 Hello and welcome to the reason live stream. I'm Zach Weissmuller joined by my colleague Nick Gillespie. Hey, Nick Hey, Matt Matt and Zach. Good seeing you. Yep. And yet today we're gonna talk with Matt Ridley who's joining us To examine in great detail some of the recent developments in the origins of COVID mystery Largely tied to documents and recent testimony in the House Select Committee investigation And Matt Ridley science journalists co-author of a book on this very topic Viral the search for the origin of COVID-19 is here to help us out. Matt. Thank you for talking with us today Zach, it's good to be with you again. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah Pleasure to have you and I interviewed you and your co-author Alina Chan a molecular biologist and one of the earliest and most outspoken Skeptics of the animal markets bill over story around when your book came out in November 2021 and You had this to say about the state of the search for COVID's origins Documents show that eco health alliance worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to make several bat-borne SARS like Coronaviruses and even MERS more infectious to human cells Chan and Ridley say that when they started writing the book They didn't have a strong view about which theory was correct But these recent revelations have shifted their thinking in favor of the lab leak theory In light of grant proposals and reports released within the past few months Chan wrote on Twitter We know novel SARS like viruses were being synthesized and engineered at unprecedented scale that changed my mind completely So knowing that there actually was a plan a pipeline a protocol for doing this work How optimistic or pessimistic are you that we ever will get to the truth of the matter here? I'm generally optimistic. I think truth will out here. It may take a long time But I think there are people who know what happened whatever it had You know, even if it's just what happened in a in a market There are people who know and I can't help thinking that at some point We will be able to find out who they are and ask them even in a regime as repressive and Controlling as China's so I hope we do find out. There are plenty of people who say it's too late We've lost the chance. We'll never find out I'm not one of them at least not yet So with the time that's passed and all the material that's come to light since then which we're about to get into Are you more or less optimistic that we are going to get answers? I'm about the same. I'm still optimistic that we are going to get answers I think it'll be very difficult to keep this vitally important question secret forever Because there are people who know and I'll give you an example of why we why I think that is the case In April George Gao came to Geneva. He's that he was the head of the Chinese CDC Centers for Disease Control Based in Beijing and he was the man who really triggered my interest in this because he He announced in May of 2020 that he thought the market was irrelevant to the story That it was a super spreader event and not the origin So it was with some excitement that I realized I had a chance to meet him in Geneva this year Along with Alina. We both talked to him at some length and he was pretty clear although not in so many words that the market theory Is not tenable But that you can't rule out the lab theory now if that's coming from a senior official in china I mean he repeated the same thing to the bbc and to vanity fair shortly afterwards and was Forced to retract some of his remarks by the regime. So I don't think we're going to be seeing a lot of him in the western media from now on But he's a very open and affable person and you know, just imagine how difficult it's going to be for the chinese regime to make sure that every scientist who travels abroad over the next few years Who has had some knowledge of what went on in wuhan in 2019? um doesn't Sing like a canary when they get here And you mentioned in that answer that it's a vitally important question That's one line of response I've seen as as more and more people have come to believe accept this as a real possibility and By the way, we have some polling numbers here that show two-thirds of americans say It's definitely or probably true that the virus Originated in a lab in china that's up from a little less than 50 percent in 2020 And if you really dig into this you see a real partisan divide and who believes or doesn't believe that But before we get into that You know one of the responses i've seen is well like how much does it really matter? Why is this a vitally important question to get the answer to? Well three reasons in my view The first is that 20 million people are dead and we owe it to their Memory to find out how and why you know if if 200 people die in an airline crash We don't say well, we may never find out. Let's not bother to try and find out We we owe it to the people who've died and the people whose lives were turned upside down Secondly, we need to find out because it will help us to make sure it doesn't happen again People say well doesn't matter which way it happened We still ought to be taking measures to make sure it doesn't happen again Yeah, but that's not the way the world works The way the world works is that virology research of the kind that might have led to this accident Including collecting wild bat viruses and bringing them to labs in cities Is still happening And the third reason why we need to find out Is because Bad actors have watched this episode with great interest terrorists rogue states like north korea They are realizing that putting together a An infectious virus not necessarily a very lethal virus, but an infectious virus And releasing it can bring the the western world to its knees pretty quickly and You know, they probably haven't got the expertise to do it let alone in secret but You can bet your bet on bottom dollar that isis and north korea would quite like to do that at some point It's a very cheap way of of waging war and the best part of it Is that if they did that The western world at least the world health organization Would shrug its shoulders and say we may never may never find out how it happened That's another reason why we should try and find out Do you uh, you know, how does it feel to kind of see the world? And certainly the united states and I suspect the uk as well kind of start to come to your position That the lab leak theory is plausible and should be investigative because when you first started talking about this You know, this was the type of view that could get people kicked off of social media or you know at the very least Get a lot of social approbial You know, do you take any satisfaction? in You know kind of seeing people say like oh this is you know, maybe really what we should be investigating Over the course of my career. I've tried to persuade the public of a number And I've rarely been successful in shifting public opinion in my direction This one is well, you know people some people probably more believe in evolution now than they did before you started writing so Right, but you know, it's a slow grind usually. Yeah, and now I'm not going to take credit for the shift in public opinion but but I am going to say that When I explain the arguments explain the evidence explain the data The coincidence of time and place the kind of work that was going on in the Wuhan lab the kind of behavior of the of the researchers and the regime after the the event began People are very quickly persuaded that there is at least a strong case to answer And you see that in those polls, you know, two-thirds of americans and yes, you said it's on partisan lines But not that strongly, you know, I mean an awful lot of democrats also think that it's probably out of a lab Yeah, according according to this poll as of march 4th 2023. It is 40 54 percent of democrats so over half of democrats back in 2020 that number was 33 the number of republicans back then was 72 percent So, yeah, that's the the partisan divide which i'm sure has, uh, you know For someone like you who's trying to investigate this from a non through a non partisan lens That must have presented, you know, some challenges Yes, but the the the challenge the the disconnect that I think is more important is the disconnect between what the public thinks and what the scientific establishment thinks Because on the whole most of the scientific establishment nature