 There was a really interesting email that the House Committee unredacted here. And I mean, I just pulling up this image because this is just an amazing redaction that many journalists were trying to get for a long time. The House Committee was able to get it. You know, the unredacted version says, folks, the call with Jeremy Farrar, welcome trust, redacted. Happy to chat with any of you about this. Best regards, Tony. That's what we got out of that. The unredacted material is actually fairly interesting. I'm going to zoom in here. He's talking about these early discussions that he had with Anderson and the team and that they had the suspicion that there had been manipulation, which was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain of function experiments to determine molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection and the outbreak originated in Wuhan. So right there, beginning of the pandemic, is Fauci laying out that he knew about the gain of function experiments in Wuhan. He knew this was a possibility. He also knew about these studies that had occurred there. You mentioned Ralph Barrick earlier. This is one of the famous studies, which is a collaboration between Xi, who was the head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Ralph Barrick, a major researcher at UNC, I believe. And in this study, they created chimeric virus from a bat coronavirus in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. So they created exactly the kind of prototype you would expect in this kind of research. And here's the kicker, the acknowledgments. Research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and National Institute of Aging and the US National Institutes of Health. So Collins and Fauci's agencies. This is a January 27th email where Fauci is being alerted for the first time that his agency sent money to EcoHealth, which is the group that was collaborating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on this research. So very early on, he was aware that these were issues that were in the air. And so in light of all that, I want to play kind of the famous back and forth clip between Anthony Fauci and Rand Paul, where he puts this question directly to him. And it got a certain reaction at the time. But now that we know more, I just like people to see it again, maybe in a new light. So let's pull up that clip. This research matches, these are Dr. Ebright's words, this research matches indeed epitomizes the definition of gain of function research. Done entirely in Wuhan, for which there was supposed to be a federal pause. Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain of function research in Wuhan? Your microphone. Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress. And I do not retract that statement. This paper that you were referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function. What was, let me finish. You take an animal virus, and you increase its visibility to humans, you're saying that's not gain of function? That is correct. And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about. All right. It's official. He does not know what he's talking about. What's your reaction to that, Matt Ridley? Well, if you go back to that exchange, there is a sort of justification for what Tony Fauci is saying. It's not a very good one, but it's one that he was clinging to, which is that there are various definitions of gain of function and the specific definition in the US funding issue is that you improve a human virus, not an animal virus, to make it more infectious to humans. That's the angel on the head of the pin that he's dancing on. But as you say, then why was he using the phrase gain of function to describe this work months earlier in that email? And if you can just pull up that hugely redacted email again, it's pretty clear to me, because that email doesn't say anything terribly interesting apart from that. It's pretty clear to me that the reason for redacting that email under the Freedom of Information Act, the reason for redacting the whole email was to save Anthony Fauci's face after that exchange with Rand Paul. It's hard to believe that there was any other reason for doing that. It's certainly not to protect sources or to not invade the privacy of someone else or that kind of thing. The legitimate excuses for redaction are not there. This was a political redaction of an email in view of that exchange that had already happened. Could I bring up someone whose name you mentioned earlier in passing Ralph Barrick? You mentioned he's a very important and accomplished researcher who seems to be on the periphery here. What can you tell us about the person of Ralph Barrick and his importance to this conversation? Ralph Barrick is probably the premier coronavirus researcher in terms of his ability to manipulate these viruses. He developed several techniques, including this reverse genetics technique, which is essentially a way of, as it were, going from a sequence that you want to a live virus. He developed the so-called noceum technique, which is named after a biting midge that you don't see, because it's so small, which is effectively a way of altering the genes of coronaviruses in such a way that you don't leave any scars, any joins. He was really the person who was doing spectacular new work on coronaviruses. He had an idea about how to develop vaccines in this area, et cetera. But he's working mainly on these obscure coronaviruses that nobody's terribly interested in, and then along comes SARS-1 in 2003, and suddenly it's a much bigger deal. And then MERS, and suddenly coronaviruses are of great