 All right, welcome everybody to this interview. This is part of a project that I call, we call ingenuism. It's a project that I'm involved with with my business partner Robert Handershot and my co-author, Don Watkins. It's a deep study of progress and human flourishing inspired to a logic stand. Much of the content is inspired by a guest today, Matt Ridley. You can find out more about ingenuism and ingenuism.com where you can subscribe to our sub-stack newsletter and coverage you to do so. And we also have a podcast and you can find interviews on our YouTube channel. So just search ingenuism on YouTube and you will find it. So I'm really pleased to have with me today, Matt Ridley. Matt is of course a well-known science writer, most recently of this book, which we will be discussing, whoops, there it is, Vival with Alina Chan. Previously, he wrote his book on how innovation works, which I interviewed him on, must have been a year or two ago, I can't even remember anymore. And of course, he is famous as the rational optimist and we will ask him if he still is. You can ask Matt questions on the super chat. So feel free to do so. I am monitoring it. We're doing this live for that purpose. So, Matt, welcome. Daron, it's great to be back on your show. Thank you so much for inviting me. Oh, my pleasure. I actually got a pre-publication copy of the book and managed to read it last week. And I have to say, in spite of the depressing topic, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It reads like a detective story. It could have easily gotten bogged down with a lot of details and a lot of science speak. And yet, as you always managed to do, it read, it was easy and it flowed nicely. And it presented, I thought, a very fair perspective on all the different possibilities in terms that we know of. We don't know what we don't know in terms of the origin. So yeah, thank you for writing this. Well, a lot of the credit should go to my co-author, Alina Chan, a brilliant young scientist who's been pushing for proper investigation of exactly how this pandemic started for nearly two years now. And she's extraordinary. And it was a real pleasure and privilege to work with her. Although I only met her for the first time 10 days ago. I heard. So you did this all virtually. That's amazing. So tell us a little bit about how you got started on this. I mean, you obviously have not made friends with this project and what got you motivated? You've always been focused on the positive, if you will, innovation, progress, explaining it, giving out kind of the scientific context for it. How did you get involved in this particular project? Yeah, well, you're right. The pandemic is a setback for those who believe in progress and optimism. I did, in the rational optimist say that one of the things that could derail progress in the 21st century was a pandemic. I later said, I don't think it's gonna happen because our genetic technologies are getting so good when I was wrong there. But to some extent, I think I owe it to myself to understand why this setback happened. But I think the world deserves an answer. There are maybe 16 million people dead now. That's an enormous death toll. We owe it to them and their families. We also need to find out in order to prevent another pandemic. And I think we have to bear in mind that bad actors are watching this, excuse me, watching this episode and saying to themselves, we could wreak havoc with a virus. So we need to show that we're gonna find out how it happened and track down anyone who started it. I don't think anyone did start it deliberately, but I think it's possible that an accident in research happened as we argue in the book. And that needs to be found out if it's the case. So it's very much been a project that I didn't wish on myself. I didn't say, oh, this is gonna be fun. I just think this is too important not to find, this is the most important question facing humanity at the moment, I think. We've got a devastating pandemic that's killing millions and we don't know how it started. That's not good enough for me. I wanna find out. I wanna turn over every stone that might show an answer. What is the importance of how it started? So what could we learn if we knew whether it was a direct transmission from animal to human or whether it came from our lab? Obviously, if it was an engineered, there's lessons there, but why is the origin so important? Because if it came through the wildlife trade from a food market, then there are very clear lessons that we aren't doing enough to stop these viruses getting into the human race from that means. If it came because of cutting down forests, we need to look into that. If it came because of a bio warfare program, we need to look into that. If it came because of a laboratory accident during well-meaning scientific research, we need to think again about how such research is regulated. Of those various possibilities, the ones that we think very clearly are still plausible and the others really are not at all plausible. The ones that are plausible are that it was something to do with the wildlife food trade or that it was an accident in a research laboratory. And the evidence for those two is what we examine at great length in the book. And we both started out thinking the wildlife trade was more likely, but the research related accident couldn't be ruled out. We now think that the research related accident is more likely. We lean towards that explanation. The more we found out the weaker the food related explanation has become and the stronger the lab related explanation has become. So obviously we can't go through the whole book and all the details that you provide there, but can you give us an outline of each one of those hypotheses, of each one of those possibilities? The food market, the natural, kind of a natural transmission in the lab leak theory? Yeah. Well, in outline, many of the early cases in Wuhan were close to or associated with a market