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Nov. 20, 2024 - Epoch Times
23:29
How to Reduce the Risk of Lab- Generated Pathogens: Dr. Bryce Nickels
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We have a problem that the scientific community is not actually set up to protect the public from the risk of accidents in labs.
Dr.
Bryce Nichols is a professor of genetics at Rutgers University and the co-founder of Biosafety Now.
An organization that aims to reduce the public threat of lab-generated pandemic pathogens.
Like any person that's trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, occasionally what you'll do is you'll say things that are technically correct, but it's used to deceive.
And that's what's been going on for this use of the term gain of function.
In this episode, we discuss the Risky Research Review Act.
If passed, this legislation will establish an independent review board to assess the risks and benefits of certain gain-of-function research and determine whether such research should be done in the first place.
They believe that what they're doing is so important that it's okay to lie.
We want to make there be incentives to tell the truth, not to hide the truth.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Dr.
Bryce Nichols, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you.
I'm very excited to talk to you today.
We were on a panel just recently together, and you came out as a huge proponent of Senator Rand Paul's and Senator Peter's Risky Research Review Act.
I'll briefly get you to tell me what it is and why you're such a supporter.
So the Risky Research Review Act is a historic piece of legislation that would establish for the first time an independent review board, part of the executive branch, that would be responsible for doing risk-benefit assessment of high-risk research that's going up for federal funding.
The reason why that's extremely important is because Right now, and for decades, there has not been any independent risk-benefit assessment for research that is high risk.
And so, just to be clear, what risk-benefit assessment is, is a question of whether or not the research should be done or not.
It's different from biosafety and biosecurity because those refer to the procedures and processes that you need to have in place.
For if you perform the research, you make sure that you don't have an accidental or deliberate escape of some pathogen from a lab.
We're literally talking about whether or not an experiment should be done.
And that's sort of a strange thought to some people because they want to just immediately go to biosafety, but that's referring to can it be done safely, not whether or not it should be done in the first place.
Okay.
And more specifically, what are the kind of classes of research that fit into this?
It's a very, very small subset of all life science research that would involve very high risk pathogens.
Pathogens that if you modify them, they could become much more dangerous and cause a pandemic.
So they're referred to as potential pandemic pathogens.
The bill right now has a very specific list of pathogens that qualify for review under this legislation, and that's really important because it limits the scope of the bill to a very, very small subset of research, and it gets rid of one of the key concerns, which has been the key concerns of researchers, that if you have this board, that it will slow the progress of all life science research.
That's not the case.
There's only maybe a few dozen projects that would qualify for review under this legislation.
And so it will provide protection to the public without any, you know, slowing down of essential research.
So Dr.
Nichols, tell me a little bit about yourself.
Politicians come up with all sorts of legislation for all sorts of reasons.
You're putting your reputation on the line with this bill.
I want to understand where you're coming from here.
To be fair, you can't really put much on the line if you're putting my reputation on the line.
I would say that, so I'm a professor of genetics at Rutgers University, but the reason I'm involved in this issue is because about two years ago, I co-founded a nonprofit organization called Biosafety Now, along with a colleague of mine at Rutgers, Richard Ebright.
And another collaborator of mine who's not at Rutgers, who's at Cold Spring Harbor named Justin Kinney, who had to leave the organization in January, this past January.
And I guess what I should say is the mission of that nonprofit is to reduce the threat of lab-generated pandemics to the public, fundamentally.
That's our main mission.
But we also are looking for accountability because one of the, of course, the thing we haven't discussed yet is COVID. Where did COVID come from, right?
And so right now, even Anthony Fauci himself says, we can't rule out that it came from a lab.
Fauci and others, many virologists, think that it came from nature.
But even if there was a 0.1% chance that it came from a lab, the fact that it killed millions of people and caused trillions of dollars of economic damage should provide some pause that we should Do what we can to prevent that from happening again, even if it was a small chance.
