Welcome to the making cents podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed. And we'll only be here in the first part of this conversation in order to access full episodes of The Making Sense podcast. You'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris dot-org there, you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcast track along with other subscriber, only content.
Don't we don't run ads on the podcast and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, there's a lot happening with aii these days. The chat Bots over at Bing powered by open a eyes program called Sydney. Apparently seems to have gone out.
All crazy. Also human just beat a high-level computer at go which was previously considered impossible so it would appear that our robot overlords are looking a little sketchy. I think I'll do another a, I focused podcast pretty soon seems like there's a lot to talk about. But today we are talking about the origins of the covid pandemic. And for that conversation, I have Matt Ridley and Alina Cho.
Chan, Matt is a writer, his books have been translated into 31 languages and won many awards. They include the Red Queen genome, the rational Optimist, and the evolution of everything. And his new book with only Chan is viral the search for the origin of covid-19.
Matt also sat in the House of Lords between 2013 and 2021 and served on the Science and Technology select committee there. And the artificial intelligence Select Committee,
He was also the founding chairman of the international Centre for life in Newcastle, and he created the mind and matter column for the Wall Street Journal in 2010 and was a columnist there from 2013 to 2018. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of literature and of the Academy of Medical sciences and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Elena. Chan is a Scientific Advisor and viral Vector engineer at the broad Institute.
At MIT and Harvard, she's a recent brode, ignite fellow and human Frontier Science Program fellow with a background in medical genetics. Synthetic biology and genetic engineering during the pandemic, dr. Chan investigated. The problem is relevant to finding the origin of the tsar's Covey to virus and in 2022 should join the pathogens project task force, which was organized by the bulletin of atomic scientists. And the purpose of this project is to generate new thinking on high-risk,
Risk pathogen research and to help prevent future. Lab-based outbreaks, as I said the topic today is the origins of covid. More precisely the Stars Covey to virus. So we discuss the evidence of a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of biology. We talk about media and academic censorship of this topic. The history of collaboration between Western scientists and Chinese labs
The problems with so-called gain-of-function research, the evidence for the zoonotic origins of starts Covey to such as it is.
The initial complacency and denialism of the Chinese, the biosafety levels at the Wuhan Institute of biology, the molecular evidence of Arab League, the Practical constraints on synthesizing, viruses, the lack of international cooperation, conspiracy theories, promulgated, by the CCP, the Eco Health Alliance different kinds of gain-of-function, research, virus, hunting risk, and reward in the search for knowledge.
Anthony fauci and other topics.
Anyway, I found it a fascinating and also fairly confounding conversation. This is one of those topics where you just can't believe we're in the situation that we're in given bad incentives and basic human stupidity. Anyway, Matt and Alina were great guys to the topic. So I hope you find this useful.
And I bring you Matt Ridley and Alina Chan.
I'm here with Matt Ridley and Alina Chan, Matt Elena. Thanks for joining me. Great to be with you say. So we're going to talk about your book that Kyle when did it first come out. It is now out in paperback. What when did you first publish this? That I should give the title. It's viral this search for the origin of covid-19. One was a book first. Published
it came out in the full of 2021 and paperback which was updated in the spring of 2022.
Is that right Elena of? I got the name the years
right? Yeah the paper bag came on in June last year. Okay. So obviously we will incorporate any up-to-the-minute findings or thoughts or misgivings or retractions or epiphanies that you might have. And it's say this is a topic that has always been interesting and consequential. I think let me just put my prior cards on the table, I always felt that
Elation about the, the origins of covid was more or less irrelevant and perhaps counterproductive, the very beginning, and once we knew we had a pandemic on our hands and we knew we had sequenced the Genome of the virus. It seemed to me that the first order of business for a considerable period of time, was to Simply design vaccines against that virus, which we did very quickly and to try to secure as much.
Cooperation, as we could it all of our Collective efforts to not have the pandemic be as bad as it might be, but obviously the push back against speculation about this topic, that emerged fairly quickly. Always seemed crazy. And disingenuous it was never raised dust to worry that this had leaked out of a lab and it's, you know, obviously quite consequential to get to something like a growl.
Truth consensus about the origins of this pandemic. Ultimately, because we need to figure out how to not do this sort of thing. Again, if we are in any way culpable for the emergence of this virus. So, having that, that's where I was, I've always been it's not that I have have not been interested. It's just, it's only that's something like this moment, where I feel like, all right, this is a very important project to drill down on this, obviously, you both were
Much more interested earlier because you've written a book on this topic, but I'm wondering if my initial disinclination to drill down on the origin story seems questionable to you. I just it seemed politically inflammatory initially and it also seemed like when the the first job is to design vaccines, it didn't seem quite relevant to know the origin. Is there something that that was missing their semi?
We started on the same footing as you, so I was more interested in how the virus was causing disease in people before I read that it was not mutating much and that's when the alarm went off that this might have come from a lamb to me. So I was actually more interested in finding a way to treat the disease rather than to find out where it came from. But to the question of which is more important, I think that both have to be investigated in parallel because if you wait too long it will become impossible to find the origin of the outbreak.
