You might have noticed there's been a bit of talk recently about a certain virus. A virus that may or may not have a vaccine that is very safe and effective, that may or may not be curable via hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D and ivermectin. That may or may not have escaped from a certain Chinese lab....Yes folks, we're talking about SARS CoV-2. And although it's technically not directly guru-related, these are topics that have sucked so many of our gurus in like a conceptual black hole. So, we were particularly happy that Dr. Stuart Neil was willing to talk to us and sort this stuff out. Stuart is a Professor of Virology at King's College London. He's a specialist in virus cell biology and immunology, antiviral restriction, and has studied HIV, Ebola, and most recently COVID.Stuart is passionate about helping to inform the public about the state of scientific knowledge on COVID, and is known for his many excellent twitter threads helping to provide summaries and combat the misinformation and conspiracy theories that surround these topics.In this episode, Stuart gives a nuanced and crystal clear summary of where the evidence is pointing on these COVID-related topics. Stuart's frank about what we do and we do not know on these topics. And with Matt and Chris, there's interesting discussions about the controversies surrounding THAT letter to the Lancet, how scientific publishing works, and how the 'scientific consensus' develops in a politically charged and highly dynamic situation.If you have friends or colleagues who are uncertain about what positions the evidence supports on COVID, then THIS is the guy and THIS is the episode you want them to listen to.LinksStuart's article on Fake Science and Judy MikovitsStuart's Twitter profileD.R.A.S.T.I.C.'s WebsiteThis Week's SponsorCheck out the sponsor of this week's episode, Ground News, and get the app at ground.news/gurus.
Hello, and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listens to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, and with me is Chris Kavanagh.
We're not decoding any great minds today, but we are talking to a great mind, aren't we, Chris?
That's right.
We've invited on an illustrious guest, as we're wont to do, to try and alleviate our shoddy, ill-informed takes.
Yes, that's right.
That helps us out.
We'll introduce him a little bit later on, but I was really glad to do this interview because even though it's not directly Guru related, it pertains to this particular topic about vaccines and ivermectin and so on.
You may have heard of those topics, Chris, if you recall.
There's a bit of buzz about them in the media recently.
No, iver what?
Yeah, ivermectin.
Yeah, I have.
I've heard a thing.
I've heard, you know, just in the ether once or twice people mentioned that topic.
Yeah.
And that lab, something leaked from a lab.
I've seen that once or twice online as well, right?
Yeah.
I think it was a gas or a flock of birds or something got out from a lab.
All I know is shh, you're not allowed to talk about that.
That's it.
We're in danger, Matt.
Ixnay.
Ixnay on the lab, lab leak chat, okay?
Okay, okay.
So yes, we are going to be talking about COVID and lab leaks.
And even though it's not guru-specific, it's obviously one of these topics that has sucked in so many of our gurus, like a kind of conceptual black hole.
It was great to get somebody on who actually knows what they're talking about.
By the way, gang, we have an actual virologist, Stuart Neal, who we'll introduce in the actual interview.
This is somebody that is properly well informed about the topic and does a very good job of explaining lots of details with quite nuanced takes and balance.
So if you hate me and Matt, you'll still possibly like Stuart.
So stick with it.
Well, the thing I liked about Stuart is how he confirmed that you and I were completely right all along.
That's what makes him pretty much a reasonable figure in this discourse.
That goes without saying, Matt.
Yeah.
But enough about him.
We'll be talking to him later.
What about our schedule?
What's coming up?
Oh, yeah.
So you may have noticed, guys and gals and peoples, that we haven't had a Guru episode in a little while, which is merely because of Matt and I's scheduling and various deadlines that we're dealing with at work.
This matter will be resolved in the next episode.
We're going to have a Guru-specific one.
We are getting into the season of self-help.
So we're going to look at Michaela Peterson.
We're going to look at Brene Brown.
Isn't that right, Matt?
One of the Niamhs.
And a couple of other people.
So if you're waiting for Guru episodes, they're coming.
And we also have an extra special secret episode that will be released this month that I think many of you will be interested in.
So there's a little tease for you.
There's something special coming later this month.
I feel a little bad that a big part of the reason we don't have Guru-specific episodes coming up is that I haven't done the research and the clipping.
Matthew, Matthew!
Look, I understand how hard it is to gather clips from Guru's content.
I know the work that that requires, so don't you worry at all.
I'm very sympathetic to the level of preparation required to extract clips.
Yes.
It's really what makes this podcast what it is.
The thing is, Chris, I've got this family and I've got this job, which is very demanding.
You wouldn't know what that's like.
I don't have a lot of frivolous free time.
That's right.
I luxury in the amount of free time that I currently have.
It's glorious, Matt.
So your life just sounds like, you know, I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry to hear that.
I hope you get some time free.
Yeah.
But don't worry.
Don't worry.
It'll happen.
All in due course.
So we're going to do some Patreon shoutouts and maybe look at a review or two.
But before we do that, is there a particular product, a commercial product?
No, no.
He's nodding his head at me.
I'm not, yeah.
No, Matt, we're outworked.
There's no more advertisements.
We're just, we're not anti-capitalists.
We're going to discuss about the exploitative nature of product endorsements and this kind of thing.
Yes.
Or we're going to talk about a product that we already discussed in the previous week with the jaunty music that would be kicking in now.
So, Matt.
The product is Grind News.
Now, we introduced this last week, but there may be new listeners or maybe people have forgot.
So what is Grind News?
Well, I'll tell you what it's not.
It's not a fact checker or something like that.
Rather, it's a platform that allows you to see how news stories are being covered across the political spectrum.
So it's an app.
Or a website?
Or it's both?
It's both.
You can go to the website.
And if you do want to go to the website, you should go to ground.news forward slash gurus.
Very important to add that slash gurus.
Otherwise, we won't get a kickback, will we, Chris?
Yeah, so it's in line with our brand, Matt, to look at things critically, examine things from different angles and try to identify the bias in the sources that you're looking at.
And this app and website can help you do it because it takes each site and the way the stories are being covered across different media and shows you the spectrum of kind of coverage and opinions.
Along with the kind of skew on the individual website.
So in this respect, I think it's a good tool that people would want to check out who might listen to this podcast.
Yeah, I've tried it out and I quite liked it.
I did.
I searched for a couple of interesting news stories that were relevant to me, like the COVID restrictions in Australia.
And I was curious about how that was getting covered in the American press.
And that was quite revealing.
And I guess it's also useful if you are sort of influenced by a story, you think it's really significant to maybe just for useful context to know whether or not it's getting covered.
sort of entirely by left-wing media or the right-wing media or some mix of the two.
So goodstuffground.news.com.
Go check it out or download the app.
So, Matt, we're going to go into the interview segment now, but one piece of context that we actually don't explain during the interview that I think is useful for listeners to know in advance is that there's references to a grant proposal and the uncovering of a grant proposal.
This is associated with an older Proposal prepared by EcoHealth Alliance associated with Peter Daszak.
And some of the things that are proposed, advocates of the lab lake argue that these increase the odds in favor of there being a lab lake because they are similar to some things that we now observe in the coronavirus.
Whether that's valid or not, interpretation, we'll get into in the discussion with Stuart.
But just to mention...
There is a grant proposal that's mentioned, and that's what it's in reference to, this uncovered document.
Understood?
It'll all become clear, Matt.
Stuart will do a better job.
So, here we go.
With us today, we have someone to help us decide what is true, beautiful, and real in this crazy next-up world.
And that person is Professor Stuart Neal.
Stuart's a Professor of Virology and Head of Department of Infectious Diseases and Director of Program Infection and Immunity at King's College London.
Welcome, Stuart.
Thanks for coming on.
Thank you very much for having me.
With that introduction, Matt, it'll be very hard to work out what subject we might be discussing this week.
It's very hard, isn't it, virologist?
It could be anything, really.
You know, I'm like a goldfish.
I got the name right.
I got the field right, the institution right.
No, I didn't mean that.
I just meant that Stuart must be, like many virologists in the world, quite fed up of discussing coronaviruses and related topics, but we're going to make him do so and discuss the lab leak,
which must be another favorite topic.
Oh, yeah, that keeps me up at night.
The trouble is, is that, I mean, speaking from the vast majority of the virology community, most of us until about 18 months were not coronavirologists.
What percentage of the field was, were coronaviruses like a big part of the field prior to the pandemic or were they relatively niche?
They were very niche until 2003 when SARS happened and then there was an explosion of interest in SARS coronaviruses, but very much.
But along the lines of the spike protein, there wasn't so much of the nuts and bolts of this virus.
That part of the field has always been fairly small.
A handful of labs are really doing the bulk of the molecular work on understanding how coronaviruses work.
So it's never been a very big field until obviously 18 months ago.
And Stuart, you, in particular, your work, I know you were recently, for example, on the paper about COVID origins, but...
As you mentioned recently, a lot of people switching to get a crash course on corona viruses.
So what was your work before and what is it now primarily about?
So I've always been, I mean, I'm a molecular virologist.
I work on how viruses interact with their hosts, particularly how viruses sort of overcome the defense systems and how those defense mechanisms work, this sort of interplay between viruses and their hosts.
And this is a very important evolutionary battleground when you're considering how viruses can jump from one species to another, as well as cause disease in the individual that they're infected.
At the root of that, I've always been an HIV virologist, HIV-1 cause AIDS.
That's been my major virus.
And I've worked on that for a number of years.
But in the last few years, that interest has expanded into Ebola virus and influenza virus.
Very much comparative virology in terms of how do very different viruses counteract the same host intrinsic mechanisms that are there to defend us against them.
Yes, so I guess the immune system generally is the response of multicellular organisms like us that need to defend themselves against these potentially fast evolving little pieces of genetic material.
So it's just sort of adapt, I guess, on a time scale that can't be done in evolutionary terms.
Well, you've got two major aspects of the immune system.
You have the innate immune system that is effectively ready to go and is encoded by a bunch of genes that are involved in recognizing what's different from us.
So this sort of pattern recognition is what we call it.
Downstream of that recognition are a whole bunch of genetically encoded mechanisms to make life hard for viruses to replicate in the organism.
Every successful virus has a mechanism by which it can counteract or overcome some of that innate immunity for as long as it takes to make enough new viruses to spread to a new host.
So pretty much every virus does that.
And then you have what's called the adaptive immune response, which is your T cells and your antibodies.
And they're the ones that learn what the virus looks like after you've been infected.
To combat it in situ, but also retain a memory of what that virus looks like such that if you meet it again, you don't get sick.
