UNLOCKED Premium Episode 129: Lab Leak Hypothesis feat Dr. Alex Greninger
We spoke to a clinical pathologist and the assistant director of the clinical virology lab at University of Washington Medical Center. The topic this week is the lab leak hypothesis - which has recently seen a revival in public discussion.
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SOURCES:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-man-made-491053
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_origin_of_COVID-19
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-broad-institute-coronavirus/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-epidemic-draws-scrutiny-to-labs-handling-deadly-pathogens-11583349777
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-wet-market.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/covid-19-lab-leak-natural-market-theory-conspiracy-theory-1176213/
https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covid-lab-leak-theory-wuhan-shouldnt-dismissed-column/4765985001/
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210217/The-origin-of-SARS-CoV-2-furin-cleavage-site-remains-a-mystery.aspx
https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments-that-may-have-started-coronavirus-pandemic-1500503
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 129 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Lab Leak Hypothesis episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Field, and Travis View.
There's a good chance that at some point during the pandemic, a family or friend sent you a wild article or blurry JPEG about COVID-19.
It may have been a fake cure, or a preventative technique, or even a claim that the numbers of deaths had been exaggerated, or an explanation that the virus doesn't exist at all.
Some of these ideas can be traced back to cynical political figures like Donald Trump, the broader GOP in its media sphere, or even Koch-style deregulators.
At the grassroots level, this has been met with the spread of COVID denialism and the organizing of mass protests and anti-lockdown gatherings, etc.
But broader geopolitics have also interacted with how we talk about COVID-19, and who we blame for its death toll and disruption to our lives.
I'm speaking, of course, of the never-ending Cold War.
In this context, blaming China is actually strategically useful, just another prong in a both covert and public effort to undermine the perceived foe.
Lab leak theory The idea that the virus may have been accidentally released from a laboratory was, during the Trump era, widely derided by the liberal and mainstream media as a conspiracy theory.
But now that Biden is president, we are seeing not just a resurgence of lab leak theory, but a concurrent effort by the new administration to escalate the perceived conflict between the United States and China.
Taking into account all of these complex layers, we've set out to explore the lab leak theory in this episode with the help of our guest, Dr. Alex Grenninger, a pathology lab scientist and the assistant director of the Clinical Virology Labs at the University of Washington Medical Center.
To date, we do not have a complete, definite account of the origins of COVID-19 and the virus that causes the illness, which is called SARS-CoV-2.
Which is disappointing to me because I rely on science to give me some sense of stability in this chaotic world, and right now, science is letting me down.
There's just too much uncertainty for me, personally.
Join the club.
The most popular theory is that the virus originated in wildlife before spreading to humans.
This kind of animal-to-human transmission is called zoonotic spillover.
Researchers have some leads that support the natural origin theory.
Bats are known carriers of coronaviruses, and scientists have determined that the genome of SARS-CoV-2 is most similar to two bat coronaviruses called RATG13 However, the genome of RATG13 is only 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2's genome, which means that the specific precursor of the virus isn't yet known.
Fortunately, scientists have found another clue while observing the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein in SARS-CoV-2.
Now, when you look at pictures or drawings of the coronavirus and you see those little protrusions that are coming out of, like, the sphere of the virus, Those are called spike proteins and they form the crown which give the coronavirus its name.
I actually did not know that it was called that because it's got a little crown.
So it's a king is what you're saying?
Yes, it's a king virus.
So the presence of these spike proteins is what allows these viruses to penetrate host cells and cause infection.
Scientists found out that the receptor-binding domain of these spike proteins in SARS-CoV-2 is closely related to an entirely different coronavirus found in Malayan pangolins.
And pangolins are these critters that kind of look like small anteaters with scales.
Huh.
So for this reason, scientists hypothesize that the new coronavirus moved through bats and then pangolins before jumping to humans.
I'm told that this is a good working theory.
This is basically what they came up with in the early days.
The problem is that scientists have yet to find a definite smoking gun, such as a pangolin virus that has all the right SARS-CoV-2-like elements put together.
We only have hints and clues from SARS-CoV-2 that suggest a strong connection.
And they have been executing 10,000 pangolins a day.
As is correct.
This feels like the beginning of The Hot Zone.
Did you ever read that book?
I did not, no.
Oh!
Jakey read a book.
Literally sounds like you picked it up at the airport and it had like a half nude woman with a gun on the cover.
It definitely was like an airport book for sure.
But I believe, you know, Michael Crichton maybe?
You figure it out, listener.
I'm going to get owned for this on Twitter.
However, in the absence of certainty, there is an alternative view that the virus escaped or was even engineered by a laboratory.
The main suspect is the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As the name suggests, the lab is based in Wuhan, China, which also happens to be where the virus first spread.
This is a research facility founded in the 1950s that was the first in China to receive the highest level of biosafety clearance, meaning that it is equipped to study the world's highest risk infectious agents and toxins, ones that require the strictest biocontainment measures.
So we're talking about like, you know, the Andromeda strain suits, these, you know, the contagion suits.
And by the way, the French helped them build this.
Um, and then they eventually just like kicked the French out.
They were like, eh, we got the facilities down.
Thank you very much.
Goodbye!
And just, they've been running it since.
Good for them.
Which is how you should treat the French, I totally agree.
Now to make matters more interesting, for five years prior to the pandemic, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have engaged in so-called gain-of-function research, which is designed to enhance certain properties of viruses for the purpose of anticipating future pandemics.
This kind of research is so controversial that back in 2014, the U.S.
government paused funding for it.
This pause was intended to provide time to address concerns about the risks and benefits of these studies.
A statement from the White House about the pause said this.
Specifically, the funding pause will apply to gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to
influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses, such as the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or
transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route."
So, just to reiterate, there's no definite evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was produced via
gain-of-function research or anything like that, but it is something that people pointed
out and it's caused a lot of concern and it's mentioned on Tucker Carlson a lot.
In the early days of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was dismissed as poorly evidenced
at best and a wild conspiracy theory at worst.
And it didn't help that the main proponents of this theory were people like President Trump, Republican Senator Tom Cotton, and Jake.
That really was a strike to its credibility, that third.
The first two, look, there's a little bit of leeway, but once you get to that third guy, if he's pushing it, you know, you grew it in a cup of water, you know?
One thing that really didn't help in terms of its credibility was Just how often the kind of lab leak theory was kind of also pushed alongside this like bio-weapon kind of idea, right?
That it's deliberately been unleashed?
Because leaking from the lab doesn't mean shit.
It doesn't mean it's designed.
It doesn't mean it's on purpose that they're leaking it.
There's various like assumptions there.
Yeah.
Yeah, quite often people would say like a deliberate engineered virus.