magazine science magazine the academy of medical sciences in this country the royal society in the u.s. The uh Main academies and so on They on the whole take the view no no we can rule out a lab leak No We have proved it was from the market now if you if you really think that if you really think it's it's not even a starter Then you should be very concerned that 66 of the public disagree with you and you should be out there making your case from the rooftops What's so striking is that the scientists on that side of the debate don't want to engage with the argument They want to just say it's let's let it go away. It's over. It's finished Instead of trying to bring these 66 percent round to their point of view Is there um any sign that the world health organization is shifting? If not, it's rhetoric it's practice because you know from the beginning really and I think rightly The who came in for a lot of You know negative criticism Um, where you know, are they doing anything differently? I'm afraid not as far as I can tell Um, they set up an organization called say go which scientific advisory group on origin of novel pathogens um, it doesn't seem to have achieved anything or announced anything the work that WHO is doing through that through that group and others is mostly still focused their conferences are mostly still focused on natural emergence of viruses Uh, you know the forward-looking work. It doesn't say natural emergence and lab based emergence, which it surely should do um, the WHO in my view Played a crucial role in helping to rehabilitate the lab theory by accident because what they did was they went in late 20 20 into sorry early 2021 into wuhan Conducted a pretty farcical And superficial investigation and then sat down at a press conference with the chinese authorities and announced that a lab leak was extremely unlikely And more likely was that it came to china on frozen food probably from abroad now. That's a chinese Authorities idea that has no credibility whatsoever And so by endorsing it the world health organization effectively shot itself in the foot Made it, you know Made itself look really ridiculous And it was very shortly after that that a large group of scientists wrote to science magazine and said this is Not good enough. It may well have come from a lab that possibility needs to be taken seriously And that was really the breaking of the dam. That was the moment when for example, facebook stops Stopped censoring The lab leak as a conspiracy theory You said that The scientific community is not really eager to this day to talk about this topic or debate it They are in the us being forced to talk about it and debate it because they're being pulled in front of a congressional committee This is a report that was put out by the select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic Called the proximal origin of a cover-up did the Bethesda boys downplay a lab leak Again here in the u.s. We're looking at this that this is very much in a partisan lens So republicans control the house. This is a house controlled committee Nonetheless, they've got access to real Documents that the rest of us were not able to have access to at this point and that's what we're going to go through Now a little bit. This is from their executive summary their kind of bottom line here is that This the proximal origins paper, which we'll talk about what that is in just a second is one of the single most impactful and influential scientific papers in history and it expressed Conclusions that were not based on sound science nor in fact, but instead on assumptions The question is why so that was the frame that they went into this with And this is the paper that they are referencing the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 published march 17th 2020 they said it was in that Previous document that it's an extremely influential paper that's been accessed 5.84 million times as the as at time of that publication Could you just talk a little bit about this paper matt? What is it? What's its import? How How much of an impact has it had on the debate? Yes, they're not wrong. This is an extremely important paper. It was extremely important for me too I was in the house of lords at the time. I was being asked by a number of colleagues Who were who said, you know a bit about biology What do you reckon about this idea that the virus came out of the lab? And I was going around saying no it didn't The reason I know that is an influential paper with Five authors has been published in nature medicine and it comes to a firm conclusion that no lab based scenario is plausible Now I haven't Followed every twist and turn of their argument yet, so I can't judge it. But that seems to me pretty slam dunk Now I was wrong There was no good argument in that paper and I read it and I reread it and over the month or two after it came out I found myself wondering Why the arguments it put forward were so Conclusive because they didn't seem to be for one thing. They mentioned the pangolin virus as being a new Breakthrough that implied that this that the SARS-CoV-2 might have been in the pangolin species But the problem with that Is that it doesn't have the crucial feature of SARS-CoV-2 the furian cleavage site that makes it so infectious that makes it effectually effectively a respiratory rather than an enteric disease and So the and you know so the pangolin virus can't be the ancestor Then they mentioned something called olink glycans. I didn't understand what those were at the time So I had to you know go back and teach myself a little Glycosylation biology to to understand that And even they have now said that's no strong argument and then they produced an argument that Really one should have seen through straight away and I'm kicking myself for not being more skeptical very early on and that is that the um The furian cleavage site and the receptor binding domain the bit that attaches to the human cells and gets in there Isn't as good as it could be It could be better. It's it's it's suboptimal You and if you are going to design it you've designed it better Well, there's two arguments against that the first is Where did you get this idea that human beings always get everything perfectly right first time? Of course, you might come up with a design that was suboptimal and the second is that It may be suboptimal to you, but it's pretty darn good. It's killed 20 million people now It's extremely infectious you know, so so it You know those are the three main arguments in proximal origin for why they could reject a lab based scenario It was not in the least persuasive in that respect, but it was extraordinarily influential Not just on me, but on many many other scientists what uh, what uh Excuse me very briefly What explains, you know your interest in embracing the paper Is it partly that it's coming from very reputable people in a very reputable outlet? Is it You know at that point in a pandemic we were just looking for a reason for this not to be The you know a result of human, you know human intervention into things Two reasons one. Yes, it they were reputable people. They were Um virologists, they were people studying evolutionary biology and now generally I'm an evolutionary biologist myself by training I have respect for these kind of people. They they usually know what they're talking about but the other reason why it fell on fertile ground with me Was because I had a I guess you'd call it a Bayesian prior a a an assumption going into this which is that As good as we are at genetic engineering We're not smart enough to produce de novo viruses that that that are beautifully designed mother nature is a way better genetic engineer than we will ever be And I had underestimated the progress that had been made in molecular virology over the past 10 years I hadn't been following the the the subject particularly closely and the degree to which they knew exactly how to tweak a binding domain or a fear in cleavage site to To switch a virus onto a different type of cell or a different type of organism What you know, you mentioned that there's this number of logical gaps in the argument of the paper And that that makes it not very persuasive and anyone who Sort of knows what they're talking about can start to pick up on those gaps And what we've seen I think since We last spoke with some of these documents that we're about to get into is that the authors of the paper were keenly aware of