where food was for sale. As it was called a seafood market, most of it was seafood, but we also know that some wild animals were sold in that market, not very many, but some. And that very much echoed what happened in the case of SARS, a very closely related virus that caused an epidemic in 2002, three in Southern China, much further south than Wuhan. And that was very quickly identified as having been started mainly among food handlers, among chefs and market traders and was being caused by, they were picking it up from animals called palm civets and a number of other animals. And these animals had somehow acquired a bat virus. It became clear also that this was a virus from bats. So why not the same explanation? This time seems to make a lot of sense. It does seem to be a bit of a connection with the seafood market. The problem is that as time has gone by, they've tested animal after animal and they've not been able to find a single one carrying this virus. 80,000 animals have now been tested in China. It shouldn't take two years to track this down. As for the early cases, China has simply not been forthcoming about what the professions of those people were, what their locations were, et cetera, et cetera. We just, we don't have a good contact tracing pattern for the early cases. Now either they've got one and they're not sharing it with us or they haven't done the work properly, both of which are rather disturbing possibilities. Meanwhile, we have to look at another possibility, which is that Wuhan is not where these viruses live naturally. In the previous pandemic in Guangzhou, that is where these viruses live. But lots of testing has been done on bats in and around Wuhan city and they don't carry this virus. The virus lives 1,000 miles to the south in bats that live in that region in Southeast Asia and Southern China. So the question is how it got from there to there. And there isn't a very big wildlife trade to Wuhan, not nothing like as big as there is to Guangdong province. But what there is is a lot of scientists who go from Wuhan to Southern China sample bats for viruses, take the samples back to Wuhan to a particular institute called the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the leading institute in the world for studying bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses and has published more papers on it than any other topic, has collected more samples, has a bigger database than any other. And at that lab, they do experiments with those viruses that include sequencing their genomes, altering their genomes, testing their infectious ability in human cells, testing them in humanized mice. And we know that among the viruses they took to Wuhan were some that were very closely related to this virus. And we know they were sequencing one of those viruses in 2018, and they may have been looking at others similar ones. So it's not unreasonable to say, are you sure there wasn't an accident? Now, the response from the Chinese lab has been saying, we've looked into it, we don't think there was an accident. Well, in 2003-4, SARS infected researchers at least four times, twice in Beijing, once in Taiwan, once in Singapore. And in three of those cases, nobody knew how it happened. All they knew was that a researcher working on SARS in the lab caught SARS. And since there's no SARS in the community, the only way they could have caught it was in the lab. So, and this virus is far more infectious than SARS. It's far easier to catch. So if it was in a laboratory, a researcher would be almost bound to have picked it up. And he might have thought he was just suffering from a cold, because one of the worrying features of this virus is that it is so mild in younger people that they wouldn't make a big deal out of it. And the intelligence community tells us that three researchers from that institute were hospitalized with what sound very like symptoms of this disease in November 2019, which is about the right time period. Now, I can't independently confirm that. I don't have security clearance to know what the source of that information is. But in the end, a bat-born SARS-like virus causes a pandemic starting in a city which has the biggest research program on bat-born SARS-like coronaviruses. That deserves our attention. And those who say, don't be ridiculous. Of course, it was something to do with the food market, even though we found no infected animals. I'm sorry, they're not being responsible. So a lot of people say, you know, this lab was a, you know, the most secure lab, right? Category four, whatever they call it, and the probability of something escaping for category four is very low. But one of the things you document in the book is that they weren't doing their SARS research or the bat-virus research in that particular lab. Correct. The only category four, which is the highest security level lab in China is at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It opened its doors a couple of years ago. It was built with the collaboration of the French. But that's not the lab they've been doing this work in. They've been doing this work in biosecurity level three for the humanized mice experiments and biosecurity level two for the human cell experiments. Now, two is nothing really more than make sure you're wearing gloves. I mean, you might not even have to wear a mask or goggles in biosecurity level two. And that's fine if you're working with a virus that you know can't infect humans, which is probably what they thought about most of these bat viruses. But they were looking for bat viruses that had the capability of infecting humans. That's why they were looking. So it does seem odd to have been doing those experiments at biosecurity level two. And experienced researchers, the most experienced coronavirus researcher of all, Ralph Barick, is among those who've said that doesn't sound right. They should have been doing this work at a higher security level. So since the book came out and