Now personally, I think it's a much greater than 0.1% chance.
I think it's the most likely explanation for the pandemic.
But throwing that all aside, A bill like this is a very nice piece of legislation to just finally do something to, you know, address the concerns that the public has had about the pandemic being caused by research.
Because if you look at the polling on this, I think it's close to 60% of the public think that the COVID pandemic was caused by lab research.
And what's astonishing is that The pandemic broke out, what, four and a half years ago?
And there's been no, nothing, literally no change in the regulatory landscape for this type of extremely high-risk research.
And so that's just negligent.
So finally, this bill is a massive step forward because it will do something that's never been done before, which should be supported by everybody, simply just to say, if I'm doing something that could cause massive harm, maybe that should be looked at by somebody other than me to make the decision about whether I should proceed.
I mean, many people have kind of moved on from the origin question.
And that's kind of absurd, given that the conference that we had yesterday was based on the things that happened downstream of the pandemic.
But I'm really curious about your actual research, because you got interested in this because you have an understanding of genetics, an understanding of viruses.
Well, So I do basic research.
I study bacteria.
I study aspects of what's called the central dogma of molecular biology.
This is the way in which DNA is converted into RNA. There's nothing relevant about my research to me supporting this bill.
What is relevant, I guess, is the fact that I have a PhD.
I run a lab that's funded by the NIH. I have some understanding about the impact this bill will have on life science research, which is minimal.
I made a point yesterday on the panel about that we're all still working with limited information, right?
And it's not just information that's hidden by China.
It's also information hidden by the US that should be not hidden by people in the US. Everybody in the US that has Some connection to the research that might have caused the pandemic.
They have not been fully transparent.
They have not been forthcoming with government officials that are trying to investigate this.
There is a concern, of course, that Because the U.S. government likely has culpability at some level, that there's only so much that the U.S. government wants to sort of dig into this before they're going to try to start spinning their wheels.
Like, ah, we can't make any more progress.
Since we're having a discussion trying to figure something out and we don't have all the information, it's hard to even, for me personally, to try to weigh probabilities.
I think I said yesterday that the biggest sign to me that this is a lab accident is the fact that the virology community as a whole seems to be hell-bent on making the public convinced that it's not a lab accident, publishing laughably horrible papers.
When we have documentation of private conversations that the virologists were having when they were putting these papers out, And they're stating things in private that are contradicted with papers that they're publishing at the same time.
That's a problem.
That's a problem.
It's a bigger problem, too, that there's been no call within the scientific community to say, well, that's wrong.
We should go back and say, you know, those should be retracted, or you need to apologize for this.
What's fascinating is instead, and I think it was sort of reflected on the panel yesterday, instead the excuse is, oh, that's just the way science occurs.
That's just the process of science today.
To which I would say, well, that's messed up, right?
As a member of the public, you should be outraged that somebody would be admitting that the scientific enterprise itself is corrupted and that the journal publication process is corrupted, the peer review process is corrupted, and that there isn't really an expectation for scientists to wholeheartedly believe information that they put in a scientific paper.
That's disgraceful.
So...
When you look at the track record of the people who have been publishing these papers that are supportive of a natural origin, the first paper that came out is this thing called Proximal Origin, or the Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, which was published in March of 2020.
What started that paper was a conference call on February 1st, where there were the core author group of that paper I was on a conference call with several virologists, many of whom had participated in doing, you know, that were big proponents of this gain-of-function research of concern.
One of them is a very strong proponent of it.
His name is Ron Fouché, and he's at Erasmus University.
He laid out the case for the way virologists should handle this moving forward, which was If this came from a lab, this is going to be bad for our research programs and therefore we should do everything we can to make it clear this didn't come from a lab.
It's very simple.
There's no incentive for the scientific community to investigate this as a lab leak.
At all.
So we have a problem just generally that the scientific community is not actually set up to protect the public from the risk of accidents in labs.