these logical leaps as well And so the question becomes How did and why did this paper? Start with a certain conclusion and end up Somewhere much different and the the first thing that we can look at Is this email On january 31st from christian anderson. He's the lead author of the paper He's writing to anthony fauci. This is before the paper. This is kind of what kicked off The creation of the paper and he writes here about that. He's looked at this sequence he's looked at the genetic sequence of the virus and that the when you look closely The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome So one has to look really closely to see that some of the features look potentially engineered Then anderson goes on to say in his testimony and elsewhere that Fauci then Encouraged him if he thinks that there's something strange here to start looking into this question and and putting a paper together This we now have access to some of the earlier drafts of the paper. The paper came out It was officially published in march. This is from february 1st So this is like the first draft of the paper and he says Or the authors say it is impossible to distinguish whether this strange fear and cleavage site was gained due to evolution or passage and by passage they've been kind of continually infecting animals in the lab to increase the You know transmissibility or whatever of the virus And the data is consistent with either scenario So that was the first draft if we jump to the final draft here the conclusion is Since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features including the optimized rbd and poly basic cleavage site In related coronaviruses in nature We do not believe that any type of laboratory based scenario is plausible So they went from it's impossible to tell to the the end here is that Any kind of laboratory based scenario whether it's engineering or you know passing through mice over and over again Is not plausible at all and the question that this group is trying to get to is How did how did that process work? What what what was it? The you know normal scientific inquiry that led you there or was there pressure coming in and one of the emails they highlighted was this one between christian anderson and the editor of nature magazine where it would ultimately be published saying that um, you know admitting that this was prompted by Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, jeremy ferrer, who was a colleague in the uk And uh, this is so you know the the committee points to this is kind of like here this this proves right here that Fauci from the very beginning You know Created this paper and he did so for a certain reason. I want to quickly play uh christian anderson's response to that In his congressional testimony and then get you to weigh in on all of that matt and and tell me you know What to make of all this When I outlined my initial hypothesis about a potentially engineered virus Dr. Fauci told me and i'm paraphrasing here If you think this virus came from a lab you should write a scientific paper about it Not only is this not a prompt to disprove the lab leak theory It was specifically predicated on our initial hypothesis of a lab associated virus The allegations that dr. Fauci prompted the drafting a proximal origin to disprove the lab leak Is quote mine from an email I wrote to participants of the february 1 conference call The scientific method is based on two basic concepts of one formulating hypotheses and two testing those hypotheses often by trying to disprove them My initial hypothesis was a lab theory When I stated that we were trying to disprove any type of lab theory. I was specifically referring to us testing our early hypothesis This is textbook science in action What's your reaction to that was Do you believe that anderson was kind of in a good faith way just trying to follow the scientific method? And that is how this conclusion was ultimately reached No, i'm afraid I don't um, I corresponded with christian anderson at the time He gave no indication that he was considering a lab leak as even a possibility I think it's worth just going back to the timeline And and working out what happens. You're quite right to to show that christian anderson Raised with tony fauci the possibility that this virus was engineered in on the 31st of january 2020 And he wasn't the only one raising this query because jeremy farrow at the welcome trust in the uk Was talking to eddie holmes in australia And robert gary was joining in and andrew rambo in edinburgh basically As far as recounts in a book that he's written These guys were saying 60 40 80 20 50 50. We think this was engineered And that's why everyone was raising this with fauci and saying there needs to be a conversation about how we deal with this possibility Uh and that conversation indeed took place on the 1st of february the saturday as we now know and um Sorry, let me just pause there and go back to christian anderson's remark about the scientific method as it's supposed to be done If you have that Concern why not share it with the world? He never indicated That he even thought that and nor did any of those other authors until Further information came to light many months later He never said In february march or indeed even april 2020 By the way, we did look at whether it was potentially engineered because we couldn't figure out a way in which that fear in cleavage site had been inserted Added to the genome unless by engineering It didn't look natural Robert gary was very explicit on that point. He said it doesn't look I can't think of an evolutionary mechanism by which that could have been added so um and and Over the following days after that conference call christian anderson makes some really very good Arguments as to why we need to keep considering this lab based scenario in private But he never breathes any of this in public Now after the conference call on saturday february the first the The the on the conference call were two dutch scientists ron fuchsiae and marion coopmans who argued strongly that It was a mistake to even consider this possibility One of the reasons they gave was because it might open a pandora's box of speculating about the origin of other pandemics including ebola That's effectively a sort of warning, you know watch it chaps. This might This might rebound on you um and interestingly though the And the these two knew a lot more about coronavirus biology than christian anderson did Eddie homes knew quite a lot, but but gary and anderson were basically ebola experts not not coronavirus experts There's one name by the way, which who wasn't on the meeting and should have been and knew far more coronavirus biology than any of these people and that's ralph barrick in north carolina who Somehow seems to have stayed well clear of this whole process, but that's another interesting question anyway, the the point is That after that as a result of that phone call it was agreed that anderson would draft a paper And the original suggestion was As indeed he said in that testimony that it should consider the lab leak And the evidence for and against it But fuchsiae's and coopmans Strong view that this was going to be a mistake Comes through in subsequent emails And they then got very upset by the way when their arguments were suddenly adopted into anderson's draft without their names appearing and Meanwhile, we have fouchy and farah And to some extent francis collins contributing suggestions in the drafting Quite specific suggestions, which means their names should have been on the paper Yeah, let me pull up one quick example of a suggestion that farah Added to the document. This was on february 17th, right the day the prox proximal origin was first published publicly He asks anderson would you be willing to change one sentence from it's unlikely that sarah's cov to emerge through laboratory manipulation to It's improbable that sarah's cov to emerge through laboratory manipulation. And then Anderson responds sure no problem. And then as we saw earlier the final language is much more like it's There's very low probability that this let's see the exact Yeah, um, we did not believe any type of lab Unprobable to it's implausible. I don't know how much the semantics matter But it seems like it's getting like less and less likely the more the kind of edits come in from the top Yeah, and uh, yeah, so there's a process of shifting the paper from Open-minded discussion of the