it came out this week, but since you wrote the book or finished the book, there's some new evidence. I saw an article you wrote recently or I guess last week, a documentary that evidence about the potential lab leak theory. What is that? There was one bit of evidence we just managed to squeeze into the book just before we finished editing it. And there was another bit that came out just too late. And that was that a very similar virus has now been found in Laos in the country to the south of China. Slightly more similar than the most similar one we knew about so far. And so everyone said, oh, well, that's fine. That lets the scientists off the hook because they've got no connection with Laos. These are Chinese scientists working in China. Well, very shortly after that, a document was leaked which showed that the EcoHealth Alliance, which is this US based foundation that coordinates a lot of this virus hunting work in China and neighboring countries, had been collecting similar viruses to this in Laos among other countries for a number of years but had said to their funders in the US government, in order not to have the complication of dealing with subcontractors in Laos, we would like to send these samples that we collect to a partner that we already work with which is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So these samples from Southeast Asia will be sent to Wuhan. Now, so therefore the discovery of a Laos connection or a closely related virus in Laos doesn't exonerate the Wuhan Institute of Virology at all nor does it convict it, of course. It doesn't produce direct evidence either way, but that's an example of the kind of things. Now, the one thing the Laos virus lacks that SARS-CoV-2 has got is a feature called the Furin cleavage site. This is a little feature that makes the virus highly infectious. It's one of the main reasons we're having a pandemic rather than a local outbreak. And that's a very odd feature because although other coronaviruses have this feature, no SARS-like coronavirus has ever been found with it. Thousands have been looked at, none of them have ever been found with this feature. So the question is, could that have been put in deliberately? Well, putting Furin cleavage sites into viruses has become a bit of a hobby actually of virologists over the last 10 years. There's been at least 11 experiments to do that. One of them we now know was planned by the EcoHealth Alliance with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018. They asked for money to do exactly this for a SARS-like coronavirus. They said, if we find a novel SARS-like coronaviruses, we would like to put in a novel Furin cleavage site and see if it makes it easier to grow these viruses in cells in the laboratory. Now, you would think that the EcoHealth Alliance, which is a US-based foundation and whose president has been involved very closely in the World Health Organization investigation into this might have volunteered this information some time in the last two years, but it came as a result of a leak of a document at the end of August, the beginning of September. It's a pretty extraordinary state of affairs that even in the West, let alone in China, people like me and Alina Chan, who want to find out what happened, are left scratching around with readable information requests and leak documents to find out what our money as taxpayers was funding in these labs and what they were planning to do with it rather than proper transparency. So could the Furin 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 Furin cleavage site in the laboratory. What happened was that there were some very rare variants that had it already. And 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. It's not a question of just changing one letter here and one letter there. You can get a Furin cleavage site by changing one letter here and one letter there, but this didn't happen this way. Because we look at, 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. So, 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, right? I mean, it would be, you know, 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. You know, 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. Go ahead. I was just gonna say what Christian Anderson said about the fear and 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. You know, 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 a 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. Okay? 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 Li 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? It is extraordinary. Now, I should add at this point, we found that with some very honorable exceptions, mainstream scientists, mainstream journalists, and even mainstream intelligence agents are not much help to us. The people who've been most helped to us are open source analysts, amateur internet sleuths who know how to research the obscure corners of the web to find Chinese documents, theses, databases, research reports, grant proposals. And these guys are extraordinary. There's a guy called the Seeker in India who came up with some incredibly useful information. There's a Spaniard called Francisco de Rivera in Madrid who just simply ended up creating an enormous spreadsheet on which every serial number of every virus that he could track down what information was had about it and it was a very useful bit of work, et cetera. But no thanks, as I say, to official sources. I mean, these guys are, you know, both those people I've mentioned are kind of working in their basements in their spare time. I mean, that was stunning. The fact that, you know, the work that these guys are doing should be what journalists are doing. And we certainly should have scientists involved in this. And it really shows the power of the internet. You couldn't have done this 20 years ago. That's right. And the power of this connection, this connected world we live in, as you said, the people in all kinds of