Bret Weinstein and Yuri Deigin: Did Covid-19 leak From a Lab?
Yuri Deigin and Bret Weinstein Discuss the evidence for the SARS-CoV-2 lab-leak hypothesis. Find his Medium article here: https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, follow us on twitter (@BretWeinstein, @ydeigin), and consider supporting me on Patreon or Paypal. Theme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for providing us the right...
He is a tech entrepreneur and longevity researcher who has recently come to my attention as someone who has done extensive work looking into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
And I was very impressed when I read his paper on Medium.
I talked about it previously on the podcast with Heather, and so many of you have seen his work.
What you may or may not know is that, especially this week, that work has shown up in a number of mainstream publications as a strong bit of research pointing in the direction of at least not shutting down the laboratory origin hypothesis Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
So, you and I have talked a number of times about what this virus looks like to us and why it is that we're having trouble swallowing the official story that this virus clearly came from nature, perhaps through a wet market, but that it has nothing to do with the two labs that study bat-borne coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.
So what I want to do is bring the fans of this podcast along a bit so that they can get the view from somebody who really does understand the biotech aspect of coronavirus research and they can make a judgment for themselves based on real information rather than just dueling personalities making claims.
I hope I can fill those shoes, but thanks for the credit of knowledge that you're giving me.
Well, I know you can fill those shoes.
I think you don't fully believe that you are at an epicenter of history, but obviously the pandemic is a major historical event.
In some ways it is a singular historical event.
And your work on, you know, your work which is, you know, not in the laboratory with coronaviruses, but your work revealing the patterns in that body of literature and what they suggest about what is possible and what we have to consider with respect to this pandemic, that work is the gold standard.
You've really done a better job than anybody else surveying That literature and pointing out what it implies.
I mean it really... There's one problem with it.
It's that the work is so complex that I had to read your paper twice in order to understand fully what you were saying.
And I think for lay people it's out of reach until we unpack it for them a bit.
But it really is very high quality work and you're courageous to have put it out.
Well, thank you.
I just, you know, disclaimer that I'm not a virologist by any stretch of imagination.
And I mean, my knowledge of biology is, I think, you know, just at a level where I can just see genetic patterns and blast sequences and see differences or similarities.
And that Medium post or Medium article is nowhere, like it's not a scientific paper and it's not meant to be.
It's meant to be just an overview of the things that virologists have been doing and the kind of research they've been doing and just my kind of ramblings about the things that I would have thought could have pointed
at a lab origin or natural origin and I was kind of sharing my my journey which took me from initially being extremely skeptical about the possibility of lab escape to being much less skeptical and actually quite upset that so many established scientists just dismissed this as a conspiracy theory which kind of leads people like me initially who trust scientists trust their opinion to
Just by association to do the same.
But actually, when you look at the facts, I don't think we can be that sure that this is not a lab leak.
And I think those virologists who claim that there's zero chance or virtually no chance of this being a lab escape are, to put it mildly, incorrect.
Well, you know, you're obviously bending over backwards not to say what I think is clear to both of us, which is we can't say that this is a lab leak, but we can say anybody who tells you for sure that it isn't is either very confused about the facts or not telling you what they know, and that that, you know, you're not a virologist, but In a sense, that may be why you're able to play the role that you're playing.
Something about the incentives that surround mainstream virology at the moment has caused the entire field to line up behind a story that is incorrect, that LabLeak is not worth considering as a hypothesis.
As I've pointed out on the podcast before, that puts us in a very dangerous situation because at the moment when we have a global pandemic unfolding with a bat-derived coronavirus, the very people who need to be at the forefront of helping us understand what that means, what that implies about The mechanisms that work in this virus, those people have all compromised themselves by telling us a fairy tale.
So, what I'd like to do is unpack a little bit What the evidence does look like and what it doesn't yet tell us.
So, can you outline what the facts are that are most striking to you with respect to unpacking or with respect to sorting out what the most likely explanation is?
Sure!
Well, I mean, the biggest The most striking thing is this happening in Wuhan, which is next door to the lab that is the number one lab in China on coronaviruses.
And this in itself is a huge coincidence that hasn't been explained at all at this point.
And which has puzzled many scientists, including Shi Zhenglin, the chief scientist in coronavirology.
She's not the head of the Wuhan Institute, but she's probably the number one leading scientist or the most recognized name in coronavirology in China.
And she herself was the kind of the number one person suspecting a lab leak out of her lab because Wuhan is a very odd place for a coronavirus leak to occur from like a bad coronavirus because Well, first of all, they don't really eat bats in Wuhan or Hubei, as opposed to like in the south of China, where actually like Guangdong, where it's it is partly cuisine.
And I didn't know all this.
Like to me, like when people were initially saying that this is odd, I thought, well, come on, it's a wet market.
Yeah, it's like, Maybe a small chance of happening, but I'm sure they had bats there.
But when I actually looked at the evidence, before I became skeptical of the impossibility of the lab leak, I thought that, you know, it's not a big coincidence.
But after looking at it, I realized that it is a huge coincidence.
Because those bats that carry those coronaviruses, they don't live in nowhere near Wuhan.
They live, you know, 2,000 kilometers away in Yunnan and any other outbreaks of coronaviruses like SARS or HKU1 that happened in I guess the tropical climates.
And Wuhan is just a very, very odd place for this to have occurred.
It's an odd place.
It's also an odd time since those bats would have been hibernating.
Yes, absolutely.
Two conspicuous facts that suggest something about the Wuhan origin is odd.
Right.
And we don't have any explanation, like natural origin explanation of how the virus could have gotten there.
Like they scoured the wet market and now even the official Chinese sources dismiss this hypothesis that no, actually wet market is not the place of origin of the epidemic.
And so it's just a huge question mark, which isn't in any way explained at this point.
And LabLeak explains it perfectly, you know?
So I think it would be worth pointing out that you and I had a parallel journey in this regard.
You were initially researching to basically to buttress your argument that the LabLeak hypothesis was an empty one, and as you delved you discovered that it wasn't an empty hypothesis at all.
For my part, I was in the Amazon with Heather, completely out of contact with the world, and we emerged from a very remote location, the Tipitini Biological Station, into, we came out and went into the Andes for a couple days, and we started to look at what was on the internet that we had missed, and there was a story about this coronavirus circulating, and this was very early, this was in February.
I looked at it, and I'm a bat biologist, and I saw, okay, there's a wet market, people are eating bats, this is a bat-borne coronavirus.
The story looked very straightforward to me, and so I tweeted about it, and I said, you know, I haven't done a thorough look, but what I understand from the evidence here, this does look like a virus that would have been in horseshoe bats, and that it would have emerged through contact, and I said something about wet markets being dangerous, I think.
And I immediately got back a number of replies that said, so you think it's a coincidence that it's in the same location as this, you know, biosafety lab level 4 that studies bat coronaviruses?
And I immediately retracted my tweet and I said, there's obviously something about this story I don't understand because that's a huge coincidence.
And you know, I initially thought maybe The facts wouldn't turn out to be what I thought they were.
They would turn out, you know, as you wondered, maybe these labs that study these viruses are really very common, and so it showing up in Wuhan isn't that special, because if there are a thousand such labs or whatever, then okay, it emerged near one of them.
But no, this is one of the two most important labs in the world that studies these viruses.
So anyway, that moment of waking up to these coincidences are too big to ignore, then leads you into the biology.
And kind of one of the contrary points that was being made initially was that, well, of course they had the lab where the bats are.
But then you actually examine it and realize, no, those bats don't live anywhere near the lab.
They live thousands of kilometers away.
And that alone was enough to make you, you know, scratch your head and think maybe, you know, this is all to this story that people like virologists make it out to be.
Yeah, a lot of questions that kind of led me down the rabbit hole and after looking at the kind of research that has been going on in that lab and around the world, the lab leak hypothesis has become much more probable than initially thought.
Yeah, I think the frightening thing to me, maybe the most frightening thing here, is that if you have the background that allows you to just even begin to look into the facts here, and you don't have a dog in the fight, you're not a virologist, right, or you're not signed up with a political team that's selling a particular story, then you instantly end up in this rabbit hole where
All of the things that you're told about why you shouldn't pay any attention to that hypothesis turn out to be paper-thin, and then all of the things that might point in the direction of the lab turn out to be harder to dismiss than you would like them to be.
And so at the point you start talking to people about this, you discover that the resistance to this idea is not based in facts or logic.
It is based in something else, but it is very strong.
So have you encountered this?
I don't know if I said at the top, you're in Moscow.
You've been in Moscow for the whole duration of the pandemic?
Yeah, I kind of got stuck in Moscow once the flights got cancelled and the borders closed.
Yeah, absolutely, I encountered it and actually I was a bit surprised that the strongest opposition to the idea that lab leak is possible I got from the Russian scientific community and people who also supposedly, you know, they don't have any dogs in this fight either, but to them the very kind of thought of even considering that the scientists could be lying.
To them, that was blasphemy.
And they were very harsh in the criticism that I'm just kind of peddling baseless conspiracy theories.
But when actually pressed for kind of a logical explanation, why they think it's okay to dismiss a lab hypothesis?
Why do they believe so strongly that it cannot possibly be a lab leak?
They don't really have any evidence or at least nothing strong, like conclusive.
