort of immaculate conception of modern biotechnology. And that was the most common way of rescuing coronaviruses from these wildlife samples where you could have the genome, but you may not have cultured the virus. The virus may have died while it was being transported to a lab, but you can still get the genome, you can still get the virus, you can still study it. And that methodology was also in defuse, but it was a bit more technical and subtle to find these fingerprints in the genome, but that's what we found. So Alex's paper made certain predictions about what scientists would have done to what you would expect to see in their work if this were a synthetic virus, an infectious clone. To bring it back to the documents, Emily, how do the documents work in conjunction with Alex's work when you look at them side by side? What are some of the consistencies or inconsistencies that jumped out to you? Yeah. So first of all, just to follow up on some of the things that Alex mentioned. So I think the more candid notes we have about the defuse proposal show that their intention was to generate viruses that could generate disease and humanized mice. That was the so-called gold standard. That's how Peter Dazek put it in the meeting minutes from one of their calls together. So the methods that they were using to get to that gold standard may have included the technique that Alex described, but I think that part is somewhat controversial, whereas there are some notes that we obtained that confirm that other features of SARS-CoV-2 that immediately stood out to people as a sign of engineering in the lab were really central to the research interests of that PI. He mentioned Ralph Barrick, sort of the top virologist focusing on coronaviruses in the world. So he intended to create a model in order to generate viruses that could cause disease and humanized mice. And two of the key features that he screened for with that model or intended to screen for with that model were if you're in cleavage site, particularly if you're in cleavage site at the S1-S2 boundary in the spike protein, and a receptor binding domain that was very good at latching on to humanase 2. And maybe that doesn't grab people right away if you're not super familiar with the debate around the origins of COVID, but really people have been talking about SARS-CoV-2's immediate ability to latch on to humanase 2 from the beginning. It's a immediate ability to be very transmissible and infectious and go on to infect pretty much everyone on the globe. And people have been talking about that fear in cleavage site from the beginning as a signal of engineering. So I think those two elements are also very important to focus on. Also, just as Alex mentioned, people were very interested in clearing cleavage sites around the time of the diffuse proposal when that was submitted. And in fact, in doing this reporting, I went back and I watched some of the debate around gain of function research back in 2014 when there was a pause on gain of function research of concern and NIH was hosting debates about what sort of regulation should be in place. And Barrick was obviously an opponent of regulations, at least for coronaviruses, which was his interest. And a lot of the questions that he and his colleagues got were around, okay, so what would be a permissible experiment would inserting a fear in cleavage site? Would that be permissible? And so obviously this was on people's minds. And so as someone who was not familiar with that debate and was not tracking that debate at the time, it was surprising to me to go back and watch because obviously when a virus with a fear in cleavage site appeared in Wuhan, the lab working closely with Barrick, no one said, oh yes, we've been discussing this for years. So anyway, so with regard to the restriction sites, so the documents do include a budget line for BSMBI, which is one of the restriction sites that make up that pattern that Alex and his colleagues described. But there is some debate about is that a budget for the entire project, or is that just a budget for the USGS component? How central is the budget line to? Yeah, well, let me bring up, I've got a, so this is a tweet from Richard E. Bright, who was one of the biologists who was kind of, I mean, one of the earliest people I remember raising this possibility of it being a lab leak. And he calls this this invoice for this particular enzyme that Alex mentions in his study. This is an order form for it, and he calls it the equivalent of a smoking gun. On the other hand, Alina Chan, who is another, someone who's been very sort of putting out the idea of this could have been allowed leak for a long time. We've had her on the show before. She co-authored a whole book about the origins of COVID with Matt Ridley called Viral. And she's not convinced yet. She says there isn't enough yet to say a lab accident happened beyond a reasonable doubt, mostly because the emails and documents we're talking about are from early 2018. So therefore it's unsurprising. There's not any direct evidence of a line from this order to the creation of SARS-CoV-2. I guess an open question that I have for both of you is how should we evaluate evidence and when is the appropriate time to say, case closed, this is the smoking gun. We can pretty much say at this point we're never going to get 100% certainty, but beyond a reasonable doubt, looks like something happened here. Something was constructed. I'm happy to jump in here. I think what I was doing before COVID was specifically forecasting which species are quasi-species that are jump capable? What's the likelihood of that emerging? Where is it likely to emerge? And what does that look like? And we all have actually seen a recent example of a natural spillover with the avian influenza outbreaks that happened last year. Many people got infected. And you see these stuttering chains of transmission because exactly as Emily said, the virus was not very transmissible when it first jumped into the human