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Nov. 18, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
09:35
Where Did Covid-19 Come From?
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And you've co-authored this book, Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.
All right, welcome to the show.
Hello, it's nice to be on the show with you.
That's wonderful.
Are you in London right now?
I'm in Newcastle in Northern England, but yeah, I'm in the UK. How far is Newcastle from Leeds?
About 100 miles further north.
Uh-huh, because I studied in Leeds for a year, so I have some sense.
By the way, do they say any longer that's like bringing coal to Newcastle, or is that phrase dead?
Well, it's still alive as a metaphor, but there's not much coal being mined in this area anymore.
Hold on, we're getting an echo here.
Am I the only one hearing an echo?
You're hearing one too?
Okay, forgive me, sir.
I will give it another try.
Anyway, that's a very famous phrase, but I'll bet you young Americans never heard of it, coal to Newcastle.
Anyway, coal is so polluting.
They don't want to bring coal to Newcastle.
So tell me, did anything in your excellent detective work surprise you?
Or did you go in thinking that your conclusions would be what they are?
No, we did not.
I should say my co-author on this book, Alina Chan, is a brilliant young scientist at Harvard and MIT. She's an expert in genomics and molecular biology and that kind of thing.
So she's a huge expert on this sort of stuff.
And she and I both...
Thought in the spring of 2020 that this was probably a natural event in a market in Wuhan, that an animal had been sold to someone which had a virus in it, and that's how the whole thing started.
Because that's how SARS started.
That's essentially how MERS started.
That's how these coronavirus outbreaks usually begin.
So we thought, you know, it's important to explore all possibilities.
But we got a bit disturbed by the way people were ruling out the other alternative, that it was a laboratory accident as a conspiracy theory early on.
And they were doing so on the basis that, you know, not on any specific evidence, but because they just wanted to rule it out as a possibility.
And so we...
We began to look into this.
We said the evidence actually is not very good.
There doesn't seem to be any case of infected animals.
We now know, two years in, that after 18 months of searching, they've not been able to find infected animals at all in China.
80,000 animals have been tested.
None of them turned out to have this virus in them, except those who've since bought it from human beings during the pandemic.
Whereas the evidence that...
This might have occurred as a result of an accident in a laboratory has become stronger and stronger.
There's one lab in the world that focuses on SARS-like coronaviruses above all others, publishes more data on them and collects more viruses, tens of thousands of viruses, and studies them and manipulates them and analyzes them.
That lab is in a city called Wuhan.
Amazing.
Was there one eureka moment, as we say?
I don't know if it's international in the English-speaking world, but was there this moment when the two of you said, oh, my God, it started in a lab?
No, and we haven't concluded that for certain.
We end the book with presenting the best case we can for it still being a natural origin, the best case we can for it...
Being a laboratory origin, and then a call for an independent evaluation.
But we both now lean towards the conclusion that it was a laboratory event.
And I will mention one moment, right towards the end of writing the book, in September this year, when we'd already finished the book and we were just revising the last few revisions, and then a document dropped, which was a grant application made in 2018. By the EcoHealth Alliance, which is a foundation in the US that funds research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And what that document said was that the scientists, in collaboration with the Wuhan scientists, wanted to try inserting a particular genetic sequence into SARS-like coronaviruses, novel ones that they were just finding, over the next few years in order to...
Make them easier to grow in cells in the laboratory.
Now that is the sequence, the exact feature that appears in the genome of this virus and in no other SARS-like coronavirus.
And it looked odder and odder over recent months.
This stands out from...
All the other features, all the other SARS-like coronavirus in having this feature, which is what makes it so infectious, what makes it capable of causing a pandemic.
And until this point, we had no direct evidence that anyone was thinking of doing an experiment of putting one of these into this particular kinds of viruses.
We knew they were capable of putting this sequence into other viruses, but we didn't know they had a plan to do it.
Now, the scientist who put that application into the Department of Defense in the United States was on the...
The World Health Organization investigation into the origin of the pandemic was the organizer of a letter to the Lancet ruling out a laboratory origin.
And never once in two years had he thought to mention that he was part of a plan to put this sequence into a similar kind of virus at some point.
And he still hasn't explained himself.
His name is Peter Daszak.
We'd love to ask him.
He blocked us on Twitter the moment we started asking him.
It's a very odd situation, this, because we're not here to say it definitely came from a laboratory, but we are here to say there have been lots of laboratory leaks of viruses in the past.
SARS leaked six times from labs.
If a virus like this was in a lab and was experimented, then it's very likely that the researchers would get infected, would catch a cold.
If they were working at low biosecurity levels, at biosecurity level 2, where you basically just wear a mask and gloves.
And they were.
That's the level they were doing these experiments at.
And as I say, there's no other lab in the world that was doing as many experiments on SARS-like coronaviruses than Wuhan.
So if it's a coincidence, it's an enormous and extraordinary coincidence.
And so...
In the interests of satisfying people like me, the scientists ought to come forward and say, look, here's everything we know about what went on at that time.
Here's all the experiments we did, all the experiments we were planning, all the viruses we sampled in the wild, all the viruses we brought back from thousands of miles away.
These viruses don't live near Wuhan.
They're from thousands of miles away.
Here's all the evidence.
And you can see that none of this involves anything like this virus, and therefore we're innocent.
But the fact that we have to extract this information by leaks and freedom of information requests and open source analysts going into Chinese websites and looking for obscure theses and other documents just leaves us saying, well, are you trying to hide something?
Yeah, one would think so.
I want to go back to something you mentioned, and I just didn't want to interrupt you.
That there was, in the beginning, there was suppression of anyone or any tweet that would suggest that it was developed in a lab, the virus.
Who was doing that?
Who in the media, or if not media, who in politics, who was doing the suppressing?
It's a very good question.
And you're right, that up until May of this year...
Any discussion in the media of a lab leak was called a conspiracy theory by mainstream media, newspapers, New York Times, other ones like that.
They would simply label it.
This is a...
Along with, you know, the idea that the 5G phone signal is causing the pandemic.
You know, that sort of mad conspiracy theory.
All right, hold it there if you would.
Forgive me, but I want to promote your book, if that's okay with you.
Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.
Matt Ridley is the co-author with Alina Chan, the scientist.
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