Eventually, it all ended up being being dependent on the four percent difference between the sequence of genomic sequence of SARS-2 and the nearest common ancestor, the RATG sequence, RATG-13 that the Wuhan lab released, and it all kind of takes
One at the word that this is the only sequence and the closest sequence they ever had and completely just trusts them and thinks that, you know, that that's those people think the Russian kind of critics think that that's the strongest evidence that this could not have happened inside a lab.
Right.
A sequence that came from a lab that obviously has a tremendous amount at stake in the question of whether they are responsible.
Absolutely.
And it's a very suspicious way in which it was revealed, and just those little half-truths about that sequence that were revealed in a piecemeal fashion, like limited hangout fashion, that to this day haven't really been explained.
Nobody has been pressing the Wuhan or Xi Jinping about this sequence.
Whereas there's so many questions about it, first and foremost being, why did she rename it, right?
And why didn't she mention in the 2020 paper, why didn't she mention that she collected it in 2013?
From a mine in which six people got SARS-like pneumonia.
Okay, so my listeners are not going to have any idea what you're talking about yet, so let's put this story together so that they can follow it.
So, R-A-T-G-13 is the name of the individual from which the sample was collected?
An individual bat?
No, it's the name, it's actually the name of the strain.
R.A.
is Rhinolophus affinis.
Yeah, that's right.
Rhinolophus affinis, which is a horseshoe bat.
Right, it's like one of the, like the horseshoe bats are like a big family.
Yeah, it's a family.
Yeah, because they have Cynicus as well.
Cynicus, Bass, Rhinolophus, Cynicus were the ones who had the first SARS and that was the kind of the bat family that she generally initially specialized in.
And Affinus is kind of the one that like The one she initially dismissed, or at least she claims, but this is the one that harbored this strain.
So R.A.
is the bats, T.G.
is Tong Guan Zhen, or Tong Guan, or Tong Guan Zhen, is the place where the mine, it was that, like the area in You've got a lab that specializes on bat coronaviruses.
They are studying these viruses.
Their grants and their papers point to the danger of a virus emerging from nature.
They point to bats as a likely place for a coronavirus to come from on the basis that SARS, the first SARS, SARS-CoV, the initial one, ...appears to have emerged from a bat, and so their point at a scientific level was, we need to study these viruses and how they might emerge so we can prevent a pandemic.
Is that approximately right?
Yeah, and they had grants for this for probably over a decade and worked together with EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak.
We'll come back to him.
Right.
But the story, let's get back to the story of the strain, the RITG strain.
It wasn't originally named RATG13 and in 2020 it was only revealed that what the Wuhan Institute claimed that they fully sequenced it and they said that when they collected it in 2013 they only sequenced a very short fragment of its RDRP gene, the
The polymerase gene that copies a virus, which was their standard practice to determine pretty much the phylogeny of the virus.
I'm sorry to interrupt you.
I want to go back to the sequence of events so that people can follow.
This Wuhan Institute of Virology lab that studies emergent coronaviruses because of the danger of a pandemic is looking in Yunnan province in a cave, in a mine, that has horseshoe bats and they're looking there... Am I correct that there has been a minor outbreak?
There's a minor outbreak of pneumonias Right.
Well, they had six miners having a minor outbreak.
This is the puns.
No, I like it.
And so they were invited.
The Wuhan Institute was invited to investigate.
The outbreak actually happened in 2012.
And so they were invited in 2012.
Shi Zhengli and Wuhan Institute and some other virologists from other institutes from across China were invited to kind of look at the mine, look at the viruses that inhabit this mine.
And they had, I think, three or four trips, and they extracted this one in 2013, probably the last trip of that four in that time span.
And by then, three of the miners have died.
And they also analyzed four of the minor samples, so the four surviving minors.
Two minors died right away, four minors were in the hospital, and they had their blood samples, sputum samples collected and sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology on the advice of the head academic in China responsible for SARS, Dr. Zhong Nansheng.
I hope I'm not butchering his name.
So on his advice they sequenced the minor samples, not sequenced, they checked the minor blood samples against various viral antibodies and antibodies for SARS, the first SARS, came up positive.
They detected IgG SARS antibodies, which of course is Hugely suspicious, because the first SARS outbreak was pretty small in China.
It was just about 5,000 people in mainland China.
So the odds of having four minors in the same cave carrying antibodies from the first outbreak are negligible.
Most likely, it's actually just SARS antibodies cross-react with a close relative, another SARS-like strain, which, you know, which Shenzhen was on the hunt for for many years.
And now we know that this, of course, the SARS-2 is a SARS-like strain, like it's close enough relative that there's a high chance of antibodies cross-reacting.
The antibody tests for the first SARS cross-reacting with any kind of SARS-like antibodies that could have been produced when people are infected by SARS-2 or RATG-13 or any other similar strain that could have been in that cave.
And so the fact that this was never mentioned, like all of this knowledge now about the four minors having SARS antibodies, about Wuhan Institute testing the minors blood samples, has only been revealed in the past few weeks through like Twitter activists digging into Chinese PhD and master's thesis in Chinese that were never translated into English.
So, you know, when we kind of look at this, the story of Xi Jinping and Peter Daszak saying that when they discovered this bad strain in 2013, it was so uninteresting to them that they just put it in the freezer and never touched it until in 2020.
Just by sheer luck, they sequenced SARS-2 and saw a similarity to this little fragment they initially sequenced.
That story kind of becomes hard to believe, you know.
I mean, you're being generous.
It does not add up.
The fact is you have a lab that has dedicated itself to studying SARS-like coronaviruses They have happened on a cave in which humans have been infected, the first step in the pandemic sequence, and you've got these cross-reactive antibodies.
So this is what they're looking for.
And their story, that they at the time regarded it as unimportant, just simply holds no water.
I would point out that there's another important piece of information here for people trying to understand why you and I and a few others have landed so far from the consensus perspective.
One of the things that is maximally conspicuous to me is the virus that emerges in Wuhan is ready to go, right?
It is It is adapted to human beings.
There is no evidence of a phase in which it is fumbling about trying to discover the means to infect human cells well enough to become spreadable.
Right?
No evidence of that.
It hits the ground and boom!
Now, the story from 2012-2013 in this cave, this mine in Yunnan, is indicative of something that must be true, which is actually little jumps into human beings are not that uncommon.
In general, no pandemic arises because they don't experiment successfully.
The viruses don't experiment successfully and discover the key to infecting large numbers of humans.
So people may get sick, they may die, or they may get sick and they get better.
But the world doesn't end up knowing about these things because it's a tiny outbreak of pneumonias and there are pneumonias all the time.
So the fact of the virus in Wuhan being so well adapted, the fact that we have evidence that viruses that are not especially well adapted do jump sometimes and it doesn't turn into something that we notice at a historical level, these two things are really important.
And then you have a laboratory behaving oddly With respect to the exact thing that they claim to be looking for.
We know they were looking for it.
We know that they were working on these things.
And so now I want you to unpack, if you will, the oddness.
So, this is again something that you called my attention to.
I never would have gotten there on my own.
RATG-13 is the strain that is revealed in 2020, after the pandemic begins, or late 2019?
Okay, so this is the strain.
Well, January 29th, I think it was.
Published by Shi Zhengli, preprint was.
Shi Zhengli publishes a sequence, she says it's the closest thing we've got to the circulating virus, the virus that's circulating in the human population.
It comes from a sample we collected in 2013 in Yunnan, and we didn't think much of it at the time, but here it is, we've got it, or we had it.
Am I correct that they do not?
Yeah, she just mentioned it in passing in like a very short sentence.
She never mentioned the mine.
She never mentioned pneumonia.
And it's a different name from the one that they had given it in 2013.
And also they don't cite their original publication in which they revealed this.
original short sequence of this strain.
Initially they called it 4991, Betcov4991, which is just the number of the sample.
And it's just odd that they decided to rename it and never mentioned the original strain.
The Scientifically speaking this is unacceptable.
You would not rename a strain and not at least leave some pointer that explains why you renamed it and allows somebody to trace it.
And I think people should actually look at your Twitter feed because They can see you, as you're trying to sort out, you've got these sequences that may in fact be the same strain under two different names, and you simply pose the question on Twitter, are these two the same?
Right?
And it turns out that we now know that they are, based on, well, what is the answer?
Well, now they claim they are.
It's, I mean, there's some wild speculations that maybe, maybe they just They couldn't bring themselves to claim they're the same thing because they just took the 4991s, the little fragment, and they kind of worked around it and put something closer to SARS-2, but maybe the actual initial sequence is different, or maybe it's
Extracted out of the minor samples.
There's like, there's so many possibilities and I agree they're just, you know, wild conjecture at this point.
But it's just very odd.
Yeah, why would, you know, scientists not even mention, not even cite themselves their, you know, previous work where they collected it, they should get some, you know, additional accolades for it.
and they just can't bring themselves to mention this and remain quiet about it.
And still they haven't explained.
They just, all that happened is in their internal database, there's some big Chinese database on viruses, All they did is they kind of added in the 4991 to the description of the RITG sequence, just in brackets, which kind of indicates that now they have confirmed that it's indeed the same sequence that they collected in 2013.
But there's been no official commentary and there's been no official explanation.
And even I think in the follow up paper, they still don't cite the 2016 paper by the Wuhan Institute authors, which just very odd behavior.
So it's as if they're... Go ahead.
Yeah.
No, I don't know.