And like we discussed in the coronavirus conspiracy theory episode, there's really no evidence of that whatsoever.
But I mean, the fact that was that was kind of like inflated with, I guess, the more reasonable sort of lab leak hypothesis meant that people tend to reject both those theories out of hand.
Well, of course, and there's the line from Dustin Hoffman in the 1990s film Outbreak, where he says, you know, I don't want this thing walking out on the bottom of somebody's shoe.
It makes you think of that line.
However, as time went on, scientists became more willing to voice support for at least the possibility of the lab leak theory.
This is perhaps best embodied in the recent letter published in the journal Science, which is titled, Investigate the Origins of COVID-19.
In that letter, a group of 17 scientists say, theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.
On May 26, President Joe Biden issued a statement saying that when he first entered office, he tasked the intelligence community with determining whether the virus, quote, emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.
When that analysis proved inconclusive, he asked the intelligence community to redouble their efforts and report back in 90 days.
That report apparently is forthcoming.
Apparently, these are the kinds of calls you make when you're president.
You ask people to do something, and when they don't or they can't, you just tell them to do it again, but you try harder this time.
The lab leak theory is also less taboo in the media.
In a recent appearance on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, comedian Jon Stewart joked about the lab leak theory.
There's a chance that this was created in a lab.
There's an investigation.
A chance?
If there's evidence, I'd love to hear it.
I just don't know.
There's a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China.
What do we do?
Oh, you know who we could ask?
The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab.
The disease is the same name as the lab.
That's just a little too weird, don't you think?
And then they ask those scientists, they're like, so wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab.
How did this happen?
And they're like, a pangolin kissed a turtle.
And you're like, no.
You're the name of your lab.
If you look at the name, look at the name.
Let me see your business card.
Show me your business card.
Oh, I work at the coronavirus lab in Wuhan.
Oh, because there's a coronavirus loose in Wuhan.
How did that happen?
Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and Then it sneezed into my chili, and now we all have coronavirus.
Okay, okay!
What about this?
What about this?
Listen to this.
Wait a second.
This is InfoWars.
This is fucking InfoWars.
Jon Stewart has been shit for a while, but man, this is a dumb as rocks argument.
Yeah I mean like that is how so many diseases have started and it's like actually there's even a theory that when there was contact with the new world and the old world that the reason that so many diseases seemed to go one way basically from Europe and Asia and all these other countries to the new world and we didn't really seem to get many back was because of animal husbandry, was because Europeans lived among animals and like bred them and stuff like that whereas not many civilizations in the Americas did that.
Um, so we had like way more diseases to give them essentially than they had to give us.
So it's not like, it's not, it's not crazy.
You know, he's like making it, making it sound sort of like, you know, someone's just, just like, yeah, kind of like randomly picking up different animals that could, but that is how lots and lots of human diseases begin.
And he's just basically being like, oh, there's a lab that studies this stuff in Wuhan and the first outbreak was in Wuhan.
Same name.
It's the same name.
It's the same name.
That's not how science or research or investigation works at all.
It's Jake logic at best.
Yeah, like I explained earlier, the whole bat-pangolin theory is based on genomic analysis.
They weren't, like, picking animals at random.
Now, I was really intrigued by these shifting attitudes on the origin of the coronavirus, so I thought I'd, like, dive into the evidence as best I could to see why the lab leak theory has gained more interest.
As always, I wanted to include the disclaimer that I'm not a scientist.
None of us are.
Annie's the closest, because she's a doctor.
She has a great podcast about viruses.
Inoculations and whatnot.
But I will include links to my sources in the show notes of this episode.
But before I proceed, I want to address the real question on everyone's mind.
Will I be thoroughly owned if the lab leak theory turns out to be true?
And I would submit that I will not be owned, necessarily.
So early in 2020, I relied on scientific papers published at the time to deny that the virus was engineered in the lab.
But I did allow for the possibility of the lab leak hypothesis.
In April of 2020, I tweeted this in response to criticism from longtime friend of the show, Neon Revolt.
I said, quote, Oh, so this episode is just a defense episode.
I thought this was going to be a little different, Travis.
No, no, no.
I was like... It always delves back down into the mud.
That's right.
People misinterpreted your words, did they?
Over a year ago, I tweeted, "Neon seems to be confusing two distinct questions.
One, was SARS-CoV-2 constructed in the laboratory?
And two, did SARS-CoV-2 escape from the laboratory?"
As the retweeted article explains, the genomic evidence shows that the answer to question number
one is no. But the fact that the virus is natural doesn't eliminate the possibility
that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The article I retweeted doesn't address that question.
The lab escape theory is possible, but lacks evidence at the moment.
First of all, calling it escape makes it sound like the virus built, like, a series of pillows and sheets tied together and scaled the wall.
That's why he put escaped in quotes.
A daring escape!
So, as always, my secret to never being wrong is never believing in anything.
Now, one of the big reasons that the lab leak theory is getting more play is that the investigations so far haven't been conclusive.
And this is in contrast to investigations into previous coronaviruses.
For example, the intermediary host species of SARS-1 was identified within four months of the epidemic's outbreak.
This was all the way back in the early 2000s.
The host species of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, was identified within nine months.
Now it's been over a year and a half since the pandemic began and researchers have failed to find either the original bat population or the intermediate species to which SARS-2 might have jumped to humans.
The first official report from the World Health Organization on the origins of the virus came from an international team of scientists who traveled to Wuhan at the beginning of the year.
During their 28-day trip, the scientists tried to reconstruct the early moments of the outbreak and the possible pathways for the emergence of the virus.
The final report, titled who convened global study of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 was issued on March 30th and failed to offer any definite conclusions.
The authors concluded that it was most likely that the virus was introduced to humans by an animal which acted as an intermediate host.
That study dubbed the possibility that the virus came from a lab as extremely unlikely.
However, there was widespread concern about how the study was conducted.
Specifically, there are concerns that China wasn't being as transparent as they could be.
The World Health Organization's Director General even called out China for not being more transparent and raised concerns that scientists were unable to get unfettered access to biological samples and raw data that was relevant to the investigation.
The first report was intended to be the starting point for the joint WHO-China probe, with a second phase of more in-depth studies to follow.
But since the Phase 1 uncovered so little, it's unclear, apparently, what Phase 2 is going to look like at the moment.
Now, with all that being said, I do want to mention that there have been scientists who took the lab leak theory seriously in 2020.
One of the earliest scientists to posit the lab leak theory was Bo Tao Xiao from the South China University of Technology.
In February of 2020, he published a brief article in ResearchGate titled, The Possible Origins of 2019 NCoV Coronavirus.
It concludes, In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Safety level may need to be reinforced in high-risk, biohazardous laboratories.
