 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 up 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 US, we're looking at this. 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 gonna go through now a little bit. This is from their executive summary. Their bottom line here is that 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. There's this number of logical gaps in the argument of the paper and 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 and why did this paper start with a certain conclusion and end up somewhere much different? And 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 kind of what kicked off the creation of the paper and he writes here that he's looked at the sequence, he's looked at the genetic sequence of the virus and that 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 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 in 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 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 polybasic 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 end here is that any kind of laboratory-based scenario, whether it's engineering or 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 that process work? What was it the 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, admitting that this was prompted by Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, Jeremy Ferrer, who was a colleague in the UK. And this is, so the committee points to this is kind of like here, this proves right here that Fauci from the very beginning created this paper and he did so for a certain reason. I wanna quickly play Christian Anderson's response to that in his congressional testimony and then get you to weigh in on all of that, Matt, and tell me 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 of Proximal Origin to disprove the lab leak is quote-mined 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. 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 working out what happens. You're quite right to show that Christian Anderson raised with Tony Fauci the possibility that this virus was engineered on the 31st of January, 2020. And he wasn't the only one raising this query because Jeremy Farah at the Wellcome Trust in the UK was talking to Eddie Holmes in Australia and Robert Gary was joining in and Andrew Rambo in Edinburgh. Basically, as Farah 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. And that conversation indeed took place on the 1st of February, the Saturday, as we now know. And 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. 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 1st, on the conference call were two Dutch scientists, Ron Fouchier and Marion Koepmans, 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 rebound on you. And interestingly though, and these two knew a lot more about coronavirus biology than Christian Anderson did. Eddie Holmes knew quite a lot, but Gary and Anderson were basically Ebola experts, not coronavirus experts. There's one name, by the way, who wasn't on the meeting and should have been and knew far more about coronavirus biology than any of these people. And that's Ralph Barrick in North Carolina, somehow seems to have stayed well clear of this whole process, but that's another interesting question. Anyway, the point is 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 Fouchier's and Coopman's 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 Fouchier 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 Proximal Origin was first published publicly, he asks Anderson, would you be willing to change one sentence from it's unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation to it's improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation? And then Anderson responds, sure, no problem. And then as we saw earlier, the final language is much more like there's very low probability that, let's see the exact, yeah. We did not believe any type of lab improbable to it's implausible. I don't know how much the semantics matter, but it seems like it's getting less and less likely the more the kind of edits come in from the top. 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 Koopman'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 are also exchanges between Anderson and others. There's one that came out just 24 hours ago in which he says, it's frigging well possible. He uses the word frigging. Frigging well possible that it did come out of a lab. 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, 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, or 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 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. That ongoing pattern of 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 bow on this section, I think, is 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 sent through tissue over and over in a lab. At the beginning, he thought it was 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 Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger obtained some of the Slack chats from 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, Andrew 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 wanna go out there, gun swing, say, don't be such an idiot believing these dumb theories. 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 fear and sight could have been inserted via Gibson Assembly. I mean, that, you know, if I were Christian Anderson's attorney, I would be concerned seeing these two documents right next to each other. But I think that the committee has established that there was, at the very least, a very large public-private gap and that there was some level of pressure coming both from 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 nefarious and how much was like confirmation bias and wanting a certain outcome that was just gonna 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. Proximal origin has been published two months after it's been drafted. 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 a lab leak back. And so it, you know, remember, 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 1st of February and the 4th 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 any vindication of the Trump regime, et cetera. 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 the null hypothesis here that they changed their minds for political, not scientific reasons. And it does seem very persuasive. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Matt Ridley about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can watch another clip from that conversation right here or the full conversation right here.