 there does appear to be a lot of viral research that has an overlap with national security national security apparatus like I guess they call it dual use. How concerned you know should we be in general about bioweapons at this point you know is now the time to start talking about it more now that we have seen what a even an accidental release or spillover 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 I said earlier shown bad actors what could be done and therefore there must be some interest in developing bioweapons in terrorist organizations and rogue states. Clearly there is bioweapon 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 is now in charge of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to develop surveillance techniques to try and make sure that didn't happen during the Beijing Olympics. So you know 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 defence blur into offense is a good question and are there 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 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 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 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 Anthony Blinken is talking about that with his counterpart in China when they meet. How do you reckon we deal with China at this point because you know there 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 uh you know beginning of the pandemic uh the the new information that's come to light is that one of those researchers was Ben Hu a scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who worked you know side by side with Xi on these bat coronavirus on how they infect humans and a US intelligence report identifies as him as one of the researchers who became ill 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 get this global danger under control or under heel 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 you know not revealing the the genetic database that they had in in the lab not revealing what happened in those early cases not talking about those sick researchers etc and 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 grand glass capacities in their lungs which are a pretty diagnostic feature then you know it it's it's of 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 the 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 antin blinkham was on his way to beijing at that very week it's clear that the biden administration was trying to baudela 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 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 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 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 we've talked about i think matt taibbi we've 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 covid 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 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 a business consultant in new zealand of french origin who has been extraordinarily good at working at 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 reasons 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 have i see a tendency when even the lab leakers get together and have a conference or they do a podcast i mean 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 threw a stone at some goliaths 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