countries sharing information, digging through the web, discovering things, bringing it to the forefront. What did you have to do in order to verify that the documents were real? I mean, because it is a mess out there, we all know there are lots of crazy conspiracy theories. I think one of the, I initially responded negatively to the lab leak theory primarily because of where it was coming from. You know, places where lots of people dealt with conspiracy theories. How do you separate what is a conspiracy and what appears real? Absolutely. Well, this has been a really tough thing for us to do. And there've been many times when Alina Chan and I have said, can we trust this document? Do we think it's real? What can we do to find out whether it is real? And, you know, right at the end of finishing our book, we had this problem with this so-called defuse proposal, which was the one in which the proposal to put the fear and cleavage site into cells like coronavirus was proposed. And we did everything we could to independently verify this. And we ended up, you know, 99.99% convinced that it's not a fake document. And effectively it has been confirmed by EcoHealth Alliance and well, you know, we managed to get sources within the Pentagon actually to verify it. So sometimes things like that have helped us. But it's also been very helpful, Alina speaks and reads Chinese. So we're not relying on translations of documents. That's quite important. And, you know, in the case of the theses dug up by the Seeker, you know, you can go and look at these databases where he found them. And for a while, they were still there. Of course, within a few days they'd gone. But, you know, it was possible to, and actually one of the main things that happened, you know, a whole bunch of stuff was worked out by the Seeker, Rossano Segreto, Francisco Ribeira. And this was still speculative. And then the Wuhenen Institute of Virology published an addendum to their paper, which effectively confirmed a bunch of stuff. You know, they gave a number for how many viruses they had collected in one particular location. It was 1,322. Francisco had by then worked out several months before that they had 1,320 viruses from that location. So he wasn't far out. And he's not a biologist, he is, but the Seeker's not. No, the Seeker's not, Francisco's not. Rossano Segreto is, she's a genomic scientist. She's, you know, a professional scientist. Some of these guys are Yuri Degin, who's an incredibly important figure in this as a Russian biotech entrepreneur. Francisco is basically a technology consultant. Gilles Demineur, for another guy who's been very important, New Zealand-based guy, is basically a data scientist. So they're good at digging stuff into the dark corners of the web and finding... Yeah, well, what did he do? Well, the Seeker said to us was, I just know how to make search engines work for me. I wish I had that skill. Exactly, you do. So I want to talk a little bit about gain of research, gain of function research. If you could tell us what that is and then give us the best positive argument for why we should do it, right? And then we can talk about what the risks are related to it. Yeah. Well, there was a big debate in 2014, 2015 over something called gain of function research. And it blew up for two reasons. One, because of a couple of experiments done on influenza, done very responsibly and very careful conditions in a very safe way. But the purpose of which was to see how easy it was to turn a bird influenza virus into a mammal influenza virus that could be spread through the air. And the answer was it was quite easy, genetically and evolutionarily. So that's useful information that came out of such an experiment. But it's also a dangerous experiment because if one of the ferrets that got infected in one of these experiments, you know wasn't properly disposed of and somebody breathed in while they were handling its body, then suddenly you've got a pandemic on your hands that's more dangerous than it would have been at the beginning of the experiment. So that was what the debate was all about. And around the same time, there was a series of high profile incidents in US laboratories, including the discovery of smallpox including the transmission through the smallpox samples that should have been destroyed previously including a dangerous type of flu that was sent through the post which it shouldn't have been, you know, et cetera which reminded everybody that for all your protocols things can go wrong in labs. So a bunch of scientists called themselves the Cambridge Working Group campaigned very hard to say, we are going too far. We're doing stuff that is well motivated but it's probably not worth the risk and we ought to pause it and stop it. In 2014, the Obama administration did begin to did pause funding for that research federal funding for that research. That pause was lifted in 2017. In any case, the pause had lots of exemptions in it. If you're working on animal viruses and you weren't testing them in human beings then maybe it was okay. It was very easy to continue some kind of this research. A lot of people felt that the pause was was honored in the breach rather than in the way it should have been. So this event has clearly revived that. Whether this pandemic began this way or not I personally as a huge fan of biotechnology as somebody who's always supported it is the best possible way to improve the planet for human beings and for the environment am shocked by how far virologists have been going in terms of taking risks with experiments. The rewards of which are not noticeably huge. Yes, it's helped to know how easy a virus could turn into a pandemic. But is it worth risking starting a pandemic while doing that? I don't think it is. So if this debate continues even after the discovery that this pandemic actually had nothing to do with such research which is possible I will be among those calling for greater precautions around this