So it's the adaptive immune response that you are trying to educate for vaccine.
But the innate immune response is by and large the first line of defense.
And it's how successful that is, is going to determine how sick you get.
I think Stuart, I came across you in general from the threads that you were posting.
Quite detailed threads, but I would say written with, from my perspective, to be comprehensible to like a lay audience, but including a significant amount of detail.
So you've produced quite a lot of things describing, not just related to the current lab leak controversy and so on, but I've seen other threads where you're trying to contextualize information that's come out.
And I was just wondering.
Is that something that you did prior to the pandemic or did that start up in the past year or so?
I guess that started up in the past year.
I mean, like most people, most people's Twitter threats start as rants against the government at some level.
I think when this kicked off, it became incumbent.
The trouble is, there's a lot of stuff about the virus, about the disease it causes, about all the response from it.
Make to try and combat it.
That is nuanced.
Doesn't neatly fall into a sound bite.
As soon as you try and do that, that's where the misinformation starts to creep in.
And it's important to try and put, I feel anyway, some of these complicated ideas into a more digestible form that people can understand that.
Yeah.
Okay.
You might think that, but there are various reasons why this is more complicated than you're being presented with.
I mean, whether I've been at all successful in doing that, I mean, it's not for me to say, but the trouble is, is that if you look at newspaper articles, if you look at the five minutes on news or whatever, you never get that level of granularity.
And I think people generally want to know.
People want to understand why they're being subjected to all these measures.
They want to understand why this virus has arrived, where it came from.
Why is it causing the disease it does?
What can we expect in the future?
And also the other important point I think for a lot of this is, as I said to you earlier, many of us have become coronavirologists over the last 18 months.
Most of us didn't know a huge amount about these things beforehand, other than what we might generally absorb over the years.
It's a very steep learning curve for all of us.
We're all trying to find out.
There's plenty of scope for us to say to the public.
You know, we don't understand this, but this is what we think.
And these are the experiments we're doing to try and address this.
And upon that, we're going to start changing our mind.
It's a very fast evolving situation.
I mean, it's very strange, as a scientist anyway, it's very strange to be in a situation where the science is evolving in real time in the public space.
And sometimes, occasionally it's important that people who do have a bit of knowledge take the time to actually put some of this stuff in perspective, I think.
So I will say, Stuart, speaking as someone who's on the receiving end of your threads, that they do indeed achieve what you intended by adding nuance.
And actually, my initial impression, I think we'll end up talking about the lab leak in the latter half.
But my initial impression of you was that you were one of the people that probably had A slightly more sympathetic position about the need to consider that not a very, very low probability hypothesis,
but rather just a low probability hypothesis.
At least there was a maybe stronger dismissive attitude that I picked up from other virologists.
I don't know if you would agree.
I've been thinking about this overnight because I thought this sort of question might come up.
And I think if you go back to the beginning, say February, Last year, January last year.
Then the trouble is, and you guys will have noticed this obviously because this is the point of your podcast, the way that certain aspects of the current affairs get seized on by the conspiracy theorists in a way that sort of back up their pre-existing ideas of what's going on,
be it the New World Order or the Q and Unlock or the anti-vaxxers or whatever.
And this got seized on very early on by those people.
As being, oh, this is part of the great reset or it's been released just to keep Bill Gates in whatever money he's got.
Also, I think as virologists, we've been, I mean, as an HIV role as virologist, I've been certainly well-attuned to this because this has happened before.
HIV, one of the major bits of misinformation that was promulgated in sub-Saharan Africa in the eighties.
Was that HIV had been invented in a CIA-sponsored lab as a way of suppressing African nations or whatever theory they'd come up with.
And that was a direct fabrication by the KGB.
And we know that now.
That was something that persisted for a very, very long time.
And so, of course, when those first rumors or accusations come out, the role of the eyes is, oh God, here we go again, you know.
I can understand why the first...
Thoughts that that may well have been maybe more dismissive than they should have been.
Would you include with that, Stuart, the initial response with the Lancet letter, which became a lightning rod in subsequent months?
When we've discussed that, I find, to me, it looks like there's kind of two independent narratives running.
And I don't know if this is fair or not, but it's looked like when I read the scientific papers, and I'm an overallologist, I'm just going by the kind of surface level familiarity I have with academic papers and how to read.
I can't parse the technical details, but I can follow along with review articles and that kind of thing.
And I got the impression, even from the early review articles, that this had all the characteristics that you would expect from a zoonotic release.
But there was a possibility, they can't relate yet, that it could be a laboratory leak.
So the people tended to include caveats at some point along the line that said, it's possible.
And then there was the Lancet letter, which came out, which said, we stand with our Chinese colleagues and condemn the conspiracy theories, right?
Now, one reading of that, which is the reading I took, which some people would regard as too sympathetic, is that they were reacting to what you're discussing, the kind of proliferation.
of conspiracy theories directed at researchers and demonizing the Chinese researchers in general.
But our people took that to say that essentially any talk of a lab leak or even discussing the possibility was now on the level of a conspiracy theory within the field and that anybody in the field I guess I agree with the sentiment of the letter to a certain extent.
I think the tone was not correct in retrospect.
I don't think it was a particularly clever letter to write, thinking back on it.
I don't think that the people who signed it should have really been the ones writing that letter either.
Because there is obviously a conflict of interest and that is always going to be left on.
I agree with your sympathetic sort of take on it.
Since you're in the community of virologists, was the sentiment there that, you know, the way that maybe Alina Chan and Richard Ebright and so on figures within the lab leak community would say that there was a silency of the ability to talk about lab leaks.
I find that a bit difficult.
I mean, you know, this was not a scientific paper.
It was a correspondence letter to the Lancet.
It didn't present any data.
It was just a little piece.
And let's face it, the Lancet and the BMJ over this whole pandemic have published some real turgid crap in terms of correspondence and letters from anti-vaxxers to COVID denialists to everybody have seemed to have got their day in the sun when it comes to correspondence in the Lancet and the BMJ.
There's a tendency to make far more out of this letter than there needs to be.
I mean, the idea that just because 20-odd people signed a letter to The Lancet, that any discussion of this subject was verboten.
I think that's a really important point that might not be obvious to non-academics who are listening, which is that I think many people, when they hear of something that is published in The Lancet or Nature or something, then they You might perceive that to some degree as being like the establishment has undersigned this article,
this communication, when that's not how journals work, right?
Yes, there's a review process, there are editors on big journals, there's sub-editors and all of these things.
And when something's published, it's passed a minimum bar to be accepted, but it doesn't reflect the unanimous, like everyone in the community has signed off on it.
This didn't go through that because it's a letter.
It's just like a letter would write to the newspaper, you know, a bumbling colonel from the south of England decrying the fact that kids chew too much gum.
Our recent guest, Stuart Ritchie, who was also talking about this, and he took issue with the exclamation point, that there was an exclamation point in the letter.
He was saying, you know, they shouldn't be.
An exclamation point.
But if you take it as the, what you described the Colonel writing into the scientific journal said that, you know, that's, that's understandable.
People have strong opinions, but yeah, but perhaps ill chosen nonetheless.
In retrospect, I don't think it was very smart.
There's been a lot of these sort of letters flying around about various subjects, some of which I've been asked to sign.
And apart from one, I've always declined because We should be presenting the data and talking about the data and backing it up with actual hard experimental demonstration or that this is not correct.
I don't think it was really the place to be airing that in the letters.
I think the far better letter was the Christian Anderson letter that was in Nature Medicine, where they'd done some first-person sequence analysis and said, look, there's nothing that looks obviously dodgy here.
I mean, that's a contentious statement in itself.
But people have poured over that as over the top.
But at least that was an honest first pass of what we knew at the top.
Yeah.
The thing that struck me about that was, as with many of these kind of controversies, there have been people pouring over emails.
And this is very familiar.
You mentioned, Stuart, HIV researchers, freedom of information requests.
This kind of thing does happen.
And also with climate change, kind of pouring over emails.
You might find out some legitimate information from that, but often it's people reading very deeply into individual emails that were sent.
And the one with Christian Anderson that struck me as completely uncontroversial, but was regarded as for the internet for at least a week or two as the smoking gun, was him sending an email, I think to Fauci or somebody saying that at first pass, this looks like it could have been engineered,
but we need to run.
More tests.
And then subsequently, a couple of days later or so, he had apparently changed his view.
But to me, that's entirely reasonable because it says in the message, but we need to run the test to make sure if this is the case.
And then academics, I've had tons of things where people have said, I think it's like this.
And then they come back and say, actually, I run the stuff and it didn't turn out like that or even can't be because people were saying, oh, she got on the phone.
I told them, you know, ixnay on the mention of artificial dabbling.
I don't think that's true, but even if you took it as that, researchers can have conversations and somebody says, well, no, but actually we see this in all the viruses or whatever.
It could be the case and you revise your opinion.
It just, a lot of the dynamics strike me as unhelpfully hyperbolic because every few days, it seems like we get a new piece of...
Information which is revealed as this is the smoking gun, which proves...
And oftentimes it's recycled and then presented in a different way.
I think the trouble is what people don't appreciate is how fast moving that situation was.
You've got this disease that's turned up in Wuhan tail end of December is when people start hearing about it.
They released the damn sequence in mid-January, at which point Fauci as head of the NIAID is obviously...
We're going to say, well, we're going to ship this thing over to the United States.
We're going to get everyone who knows about virus sequences together in a room and ask them the question, what do they think?
And of course, in that sort of heightened atmosphere, and this is where it is somewhat silly, everyone who was in that room knew where the Wuhan Institute of Virology was and knew exactly what the Wuhan Institute of Virology does.
It was natural that they were going to worry that this was something to do with the research going on there.
And particularly when use for more and more often come on to this, some of the features of this virus were somewhat different to the other viruses that had hitherto been known about.
So that's obvious.
Oh my God, what's that?
We haven't seen one of those in there before.
That's a bit odd.
That doesn't look like what we'd predict from evolution theory.
At which point, probably someone else in the room, as I understand properly, this is true, said, actually, that may not be as odd as you think it is because we've seen it in this and this and this.
And the other people around the table go, well, didn't know that.
Well, that changed my mind.
That can happen.
So in that heightened atmosphere, people who should know these things because they're so bound up in poring over this wall.
Some of these more esoteric facts may slightly slip their mind occasionally.
They're humans.
That's shocking.
The idea that everyone sits around a discussion and says, oh, well, I think that, and somebody else said, well, you know, I mean, that's bollocks because there's less than this.