population. And so for me, what jumped out is like, we'll put the line way over here for case closed. And then there's a line way over here for open the books. And I think we crossed the open the books line immediately when SARS-CoV-2 emerged, it had a receptor binding domain that was better at binding humans than bats. That's a really unusual feature for a bat coronavirus. Viruses specialize on their hosts. They get these very specific moldings of their spike genes, the receptors of their hosts, the receptors of bats are different from humans. So this should be molded to a bat, but instead it looked more molded to a human than a bat. So that was immediately a very strange occurrence that it didn't have this multiple spillover events across a wide geographic range consistent with the animal trade outbreak of SARS-1. There were not infections concentrated in animal handlers like we saw on civet handlers in SARS-1 or in poultry farmers for avian influenza. Instead, it was this singular outbreak that just exploded immediately out of Wuhan with a SARS coronavirus receptor binding domain was better fit for humans than bats that had a fear in cleavage site that as someone again in this wildlife virology community, I knew that many virologists were fixated on fear and cleavage sites. This was something that virologists thought a lot about. But when you look at the data in nature, nature did not stumble upon it that often. Instead, when it happened, we made a big deal out of it, wrote big papers about it and everyone was aware of it, but nature was not. And so for me, we crossed the line to open the books almost immediately at the start of the pandemic. But that's never seemed to have been the attitude. Opening the books, what would follow from that is open scientific, this is an empirical question, so that requires open scientific inquiry. But I think to capture the tone of that, we can just look at these tweets from Christian Andersen, who was one of the authors on the famous Proximal Origins paper that proposed that this jump from pangolins to humans, that pangolins were the intermediate host, and then it was revealed through documents that he had this kind of this back channel with Anthony Fauci, who was sort of guiding that project the entire time. But his reaction to your preprint, Alex, was that it is so deeply flawed that it wouldn't pass kindergarten molecular biology, it's more of the same poppycock dressed up as science with a heavy dose of techno babble on the side. And you don't have to reply to that kind of name calling, though you can if you want. What I'd like to know is what are the challenges for dissenting scientists at this point in examining this question? Obviously, there's been challenges along the way, but like, at this point, do you feel that your paper could even get a fair peer review, or is the process itself kind of compromised? Well, a couple points here. One, yeah, the feedback from Christian Andersen was not the most constructive feedback we received. Another little aside, my mom was a molecular biologist. So in kindergarten, I was doing some listening about DNA at the table, but not that much admittedly. And then finally, a lab origin involves a lab. And the lab involves researchers, and researchers are in this network of colleagues and funders. And so when we pass this open to books phase, very early on in the pandemic, we would have liked to hear about, for example, the diffuse proposal. But did we hear about the diffuse proposal? No, we didn't. Did we hear that NIAID had actually funded the unique collaboration of the diffuse PI's in 2019? No, we didn't. Instead, Anthony Fauci helped prompt that proximal origin paper. Peter Daszak, the PI of diffuse wrote a paper to the Lancet calling lab origin theories, conspiracy theories, without acknowledging the conflict of interest that he was working with the lab in question, that he wrote the diffuse proposal containing a highly specific proposal to make something not found in nature, something so unnatural that you could have patented it in 2018. And SARS-CoV-2 would be an infringement of their patent. That's a very important conflict of interest he should have disclosed when we were at the open to books phase in January of 2020. And he didn't. In fact, we also have emails of Peter Daszak writing the fellow colleagues of the PI of the fellow PI's diffuse proposal in an email titled, no need for you to sign the statement Ralph to exclamation marks. And in that email, Peter Daszak says that he proposes that they don't sign this. The PI is proposed to make this unique product not found in nature, which mirrors SARS-CoV-2 to the letter. They propose to not sign this statement calling lab origin theories, conspiracy theories. Daszak was then appointed the U.S. emissary to the World Health Organization's COVID origins investigation in Wuhan. And he didn't disclose diffuse to the world then. He was appointed to lead the Lancet's COVID origin task force by Jeffrey Sachs. And he didn't disclose it then and said he appointed all of his close colleagues who also had conflicts of interest in their work with the Wuhan labs as fellow investigators of this lab origin accident. When Jeffrey Sachs started turning over stones, he found conflicts of interest everywhere. And so at the heart of a lab origin is a lab and researchers. And the unfortunate thing we're seeing here is that many of the researchers and their funders have these very tight connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I happen to be one of the people who was working on a DARPA pre-empt grant in this field without any connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And also at the time of writing this paper, I wasn't in academia. I wasn't writing grants NIAID. I was an independent scientific consultant. And that made me somewhat immune to Christian Anderson's tweets in this sense. You know, I was really focused on the question at hand. Yeah, I'm really it's the the role of sort of institutions