research. Is there anything to be said that this could advance discovering cures, vaccines, ways in which to handle pandemics much better in the future? Is there an argument like that to be made? Yeah and you know related specifically to this work on SARS like viruses there was a debate between two groups of virologists just a couple of years ago in which one group said look I think there are better ways of preparing for a pandemic than this. We're not convinced that that is actually the best way of preparing for a pandemic. How about we do more testing in human beings? We do you know we work on making vaccines easier to develop etc. But the other group said well actually no because one of the things we're doing is that we think we can come up with a pan-coronavirus pandemic sorry a pan-coronavirus vaccine that will enable us to vaccinate everybody before against any kind of coronavirus pandemic and that would be a wonderful thing and we deserve the Nobel Prize for getting that sort of thing and actually you know it's not a bad ambition to have but you know I say again they didn't achieve that. I mean some of the ideas they came up with were also a little bit wacky. I mean they were talking about spraying a mist into caves of a vaccine which they hadn't yet invented that would immunize the bats against these viruses. They were talking about developing an app that soldiers could have on their phones alerting them to the proximity of disease carrying bats. Well I can't believe that's really a priority for the Pentagon. I always worry about these things anytime we put limits on scientists and I know you do too because I mean the whole point about ideas having sex well they have to meet and they have to generate more ideas but it does seem like this is one of those cases where the downsides are so significant as in the upside at least seemingly are limited. Well you know one of the things that worries me is the degree to which this will reinforce the concerns of an anti-science move. So that was my next question Max. People who are anti-GMOs you know quite a lot of these freedom of information requests are being driven by what for me are uncomfortable bedfellows people who are campaigning against GMOs and things like that. So yeah that was going to be my next question is what do you think I mean not just not just the origins but just the whole COVID phenomena the way we responded the way different governments responded the way this has become tribal and political. Do you worry about people's attitudes towards science towards progress towards innovation as we move here into the future? I do I mean you know let's not forget that the development of vaccines was a triumph for science a triumph for technology a triumph for knowledge you know the work on messenger RNA technology that led to these rapid vaccine developments has been going on for 20-30 years it was a fairly neglected field but it's now shown what we can do and I think the result is that from now on we will be able to turn on a new vaccine for a new threat much quicker than we'd been able to do before. That's a thrilling prospect and if you look at vaccine development before the pandemic it was a terribly slow business still if anything it was taking longer than it used to and I dug out complaints from people in this field from 2019 saying before the pandemic began saying I'm sorry but you know the we really got to get better at producing vaccines and an organization called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation backed by people like the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust was starting work from 2017 saying we've got to get quicker at making vaccines because otherwise we're going to be taken by surprise by a pandemic it didn't get going soon enough but I do think that out of this pandemic such stuff will come but also out of this pandemic will come a lot of people who have lost respect for scientists either because they're anti-vax and you know I'm pro-vax myself but I do worry that making vaccines compulsory tends to cause you know tends to backfire and also the model you know the scientific modelers who told us with absolute certainty that there was going to be a spike next month or there was you know we needed to lock down now when we and you know the UK we were told if we if we ended all restrictions in July there would be a catastrophic number of deaths by September, October we've had nothing like that so I do think modeling scientific modeling which is a branch of science I've had it in for a number of years deserves a good critical look after this pandemic but I worry that if I say things like that other people will say yo see we can ignore all science you know and I you know I worry about bad scientific practice dragging down the reputation of all science and and what's happened in the US but I think this happened in the UK as well is the scientists got involved in the politics and and you couldn't separate them you know Fauci is now a political figure he's not a scientist anymore and and no matter what you think about Fauci much of the debate is is couched in in politics and I think the same thing happened in the UK where all these scientists from Oxford and elsewhere which does bring us to I know people are curious what's your opinion of Fauci but in particular with respect to you know this this gain of function research and the lab leak I know he's had some exchange with Senator Rand Paul over this do you have any opinion about what he knows what he's hiding or what he or is it is or is he really is it really clueless as he claims to be well I try and stay out of that particular one for two reasons one because it's as you say a US political row I'm not US based I don't I'm not close enough to to decide who's right and who's wrong and the other reason is because there is there's clearly a you know a sort of gray area of interpretation here and and for me the the big deal is what happened in China and I don't