Right. Yeah, that I honestly I had not thought about that part of it that you sort of lose your connection to the facts if you're not really looking as much as you can look as early as you can look before we jump in. And this is really is a fascinating topic, which has a lot of light, on a fair amount of societal dysfunction, or what we're going to talk about the origins of covid. But in the background and and perhaps explicitly, we're also talking about the political Corruption of Science. And
A fundamental lack of transparency on the part of Public Health officials. And you know, attended failures of cooperation before we jump in. Perhaps both of you can summarize your your relevant backgrounds here. Let's start with you Madame. You and I obviously are quite familiar with one another though. We have not yet met scandalously. I've read several of your books and I will have introduced you both properly at the beginning here in the intro, but give me your potted Biomat
will do. Yeah, I'm a
Longtime fan of Sam Harris. That's one thing you can say about me, but my bio is the die. I'm an evolutionary biologist by training. Did a d fil at Oxford in the behavior of birds a very long time ago. I then became a journalist, I then became a book writer and author, nonfiction author, and various other things. I did ended up in the UK Parliament for nine years in the House of Lords, not in the Commons and the
Common theme of my career is a fascination with science and with evolutionary biology in particular. So actually coming to this topic I was especially interested in the story of the bats, right? From the start or at least whatever other species it was going to turn out to be but it very quickly became clear that all these stars like viruses are basically found in one Genesis of bats, the Horseshoe bats and it was writing about that that got me into this.
Topic. I very quickly learned that I could rule out a lab leak as plausible on the basis of arguments that were being put in what seemed to be authoritative, scientific papers. I then later came to question that and thought that those papers were premature and that's how I got more and more intrigued and it was Alina's work, really? That tipped me over the
edge. Hmm and Lena, so I've been working in labs for about 14 years. I have a background in Biochemistry.
Medical genetics genetic engineering and now gene therapy. So I am a Scientist at the broad Institute of MIT and have it and at see that the common theme in my research, in my in my scientific life is thinking about how to re-engineer human cells. But for therapeutic purposes and now thinking about how viruses interact with their host with human cells. Hmm, wonderful. Well, so you are just the people I want to talk to on this topic and as
As chance would have it. You've written a book on it. So how did you come to collaborate on the book together and perhaps just give us its basic thesis? What are you alleging happened or may have happened. And maybe before we Mo we're going to track through this, you know, the various Arguments for and against the thesis but you might just say how your thinking may have evolved in the meantime I'm a I have you become more convinced or less convinced of anything.
A particular claim,
it should like kick off on that because I was commissioned by The Wall Street Journal, to write an article, called the bats behind the pandemic in. I think it was April or May of 2020 and I had by then become intrigued by this story. That this virus seems to have come from bats and that they had already found a very similar relative, but I didn't know where or when. And the more I dug into the topic, the more I began
On to question, the received wisdom, at the time, which I had been conveying to other people that you could rule out a lab origin. And then I came across a paper by Alina and two of her colleagues which said that this virus had experienced no burst of Rapid evolutionary change on first entering the human species in 2019, which is surprising because the original SARS had shown that and most viruses do that, they have to evolve pretty fast to suit the new host.
And she wants it. Tipped me off that the Chinese had no ruled out that it began in the market. George go, the head of the Centers for Disease Control in Beijing. Had announced that he thought the market was a super spreader event, not a origin event and that's when I started getting intrigued and Alina was the first scientist I talked to who said, look, it's an open question. We don't know if it came out of a lab, we don't know if it came out of a market, I got more and more interested in it. I followed her work and other work.
More and more closely, Doug as deeply as I could. And eventually I said to her, could we collaborate on a book? Because although I know quite a lot about genomics, I've written several books on the topic. I'm basically a writer not a scientist and I would need to collaborate with somebody who understood the science. We both, I think's thought and Alena can confirm this at the start that it could go either way that we would probably find out while we were writing the book. What the answer was, we
Wrong about that. By the way, we still don't know, three years later but we would probably find out that it was either something to do with that seafood market or something to do with that laboratory in Wuhan. And so we devoted roughly equal quantities of text in the book To Each argument. But I think by the end we were both leaning towards the lab and then a couple of other things happened just as we were about to publish a document dropped, which we can describe later, which
So I think tipped us both into the view that the lab was now more likely than the
market. What has been your experience touching this topic trying to publish on it and Publishing in fact at a certain point and it has been a, a fraught adventure and Publishing. And I know you've testified both testified before the UK Parliament, just what? Manner of courting controversy has this been and
How has that political environment around this evolved over the last few years?
Yeah, well we've met all sorts of barriers, you know, this was described as a conspiracy theory that it could have come out of the lab very early on and it was as a result banned from discussion altogether on places like Facebook. Luckily on Twitter it wasn't you could still speculate and share information on Twitter so in the social media space it wasn't easy.
