 Hello and welcome to NewsClick today in Dockman Science and Tech. We will be looking at the issue of the lab leak theory, the theory that the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, the SARS-CoV-2 virus actually leaked from a lab in China. And we see again that this issue, this theory is being pushed in the mainstream media as being equally possible that as a theory that the virus naturally evolved. So, we have with us, Praveer Korkar, asked to discuss the plausibility of these two scenarios and how possible are the two scenarios equally possible or really how do you weigh them? So Praveer, can you tell us about this narrative that is being pushed? Yeah, I want to widen this framing of the issue that how do you actually evaluate different possibilities? Well, for instance, you have a lab leak versus nature issue where you have also, for instance, the UFO issue. Now, that's an interesting one because there is a recent US military report about detailed examination they have done UFOs visit the world or not. And that has come out with a number of instances where they have no explanation, therefore appearing to say that UFOs could actually have come. Now, I take this also with the US administration demand of Saddam Hussein that he showed us that he has no WMDs, but I'll postpone that for the time being. Let's look at alternative hypothesis when it is framed. And how do we normally evaluate it? See, if you ask people that there are two possibilities, immediately the brain receives it as if there are two equally probable hypotheses. So it doesn't appear that the possibilities could have completely different probabilities. And I think that's the key issue here. When you frame it that there are two hypotheses about how the current coronavirus COVID-19 epidemic emerged, the understanding is if there are two hypotheses, then both should have equal probability to start. Now, the difference here is that we have had very small outbreaks from labs earlier or viruses which have been studied and they have infected very few people. So five, six, ten, those are the kind of numbers you have seen and these leaks have also been very few, leaks meaning either because somebody got infected, because of the biosafety precautions not being taken and infected to others. So this is one class of things against epidemics which have repeatedly occurred in nature. We have hundreds of epidemics which have occurred and in this century because we have the SARS, MERS, SARS-CoV-2, the viruses that have all coronavirus, but we have also had the H5N1, H1N1 repeatedly being threatened and some of them have actually occurred as epidemics. We have every year new flu viruses that emerge and we have number of millions of cases that take place over loads. So we periodically see viruses emerge from nature and why is it that the pathways of such emergence are enormous? Why? Because animals are much larger in number, as you know, than for instance, laboratories, the particularly biosafety laboratories where such research is conducted. So numbers of animals which carry different zoonotic diseases as we call them are enormous, they are very large. In China they have for instance investigated 80,000 animals but the point is there's still a small drop in the ocean compared to the total number of animals that exist. They can directly infect millions of people they're in contact with, birds, bats, rats, all of these are carriers of zoonotic diseases and of course we know from the Ebola case we don't know what the carrier is but we know for instance in the AIDS epidemic that the carrier was a chimpanzee. So you have this n number of vectors which are there and they can directly infect human beings but they can also have intermediate animals which become there the root to the human being. So you really see that as what happened in the policy of SARS or SARS-CoV-1 as we now call it or MERS where in one case it was actually the civet which seemed to have been the carrier, intermediate animal and the other was the canvas which actually actually was the intermediate carrier between the backs of the human population. So the number of pathways are enormous the populations are very large therefore though we put it as if it's an either or hypothesis it's actually the probability of one is much larger because of possibilities within that are literally millions against the few very few where in the biological research in the one piece that exists in the world which can carry out such research. Now there are also questions why the Wuhan research laboratory was doing or working on this virus and it is close to Wuhan where obviously in the first known cases have broken out but that's where you normally put a research laboratory because these kind of diseases are there a world laboratory is there where Ebola is prevalent so all of these are naturally what happens if you have any endemic disease that exists then of course the research laboratory is going to be close to there and that's why 200 of the research laboratories is where it is because it's searching bad virus and now so that's that's one part of it I want to draw the parallel to the UFO example for exactly the same reason that we believe it's either extraterrestrial or it is nature talk human in the world, terrestrial phenomena. If you pray a bit like this you are again causing a binary that extraterrestrial or terrestrial except the terrestrial phenomena within it has a huge number of altering possibilities people making simple mistakes, mistaking natural phenomena for extraterrestrial interventions or even man-made phenomena of different kind balloons and so on big identified as you are first so what you by this binary framing it in this particular way you are actually comparing millions of possibilities against one very specific or maybe five, ten very specific things that you know are quote unquote as the alternatives and therefore the probabilities of that are very very different and I think this is the problem putting it as the alternative as possibilities that then the argument is why should we not look at the lab as an equally possible hypothesis and the equally the world is not used but that's the way it is actually played and saying we should then look at this as well and then of course you have the next is the conspiracy hypothesis of different kinds when you put all kinds of correlations and claim that this is why it must have happened in the way they presume the lab will occur but I would like as I said to go back to the UFO case what does the UFO case show there are literally number of such instances where they could not identify the possible cause so therefore they have said we can't prove it is not extraterrestrial and I think this is the problem that we now have it has been basically also come in public domain to all the newspapers UFOs could actually exist that American investigation showed that yes there are possibilities of UFO so I think this is the whole problem that because