Oh, right.
Okay.
I mean, it's the same as presenting a grant application and redacting the reviews.
Because when the grant is discussed at a table, someone may have a view that they've committed to paper.
And then somebody else at the table says, oh, actually, that's not necessarily true because of this, this, and this.
And so the person at the grant table said, oh, in that case, that objection that I had originally when I reviewed this, I'm now going to set aside.
So this is where this sort of selective release of bits and piecemeal email correspondence or documentation.
If you weren't in the room and you weren't in part of the discussions is totally
Matt and I are from a very different side of academia, but none of it sounds surprising to somebody who's worked on projects or collaborations, right?
That's the way that you do science.
It is messy and there often are things that, including things that people say, that they might regret if it was all made public.
But the thing that struck me about those email exchanges is it clearly shows that People were considering if it's possible.
And if the evidence had went that way, the follow-up email would have been, okay, this definitely looks like that.
Instead of, oh, we've revised our assessment.
But Matt, you did have some general question you wanted to address, right?
I do.
But before I do, I might ask another basic question, which is hypothetically, let's say, because this is the conspiracy theorists.
Point of view.
But if someone like yourself had, say, done some analysis, found some evidence that suggested strongly that it was an engineered lab leak type virus, would you feel personally reluctant?
Would you be feeling at any professional risk to write that thing up and submit it to a good journal?
And if so, would you be expecting major personal difficulties in doing so?
Probably not.
It wouldn't stop me right at that.
The question is, is the data and interpretation robust?
I think, so to give you the example, the obvious one would have been, and this is what really was the driving force in that letter by Christian Anderson and Bob Gary and Eddie Holmes and Andrew Rabbo, was that when they'd looked at this virus in the context of what they knew was going on in Wuhan,
what they knew was that These guys or their collaborators had been taking a SARS-1 related bat coronavirus, which they'd characterized previously and published quite a lot on, and inserting the spike genes of these things they'd found in different cases,
different samples into that.
And what was very clear from the sequence was that the SARS-CoV-2 genome was not that.
So that was the, it is not obviously engineered because that.
Is what they were known to be doing.
So obviously if you've seen that, if you've done some analysis and found that, then why would anyone have any compunction about publishing that?
We are, as a field, I mean, maybe this is my naive point of view.
We want to understand viruses, where they come from, how they make people sick.
We don't want to release viruses that make people sick onto the world and cover it up.
What?
That's a minority view, sir.
It should be very hard, Chris, to find a virologist who does.
Look, I've seen James Bond films.
I know how this works.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, it's funny.
I wonder how many copies of The Stand got sold during it.
You mentioned sort of like the virologists, a lot of them got a crash course in coronavirus virology, but it feels like the entire internet.
Has become armchair experts in virology and how to track the outbreaks of viruses and stuff.
This must be frustrating.
But another aspect which must be personally frustrating is that I've noticed, and I know that you've experienced to some extent, that there's comprehensive efforts to link every virologist, especially if they dare say that the evidence leans against LabLake,
to connect their funding.
In some way to the Wuhan Institute or to nefarious schemes to gain a function research.
And I just wonder your personal experience of that or how you deal with those kinds of allegations.
It just makes me laugh.
I mean, actually, one of the things I've always thought about is engaging with some of these people.
I don't want to tell them all with the same brush either on this because I don't disrespect all of them or think they're all total nutters.
But one of the things that was fairly easy for the engagement with some of these people for me is that they can dig as much as they like.
They're not going to find a conflict of interest that I have.
One of them tried very hard and came up blank because I'm funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Well, you know, like 3,000 other people, I'm not funded to work on coronaviruses.
I've actually rechecked my funding to work on aspects of COVID-19 locally in my lab.
I have got a grant subsequently from a Chinese-British philanthropic organization to work on COVID diagnostics and serology.
That sounds exactly like what a James Bond villain would use to disguise their ass.
And literally, that is it.
In fact, actually, we haven't collaborated with or worked with any of the major protagonists in any of this until very recently when we've sort of resolved in a minor way in the writing of that.
Origins review.
So I think that's made it a bit easier for me.
They couldn't just say, oh, you're watching the WIB.
But that sort of questioning of your motivations, I mean, it's tiresome.
It really is.
Oh, you should be questioning the lab leak.
Otherwise you're responsible for the deaths of 4 million people.
It.
Yeah.
The logic leaves something to be desired.
Thing is, I want to know the right answer.
And if the evidence points to the right answer being that this virus actually did emanate from a laboratory for whatever reason, whether it be some sort of accident, some sort of poor safety record or whatever, then that's the answer.
And I'm totally fine with that.
What I don't like is the dismissal of evidence just because it doesn't suit one's narrative.
Yeah, very true.
I mean, a common thing I've seen, a common comment, which I totally...
Fear myself is that people will sometimes say, "Who cares?
Why do I care?"
I can understand why you would care, a professional.
For most of us, it doesn't actually matter a great deal whether these two things.
So there's no great ideological reason why we should want it to be a natural origin or a lovely, because most people in the West have zero sympathy with the CCP.
If somehow you dismiss or question...
The lab leak narrative, you are somehow a sympathizer of the Chinese Communist Party, which is, I don't quite know where to start packing up.
No, there's nowhere to unpack that.
Well, look, let's have a little break from lab leaks.
I'm sure Chris will draw us back there soon enough.
I feel since we got you here, Stuart, I feel obligated to ask you some very, I feel like they're stupid questions, but since some of our very successful and popular conspiracy theorists argue the alternative, and these people can remain nameless, but they rest heavily on their laurels,
on their background as evolutionary biologists, and we cannot say that we have any special expertise to disagree with them.
I guess I need to ask you, do you have serious concerns about the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines, which had any hesitancy about taking them?
Do you think perhaps that taking some other treatments like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin might possibly be a better option?
If not, why not?
Well, I certainly don't have any qualms about the vaccines.
It's an amazing success story when you think of going from zero to...
To a certain extent, we got lucky in just how "easy" this is to vaccinate against, because I'm used to working with a virus where for the past almost 40 years, we've singularly failed to get a vaccine against it, which is HIV.
And also the scale at which this has been deployed and the lack of any really hugely significant side effects associated with it.
We could argue the toss about some very rare clots and things that might be associated with that virus vaccine.
But how successful that has been and how much of a difference that has made in terms of the difference between the incidence of infection and the incidence of hospitalization.
I mean, I think it's just a no-brainer in that respect.
When it comes to other drugs, I mean, this does kind of make me laugh a little bit.
Hydroxychloroquine doesn't work.
Hydroxychloroquine, what it...
What it does is it blocks the entry of certain viruses into the cell that use an intracelular compartment called an endosome.
And one of the local effects of that compound is to neutralize the acidic pH of that endosome so the virus and the cell membrane can't fuse, right?
And if you take SARS-CoV-2 and you put it on Vero cells, which is commonly used in cell line in the lab for working with this virus, then phytroxychloroquine will interfere with this infection.
And that's where this came from.
However, in lung cells, in lung epithelial cell lines, when you do this, they have quite a high level of a surface protease called TMPRS2, and that clips and activates the spike protein,
the SARS-CoV-2, at the cell surface, and therefore that virus then does not need that endosome to get into the cell.
In quite the same way as it would have done in the Vero cells.
And in the context of those cells, and in the context of the actual tissue, hydroxychloroquine therefore does nothing.
And there's a very clear biological basis for why hydroxychloroquine does nothing.
When it comes to ivermectin, I mean, the trouble with all of these things is that one of the first things that people did, and it was a reasonable thing to do, was to take these big compound libraries of food, drugs, everywhere and just throw it at the virus in culture.
And we've got stacks of these things, but going from something that inhibits the virus-replicating culture to something that's usable in people is a very different thing.
Particularly the doses you might need, the knock-on side effects and adverse effects that those doses may have, whether the drug is amenable in the tissue that you want it to be in when the virus comes along.
And also, one of the problems with antiviral drugs is you really need to be there on the ground, because chasing it with an antiviral drug, in the case of most viruses, is not particularly successful, even when remdesivir doesn't work that well.
So what are the arguments you get thrown about?
Oh yeah, well, they're just suppressing it because these are cheap as chips drugs.
They really want to sell their expensive stuff.
Well, that would hold water if the most common drug that was being used to treat people with serious COVID wasn't dexamethasone, which is cheaper than anything.
Just a broad spectrum anti-inflammatory steroid.
It does make a belief that people would...
I mean, there was one, I know who you're talking about when it comes to other reptiles.
Why are you hesitant to imagine them, Mark?
They're known to our audience.
I feel like you've mentioned them more than enough.
Okay.
So I think this is the important thing, which is that in a lot of scientific questions, there is obviously degrees of uncertainty and a legitimate spectrum of opinion, including outlier or less than popular opinions.
And I think that's true for a lot of questions.
And I think what many people can struggle in estimating is the degree to which a position may well not be your opinion.
It may not be the centroid of the scientific consensus.
But then there's still opinions that are not that, but are kind of legitimate, you know, possible.
And I think someone who is reasonably bullish on the lab leak could maybe fit into that category of, it's not the most likely option.
It's maybe not supported by the majority of experts, but it's...
It's within the realms of debate.
I'm just wondering if you could jump out to give us a perspective on the field rather than your personal opinion.
Where does ivermectin and the dangers of vaccines fit in that spectrum of opinion?
I think the point is, is that you find a compound in vitro that may have an effect and you do a proper randomized clinical trial.
And you do that proper randomized clinical trial well.
With enough statistical power that gives you the answer, and then you move on.
And if it doesn't work in that, you throw it in the bin and find something else.
What gets me about this is not the fact that, oh, we really ought to be looking at ivermectin because we don't know if it'll be efficacious.
Everyone will be on board in that.
It's that we've got to still keep using ivermectin because that clinical trial didn't give us the answer we wanted.
That's where I'm part company.
The thing is, that's where the ivermectin pushers are now.
They're not at this point where it seems like an interesting thing to try.
It's been tried lots.
It doesn't bloody work.
What point is the penny going to drop?
I think I might
Piggyback on that question, Stuart, because the exact same framing that Matt asked about trying to take the poison fruit view of a field.
If you ask me to do it for my own field, I'll have my own biases, impact things.
But Matt and I were talking off-air before about how it's a shame there hasn't been a survey done yet about virologists' opinions about stuff with the COVID virus, like there has been with climate change or there often is with controversial issues.
And it's hard for people, including myself, to get an appropriate view online of the relevant spread of expert opinion.