lab leak of the kind that christian anderson talked about in his testimony to a dogmatic dismissal of the possibility on all counts and As it becomes effectively the fochier and coopman's view and not the anderson view yet It has anderson's name on it Who is pressuring them to do that? There is one email that refers to the higher ups wanting this to happen There is there are also exchanges between anderson and others that There's one that came out just 24 hours ago In which he says it's frigging well possible uses the word frigging Frigging well possible that it did come out of a lab, you know in private anderson is doing all the right things He's raising all these questions. And yet he's the senior author on a paper that comes out completely dismissing the possibility There's a little pangolin Thing in here too because during that week between the first and the eighth of february um Rumors spread that there was an announcement coming about pangolins the pangolin announcement was made By a south china university that they'd found a very similar virus in pangolins and they even said that it was 99 the same and there was great excitement and Francis collins wrote to jeremy farah and said Oh good. I assume it has the fear in clear. No, does it have the fear in cleavage site? and by The end of that week they knew that it did not have the fear in cleavage site And so there's an exchange between anderson and an editor at nature magazine in which she says Can't you make this stronger this document? Can't you? Um Dismiss the possibility altogether because isn't that what we're trying to do And surely the pangolins are evidence for that and he patiently explains to her now. I'm afraid the pangolins Don't really help us here is this Between christian anderson and claire thomas and uh, You know you set it up there and what he typically says is the more sequences we see from pangolins And we've been analyzing these very carefully the more unlikely it seems that they're the intermediate hosts Unlikely they have a direct connection to the covet 19 epidemic None of this helps refute a lab origin and the possibility must be considered as a serious scientific theory Which is what we do and not dismissed out of hand as another quote conspiracy theory We really really wish we could do that In parentheses, that's how this got started. But unfortunately, it's not possible In the data it's interesting with the pangolins too. You know, uh, robert gary, uh, we have a clip of him and he's still You know still citing the pangolins. Yeah as the He changed his mind. Yeah, nick go ahead before we get to the pangolins. Could you just dilate a little bit on Why were the dutch? Scientists or researchers so emphatic that you don't want to open up the idea That this is engineered and what what's the connection there with the bola? um fogey had been uh, the main protagonist in a very controversial episode About 10 years ago Which led to the whole debate about gain of function research He planned to do an experiment, uh, in which, uh bird flu Would be infected into ferrets And would be manipulated in such a way Genomically that it would then become possible for the ferrets to infect other ferrets through the air In effect turning a bird virus into a mammal virus Now he knew that was a very dangerous thing to do because you know, you're effectively Turning it into something that might be able to infect human beings at some point So the experiment was very carefully planned very carefully controlled done under very strict conditions, etc But it it led to a huge debate in the scientific community in the scientific journals about whether we should even be doing these kinds of experiments and The a group called the Cambridge working group was set up to campaign within science against doing this and Fauci eventually came down on the side of continuing to do these kinds of experiments But somewhat out of the blue in in 2014 the obama administration Did suddenly pause any funding of such experiments it effectively banned gain of function research of this kind um, that ban was lifted in 2017 under Donald trump But probably under the influence of Anthony Fauci in in fact Because he had always argued that we should continue these kinds of experiments. So Fauci had Scars on his back from this controversial episode and had been on the side of doing Risky experiments in order to help humanity, you know, I mean he wasn't motivated by trying to do evil things, of course Coatman's is not really one of these lab based virologists at all. She's an expert in how Viruses are picked up from animals in the wild the zoonosis stuff and she was particularly Crucial in in finding out how mers Entered the human species in 2012 via camels from bats. So she was very much in the Camp that says this is probably a zoonotic event But she had no particular reason I think To know that a lab based scenario was impossible or implausible And we'll return to the gain of function question in a minute because that may help explain some of the Motivations for coming to this conclusion in this paper But I think it is worth dissecting the the anatomy a little bit more of how this all fit together and the pangolins that you mentioned are Important component because there there was a time When that paper first came out when it was like the Scientists were on social media and in papers declaring. Okay. We figured it out. It's the pangolins that now is Not a serious theory yet. It is what bob gary advanced here in his congressional testimony as his reason For getting from that initial, you know much weaker claim that we don't know Whether this is laboratory or zoo to the stronger claim of This is it's totally it's it's implausible that it came from a lab So let's play that clip and get your reaction to it I just can't figure out how this gets accomplished in nature Unquote so then within a matter of days something changed and that's what this committee is trying to get to the bottom of What happened within that three day period between the conference call and the paper That all of a sudden you did a 180 and It couldn't possibly come from a lab or maybe but You're all saying that you know, this was by short from nature. What happened in those three days Well, we examined the genomes more closely. We looked at other coronaviruses and There was some new data that came there was where did that data come from? The scientific literature, you know the publication of the pangolin genomic sequence Showed that there was a receptor binding domain that was very close to the In exactly what my colleague here brought up. Yes, exactly You have stated that pangolins may have played some role In the recombination event that led to the covid pandemic. Is that correct? That is not correct I don't think pangolins have played a role in the pandemic per se The fact that we find similar viruses in pangolins and there is a recombinant history of the virus themselves However, that recombinant history is very likely in bats. Thank you. Dr. Gary in in pangolins you're So so I agree. I don't think there's a direct route from a pangolin to SARS-CoV-2 So what's going on there in in your opinion? Are they Why why is he bringing this up? Is he saying that it was at the time he believed that It was the pangolins and that's why they revised it But now they don't or that there's some mechanism that the pangolin paper like illuminated for them What's your interpretation of of that? Yeah, it's it's it's very complicated, but Robert Gary said there quite clearly when asked what scientific information had changed his minds in three days between the first and the fourth of february he said the only New information he could cite was the pangolins and he's right There is no other data that was published in that period that could possibly be used to Help illuminate this problem. It wasn't you know, he said we looked at other coronaviruses. Nothing new came out except that It was announced that pangolins had a similar virus in Well by the end of that week they knew that that pangolin virus did not have a fear in cleavage site the very feature That had alerted them to the possibility that it might be partly man-made because You know no sars like corona virus had ever been seen with a fear in cleavage site in it let alone one that's inserted added You know, it actually interrupts the existing sequence and and juts in at that point So the pangolins don't provide an answer to that um The