 Yeah, well, you're right that 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 going to happen because our genetic technologies are getting so good. Well, I was wrong there. To some extent, I think I owe it to myself to understand why this setback happened. But I think the world deserves an answer. You know, 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, you know, we need to show that we're going to find out how it happened and track down anyone who started it. So 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, you know, a project that I didn't wish on myself. I didn't say, oh, this is going to 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, you know, 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 want to find out. I want to turn over every stone that might show an answer. What is the importance of how it started? So, you know, what could we learn if we knew whether it was a direct transmission from animal to human or whether it came from a lab? Obviously, if it was an engineered, there's lessons there, but why is the origin so important? Because the, 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 that the food market the natural kind of a natural transmission and in the lab lab leak. Yeah. Well, in outline, the the 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 two thousand and two 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 that 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 etc etc. 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 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 a thousand 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, 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. 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 this lab was the most secure lab, right, category 4, whatever they call it. And the probability of something escaping from category 4 is very low. But one of the things you document in the book is that they weren't doing their SARS research or their bat-virus research in that particular lab. Correct. The only category 4, 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 3 for the humanized mice experiments and biosecurity level 2 for the human cell experiments. Now, 2 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 2. 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 2. And experienced researchers, the most experienced coronavirus researcher of all, Ralph Barrick, 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 documenting that evidence about the potential lab leak theory. What is that? There was one bit of evidence we just managed to squeeze in to 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. 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 you know 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 reasons 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. They've never 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 has 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 sometime 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, left scratching around with three different information requests and leaked 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. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. 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