Z that changed a bit in 2021 the world got a bit more open-minded. In terms of the media, we found certain newspapers and broadcast Outlets were very interested in talking about this topic and thought it was an interesting one. Others wouldn't go near it. CNN. And the BBC just wouldn't talk about our book at all. For example,
is that still the case?
Yeah, it's basically as far as I know it is I think I think you have been on CNN Alina once but but only a long time ago so and I've not been
Well there was one very, very obscure, BBC programme had a son before, they realized how unfashionable we were.
I don't think I've been on CNN. I think they canceled last minute also and I think we've seen that a lot. A lot of these more popular news media would reach out saying, they want to interview us on the book and then a few days right before they would say, oh, we can't touch this topic or scientific editor is against it that kind of thing. So there has been, I think some self-censorship
A ship on this part on the part of news reporters on this
topic. Yeah. And also it's worth mentioning that, you know, we've had a lot of encouragement from scientists privately an awful lot of people are saying to us. Keep going you're on the right track but in public very few of them are but with their heads above the parapet and when I pressed, for example, the Royal Society in London and also the Academy of Medical Sciences to hold a debate on the origin of a pandemic, that's killing north of 10 million people.
I was told the topic is too controversial and we found something similar in the US that, you know, the the question of sort of opening it up to a proper conversation is is just not acceptable within conventional science. And this, this is odd because the public generally thinks it came from a lab. If you look at opinion polling and based on anecdotal conversations, I have with people and awful. Lot of people think. Yeah, of course, it came out of that.
Clap. Whereas the scientific establishment likes to say that the vast majority of scientists think it didn't come out of a lab. Now if that's true, if they think that and they know the public are as it were wrong on this topic then they ought to be all the more willing to come out and debate it and not knock down the theory that it came out of a lab. And for me it's very odd that we can't have. We haven't been able to have a very open wide-ranging conversation in much of the media about this over the last two or three
years.
One of the things I've seen as well over the last two years, is that a lot of emails have been obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showing that virologist who publicly said of course, it came from an animal that market privately in their emails, they were worrying. Whether this virus had been engineered in the Wuhan lab. Okay. Well I want us to explore the nature of the controversy because it is surprising to me that it is this controversial to speculate about the origins of the virus into
worried that it could have leaked out of a lab. I think just to frame that surprised more fully. Its first of all there's been a rich history of security, breaches and labs and leaks of dangerous pathogens, even from Labs with, you know, higher security than Wuhan Institute of biology halves. So, we know we're bad at this, the containing dangerous viruses. And this is just, you know, a continuous source of
CERN. And so we should want to talk about evidence of yet another leak. Also, the Chinese are have not been especially cooperative, and their political regime is not so widely respected at the moment II. Maybe let's just touch the general question now, why would people in the western press and the scientific community in particular, the so coddling of
Has political sensitivities on this topic. I get why the Chinese don't want to admit or don't want to understand that they through negligence, have birthday, Global pandemic? If in fact they have and we, you know, we could argue is negligence either way, whether it's a wet Market, or a lab league. But why would the Western press and the Western Scientific community be. So eager to protect their self-concept.
On this point Elena do you want to go first on that? Sure chip
in. So I'll say first that, when I first started wondering about where this pandemic had come from. I had no idea about this whole history of collaboration between not just the us, but many other countries across Asia and Europe with labs in China to do quite risky, virus work. That might have led to this pandemic. So here it's not just whether Western scientists
And of, you know, provoking China, it's really question of are. They also complicit in the origin of covid-19 and over the last three years we've seen again, and again a lot of support within the US for exactly that type of dangerous virus research. That's commonly known now, as gain-of-function research. So if the pandemic did start from a lab in Wuhan, it is not just a Chinese government issue. It is actually an issue that affects multiple countries. Many
Countries who have all supported and endorsed and engaged in this work and the u.s. is a big funder of it, so they would have almost equal responsibility, I think in my eyes. Okay, so it's not just China and China and its political sensitivities. If in fact, this is the result of laboratory negligence. There's a lot of blame to spread around and we'll get there. So, to start
what I mean, sorry just to chip in the Sam, if I may just to just to amplify one of
The points. It is the case that the Western virology feels worried that its entire research program. Indeed the whole of biotechnology might lose its funding might lose its social license. If a major accident is revealed to of happened as a result of work in a laboratory and you know, I share that concern in a sense, I'm Pro biotech, I'm pro-vaccine. I'm
Genetic engineering of crops and in medicine as well. And it would be a terrible pity. If as a result of this, the world said, right? We don't want to do have anything to do with biotechnology ever again. You know, it's a disaster but I think truth is more important than consequence and and actually you know science will be better off saying no, let's find out. And if this did go wrong let's learn lessons and make sure we don't do it again.