At a minimum, that should call for serious questioning about regulation of these activities, but also perhaps establishment of systems that are in fact designed to detect And deal with if there is a potential lab accident, for example.
Is there an incentive to do that?
Of course not, because if there is a lab accident in a community, the university or the private company is going to have a massive liability for causing harm to the public.
So what's baked into that system is one where we do research, we ask for money, saying that we're going to save all your lives with this research, And if anything goes wrong, we really should cover it up because if we admit to the public that we had an accident, we're not going to get our money.
It's laid out in those emails.
And it's not just laid out in those emails.
You see it in the op-eds that the virologists even publish to this day.
It's sort of a strange thing that they think that it's okay for them to Lie, essentially lie to the public, because if they didn't, it would be bad for their future careers.
Or maybe they believe that the research really is important and in the public interest.
They want to make sure to keep being able to do that, right?
Right.
So they lie.
Okay.
Right.
So exactly.
I guess we would say they have a God complex, right?
That they believe that what they're doing is so important that it's okay to lie.
This idea of a noble lie, I guess, if you believe in noble lies.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know.
Do you believe in noble lies or am I putting you on the spot?
I can tell you that in the last few, I hadn't thought much about noble lies, but in the last few years, I've been thinking a lot about noble lies and You know, concerned about their use, let's say.
If somebody is coming to your house and they're looking for somebody to kill that person, right, and that person is hiding somewhere in your house, I think it's okay to not say, oh, they're upstairs.
I would agree that that's an appropriate time to lie.
Just one sec.
We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Dr.
Bryce Nichols, co-founder of Biosafety Now and professor of genetics at Rutgers University.
If you really believe that this research is in the public interest, you might believe that if you're unable to do it, the public will be harmed, hence you justifying the noble lie, right?
You would need to demonstrate that it had any benefit, which it has not had.
Any molecular biology lab is going to do gain-of-function research, but they're not doing it on a pathogen that could kill everybody.
If you're doing it on something like Ebola or on a coronavirus, that's different.
That's a different category.
That's why I said that this is really important for the public to understand that this bill and everything about this discussion is...
A small, small, small, small, small fraction of all life science research, which makes it even more remarkable that the scientific community has sort of, you know, gathered around and protected this very, very tiny piece of the larger life science research.
Scientists should be precise with language, but like any person that's trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, occasionally what you'll do is you'll say things that are technically correct, But it's used to deceive.
And that's what's been going on for this use of the term gain-of-function, because my lab does a lot of gain-of-function research, but we're doing it on E. coli bacteria, which is not a pathogen that can...
We do it on non-pathogenic form of bacteria that the research, which you would consider gain-of-function, is not going to lead to that bacteria causing disease, causing a pandemic.
That's very common across all of life sciences.
It accounts for about 99.99% of gain-of-function research at large.
So this 0.01% or maybe a little bit more is the type of research that occurs on a very specific group of viruses which have the possibility of if they are mutated They could kill more people, transmit between people better, and that's the research we're talking about.
When the virology community talks about gain of function and talks about the benefits of gain of function, they are talking about the benefits of the 99.99% of gain of function that doesn't fall under the 0.01% that we're talking about.
Which has had no effect on developing vaccines or therapeutics.
That's just demonstrably true.
You could even look, when Vincent Racchianello, who's a very large, he's a virologist who's a big proponent of gain-of-function research, was asked directly, In an article that David Zwieg wrote for the Free Press about a year and a half, or maybe a year, year and a half ago, Reckinello couldn't answer this question.
He did not give an example.
David really wanted to know, what's the example?
Every reporter that covers this issue was like, well, what is the example of a situation where this small fraction of research contributed to the development of a vaccine or therapeutic?
And they're given an example that falls over here, not here.
So there really is no example?
No.
I'm waiting for one.
Now that we have a bill, what we can do is say, alright, give us an example of the type of research that you think is useful, that has shown value in generating a vaccine or therapeutic.