It's either they're really uncomfortable with what they're doing or Because, I mean, it's obvious that, you know, once they reveal it, people are gonna arrive at the conclusion that it's the same sequence.
I mean, the original fragment, 4991, was submitted to GeneBank in 2013.
It's not like it can be, you know, deleted from there, so...
It's very odd that, you know, the way that they chose to disseminate this information to the public.
So in some sense, the odd relationship between sample 4991 and RATG13, the fact that they appear to be based on the same strain, are not identified as the same strain, It's hard to avoid the impression that this is functioning like two sets of books, where if you don't want somebody to be able to follow a trail, you could rename something so that it doesn't connect to the other things that would constitute evidence of what it really was.
So, I'm not saying that that happened.
But I am saying it is very interesting that this lab is behaving in a scientifically unorthodox, unacceptable, and if it's intentional, unethical way with respect to samples that are now at the center of a historical pandemic.
Whatever its source, we have a right to understand what it is that these samples are and what the relationship to each other is.
And then you mentioned databases.
What has been your experience looking into these databases in order to figure out what connects to what?
So there's another database or there was another database by Xi Jinping herself, like her private, not private, personal database.
It was public at the time and she essentially collected her own little viral samples Or pasted some little parts of the genome that she thought were interesting into this database rather than submit them to GeneBank or other databases.
So that database has been missing.
It seems to have been deleted.
The download link is no longer available.
And also that database was kind of in the midst of a bit of a, not a scandal, but it was very interesting to see that On December 30th, Xi Jinping kind of scrubbed the database of some mentions of arthropod vectors or like mosquitoes or she changed those names to, not those phrases, she changed to bad coronaviruses.
So initially it was a database of potential wildlife coronaviruses and zoonotic interactions Or actually host switching interactions.
And all those mentions were deleted and replaced by just bat and rodent coronaviruses.
Which, you know, a lot of people noticed that.
And maybe at the time, whoever, well, it was done under Xi Jinping's idea, I think, whoever was doing the changes probably didn't realize that there is a change tracking system in place where people can just go back to the previous version of the description and see the differences.
And I mean, that's kind of a minor thing.
The major thing is that now the 60 megabyte database that was previously available for download is no longer there.
You know, the download link, if you click on it, you just get an empty archive back.
And people have tried contacting the hosting provider of the database to check, you know, was there a backup file?
Can we get it back online?
And the response they got was Laughable that, oh, sorry, we didn't keep the backup, you know, it's... They didn't keep the backup of these.
Yeah, how things can be, which I'm sure there's virology labs that probably have the backup because it was just one downloadable file.
It's not that big, just 60 megs, and if they have it, it'd be great if they could share it.
Because many people will have downloaded it, right?
Many people will have downloaded it in the course of their work.
I'm pretty sure that the Barrick Lab would have it because I've been working on a lot of the similar sequences.
It's great to see what your...
Competitor slash collaborator has, you know, to kind of maybe give you ideas on what they're working on, see their recent submissions.
I think that can give a good idea of the types of... to a person skilled in art could give ideas of what research directions the competitor is following.
So I'm sure that we're keeping tabs on each other.
So yeah, if anybody has the database and They can share it, or at least check if there's any kind of odd sequences, maybe just, you know... No, no, please share the database with us if you have it.
This is important and it's, you know, it would be great to check some hypotheses here, but really that database is disproportionately valuable in light of the pandemic and what information it might contain.
So, you mentioned the Barrick Lab.
This is Ralph Barrick in North Carolina.
Is that right?
Yes.
So, Ralph Barrick is the PI in the other major coronavirus laboratory.
He's in the U.S.
He has collaborated with the Zhengli Lab in China at times.
They are also competitors.
You know, this is the way science works.
So they're friendly competitors who are constantly, as you point out in your Medium article, one-upping each other with respect to their ability to manipulate viruses and things like this.
But anyway, this deserves to be on the table because the Barak Lab has been quiet, am I right, about these abnormalities and coincidences?
They have effectively signed on to the consensus that a laboratory leak is so preposterous as to not be worth our consideration?
Well, I think there was just one brief mention by Ralph Baric that a lab leak is theoretically possible, so he personally, I don't think he said he can rule it out.
That was a while back, but he never dove into the details.
And one thing he said that at this point, we still don't have any kind of evidence of a natural origin.
We don't have an intermediate host.
And since then, I haven't really heard anything from Ralph.
I just heard, I guess, a couple of podcasts with him on, like, virology.
The Virology Podcasts.
This Week in Virology, I think.
Okay.
Well, that's better.
I'm glad to hear that he acknowledges that it's an open possibility at some level.
I think so.
I mean, I hope I'm remembering correctly.
that.
I mean, I hope he actually goes on the record and says what he really thinks, because I don't think, yes, anybody has been quoting him verbatim about his stance on this being either a lab leak or impossibility of a lab leak.
Okay.
So let's, we've jumped around a little bit.
We've got a massive coincidence in terms of the emergence of the virus.
It emerging in Wuhan is suspicious.
It emerging at the end of the year in winter when the bats would have been hibernating is suspicious.
Even the Chinese government now acknowledges that the wet market is not the origin point.
And it's not even a bat virus, it doesn't seem like.
The receptor binding domain is not optimized for bats.
I'm not sure, did they try infecting The RBM did not come from a pangolin.
The closest sequence we have is from a pangolin.
Am I right about that?
That's the whole father.
Now, wait a second.
I want to correct you.
The RBM did not come from a pangolin.
The closest sequence we have is from a pangolin.
Am I right about that?
It's not that we know that the RBM came from a pangolin.
A pangolin has been offered as the likely intermediate because the sequence for it.
So the binding domain is this important sequence that creates the proteins that allow the SARS-CoV-2 viral particles to invade cells.
So it binds the ACE particle.
So, am I correct?
We don't know that this is from a pangolin, but that's our best guess because of the sequence similarity.
Well, the RBM is from a pangolin strain.
The RBM is nowhere else to be found.
That RBM is pretty unique, and it's kind of been throwing a wrench into these phylogenetic trees.
Because in all other respects, in all other parts of the sequence, RATG13 is the closest.
Relative of SARS-2.
But in that very narrow strain of the spike protein, the RBM, the receptor binding domain, that is actually kind of the key to entry of the particular animal.
Because, you know, the ACE2 receptor is different in different animals.
That came from a pangolin.
And moreover, the more interesting part is that it actually binds to a human receptor better than it does to a pangolin receptor.
So it seems a bit more optimized or adapted to humans than to pangolins, although the strain is supposedly extracted from pangolins that were smuggled or captured by Chinese customs from smugglers in Guangdong in 2019.
And then they sent some samples to some labs I still think we need to sort this out.
I think we are having a communication problem for some reason.
The sequence is not 100% identical to the pangolin binding domain sequence.
It's 99% I mean it's it's got like uh I want to say how many is it 70 a minute it only has one amino acid difference in the receptor binding motif there's the receptor binding domain and the receptor binding motif the RPM And that one has, you know, all but one amino acid identical to the pangolin strain, MP789.
And how big is the motif?
It's not that big.
My memory, I mean, I think it's like 78 or 79 amino acids.
So it's short.
One of them is different.
Yeah, it's pretty short.
The domain is bigger.
It's, I want to say, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred, you know.
And what is the percentage similarity of the whole domain?
Well, the RBD, the domain, is actually very similar between the three strains, between the SARS-2, the pangolin, and the RTG13, and it's pretty conserved with other strains.
But it's actually the RBM, it's different between SARS-2 and RTG13, but it's nearly identical with just one amino acid difference between the pangolin strain.
and SARS-2 and the only thing is that it's identical on the amino acid level but on the nucleotide level there are some dissimilarities and there's actually quite a lot of differences for some people to to claim that you know it couldn't have been like a lab leak because
It would have taken a lot, like for natural passaging of the two strains, to have such a high difference in nucleotides, although the amino acids are the same, nucleotides have like a 12% difference.
So you're talking about what we call synonymous mutations, right?
Right, yes.
So for those of you who are maybe grappling to remember your high school or college biology, because you have a triplet codon and you only have 20 amino acids that are possible to be specified, there's a lot of redundancy in the code.
So you can make changes in the genetic code that don't change the sequence of the protein in question.
And the protein in question is the important thing because that's what dictates how much affinity This molecule has for the cell receptor to which it is binding that allows the virus to gain access.
Is that a fair summary?
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
So when we're talking about how similar or how different, we have to be careful about whether we're talking about the protein, in which case you have very tight similarity, or the underlying genes, in this case RNA, which would be More distinct.
And so then there's a question about how much time would have to pass and how much, if you were involved in an experiment, how much passaging, that is moving it from one cell to the next or one, you can also do this with living animals, from one animal to the next, would you have to do to get this level of sequence difference?
So, you want to unpack for us what you think... So you have RATG13, which is the strain that is revealed in 2020 by the Zhangli lab.
You have 4991, which is at some level the same strain we now know, although we don't really know what RATG13 is because, am I correct, there is no physical sample of RATG13?
Well, this is a good question, too.
I mean, because they claim they re-sequenced the old fecal swab that they took from the bats in 2013, and they claim they don't have the live virus, but they re-sequenced something, and so that something must be the sample they collected.
2013 and some people are, yeah, some people are skeptical at all that RATG-13 even exists, that this sample exists, that they actually re-sequenced something.
People are skeptical about that and think that maybe they, you know, came up with a sequence in other ways, other creative ways.