think you know if we spend too much time focusing on whether or not someone is misleading someone else within the United States we to some extent let off the hook what was happening in China yes there was gain of function research funded in the US probably just within the spirit the letter of the rules if not the spirit of them yes some of that money found its way to China to support work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology but no it wasn't their main source of income most of these experiments were being funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences not the Eco Health Alliance behind that the the US government so so I on the whole I think the Rand Paul Anthony Fauci disagreement is a sideshow and I kind of want to keep it that way but I recognize that it's not an unimportant sideshow so somebody's asking about the one of the other hypotheses that were presented by the Chinese which was which which they really promoted which was the frozen food scenario which you cover in the book so it is is that is that even a possibility and then if not what is the most plausible case for an you know a direct animal to human transmission what would the Chinese argue is the most likely scenario right well just think through you know let's remember that in February we were confronted with a press conference jointly from the World Health Organization and the Chinese scientists saying we've looked into this and our conclusion which we've all signed up to is that a frozen food import origin for this virus is quite likely and a laboratory accident origin is very unlikely so they were deliberately saying one is much more likely than the other just think that through for a moment first of all there's no evidence at all there's no individual piece of frozen food that had the virus on it secondly are you saying that somewhere in southern China there's a hog badger farm where he farms hog badgers which happens and he drops them up and put freezes them and ships them off to markets all over China most of them go to Guangdong province but a few go north to Wuhan and it so happens that one of these samples one of these shipments has a dangerous virus on it the virus somehow survives the freezing and the shipping even though that generally isn't great for viruses but it never infects the farmer it never infects the people in the food handling factory it never infects the people in the freezing plant it never infects anybody along the way it never affects anybody in Guangdong province or any other province that receives these shipments it only infects people at one market in one city which doesn't have a great deal of this stuff being sold in it in the city of Wuhan and then it disappears you know we get one shipment that does this but we test the samples in early January 2020 they did that no they couldn't find this virus they found it on surfaces in the in the market where people infected people had touched things but they could not find it on any stuff that was for sale in the market so I'm sorry but that really does stretch credibility to the limit when Peter Dazak was asked about that he said but we found that they were selling hog badgers and ferret badgers and bamboo rats in this market and later evidence came to light which they didn't know at the time that some of these animals were live when sold so that he said is dynamite that is direct evidence no it's not what you've got to find is that one of these is infected and do you think they're suppressing any of the animal results well that there is an interesting possibility which is that the Chinese authorities are just as reluctant to come up with a live animal trade explanation of this pandemic as they are of a laboratory one why because traditional Chinese medicine has been encouraged by Xi Jinping's particularly in the last few years he persuaded the World Health Organization to recognize it as a form of medicine for the first time in 2019 and it's based on selling wildlife products behind that there has been official encouragement of wildlife farming of civet cats and hog badgers and so on being reared on farms not just sheep and cows and pigs but these other wildlife animals being reared on farms so there's been specific encouragement of this it's a big trade and it's been growing so I think there's people in the Chinese authorities saying we don't want to blame that because that would cause all sorts of problems and we don't want to blame the lab so let's blame frozen food from I don't know Vietnam or Australia or somewhere maybe they come up with a theory that it's from North Carolina right well they yes in a one point at one point and a Chinese spokesman said have you noticed there have been incidents at Ralph Barrick's coronavirus laboratory in Chapel Hill North Carolina why aren't we investigating them that's much more likely because they've had these incidents well a the disease didn't start in North Carolina it started in Wuhan and b incidentally there are no horseshoe bats in North America and these viruses come from horseshoe bats so when Ralph Barrick was working on these kinds of viruses he had to get sequences from Wuhan and then use those sequences to create viruses in in the in the laboratory so yes it's completely possible that someone might get infected with a similar virus in Chapel Hill but why that should lead to an outbreak in Wuhan not very likely so do you think the Chinese as the optimal outcome is that everybody just forgets about this that they never we never find out definitively where it comes from and they'll just delay and postpone and send up you know send us in all kinds of directions to avoid finding the source is that what's motivating them at this point yes I think roughly that is and if you think about what happened in the early months of this pandemic when the Chinese authorities did some very odd things they persecuted and punished anybody who talked about this they denied human to human transmission