 The best theory 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 could create a vaccine that would work for all coronaviruses. The person who was working on these vaccines, we know his name, General Zhou Yusun. 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 Zhou Yusun 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. We also actually know the names of the three scientists who got sick in November of 2019. We actually know the names. Some people say these are the patient zero and they got sick in 2019, November. And yet the Chinese didn't admit to anything going on until January. And even in January, second week of January, the Chinese are still saying, Oh, nothing to see here. We don't think it's transmittable between humans. Meanwhile, it's been cooking and growing for three months and they knew that wasn't true. How should science funding in this country change given the facts we've learned through this discovery? You know, this debate's been going on a long time. Some scientists engineered avian flu and made it transmittable through the air among mammals. And people were very concerned because avian flu is very deadly in humans, but fortunately doesn't infect humans very easily. So they had a big debate and they shut down gain of function research between 2014 and 2016. The problem was Anthony Fauci kept giving exemptions to all the people that were doing this research. And then in 2017, the pause on gain of function funding expires and they set up a new committee, a pandemic pathogen committee that's supposed to review things for safety. Well, all those things sound good, but then none of the Wuhan research ever went before the committee. In fact, the committee, the chair of the committee told me they only looked at three projects out of probably possibly hundreds of these gain of function grants that they were looking at. So what you end up having to have is I think you probably need a committee of scientists as well as people in the National Security Theater who are aware of what kind of weapons can be made from these viruses. You need them looking at it and trying to decide whether the taxpayers should fund this. I think rather than a blanket ban of just saying no gain of function, the problem is if you say no gain of function, Anthony Fauci already says all of these experiments which were obviously gain of function were not. So he just defines himself out of the rules. And I think they'll continue to do that. But I think you need a committee. And the other thing about the committee is it has to be independent. They have to be able to review any grant throughout government. And they also can't be the same people getting the money. So for example, this Christian Anderson who does Fauci's bidding to write a paper saying nothing to see here, he got a $9 million grant the next month. So you can't have the people involved with determining whether something's safe also be getting grants from the people that are judging the safety of. That's too incestuous to be a real oversight condition. But we think it can be done. Our hope still is that we can get a bipartisan bill out of this. We continue to try to work with Democrats every day to get them interested in the issue. The hardest part is just the lack of curiosity. The Democrats haven't really cared much about this. A million Americans died and Democrats seem to be blasé about doing anything about it. You also suggest in the book some sorts of controls over the actual materials that are used in labs to manipulate viruses or bacterias or other life forms. And we're in the synthetic biology age now and in some sense the gatekeeping is gone. I just wonder how do you think about the trade-offs there in terms of not stifling scientific progress while at the same time making sure we don't have rogue groups creating super viruses that cause a global pandemic? Most research goes to universities and through grant agencies giving to the universities. And so I think that can be policed through some sort of safety committee application of judging what is safe and what is not safe. But we live in an era you're right, an era of synthetic biology. You can order on the internet the RNA to create the polio virus. You can literally get on the internet right now and order the bits of it. If you know how to put it together you can create the polio virus from nothing. It's almost as if you're creating life. Now a virus may not really be life because it has to live in a living cell, but essentially you're creating something that you can put into and basically bring alive from nothing. So I think there should be some rules on ordering this. We don't let you buy centrifuges online. We don't let you enrich uranium in your basement. This is I think equivalent to nuclear weapons and how many people can die from this. And so even being a libertarian and not believing in many government rules this is one of the exceptions that I think government could participate in. The other thing is is since government funds so much of this, even as a libertarian there's no real restriction on how much you want to regulate government or regulate the expenditure of government funds. So I think there needs to be a great deal more done to this and probably 95 to 99% of it will be government funds that need to be regulated more strictly. Hey thanks for watching that clip from my conversation with Rand Paul. You can watch another clip right here or the full conversation over here.