Yeah well I think one could well one
Or whether we want to have anything to do with gain-of-function, research, which we'll talk about in, this is something that I've touched on this podcast. Once before, my friend, Rob Reid did a special episode on, on This research. So that part is especially worth worrying about in my view, but we'll get there. So let's take it from the top here. What is the best argument for the natural origins of this virus? May be either if memory serves at the beginning.
And perhaps this is still, the case. There was evidence that it started spreading from the wet Market, whatever is or you know, an initial Origins might have been you, you just referred to it as possibly a super spreader event. So, there was a pattern of spread with the wet Market at as its epicenter. And I forget what it was of something. Like, 27 First cases, that were detected there, try to give the case for the zoonotic Origins.
Of this right. Pandemic.
Well maybe I can chip in on that one and Alena can join in the in the case of SARS in 2003, there was a very clear link to markets food handlers and that kind of thing. So when this one cropped up, and it's a very, very similar virus, it's very closely related to saws and it was first noticed in and around a food market, it seemed to be very much the same story.
And that remains a possibility. There were mammals on sale in that market not nearly as many as you would find in southern China. This is an area of China, where you don't have that the same habit of buying live animals in markets to the same degree, but the were mammals on sale in that market and people did seem to get infected in that market and the geographical proximity of the outbreak to a major Food Market does look a bit like
SARS in 2003. The problem was, they never found an infected animal whereas they easily found them in the case of SARS. And although they found evidence of the virus in the market, it was on things like door knobs countertops in in the sewage you know, it was the human version of the virus being spread around by people. So yeah, it's it remains a possibility that this was very much like SARS it started in that market and that somebody was selling
Bamboo rats which had been kept in a cave where bats had been defecating on them or something like that. And yes, you know we would we would expect something like that to happen every now and then because we know that these viruses are circulating in Wild bats and people are coming into contact with them in the wild
and is it true that there was no possible. Progenitor virus found in any animal in the market? Yes, that's true.
I think that the many lessons to be learned from how this pandemic was, was traced in terms of how the local investigators in Wuhan tried to find the source of the virus. So what had happened was there were there were hospitals in one in the middle of Wuhan and they were seeing cases of unexplained pneumonia. So they didn't know what was infecting these people. And then doctors started realizing that they were seeing some cases from this Market from the seafood market that. So some number of life
Animals. So they call it investigators and then those investigators thought, maybe it's us one happening again. And at that time, they were not, you know, so sure about human-to-human transmission yet. So what they did was they looked at the animals in the market or supply chain, they went straight to the market and they wrote all this down and their notes in their Publications, in early 2020. They said, we are just going to look at the market. We're going to look at the hospitals near the market and we're going to look in the neighborhood of the market. So they come.
Be focused their search on people with either links to the market. Or if there are no links to the market, they had to live near the market. So what this did was it led to this looking under the, you know, bright light, but not looking around in the dark kind of analogy where they ended up, confining, the search prematurely to one hypothesis such that if there had been earlier cases, not linked to the market or living far away from Market, they would have been missed completely. So in this sense, this
Led to this great unknown that persist to today, are there earlier cases than the market are there cases in November, for example, that we don't know about and if the Chinese government knows they have, not told us, they have not share that information with us just to restate that so people don't miss it. So it what you're describing is the kind of selection bias. If you look for cases, associated with the market, if you find anything, you're only going to find cases associated with the market, and then if you populate a map with those red dots, well then you're going to have
At a map that looks like the market was the epicenter of everything you found, but that could, in fact be an artifact of just how you went looking for data. And obviously, it doesn't differentiate the market as origin thesis from the market as amplifier thesis. Is there more there. Alan, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. And just to reiterate and the time people will not allow it to acknowledge that the virus was spreading from Human to human. There are anecdotes reports from Wuhan with
Doctors, for example, were not allowed to wear masks because they were told that this virus is not spreading human to human. So to wear a mask would acknowledge that, it could catch it from their patients. So in that sense, investigators would not allowed to look for people who just caught it from other people. They were looking for people who had exposure to animals had eaten at a restaurant where those alive animal, for example. Well, that's an amazing change because you when you describe it that way, it seems.
Like a political maneuver to want to put the bravest face possible on the top of this pandemic. But obviously the Chinese have changed their behavior. Rather markedly since they've gone so far as to I believe, weld people into their apartments. And there's zero covid policy to the eyes of the rest of the world and has looked for now several years, fairly berserk. So what do you actually see?
Saying about the political social cultural attitude of the Chinese. In the first months of the pandemic.
I think we're saying that it flipped it went from extraordinary complacency and false. Reassurance the period up till roughly the middle of January 2020. When they were insisting there was no human to human transmission telling the world health.
You to spread that message and also saying they had it under control and that they hadn't had any deaths for Den days or something. So the really was a period in January 2020. When probably local officials were desperate not to get into trouble with more powerful Central bureaucrats. And we're giving out false reassurance about what was happening, don't worry, we've closed the market and there's no human transmission, the cases that are in hospitals,
Will either recover or die and then it will Peter out. And then by the end of January, they suddenly realize on because of the flood of people coming into the hospitals that that's wrong, that people are giving it to each other on a massive scale that is spreading like mad and that it's killing people. And so they then reacted with very, very Draconian. Lockdowns as you say that sort of worked to start with with the relatively less infectious.