So let's just be clear about this.
We don't have any reason to believe one way or the other.
What we don't have is a physical sample.
But it is entirely possible to take a sequence, let's say 4991 sequence, and to modify it without doing anything in a laboratory and enter a new sequence that has high analogy to 4991 into a database under a new name.
So there's nothing that prevents this.
This is on the honor system.
People enter sequences.
And it's up to them to provide a reference sample or something.
And other than that, we are just simply taking them at their word.
So we don't know whether it's possible that RATG 13 didn't exist, that it's a modification of a sequence that was created for a purpose.
It's possible that the sample did exist and they did do away with it.
They disposed of it and have only the text left.
But anyway, these are all open possibilities, and until we have a frank discussion coming out of that lab about what they did and didn't do, we just are in no position to know.
Yeah, and even if they had originally sequenced it, they can then, you know, take that sequence, recreate the original virus, put it into some cell culture, do many experiments on it, and it will mutate, and then they can take the new mutated virus and re-sequence it and say, oh no, here it is, this is what we collected back in 2013, and you'd see, you know, many differences.
from the original sequence and as you said it's just their word that in science you know people take just people at their word and normally nobody really has any incentive to lie which you know in the case of an investigation might not be entirely correct.
So am I correct that from the sequence that they have given us, that they could actually, even if there is no physical sample of this virus left in the lab or even in nature, let's say it had gone extinct, they could resurrect that virus from the sequence alone.
Current technology would allow them to take the coat from a coronavirus and install a genome that they had effectively written from scratch.
Is that correct?
Yeah, absolutely.
If you have the code, the sequence, you can just print the DNA, the DNA version of the RNA virus.
That's what is normally done in viral reverse genetics.
You print like seven fragments of the virus in the language of DNA, then you Stitch them together in your, you know, cells of interest and create one, you know, one long DNA clone of the underlying RNA virus and then you put it into a different cell culture which turns DNA into RNA and voila!
You got a live virus just from, you know, essentially from a computer.
And, I mean, it's done routinely and it was just recently done with SARS-2 in two labs, in one Swiss lab, did it like in a month They put together SARS-CoV-2 from the sequence alone.
Yeah, yeah.
They just download the Chinese sequence, ordered the DNA printed in Genzyme in the States, waited three weeks until they got, you know, mailed back, and then within a week they assembled the live virus from the fragments that they got printed in the States in Switzerland.
And, you know, the Galveston lab in Texas did pretty much the same thing.
It's a terrifying level of power.
Well, yeah, that's, I mean, biology and genetic engineering has been growing by leaps and bounds and the things you can do today with genetics or life systems.
Yes, you have.
Unlimited power to do bad things, I'd say.
We still don't know about the underlying mechanisms in many organisms, but we can muck around with them pretty good.
Yeah, we can composite them.
We can take pieces from here and pieces from there, and in fact that's one of the things that is very clear in your review article that you wrote.
is that we now routinely composite viruses in order to find out how they will function once done.
So the creation of chimeric viruses that, for example, have assets from one place and assets from another place from two different ancestral strains,
And then you can put them in an environment and see how they infect the cells from a creature or the creature itself, and then you can passage them one generation to the next, either of cells or individuals, and you can basically guide them evolutionarily to become better and better at infecting whatever creature it is, and then you can discover how the sequence changed in order to make them better.
So the fact that all of these things are now Happening in labs routinely, presumably usually with good intentions, with the intention of making us safer rather than jeopardizing us.
It certainly could be weaponized and maybe is weaponized sometimes, but scientists are routinely doing these things in the interest of making humanity safer.
But the technology involved in doing these experiments obviously carries a tremendous risk, you know?
SARS-CoV-2 is bad.
It's highly infectious and has a very long list of very dangerous symptoms, but it obviously has a relatively low death rate per infection.
That could be worse, and the ability for anybody to download a sequence And what would it cost to put together a laboratory that was capable of taking, let's say, SARS-CoV-2 from the sequence alone and creating a live infectious virus?
From scratch, I guess it'd be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That's a very low number, given... For a bad actor, yeah.
You can print the sequence for like $30,000.
Base sequence, but $30,000 if you order it from the States, if you do it in China, it's probably 10 times less.
You can order the sequence.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, there's so many CROs that like companies that do custom, you know, DNA printing, protein printing, if you need like an actual peptide or protein.
But yeah, any kind of biology work is now outsourced.
There's so many providers and a lot of them in China because it's cheap or India.
It's a cheap commodity now.
Creation of DNA or RNA feed.
Okay.
Actually, one thing we just briefly touched upon about the synthetic chimeric viruses, and this is true about SARS-CoV-2, SARS-2, in precisely the RBM, the receptor binding motif,
that is supposedly coming from the pangolin, not supposedly, it's the closest to the pangolin strain and everything else is closest to RATG13.
So, if we're talking about a natural origin, we have to explain somehow How the two viruses recombined.
And of course it can happen in nature, but it would take a pangolin and a bat meeting, you know, at the same spot.
Because for a virus to recombine, it needs to be in the same cell, like two different strains to recombine.
They need to enter the same cell and, you know, start replicating there for them to have a chance to recombine.
And it's really unexplained at this point how this can happen, because pangolins and bats are not known to inhabit similar areas or have any kind of parties together.
Yeah, it's not impossible, but it's also got to be considered ecologically highly unlikely.
You know, the other thing is, bats... the way bats roost creates large populations and the fact that they're small animals means that effectively you can have a large number of bats, but pangolins aren't like this and so the number of individuals is low, which means the number of opportunities for an animal to be infected by two different strains that then get to combine is pretty low.
Pangolin is just a... it's a suspicious proposal as the intermediate
So, you know, not impossible, but at some level we ought to be obsessed with finding whatever the wild intermediate host is, because it will tell us an awful lot, and it will allow us to put this lab origin hypothesis to rest, if indeed it should be put to rest, but one does not get the sense that this is a focus, and it really, it just, it needs to be.
Yeah, for some reason we don't see a huge effort in China to find this intermediate animal or to survey other Yunnan strains or maybe go back to that cave.
But I think we should really go back to the fridge in the Wuhan Institute and check the miners' samples, those four miners that had SARS antibodies.
We should really try to extract the genome of Yep, I think that's a great point.
SARS-like virus that they have.
I think that would offer some clues as to what this pandemic is. - Yep, I think that's a great point.
Just to fill in what the problem is and why we're focused here.
When you generate a phylogeny, that is a tree that tells you how closely related organisms are to each other.
We've all seen these things, these bifurcating trees of animals or plants or whatever.
You can do this with viruses too, of course.
And the problem with SARS-CoV-2 is that it doesn't land in one place.
If you sequence one part of its genome, or in fact most of its genome, it lands in one place closely affiliated with the Rhinolophus horseshoe bat virus.
And if you sequence this other very important part, it comes out much closer to this pangolin version of the virus.
So not impossible the two would have come together, but very unlikely ecologically.
And so Really the question is, which is more likely?
that some very unusual ecological event took place in some individual pangolin somewhere, or that a laboratory, in an attempt to create a virus that was highly infectious and therefore highly relevant to the study of human pandemics emerging from bats, would have composited in an attempt to create a virus that was highly infectious and therefore highly relevant to the study of human pandemics emerging from bats, would have composited two viruses, thereby solving a
In other words, the jump to humans would typically be a very short-lived jump, and if you were in a laboratory and you were worried about things jumping into humans, you might make that jump for it.
You would composite two viruses, you would make a virus that had capabilities that no wild virus does, in order to see what happens next.
And if that thing escaped, it might be that we are living downstream of that terrible phenomenon.
If it escaped from the lab, having been composited for the purpose of making it more infectious or interesting to them in some ways, then many of the phenomena that are so unusual that we are seeing, like the
The very large range of symptoms that COVID-19 produces might be the result of the compositing and the passaging of these viruses in a laboratory, which would have evolutionarily imbued the virus with special capabilities, especially if it was passaged in human cells, which is something that's done.
You may have heard of HeLa cells, HeLa cells being cells from a particular... Helen Lack was her name, a patient who died of cancer, and her cancer is now a cell line that continues in many laboratories and is used for experiments to see how things interface with humans.
You know, arguably, this cell lineage could have been used to passage viruses that had been composited, and then it would... the viruses that were then the result of this experiment would have new capacities that a human being wouldn't know to generate, but that over evolutionary time in the laboratory, the virus would have picked up.
You know, could that explain the incredible transmissibility of this virus?
Possibly.
Right, and we didn't even get to the Furrin site, which is another big surprise in a beta coronavirus, which isn't seen anywhere else with anything close to, like, less than 60% similarity.
So let's have you spell this out.
What is a Furrin site?
Okay, so that's a cleavage side.
Okay, let's step back.
For the virus to infect a cell, it needs to attach to the ACE2 receptor and then what needs to happen is it's a two-step process.
The spike protein needs to be kind of cut in two And at the position it's cut, this is where the fusion peptide is located that then starts attaching to the cell membrane and kind of invaginates the virus into the membrane and starts the fusion process, the membrane fusion, to get inside the cell.
And so for this fusion peptide to become activated, the spike needs to be cut at this cleavage site, and a very efficient new cleavage site is found in SARS-2, which can be cut by a furin family of proteases that can recognize a specific sequence of four amino acids.
All right, hold on.
I want to slow you down just so people get it.