problem was that the way the chinese Scientists had announced the pangolin discovery was to overhype it they had come out with a press release saying we have a 99 similar virus and Everyone said problem solved. We've turned the intermediate species as you say It wasn't for another three weeks that we saw that the world saw The actual genomes of those pangolin viruses and saw that they were 90 percent similar to sars gov 2 not 99 percent Varsely different in other words. I mean, you know, that's a 10 percent is an enormous genetic difference So they couldn't possibly be the ancestors And as I say, they didn't have the fear in cleavage site now those four papers about pangolins that came out Were a mess and it was my co-author elena chan who pointed out that two of them Used the same data set under different names. Well, that's practically fraudulent actually, you know to to republish the same data set under different labels They had They their their numbers and their details just didn't add up They had all the hallmarks of a rush job to try and get something out there to imply that there was a a connection to An animal that might have been on sale in the market Yeah, by the way, there were no pangolins on sale in the woodland seafood market just Is the presumption with um, the chinese papers that they were doing the bidding, you know explicitly of the government or How how does that work? You know, we were talking a little bit ago about this is how science works Science is always taking place within a political context, you know, certainly within the united states and the oe cd But also in china, um, you know, what what explains the sloppiness? Do you think of the of the chinese papers? Well, there was an edict went out in january no publication of any scientific speculation or data Without the say so of the regime that was made very clear And that was part of when a major general from the people's liberation army was appointed to Run the wuhan institute of virology a major general with relevant virology expertise. She's not she's not just a general She is a scientist But nonetheless under strict military control and with no publication no communication No talking to journalists by any scientist in wuhan or elsewhere without the regime's approval So yes, these pangolin papers were Approved if if not actually promoted now Sorry, I just want to make one slightly speculative point Several of us have looked hard at this pangolin data And we're not convinced that a pangolin ever had a virus What do I mean by that? Well, um, there's been no sign of these these viruses in wild pangolins Most of the confiscated smuggled pangolins that we're talking about were not infected with coronavirus They had other viruses in them, but they didn't have only two of the sample in question had Apparently very small traces of this virus in them Now, where was this sequencing done that discovered these traces? It was in guangdong in southern china nowhere near wuhan by the way um, and that very institute the gia br uh, the guangdong institute for applied biological research Had been handling bats from wuhan No, sorry, not wuhan yunnan Which is where we think that the natural reservoir of sars like coronaviruses is shortly before this So it's possible that we're talking about a case of contamination of a sequencing machine By a bat virus that was then attributed to the pangolins Um, uh, you know, it could be something as simple as that this happens all the time by the way You get contamination of sequencing machines. It's very difficult to avoid and and whoever's been using the machine before you There was a famous case That seemed to show sars-cov-2 in Antarctic soil samples from before december 2020 Um, what you know, how could that be? Well, it's a case of contamination the same Institute that was sampling the Antarctic soil samples that machine had been used early in the pandemic for sampling sars-cov-2. So, um The pangolins are a red herring in every conceivable sense Yeah, and I think the important thing to uh underline there is that you know, they were a red herring and also one that You know christian anderson himself was not Buying as we saw in those previous documents in the very testimony that uh in front of Congress and it's just that that ongoing pattern of a the difference between like the what's put out publicly And these chats and emails that are happening behind the scenes One of the most egregious ones that has come out in recent days that kind of put a A bow on this section. I think is you know in his opening Written testimony. This is what christian anderson says about these final conclusions that his paper came to By the time we published our final version of proximal origin I no longer believe that The culturing scenario was plausible. So that's the scenario where it was, you know, sent through tissue over and over in a lab he By the beginning he thought it was, you know possible by the end He thought it was not plausible and that's why they came to that conclusion Well on their sub-stack Matt taiyibi and michael schellenberger obtained some of the slack chats From uh anderson and some of his colleagues. This is from april 16th 2020 This is a month after the final publication of the paper He tells his colleague, uh, andrew uh rambaut That here's the issue I'm still not fully convinced that no culture was involved If culture was involved then the prior completely changes Because this could have happened with any random stars like cub, which there are many I really really want to go out there gun swing say don't be such an idiot believing these dumb theories The president is deflecting from the real problems, but I'm worried that we can't fully disprove culture We also can't fully rule out engineering for basic research Yes, no obvious signs of engineering anywhere But that furan site could have been inserted via gibbson assembly. I mean that A you know if I were christian anderson's Attorney I would be concerned seeing these two documents right next to each other um, but uh, I think That the committee has established that there was at the very least a very large public private gap and um That there was some level Of pressure coming both from our the the top levels of our public health institutions But also peer pressure from the peer reviewers who wanted a certain outcome And I guess the main question is that they can't really be answered is like how much of this was You know nefarious and how much was like confirmation bias and wanting a certain Outcome that that was just going to be inevitable with this group of scientists Yeah, I mean notice the date on those last messages April the 16th. This is a whole month after Yeah, um proximal origin has been published Two months after it's been drafted And and far from believing his own paper. He still thinks it's possible that it was a lab leak Yeah, and he's not saying that to the world. This is the time when I'm communicating with him by email and I'm getting complete denial of of a lab leak back And so it you know, remember What what what's the alternative here? What is it that really changed their minds about publishing any speculation about a lab leak? It's politics not science In other words in those three days between the first of february and the fourth of february When they draft the paper and then in the days after when they strengthen the paper They are concerned about the implications for science The implications for relations with china the implications for The Any vindication of the trump regime, etc. That's what's really bothering them As he says, you know in that last message he says something about I really want to be able to go out there and say that the administration's wrong Yeah, the wording's in there somewhere So, you know, that's that that's the that's the null hypothesis here that they change their minds for political not scientific reasons And it does seem very persuasive Do you uh, have any background on christian anderson to You know, does it does this strike you as behavior? You know, that's in keeping with his public or professional record or is this A moment where he's you know, somebody in his shoes. I mean, I'm thinking it's like an ipson player or something like that Where the weight of the political world is crushing him and he just can't really You know go public with what he seems to believe which is not that it's definitely a lab leak but that he can't rule it out I I'd never heard of him