I have probably more familiarity with doing that because of being interested in things like conspiracy theories and so on, to try and work out where the general consensus of a field is.
And within that, in the online world, there's a bunch of people that are involved in Particularly advocating the possibility of the lab league.
And this would be figures like Richard E. Bright and Alina Chan.
For an outsider, it's hard to place them in the discipline.
As Matt described, Weller, Richard E. Bright, for example, is somebody who maybe has a longstanding concern about gain-of-function research and represents an opinion which exists in the field, but is an extreme.
But online can come to present that that is a mainstream dominant view.
Or it could be that it's more mixed than that.
And actually, he represents a big sweep of the field.
So I guess it's two separate questions I have is, in terms of the lab leak, the overall split of where that stands in the community of virologists.
And on the other hand, the concerns about data function research.
To what extent there is very mixed opinions on that across the field.
Let's split that into two because I think this is a lot of the problem is that these two things are being conflated.
When it comes to did this virus emanate from a lab or the lab, then yes, there are virologists who think that there's a chance and a reasonable chance that needs to be ruled out.
I have sympathy with some of those arguments.
I have very good friends who have said to me, "Oh, definitely come from the lab.
What do you reckon?
Come on."
I mean, this sort of uptight talk.
We've had these conversations.
But within the framework of that, one has to sort of split up what is plausible and possible from what is implausible and completely out there.
And then there is this general idea of lab safety and what we should and should not be doing with pathogenic organisms.
Most of us are all on the same page on that one.
None of us think gain-of-function experimentation, certainly gain-of-function experimentation without good rationale and proper biological containment is a good idea.
So with that, I'm completely in agreement or a certain sympathetic with Richard E. Bright's point of view.
I've never, not in any cavalier way, think that we should be just Willy-nilly engineering bloody viruses just for the hell of it to see what they'll do.
I mean, that's just bad.
Because nothing is absolute and it is possible in whatever containment laboratory you have, it is possible for an accident to happen.
If you will contemplate in some form of research that would entail you having to modify a pathogen in a way that may increase its transmissibility, pathogenicity.
Or replication, then you have to be pretty damn sure what the rationale for that is going to be and why the risk is worth taking.
And that needs to be not assessed simply by you, but by people who are separated from you by some sort of regulatory process that means that you cannot do stuff just for the help.
So I think we're all on that page where the problem I find with Richard Ebright is that He will take, again, bits and pieces of information to conflate together to support his contention that nothing should ever be allowed,
ever.
Pinning him down on what bit of gate of function do you think is acceptable?
He thinks that basically none of this sort of experimentation has ever led to anything concretely useful.
I mean, that's just nonsense for stuff, but I think we all want proper And if that means tightening up regulations on gain and function research on certain aspects of human pathogens, then so be it.
But we need the entire international community to sign up to that as well.
And that includes the Russians and the Chinese.
So there's a difficult circle to square as well.
So someone like Richard Ebright has been on this sort of mission for a while before COVID came along.
Is that right?
I've heard someone referred to him as being very Calvinist about this.
I think that's probably true.
Something that I've noticed, and I don't think it's restricted to Richard's engagement online, but I have noticed that in the way that he engages is that there's something of a gravitational pull towards more hyperbolic takes and more extreme language,
and you get rewarded for it.
You recently, Stuart, pulled him up for Presenting the grant proposal and essentially presenting it in a way that made it sound extremely sinister.
And maybe there are aspects of it that we should be concerned about, but the way it then filtered out into the media, I don't know if it was from Richard Fred or not, but it went...
I think the Telegraph with a headline saying researchers were trying to infect bats and essentially strongly implying that we now know there was a plan to release coronaviruses into the bat populations and it likely led to this pandemic.
And it seemed that he then went back and issued a caveat about 12 hours later, but that's already shared around thousands of times.
I mean, this is the problem.
You know, you present, you throw this grant application down into the public space and then everyone just cherry picks the words they want to see and doesn't quite understand how this would all fit together in context.
You asked earlier why, you know, why I got into this a little bit.
One of the reasons I got into this whole lab leak discussion and engaging with these people was I saw the sort of level of accusation was being levered against people, honourable members of the field.
We're just trying to sort of take all this information, trying to work out where this virus came from.
And I think where I lost it completely was when Richard started to refer to these people's cockroaches.
And in another tweet, he, I think referred to virologists in gaining gain and function as being the equivalent of Dr. Mengele.
And at that point, you know, I mean, this is not some sort of anonymous keyboard warrior behind some sort of Silly Avatar.
I mean, this is a head of an institute at Rutgers, an ex-Howard Hughes medical institution investigator, someone with 30 years history of really high level science on the transcription of complexes and bacteria.
I'm sorry, but I just hold those people to a different standard.
Yeah.
And they should be.
And that language should not be allowed.
That language should not be tolerated.
No, it's like, I don't think your reaction is too strong there because especially we were talking about this just before we started recording, but I think it's a good point to be, is that you've had it, I led Stuart in this conversation as well.
There are people within who are kind of stronger leaning towards the lab, like who are reasonable people, including people with relevant expertise.
Then there are also, though, a much larger group of people who follow along and are much more conspiracy-minded and don't know the relevant scientific evidence and are much more in it for potentially partisan politics reasons and stuff as well.
And even if not, whipping up the targeted potential hatred against researchers is never a good idea.
When that dynamic exists, because you don't need to tell people, if you're telling someone that it's very likely this guy Fauci is responsible for a pandemic that's killed millions and he's gleefully collaborating with the Chinese behind our backs and lying to people in front of their faces.
There's a lot of people in the world and there's a lot of people that would see that as it wouldn't be wrong to do something about a villain like that.
That's your big concern.
The incident I was referring to certainly with some of the language that Richard had used against certain scientists like Fauci, like Christian Andersen.
I mean, he was pulled up by Alina Chan for saying, you shouldn't be saying that.
I mean, what happens if someone actually reads your words and takes you up on that and actually threatens to do violence to people or words to that effect?
Because let's not be coy about this.
Everyone in this space receives dodgy emails, which is, you know, and some more than others.
I've been through the spirit, but I know others have.
And his reaction was, well, you know, that's life.
You know, that was the point where I thought, well, I'm sorry, this is now beyond fail.
Yep.
Yeah.
You mentioned, Stuart, that you're aware that people in this area, that you get dodgy emails.
But actually, I don't think that's something that the majority of people are aware, like myself included.
Now that you mentioned that, I would kind of expect it.
But I'm just wondering, is that now a kind of part of the job?
That if you get a public profile and you're a virologist, you're likely to get that kind of attention?
Virologist or clinician dealing with COVID has been in the public space and who engages in trying to, A, explain, B, sort of be quite strong about various opinions on this, whatever way they thought, will undoubtedly receive emails from people that are not too complimentary.
And to be quite honest with you, it's mainly the female scientists and clinicians who get the worst of it.
And I know that.
Do these include threats or just abusive?
I mean, I know of people who have received threats of violence, threats of sexual assault, threats of just dodgy intimidation, and not just sort of like on quote-unquote my side of the argument.
On the other side of the argument as well, it's not limited to that side of the argument.
I know that some of the leading proponents of the public, particularly the ones who are not anonymous in the public space, have also received Unacceptable intimidation from people purporting to be supporters of one side or another,
which is, I mean, this is a discussion about ideas.
It's a discussion about the likelihood of something happening.
And if something could have happened, what is the most likely way it could have done?
I don't have any personal antipathy towards anyone who holds different view, but I do want to have an honest discussion about What is likely, what is not, and what the evidence does look like.
Yeah.
I think, Stuart, that these kind of dynamics, it's often what Matt and I are talking about on the podcast when we're discussing the lab leak, that all of the things that you're discussing about, the interesting scientific discussion that you can have about the relative evidence or the development of new information that comes out,
even the grant proposal details, that there are legitimate things to discuss in it, it still should be done with the awareness that These kinds of online ecosystems exist and there are people that get threats and that there are more unhinged members of various communities on whatever side that you have to take into account what possible forces you unleash if you're pointing fingers and doing things like that.
And it doesn't mean that you can never legitimately criticize someone or point out that this research is the type that I think is problematic.
I think you can do that and do it in a responsible way.
This is the bit that always I find really amusing when certain folks say, oh, Stuart is one of the only virologists who hasn't blocked us.
It's like, well, why do you think the other ones did?
It wasn't because you were making an argument that was cogent or coherent.
It's because most of the people who jumped on this are complete assholes.
I like that level of forefrightness.
That's accurate.
I really feel for more religious, I have to say, because I've felt for climate scientists for a long time, but that's been controversial and politically charged for a long time.
And I count my lucky stars that Chris and I are studying religion and addiction or whatever, and other people are studying black holes and these other...
These other areas that do not have this political charge, but it's like the field of virology just within, like I remember when virology was not sexy, when nobody was paying attention to it.
It was a lovely time.
This was one of the interesting things that being a virologist, when of course when this play blew up, I mean prior to that.
No one really gave a crap about what you worked on and no one wanted to talk to you about it.
And suddenly everyone wanted to talk to you about it.
And that was great, really interesting and a great sort of halcyon time to be in.
It started a pandemic as often as it's been.
And as a virologist, it's like, wow, this is what we do.
We need to be in there and talking about this and trying to find out what's going on.
It rapidly degenerated.
And I think a lot of that, as you probably well know, people are not.
Hardwired very well to cope with, deal with, understand seemingly random acts.
Ostensibly, it's far more comfortable to believe that someone knows more than and therefore it's somebody's fault.
Because a nefarious action and a cover-up is almost more comfortable to believe than all powerful human beings not being as powerful as we'd like to think we are.
And that nature can throw the dice and we get screwed.
This is why a lot of people always gravitate towards these sort of quote-unquote simpler explanations.
Because everyone understands that if someone did something dodgy in a lab and it got out, obviously they'd try and hide it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I think, Stuart, now we're in an area that I feel like I'm on firm ground because I can guarantee you.
This agent-based reasoning, this heuristic, this presumption that behind every significant, impactful, salient act is an actor with motives and intentions and so on, and a kind of a paranoia that they may well not have our best interests at heart.
This is Psychology 101, so I can just confirm that for you.
A bit like you, I was studying anti-vax and vaccine hesitancy, basically, for well before COVID.
And it was a very unsexy field.
Like, the last big thing that happened was Andrew Wakefield and the MMR vaccine.
And, you know, that was a thing, but it wasn't that prevalent.
Jim Carrey.
Yeah.