Now the evidence cited in the paper, which was very brief, included lab locations in Wuhan, reference to past incidents of mishandled pathogens elsewhere in China, and the fact that a Wuhan researcher connected to the institute was famous for collecting thousands of bats and sometimes getting bitten.
Which I know reasons.
What?
Don't do that.
He's a scientist, he gets bitten by bats.
You know?
What are you gonna do?
Just don't do that.
Just choose not to do that if you're a guy doing the viruses in the lab.
Don't become Batman.
You don't need your Dark Knight of the Soul.
You don't need to be forged in the darkness and become what potentially... I mean, honestly though, 3.2 million... I disagree.
Everyone needs a hobby and why not collect thousands of bats?
If the real Batman has a death toll of 3.2 million, this is gonna be crazy.
Now, that author actually did retract that paper, and he later told the Wall Street Journal that he withdrew the paper because it was not supported by direct proofs.
We also recently learned that top health experts in the U.S.
government seriously considered the possibility that the virus is engineered, and this is thanks to emails that were released under the Freedom of Information Act from Dr. Fauci.
Now, one such expert who voiced concerns privately is Dr. Christian Anderson, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
He also happens to be one of the most outspoken proponents of the theory that the coronavirus originated from a natural spillover from animals to humans.
In a January 2020 email to Dr. Fauci, Anderson wrote this.
The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome, less than 0.1%,
so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features
potentially look engineered. He also wrote that he thought the virus's genome was
"inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."
When these emails were published, a lot of bad faith actors suggested that this was evidence
that Anderson knew that the lab leak theory was true privately, but he publicly never
voiced this opinion.
Anderson was targeted for harassment on Twitter, which led to him deactivating his account.
Now, obviously, I think government transparency is a good thing.
I'm glad these emails were released.
This was done by BuzzFeed.
But it's a shame that scientists are targeted like this just for exploring the theory.
This guy, Dr. Christian Anderson, he also wrote a really influential paper called The Proximate Origin of SARS-CoV-2, which suggested it was natural.
That shows that even people who promote the theory that it was natural, they weren't dogmatic about it.
They were seriously considering the possibility that it was lab engineered or a lab leak.
They just didn't come to that conclusion when they're ready to publish their findings publicly.
Yeah.
I mean, they just did what, like, any responsible academic should do, which is just not, like, speculate out loud, right?
Right.
You kind of have to, like, amass the evidence and then come to a conclusion before you're willing to just, like, publish every single thought you have on a subject.
I suppose so, but it's funny because I guess the virus put us up against the wall in terms of time, and so we have had even vaccines that were potentially more dangerous or less effective than others, and we had to discard those or come back on them in many countries.
But creating a theory and then testing it out is part of science as well, and we were kind of pushed into a state where we all had to kind of I guess, hopefully, pool our theories and pool our data and pool the scientific facts so we can eliminate and prune away the ones that are useless.
But there was, I think, a certain level of repression against those ideas or being able to mention them or discuss them.
For good reason, because people were like, it's incredibly dangerous if part of our population starts to think this one thing that might not be true yet, and then it'll change their behavior in regards to how they practice safety and all of that, and increase the death count.
So it's a fucking awful situation we've been put in.
Yeah, especially since there was so much antagonism to Asian people in so many different countries as well.
It's really not just kind of an idea you just want to idly speculate on out loud, do you know?
Dr. Anderson later explained to the New York Times that the features in SARS-CoV-2 that initially suggested possible engineering were identified in related coronaviruses, meaning that the features that initially looked unusual to him actually weren't.
Many of these analyses were completed in a matter of days, which allowed him to reject the preliminary hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered while leaving other lab-based scenarios on the table.
On November 2, 2020, David A. Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist, wrote an opinion piece in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled, To Stop the Next Pandemic, We Need to Unravel the Origins of COVID-19.
In the letter, Relman laments how little had been discovered through genomic analysis alone.
In an effort to reveal the origins of the pandemic, researchers so far have focused on the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence.
However, the sequence of the pandemic virus tells us only so much.
First, the closest known relatives, RATG13 and RMYN02 are not that close.
Second, there is probably more than one recent ancestral lineage that contributes to SARS-CoV-2 because its genome shows evidence of recombination between different parental viruses.
In nature, recombination is common among coronaviruses.
But it's also common in some research laboratories where recombinant engineering is used to study those viruses.
The bottom line is simple.
We need to identify the immediate parents of SARS-CoV-2 and they are missing.
One of the most vocal scientists promoting the possibility of a lab leak is Dr. Alina Chan, who is a fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Her research focused on the genetic blueprint of the virus.
She studied SARS-CoV-1, which spread to humans back in 2003, and is closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
What Chan found interesting is that the new virus wasn't having to adapt in order to rapidly spread in the same way that SARS-CoV-1 did.
According to the paper she authored with fellow scientist Xing He Zhan, this implied that the new virus developed partly in a lab.
A Boston Magazine profile of Chan explains her reasoning.
It was clear that the first SARS evolved rapidly during its first three months of existence, constantly fine-tuning its ability to infect humans and settling down only during the later stages of the epidemic.
In contrast, the new virus looked a lot more like late-stage SARS.
It's almost as if we're missing the early phase, Chan marvelled to Zahn, or, as she put it in their paper, as if it was already well-adapted for human transmission.
That was a profoundly provocative line.
Chan was implying that the virus was already familiar with human physiology when it had its coming out party in Wuhan in late 2019.
If so, there were three possible explanations.
Perhaps it was just staggeringly bad luck.
The mutations had all occurred in an earlier host species and just happened to be the perfect genetic arrangement for an invasion of humanity.
But that made no sense.
Those mutations would have been disadvantageous in the old host.
Maybe the virus had been circulating undetected in humans for months, working out the kinks, and nobody had noticed.
Also unlikely.
China's health officials would not have missed it, and even if they had, they'd be able to go back now through stored samples to find the trail of earlier versions.
And they weren't coming up with anything.
That left a third possibility.
The missing phase had happened in a lab, where the virus had been trained on human cells.
Chan knew this was the third rail of potential explanations.
At the time, conspiracy theorists were spinning bioweapon fantasies, and Chan was loathe to give them any more ammunition.
But she also didn't want to play politics by withholding her findings.
In a recent interview, Chan said that political rhetoric about the virus under the Trump administration made some scientists reluctant to discuss the lab leak theory.
She said this.
At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins.
Further circumstantial evidence of the lab leak hypothesis was added in May of 2021 thanks to a Wall Street Journal article.
It reported about a U.S.
intelligence report which identified three researchers at the Wuhan lab who sought treatment at a hospital after falling ill in November of 2019.
This report echoed a U.S.
US State Department fact sheet released shortly before the end of the Trump administration,
which said this.