and people who are independent of those institutions in this is a really important and interesting aspect of how this is all played out. And I'm curious about your thoughts on it too, Emily, because from a media perspective, you're working for an organization, U.S. right to know that operates outside of the mainstream media ecosystem. It's an organization that to be honest, I was a little wary of because I think there's some fundamental disagreements and how the editorial leadership looks at things like GMOs or the Green Revolution. But I honestly think your work speaks for itself on this topic, which is largely consists of obtaining and reporting on government documents in a pretty straightforward manner. It's odd to me that more publications haven't picked up on these documents. What do you make of the media environments at this point as it pertains to the investigation into covid's origins? Yeah, I think before I start ranting about the media, just to follow up on a couple of the things that Alex was mentioning, I think in addition to the scientific evidence that we dug up and that he dug up, I think it's also important to look at the behavioral clues here and the odd actions of people sort of central to the coronavirus research going on in Wuhan after SARS-CoV-2 emerged from that city, including the fact that Derek was working on this model that was meant to predict whether a coronavirus could cause disease and humanized mice using the receptor-binding domain's ability to bind to humanase 2 and fear and cleavage sites. And then when SARS-CoV-2 with these unique features showed up, did not raise his hand to say, I actually have a model. I've been studying this for years. It's an odd silence, for sure. Absolutely, yes. And why did Dasek continue to insist for years that this work would go on at the University of North Carolina under a BSL-3 when clearly he knew he wrote this comment saying that in fact this work would be outsourced to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and would be conducted under BSL-2. Yeah, let me pull that up. This is from those documents. So, yeah, you got the annotated comments on their proposal and so here you've got Peter Dasek saying that, you know, if we win the contract, I am not proposing that all the work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph Barrick in North Carolina, but he wants to stress the U.S. side of the proposal to DARPA so that they're comfortable. In other words, he wants to play down the fact that, as he says, a lot of this work can be done in Wuhan. And then further down, you've got Ralph Barrick talking about their proposal to, in China, do this in a biosecurity level two rather than the higher biosecurity level three that would be expected to the U.S. And he says that, you know, if they're growing those under BSL-2 in China, U.S. researchers will likely freak out. And so, yeah, there's really that it's very revealing of the mindset and the culture of like, I mean, these are people who have a really serious responsibility of handling a virus that can kill lots of people and just societal destruction. And they're kind of like, what can we slip past DARPA? And again, luckily DARPA did not approve this particular grant, but it does say a lot about kind of the atmosphere. What was the cavalier attitude of the scientists that are working with these really deadly, dangerous viruses? Emily, continue with your explanation of the psychology, and then if you could also talk a little bit about the media coverage of the lab leak at present. Yeah, I mean, I think you're spot on there. I mean, Barrick said that U.S. researchers would freak out about this work being outsourced to BSL-2 in China before virus started circulating the globe out of Wuhan. So of course he knew people would freak out about this. And instead of doing what I think would be the moral patriotic thing and being transparent and coming forward, they attempted to save their own reputations. And clearly Dazsak made a bet that these documents would never come out. And so he kept lying to his sources in media and lying to other scientists that this work was to be done in more rigorous biosafety standards of the U.S. And he knew that to be a lie. He also said that they didn't sample in Laos. And that was also a lie. Some of SARS-CoV-2's closest relatives circulate in southeast China, so that's highly relevant information to the origins of COVID. And people looked in GenBank and said, it says that this was sampled in Laos. What's going on? And our documents also confirmed their intention to sample there. So the behavior is very strange. The Lancet letter, organizing that and telling Ralph Barrick to leave his name off, it's, you know, I think that speaks volumes as well. And then also I did want to answer your original question about what is, what would constitute kind of final firm evidence. I think the research described in the documents that we in drastic obtained probably describe how SARS-CoV-2 became SARS-CoV-2, but we don't know what viruses they were starting with. We don't know at the time they were exchanging these notes and having these conversations if they had sampled SARS-CoV-2 like viruses at that point. You know, we know they have identified RITG-13, one of SARS-CoV-2's closest relatives. But I think we need to know more information about that. But if we were to confirm that they were doing, using some of the techniques described in these documents with SARS-CoV-2 like viruses, I think that would be, I mean, as close to like a final smoking gun as you could get. So, but it's also worth remembering. It also seems very likely that, let's say that the Chinese government had that information that there's almost no chance that would ever come out. Well, one quick point on that. There was an email Peter Dasek sent to his U.S.