Like, a few things happened, and then suddenly it really blew up all of a sudden.
COVID has been a bloody dreamtime for the anti-vaxxers.
It's funny enough, we're talking about that in Wakefield.
Funnily enough, my first toe into this, I'm an HIV virologist, a retrovirologist.
Now, you may or may not know of a story that happened some 10, 11 years ago, where someone purported or a group purported to have identified a retrovirus that was causing chronic fatigues.
And this was massive news.
Anyway, it all turned out to be ultimately a mixture of scientific fraud and sloppy science.
And it got very politically charged and very nasty, and in the end all the papers got retracted.
Anyway, the lead author, or certainly the senior author of the original paper that identified this "virus" in chronic fatigue syndrome is a woman called Judy Mekowitz, who then turned up in this plandemic.
Yeah.
That was getting record-breaking amounts of removals from YouTube about April last year.
And the thing is, as a retrovirologist, we'd lived through all this.
We'd seen this person in action.
We knew exactly where she was coming from.
And that she had hitched her wagons to the anti-vaccine and was trying to report that COVID had come out of some flu vaccination program.
That Fauci knew about this all along.
So I wrote an article about that, just the potted history of XMRV and how this has all come to being and why you really shouldn't listen to this lady.
That's one of the interesting things that people that are sort of new conspiracy theorists, new anti-vaxxers, are not aware of the history of this.
And they are not aware that what's happening is that these memes have been recycled.
From previous kids.
I'm not anti-vaccine.
I just want to see if vaccines.
But it's not only that, is it?
Thinking about it, you look at QAnon and the Pizzagate rumors and you think, well, where's that come from?
Well, that's just like medieval anti-Jewish blood libel.
That's what that is.
Recycled for the 21st century with the Democrats instead of...
Yes.
Although when you scrape away at that, you find that this is a very cool bit of anti-Semitism.
Completely agree.
And the New World Order and the Great Reset, you see these recycling of these essentially Jewish conspiracy theories.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's scary.
I mean, it's always funny that it's always, you don't have to take very long for the word Rothschild to come up in any of these.
No.
Yeah.
Or Soros.
Soros is always our lurking.
Stuart, that actually, this might be a little bit unfair to the group I'm about to speak of.
But to me, like Matt, I've been interested in conspiracy communities.
So 9-11 truthers and the engineers for 9-11 truth or whatever.
I see here parallels now online with various people that are advocates for LabLake.
And like I've said, I'm not punishing everybody in that community with that brush.
But I do wonder
I can't remember what DRASTIC stands for.
It's an impressive acronym.
It's in line with a lot of these organizations that have crept up.
Now, the bit that I'm curious about is, I know some people that are involved with that, like Yuri Dagon, for example.
And I don't know, sometimes I definitely see them as coming close to the dynamics that I see in Trooper communities and conspiracy communities.
But on the other hand, they do seem to have members who have some expertise and familiarity and have published some papers.
I think they were the sources for getting some of the grant proposals and that.
So I wonder how you...
I know you've interacted with the various members quite a lot, and maybe the collective it's hard to have an opinion on, but I'd be interested in your take on, like, what do you think about Drastic?
It's an interesting question.
I've always wrestled with this one.
I don't think there's any doubt that they've uncovered some interesting stuff.
And I think...
Some of that interesting stuff that owes actual debate.
And because a lot of it is historically very interesting, one can sort of always debate the interpretation of the facts in the light of the science we understand.
That's fine.
I think there are some members of Drastic who are sort of much more intellectually honest about what the data shows and what it doesn't show.
What one could potentially hypothesize and what would be the required evidence that would nail it.
And then there are other members who will just, you know, bill carsons.
And if you look at the various strands of these hypotheses, they're often fairly intelligently inconsistent.
What is a little disappointing is you don't see any debate amongst these guys about what is likely and what is not likely.
They've probably decided not to do that because they feel that would be a weakness.
I don't think it would be a weakness, to be honest.
I think it would just sort the weed from chaff and we could actually have a proper discussion about what the nature of evidence is and what one would need to prove because there are very clear questions.
Disagree with them that there are very clear questions that need to be answered.
And the longer this goes on and the longer those questions are unanswered, these different theories and the more outlandish ones are just going to proliferate and expand.
And because it's become so damn political now, I do fear forever getting to the true clutch.
Stuart, the thing that you put your finger on there about the mutually incompatible hypotheses, that's one of the features that makes me concerned, right?
Because that's what you saw with like 9 /11 troopers.
They all have different ideas about what happened and what went on, but they don't focus on how their various theories cannot congeal together.
They're contradictory.
And that's a common thing that you see amongst conspiracy communities.
But in the same way, I am very curious if you are basically saying, so like you said, they have on Earth things which raise questions, which it's good to have a discussion about whatever the case may be about the origins.
And I wonder if you were putting the best case on their behalf of what is the details, genetic or oral-wise, that raise the biggest questions or that we still need to answer that would help address the likelihood of a lab leak origin possibility.
What are the kind of strongest piece of evidence that they've uncovered from your point of view?
Obviously, it's in circumstance.
The strongest piece of evidence has always been the proximity of the WIV to the century, but it's the century of the outbreak.
I mean, I think that's always been the strongest.
The major thing we need to know is what live viruses were being worked on in the WIV in the fall of 2019.
And if a live virus that could reasonably be considered to be the precursor of SARS-CoV-2 was being cultured.
In that lab or existed in a form that could potentially have infected somebody in that lab in the fall of 2019, then it's game on.
But if that didn't exist, then this all falls down.
And no amount of sort of saying, well, they were planning to do this with these viruses, so maybe they were obviously doing it with these as well, but we don't know they had.
It's going to get there.
I think the interesting backstory has been the Mojang miners, but there's been this effort to try and A lot of banging square pegs into round holes, basically, it seems to me, to try and make all the bits fit together in a sort of coherent narrative that always never really sort of transpires.
Stuart, what is the Mojang miners, just for people who might not be familiar?
So this is 2012 in Yunnan province, which is a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan, where the biggest concentration of bats with Sarbica virus is this virus family that which SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1 members exists and has been sampled.
In 2012, six miners who had gone into an abandoned mine to clear back guano came down with a febrile respiratory infection that looked on the face of it, according to the medical notes, very, very similar to what we would expect SARS to look like.
And three of these miners subsequently died.
At that point...
The local hospital raised the alarm that was passed on to the WIV that maybe there's a potential for a coronavirus here because this looks a bit like SARS.
But there appears to have been some serology, some antibody tests done very early on that seem to indicate that there may have been some cross-reaction with what would have been SARS-CoV-1 immune responses at the time with the detection reagents.
But according to theses that were unearthed by Drastic, The people testing it tried to look for a whole bunch of different viruses in these samples, and their PCRs were always negative.
And subsequently, the serology, as we understand it from them far away, was repeated and could never be reproduced.
So you had something that looked very much like SARS, but they could never layer it.
And that then coincided with various trips thereafter by the WIV to this mine to sample bats.
Just the WIV, but other groups as well.
And several papers came out over the ensuing years of novel viruses detected in these bats, including one from the WIV that had a group of different, a diverse family of SARS-like viruses,
sequences detected in the bats in this mine.
One of which was a sequence called RA for Ruthenolus aphanus.
The best species.
4991, so that was the number.
And these were basically just small fragments, PCR'd up and sequenced, and no virus is isolated.
Well, that certainly seems to be the line that's being drawn.
Subsequently, when SARS-CoV-2 was identified, the sequence was determined and published.
It turned out that one of the fragments that they had sequenced from the mine Was very, very closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
And that sample was then sequenced with its full genome.
And it's still somewhat unclear when that was sequenced, whether it was sequenced originally in 2018 and not analyzed properly, or whether it was sequenced subsequent to discovery, but I think probably 2018.
That turned out to be this virus RATG13.
So that full genome virus was then renamed RATG13.
Now the controversy comes.
From when the WAV published this paper in Nature, identifying RATG13 as the most closely related then-note virus to a SARS-CoV-2, they didn't refer back to the previous paper in which they described the original provenance sequence.
And that is probably the most important thing that DRASTIC probably did was that they unearthed or they went back through that link.
And drew a line between this 4991 sequence and this RAT213 sequence and said, well, actually, it actually came from the mine.
It didn't just come from some random place in Unan.
Upon that, they've tried to build an idea that maybe they actually isolated a virus back in 2019 that was SARS-CoV-2, sorry, 2012 that was SARS-CoV-2, and have been working on it ever since.
But A, there's no evidence for that.
That was really used as a predication to say that this virus could be the source of SARS-CoV-2, where the actual phylogenetic analysis of these viruses showed that they are highly related, but actually one is not a descendant of the other.
They both share a common ancestor about 40-odd years ago.
And so there is no biological way of selecting and making RATG13 turn into SARS-CoV-2 in the lab.
That's just not possible.
When that was pointed out to certain members, then they start shifting the sands a little bit to say, well, you know, maybe that sequence then is fake and maybe they've made this sequence up to look like a cousin of SARS-CoV-2 to hide the fact that they really had the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 in the lab.
That's where you start to lose patience for them from a friend.
That's where it relates to, there's a recent Paper.
It's not out yet.
It's whatever nature equivalent of preprints are.
So they have a bespoke terminology for that.
But there's been a discovery, right, of, as far as I understand, and correct me, anything wrong here, there's been viruses discovered which are genetically closer than samples collected in Laos.
This does not mean that they are the direct ancestors, but it suggests that these kind of viruses are existing.
Across various populations and including viruses close to what we have found with the current coronavirus.
And that leads to an increased likelihood that it doesn't need to come from a lab if these are in the wild.
Let's go back to SARS-CoV-2.
So the SARS-CoV-2 spike is the protein that gets the virus into the cell.
And that's got two contentious components to it when it comes to this discussion.
One is the receptor binding domain, or RBD, and one is this curative site.
Now, the receptor binding domain is the bit of the protein that binds onto ACE2, which is the protein on the cell surface that the virus uses to get in.
Now, what was very intriguing about SARS-CoV-2...
Was it uses human ACE2, but it interacts with it in a way that wouldn't have been predicted from SARS-CoV-1.
Okay.
And it also interacts with human ACE2.
When it comes to mammalian ACE2 proteins, it interacts with human ACE2, probably best or amongst the best of all the mammalian ACE2 proteins tested, depending on who's doing the experiment or claiming credit for some sort of computer model.
So that...
Well, this is odd.