"The US government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became
sick in autumn 2019 before the first identified case of the outbreak with symptoms consistent
with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility
of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli's public claim that there was "zero infection"
among the WIV staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses."
Now I'm not saying that this story is necessarily true just because the Wall Street Journal
or the State Department under the Trump administration says it's true.
I'm not saying it's false either.
But I do want to briefly make the observation that one of the authors of that Wall Street Journal report is a journalist named Michael R. Gordon, and All the way back for you, you know, take the time machine back to the early 2000s.
In 2002, Michael R. Gordon happened to co-author a report for the New York Times headlined, Threats and Responses, the Iraqis, U.S.
says Hussein intensifies quest for A-bomb parts.
That report relayed the belief from U.S.
officials that Iraqis sought aluminum tubes, which the officials believed were part of an atomic bomb program.
The aluminum tubes apparently were real, but the suspected use for them was way off.
That report was followed up two years later by another New York Times report rebutting it.
It was headlined, The Aluminum Tube Story, A Special Report, How the White House Embraced Suspect Iraq Arms Intelligence.
It turns out that the top experts in government actually believe that those aluminum tubes were intended for small artillery rockets and not weapons of mass destruction.
Oh no, so the New York Times is doing some sort of like Cold War manipulation stuff around crucial events?
Weird.
I will say, you know, it seems like one of the authors of the Wall Street Journal report claiming that three of the Wuhan lab employees got sick at one point in the past thoughtlessly repeated bad U.S.
intelligence in a New York Times report during the lead up to the Iraq war.
That's just it.
I'm not saying, I'm not providing any analysis of those facts, but this is just the facts of the matter.
Yeah, but if you made a mistake like that the first time around, you'd be sure as hell to never make it again.
That's right, he learned the first time.
And also, the worst that we can say about Mr. Gordon is that when he gets his CIA contact on the phone, he's an incredible pushover and a huge rube.
There's also an interesting social media angle regarding the whole lab leak theory saga.
Facebook announced in February of 2020 that it had expanded the list of misleading health claims that it would ban.
Specifically, it removed claims asserting that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured.
However, in May of this year, Facebook updated its policy.
The company said this in an email.
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps.
We're continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
We apologize to both Joe M. and FuckFace5D for suspending their accounts.
All QAnon accounts will now be reinstated and given priority.
I mean, yeah, you know how much I believe in the Bad Hammer, but I think that, I mean, this is, I think, perhaps the greatest illustration about, you know, the issues around moderating misinformation.
Because, you know, what happens if something appears to be, you know, wild misinformation, but then is later, eh, Yeah, and what happens when state actors or other powerful actors decide to use the mechanisms that have been put in place to identify disinformation to purposefully push a narrative?
Then we'll make QAnon people right, and that's gonna be awesome.
Yeah, I mean, essentially the question here is, what happens if the QAnon people get one thing right?
Which, listen, here and there, who hasn't had a taste of a QAnon belief where you're like, this one though!
Which, by the way, is still too early to determine.
I mean, the fact that people are, I guess, more openly talking about the possibility has caused a lot of conspiracy theorists to take, like, a victory lap.
Even though that's not the favored hypothesis, there's still not a smoking gun.
Oh no, I just meant that they were going to be right about these actors, these state actors, etc.
using the disinformation mechanisms to push false narratives.
Yeah, fair.
Yeah, but I don't think they should get a hand clap for that.
Any moron can sell that one.
Please, what did you just say about me?
Researching this whole thing is really frustrating because obviously from a public health perspective, it's obviously important to have a definite account of how the virus originated.
But you always get the feeling that you're being screwed with.
There's like all these powerful actors, whether it's like, you know, powerful, you know, governments or scientists, they all have an agenda.
And they're all trying to influence people's opinions for one reason or another.
And there are really, really high stakes, you know, if it turns out that is a, you know, a lab leak, that'll be Devastating for scientific research because all of a sudden there'll be heightened scrutiny on a laboratory doing these research.
There'll be heightened tensions with China.
And there are lots of really, you know, there's lots of politics at play.
And all these politics make the scientific debate, which is already impenetrable to the layman practically, even murkier.
Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, none of us are scientists.
That's why we are joined now by Dr. Alex Greninger.
He is a pathology lab scientist and assistant director of the Clinical Virology Labs at the University of Washington Medical Center.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me.
Now, without ruling out any possibility, it's my understanding that most researchers think that the most plausible scenario for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is that it jumped directly from an animal to a human.
So why has that been the theory that scientists have leaned towards?
Well, I think that that's probably the theory that most scientists have leaned towards because it's basically got the longest track record for most viruses.
And we have an incredible appreciation for all of the viruses that exist in bats, the coronavirus that exists in bats, as well, that we just do not know about.
So it really is, again for all of these things, it's such an unsatisfying scientific topic to talk about because it is really an appreciation of the limits of our knowledge that sort of gives you that sort sort of basis to think about, all right, well, how could we
truly, truly know what's, what's, what's going on here? And so that, that I think is, is one
of the major things is driving this is we just know that there are so many SAR becoviruses,
SARS-like coronaviruses that exist in these, in these bat reservoirs that we are, do not
know about. And so it's just, it's entirely plausible this would come from an animal and
that's where it would come from.
You know, that's where we expect it to come. That's the a priori, you know, place you would,
you would start from. Would it be fair to say that scientists have become like more
open to voicing the possibility of the lab leak hypothesis more so now than, than their
early days of the pandemic?
Yeah, and here I think there's a little bit of sort of just a continued sort of absence of evidence, and I think one of the things that I find to be interesting is I think that no matter where the virus came from, you would want to profile these bat reservoirs as well as other animal reservoirs in in southeastern China and around the world. Actually
right now the the US is putting out there's a grant proposal for sort of more of
this work to be able to look for new coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses and phyloviruses. And I
think one of the things that's odd is just we haven't you'd expect there'd be a lot more
movement on this topic and and there's been actually quite little.
I mean, there were some sequences and other coronaviruses that came out sort of early in the pandemic, sort of that very early part, where it's like, okay, well, here's this rat G13, and here's the few other coronaviruses that came out.
But there haven't been, like, given the profound diversity and number of these types of viruses that we Here's a funny thing.
There actually was a group that basically went for the last like five or six years and did little sequencing of little tiny 300 nucleotide, 400 nucleotide chunks of these viruses called the Predict Project and they found almost a hundred new coronaviruses and they didn't find this one but there's still so many they haven't even sequenced whole genomes of these so we don't have we only have that little portion of the genome so In every sort of viral discovery effort in this space finds the same sort of thing where we just sort of just find just the little tip of the sort of what we call it a rarefaction curve of how well we're sampling to capture the number of viruses that are there and and these efforts have only really begun in earnest in the last you know decade.