before this episode. I've never met him. I know nothing about his biography prior to this he is at the Scripps institution in san diego which was in financial difficulty But a year before the pandemic and was bailed out with a Partnership with the shenzhen institute in china that may or may not be Relevant he is in receipt of large grants from the national institutes of health via the national institute for allergies and infectious diseases, which tony fouchi is head of So he is on these calls. He is talking to his principal funder And you know, there is a conflict of interest there. There's no question about it if he's getting the the vibe that It would please his funder if he could rule out a lab leak Then it's not going to do his future funding any harm right, and I think that getting to these conflict of interest questions next might further illuminate Why if there was some level of pressure coming from The nih and the nad which fouchi headed. Why was that? you know, there was a really interesting email that The house committee 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 farar welcome trust redacted Happy to chat with any of you about this best regards. Tony. That's what we got out of that The the unredacted material is actually fairly interested. I'm going to zoom in here He's talking about these discussion these early discussions that he had with anderson and the team and That they had the suspicion that There you know 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 fouchi 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 barrack earlier This is one of the famous studies, which is a collaboration between She who was the head of the wuhan institute of virology and ralph barrack a major researcher at u.n.c. I believe and in this study they Created Chimeric virus from a bat corona virus in a mouse adapted SARS-CoV backbone so they created exactly the kind of like prototype you would expect in this 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 u.s. National institutes of health. So call ins and fouchis agencies This is a january 27th email where Fouchi's being alerted for the first time that his agency sent money to Eco health which is the group that was you know collaborating with The wuhan institute of virology on this research. So very early on He was aware that these were issues that were were in the air and so in light of all that I want to play kind of the the famous back and forth clip between Anthony fouchi and rand paul where he puts this question directly to him and You know, it got a certain reaction At the time, but now that we know more I just like people to to see it again Maybe in a new light. So let's uh, 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 the Transability to humans right you're saying that's not gain of function. Yeah, that is correct and 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 Okay, you All right, it's it's official. He does not know what he's talking about. What's your reaction to that? matteredly well, um 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 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, right? That was that's the the angel on the head of the pin that he's that he's dancing on but um, 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. Yeah 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. Yeah, it's certainly not to protect sources or to Um, uh, not invade the privacy of someone else or you know that kind of thing that the the the 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 uh someone whose name you mentioned earlier in passing Ralph barrack? You mentioned he's uh very important and You know accomplished researcher who seems to be You know on the periphery here What can you tell us about the the person of Ralph barrack and his importance to this conversation? Well, Ralph barrack is probably the premier coronavirus researcher in terms of his ability to 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 um He developed the uh, so-called no seum 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 corona viruses in such a way that you don't leave any scars any joins um He was really the the person who was doing spectacular new Work on coronaviruses. He had an idea about how to develop Vaccines in this area, etc But he's working mainly on of these these obscure coronaviruses that nobody's terribly interested in and the long come sars one 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 shijun li lab gets involved in coronaviruses research because they basically are Hunting down the origin of sars one is where how they start um, and then they want to get into much more molecular work They want to learn from ralph barrack 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 shijun li 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 Miniaturies paper um Very very important and significant sort of groundbreaking paper in 2015 None of that work on that paper was done in in wuhan. It was done in north carolina but Following that paper the shijun li lab led by ben hu and peng zhou is rapidly trying to catch up with Ralph barrack by emulating his techniques and one of the most important documents That we haven't talked about yet And which is the one that really persuaded my co-author elena chan and myself to come off the fence The so-called diffuse proposal Was a request to DARPA in the pentagon For money to do work on sars like coronaviruses that would include inserting fury and 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 whose name is on it, but so is shijun li's So it's pretty obvious that when that was turned down in 2018 for work for 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 The proposal has some very specific things in it That 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 we were that you know 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 Overarching like perception that they don't want out there And rough 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 proxmo origin paper. He didn't put his name to the letter in the lancet 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 in 2021 that indicated that he still that he thought it was possible that this thing might have come from a lab So I think he's 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 what he Thinks happened, but I think he's aware that it could be what's happened And and he is really a very critical person now interestingly, there's a 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. So boy, this is starting to sound like, you know conversations about communist infiltration in the 1950s Or something. I mean, there's a lot of skull duggery going on Can I ask in in your opinion? Is anthony Fauci? And I don't know how to put this so, uh, you know, uh 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? You know 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 He's like the jager Hoover of infectious disease He's the jager Hoover of in fact, that's a very good line And uh, and 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 in the sort of czar of the bioterror defense Research Establishment, uh, so he's he's he's you know, he's nominally under Francis Collins at the National Institute of Health, but that's not the way it works He's uh, he's been an enormously powerful individual Controlling an enormous amount of funding. He's very articulate. He's a fabulous scientist did wonderful work on on hiv many years ago When I first knew of his his work but I think he has um Dug himself into a hole here that he's struggling to dig 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 I want to shift us to a slightly different but related topic, you know lab leak theorists were often accused of positing a much more alarming and I think less much less defensible theory about an intentional release of bio weapons recently Some version of that idea was floated by presidential candidate rfk jr Let's look at some of the comments He made at a fundraising dinner posted by the new york post last week and get your reaction to rfk Talk about bio weapons I know a lot now about bio weapons because I've been doing a book on it for the past two and a half years and um And you know what we the technology that we now have to develop these hydro We have we've put hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes The chinese have done the same thing in fact COVID-19 there's an argument that it is ethnically Targeted COVID-19 