The cleaving peptide, the protein that does the cutting, is resident in the human cell.
Am I correct?
Right.
Okay.
Yes.
Protease is in the human cell, and then there is a sequence... Oh, go ahead.
Yeah, and now in the extracellular matrix as well.
It's actually both inside cells and outside cells and some proteases are actually found on the membrane and the furin site is a very efficient site to be cleaved because it can be cleaved by various families of these proteases and this increases the viral tropism Much greater than without the sight.
Okay.
Again, I want to get this into understandable language.
The human being is producing a protein.
The purpose of this protein, what it does is it cuts a particular sequence that it finds and it cuts in a particular way.
It's like a surgical instrument that looks only for one sequence and slices whenever it finds it.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
You know it's correct.
I know it's correct, but... You know better than I do.
No, that's not true.
I think we know similarly, but... So, okay.
So, the virus, by providing the sequence at which this existing protease already cuts, takes a quantum leap in its ability to infect human cells.
Is that correct?
And in fact, its ability to move between species.
Am I correct about that too?
Right, yes.
It's been shown that the addition of urine site greatly enhances the ability of a virus to infect different types of cells and cells from different animals.
Because now the virus isn't so dependent on the exact match of its kind of spike-binding domain and the receptor, human receptor, but the actual fusion can happen to other cells where the attachment might not be as strong, like just from a species standpoint.
Okay.
And these fern sites, again, a sequence at which these human-made proteases slice That fern site, where do we find it in natural coronaviruses?
Well, at that particular spot we don't really see furin sites in beta coronaviruses.
I mean it's a cleavage site but it's cleaved by different proteases, not as efficient for at least in humans as furin is.
We see them in like alpha coronaviruses or other families of Coronaviruses, but we know that the introduction of this fernscyte, just from previous experiments in culture and other viruses as well and in influenza, that it greatly increases the transmissibility and expands the repertoire of a virus in terms of types of cells and types of animals it can infect.
Okay, so a fernscyte greatly enhances transmissibility.
But now you've talked about alpha and beta coronaviruses.
So where do we see fur in sites and where don't we see them?
We see them in alpha coronaviruses.
There's one in MERS.
What are alpha coronaviruses?
It's just a different family of... I'm trying to get you to spell out how unlikely it is that you would find this fur in sight in a horseshoe bat-derived coronavirus from the wild, based on what we see in viruses of that type that we've encountered.
Well, just by, you know, the phylogeny or surveillance of this beta coronavirus lineage, having none of them having the fear inside.
And this one, SARS-2, having one, it's just statistically very unlikely to expect it to see there.
And moreover, I think when we put them in cell culture, I think it tends to actually mutate away.
Very interesting.
In cell culture, what kind of cells?
I think they saw it in Vero cells, the green monkey kidney cell line.
But I wasn't really prepared to go this deep into the actual experiments on the furin site.
But it's just very unlikely to see it in this type of coronavirus.
And the fact that it seems that there's some kind of evolutionary, not evolutionary, some kind of selection pressure against it in the beta coronavirus lineage because of, you know, it may be in bats, in horseshoe bats, that beta coronaviruses normally are found that that furin site is actually, you know, detrimental to the virus.
So that's why.
So, if I can just translate this, probably there's a trade-off cost to having a fear insight, and so what happens is if you allow the thing to evolve under natural circumstances or semi-natural circumstances, the fear insight comes apart because some other priority is higher.
What we see in SARS-CoV-2 is a fern site that is not found in any of the natural lineages that come from bats, for example.
And so the question is, did something really unusual happen here that put that fern site either through an evolutionary mechanism or through a hybridization event?
Did a fern site get added to a virus that almost never has one when we find it?
In fact, in the wild, never does have it.
Or did a laboratory decide, well, one thing that we could study is what happens if there was a fern site.
That would create a virus that had capacities we haven't seen and maybe we'd like to investigate those capacities.
Or third possibility, you tell me if any of these are off the map of actual possibilities, third possibility is a passaging experiment generates a furrin site because the conditions that are provided to the virus make it advantageous and whatever the trade-off is is not prioritized by the laboratory environment.
Fernside is short in sequence, am I correct?
Yes, it's just four amino acids.
Four amino acids, so that's a very short site.
And so you could get there through chimerism, and you could get there through passaging.
Am I right about that?
Yes, absolutely.
So the question then is, is the highly unusual fact of a foreign site showing up in this virus that is creating the COVID-19 pandemic the result of some natural event that is very unusual?
Or is it the result of laboratory manipulation, which would make good sense if you were of a mindset to study potentially emergent pandemic-causing viruses?
Yeah, it's a big question and unexplained at this point.
I think there's also one interesting aspect of the site, the Furin site, that I find interesting is that the way it's constructed in the nucleotide code It actually has a special like a digestion enzyme site that could greatly help with screening for mutations in cell culture to screen if that furan site is actually mutated away or
On the contrary, to actually screen for colonies that still have it, the Fau-1, the restriction enzyme site, and the way it's implemented, the four amino acids that are coded for, the first two arginines are coded by pretty unusual codons that are in general found quite rarely in the sequence.
But what they do allow for is for this new restriction enzyme to be present in the insert.
And this is another thing that the furan site is not only interesting is that it's there, it's interesting in the way it occurred in the SARS-2 sequence, in the SARS-2 genome, is that it's in there by an insertion and it's insert of 12 nucleotides Whereas usually, you know, it's not unusual for viruses to develop these furin sites that didn't have them before, but usually it happens through mutations.
Like the sequence length doesn't change.
It's not like you see a magical appearance of 12 new nucleotides at the very spot that now has a furin site, which is what happened in SARS-2.
And so these two interesting, you know, occurrences are Again, they're not proof of anything, but they're just add to the bag of questions that kind of weighing heavily on the tip of the scale.
They're very conspicuous when taken together.
Right.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
So, all right, so you've got a fern site that shows up out of nowhere in a play in a virus that would typically not have one.
You have the fact that the sequence is added rather than the result of mutations of the sequence that was present.
That's also conspicuous, so that could be evidence of a laboratory inserting this sequence rather than it resulting from a natural process.
And then you point to flanking sequences that, if I understand you right, you're suggesting they could be used as a kind of indicator.
Sometimes scientists will add something to a modification so that they can detect whether the modification is present in a particular sample.
And so in this case, if furrin is something that would tend to evolve away as a result of a tradeoff cost, you might want a little indicator to tell you whether it was still present.
Is that what you're getting at?
And it's not even the flanking, it's actually inside of the insert.
And the way the insert is done, the codons coding for it, the two arginines, enable this new restriction enzyme site to be there.
And it could be used for, you know, RFLIP, the Restriction Length Fragment Polymorphism screening process.
To very quickly, very efficiently see if your colony of a virus has this fear inside or it doesn't.
So you can, if you want it to stay in the colony, you can screen the colonies that have it pretty efficiently without, you know, having to bother to re-sequence the whole thing.
I mean, all of it could be a result of just occurring naturally, but it's just, as you said, taking together all those coincidences just add up to the point where you start, you know, being somewhat suspicious about this being handmade rather than, you know, evolutionary selected for.
And another point I want to make is that the Lab League doesn't necessarily mean handmade.
It could also mean like everything that happens in nature can happen in the lab, especially given that the lab is the place where all of these pangolins and bats all are brought together or even maybe, you know, they're put in the same culture, maybe inadvertently.
And so, just like some virologists say that they think it's a process of natural selection that is at work here.
Well, natural selection can work in a lab, you know, just in holding pens for, I don't know, bats, which the Wuhan CDC had live bats to extract virus samples from.
I don't know if they have pangolins, but they have pangolins, live pangolins in Guangdong and the wildlife refuge center where the Chinese customs sent the smuggled pangolins to.
So just because, you know, some some virologists think that all the hallmarks that we see in the virus, like what Anderson and others are claiming, they think they are much more likely to occur through natural selection.
Again, that doesn't preclude a lab leak.
Natural selection can be at work in a lab without even the scientists knowing it.
They can just, you know, have some infected bats and infected pangolins.
And it's actually much higher odds of happening in a lab than in some remote location in Yunnan or Malaysia where the pangolins normally live in a lab.
And even if it does happen there, it still doesn't explain how this materializes in Wuhan without managing to infect anyone along the way.
Yeah.
Which is a big question.
So it's funny you mention this issue of evolution taking place in the lab without scientists knowing about it because of course one of the ways that people know about me at this point has to do with my discovery or my prediction, hypothesis that made a prediction, that the long telomeres that we see in laboratory mice are actually not indicative of the nature of mice generally but are indicative of a kind of evolutionary pressure that exists in the breeding colonies.
That nobody had recognized, and so we now know that this is right, and that those telomeres were elongated by selection in the laboratory, or in the breeding colony, and of course that was not the intent of the people who were breeding these mice.
In fact, they weren't even aware that they were exerting a strong selective pressure, but it was enough to radically elongate the telomeres.
So this kind of thing happens all the time, and in this case, It's particularly dangerous because if this virus was passaged in the lab under conditions that were special, in other words, if it was passaged in human cancer cells, Well, cancers have particular idiosyncrasies, and any particular cancer that you would choose would have idiosyncrasies.
And those idiosyncrasies would have a lot to say, potentially, about the way the virus functions.
Also, you point out the issue of evolving away.
To the extent that this virus might have been passaged and favored to adapt to certain cells, that might be giving us advantages at the moment.