There's a little bit of explosion after the SARS sort of 2003 SARS but we just there's just so much out there that we have not sampled and and that is You know, I think really what drives that sort of, the overall sort of lack of, you know, hey, this is a conclusive, this is what it is.
We have to appreciate that nature is going to be the most commonplace that it's going to come from.
And there's all those other viruses, all those interactions that we don't capture, that we do not have good eyes on.
So what would be an example of, like, some information or evidence that would be a smoking gun?
Like, what could we find that would make either people say, OK, yes, definitely it came from nature, end of debate, or it was from a lab leak, end of debate?
Well, I'm going to start first with what's, you know, the sort of unsatisfying part to answer your question, which is, you know, coronaviruses have reverse genetic systems.
which basically means that you can clone out the entire genome.
The RNA of a coronavirus is potentially infectious if you put it into a cell,
if you get the whole thing in there. And so you actually, in some ways, it's a question of intent and you can't
really know whether something came naturally because I can synthetically
make something that was natural in a lab.
So both are equally possible given the same sort of sequence in some ways.
Now that's just a, that's a little bit of a dodge from your question, but I think it's worth appreciating that that's currently the scientific, that's where we're at right now with this.
It's helpful to know what was in the lab, what's been inventoried.
I think one of the things that I went to Shanghai a few years ago and I've just been blown
away by sort of the leapfrog nature of a lot of the technology
there. They have incredible genome sequencing operations and genomes is how
we sort of try to suss out this information. That sequence
data can travel far and wide. Just like we can be, you know, it's digital, we can be in
different rooms talking here to each other and you can sort of look at
sequence from a isolate that was found, you know, on the other side of the
world and you can have that in your inbox in a second.
And so, you know, having those, they have those capabilities, and we want to know, I have that, have every single isolate that's gone into the labs, as well as a greater strong, a stronger sampling effort on the animal reservoirs that we know for coronaviruses.
So it really comes down to sort of what, you know, from like a smoking gun, sorry, from the lab side, you want to know what's in the lab.
It's not a smoking gun though, it just means, hey, what's just there?
Both things that could equally come out of nature and come from the lab as well in that way.
And then what would also be helpful from a nature standpoint is better sampling of these reservoirs where you find something.
The closest ancestor that we currently have right now is about, we think, we estimate 50 years 50 to 70 years is the closest virus that we have to this one currently.
Wait, 50 to 70 years old?
Yeah, so like they last saw each other.
So it'd be like you and your grandfather or, you know.
You have a different generation size, right?
So it's not appropriate to say in that way, you know, say 20-25 year generation size.
This sucker has, you know, like a much faster generation size.
But that's, if you look at the genome diversity, how far they are apart from each other, and we sort of know how fast coronaviruses evolve, and you can sort of, you know, there's some wide airbars on it, but you can say, like, most of the estimates have said that the RATG-13 and the SARS-CoV-2 last saw each other about 19 in the 1950s.
So this might seem like a silly or an obvious question, but would a potential, if not smoking gun, but a gun that's on its way to smoking, would that be, I guess, essentially like we could find a sample of the bat which has got a coronavirus which is closer in between the sample we have from 50 years ago and the sample we have now?
Yes, exactly.
So you want to find closer ancestors.
Presumably this thing, SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-CoV-2 like progenitor, you know, is able to spread well in some sort of other reservoir, whatever animal reservoir, bat reservoir it is.
And so you'd expect to find more of those and that are sort of closer than that 50 year
time frame.
I would say that this is somewhat complicated by the broad tropism of these viruses.
So, you know, if it's too close, you actually can't necessarily, it's hard to tell, like,
if it's only like a year or two years apart, like, it's too close, you can't tell that
we would have given it, like the minks, right?
Like, you know, you know, the minks that got infected by SARS-CoV-2.
Well, we pretty much think that the humans infected the minks, it's not the minks that
gave it to the humans.
And so you look at the virus in the minks and you're like, oh, it's really close to
SARS-CoV-2, but it doesn't mean it came from the minks.
So sometimes the directionality can be a little bit difficult in these sort of questions.
But certainly if you found something that was, you know, sort of 10 years, you know,
10 years apart in that way, or so just a little bit closer than that, that sort of 50 years.
That said, from some of the more recent coronavirus discoveries, you know, we've also found sort of those, the thing people get very excited about, this furin cleavage site.
We find furin cleavage sites and other beta coronaviruses as well.
That's been known for a while, but as well as some of these sarbecoviruses as well.
And so it starts to make it more and more sort of like, hey, nature's thought of this.
I think that's another thing that a lot of scientists, you know, again, it's a little bit of humility in the sense of we don't really know how to engineer these, we engineer these things well enough and nature has such a population size, the amount of virus, the number of different viruses and the amount of virus that gets created in nature far exceeds what we do in the laboratory.
And you can see that right now even in the human populations, like what does this, what This delta variant that seems to come out of India, you know, you spotted a huge population size to grow in and it will sample the evolutionary space and it will find a solution to its problems.
And we see that just when we restricted to the human population and we don't bring in all the bats and all of the other animals that this virus can spread in, which is, you know, also quite a large population size and a niche for the virus.
Has uncovering the origins of this pandemic been, you think, I guess, unusually difficult compared to, you know, I guess, past sort of research investigations or about as tough as we thought it would be?
No, we're on par.
I mean, if anything, it's, I mean, I would say, here's the thing, I want to keep saying this, that I think that I've been surprised at how few new coronaviruses have been sequenced in the last year and a half.
Like, I would think that you would go to town on those reservoirs given what's going on.
Now, I understand there's a biosafety and biosecurity risk, right?
Like you actually could by doing that work, you do potentially hasten the emergence
into human populations if you don't do it under the correct biosafety work.
But if you're out there swabbing bat rectums or whatever, that actually is, that is a risk factor
for creating a new zoonosis in some ways if you don't do it in the context of the right biosafety.
But I think that there's a huge premium on doing that kind of work.
Be really important to understand that.
We've shown that we don't know where SARS-CoV-3 is sort of coming from as well in the next one.
And we sort of, we've definitely, when you look back, it's a very different story
we tell ourselves when it comes to SARS 2003, when it comes to MERS, you know,
when it comes to these coronaviruses, we know that they have a...
True pandemic potential, where before we sort of told ourselves, you know, nice evening bedtime stories about how we were stronger, better, faster than these viruses, and they weren't really going to do this to us.
And so now it's like, all right, it's on.
Like, we need to know every single one, you know, the name, rank, and serial number for all of these guys.
We need to have history to know where they've come from, you know, what their ability is.