for far longer than was wise thus allowing to escape they published the genome of the virus and compared it with a genome that they knew about but changed the name of that other genome to obscure its origins and didn't link to the fact that it was involved in an outbreak where people had died you know there was a bunch of stuff that was you know keystone cops like in its clumsy attempt to deflect attention and blame and so on and I think it's important to remember that at that time they didn't expect this to turn into a global pandemic with the kind of attention that it's had at the time we were thinking this would be a little local outbreak in Wuhan I mean I certainly went on thinking well into February that this was like SARS it would blow over in a month or two and you know it the fact that it then turned into a global pandemic meant there was far more attention on these decisions they'd taken in the first month than they would have expected but in terms of what they hope will happen now there's an interesting parallel Svedlovsk 1939 Soviet Union 80 people die of anthrax there's a plant in in Svedlovsk that is thought to be a bio warfare plant working on anthrax is there a connection the Soviet authorities say no international scientists demand a right to inspect they get it they brought in they look around they say well actually you know we think the Soviets are right about this it it wasn't and everyone said and everyone says fine and it goes away five or six years later the Soviet Union collapses and scientists then from that plant then come forward and say actually you know what we were lying we did leave the filter of an exhaust pipe on a particular day by mistake and it led to anthrax being sprayed downtown from our lab and that's why 80 people died now if the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed we'd never have known that yeah and indeed we'd have thought that the whole story was exonerated because international scientists have been involved in looking into it I mean one of the things that scares me about you know what we expect is behavior from China we'd expect it from the Soviet Union those political systems are built to hide and and to prevent information from getting out one would have hoped that China was changing but I think the last few years have shown us that they haven't what scares me is the is the is the is the lack of transparency in the US from from agencies like the equal health alliance who must know more than what they're telling the world and telling scientists and so yes the blame needs to be placed on China I agree with you but it's it's a little spooky when our own governments are playing the same game that the authoritarians are I agree with that and it it's it's shaken my faith in western countries but at the same time I still don't I don't I mean some senior scientists have said to me look Matt of course they were secretive that's what communist regimes do and I've said to them I'm sorry how is that supposed to reassure me why should I let them off the hook just because they're communists and if that's the case we shouldn't be funding research in these countries we should be very careful and how we cooperate with them and how we engage with them it seems to me if they're going to hide stuff then it's not my tax money they should be going to to be funding these things well I I do think that I mean you know we've we've been keenly cooperating on scientific issues with China for two or three decades now and it's brought enormous benefits in both directions but they've been increasing worries about the degree to which either corporate or government espionage is involved in some of these collaborations and I think under Hu Jintao and a sort of relatively liberal leader it was going along fine under the much more authoritarian regime that Xi Jinping is increasingly asserting I think we need to think very hard about some of these collaborations I agree and this this should be a this should be an important piece of evidence or something to think about so somebody has a question that is more broadly about COVID so do you think do you think we should now consider COVID as a seasonal flu like where we take a you know like a seasonal flu shot once a year is that what's going to happen is it endemic indeed to to human populations now? Roughly speaking yes the case fatality rate is now down to somewhere around 0.1% in most people particularly in younger people that's pretty similar to flu we don't try and shut down society because of flu and so I think that's I think you know it's probably evolving to be milder too I think there's some evidence that the Delta variant is much more infectious but not more virulent slightly less virulent and I think that generally tends to happen you know don't forget there are 200 different kinds of virus that cause the common cold none of them kill us or at least hardly ever kill us and four of those are coronaviruses which probably began with nasty pandemics that then settle down to being much milder viruses so I think that that is the way we're going to go I don't think we can eradicate it because it's in our animals too I mean I was talking to a neighbour of mine who has had COVID in the last couple of weeks and her cat has now got it and I read somewhere that the deer in Michigan you know a significant percentage of the deer in Michigan have it which is that's a scary thought isn't it so yeah so do you think this is are we going to see an increase in research on viruses is this is this kind of the wake up call that people needed COVID for more innovation more science more investment in protecting us from the next pandemic certainly the you know the mRNA is very promising not only for this but also for malaria and other things but is there going to be a positive outcome from this not that anything would justify what we've been through? Yes I think I do think that I think vaccines in particular will get a huge boost if that's not