-based colleagues in April of 2020 with the subject on China GenBank sequences. GenBank is where we deposit our sequences. And then the importance of this email was high. In that email Peter Dasek said to his colleagues, let's not upload these China GenBank sequences. They were part of the terminated NIAID grant, that same grant that brought together diffused collaborators in 2019. And Dasek mentioned that if you did publish these sequences, it would bring very unwelcome attention to USAID, Predict, UC Davis, and other colleagues on this email. So, it's possible the digital signatures of this work still exist out there or have been deleted or scrubbed in a deliberate effort by Dasek to not bring unwelcome attention to he and his collaborators. Absolutely. And of course, you know, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took its database offline. So, again, sort of the behavioral clues here suggest that there could be something to hide. And we've submitted FOIA requests to NIH, which hosts the repositories for these sequences for metadata that could hopefully shed light on that deleted data. But yeah. So, is this where I rant about the media? Well, let me, yeah, let me bring this back to the media question for a second. Because, you know, one example that really comes to mind for me and how that they're the sort of treatment, because it's not like the New York Times has not covered the idea of a lab leak at all or other large prestigious organizations. It's just that there's a sort of a symmetry because I think it goes back to this network that you're talking about. It's kind of understandable. You have a respectable scientist saying one thing. They might have motives for saying that thing. But then that is what gets treated as more credible right out of the gate. And like one striking example to me was the way that this is a New York Times article on the pre-print on the kind of definitive paper that's making the argument that this spillover from animals to humans happened at the Hunan market. New research points to Wuhan market as pandemic origin and kind of the way this was reported. You can see a quote from Michael Warby, one of the lead authors on it when you look at the evidence all together. It's an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started in the Hunan market. Some of those conclusions were softened a little bit once this went through peer review. Notes there that at the time of publication in the New York Times it had not yet been published in a scientific journal. I do want to talk a little bit about the way that was covered, but also about the study itself. Maybe Alex could weigh in on this. They're arguing that the argument of the paper is they did samples in the market and you can see in this diagram there's a little red hot spot where they're saying most of the virus was transmitted or you know the hot spot of viral samples was in this little corner like one or two stalls and then if you zoom in on that you'll see they've got you know these two stalls kind of highlighted in red and they've got pictures of raccoon dogs and unknown birds. Basically mammals that plausibly could have transmitted the virus from to human beings in the market and kicked this pandemic off. This and one other paper who was by many of the same authors are kind of like the touchstones for like this is the definitive argument for zoonotic spillover of the virus which is a very common way for pandemics to start. What is your analysis in short of this paper Alex? If you could keep up that figure that's actually a great great touch point. So this analysis made a statistical error and the error fails to account for sampling biases. If you look at that little gradation of number of environmental positives at the middle kind of near the bottom there that's the statistic that they were analyzing and so yeah it looks like there's a high number of environmental positives in this lower left quadrant. However we pointed out that the Chinese researchers who conducted this work said in their methods they are prioritizing samples near animal stalls so they took more samples that's why there's a higher number of samples. If you look at the percent of samples that test positive they were actually highest near vegetable traders and in the toilet in the sewage so it tells a very different epidemiological story of human to human transmission and another point to you know on the broader topic of war in Vietnam they looked at where are cases found within the city of Wuhan and they said ah well these cases is found within the city of Wuhan with asterisks cases provided by the Chinese government were centralized localized around the Wuhan the Huanan seafood market. However when you do this statistical analysis of those data you find that the unlinked cases are actually closer to the seafood market which suggests that these cases did have this bias and case ascertainment. Furthermore there were cases left out of this analysis cases that preceded the wet market outbreak for instance a December 4th report of the SARS coronavirus case in Wuhan that coincided with an uptick of the use of the word SARS in the Chinese social media app Weibo so those two data points corroborate this case preceding the wet market outbreak and further more there's another analysis of these care seeking terms that are less likely to have been filtered which showed that the earlier hotspot of care seeking term usage in Wuhan was on the other side of the river near a hospital that's one of the closest hospitals to the Wuhan Institute of Virology so when we try to look at these independent lines to corroborate this and when we account for the statistical biases their findings don't hold their claim of this positive evidence hasn't lasted the test of time so that's the word we at our paper and most of us who were in the field knew that right away David Roman called this hopelessly impoverished early case data and it was quite evident that that was the case so for us scientists in the field it's unusual that these two papers the other one had similar statistical flaws in a bug in its code that completely undermined it these two papers were both published