Like, for example, the I don't know if that story is right or not.
transmitting itself outdoors, well, the laboratory is an indoor environment.
It's possible that something was selected for that made it particularly transmissible indoors and did so at cost, at expense to it, in terms of how transmissible it is outdoors.
And what's going to happen then is over time, it's going to become more transmissible outdoors.
So I don't know if that story is right or not.
I mean, we don't know if this came from the lab or it didn't, but if it did, and that has had effects on its nature as a virus, then not knowing that is going to cause us to make the problem worse.
Because to the extent that right now we have a virus that we can interact outside and not transmit it to each other, we would be very wise to act carefully so that it does not learn the trick of being transmitted outside.
And if we're casual about outside, it will evolve in that direction.
One thing I really hope people get from our discussion is that this is not a question of blame.
This is not a question of who cares, it's now a human pandemic and let's deal with it.
This is a matter that has very important implications for the pandemic that we are facing, how long we will face it, how many people will die.
If it is a wild derived virus, we need to know that.
And the way we're going to find that out is we're going to settle this by finding a population of some other creature, an intermediate host in the wild, but that's going to require transparency with respect to what went on in this lab in Wuhan.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I don't know if we're going to get it.
I mean, they hold all the cards, unless there's immense international pressure.
Or there's some kind of whistleblower.
Well, yes, a whistleblower would be great.
I would love to see a whistleblower.
But, Yuri, you have no idea, I think, how important an effect you are having on this story.
Right?
We saw... Me?
Yeah, you.
I hope not too important for, I don't know, some people want to get rid of me.
Oh, yes, you're not important.
Hello.
Yes, Yuri is completely unimportant, and he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Just ignore him.
But if we were to put that aside, Matt Ridley published in the Washington Post this week an article pointing out what you have been saying, and in fact, you know, he... Well, it wasn't just me.
It's just, I mean, a lot of people were saying...
And many of them way prior to my article.
And it's good that there are people who are not afraid to speak out.
I agree.
Let's hope there's more and more.
But, well, again, you know, I don't want to put you in danger by pointing out the centrality of your work, but I think a lot of people have had the same reaction to it that I have, which is that, you know, we go looking for evidence and we find that a lot of the evidence is compromised by people who do have such a conspiratorial bent that they are basically verifying their own beliefs rather than doing
An honest careful job of sorting the evidence that goes in both directions what I saw in your work and what I expect Matt Ridley saw in your work and what others who I know have cited you, you know, I saw another one in the The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists today investigating this question.
It also cites you.
So your clear self-skepticism, your desire to do this honestly, you and I share a desire to actually be wrong in this case.
It would be much better if this did not come from the lab.
I don't want to be right.
I don't want to be right either, but if we are right that this is the most likely explanation, I'll speak for myself, I believe it to be the most likely explanation at this point.
If we are on the right track there then it is urgent that the virology community stop telling us a fiction and that they come clean with what they know and they understand and I think in order for that to happen it is incumbent on us to be clear that let's say the worst is true let's say that this virus was created in the lab that it was the result of
A chimeric virus that was then passaged through human cells and that this explains something about the way it behaves now that it's escaped into the human population.
That does not mean that this is Chinese in origin.
The scientific community was engaged in these experiments.
Yes, this most likely would have come from the lab in Wuhan, but that lab was involved in international discussions.
The granting agencies include the NIH.
So this is a global problem.
We share responsibility for it.
And the most important thing is that in an effort not to take responsibility, that we don't bury the evidence of what the virus is, because that evidence is essential for us figuring out how to deal with it, which is obviously to any reasonable person, the most important question on the table.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And the second most important question, I think, is the nature of gain-of-function studies and the, you know, should they be, like, what's the benefit, and should they be maybe reconsidered And another moratorium on global moratorium on them should be maybe in place, at least for a few years until we sort out, you know, what are the benefits that humanity is gaining from these kind of studies?
Because what humanity was promised originally that they would, those studies would help prevent pandemics that would provide vaccines and treatments to Viruses poised for emergence to take the headline of one of the studies.
Those promises have come up empty and we're nowhere, I don't think, closer to any treatment or vaccine from those studies than we were before they were conducted.
Again, I might be a little So far I just don't have any, I don't know of any conclusive evidence for vaccines or treatments that have come out of studies, not just on coronaviruses, even influenza, the first H5N1 gain-of-function experiment.
I don't see it having provided the world with anything of great value.
Well, the risks of these studies, even if this one wasn't a lab leak, just in general, the risks of gain-of-function studies is huge with, I think, unjustified benefits.
So this is the second topic.
Yes, well, okay.
I agree with this and I think there's a third one, too.
So the first one is what do we do about the circulating SARS-CoV-2 virus, which depends in part on figuring out what it is adapted for, which might be a laboratory environment.
The second question is what do we do about gain-of-function research going forward in light of the danger?
Even if this wasn't a lab leak, we now are suddenly aware of all the things that are going on in a lab and that it is plausible that this pandemic emerged from a lab tells us that this is a major global concern and we need to figure out what to do.
And then I would say the third thing on that list is The fact that this work is now possible, even if we have a scientific moratorium, does not prevent somebody from taking over that research.
Even if we stop doing it in the scientific community, what stops some A country that is interested in changing its ranking in the world power structure, or a malevolent organization that wished to use it to its own ends.
And I will say, it's not even difficult to figure out a perfectly amoral entity, somebody who just really didn't care about other people.
could use this technology to greatly increase their own power and wealth, and it's not hard to figure out how they would do it.
So, we have a problem.
We have now generated the technology to do things which, having been generated and shared publicly, discussed in literature, are now available to people that do not share our values, and that is a big concern.
Yeah, it's a tough one.
I mean, is bioterrorism, as it was a very tough question, I think have become a much more urgent cause of concern after some bad actors that were probably not bright enough to see the potential of bioterrorism. I think have become a much more urgent cause of After this pandemic, they probably could have woken up to, whoa, you know, and you don't even need a lab now.
All you can, all you need to do is collect some samples from, I don't know, or maybe steal samples from labs or just samples of even this virus and release it strategically in places where people don't expect it, so I don't know, church or subway system or something. so I don't know, church or subway system or something.
And yeah, you can just wreak havoc on economies of countries that you like to see go down. - Well, you could- - It's a big problem.
You could do that.
And I also just as a mental exercise I was you know early on in the discussion of Could this have come from a lab?
Could it be a bioweapon and all that?
There was lots of discussion about whether or not this virus would make any sense as a weapon, and I agree that if your purpose was military, effectively, this virus is not a particularly good choice because so many people are asymptomatic.
But that does not have to be what was on people's minds and I really hesitate to put this idea into the world But my feeling is it's so obvious that my being quiet about it doesn't help so probably better that we are all Sobered up and aware of this the I If one decided to create such a virus and release it, one could
pretty reliably guess that it was going to have a negative impact on, let's say, air travel, hotels, cruises, these kinds of things.
And obviously the nature of markets are such that if you can predict when nobody else can that these particular industries are about to take a huge hit, You can take small amounts of money and turn it into large amounts of money, or take large amounts of money and turn it into gargantuan quantities of money, for just simply being able to predict what others don't see coming.
And that fact means that motive here could be utterly mundane.
Now, again, there is no evidence that this was intentionally released by anybody, and I think you and I are both believers that Most probable explanation is well-intentioned research that resulted in a leak nobody foresaw.
But I have to say, one other possibility, again zero evidence for it but it has to be on the list of things that could explain the phenomena that we see, Is that if somebody did create the virus, Wuhan would be the kind of place you would want to release it in order to hide your tracks.
Right?
Because if it's released in Wuhan, then the obvious, you know, the obvious interpretation is that the laboratories in Wuhan, and there are two of them that study bat coronaviruses, that one of them made an error.
But yeah, it would probably have to be a huge inside job for them to know that One would have the RATG string.
Really, you know, setting up Wuhan Institute.
Because, you know, the SARS-2 is so close to the strain that Wuhan Institute had.
Well, so I agree with your logic, assuming RATG-13 is what we think it is.
And would you say that the similarity to 4991 is sufficient?
4991, similarity to 4991 is sufficient, that somebody would have had to have, they would have had to have lots of information about what was going on.
So it's unlikely that some malevolent force, it's not impossible that somebody would release a bat-like coronavirus in Wuhan in order to hide their tracks, but the chances that they would get something so close to RATG 13 and 4991 is pretty low.
Thank you.
I mean, it's not impossible, but it would be someone with really deep knowledge of what Wuhan Institute was doing.
So, I mean, probably if an actor of that caliber was contemplating something like this, they'd do a lot of the homework.
I mean, it's a possibility.
It's a very, very remote possibility.
It's a remote possibility.
There's no evidence for it.
But I think actually we're modeling something that I want to see people be better about, which is conspiracies exist in the world.
I mean, it's a huge concern going forward.
Yeah, it's a huge concern going forward.
And we have to learn how to talk about the possibility without being labeled crazy for engaging in even considering it.
And so, you know, what you've just seen is two people who know something about this story and the relevant scientific details.
And, um, you know, I think we're both pretty skeptical that this has unfolded now, but we're worried that it could unfold in the future.
Yes, I hope.
I hope we're wrong.
Yeah, I hope we're wrong too, and I hope that, yeah, best possible from my perspective, and I'm sure I speak for you here, is this comes from the wild through some Unusual, hard-to-imagine series of ecological events that we are capable of discovering and figuring out.