That was one of the bits of evidence that led a lot of, I guess, the lab leak enthusiasts to say, well, okay, well, you know, because it's going for human ACE2 better than anything else, there's no way that could have happened naturally.
It must have been engineered or selected in the lab to do that.
So you then find these pangolin viruses that have a receptor binding domain that actually is It's pretty good on human ACE2 as well.
But there is then a problem with those.
The major problem actually is that those sequences have been discovered before and somebody else tried to palm them off as their own discovery.
That's the major concern about that.
So there is some dodgy going on, but it wasn't really the sequence as such.
It was the fact that somebody else decided they were going to take those sequences and pretend they found them as well.
Then you have this concerted effort to say, oh, well, those sequences must be fake.
Those things must be made up.
There's no way they could have found those.
Fair enough.
Right.
So, because what they want to rubbish the fact is that there is no way that this receptor binding domain in this format could exist naturally.
Now we know from this family now, we know from the family of sub-ecoviruses that are two main groups, the SARS-1-like, the SARS-2-like.
If you look at their genomes, actually, there's a huge evolutionary history of them swapping bits and pieces all over, as if they've been circulating in bats, all these viruses circulating in bats and potentially other animals for years and years and years, and building up all these swaps.
So what we found now, or we, people looking at these things have found, is that actually, while we thought RATG13 and SARS-CoV-2 were the closest relatives, There are parts of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that are much closer to these other bat viruses that have been sampled subsequent to the pandemic,
or certainly characterized subsequent to the pandemic, than RATG13.
So that clearly strengthens the argument that parts of that SARS-CoV-2 genome are not the closest related to the Mojang.
RATG13 sequence and could be from elsewhere.
It doesn't follow, but just because you found the closest relative in one place, you're going to find this one and that place too.
But still, this affinity for ACE2 has been a sort of a bone of contention.
These Laotian viruses that have been found in a cave on the Chinese-Laos border are, again, sub-ecoviruses, part of the same family.
Most of the genomes are not quite as close to SARS-CoV-2.
As some of the other ones we know about, but the receptor binding domain is only two or three amino acids different.
And that spike protein allows, according to the preprint, we do have to be clear.
This is still a paper under peer review.
There are still sort of questions that might need to be addressed.
From the data that's presented in this article, that spike can use human ACE2.
Probably even more efficiently and binds even tighter to human ACE2 than does the Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2.
To a certain extent, you're talking about a receptor binding domain that is closer to the original SARS-CoV-2 virus than some of the variants of concern that we're seeing in the SARS-CoV-2 population.
So this is near as DAB at the same RBD, which means that we've now found examples of this in various places.
These viruses are swimming around with each other, they're exchanging bits and pieces of their genome, and somewhere along the line, SARS-CoV-2 popped out.
Now, if you think about, and Mike Warabee did a really nice thread on this a few weeks ago, if you think about all the improbabilities between a bat virus getting into an animal, getting into a human, getting sustained replication, getting to a point where it gets into a big city to sustain human-to-human transmission.
To such an extent that we start to see it and acknowledge it as such, that virus is always going to have these attributes that make it that because all of those changes would have happened in the time when we didn't know it was in existence.
Yeah.
It's like an availability bias.
Yeah.
It's the one that got through.
So yeah.
The EcoHealth Alliance have put out a preprint a couple of weeks ago in which as part, actually, this is actually what was One of the aims of these contentious grant applications was to build mathematical and ecological models to try and predict the relative risk of overspill of bats or ecoviruses into humans based on the range of the bats,
the likelihood they were infected, the interaction between those bats and people or bats and the farmed animals in which people might then have subsequent contact with.
The likelihood someone would get infected, the likelihood that you could tell that from the antibodies they may have.
All of these things together, they built up this mathematical model to come to the conclusion that they reckon there was potentially a few hundred thousand overspills of these viruses into humans every year within the Southeast Asian region.
And you think at that point, most of those will not either replicate in the person.
Or transmit between people or cause any problem whatsoever.
It's the one that makes it through.
And the one that makes it through is always going to have the special attributes because that's how it made it through.
And at any point, Stuart, I guess there is the possibility though that people can always say then that, well, even if all that was true, it doesn't mean that some researcher didn't go collect.
The sample, take it to the lab at that point, and then it came out of the lab, right?
So there's always...
You can't, of course you can't, but you're starting to restrict possibilities.
This completely cut the lab leak hypothesis off, of course it does.
But what it does say is that there is no a priori requirement for an RBD of that affinity for humanase to be a lab artifact.
It exists in nature.
So just seeing something with that affinity for human ACE2 is not evidence of engineering.
And so that's why it's important.
And so now you see them, and you see it over the next few days, because it's starting this morning, of them tying themselves up in knots to try and rubbish these sequences.
So now, you know, we'll go, oh, you know, where are all these other samples they took?
Where are the rural roots?
The classic one now is that apparently what's happened is that These bats in this remote corner of Laos have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 from humans.
And then in these bats, which are subsequently circulating in the other viruses, there's been a recombination event, which has placed this RBD in that virus, just in time for the guys from the past to turn up and stick a Q-tip on their ass.
That's creative.
That's very creative.
That's good.
Well, I mean, yes, I'm obviously not qualified to judge almost all of these technical details, but the one thing I keep detecting from what you've been saying is that conspiratorial thinking, which is when one explanation doesn't pan out,
immediately shifting the ground, and rather than just accepting it, to find excuses and find other explanations.
Well, this is it, but the thing is, is that...
We all should want to know the truth about what was or was not being worked on in labs in the Wuhan area in the fall of 2019.
You know, because this, if it came from a lab, it's the lost viruses that were there, then it would be presumably an accident.
The idea that they've had all these interesting viruses, they've been working on these things and never publishing any of this.
You know, science doesn't work like that.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like an idea that, oh, well, this DARPA grant, this grant from the Department of Defense or whatever it was in the States, this big one that's caused the contention this week, wasn't funded.
And it was a big consortium where the heavy lifting of all the sort of virology, molecular virology, was going to be done in the United States.
The fact that that didn't get funded was, oh, well, all the work shifted in an unfunded form to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And they knocked it all up in the last year.
Yeah, Stuart, that reminds me that I've started listening to This Week in Virology for the past maybe six to 12 months.
And the one thing that I keep getting from the discussions that I hear from virologists like yourself that appear on TWIV, Week In and Week Guide, and the people on our podcast, right, who are not virologists, including Brett Weinstein and Heller Haying and various other people.
It's that the people who work on these viruses or just work in labs seem to have a very clear idea, like how difficult things are to culture, how complicated things are and how likely things are to feel.
And to say like, yes, we can't say this definitely didn't happen, but we can almost say that it requires a level of foresight that, you know, no researcher that we're aware of has about like things.
Where evolution would go?
It's post-hoc rationalization of everything.
Everything could be made to fit in hindsight.
Bearing in mind the logic of time, but I really wish all my science and all my experiments worked as quickly and as well as these guys seem to think that it all does.
I'd like to think that we're not on the rubbish end of that spectrum in what we do.
And we could never do this that fast.
Now, there are certain people, obviously, we're not molecular coronavirologists.
I mean, the people on this grant, some of them are.
So they have a lot of the massive memory and the ability to do these things more rapidly.
But even the people I know who've tooled up to do this and have become fairly expert in the last year, to make a recombinant coronavirus is not trivial.
It takes weeks.
Keep sequencing, make sure you haven't introduced any mutations and then rescuing it from the cells and then finding that it doesn't replicate.
You don't know why.
Theoretical stuff, yes, fine.
It's all fairly easy conceptually to do the theory, but doing it in practice is not trivial.
And the idea that you just knock this stuff off on a wet weekend, you know, it just doesn't work like that.
At least it's attributing, you know, good skills to your field.
I'm really gratified they have so much confidence.
Yeah.
It's interesting that point, isn't it?
Because the danger with people that come into something from outside and that they might read a few papers and they might have, say, some background in biology generally or evolution generally, and they might even be well-intentioned, but they will always lack that there's a context,
like there's a practical, real-world context which allows People who have a first-hand, hands-on knowledge of dealing with this stuff will know that some things are just inherently implausible.
And the chances, just intuitively, the chances of that happening and then that happening and then this going on is just inherently, a priori, very unlikely.
So I guess that can feed conspiracy theories.
I mean, it's like the insertion of this fear and cleavage side, which is the other contentious thing, which is the other thing about...
These spied proteins is as part of their biology, there's a site in the middle of the protein that gets cut by protease enzymes.
And for most bat viruses, that happens during the way into the cell.
But at some point in that cell, during the entry process, a protease will come along and cut that protein in half and activate its ability to fuse.
Now, the difference between all the other known bat sarbicoviruses, SARS-CoV-2, The SARS-CoV-2 has what's called a furin cleavage site at this point in the protein, which means that it comes out of the cell infected already pre-cleaved.
And this is an attribute that is quite common in respiratory viruses that spread through the respiratory route.
The presence of these sort of furin cleavage sites.
Or multi-basic cleavage sites.
I mean, they're a feature of lots of other viruses as well.
But in respiratory viruses, they're often a cause for concern.
There are a cause for discerning influenza for itself.
And there are various other members in the wider coronavirus family that have these fewer cleavage sites.
The fact that this turned up was a surprising and b fairly alarming.
And in fact, we know that this site is very important for transmission between people.
And in fact, The site that is in SARS-CoV-2 is not a site you would predict it to be a very efficient site, if you were just looking at the sequence.
And we know it's not very efficient, actually, because it only is cleaved about 50% of the time.
And if you look at the new variants of concern, particularly like Alpha and Delta, the big ones.
They've picked up mutations in this or just adjacent to this cleavage site that actually make that cleavage work far better.
And that's one of the major reasons why these viruses are more infectious.
So the presence of this site, again, has been used to say, well, you know, it's not there in the rest of the family.
It's the creationist argument, oh, this couldn't have evolved by chance.
It must have been inserted.
It must have been designed that way.
The trouble is that's always predicated on this idea that we have some Vast knowledge of the representative spread of the nature of these viruses in the world.
We don't.
We haven't found one yet.
Well, we hadn't found a receptor binding domain that was good as SARS-CoV-2 until two weeks before.
The idea that we will never find one is just a nonsense.
And the idea that this might not be something that evolves in bats, but may evolve in an intermediary host species could well be a species that is Farmed and then sold in wet markets, for example, is certainly not implausible.
But yet everything is sort of predicated on this idea that this must have been inserted.
And the trouble with this new DARPA grant is it does sort of very much state, and these are sort of creative virologists, they know what they're looking for.