side by side in science and then both presented in the New York Times and the Atlantic and the Guardian as you know this positive evidence that's been solved and for many of us scientists especially me familiar with the standards of evidence in the field before COVID for instance looking at the percent of PCR tests that are positive which we all know was a big debate during COVID in terms of how to measure prevalence in the population to control for increasing rates of testing you know for us who are familiar with the standards of evidence and the common modes of analysis in the field these papers were highly unusual so was the proximal origin paper by these same authors and then you trace it back to the wall and you find the Anthony Fauci who flooded the diffused PIs in 2019 he prompted this call he put the people in the room and who did he put in the room with Christian Anderson in many homes he put in the leading proponents of gain of function research including the OG Ron Fuchsier who passage that avian influenza through ferrets so this was you know it's like the EPA calling in all the oil and gas companies when they're presented with the study finding evidence of climate change you know when us scientists who are familiar with the other scientists and the debates in the field and the methods and modes of analysis when we see this it's just a that to me is raising alarm bells in addition to the genomic evidence of if you're in cleavage site not just any fear in cleavage site you know but if you're in cleavage site in the exact position where Emily's recently FOIA documents proposed to insert it in Wuhan where this was proposed to be conducted and far from the hot spot of bats are as coronavirus is and a litany of other evidence that all combines and I think for me that's how I think of the evidence is we have to treat these zoonotic origin papers methodically and look at them carefully and see how much evidence they do provide once we throw those off the table based on their statistical flaws and other other problems with them all that's left is this mountain of evidence you know it's like the straw that broke the camel's back we're looking for that straw but we're forgetting about the many bails of hay that are already there and that's you know our paper was yet another straw but Emily is right to point out and thinking about this evidence you have to look at everything you have to look at the Wuhan origin the fear in cleavage site at the S1S2 junction with these weird codons bioengineers use with all this weird behavior both of the Chinese government and the researchers connected with the Wuhan labs and coincidentally we found evidence consistent with the exact method for assembly that they proposed and that every time we FOIA new documents we only get closer to the truth that corroborates the theory we've had all along so what does this all say about the state of science journalism Emily Emily do you want to take that i've got opinions but i feel like you have some good ones too yeah um i feel like i could rant about this all day but i think just taking the warby paper as an example um i mean some of the stuff we're discussing is very high level and maybe the journalists just didn't understand you might say but remember that at the point that that pre-print came out and the new york times push alerted it the senior authors of that paper had been caught lying already we already had the FOIA emails showing that anderson said that the SARS-CoV-2 genome had features consistent with engineering and then four days later told the national academies that um that that was a crank theory um and we already knew that rubber gary another author on that paper um had said i can't figure out how this spike protein gets accomplished in nature but it would be easy to do in a lab and then you know a few days later started drafting a paper that would dismiss the idea of engineering as a conspiracy theory so these people were already not credible you know and zack you were talking about how you know people's default is often while this person has a lot of expertise they're affiliated with this prestigious institution they seem the the most credible and um in 99 percent of cases i would agree but i think we're in this unique situation where we're trusting virologists to give us straight answer straight answers about whether a pandemic that killed millions of people stemmed from controversial virology research um and you know these virologists in particular already at this point had a track record of dishonesty and i think when you're a reporter i think you have to have some healthy skepticism and you know prestige is important expertise is important but so is integrity and i remember when this you know paper got a lot of attention in the press i mean the york times alerted it cnn alerted it a bunch of other news organizations i remember thinking you know does honesty not matter it does integrity not matter um i think clearly matters and um you know another aspect here um that should have alerted journalists to something strange going on was the fact that i mean literally hours before the warby pre-print published the china cdc had come out with its own analysis um and a pre-print of this data and they had concluded that the wet market was a superspreader event that it had just amplified an already existing epidemic um you know that conclusion happens to be consistent with their country's propaganda around the pandemic starting somewhere else but they did collect the data um and they have more knowledge about how they collected their own data than western scientists working on laptops many miles away and what they said was exactly what alex just said which is that you know the samples that appear to cluster around the animal stalls we actually focused our our collection efforts there um and jesse bloom has analyzed the metagenomic data and found that um animal dna specifically animals that could have served as intermediate hosts like raccoon dogs is uh not