So the lab isn't at fault.
They can be exonerated and we can sober up on the basis that we've been now through this exercise and learned the lessons that it has to teach us and we can figure out what we should think about gain-of-function research and we should think about what the heck we're gonna do about the amazing
Right, and there will almost have to be some kind of really broad surveillance of new viral outbreaks or just outbreaks throughout the world where there needs to be some kind of like one big agency, like there's a nuclear agency.
Monitoring, like, the possible bioterrorism and if there is a cluster of similar infections, you know, in one geography.
Just really trying to sequence quickly what is the agent behind this and hopefully, you know, not let it get out the way that this one got out.
And I gotta say, like, even without any conspiracy theories or a lab leak, the way it was handled by Wuhan government or Chinese government just not imposing a lockdown soon enough and letting people celebrate the Chinese New Year and intermingle and leave the country.
I mean, that alone is pretty Disappointing and in the future we really need like really quickly isolate geographies where outbreaks happen so that we can avoid global pandemic on like the scale is completely crazy that this is
And I'm afraid we're just beginning to see the numbers just, you know, start growing even further in other continents, other countries like now Africa and South America.
We're reporting high growth, so I'm afraid we're not there yet to see this pandemic play out.
Yeah, I share those fears with you, and I do feel like, as bad as this is, this is the ultimate trial run.
This is the thing that sobers you up.
You know, I hope there's also a willingness to consider the general style of problem, because I know that over the last, gosh, what would it be?
2008 financial crisis, 2011 Fukushima, Aliso Canyon, and I don't know, what was that?
2017, 18.
Anyway, we keep having this situation where we discover what some industry is doing after it is too late.
When some of the Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico.
So I constantly feel like I'm learning what I needed to know after the accident has already happened.
And that what I really want is somebody to fast forward that process so I can know all of the processes that we're engaged in that are unbelievably dangerous so that we can talk about them ahead of time rather than once the cat's out of the bag.
And, you know, this May be the worst of these in terms of the destruction Economic and human that ultimately comes out of it and frankly even if this thing evolves into something with flu-like levels of hazard That humanity is stuck with even that Would be a major setback.
I mean, we have flu circulating every year.
That's a big problem for humans.
To have a second one of those, if that's what this turned into, would be a huge disaster going forward.
So, we are playing with fire.
Go ahead.
Yeah, we're not even sure about the long-term consequences of this.
It's only been six months that we've kind of known this virus.
We don't know if it can hide and become a chronic infection like the feline peritonitis, which is also a coronavirus that can actually learn to hide in the immune cells and then it just becomes fatal in like 10% of the infected cats.
I hope this is not going to be the case with this one.
Yeah.
But it's, you know, not You know, there could be long-term bad consequences that we're just not even, you know, aware of.
Totally.
The words of Donald Rumsfeld.
You're quoting Donald Rumsfeld, I love that.
Yeah, for what it's worth, Heather and I are constantly quoting that guy.
You know, he's like the Yogi Berra of geopolitical phenomena or something.
But I agree with you, this thing could hide in neurological tissue, it could hide in immunological tissue, it could learn to change at a rate that would allow individuals to be reinfected multiple times over a lifetime.
We just don't know what we're playing with here.
Right.
Male reproductive system.
They already had issues with the first SARS where autopsies saw infected gonads.
There were reports in China with male fertility issues of people after having had the SARS-2.
So yeah, it's just I don't want to like scare people, but I'm pretty scared myself that like long term this can be a bad one.
Yeah, I agree.
Not like flu.
I mean, flu is bad enough, but like chronic flu hiding side.
Yeah.
That would be the worst possible scenario.
I find myself in these conversations all the time, too, where people are, I mean, in my country, people have been convinced by our president, amongst others, to treat this as more trivial than it is.
And I keep trying to alert people that just the size of the unknowns here, the magnitude of them, is so great that we are wise to be treating this very seriously.
Yeah, at this point, if anybody is still unconvinced that this is much more serious than the flu, I think they're living under a rock.
But initially, we all kind of were, just based on the previous track record of other viruses, other outbreaks, even coronaviruses.
SARS and MERS were pretty bad, but comparatively, it was just a few thousand people that were sick.
Yeah, they burned out.
Yeah, exactly, and that's what we thought, you know, or many people thought, me included, in the beginning, that, oh, it's just another, you know, something seasonal from China that we get every year, and it just usually subsides pretty quickly, and it's not a big deal.
It's exactly what I thought, too.
I remembered SARS, and I thought, okay, that's bad, but limited.
Boy, were we wrong!
So let me ask you two more questions.
One, your experience since releasing your medium piece.
Well, it wasn't very pleasant.
I mean, there's a lot of positive feedback.
But the share of the negative feedback I got, especially initially in Russia, it was very vicious.
For some reason, people started attacking me personally, questioning my intelligence or whatever, the qualifications of being able to, I don't know, read scientific papers or whatever.
That had really nothing to do with whatever facts I presented.
I mean, I suggested initially for everybody just to read with a skeptical mind and analyze for themselves.
Just don't... I mean, I don't really put a lot of My own views on the article, I just pretty much summarize the facts.
Of course, I mean, I color it with my views, but you know, you can do your own analysis.
And if you think I made a mistake, just you can point out the mistakes rather than say I'm an idiot or I'm a conspiracy nut.
Well, that's not really what they're saying.
As somebody with considerable experience with things in this neighborhood, What they were trying to do was make you hurt, to dissuade you from continuing and to make an example of you so that others would know not to make the error in their view that you made.
But the error that you made was doing an honest analysis and sharing what you discovered.
With the public so my sense is we needed you to do that and I know that it as much as I was already quite suspicious it gave me a tremendous boost in terms of understanding
Exactly what the suspicions were rationally based on and how to follow the trail into a realm, you know, I'm not... biotech, cellular biology was never my primary interest, so just having somebody guide me into the literature that was relevant to this, since I didn't know anything about what was taking place with coronavirus research.
That was all new to me.
So, what you did needed to be done, which is exactly why you were punished for it.
That said... Yeah!
Oh, go ahead.
Well, yes.
And I mean, if whoever wanted to reach the goal of making me feel unpleasant, they did so.
But the initial kind of fecal storm subsided.
And after that, I got mostly positive feedback of people saying that It did open their eyes to at least the scale of gain-of-function research that has been going on in the virology community and the danger that itself poses.
Even if the lab leak theory is to them still highly unlikely, the fact that there's so much dangerous research around and still goes on, to them that was a revelation.
And in parallel, some scientists have reached out and said that they definitely support the idea that we cannot rule out the lab leak at this point, and that it should be considered on an equal basis with any other hypothesis, as opposed to some people, some virologists, claiming this is sheer lunacy and conspiracy theory.
Yeah, well, so I've been suggesting to my audience that conspiracy theory is a stigma, a term that's loaded with stigma designed for a purpose.
Conspiracy hypothesis is really what we're talking about.
Yes, it does appear, at the very least, that there is a conspiracy to prevent us from investigating what happened here.
In other words, the unnatural alignment of virologists with each other around a story that doesn't stand up, that does appear to be a kind of collusion.
Now, there's also other evidence.
How's your computer?
It's okay now.
It's okay now?
What happened?
Well, I don't know.
I think it might have been hacked.
It just started doing really weird things and not connecting to the internet.
I just... You've had computer problems.
Probably malware.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't want to claim it's connected, but some other people... Well, I agree.
...should have some other computer issues at the same time.
Computers are...
Computers are complex.
Things go wrong with them.
You never know.
I've had computer problems, too, of late.
It's pretty dramatic, in fact.
Could be nothing.
You know of anybody else who's been courageously investigating this hypothesis who might have had some trouble?
I know at least one person, yes.
All right.
So, take that for what it's worth.
People have computer... I mean, look, there's nobody who's watching this podcast who doesn't have a computer.
They screw up, right?
Things happen.
On the other hand, there does come a point at which your problems are severe enough, mysterious enough, and form a kind of pattern with other people who are also using their computers.
to discuss and investigate possibilities that obviously powerful forces don't want discussed.
And you just simply have to ask the question, are my computer glitches normal, or is what seems like an anomalous rate of computer errors telling me something about the level of disturbance that I have caused in the universe?
Right, so if maybe other researchers who have been working on the Lab Leak Hypothesis had some kind of computer problems or any other weird things happen in their lives, maybe they can share it and we can put together some kind of list of unexplained coincidences outside of the Lab Leak Hypothesis.
I think it's well worth considering.
All right, is there anything that you think we've missed that needs to be on the table for people to understand the landscape they've landed in?
Well, I mean, I think we already said way too much for anybody to get their head across at this point.
We discussed a lot of things, but I think we've touched upon all the main points of This huge coincidence with a lot of unanswered questions and I just hope they're answered.
You know, I just hope somehow someone pressures the scientists or not even just answered, but we need access to the lab.
We need to, you know, the WHO or whoever needs to Check the environment or we'd like to see the samples collected from those miners and we would like to sequence and we'd like to independently sequence the RATG sample to just verify that, you know, everything that the Wuhan Institute was telling us is indeed the facts.
What do you think about the idea that for the good of humanity we ought to be offering immunity to scientists who were involved in legitimate scientific research, not weapons research, but legitimate scientific research into potentially human infecting viruses.