you could not identify it for what it was from this grainy old camera photos which were there at that point of time to extrapolate that we can't understand it and therefore it must be extraterrestrial is equivalent to saying that because we haven't found an animal which infected us therefore it could be it's a lab I think both are the equal equal possibility arguments that are being presented as equal probability I think this is where the fundamental problem in science lies that we cannot disprove something that easy that to disprove something is almost an impossibility and because there are so many ways that it could happen and we as human beings have not explored all the possibilities at any point of time that's why we get the problem of trying to find something that does not exist and proving that it does not exist. So right Praveen talk about disproving and we also can look at the example of WMDs in Iraq and Saddam Hussein being asked to prove that he does not have those weapons or the Wuhan lab being asked to prove that they in fact that the virus did not leak from there so then in such scenarios also then how do they go about proving this you know that this negative that the basically it's a negative that this did not happen. Proving the negative is impossible essentially logically to show something did not happen is it's almost an impossible task unless you know there is a murder which has taken place at the particular point of time and you have an alibi now unfortunately those are not the examples we are talking about. Saddam Hussein's case is very interesting because if you look at the American television coverage at that point or all the media articles that were coming the argument was a very simple one that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction to show his good faith all he has to show is his close and destroy. If he does not, if he doesn't disclose them it's proof that he has weapons of mass destruction which is not disclosed so it started by saying that weapons of mass destruction exist in Iraq Saddam has it so the only way he can show that he doesn't have it is to give it to us show it to us and then we will destroy but the point is even if he did that assuming for example here that you tucked away the point is that how does he prove he doesn't have more so this is where the issue really lay over there that they had allowed weapons inspector to go anywhere and everywhere the military intelligence agencies which were there part of those inspections that the map of Iraq's everything very thoroughly and therefore it was very useful to the Iraq invasion later and the bombings but Saddam trying to prove a negative was never wrong and we remember the two proofs that the United States presented one of the yellow cakes which was the case which was from Niger which was disproved by actually their own internal US staff who said this is bogus and that we have created a lot of problems later on for one of the persons who was a partner of a CIA agent who was actually exposed by the Bush administration trying to darken his name and the claim that where this yellow cakes from Niger were really not being imported by Saddam Hussein and we have the famous example of US Secretary of State US Secretary of State Colin Powell presenting as biological weapon something which was essentially a moving mobile van for purposes of purely collecting samples and so on. So providing these kind of evidence was what led to the Iraq war and we now know that even the Saddam Hussein did not have WMD's either biological weapons as Colin Powell had stated in the UN Security Council or what the Bush administration is claiming right through about nuclear weapons and this is what was the UK also completely backed with supposedly their input. So proving the negative wasn't possible and as we said even giving all access did not help Saddam Hussein. Now what in this particular case he gently the Chinese expert on coronaviruses particularly bad coronaviruses would really roamed in all places where bats are there trying to study possible infections that they carry to humans with zoonotic diseases who really played a stellar role including in Ebola trying to find vaccines for Ebola and so on. So this she has said in one interview I think with New York Times she says I'm being asked to prove the that something did not happen how do I prove something did not happen how do I prove the negative. So this was her position as well that's how do I prove that something did not happen when it didn't happen and we have Jillian Anderson who was the last researcher in Wuhan laboratory or researcher who was there at this particular time or at least in contact with people in this particular time she was there just before I think the actually pandemic broke out and she says that in this whole period she was very familiar with the work being done in the lab the kind of protocols it's followed that an accidental break lab break of a virus was almost impossible and she doesn't she said there is no evidence that there were people who are infected and it leaked out so this and this was a lab which had BSL for standards she very high standards and she herself says that the kind of standard that were followed were actually better than in most other similar laboratories and she instituted some of those practices in the Singapore laboratory that she works in she is an Australian origin scientist who also works in Singapore. So we have other evidence that we that are there that this is not something which would have happened apart from numerous scientists saying that look looking at the possibilities that this seems to be very weak hypothesis if at all possible and this is what the WHO report actually says of course given the politicization of the issue this has led to a huge demand that this should be treated on par with this there's Nicholas Wade who wrote a very racist theory of population genetics claiming that why white races are superior and essentially and this is something which he did exactly the way he has done here that he took all evidences from whatever sources he could find filtered out only little bits and pieces strung it together to say that this is the hypothesis science backs and it's only political correctness that people are scientists are not saying this he has done the essential hatch a job here before that it wasn't something which was in popular domain very strongly but Nicholas Wade having originally been a correspondent in science correspondent of Times New York Times and he had some credibility before this book that he published about 10 years back which destroyed his credibility about being neutral about science or being an actually a good science journalist. So he's come back with this lapnik hypothesis and well he's come back into a fair amount of credibility because people are not talking about what he had done earlier which is very similar people are treating him as a science correspondent science journalist and