correlated with sars-cov-2 virus um and so those samples are not very meaningful which china cdc knew and said right before um the new york times put on its front page that it was definitely the wet market and the lab leak theory it's a conspiracy theory um and i think the more information we've gotten um the less and less these papers have stood up recently to experts in spatial statistics put out a paper basically saying that the war be paper is extremely flawed um but there hasn't been a lot of follow-up that i've seen in the western media at least to correct the record and to also look at some of the evidence that's accumulated on the lab side so um there's a lack of like follow-up also you know uh alex when emily talks about integrity that is the it's just so striking to go back to that doc the annotated documents where you've got um you've got uh peter dajak saying we're going to just downplay or you know conceal the fact that most of this very risky research is going to be taking place in china um the the the attitude that's on display that we talked about a little bit earlier do you have any thoughts about what can be done to change the culture or the mindset that is on display there as someone who has worked in this world of pursuing government contracts uh or you know DARPA grants in virology well i think one give credit to DARPA where it's due that they rejected this proposal that they saw through this unsafe research proposed by DASAC and they said no um but then you have to look at NIEID that funded these diffused collaborators in 2019 and then you actually have to look back beyond that to ron fushier and you have to look at you know the history of this pandemic started in 2011 um most people are looking at you know the wet market in january 2020 or cases in late 2019 but this started in 2011 and that was the beginning of a systemic seismic shift in this research community where many researchers were outraged that ron fushier not only did this research that risked causing a pandemic and killing millions of people but if it was really bad it could end human civilization and scientists spoke up within our community and we said this is not okay um please stop please halt this risk research it's not worth the risk we're not getting any material benefits there's no treatments or vaccines coming from this work stop it um but why didn't we stop it and that goes back to these 2014 discussions that emily's been listening to and others as well where there was this massive debate there was this cambridge working group of scientists from harvard and elsewhere that were saying and richard ebright and david brawman saying we need to stop this at the risk the benefit um does not outweigh the risks of this work and then there was a very political group called scientists for science effectively the boys will be boys of science that said hey just let us do science we need to be able to do this work because you never know what benefits might lurk around the corner but we know the risks lurk around the corner and they are catastrophic and so the scientists for science who signed that who were those people if you look down that list you'll see a lot of familiar names you'll see ron fushier and christian drosen who were um the two of the people that fauci furar and collins invited into the room in february of 2020 you'll see vincent rock and yello the host of this week in barology whose student angela rasmussen has become this very outspoken proponent of but scientists do science let boys be boys you'll see seven signatories who are members of n i each and n i a i d including david marins who peter dasak described as a mentor and david marins was now shown to have been withholding or to have been failing to comply with federal records retention requirements by using his gmail account to conduct official n i h business he's since been removed from his post that i h but yet we still don't have his gmail communications with his mentee peter dasak who he was in communication with in 2019 so we have this very systemic shift in science where n i a i d led by anthony fauci sided with scientists for science in this debate between scientists so we had this kingmaker of anthony fauci and francis collins who saw this debate in science and said we're going to work with these people and in fact their own people david marins and others than i a d sided with the you know proponents of this risky work so even though there was a moratorium in 2014 that obama helped pass in 2017 fauci and collins redefined the law they said well it's not gain a function research of concern if you're doing gain a function research of concern to make vaccines which is like saying it's not nuclear weapons development if you develop nuclear weapons test bunkers when obviously that would be very unethical and morally repulsive to anyone in the public who heard that reasoning and that again 2017 in that time range peter dasak thanked n i a d for overturning his own moratorium and pause on on his gain a function funding pause on his work in this n i a d grant that in 2020 he says he found these china gen bang sequences that we should not publish and so you have to trace it back you know there are these systemic problems in science and they relate to this inequality of power that comes from science funders being able to choose the winners of science and you know that's been a very difficult thing to overturn and anthony fauci being the head of n i a d for 30 years has so many connections in the media and he has so many connections at science the magazine to help science journalists tell the story he wishes to tell so when you see proximal origin written and then days later anthony fauci using his bully pulpit as the head of n i a d talking to international news outlets saying oh there's this paper i don't know who wrote it you know i don't know the authors but it shows conclusively this did not come from a lab without disclosing that again his agency supported this research overturn the