attack certain races disproportionate the the races that are most immune to COVID-19 are because of the of the structure of the the genetic structure of genetic differentials among different races of the of the receptors of the ace to receptor COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and and black people the people who are most immune are askinology shoes and and chinese And but night and we don't know whether it was deliberately targeted that or not But there are papers out there that show the you know the The racial and ethnic differential and of the impact to that We do know that the chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing And we are developing ethnic bio weapons. That's where all those labs in the ukraine Are out there collecting russian dna. They're collecting chinese dna Though we can target people by race And he subsequently Uh, I don't know clarified that position somewhat he I'm trying to pull the tweet here He Sorry, my there we go. Uh, he said that you know, he never suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews But he pointed out that governments are Uh developing ethnically targeted bio weapons and then he points to a study Uh, he says the 2021 study, but it's a 2020 study that shows some variability and subgroups Of genetic variability and I guess the ace two receptor area Uh, you know askenazi jews and uh east asians are mentioned, but so our finnish people south asians Uh, let latinos Amish none of those made uh his his list in the initial comments But I am curious just what's your reaction to rfk's concerns about ethnically targeted bio weapons might be or you're just initial gut reaction Well, I think it's mostly, um Really, uh, crankish conspiracy theory stuff, frankly I I don't Uh, I don't buy his excuses that is just that paper Showing that there's a slight difference in the Structure of the ace two receptor and the way it responds in different races. Of course, there are slight differences There always are between races the idea that that indicates some significant, uh Sort of singling out of of groups the reference to labs in ukraine is classic Tin tin foil hat stuff Um, uh, I'm afraid Um, what what do you mean by that? well, that there's been There's been a sort of strange rumor floating around that there was some kind of lab in ukraine controlled by the biden administration or the biden family that uh, that was uh That was involved in Bio weapon research and at one point there was linked to kovat 19 in very specifically now You know, I haven't looked into this very carefully. I don't waste my time on this kind of thing, but you know, yes, there are biological Laboratories in ukraine as there are in most countries, but the the the idea that they were connected with specific bio weapons let alone coronaviruses bio weapons. I'm afraid just doesn't stand up. Um, so, uh, I think he's half understood something um, and Got way carried away with it made a remark in an off-the-record session section session that uh That he can't justify based on the scientific paper. He's he's adduced and um, I think it's highly unlikely that the Chinese who were working on SARS like coronaviruses in the Wuhan Institute of virology were aware of or were deliberately causing some kind of ethnic differential in the susceptibility of people to this virus or to related viruses. Um This disease caused devastation in china as well as elsewhere Um, there are some ethnic differences in how much people suffer from this disease, but a lot of them are down to social factors It's very hard to tease out what might be genetic as opposed to social um, and if that's the Best evidence that this might be a deliberate bio weapon as opposed to an accidental release Then it's not very good evidence What's in there? Um, at least through 2020 didn't weren't there studies in the uk showing that jews actually died at a higher incidence rate than the general population from kovat I don't know. I can't I can't answer that. I haven't seen that you know if You know, we all kind of accept that kovat was not likely to be an engineered bio weapon I mean it like as you said it wouldn't really make sense the way that it it all played out There does appear to be a lot of viral research that has an overlap with national security The national security apparatus like I guess they call it dual use Um, how concerned, you know, should we be In general about bio weapons at this point, um, you know is now the time To start talking about it more now that we have seen what a Even an accidental Release or spill over whatever the case might be can do to the planet. And is there anything That can be done about it Yes, I think now is the time to be concerned because this episode as as I said earlier shown bad actors What what what could could be done and therefore there must be some interest in developing bio weapons in terrorist organizations and rogue states Clearly there is bio weapon research going on in america in britain in china in russia in other countries But most of it is defensive That is to say You know on the whole the chinese are concerned about a bioterror incident About someone unleashing a virus at the beijing olympics, for example And they appointed the major general who's now in charge of the wuhan institute of virology to to to um develop Surveillance techniques to try and make sure that didn't happen during the beijing olympics so You know the the stance of the us Certainly britain And ostensibly china has been in recent years the reason we do this kind of research Is so that we can defend against a bioterror incident or possibly a bio warfare incident Not because we want to use it offensively ourselves now Where do you know at what point does defense blur into offense is a good question And uh are the labs where secretly Some of these countries don't obey that Guidance and do go further and say let's see if we can use something that we could stick in a weapon and Throw at our enemies and kill them before they It has a chance to infect us and so on Um, and that did use to go on in the cold war big time. Yeah No question that you know anthrax and others were being weaponized for that use but uh, this is where the International convention on biological weapons. I can't remember quite what the acronym How it spells out, but that's roughly what it's called um is a very important Treaty and it has very little teeth. It's not like the nuclear weapons agreements at all And it really should be looked at pretty urgently by the united nations and by The by world powers, you know, I hope That antony blinkin is talking about that with his counterpart in china when they meet how do How do you reckon we deal with china at this point because you know, they're You know one thing we didn't talk about another piece of circumstantial evidence that has come out recently is We knew we've known for a while that there were some researchers in the lab that became ill in november of 2019 You know beginning of the pandemic Uh, the the new information that's come to light is that one of those researchers was ben who a scientist at the Wuhan virology who worked, you know side by side with she on these bat corona viruses Um on how they infect humans and a us intelligence report I uh identifies as a him as one of the researchers who became ill Um, we have to you know, qualify that and say that american officials said they were that the illness was consistent with either COVID-19 or other seasonal illnesses It the what the illness was has not been conclusively established part of the reason for that is that china has not Relinquished any blood samples for instance of their workers that might have been taken at the hospital and it's kind of part of the general pattern especially early on of China being this black box where you can't get any good data out of there They're shutting down the wet market. They're shutting down research papers that look at inconvenient questions How do you deal with a regime like that when you're trying to create some sort of Treaty to to get this global danger under control or under heal Yeah, the lack of transparency has been truly shocking And and also shocking was the world health organization praising china for its transparency during this lack of transparency but uh, you know not Revealing the the genetic database that they had in in in the lab not revealing what happened in those early cases not talking about those Sick researchers etc Now