I mean, we can actually, you've seen, this is the thing you've seen also when it comes to COVID is, you know, we've never really had in our lifetimes this sort of experience of watching this Coronavirus, Tarbecovirus, like, adapt to humans in this way.
I mean, it's actually remarkable.
When we talked to Delta, the Delta variant, we're actually talking about really, like, almost Three rounds of replacement that have happened.
Right now, we're in the middle of sort of the Delta replacement of the Alpha lineage.
The Alpha became the highest in the United States.
Before that, it was the B1 lineage.
And before that, it was the original sort of Wuhan.
And so, you know, we're watching this virus adapt to humans in real time and seeing the things that lead it to spread better, which we sort of knew about before from sort of Ebola virus work and other viruses that they, as they adapt, their glycoproteins are able to bind to human receptors better.
they might be able to get cleaved a little bit better.
There's obviously some innate immune regulation work going on as well.
But most of the action is really at that spike glycoprotein, the attachment protein of the virus,
as it learns to interact with the human receptor.
That seems to be a major determinant.
We've watched those replacements occur over and over and over.
So we know if we go into those animal reservoirs and we look at the,
we sequence viruses and we can look to see how well that those spike,
those glycoproteins, those attachment proteins bind to human receptors.
And that could be a great way to sort of triage these things or understand how they're going.
We could also figure out how well our current vaccines that we're currently making can cross-neutralize other ones, right?
We actually have a real opportunity to make some, you know, pan-sarbecovirus vaccines, pan-sarbecovirus monoclonals.
We have the ability The story of the last year and a half has been all these incipient technologies that we've had and have been ready to use.
We've got all of these abilities with nanoparticle vaccines.
We've got all these incipient technologies that have been made But there just wasn't a market.
I can't tell you how little attention or effort there was paid into the coronavirus.
Here, I'll offer you one example.
Right now, over this last week, just say past 2 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes that have been sequenced.
This is just one proxy of sort of attention and effort that's been put into this.
Going into the pandemic, Our clinical lab at the University of Washington was the leading sequencer, I believe, in the world of seasonal coronaviruses, the four seasonal coronaviruses, and we had done 57 genomes.
Like, that's what it took to be the leading sequencer in the world, versus now, just a year and a half later, you're talking about two million total sequences that have been done, and the amount of effort that has been put into these.
Before this, there was interest in flu and influenza.
There was interest in sort of a pan-influenza vaccine.
There was a little interest in RSV.
There was very little interest in parainfluenza.
There was very little interest in other coronaviruses.
There was very little interest in metanumavirus.
There just was not the same sort of.
And we also were able to do trials and work in a speed and move the field forward
and try a lot of different hypotheses.
I mean, just look at the CureVac data that came out this last week,
where you're looking at sort of a slightly different mRNA construct, a slightly different dose.
You know, we're able to learn really fast and say, that's not going to work very well.
But, you know, our initial sort of mRNA, we got very lucky that our first vaccines out of the gates were so good.
I'm very, very lucky in that regard.
But the story of this pandemic in one angle, many different stories and angles here, but one of them has just been, you know, a very impressive triumph of science in certain areas.
Now we've got to globalize it for these incipient technologies that have basically been around and were ready to be actionable, you know, in the first weeks and months of the pandemic.
Yeah, talking a little bit about speculations about origins of the pandemic.
We hear a lot of people, like I sometimes mention on Fox News, they talk about gain-of-function research in reference to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Now, is that at all relevant in investigating the origins of the pandemic?
Or is this, I don't know, just pure speculation?
I mean, a lot of it's speculation.
It's relevant in the sense, all of this is relevant in the sense because the possibility that it could have happened makes it something that we, even if it didn't happen, the possibility that it could have happened, and the fact that these viruses are so well-spread in people, such as if you did have a laboratory accident with SARS-CoV-2, could you actually, might it take off?
Well, certainly, very few countries or spaces have been able to stop the spread of this thing.
So we've really been able to see sort of almost in real time what a grape goo problem would look like as it sort of happened.
And so, you know, I think that whether or not that's exactly how it happened, we're going to have renewed attention to the biosecurity in labs and sort of ready for that.
And one of these questions is this gain of function stuff, which, you know, gain of function, I hate that term because it's like there's so many things that we do in the lab that like or you gain a function, you replace a gene with GFP, it
gained the function to glow green.
But that's not what people are talking about when they're talking about gain of function.
They're talking about transmissibility, so enhancing transmissibility in humans,
potentially in other animal models as well, so watching it adapt to that.
And then pathogenesis, so obviously if you're like, "Hey, this one gene is not doing much,
let's replace it with something like cholera toxin."
But we do not need a SARS-CoV-2 that spreads cholera toxin, right?
I mean, like, that's just not something that, like, we need.
And so, you know, there's sort of those examples here.
It's a ridiculous reductive absurdum, but still, you know, you can do those sort of replacement technologies.
What's hard, though, here, though, is that, you know, before I sort of present you a very clear sort of hypothesis or answer for sort of what are the determinants of spread in terms of, like, spike protein adaptation to humans, but we do have a very incredible opportunity here, which is to understand, you know, why was SARS-CoV-2 so different than SARS-CoV, the 2003 version, right?
Those suckers are 80% binucleotide.
They're very, very close.
I mean, right?
It was very clear when this virus came out that it was gonna be with SARS-CoV-2.
Um, and, and so, you know, would, would it be a good idea to swap some genes between these guys and try to understand, like, hey, how does it spread in a hamster, or how does it spread in vitro, or like, you know, I, I think that we, there's a compelling argument.
There's often a lot of compelling arguments for gain-of-function research, um, uh, for certain types.
It just has to be conducted at a very high, um, bio, biosafety, um, sort of level.
Uh, and that's, that's, that's, that's one of the major concerns.
So, you know, the NIH and other groups have sort of rules for reviewing that.
Certainly, you know, we don't get to review that sort of, you know, information.
And it is, I mean, it's almost like there's also an angle here that's also sort of like, you know, CRISPR sort of embryos, right?
Or like that story came out of China where someone had, you know, a scientist had done that work.
And it's like, you know, you can't, sometimes you can't actually control everything out You can't control at an individual level.
There's always a chance that something like that could happen as well.
So, you know, it's a very difficult question.
That's why we try to, that's why the current response, I think, is very reasonable, which is sort of like, hey, when someone, the scientist wants to do this, wants to do some certain experiment, you get together and you talk about it and, you know, the other people come in and make you sort of really rationalize what kind of work you want to do.
And I think both the pandemic, you know, both increases I think what ultimately will happen, I mean, I really think that's why it's so important to understand the origins.
I mean, we need to understand, we need cooperation from China and from the labs, and we also need a redoubled effort to go find all of the coronaviruses in these animal reservoirs and bat reservoirs.
it will answer a lot of these questions.