moratorium and funded these exact collaborators in 2019 what we're seeing is this very systemic problem isn't you know we would like to localize it you know i don't localize it too much because this isn't the fault of a grad student that typically were vile or was bitten by mouse you know this goes higher than that you know uh yeah that that idea of you know either decentralizing science funding or building some more firewalls between the people in political power and the people uh giving out the grants is something we've talked about on this show before in terms of other covet polo in terms of basically covet policy that was questioned throughout the pandemic and i think it's i hope it's something that someone in congress you know picks up and and runs with um in terms of you know what needs to be uncovered at this point what what more information needs to be pried out of people's hands or email inboxes by journalists or congressional investigators you know i'm really haunted by this theory that rand paul laid out when i spoke to him late last year he's someone who's uh continued to press on this issue i want to play a clip of what senator senator paul thinks is the best theory as to where this all started based on the intelligence that he's reviewed and then get your reactions to that as we start to bring this to a close let's roll that rand paul clip your best theory is is that the chinese created a virus covid in order to try to create a vaccine to oppose it to try to see if they create a vaccine that would work for all coronaviruses the person who was working on these vaccines we know his name a general zoe usin and he's developing this vaccine sometime in 2019 but he has to have somebody develop a mutant coronavirus that actually infects humans well we think that's what covid was was developed in the lab to create the vaccine we also know that zoe usin got a vaccine and he has it created by february of 2020 and most people think there's no way you could have gotten it that quickly unless you'd been working on it for some time we also know that this general dies mysteriously two months later so there's a lot to be said here that what was going on is a creation of a virus creating a gain of function coronavirus that would infect humans easily and then creating a vaccine from that and what happened is that it accidentally got out of the lab okay so what ran paul's referencing is this general in china's people's liberation army the pla zoe usin and according to the house minority select committee on intelligence report uh on the origins of covid uh hold on i had it here oh yeah they said that a site so that general zoe had reportedly worked with the wiv with the wuhan institute for biology for years before to the pandemic general zoo had worked extensively on coronavirus research coronavirus research for several years and on february 20th february 24th 2020 team led by general zoo filed a patent application for a covid 19 vaccine which the authors here characterize as an improbably fast timeline notably in the spring of 2020 as global covid 19 cases surpassed seven million and covid 19 deaths surpassed 400 000 general zoe reportedly died under mysterious circumstances you know and just to bracket that for a second uh you know we don't we have limited information about what goes on in china we're relying on you know reports from intelligence agents who are getting reports from people on the ground and their you know their take their analysis is that he may have fallen off the roof of one of these labs um but anyway in light of the information above they continue it's plausible to hypothesize that general zoo's team of researchers already possessed saris cove to prior to the pandemic as part of bio weapons research and was working on vaccine related experiments involving the virus in 2019 and that a safety incident at the institute led to its release into the world so the hypothesis is that basically they're trying to create like almost a universal covid or coronavirus vaccine and this was like the the virus they created to test against that um but you know do you have any obviously none of us have any special insight about what went on in china um but what really concerned me about all of it is the overlap between military operations and science throughout this whole story really whether it's the pla in china or darpa in the us um what have you found pulling on those kinds of threads emily so my recollection is that general zow um his death was not announced in the way you would expect from a scientist of his prestige um whether or not he was pushed out of a window of the wiv um i don't know i'd love to see that intelligence um and whether or not that abbreviated vaccine development timeline is a red flag um i don't feel qualified enough to um assess that i think there are conflicting opinions um and some debate about that because i guess the counter argument would be i believe moderna developed their vaccine extremely fast maybe even as early as january so that that's like the nature of m rna technology so that is a possibility right right um i do know through our reporting we obtained last year uh three state department cables um or two excuse me two state department cables that um detail involvement of the pl a at the wiv um this is something that she jingli was not honest about um so that's unusual um but unfortunately those cables were heavily redacted you know the odini did put out a very brief um summary of intelligence related to the wiv that confirmed um military involvement with the research there including research on coronaviruses but didn't include a lot of detail um about the nature of that research so i think we need more information and both chambers of commerce or both chambers of um congress uh unanimously approved a bill saying that we need to declassify intelligence related to the wiv and so i think we deserve to know um more information about that but i don't i just don't know yeah yeah i mean it it's like anytime you