Should have covid. That was then spreading wouldn't have worked with Omicron. For example, two years later but it worked you know Wuhan did manage to stamp it out but with extraordinarily Draconian measures as you say, you know, welding doors, shut and things like that and then they're that persisted for a couple of years until towards the end of last year, the even that became untenable. They could not stop these milder but more infectious versions of the of the virus spreading very rapidly.
Lee and they simply took the lid off. So there's been to changes in China. Both of which are probably gone too far in the wrong
direction. Yeah, I do too. You know, this is the first time I've thought about this but it just suggests to me that it me given the the alacrity with which they started locking down in Earnest. It suggests to me that those first months of denialism had to have been based on a sincere belief that there
Was
no human to human transmission or at least, it wasn't going to get out of hand. Because the moment that seemed to be the case, then they went Wishful, fairly crazy in the other direction. Well, I had the jump in here, biggest actually, in the first week of January 2020. The sequence of the virus was being auctioned off to people who make Diagnostics and to people who make vaccines. And we know that by, I think, January 4th the vaccine production for this virus had jumped into high gear, by one of these companies in China.
So I think the people that were kind of operating on two truths, at the same time, on the one hand, they had to accept what they were being told that the virus was not spreading human to human. But on the other hand, they also have to manufacture dealing wartime level amounts of vaccine for the virus. So I don't think that was a unified consensus. Of course, across this entire huge country, but that would separate groups of people acting on different almost acting as if they had to accept both truths that the truth, that wasn't spreading
Human the human but also they had to prepare for a pandemic here. We'll the timeline of Chinese vaccine development. I know is peculiar given what they claim to have known or not known and I think it relates to this the origin thesis maybe we should jump there. Now I will what are the various anomalies that suggests a non-natural? That is non zoonotic non wet Market origin for the virus and II. You know, I know these anomalies
Has existed various levels that are their molecular anomalies with respect to the virus itself and then there are things like the timeline of Chinese response and vaccine development. And then this is probably the best place to talk about the various Grant proposals that implicate, Western involvement ecohealth Alliance etcetera. But I don't know who wants to take this first, but walk me through the evidence for for non natural origin. Well, I think I could talk about this for hours, so that's quite a bit.
Evidence pointing to, it's a lamb origin. Although there's no key direct or definitive evidence for either natural or lamb origin, so I'll try and be brief. So, I think the main key points for a lamb origin, is one that location. So, one is a place where even the top SARS virus researchers didn't believe that a outbreak would occur. So when the Wuhan Institute of Neurology scientists who have spent, like the last decade,
Collecting these viruses first heard of this outbreak in her City. She said, could it have come from my lab because we never believed that you know sounds like virus would break out in Wuhan city that in fact use their own city as a negative control, so place where they would expect 00 people to be exposed to this type of bed coronavirus. And yet this was the location of arguably, the largest collection and manipulation Center of of stars, like viruses from that region, resembling this pandemic virus.
So we've got the location. Let me just make sure I understand what you're saying there. So you're saying that Wuhan is not a place where you would expect a natural ambient level of SARS virus. Has because the Horseshoe bats don't live locally. Is that what you're saying? No. So, the Hofstra bets, do lift the butt to find that type of size, like virus. These scientists had to make trips every year, far down south. So they had to travel thousands of kilometers down
South to South China to you, none. They even went across body to Southeast Asia, down south. So they were collecting across eight different countries, South China, and seven, Southeast Asian countries in that belt, where they predicted those, the highest prevalence of these type of viruses. So that type of bad, the Horseshoe bats do live brought me across China, but to find those viruses, you have to go very far down south and so even if you look at the Eco Health Alliance, so this is a new york-based us.
Profit that channels money from the US government to that Wuhan lab and other places. They recently published a map of the risk of being exposed to these viruses and Luhan is nowhere near The Hot Zone. All right, okay so I derailed you, please continue North. So on the other hand this this lab they had a extremely unique research program so it's very hard to find this type of research program in any other lab. So you have Labs that go
go out then collect tens of thousands of samples from from beds from animals in the wildlife trade and even from sick people. So this land was doing that but they also took it one step further once they had all these very interesting novel viruses they would then dissect them in the lab. They would break them down, recombine them seamlessly, so leaving no Scout race of having engineered them and try to see how these viruses could one day. In fact, people. So they were trying to predict pandemics and try to come up with Therapeutics and vaccines for
Potential and that makes in the future. But to do that, they had to bring some of these viruses closer to that type of pandemic potential. And we've seen from some of the released progress reports sent to the NIH. Then in some cases, they accidentally really enhanced. Some of these viruses in the lab in animal models that of human disease. So they had this very unique program, we're quite risky. Research was being done, and it was only found out later after
The pandemic started that much of this research including involving live. Viruses have been done at quite low biosafety and the at the biosafety that could not have protected them from being infected by viruses, like the pandemic virus. Hello, let's Linger on that point. So what is the biosafety level of the lab and how does that relate to biosafety levels elsewhere? So Matt, do you want me to take this?