If this turns out to be a leak, would you be in favor of them assuming that they We're being honorable that they be immunized from liability.
Definitely, and even, you know, in my article I say even if a leak occurred, the scientists, they're not to blame because they haven't been, you know, engaged in anything illegal or out of, even, you know, well, weapons research is a bit of a gray area, but it's not illegal for countries to engage in it.
The states and, you know, China and Russia have all been engaged in weapons research.
The thing is, like, if it escaped and there's been a cover-up, the people who are doing the cover-up, they're the ones who should face some, I don't know, ramifications.
But what I think we really need to establish is some kind of Incentive for whistleblowers to be able to blow the whistle safely with immunity and witness protection and big financial incentive to do so.
Yep.
And so far, I haven't seen anything even remotely of the sort from governments, which is a little odd.
Considering, you know, initially I thought, you know, the American government stance was that, you know, it's going to demand a full investigation, but it's not really providing financial incentive for whistleblowers to help out.
And so one of the things I suggested, maybe half-jokingly, is that maybe the community can crowdfund something like this or create a crowdfunding hotline, tip hotline for coronavirus origins research, where we can have some completely anonymous system of rewarding whistleblowers or people offering actionable tips with cryptocurrency.
We just need some, you know, Donors of crowdfunding to collect, I don't know, a bit of a purse to be able to offer these rewards for like meaningful amounts for people to be kind of risking their livelihood.
I think this is a great idea and the idea of doing it with the cryptocurrency is a wonderful idea too.
It'd be a tremendous proof of concept.
about how cryptocurrency could function to the benefit of humanity.
Right, it could be completely anonymous and that's one of the usually problems of financial incentives.
Like if somebody really is in China and he wants to or she wants to alert the U.S.
authorities and be compensated for it, it'd be really hard to do it and not, you know, get in trouble in China.
But if you're doing it online through cryptocurrency, which is, you know, anonymous and untraceable, I think that Even if it's not crowdfunding, I think the American intelligence agencies should set up some kind of system like that.
Otherwise, the risks for people in China to blow the whistle, I think are just too great for them to do so.
But if they can earn some money...
In a very safe way, I think they'd be much more inclined to do so.
And it's not necessarily just the scientists who were working on this who might know something.
It's probably like they had friends, family.
Who can offer, you know, substantive tips on what to look at and maybe who to question for investigation to move forward.
So, I don't know.
It's just... Let's just...
Let's just say humanity has an overarching need to know what took place in order to manage what we now are encountering and that suggests we should pull out all the stops with respect to liberating people to tell us what they know.
And, you know, people who have the capacity to do something that would aid in that effort know who they are and they may be more creative than you and I
Are in a position to be Maybe they can figure out some way to make it happen, but let's figure out where this thing came from and if it's nature You and I will oh this does point something out if it is nature with that this came from You and I will be relieved to discover it and we'll be happy to do a follow-up podcast and talk about What what the meaning of what we've learned is and if it came from the lab let's figure that out and
Last thing before you go, I want to talk about... I have increasingly noticed, in looking at all of the sources that claim to put the idea of a lab leak to rest, I find the name Peter Daszak, is that right?
I don't know.
It doesn't ring a bell.
This name shows up all over the place.
He's everywhere that the idea is mocked.
And he is the president of EcoAlliance, whatever EcoAlliance may be.
He's the founder, yes.
I have come... Go ahead.
Behind it, yeah.
Yeah, he's the main guy who's been doing this for many years and very publicly and very large amounts of money.
It's like dozens of millions of dollars in grant financing from various sources from NIH to Department of Defense.
Just Funding research of essentially going out to remote places in nature and collecting all sorts of dangerous pathogens and bringing them to one spot to analyze and predict the potential danger of them spilling over to humans.
Which in itself is, I think is a pretty futile exercise to be able to claim that we can somehow predict what in nature can, out of the gazillion possibilities, which mutation will actually jump out.
From nature to the human domain, just because, you know, usually what happens in nature stays in nature.
When we actually start going out and probing what, you know, bats carry in remote places and actually Bring them all together in one spot, like in Wuhan or wherever.
We're increasing the chances of it actually happening.
Well, I think there's a very simple comparison to be made, right?
In general, these things do not jump to humans.
The ones that can jump to humans... Right, no matter what Peter claims, and he's making some very odd claims of like, oh, in Asia it happens every day and there's millions of people exposed to zoonotic jumps.
And he's making a huge, huge jump from, like, extrapolation from just six farmers in Yunnan that had antibodies, six out of, like, 280.
Six farmers having antibodies for a related coronavirus that can't even infect human cells.
So he take those three percent and extrapolate it to, like, all the farmers in Southeast Asia.
And he's saying all those millions of farmers every year that get exposed to bad coronaviruses, which is...
I take exactly the opposite message, which is the jumps when they happen burn themselves out quickly because the things that have jumped are not well adapted to humans in general.
Which doesn't mean it couldn't happen, but it does mean that we can compare.
What is the risk of a jump happening that we didn't know anything about ahead of time, and that if we had known about the risk ahead of time we could have prepared?
Right?
So that's the upside of this research.
And then there's the downside, which is what are the chances that you are going to trigger the accidental release of something terrible by doing this research, which is clearly high.
And so anyway, I have come to regard this individual, and every time I see his name show up, the information does not check out.
And there's this very strong implication that those who even consider this hypothesis are telling us just how naive and under-informed they are, which does not match the information.
If you pursue the information, his assurance of this is always wrong.
So I have begun to regard him as patient zero for misinformation.
Well, yeah, I mean, he's really fighting for his life, so he really doesn't have any other way to defend himself.
And if this does turn out to be a lab leak, I mean, the ramifications for him personally, I think, just too horrible for him to consider, to even entertain the slightest idea of possibility of a lab escape.
I think you're being too generous.
The misinformation is too egregious, and the fact is, any decent human being would recognize that humanity's overarching interest in knowing what took place overrides his interest in maintaining his reputation.
Frankly, I think the world would end up being decent to a scientist who had made an honest error that had some role to play in this thing emerging.
I have very little sympathy for somebody who would hide the truth at expense to others.
I mean, people are dying.
This is not a joke.
This is not something where you get to defend your career at the expense of tens of thousands of other human beings.
Yeah, and one other point being that it's not that they just went out and collected so many viral strains, is that they actually had a whole program of synthetic, creating synthetic chimeras to kind of expand the panel of possible, first of all, to predict possible mutations in the wild for some reason, but again, as I said, very naive to predict like out of gazillion natural possibilities, which of them
Can happen in nature to predict them in the lab, to create them in the lab, and then say that we need to prepare for those.
And yeah, in the latest interview, just before the, we're actually in the middle of the pandemic in December, he gave an interview in December of 2019 at some virology conference where he was saying that they had like 100 different strains that they were working on he gave an interview in December of 2019 at some virology conference where he was saying that they had like 100 different strains that they were working on and how easy it is to manipulate coronaviruses where you
Between the virus so you can study like a more efficient vaccine.
And that was actually the kind of the overarching theme of virology research over the past few years to create a pan-coronavirus therapy, pan-coronavirus vaccine.
Whereas, so they actually needed to provide as wide a panel of coronaviruses as possible.
This is actually mentioned in the article by Ralph Baric.
It's mentioned in the grant for eco health that Wuhan Institute was part of that they have a mission to create, you know, many new viral strains against which they can test potential therapies or vaccines, which of course, you know, we haven't really gotten in time for this pandemic, you know, we haven't really gotten in time for this pandemic, but that's a different Yeah, well I think that's a proper note to end on.
I hope that we will discover things in the coming weeks that will lead us to revise Our best understanding of what likely has taken place here, but I'm very grateful to you for doing the work you've done to unearth the evidence of a lab leak hypothesis.
I regard it not only as important work, but I regard you as courageous for having done it, and it troubles me that people have tried to make you feel bad about doing it.
I hope that It's the internet.
You get to hear a lot of unpleasant things on the internet.
There are some unpleasant things on the internet.
I wonder why they put them there.
Thank you for making this much more widespread knowledge than it probably would have been without your work and continuing to Try to, you know, make people realize that, you know, this is very important and this is an important matter and we really need political support to get to the bottom of this because, you know, if it's just a bunch of people complaining on Twitter, nobody's going to be pressured into having a thorough investigation.
But if it's actually a lot of people being vocal and making their politicians heard and making them know that we want, you know, we want the truth, we can handle it.
Yeah.
Maybe we'll get to the point of having a really independent and true investigation into this.
That would be great.
Or some whistleblowers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, one way or the other we need to get to the bottom of it.
Yeah, I hope we do get there someday.
Okay.
I will put a link to your Medium article, which I think you have added to a couple times.
You've made little edits that you have highlighted so people will know what was in the original and what you've added.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I had it initially, just when I released it.
There were a couple of points that came out.
Yeah, I put, like, updated.
I haven't really updated it since.
That's probably been the same for almost a month now, or a bit more.
Well, I consider it the hallmark of an honest actor is that, you know, of course you release something as... Hello?
Hello?
You still there? - Oops, I think we got some hackers.
Oh no.
Alright, well, fortunately we got it all.
Are you able to hear me now?
Nope, can't hear me.
We're done.
Alright, I guess we're done.
Maybe now they're disconnected.
Alright, anyway, thanks so much Yuri, and I'd love to have you back to give us an update when there's something to talk about.