And that to me is the thing, that's why I'm surprised there hasn't been more effort
in the last year, year and a half in that particular space.
Do you think there is already a kind of appropriate level of scrutiny for gain-of-function research?
'Cause I've only just learned about what gain-of-function research is in the past few months
as I think everybody else has.
So I'm not really aware of where it fits in the wider virology research community.
Is it essential for creating vaccines fast and that sort of stuff?
Is it heavily regulated?
Yeah, regulation science can be mixed.
For instance, if I read a paper as a reviewer, so a paper gets submitted to a journal, I actually have to click a button that says whether or not there's any biosecurity or gain-of-function considerations that should be brought in before this paper is published.
Every single paper.
Right, so is that regulation?
Not really, it's actually sort of the community policing itself, but at the same time, it's built in sort of that everyone is thinking about this sort of question in the microbiological sciences.
Certainly when it comes to grant review time, if you're proposing anything.
I think there's a compelling reason to answer many of these questions.
review is sort of, the client's already been done, but they want the system.
There's multiple Swiss cheese models, so there's multiple checks of sort of like, "All right,
hey," throughout the system.
I think there's a compelling reason to answer many of these questions.
So I always thought that when they did that pause or ban or whatever they wanted to say
from 2015, 2016, around that time, it seemed a little bit strong, but it was a good time
to get everyone together and make this realization.
I think the other limitation with a lot of the sort of, I would say there's a lot of
gain of function sort of research is...
The models that you use it in, I mean, they're not, you know, perfect.
They're cell lines.
It's mice.
It's hamsters.
It's non-human primates.
I mean, it's not even actually people.
And so, what you see a lot of the community do, also just because it's a hassle to work with any of these pathogenic agents in the context of their actual, like, full virus.
Like, actually, I don't work with SARS-CoV-2, the virus, because I have to go to a BSL-3,
and that would take even more time, and you have to do more paperwork,
and there's more audit, there's a lot of that stuff.
So people will work in sort of more biochemical function, sort of assays, and so,
just where they isolate a single protein and look at, so one of the things that's been very impressive,
and I don't think it's, I wouldn't call it gain of function,
'cause it's not causing the virus to spread better, but it's been very good at predicting
what mutations will help it spread better, is sort of some of this deep mutational scanning work
here by Jesse Bloom and Fred Hutch on glycoproteins.
So basically you make every single mutation that possibly could be made in the context of the glycoprotein, you ask how well does it bind, or the spike protein, how well does it bind to human receptors?
And that's been very helpful in terms of understanding, it's actually anticipated some of the mutations that we're seeing by some of these variants.
And it allows us to interpret, you know, when we see a new variant, say you see like C37 in Peru or something like that, or just name Any old variant you see that's increasing in prevalence, you can sort of go to these big resources to say, okay, which mutation do you think it is that's actually helping the virus undo this?
And it helps the interpretation in real time.
So, you know, I'm not calling that by any means gain-of-function work, but there's an angle there that's like, you know, it helps us understand how the virus becomes more transmissible.
And that's very, very helpful without creating a virus that is actually becoming more transmissible in the same work.
And so it's really, a lot of it comes down to that biosecurity and biosafety level that's being worked out as well.
But you ultimately don't know until you put it in the context of a full virus, right?
I mean, there's so many open questions, so many open questions when it comes to this particular virus that we don't understand.
And I think, you know, if you have this huge pool of other sarbecoviruses spreading in bats in Southeast Asia, there is now increasingly a compelling interest to understand how these things truly behave.
I have two questions.
One kind of scary, and then one dumb, fun one, because I probably won't ever get to speak to a virologist, a real one, ever again.
The first question is, do you think, in your opinion, are we going to be dealing with this for the next couple years?
I mean, are we going to be seeing new variants spring up, and it's just going to be a matter of mitigating this latest pandemic?
Or do you think that with the vaccine, and as it gets further and further out into the world, that things will start to calm down a little bit?
Define this.
Fear of interacting with strangers.
Fear of interacting, yeah.
By personal paranoia about being heightened, you know?
These sorts of things.
Zoolineal anxiety.
Yeah, we'll be dealing with that for a long time.
I think every generation going forward will be more anxious than the prior one, but I don't know if that's related to virology.
Could you prescribe Jake, you know, maybe an anti-anxiety?
Can you get him some pills for what he's feeling?
Oh yeah, you don't want a pathologist to prescribe you anything, that's for certain.
But no, I mean, so big picture, we have never been good at getting rid of viruses.
So from a first order, that's why I asked the this part, it wasn't just being glib, it's like, from a virus standpoint, I mean, it's, I think a very, you look at the history, you've got to look at the history and say, you're gonna be doing this the rest of our lives.
Um, you know, it's here and we don't have, we're not good at getting everyone vaccinated.
We've got great vaccines.
Time is evolution.
So the faster that we move, the better we'll be in a space to get vaccine.
But you know, you look at this, you look at the history here and you wouldn't say that we're, you know, like 2009 H1N1 emerged.
I remember on the news here in Seattle and, You know, increasingly, like, influenza becomes a better analogy for these coronaviruses.
You say, okay, 2009, H1N1 emerged, and they shut the schools down, and we realized it wasn't actually, you know, as pathogenic as we feared.
And the newscaster asked us, so what happened with that?
And I'm like, well, it's still here 10 years later, and it probably killed 15,000 people last year, and people don't really just care or know or want to follow it.
And, I mean, I think that's one of the things.
It's probably the most likely thing for this virus.
It depends on how fast we can get these vaccines manufactured and made.
There's definitely a techno-optimism argument to be made, but it has to interact with our political system as well.
And that's why it's so important to come here and talk with y'all, and the work that you guys are doing is very important, right?
You've seen the leading predictor of getting vaccinated now is basically one's political affiliation in the United States.
Right.
And so that's a real, real, you know, real, real issue that we have to suss out.
Um, how we spread information.
I mean, this is our, this is our evolutionary advantage, is that we can get together and talk.
It's not like the virus gets to call up its, you know, its cousin in the Philippines and say, hey, you gotta try this E484K mutation.
Like, it's really awesome.
Um, and it can do it on demand.
Like, we get to do this.
We get to do this with masks.
We get to do this with vaccines.
We get to do this with behavior.
And this is how we, we, we fight.
Um, and that's why it's so important.
But, but I do think that this virus will be with us probably the rest of our lives And because it is, and because of that, it will be...
It's going to be concerning.
It's just going to be difficult to deal with because it's always sort of on the agenda.
It's always there.
When you get a cold, a fever, you know, like, you're always going to wonder.
It's going to be back in your mind.
Yeah.
And that's just what's going on right now.
But the most important thing right now is what we do in the next year.