a pun and the the the the the biotech century is going to get a kickstart out of this I've believed for some time although not with enormous confidence that whereas the last 50 years were dominated by computers and communication innovation and the previous 50 years were dominated by transport innovations the the next 50 years are going to be dominated by innovations in biotechnology and I suspect that that'll be one of the consequences of the pandemic that we'll see much more of that. So in the end are you still a still a rational optimist? Yes I am you can sense a tiny hesitation in my voice there I'm very aware of the fact ever since I wrote the rational optimist in 2010 in every year people have always said to me are you still a rational optimist I mean have you seen what's happening in Syria have you seen what's happening in Ebola have you seen what's happening in Ukraine have you seen what's happening with the the euro crisis you know there's always been a reason every year to dent my rational optimism and I've always said well yeah but in the big picture on the whole things are getting better look what's happening in Africa you know incredible declines in malaria mortality and child mortality generally in living improvements in living standards lifespan etc etc much greater you know it's been a great decade for Africa compared with previous ones and it's the poorest continent so I retain that general rational optimism but the pandemic has reminded us that the black swans can knock us off of course it might be an asteroid next but you know we shouldn't forget that more more disturbingly there's an internal phenomenon in human society happening that bothers me and that at three in the morning turns me into an irrational pessimist and that is the turning of our back on the Enlightenment the increasing cultural revolution that says we don't believe in evidence we don't believe in reason we basically think that those are old white male values or something like that I don't know how far that could go you know look at what happened in Cambodia or or in China in the cultural revolution that was under an authoritarian regime I'd like to think that in a free society will always be able to rebel against too much cultural despotism if I could put it that way but I have my moments of doubt these days I think we all do yes and part of the turn against the Enlightenment is the turn towards more authoritarianism goes hand in hand the Enlightenment was the error that led us towards political freedom and if we lose we lose reason we lose I think at all we we it's quite a fragile flower yeah it's rare in human history so um what's next I know it's a weird time to ask you about this but is there another project is there something you're writing about? I've just written two books in two years I mean you have to defend the Enlightenment here man I completely understand I completely understand I'm just eager for the next one thank you so much yeah well absolutely I you know I did want to ask you this and I don't know if you have a minute just to say something about this there was a touching piece in the in the book about the kind of the heroes in China who and this is kind of to counter the authoritarian nature of the regime which we know is very evil and a lot a lot of bad things but there were some people Chinese citizens who risked their lives and and risked their freedom early on in the pandemic to to warn us and and I wonder if you could just say a few things about that and then and then I'll let you go completely yeah thank you for that opportunity because you know we're not picking a fight with the Chinese people here quite the reverse you know they've suffered terribly in this and most Chinese people are simply wonderful people and early in the pandemic in particular there were a bunch of people who tried to get information out to the outside world about what was happening spoke very openly and at huge risk to themselves and then were either disappeared or reprimanded or fired or so-called rectified in really unpleasant ways and this is a huge reminder of the fact that you know just as the Soviet Union collapsed and we discovered that actually it's people did want to be free after all despite what we've been told the same is true of China that there are there are good people doing good work trying to help and freely communicate with the rest of the world and they are they are the really unsung heroes here um and I hope by the way that among them are people who are thinking of ways of blowing the whistle and coming out to the west and telling us a lot of what happened with one or two people have already done that but not from right in the heart of this story and uh we've Alina makes this point very well again and again we've got to look after such people if they do come out you know at the moment there's not a lot of incentive you know you you get a couple of interviews on Fox news and then you're kind of tossed aside um I think we've got to make it clear that such people are welcome in the west and we would like to hear from them yeah it sounds like that is maybe the only way we'll find out what actually happened somebody knows yep thank you Matt I really appreciate this this was this was a lot of fun I've enjoyed the conversation thank you good good hopefully next time it'll be on something more more positive and invigorating but uh but we need to cover these stories we need to cover all these stories as well I thank you all for for listening today really appreciate your support don't forget uh in genuism.com you can subscribe to the sub stack don't forget to share the video to like the video to do all the things you know how to do on social media let's get let's get word about uh match new book viral the search for the origins of whoops there we go of COVID-19 let's get it out there and get it sold thanks Matt I hope to catch up with you in London one of these days please look me up when you get the chance good bye