get into national security there's these major transparency issues um and as i was going through the documents that you posted um i took a little screen recording of just this series of redacted pages um in the documents um and uh maybe we can have hunt uh roll those for a second while we continue to talk this is just a continuous like stream of redacted pages so at some point classification it just becomes a brick wall and you have to either rely on whistleblowers or a really motivated investigator within the government so you know as we close out i'd like to hear from each of you what is the next step you'd like to see here either in terms of some specific piece of information coming forward policy action being taken or even just a cultural change within journalism or science um let's go to alex first and then uh give emily the last word i think you asked the big questions act um i don't have a little answer for it um science we scientists need to be able to construct better systems to hold each other accountable we need to yeah the the concepts of decentralizing science funding are useful for the ability to just remove these kingpins from this from the field but there's still going to be the questions about the research ethics and risk taking in science and when ron fuchsiae published this work in science um and when people published similar work in nature and science and sell um there was this incentive for scientists to take greater risks and i think sciences need to evaluate our own system of publication and merit allocation and funding to really think carefully about pandora's box we haven't because we haven't opened pandora's box quite like this before and so i think there is going to be some major social and systemic issues i think scientists really need to speak up and be independent um so that we can start to restore trust in our community and also help our community stay away from these you know extremely risky experiments and really i mean after the holocaust or after you know the world war two germany had a very serious national reckoning and has embedded into his culture teaching kids about how they went wrong and i think scientists need to be focused explicitly on that on how we went wrong from ron fuchsiae to anthony foushee and francis collins to peter dazsack and more um and then i think from the journalist side of things there's a lot of structural issues facing journalism i just want to say that it's amazing to see what emily has been able to do in this and i think this is inspiring to me that there are this there is this vast network of people out there with you know with sharp minds and you know stubborn heads that are pushing for this information i think the key pieces of information we need to hear from are those china jen bang sequences vassac with health i think we need to hear communications from david moran's and other program officers and not ny h and id emily herself and the us right to know team already have foyer standing for u n c's ralph barrick who's also part of this collaboration we need to be able to pry open these books look at it and personally i'm not in a very retributive mindset but i just think for the purpose of safeguarding the world in the future we have to have a full account while everyone is live today you know before someone falls from a roof or something like that we need to be able to have an account where people tell us what they did and why they did it so that we can actually create this social system science to prevent that from ever happening again emily i don't know that i am hoping for any specific policy outcome um or change in the press i just honestly want there to be clarity and a national reckoning for everyone who lost loved ones to the pandemic um or who lost businesses or major milestones in their life um i honestly think this will probably be my last investigation kind of been approaching it that way i don't have a lot of hope that you know journalism will tomorrow be like actually this is very valuable reporting um and we should reward it i think um i just want there to be clarity and some closure for people who are grieving that's really my my one hope well that's kind of surprising and and disappointing what why is this why are you thinking this is your last investigation are you just like there's your you've hit a brick wall i don't know that i will be employable after this at least in the media as it exists now so um yeah so i i don't i guess think a lot about like this is how i want the press to change you know i i just want there to be clarity around this kind of most monumental thing that has happened um in modern times so that's really my hope all i mean i can echo emily's sentiment that the challenge of speaking truth to power is power and as a scientist trying to speak this truth it's also affected my career and alienated me from colleagues and so this is the kind of social system that we exist in from journalism to science and that's something we need to reevaluate and reconstruct yeah totally agreed because uh if you two are being marginalized to that extent where uh you're you know you're feeling like you're not even employable within these institutions going forward there's something seriously wrong here and hopefully um there's you know some sort of uh turn around here or some some hope on the horizon um and uh that information continues to come out and and correct uh what has clearly been uh just a series of cover-ups and uh uh hubris and uh errors uh and i just want to thank both of you for you know joining me today to walk us through it and uh hope that you you are able to continue your work in in some form emily cup alex washburn thanks for coming on the show today thank you zack thanks for listening to just asking questions these conversations appear on reason's youtube channel and facebook page every thursday and the just asking questions podcast feed every friday subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please rate and review the show