Like, the current time is the most highly leveraged time because right now this virus starts at a point and it starts to spread out in different lineages.
And certain ones get better and better and better, but if you can try to, like, just contain as much as possible, you know, we're seeing, what are we having to deal with now?
We're having to deal with the fact that a bunch of people in the South Asia were not vaccinated as of three months ago, and that's going to soon be the dominant strain in the U.S.
And so, like, it's just, it really comes down to sort of getting those vaccines out there as fast as possible, and especially our really, really good ones.
But, but, anyway, it's, uh, it's... I wish I were more optimistic, but we've just never shown the ability to do this before.
Doesn't mean we can't!
Yeah.
Does not mean... It's not, it's not, um... So I'm not really fore... I don't want to forecast anything, but this is what should happen.
I, I just, sort of, it's more just sort of... This is what has happened.
Yeah, no, that was an incredible answer to a kind of unclear question, so thank you for that.
And then my second question is dumb, and it's of the fictional virus movies.
I'm talking the Andromeda Strain outbreak in the 90s and the latest one, Contagion.
Which was your favorite slash thought was most realistic?
I mean, I gotta go with Contagion because it was shot, I was in the lab, one of the labs where it was sort of shot.
No way, really?
They came into UCSF and they renamed all the building, they renamed it Mendel Hall.
And, you know, I remember all of the, I'll say it, sorry, but all the women in the lab got very excited because Jude Law was in the building.
Oh yeah, I mean, of course.
whatever year it was and they were all trying to find the shot. I remember that
shot, the shot that they did, one of the shots they did that one of the days
like they had a delay and delay and delay and people just got so tired like
everyone got everyone's experience of movie making of just like waiting around
yeah perfect light. But Jude Law, Jude Law was the conspiracy theorist so you're
saying that there are female virologists who were perhaps thirsting for the
conspiracy theory guy. Well we didn't know!
I don't know if they had told, if they had really casted it out that strongly, but at the time they were very excited that Jude Law was in the building, and if they could go find, you know, see where he was at.
And they kind of like hid a lot of the cast in sort of some of the conference rooms until like the light was perfect, so it wasn't really easy to see.
But it was kind of cool to see that, and they did give a nice shout-out to sort of the work that was going on in the Bay Area at that time.
Well, in my country, it's the reason that our government actually did their vaccine response so well, because Matt Hancock, who's our Minister of Health here, he was asked in a radio interview, you know, oh, how did you know before any vaccines had properly been made to procure so many from so many different companies?
And he literally was just like, oh, I watched Contagion on Netflix, and it seemed like it was a real big issue in the movie, that all the countries are scrambling to get the vaccine once they've been made.
I just thought I'd do some pre-orders and fair enough, he was right.
That's right, life imitates art.
God damn it.
We're speaking with Dr. Alex Grenager.
Thank you so much for enlightening us today.
Is there anything you'd like to plug before we let you go?
The vaccine.
The vaccine.
The vaccine is awesome.
The mRNA vaccine is awesome.
I mean, there's like very seldom in vaccinology do you get to make a vaccine that induces like even such a better response than actually getting infected with the virus.
I mean, this is really an important thing.
I think people don't really totally grok.
You know, typically they'd be like, oh, not typically, that's not what I'm saying, but like, you know, other people would be like, oh, I'm gonna go get, you know, a chicken pox or something like that, and I'll get, you know, like, all right, well, you still get chicken pox, but they're focused on the immunity.
But this one, it's like, not only do you not have to go through, you know, the entire, actually getting COVID, the risk of long COVID, you know, all the other, you know, risk of dying, the risk of passing it on to your loved ones, you don't have to go through that.
And you get a better immune response than if you'd even gone through all of that, which is just nuts.
And so that's one of the things that's just so amazing about these things.
That's why you keep seeing over and over and over.
I mean, like, you know, a new variant comes out and they're like, it's still good.
Like, all right, it induces such a strong response that even when a new virus comes out that's going to, you know, literally decimate it, I mean, take it down, take the response down by 90% potentially, it's still high enough to provide protection.
At a high level.
But we have some really great vaccines and we just gotta make a bunch of them.
We gotta convince people, or not convince, I don't mean that's the wrong, like a transitive verb.
It's just like, understand what people are concerned about them.
We gotta get them through full FDA licensure.
And we gotta keep monitoring these guys.
But, I mean, there's nothing bigger right now than what you can do and what you have with these vaccines.
If I gotta plug something, it's like, it's number one, two, and three.
No, this was really, really fascinating, and I think really, really enlightening, and it was a pleasure having you on.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
I mean, I really, I do want to, I really appreciate what you guys do, and also the help to help understand what people are thinking about when it comes to sort of this virus, because it takes all kinds, and it's, humans are, humans are funky, and it's really hard to to try to help people understand what's going on with this
virus, even after, you know, whatever, 18 months of talking about it, that it can always be
changing things. There's always something new with it. So I really appreciate what you guys
do. Thanks for listening to another premium episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast. Your
support keeps us advertising free and editorially independent. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
We usually stream twice a week at twitch.tv slash QAnonAnonymous, and for everything else, there's QAnonAnonymous.com, where you'll find merch, a link to the Discord, access to the lost episodes, music from the show, all that good stuff.
Annie, where can people find Vaccine the Human Story, your new podcast that I believe already has an episode out, right?
Maybe even two?
It's got one episode out yet and the episode two is actually being uploaded as we speak, so it will almost certainly be out by the time this episode is.
Cool.
Yeah, you can find the podcast account on Twitter at twitter.com slash vaccine podcast and you can find us on Spotify, iTunes, Google Music, YouTube, is understandably a little bit leery of a show which has got vaccine in the title.
But you can find the links to the accompanying videos on the social media.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
Here's my song, here's my focus song right from here in Manchester.
You can stick your New World Order up your arse.
You can stick your New World Order up your arse.
You can stick your New World Order, where the sun don't shine but water.
Stick your New World Order up your arse.
Singin' we are the 99% Singin' we are the 99% Singin' we are the 90 Together we are mighty We are the 99% The Queen'll be arrested in her dressing gown The Queen will be arrested in her dressing gown.
The Queen will be arrested in her, 'cause she is such a sinner.
She'll be arrested in her dressing gown.
If you can stick the 5G tower up your arse.
If you can stick the 5G tower up your arse.
You can stick your 5G tower, it's a microwave on full power!
Stick your 5G tower up your arse!
Singing we are the 99%!
Come on!
Singing we are the 99%!
Singing we are the 90!
Together we are mighty!
We are the 99%!
There'll be blue skies when the chemtrails are all gone!
There'll be blue skies when the chemtrails are all gone!
There'll be blue skies when the chemtrails and their evil plan fails!