They actually specifically state, we will look for viruses that have different cleavage sites at this point in the protein, including And of course, the fact that they've actually articulated the fact that they're looking for one means that,
you know, they must be guilty.
Even though the experimentation that is put forward as being the first part of that grant is to take those spikes and put them into the heterologous virus, this heterologous SARS-1 virus that cannot be the source of SARS-CoV-2 and characterize them in there.
The issue is with conflating these things.
That set of research is gain of function and there's no dressing that up as far as I'm concerned.
And Richard is absolutely correct.
For example, Richard Ebert is absolutely correct.
If that is not being done at the appropriate containment, then that's risky and it should not be done.
And it's a very poor practice and very likely to be a risk of some sort of bad event.
We all completely agree with, but we also know that that can't be the source of the virus.
But they want to build this case up into its sort of nth degree to be able to then say, well, they must have been doing this in Wuhan because they've got Ding doing it in Chapel Hill.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It seems like there's a general theme throughout all of the things that you've explained is that, you know, things are messy, they're complicated, and there's a certain intolerance for...
Dealing with that messiness and the fact that EcoHealth Alliance or various researchers at Wave as well, that they are the people that are experts in this area.
So if they are not guilty, if they didn't engineer it and stuff, all these things that are pointing to them that people like to regard as smoking guns or smoking bats as the case may be, they're actually just showing that these are researchers interested in this topic.
Somewhat depressingly, they're probably the people that were trying the most to identify and combat this kind of thing from happening.
This is what the old program of research was for.
I mean, this program of research was not for making bioweapons to release on an unsuspecting public.
Was it, Stuart?
Have I got my check yet?
This is the problem.
I mean, if you want to predict what the risks are going to be, and these risks are not going to go away if everyone stops working on this, you know, we're just not going to have as much knowledge as we should do when it happens again.
And this is my whole problem with this whole discussion is that we want to get to the right answer because however this happened, we've got to stop it happening again.
We need to sort of break this down into the likely sources.
Now, if it had come from a lab, as I said, Then that lab should have been harboring this virus in a live form, or at the very least, someone getting infected in the sampling process and brought it back, which I think you'd never be able to tell the difference with that.
No.
If you think about it, we tend to think, SARS-CoV-2 for the vast majority of people doesn't make them that sick.
You're talking about a mild to moderate respiratory infection for most people, which back in fall 2019, we've got probably raised too much in the wearable arm belts.
So if you think about the sort of level of lab leak, if it was infecting someone in the lab, then you'd expect to see evidence of a lot more infection in their surrounding family members, in their surrounding work colleagues.
Now, I guess we need that information, but apart from this one sort of apocryphal story that no one can ever...
Find any corroboration for, which is these three sick members of the WIB going to hospital with a respiratory infection sometime in late 2019.
There is just none of that.
And the WIB team said their group never tested positive for antibodies.
Of course, therein lies the next lie.
This is the other thing about this.
To sustain this hypothesis, there's got to be layer upon layer upon layer rather than true.
By people that don't have an obvious history of not being open about their work and being deliberately untruthful.
That's the problem we have.
And I can completely understand that the Chinese government is probably cracking down on the message.
I mean, that's certainly not helpful.
And it's certainly the case that there has been a level of obfuscation.
of some of the early events that have been going on in Wuhan late in 2019 that will illuminate a lot of this origins discussion.
That's equally true of what was going on in the live markets and the evidence of live animal sales and the lying to the WHO about live animals being on sale in Wuhan as it is about anything to do with WIV.
There are loads and loads of reasons why Chinese authorities would want to not be completely truthful about everything that's going on.
It seems like a good default assumption is that a totalitarian government will not be completely transparent about their internal workings and also the view of China as a monolithic, you know, it's a huge country with a political party that,
yes, there's only one of them allowed, but within that you have Regional authorities and you have lots of conflicting things.
The image of them as like this super well-oiled machine that is just so tightly in step, I think that's also an issue about some of the presentations.
But Stuart, we've took up your entire morning, I feel, and you've been extremely forthcoming and extremely indulgent with us.
But I'm going to ask you a mean question.
To finish with, and you can feel free to dismiss it if you think it's a nonworthy thing, but I know that you were on the paper recently with the COVID origins paper, reviewing the evidence, and that the overall conclusion of that paper was that the zoonosis origin is most likely.
And so I get that that is likely where you fall.
So if I was to ask you to assign rough percentages to that outcome, Just you personally, or you can avoid it if you want under a qualitative statement, but I'm just interested where you currently lie with the new revelations as well about the grant applications and so on.
Right, so I'm still going to go 90-10.
Well, that's just pulled off the top of my head.
That's actually still very helpful because that's the Sense that I get from listening to sources like Twiv, that that's the general assessment.
I know that people don't like to put figures to it, but I think the general view amongst the broad public on Twitter is that it's like 60 /40, not that it's 90 /10 or 50 /50.
Yeah.
I mean, the trouble is there are various different ways in which a zoonotic ogres fall from a bat could have wound up in one arm.
And those things are not mutual.
Whereas there is a very discrete set of events that must be true for a lab leak to have happened, centered around that lab in Wuhan.
And if the major facts of that simply don't stack up, then there is no probability.
I understand what you're saying on a logical level, Stuart, which is that a lot of pieces have to fall into place for one explanation to be correct.
It's not impossible.
Just because something's not impossible doesn't mean it's light.
Yeah.
So Stuart, look, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us and to everyone who's listening, because one of the things we really realize about the problems with conspiracy theorists and disinformation of all kinds is that the people who actually know stuff are actually busy doing actual work,
you know?
And the people who don't, the bullshit is, it's their job to Endlessly go on podcasts, endlessly pontificate about their speculations about this, that, and the other.
So there's this information asymmetries.
So for coming on, hopefully it'll be helpful, at least in a small way.
I'm sure I'm not going to change anyone's mind.
That's not true.
That's not true.
And then, you know, the book deals will be forthcoming, Stuart.
This is just the first step.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
The book deals.
I don't think the backhand money from legal health for defending them and all of those.
Suretyptish funding.
Yeah, I don't think the book entitled Oops, It Was The Bat After All.
That's a good title.
I'd get it.
Yeah, that's it.
Have you ever thought about writing a book, maybe The Virologist's Guide to Living in the 21st Century?
You could give your insights.
They're very bizarre.
It's been a very bizarre 18 months.
It's not going to go back to being the same again, I'm sure.
I'm not sure now that there is anything that could come out that is going to make this lab leak hypothesis go away.
Because there'll always be an issue.
It'll either be fake, it'll be propaganda, it'll be this, it'll be that.
It'll be all, well, they just want you to know that.
I completely agree.
And of course, you know, what are you going to do?
Finally, you know, whatever this bloody database is that the WIP have, which as I understand, it's simply a list of their bad samples and whether they got sequenced out.
I'm not sure that anyone has ever said it's anything more bad.
But, you know, they get that out on the table and look, there's no SARS-CoV-2 there.
Are all these not just going to pack up and go, well, it'll affect them.
Of course they're not.
They've lied about this.
Oh, it's not that, you know, they've already decided where it came from and any data to the contrary is either a lie or it is a fabrication or it is a whatever.
Yeah.
And at that point.
It becomes the 911.
It becomes the JFK.
It becomes the chemtrails in the sky.
That's completely it.
Matt and I have talked about this, but if the evidence came out tomorrow that showed that it came from a lab leak and there was irrefutable evidence of what happened, the consensus of the field of virology would shift if the evidence was undeniable to a lab leak.
And that's the asymmetry.
Because that will never happen in reverse.
There will always be, you know, I'd put money on this.
In 10 years, you will have people, even if the evidence continues to stack up to say zoonotic origin is the most likely outcome, it won't go away like you say, because that's not what happens with conspiracy theories.
There are still people that say the towers didn't collapse.
It was an inside job.
And JFK's assassination is now...
Probably the standard cultural view is that it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald, it was someone else.
So yeah, that's the thing.
JFK was one of my favorite films.
I really enjoyed that film.
I sat down to watch it the other day and thought, this is bullshit.
It's the depressing thing about, yeah, you start to see if I watch his conspiracies.
Did that have Kevin Costner in it?
Or was that someone else?
Yeah.
Oh my God.
It can't have been good.
I had Kevin Guster in it.
What the hell?
Robin Hood.
I mean, I don't know quite where we go with it.
I mean, the trouble is, and this is my pet theory about this anyways, is that I think it's associated with the wildlife trade into Wuhan.
We know that the markets were selling to order.
Exotic species, or exotic species, but certainly susceptible species that could potentially host this virus, including civic cats, which were the source of SARS-1, raccoon dogs, mink.
We know that these animals were alive in Wuhan markets up to 2019.
There's documentary evidence of this, yet they were not there when the investigative teams went into the market.
The Chinese authorities told the WHO.
There were no live animals.
Well, that was a lie.
Clearly were.
And basically, because there's been this whole illicit, sort of under-the-counter trade of these animals in China for years, that the Chinese were warned and warned and warned would be the source of the next pandemic.
And they've done nothing about it.
They've turned a blind eye to it.
For whatever reason, local authorities have let things slide.
And I think this is the root cause of a lot of the obfuscation, is local Party apparatchiks and control of these matters in the locality, trying to basically cover up the fact that they've been asleep on the job so they don't get into trouble with their gym.
And so what you have is that everything being cleared out of the market, all the supply chains being wound up.
Before anyone could get in and test, what was found?
A load of maybe about 400-odd frozen carcasses, which were PCR negative.
What was positive was the sluice areas around the market where the live animals had been stored.
So there was clear evidence of PCR positivity around there.
Other than that, you get this idea that they tested 80,000 animals.
Ooh, they tested 80,000 animals.
They didn't find any.
Well, yeah, but look at what they actually tested.
Within that 80,000 were chickens and pigs.
And rabbits, and this, that, and the other.
There was hardly any live successful species.
Some were tested in different parts of China.
Some were from the bloody zoo, for Christ's sake.
And there were no live animals tested that had been on sale within that 80,000.
You couldn't possibly have designed a testing of wildlife to not find it better if you tried.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, compared to a secret plot to create bioweapons or whatever, that's the kind of conspiracy theory I believe in.
Local apparatchiks covering their ass to avoid getting embarrassed.
Well, this idea that, you know, I mean, the trouble with these, certainly for the communists, I mean, because it was exactly the same, is that the one thing, I mean, it's like the corporate mentality, you do it off.
You do enough to get the shit off your desk and onto somebody else's.