Yes, keep going. You're doing very good job
Alina. Yep. So, so, when the outbreak was first detected,
Lots of people with just thinking about the top biosafety lamp in Wuhan so that they are bsl-4 the maximum biosafety level. But the truth was all of their research on these bat coronavirus has including this as like viruses had been done at lower levels at bsl-2 and bsl-3. So they worked with live viruses even at bsl-2 and at this level you cannot be protected from an infectious a bond, sounds like virus and there's no requirements, even if people are sick.
Heck, even they fall sick, they don't have to report it. They don't have to quarantine. So there would have been no record of someone being infected in the lab by such a virus. Wow, that's pretty damning in its own. Right, you know, Jon Stewart, famously made the joke that you've got a novel bat coronavirus outbreak. And what do you have in town? You've got the Wuhan Institute of biology working on precisely these sorts of viruses and now we find at a level of security that couldn't possibly protect against a leak.
Some level. What more do you need to know? I know there is more to know. It will talk about the can I just like Euler evidence? But that alone, isn't that damn it.
Can I just add to that point? This wasn't just one of the Chinese virology labs. This was pretty well, the leading virology lab in China with the possible exception of one or two others, and certainly, the leading one for size like coronavirus. This was the lab that a tracked down where the SARS virus
Iris came from in the cause the 2003 epidemic and they were very proud of that fact, they'd found a cave in Yunnan with horseshoe bats in it in which very close relatives of the SARS virus were circulating. So you know, this is not just any lab. This is the main size like coronavirus research lab in the world effectively and the particular striking feature.
Is that when this pandemic broke out, they announced that they already had in their possession in that lab, a very close relative of this new virus. They called it, our 80g 13. We later found it. They changed the name just before this. So it took us a long time to connect that name to an outbreak of pneumonia that killed three people and sick and three others in a mine shaft in your nan in 2012, and they had made Seven expeditions.
Has to that mine shaft, and they'd come back, not just with that one close relative of Sasuke we do. But we later found out not till the middle of 2020. But we eventually found out that they'd brought back eight other very closely related viruses. And so up, till the middle of 2020, the 9 closest relatives of this pandemic virus had been collected more than 1,000 miles from Wuhan by Wuhan scientists and brought to woo her
And that, you know, was a pretty striking fact. What? Then transpired was that the pandemic virus had a unique feature in it and I think Alana's probably better place to explain what this feature is. It's called a fearing cleavage site. It's a short text of DNA or RNA rather which enables the virus to use a human enzyme called fear in and it greatly enhances its infectivity. It's the
The reason we're having a pandemic and when they published the virus, they didn't draw attention to this fact, even though it was the first and to this day, the only sounds like coronavirus that had this feature in it. And I think Elena should be the one to tell to give a rather good metaphor for why this was surprising that they didn't draw attention to this
point. Let's let's jump their necks but Elena
Perhaps you can start by explaining if an explanation is possible, why they would have been working with these viruses at a level to condition as opposed to the level for condition. That was available to them in the same lab. Yes. So I think this this lab had been searching and hunting and collecting these viruses for so many years that they really let their gods done so up until the pandemic started.
Said there was no evidence that a bad virus, a bad Source. Like virus could jump into a person and immediately cause an outbreak. Normally it takes a while for the virus to become capable of causing massive outbreaks in people, it needs to adapt. Find the right combination of mutations to make it capable first infecting, a person creating enough copies of itself to spread from person to person and potentially through the air. So in this case, these scientists had been, you know, going to all these batcaves sometimes without
Ask without any protective gear and they've been doing it for so many years and nothing bad happened. So why would they need to upgrade to a higher biosafety level? Because once you go from vso to the bsl-3 it's a lot. It's a lot more of cost time training. You have all the special requirements. It becomes very challenging to do the experiment and very costly. So if you are the scientist and you don't really feel these viruses anymore, is there really a need to expand all that extra money and and
cause and Personnel for this extra safety but aren't we now talking about manipulations to the virus that by definition, make it more likely to infect humans and we're going to talk about a few and cleavage site and any other molecular evidence now but it isn't the the allegation that they were performing gain-of-function research of some sort, which should by definition have made them more concerned about getting infected themselves when working with these viruses.
So even in the case of the first has outbreak the early early variance of that virus went very good at causing outbreaks and people it was only at the latest stage once it had collected, the correct set of mutations that made it. Well adapted for people that it was capable of causing outbreaks. So, for these scientists, they had collected some close relatives of these as one virus and they were working with these also, a low biosafety levels but I suspect that they didn't feel threatened. They didn't feel like, you know, it
Even if I spill this, it's going to cause an outbreak. So they probably had this perception that they would require quite a few steps, quite a period of time. Repeated, repeated spillovers, repeated infections before it would reach a pandemic level. They were also working with diverse Styles, like viruses. They were going out and intentionally looking for signs, like, viruses that were different from the solids, one virus, and it was with these viruses that they were doing experiments to see how they might eventually also caused outbreaks in.