ben who did come forward after that waltry journal article and give an interview to science saying no no i'm fine I was never never anything wrong with me But we just can't trust that kind of information these days Ben who you ping and yan joe the three who allegedly got sick are all highly relevant people They're all working in exactly this area of sars like coronavirus research So if they did get sick and we are told that they had ground glass capacities in their lungs, which are a pretty diagnostic feature Then you know, it it's it's of of great relevance Interestingly, the reason that came out those three names came out a few weeks ago Was because there was a deadline for the u.s. Government under a congressional act to Release the information that they held about what happened in wuhan and what happened to the researchers in particular And it was supposed to name the researchers and give the details and when the deadline passed the Administration released only a brief summary without the names without the details and a week late and Around that time Michael Schellenberger got the information first Wall Street Journal then got it second There were administration officials Who were prepared to release those names seek privately to leak those names Because they were frustrated that the Administration was not going to obey the congressional Directive and was not going to include the names So it's clear that the biden administration at the time remember anthony blinkham was on his way to beijing at that very week It's clear that the biden administration was trying to bowdler rise This obligation that they had in order not to offend the chinese government We're in a very difficult situation in the world where we are um trading and dealing with An organization we just can't trust anymore That's a pretty serious position to have found ourselves in but it also leads to i mean a problem as you're kind of Talking about the united states government is also and many of its chief actors Are also the antithesis of transparent at this point and have given us many reasons not to trust them in any given announcement Well exactly and as i hinted earlier a lot of the redaction we're seeing when they do respond to freedom of information requests Are driven by political convenience and avoiding embarrassment, which is not supposed to be a good reason for redacting information so Can we talk a little bit about um the role of drastic? The group as well as Open communication and free speech You know both in this particular instance where You had governments of all different types You know basically refusing to come clean or to be open and transparent with with its citizens and with the scientific community even um and the role that you know in your work consistently you've talked about how You know not just political liberalism, but the advance of science of material technical scientific Even moral progress really depends upon an open and free exchange of ideas And we seem to be in a new era where it's not simply governments that are you know putting the boot to things You mentioned people like michael schellenberger Uh, we've talked about i think matt taibi. We've uh invoked him But we've seen in this you know episode in particular the absolute collusion between media outlets including social media outlets, but also news you know more traditional news outlets Talk a little bit about what are the important lessons that need to be drawn from Our You know the way that we talk about things if we're going to have not simply a free society But one which actually You know where people can start to debate ideas When you and i talked For a reason at the very start in march of 2020 at the very start of covet and you had said in that conversation There's no monopoly on wisdom Which is one of the reasons why we need to have as many people participating in discussions as possible Where are we on that and how do we how do we make that more robust? Yeah, it's it's a superb question and you you put the point well and You know for me the shocking thing of this episode has been How useless the mainstream has been To our investigation. I by that I mean mainstream media Which didn't want to know about this topic mainstream science journalists You know most of whom were completely in the camp of Being stenographers for the scientific establishment not being people who were prepared to do investigative work Mainstream politicians who on the whole didn't want to dig into this stuff The the the the intelligence community Which you know, I had conversations. I joke about this and I'm perhaps exaggerating, but I had conversations with Intelligence officials, you know who breathlessly told me in in very secretive tones things that I'd not only read I'd written And you know so so The people who are paid and then of course mainstream scientists as well The people who are paid large sums of money by governments or or by big media organizations to Make this free society work Were asleep at the switch on this issue And the people who broke the news who found things out of incredible importance Were people like the seeker a young man in india who dug into chinese websites and found crucial academic and medical theses people like francisco ribera a spanish citizen without a job sitting at home who knows how to Use databases and and developed a brilliant technique for discovering exactly where The chinese scientists had collected bat samples on which days and from which species People like gildam and earth a business consultant in new zealand of french origin who Has Been extraordinarily good at working out exactly what happened in wuhan in those early days Including how many people got sick and and who they were and which hospitals they went to and so on these are informal internet sleuths reason was called them I don't want to leave anyone out drastic was the sort of umbrella name for for a number of them They were unpaid. They were unemployed in many cases or at least doing it in their spare time And that's an extraordinary part of the story that I don't want to get lost and I I have I see a tendency when Even the lab leakers get together and have a conference or they do a podcast or something to leave that aspect out And I think that's a pity because it really does show how The citizen has a role to play even in this high tank world and Good for these davids that they went in there and fewer through a stone at some goliaths How do you uh at the by the same token? You know and we're in an age who are trust and confidence in all sorts of institutions, you know Continues to go lower and lower um the internet and other tele you know Technologies allow for this type of activity Expertise is probably at a low ebb for very good reasons, but expertise exists How do we empower? You know these types of people or how do we benefit from that without crossing over into the rfk junior territory where we just become Sitting ducks for every conspiracy theory that kind of scratches an itch That we you know that we have that we may not even recognize It's the it's a terribly difficult question to which I don't have a good answer Uh, I come across this problem all the time. I deal with Individuals who have done some brilliant work and found out something important, but then go too far and dive into speculative conspiracy theories that that can't be justified And And and it's it's one of the it's one of the hardest jobs as someone who writes about science as I have done for 40 years to Take heretics seriously But not fall for charlatans And to to decide when whether when someone is a is a A ma when a maverick is a is a heretic who should be taken seriously Or a charlatan who should be ignored It's terribly difficult and we have the institutions Specifically to give us that say oh, well, he's a professor at such and such university So we can trust him, but we can no longer do that because I'm sorry a lot of these professors are now extraordinarily subject to dogmatic group think and herd mentality and We have to have individuals who are not like that and We have to and so all I can do is say you talk to these guys you read their stuff And two pages in Your alarm bells go off and say no this stuff's nutty or they don't That cautionary note is probably a good one to end on matt really. Thank you very much for joining us today Thank you very much. You've done great work putting together all those clips. So that was really helpful Thanks