But the idea that you don't want to be the one holding the big steaming bulb when the music stops.
Make sure that all evidence of your wrongdoing is because you're the one to the re-education cap or in front of the committee if the music stops at that point.
And that's a very powerful motivator in just muddying the waters.
And then, of course, it becomes a total embarrassment to the government.
So it becomes then this thing that they want to perpetuate.
And the idea that, you know, in some respects, I mean, you remember this, I don't know if you remember, but you remember this, I don't know if any of you guys watched either too much South Park or have watched South Park.
There's this wonderful episode about the 9 /11 conspiracies where the boys are investigating where the 9 /11 conspiracies are coming from.
And through various stages, they end up in the White House with George Bush.
That basically says, yep, the government is behind all these conspiracy theories.
Why is that?
Well, the thing is we're really incompetent, but if we put these things out, then everyone believes we're far more competent than we really are.
And I think there's a certain level of ambiguity in this.
That actually suits certain political processes as well.
This idea that these, again, coming back to that idea that there must be some sort of guiding hand of people who really know what they're doing and that shit doesn't just happen and that people don't make mistakes and that inherently a lot of these so-called Titania regimes are actually sort of corrupt and incompetent down to their very core in many respects.
Yeah.
And the most important, the most guiding principle for some of these people is just to make sure they don't get into trouble.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Just let people dramatically overestimate the capabilities of the CIA and their ability to keep a secret.
They do the same with the CCP.
If you think about the sort of level of amount of people that need to be privy now to this cover up.
I mean, you're not telling me that a few well-chosen dollars in someone's pocket.
And it's all going to come out.
I think they are telling you that.
Well, Stuart, we'll let you get on with your day because it must be mid-morning now in London.
Is that right?
Yeah.
It's been a pleasure, Stuart.
And I think I speak for many more people than myself for saying thanks for engaging online.
It's not always fun, but the information you and all the virologists are putting out there, It really is extremely helpful.
And I know it must feel at times like just fighting against an endless tide of nonsense, but I think it's a really valuable service what you and other brothers are doing.
So keep at it as long as you can.
Thanks.
Thank you.
All right.
Cheers then.
Cheers.
Okay, Chris.
So that was good.
What do we want to do next?
We wanted to sign off or are there some final things we'd like to do?
Well, yes.
So we've all become enlightened of the nature of the coronavirus and the likelihood of lab.
Look, it's all clear.
We don't need to discuss this again.
It'll never come up.
God, that's all filed under, done and dusted.
So what we now like to turn to is our review of reviews segment.
We take people who have said nasty or nice things about us and we say why the nasty ones are wrong and why the nice ones have got it spot on.
I've got two good ones this week, Matt.
This one is a four-star review and it says, please condense dot dot dot.
This is the positive one I'm taking.
It's by Siobhan Blazer.
Nice Irish name, but it's from the United States App Store, so maybe.
Irish abroad or descended of Irish.
Anyway, hello, Siobhan.
And Siobhan says, I love what you guys have to say, but as an extremely busy professional, can't dedicate 90 minutes to any podcast.
Would you consider a condensed edited version?
Kudos for tackling complex and controversial topics.
So Matt, will we consider that?
Yeah.
I'm thinking it's a bit like, you know, when, you know, they have those things for kids doing an assignment, the, what are they called?
Something notes, crypt notes or something like that.
And rather than reading the huge logbook, it'll give you the key takeaways in dot point form.
I think we'd struggle to do that, wouldn't we?
No, I think you should do that, Matt.
You should produce that for each episode, a one page document that summarizes all the main points with timestamps, and you should make it available.
And then you should also edit a short and condensed 30 minute version of highlights.
And we'll release that.
If you could get on those...
I'm not being mean to you.
Your request is perfectly reasonable, but the answer is no.
We can't be more...
Chris is making reference to my utter lack of ability to do the core requirements of the podcast, let alone any stretch goals.
No, no, no, no.
I'm not.
I am not.
How dare you, Matt?
I'm simply saying that these would be all good things to do, but we just don't have time to do it.
And we're not people that are capable of concise things.
We're academics, goddammit.
This is our nature.
You know, you're asking a duck, not the quark.
So we do our best.
We try to get better at it, but we're long-winded.
Sorry.
Long-form broadcasting.
It's keeping civilization afloat.
That's right.
All those caveats and disclaimers take time.
They take time.
They do.
We've got to cover our backs.
And plus, we just recorded today a 3.5 hour episode, which is coming back later this month.
So we've actually done the opposite of what you've requested.
I'm very sorry.
We're going backwards.
We're regressing.
We are.
So, Matt, a negative review.
Oh, yeah.
Well, one more.
One more.
I've just got one more positive one.
That's one line.
I think it's very good.
Shrek's voice actor and Crocodile Dundee take on assorted cranks, grifters, and swivel-eyed loons.
Shrek's voice actor.
That was Mike Myers in a fake Scottish accent.
That's kind of insulting, but okay.
Okay.
You can't have a great ear, but the truly critical one.
You want to hear this?
Yes.
Title says, where's Robin DiAngelo?
As promised.
One star.
And this is by E-I-M-N-J.
So this podcast's very description promises the decoding of gurus from Jordan Peterson to Robin DiAngelo.
So where's the decoding of Robin?
Is there a shortage of gurus that are popular on the left to be decoded?
Demonstrate intellectual integrity by applying the same standards to gurus, regardless of whether you find them to be politically sympathetic or problematic.
That's what the free is from Jordan Peterson to Robin DiAngelo Promises.
Otherwise, the podcast should have been named Decoding the Gurus that we don't like politically or decoding mostly Eric Weinstein and his circle.
Is that it?
That's a good negative review.
Yeah.
I mean, do you have a defense for that?
He's got to state the rights, but he's also, you know, he's got one point.
He's going to kneel a couple of times with this review.
He's not going to let you forget what the description is on the podcast catcher.
And yeah, he's right.
We've talked about it, that we are unbalanced in our coverage.
We're going to try and take care of it.
But I've got one pushback for you, Matt.
Robin DiAngelo.
It's like punching a, like a sawdust strongman, right?
Like nobody agrees with her, you know, like even the far left people are beating up on her in general.
So like, it feels a little bit like Jesse single and co have done a pretty good breakdown, but I mean, we'll get to her, but it just doesn't feel like a priority.
Well, that's exactly right.
Well, first of all, I got to congratulate him for good.
Sort of rhetorical style, because, you know, the phrase that you tell them what you're going to say, then you tell them, and then you tell them what you just told them.
And he just really did have that point very effectively.
But I will reiterate your pushback, which is that it's true that we did advertise Robin DiAngelo because that was precisely the kind of person we envisaged on the left.
But our reticence to cover Robin has got nothing to do.
Sympathy for her view.
Sympathy for her or being worried about being criticized for attacking somebody on that side of the spectrum.
Our reticence stemmed from the fact that everybody's already done it.
Everyone we know across the spectrum has just put the boot into Robert D 'Angelo.
So we sort of got there too late.
But us getting in now and putting the boot in looks a bit weak.
But we still have to do it because we promised we'd do it.
We do.
And some people will not forget that.
So yeah, that's what we got to do, Matt.
We got to do it.
Another thing that we got to do is we got to thank our lovely patrons for assisting us to put out this product and keep Matt motivated with his, you know, luxury goods he purchases with the proceeds.
It's the promise of eventually receiving some of this money that keeps me going.
It's hope.
It's hope that keeps me going, Chris.
Yeah, don't you worry, Matt.
You just got to keep the clips and you'll earn your next paycheck.
I'll hold that out for you.
Okay, I'm gonna do something a bit different because we've got more patrons than we ever expected to get and we're never going to get through them.
If we only do each individual one.
So I'm going to start putting them in little chunks together.
I'm sorry.
I know it takes away the specialness, but you're all still very special to me.
And I will pronounce your name wrong each time.
So you've got that.
So Matt, I've got four conspiracy hypothesizers I want to let you know about.
And they are Freya Winter, Diane Weller, Quintus Macias, and Brendan Hitch.
Actually, Brandon Hitch, we need to talk about him again after because he's not a conspiracy hypothesizer.
So just forget I mentioned him, but the other three, they are.
So this is the third.
We've got Freya, Diane, Brandon, and...
No, Brandon's not, Matt.
Pay attention.
Keep your eye on the prize.
Brandon is a revolutionary genius, not a conspiracy hypothesizer.
Oh, okay.
I just didn't want to miss anyone.
So Freya, Diane, and...
Quintus.
It's a real name, Matt.
And it's D-A-Y-A-N.
D-A-Y-A-N.
D-A-Y-A-N.
What?
D-A-Y-A-N.
Yeah, I think so.
Is that a name?
What?
Is Quintus a name?
Yes, they're all names, Matt.
They're all names.
Stop being a Western chobinist.
These are all names.
Isn't that the name of a Norse goddess?
Well, maybe.
How do you not know that it isn't the Norse?
Look, Matt, I was doing these things together to make it more concise.
Did you not hear the reviewing?
Maybe this could be the shtick where we ducked on everybody's name.
It is the shtick, but we've gone slower.
We've gone slower than usual.
We're going back here.
Sorry, play the music and we'll...
I'm going to play the music.
Thank you all.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
So the next three and the last three that we'll mention today are Bullshido, which is our lovely friend Frost.
Brandon Hitch, who you just couldn't get as my fi to your...
Or his name out of your mouth, not his mouth out of your name.
And Sean Weitman.
And that is also a real name, Matt, okay?
Before you say.
Yeah.
Now I'm not going to make fun.
Sean's my brother's name.
And that's a good Irish name, isn't it, Chris?
Yes, it is.
So these three people, Matt, they're revolutionary geniuses.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
Yeah.
So yeah, thanks Brendan, Sean, and special thanks to Bullshido too.
You can check out his website and his podcast.
You can just type that in and you'll find it.
It's good stuff.
We've obviously interviewed him and thanks, mate.
Yeah.
Thank you all.
Thank you all.
All right.
That's it for this week.
We'll be back probably next week.
Maybe even next week, you'll get Michaela Peterson.
We'll see how math does.
We'll see how it does.
It's, you know, it's all rolling the dice.
Let's check.
Keep your fingers crossed.
I just remembered.
I just remembered like two days ago, I was all set.
I downloaded the audio.
I'd got it into the software thing and I was all set.
And then I get a call.
We don't have any time for your excuses, Matt.
I don't know.
Then I get a two-hour call from Chris.
He wants to talk to me about, I don't know, I can't remember what it was about.