So these different cells like viruses was seen as low risk, viruses. So they went seen as close relatives for the first sauce virus, likely to spill over into people any time. But it was seen as things that you could manipulate in the lab and not be so worried that you would cause a pandemic, okay? So it's, let's talk about the virus itself and you described manipulations that were seamless and and undetectable what is detectable. And when you look at a
A virus of this kind, what are the signs that it may have been manipulated and and what signs exist in the source Covey to viruses, we have come to know it. It's incredibly difficult to distinguish a lamb, engineered virus from a natural virus because any lamp engineered virus has to be derived from a virus that was found in nature scientists. Don't have a magical ability to just conjure my novel, viruses, the entire blueprint by themselves. They have to
Recent on something, they found in nature. And the problem. The challenges that nowadays the technology to build these viruses to entirely synthesized at genome, is so Advanced that you can do it. Leaving. No trace. And for example, when this virus, when the pandemic virus, it sequence was posted, it took very little time for several groups of scientists around the world to just synthetically created from scratch with no, no trace of them, having engineered it. In fact, they had to deliberately put in traces of them.
Engineering it. They deliberately put in a few mutations so that they could tell when someone in the lab had been infected by the virus in the lab or had caught the natural pandemic virus in, you know, the Train on the coffee shop, just to be clear Lena. So you just started saying that scientists cannot manufacture. Viruses, out of whole cloth, they have to piece things together from naturally occurring, viruses. But then you just said that scientists. Once we have the genome sequenced,
They built their versions of stars Covey to from scratch using nothing but base pairs. Can you square those two claims? Yes. So once you know what the code is, the code is usually from nature. You can synthetically, create the virus but what I mean by you can't control virus. Often that is you can't just make something that has never been seen before. It's like based on nothing. So you have to use sequences that you found in nature to make this other official virus in the lab.
Yeah.
Yeah. And just to just to give you an example, Sam, that might be helpful. What were mainly talking about here is manipulations to one of the genes. The spike Gene. So there's about, is it 15 genes roughly in? These sounds like coronavirus. He's, they're strung out like beads on a string. Although they do overlap. So it's a bit confusing in some ways. There's one gene that codes for the spike. The thing that sticks out
Of the surface of the virus and the binds on to human cells and nearly all the genetic manipulation experiments have involved the spike G. And so what they've done is they've said we've just collected. This virus in the wild, we've read it sequence. It's got a different spike Gene from the one that we're used to, we're going to synthesize a piece of RNA on your start with DNA but then you'll change into RNA. That is that Spike Gene from
From this Wild Virus. We're going to synthesize out from scratch, but based on the exact sequence that we've seen in nature, we're going to then swap that into a virus that we've already got growing in the lab taking out that viruses Spike Gene and putting in this new one. You've now got a manipulated virus that has a brand-new. Well it has a different spike Gene than it would normally have but it's got the same other genes as it would normally have. So it's it's very much a sort of jigsaw puzzle of genes here. That is mainly going.
God. But there's another level, which is to insert or delete sequences within the spike Gene, and that's where the fearing cleavage site comes in.
So, as the only sign of synthetic manipulation that you can't find, analogous sequences in the wild. I'm just speculating here. I don't know if this is true but let's just say that there is no example.
Al and Lia. No. Tell me if this is, in fact, the case there is no example of a fern cleavage site in a horseshoe bat, you know, found in the wild. Therefore, there's no appropriate story of how this could have been do a notic once you see this piece of molecular evidence. I mean either you either is there and you haven't found it or it's just not there. And by definition it had to have been the result of human manipulation. Well
I think there's a fundamental challenge here which is that we don't know what viruses and what sequences the oh hon Lam had found. So if you don't know what the references are, how do you know what might have been engineered in that lab and maybe an analogy? I can make it with a I? So, nowadays AI is so sophisticated that they can write its own stories from like completely create new stories by itself. So, in that sense, it's hard to tell whether a particular story was written by an AI or by a person.
No, but in science, in terms of writing virus genomes, we are not at that level yet. We're still at the level where you have to copy and paste pieces that you found from pre-existing stories. That's a pre-existing virus sequences. So without having access to that database of sequences. How do you know if something was derived from that or whether it just come from nature and we don't have access simply because of a lack of cooperation at this point with with the Chinese correct?
Yes sir.
And the database in question which Nina refers to is a as far as we know, a pretty well complete database of all the viruses they had collected over 15 years or so and their sequences their locations, their other features of them and and that database was on line until the 12th of September 2019, it then went offline. It came back briefly online in early 2020.