Alright, now we can just say, alright, let's run an exercise using this bill to see if that would have passed through this committee.
And the answer will be yes.
The committee would say, okay, yeah, you can proceed with this experiment because it's not presenting an existential threat to humanity.
So the nice thing about this bill too is it allows us to, we can actually take the examples of gain of function that supposedly created these amazing discoveries that help humanity and see if they would pass that.
And the ones that actually benefited humanity would.
The ones that they're trying to protect wouldn't.
There's been a huge loss of trust in experts over the last few years.
But you're basically saying you want a panel of nine experts to make these decisions.
How is the public to trust these nine experts?
I love this question.
We all agree that most people are genuinely good people.
But you have a lot of corrupt institutions because the incentives within these institutions create situations where good people make bad decisions.
This is the type of thing where you're actually creating a system that will work, where good people will make good decisions because of the way this is structured.
If everybody is corrupt, then nothing's going to work.
So we all have the potential to do really, really bad things if we're put into situations where the incentives are to do bad things.
This is a committee that removes the incentives to make bad decisions because if Because of the reporting, for one.
The panel will be known to the public.
The decisions will be known to the public.
You always need to be critical.
You always should be holding people accountable and making sure that they know you're watching.
If and when this passes, right?
If it's not me, it'll be somebody else that are...
Monitoring this panel to make sure that the decisions that come out of it look like they are done on the up and up.
And frankly, the Paul office had a bill with a lot of stuff that was modified in this amended version, so much so that it actually passed out of the Homeland Security Government Affairs Committee with a near unanimous bipartisan vote.
It was eight to one.
There was one dissenting vote, a senator here in California.
And maybe, maybe that senator just accidentally said no and she meant to say yes.
I don't know.
We tried to call her office to get a comment and we have not.
But the point is that if you believe that we should work together across political divide, If you believe that there was a possibility, however small, that there was a research-related incident that led to a pandemic, if you believe that people should not be able to, you know, decide to do whatever the hell they want with really dangerous pathogens, you should support this.
If a lawmaker doesn't support this, that lawmaker needs to explain exactly why they voted against this simple, simple, simple, simple common sense thing to just independently review.
Also, going back to my central point, this bill is not about the researcher.
This bill is about public safety.
So to hell with what researchers want.
What does the public want?
And this is publicly funded research.
Sorry to point at you.
My bad.
I didn't want to, you know, I felt a little intimidated.
I said the red tie is a little bit intimidating, but it's literally just a very, very minor thing for a few grants to go through an extra layer of review that will make the public sleep better at night.
Unless I'm missing something, it's possible I'm missing something.
I don't see any problems with the bill in its current form.
And I also see a bill that was highly amended be in response to prior criticisms, which I thought was great.
So where can people find out more about biosafety now and this Risky Research Review Act?
Oh, so we have a petition that is simply to get the Risky Research Review Act to the floor for a vote.
That's it, just for a vote.
And that can be found on change.org.
So, but you can find links to the petition on both our website and on our Substack page and on our Twitter.
Oh, we are on Twitter.
So yeah, follow us on Twitter.
But, yeah, I think there's a lot of things that are going to happen quickly.
I mean, the election's coming up, too, and I don't know how that's going to change the landscape of this issue, but that's actually a very interesting question about what's going to happen in this space once the election happens.
I don't know where the film is going to be, but I believe it'll be online on some website and people can go and watch it.
But there'll be a massive media campaign and we'll certainly be pushing for as many eyes to see that as possible across the world.
This is a global issue.
This isn't just a U.S. issue, even though I mean, I am just an American thought leader, but I hope next time we talk that I've gone global.
Well, I guess we'll find out soon.
We will.
And Dr.
Bryce Nichols, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you very much for having me.
I appreciate the time and I hope we can do this again.
Thank you all for joining Dr.
Bryce Nichols and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
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