how good his science could be and that of course covers up for the fact that he's now become the standard torchbearer of the anti-China and anti-Wuhanland case. Right and finally Praveen can tell us you know how does even one doesn't you know go about evaluating something there must be some sort of way to evaluate uh say the existence of biological weapons I mean Saddam Hussein for example did open up the uh they did give access for for the search to be conducted for any possible existence of weapons but so is there even if that didn't help them but is there no such possibility here of any sort of evaluation being done to find out that if such a thing could have happened. You know the what you're asking is do we have protocols for the first laboratories which deal with the biological research of this kind whether there should be there are protocols to see that these there are transparent there is transparency and there is sharing of information or what kind of research that is being done this was something the biological weapons convention had proposed this is something which is discussed the chemical weapons convention had also proposed inspections transparency all of these while in the chemical weapons there was opposition from the United States as well as the essentially by the chemical manufacturing companies that their intellectual property could be in public domain as a consequence and they could be easily monitored found out and copied but finally the US agreed to the chemical weapons treaty for this transparency and the protocols to be followed inspections included but in the case of biological weapons in 2001 they withdrew from the agreement they said we will not allow inspections we will not allow any transparency or what we are doing in our research laboratories biological research laboratories we're not going to call them weapons research laboratories but biological research laboratories now why did the withdraw is a separate question which we can discuss another time but what is important to know it happened at the Bush administration and John Bolton who has been the key figure in withdrawal of the United States for various weapons treaties he was the key person here too who said that the US should not do this and withdrew from the treaty now that had actually propositions of transparency and inspections maintaining certain information if all of that had been done the Wuhan issue would have been over because all the issues they're raising they would have been following a common protocol which had been common to all research laboratories of similar tanks here it's an interesting issue the United States is not saying that we should go back to the biological weapons convention and relook at all of these for preventing such either things happening or from knowing about it in the future they are saying we just want to see subject to Wuhan's lab to a complete exercise of finding that they this did not happen in Wuhan lab which means they're going to start finding the you know the negative that they have Wuhan labors to prove the opposite of what we're talking about not that it happened but prove it didn't happen so that's of course a negative argument but the interesting part is that the United States even today it's not just Bush administration even under the Obama administration did not go back to this now it's an interesting question why the United States refused or refuses even today to go back to the biological weapons convention and say in light of all these problems we now have we should really have a protocol to see that we know what each other is doing the United States claimed that we're withdrawing from it because it's not verifiable that if there's a weapon we can't verify it but the purpose of this was never about verifiability to go for transparency and the protocol did not go into the verifiability that you don't have new biological weapons but the processes in the lab should be transparent and that is something that they could have easily agreed upon which they did in the chemical weapons case but they did not do it in the case of biological weapons now why they did not do so the various issues but let's also face facts that after the second world war the Japanese group which practiced biological weapons use and biological weapons research on a number of prisoners including American prisoners they were given total indemnity from the war crimes and then based on the fact that it turned over all the research to the United States there was a war crimes trial in the Korea and where there was an international body which actually looked into the issue and said what Japanese research had happened that was used by the United States against North Korea at that point of time in that in the Korean war there are known examples of what they had done so the US not giving access this this issue about their getting all the information from the Japanese war criminals who had practiced biological weapons on in prisoners of war including as I said the American prisoner of war is not public domain it's not secret anymore it has come in public domain it's been released as a part of what the archives release regularly so this is the reason that why the United States may be in public taking the position against biological weapons they still may be conducting some dual use research now here is the issue we know that the biological research of certain kinds of dual use we know that vaccines preparing vaccines antibiotic in the bioreactors can also be used to create biological weapons we are aware of that so why is the US not willing to go back to the biological weapons convention if it believes that there is this possibility of weapons research taking place in other countries it's still an open question and I really have no answer except maybe that they either are conducting research which they don't want the world world to know or their biological companies think that they need to be very secretive about what they're doing and therefore intellectual property being what it is it is the dividing line between having a market controlling the market or having competition they're unwilling to share this knowledge the consequences that the world then always will wonder whenever there is a new pandemic the world will always have this question and the US having raised it once will also face similar questions if a pandemic breaks out now in the united states that people will say it happened because of your research that you are carrying out there already four day trick has been under scanner for some of these issues so this unfortunately goes only into creating more and more conspiracy theories and unfortunately now we see the United States joining full full throttling into a conspiracy theory which earlier was restricted to a very fringe groups then to very fringe groups in the world right right so thank you for being for joining us today for this discussion and that's all the time we have keep watching you stick