But only internally not available to the outside world, which it had been before, although, not all of it, there was a password-protected section. They there was a paper published by the ecohealth alliance in collaboration with the Wuhan instead of our ology which came out in 2020, but was written before the pandemic began, which did, which listed a very large number of viruses, they had worked on up until the end of 2015, the beginning of 2016. And so we think we have a fairly complete
Each idea of which virus is that collected up until that point, but if you look at the published sequences of viruses that they found in 2016 17, 18 and 19. There's very, very little information available at all and we think it's we know it's in that database that database is not being made available. We've asked for it repeatedly in every way that we can think of and said, wouldn't it be the perfect way to
To exonerate. The lab is to show us exactly what you had in the lab and show that you did not have any virus, that could have been used as a backbone or a template for making tsarskoe V2 and the answer comes back. Well if we shared it people might hack it which is frankly a meaningless thing to say because if you share something doesn't matter who hacks it you know, hacking is for secret stuff. So we just don't understand why they don't share that data.
Bass and when you say we we are talking about Western governments have requested this of the Chinese or journalists or the scientific establishment. So it's your been quite astonishing. So the World Health Organization sent a team of scientists in in early, twenty Twenty-One to hunt to investigate the origin of covid-19. And that team included, the president of the Eco Health Alliance, which collaborates with the Johan Institute of Neurology, and when they went there, they were given this nice tour of the top biosafety.
T level lab and hon, they weren't shown the lower biosafety lamps and the ecohealth president said he didn't ask for the database because he he knows that there's nothing useful in there. So he he asserted without sharing the data that we don't need to see this database.
Can I just interrupt that just just to answer your question about we? Because yes, I do mean literally a leaner and I trying to put questions to. She's young, lady herself or Jane Q. Who's a journalist who
Who has access to her and not getting anywhere in terms of responses. But I also mean, a sort of community of people who are interested in this subject, some of whom are extremely knowledgeable. Some of whom are as it were amateurs. Who come to this from outside, they're just good at handling data, or looking into databases and things like that. And they've also been trying to pose these questions on social media or directly. And as you say through governments,
Through journalists and so on and it's really been an uphill struggle. You know if if mainstream journalists or mainstream politicians were to sort of take this up and do a little bit of research and get to the point where they could ask these tough questions, it's not impossible that we could make a little progress here, but you know, when it's just a bunch of sleuths with nope.
Particular institutional background, putting the pressure on. It's very easy to ignore the
question. It's easy to see how conversation has proved impossible. Wasn't it the case at one point that the CCP was alleging that the virus had been spread to Wuhan by the Americans, or by it has. Like, I was an act of bioterrorism that came from outside of China. I mean, didn't they ever lose that much?
There was a let external.
In Wuhan in October 20, 19, the world military games in which lots of countries sent military athletes and the suggestion was made Fairly oblique Lie by the Chinese authorities. That this might have been how the virus got there. And that, it might indeed have been a bio weapon from Fort Detrick. They even mentioned the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which is another coronavirus Research Center that collaborates with Wuhan.
and you know, this is only one of many really rather flimsy theories that have been put out there by the Chinese regime that the most notorious one, of course, is the one that they got the World Health Organization to briefly endorse at a rather fascicle press conference two years ago this week, which was that, it had reached China on frozen food from overseas, Frozen Seafood in particular, for which there is no evidence, and when you think about it, it makes absolutely no sense because a, it's
A very good vehicle for transporting, viruses, and B. It would infect. Whoever else is getting frozen food from those sources. Elsewhere in the world. It wouldn't turn up in just one city, so, you know, they've been some. Some fairly desperate Alibis, put out there by the Chinese authorities to try and deflect questions about the lab in Wuhan and also about the marketing who had. I mean, we shouldn't forget that the Chinese regime doesn't
want it to be blamed on the habit of selling live animals in markets in China either.
Yeah, as I said at the top that, you know, there's negligence is there's a story of negligence. Either way, you know, whether it's a wet Market or a lab and in some ways, they're equally damning, although of different cultural practices Alina. Is there more to say about the molecular evidence or lack thereof before we move on to the political story and the story.
Bad incentives and questionable research. Yeah, so first thing I want to say about the who investigation was that it it was extremely useful for the Chinese government to use that and say look the World Health Organization says, this virus might come in on frozen food so it didn't start from China. It's not China's fault. It's also a story that they're not just telling the outside world, but they are telling people inside of China and we know from a lot of emails and actually from early Publications in 2020 that
That people inside of China. Were the first to say, maybe this is from that lamb and one thats collecting these bad viruses and doing risky research with them. And so this whole issue of the virus database being taken offline being made inaccessible, it just makes no sense because these wires Hunters has spent more than a decade collecting all these viruses putting together the database which they launched in 2019 right before pandemic. They said, this database is for other scientists around. China announcement to you.
Use to understand if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe and Sam Harris dot-org. Once you do you'll get access to all full-length episodes of The Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber, only content including bonus episodes and a mas. And the conversations I've been having on the waking up app, the making sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe. Now at Sam Harris dot-org.