interest to the world. So when the Xi Zhengli lab gets involved in coronavirus research because they basically are hunting down the origin of SARS-1, is where how they start, and then they want to get into much more molecular work, they want to learn from Ralph Barrick. But he doesn't have access to SARS-like coronaviruses because there are no horseshoe bats in North America, and all SARS-like coronaviruses live in horseshoe bats. So they come to an arrangement that Xi Zhengli will supply some of the viruses that he needs to work on, if he's going to work on SARS-like coronaviruses, in exchange for her learning some of the techniques of reverse genetics and genetic manipulation from him. So although both their names are on that paper, that Miniaturie's paper, very, very important and significant groundbreaking paper in 2015, none of that work on that paper was done in Wuhan. It was done in North Carolina. But following that paper, the Xi Zhengli lab, led by Ben Hu and Peng Zhou, is rapidly trying to catch up with Ralph Barrick by emulating his techniques. And one of the most important documents that we haven't talked about yet, which is the one that really persuaded my co-author Alina Chan and myself to come off the fence, the so-called defuse proposal, was a request to DARPA in the Pentagon for money to do work on SARS-like coronaviruses that would include inserting fewer in cleavage sites into them for the first time. And that work was to be done in North Carolina, right? But the proposal was turned down. And the partners to that request were the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Ben Hu's name is on it, but so is Xi Zhengli's. So it's pretty obvious that when that was turned down in 2018 for that experiment to be done in North Carolina, it's not pretty obvious, but it's definitely possible that the Wuhan Institute of Virology said, well, we'll go ahead and do the same experiment in our lab with all our funding from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. We don't need that grant to do that work. Indeed, they may have already started to do it because the proposal has some very specific things in it that read like the kind of thing you say when you apply for a grant for work you've already started. And so one plausible reason why Fauci, Collins at all might not want people looking too closely at this or dwelling on this is, well, let's not look too closely at the fact that our agencies were funneling money to this sort of research that maybe we did not directly fund the creation of this virus in a lab, but kind of like bootstrapping the technology and then like exporting it over to China where it's like completely unsupervised. That's kind of an overarching perception that they don't want out there. And Ralph Barrick has played a very interesting and quite county role in the debate because he did not put his name. He didn't join that conference call. He didn't put his name to the Proximal Origin paper. He didn't put his name to the letter in the launch. He was asked if he would and said, no, it's better if I don't. And he has given one or two interviews, not very many, but he gave one in 2021 that indicated that he thought it was possible that this thing might have come from a lab. So I think he's well aware that the research that he developed but that was then taken on in Wuhan could have led to the creation of this virus. And I mean, I'm sure he will deny that that's what he thinks happened, but I think he's aware that it could be what's happened. And he is really a very critical person. Now, interestingly, there's an exchange between Anthony Fauci and a congressional committee in which he says something like, I don't know if I've ever met Ralph Barrick. Well, we now know that they actually met very early in the pandemic to discuss coronavirus biology. Boy, this is starting to sound like conversations about communist infiltration in the 1950s or something. I mean, there's a lot of skull-duggery going on. Can I ask, in your opinion, is Anthony Fauci, and I don't know how to put this so felicitously, so I'll just do it kind of bluntly, is he deluded or is he corrupt? Is he covering his ass or does he really believe that he understands what happened and he needs to push the conversation in that direction? I would say to that, never underestimate the human capacity for self-deception. Anthony Fauci is the highest paid federal employee or was until he left the job. He's been in that role for something like 30 years. That's extraordinary, isn't it? I mean- Right. It's like the Jager Hoover of infectious diseases. He's the Jager Hoover of infectious diseases. That's a very good line. And his role was immensely strengthened and made more imperial, if you like, in the wake of the anthrax events of 2001 when he was effectively made part of the, when he was made to the sort of czar of the bioterror defense research establishment. So he's nominally under Francis Collins at the National Institute of Health, but that's not the way it works. He's been an enormously powerful individual controlling an enormous amount of funding. He's very articulate. He's a fabulous scientist. He did wonderful work on HIV many years ago when I first knew of his work. But I think he has dug himself into a hole here that he's struggling to dig himself out of. And I wouldn't want to use either of the words you used because I don't know enough to back them up. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Matt Ridley about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can watch another clip from that conversation right here or the full conversation right here.