Jeffrey Sachs is Chair of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission which has been created to help speed up global, equitable, and lasting solutions to the pandemic. The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is among the world's oldest and best-known general medical journals.
Jeffrey Sachs is a world-renowned professor of economics, leader in sustainable development, senior UN advisor, bestselling author, and syndicated columnist whose monthly newspaper columns appear in more than 100 countries. He is the co-recipient of the 2015 Blue Planet Prize, the leading global prize for environmental leadership, and has twice been named among Time Magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders.
Hey everybody, I'm really delighted today to have an old friend to talk to us.
Jeffrey Sachs is the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
He's the president of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
He's the winner of the 2015 Blue Planet Prize, a best-selling author, and a chairman of the Lancet's COVID-19 Commission.
The commission was announced, as I recall, I think in June of 2020 by Richard.
And then you're joining the commission, happened in November 2020, and you assembled a task force for the prestigious medical journal, 190-year-old medical journal, to determine the origins of COVID-19.
You hand-selected, I think, a number of the commissioners, but most notoriously Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance.
And to be chairman of the task force, Daszak was essentially forced to recuse himself in June of 2021.
And then you shut down the commission altogether in September of 2021.
And you did something incredibly courageous, which was to publish an article in PNAS, which has gotten a tremendous attention.
I'm sure you're getting a lot of both negative and positive feedback.
Blowback from that, essentially saying that your belief is that the best evidence is that the COVID-19 virus came from A Chinese lab that it was based upon US-funded technology.
And I would have to agree with you on that, having done a lot of research on it myself.
But let's talk about how you got involved in it in the first place.
Were you approached by Richard Horton?
Yeah, so Bobby, great to be with you.
Really fun and an important topic.
Let me just fill out a few of the details and just correct a little bit of the detail on that, because to put it clearly, I'm chairing a commission for The Lancet called the Lancet COVID-19 Commission.
It's issuing its report in mid-September.
So the commission continues.
Within the Commission, I established 11 task forces.
So some were on how to respond to the pandemic.
Some were on the financial crisis that emerged around the pandemic.
Some were on other issues about public health.
But one of them, one of the task forces, was about the origins.
And that's the task force where I asked Peter Daszak to chair and essentially to organize the task force.
So for each of these 11 task forces, I designated a public health expert or diplomatic or financial expert and then gave them or requested of them, since this was all on volunteer time on everybody's part, to organize a group of international experts to work on this.
I was chair right from the beginning of the process, which was the middle of 2020, just as the pandemic was reaching the first half year.
And it was around that time Richard Horton and I talked and thought that a commission would be a good idea, by the way, not only to Review all that happened.
We didn't know how long this would last, but also to make some recommendations along the way of how to try to keep this under control, how to make sure that there was health equity for desperately poor people who needed access to medicines or hospitals or protection or face masks or whatever it is.
And Richard Horton asked me to head this and to organize it.
The commission itself is...
40 public policy leaders from around the world, former president of the UN General Assembly, former president in a European country, several scientists, many financial experts, and so on.
But for me and for us in our discussion today, One part of this assignment was, so where'd this come from?
And I can tell you at the beginning of my engagement in this issue, well, even from the beginning of the pandemic itself, I assumed this came out of nature the same way that SARS apparently came out of nature in 2003, 2004.
In the case of SARS, best guess is that it really was an animal sold in a wet market in China that was carrying that virus.
MERS, which is another coronavirus in the Middle East respiratory syndrome, was carried by CAMEL. I assumed, okay, this is yet another one of these so-called zoonoses.
And I thought, who knows a lot about that, but the guy who's looking at these viruses in the wild, Peter Daschuk.
So I asked him, well, you're around this.
You know what's going on in China.
Why don't you establish the task force?
So it's interesting for me.
You know, I was not in any way on the lab leak side of things at the beginning.
In fact, I thought that doesn't sound right.
And I remember explaining in a very learned way to a good friend of mine, no, no, no, that's not right.
This is a natural sometime in the spring of 2020.
So what we're talking about, Bobby, is my education also, because I got to watch this story very close up by some of the principles involved in making the case that it's from nature, from the swan, Which is the one that is featured in, say, the New York Times stories in the last few months about the scientists finding the origins and so forth.
And I can tell you that over the period of two years, I was lied to so many times Daszak told me so many things that were not true, was the opposite of transparent.
I had to tell him, well, you can't head this task force.
And even later, soon after that, you can't even be on the commission.
So I didn't disband the commission, but I did take him off of the task force.
And then And it keeps coming, by the way.
The task force members were dishonest to me after I was completely clear with them.
I want to know what your potential conflicts of interest are.
Are you involved with EcoHealth Alliance, with DASHIC? Are you involved with Wuhan Institute of Virology?
Are you involved with NIH in a way that we should understand that there may be a potential conflict?
And Bobby, none of them told the truth.
Maybe that's not shocking, but it was surprising to me because these are some of them, people that I've known, I would say personal friends in some cases, for 20 years.
They absolutely did not tell the truth when I asked them clearly, explicitly.
So that was one part of the story, my growing story.
Oh, dismay, consternation, that something is really, really wrong about this.
And then on the other side, as those who follow this story, and you are certainly among the lead in that, the Freedom of Information Act and Leakes's One by one, were demolishing the premises of the natural spillover story,
but also revealing the utter transparency and misdirection that the U.S. government was leading basically but also revealing the utter transparency and misdirection that the U.S. government was So we were not hearing the truth.
Again, why am I surprised?
But it's dismaying to see it come out step by step in this way.
And what is absolutely clear to me is that there are two viable hypotheses about the origin of this.
And one of them is out of a lab and there's nothing outlandish about it at all.
And in fact, like you said, I think it's the odds on it.
I don't speak for the whole Commission in that regard.
What the Commission sees is that there are two viable explanations.
But I can tell you two years into this, with all the deceit, deception, lying that I've seen the scientists on the Huanan market side vastly overstating or misdirecting.
The gaze and the absolute absurd, sad, worrisome, frightening unwillingness of The U.S. government starting with NIH to look closely at the lab hypothesis.
It's really very telling.
So that's just to set the scene.
I started on the other side, but I watched very closely.
And like all of us, I've been an avid reader of the drip, drip, drip Of information that has been pried out of the hands of NIH, because they're not talking, they're not forthcoming, they're not being honest, Fauci's not telling it like it is.
By drip, the story's coming out, and it's a very worrisome one.
My approach to this was different than yours because I approach with this enormous skepticism that I've cultivated that basically has grown unwillingly in me since 2005, watching Fauci very carefully and watching the journals and how they've devolved.
And in fact, in 2004, Richard Horton made the statement that the scientific journals, particularly the Lancet, had devolved into propaganda vessels for the pharmaceutical industry.
And Marsha Engel, at the same time, published her book, who was a longtime publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, basically saying there's nothing in the journals that you can believe anymore.
So much of our revenue comes from pharma.
And now The Lancet is owned by Elsevier, which is a very, very wealthy company that's getting basically Pharma as its partner and China.
And throughout the pandemic, we watched Horton do all of these kind of underhanded things where he had to retract articles.
They published the article on remdesivir that allowed them, even the World Health Organization was saying, this stuff is poison, it doesn't work, it has no efficacy.
And he published the article for Fauci that allowed Fauci to then go get approval for this very, very deadly drug.
He had to do the retraction on the surrogosphere studies.
He tried to discredit hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in any kind of early treatment.
I want to make this clear.
I so admire your integrity on this issue and your willingness to publicly change your mind, which is so admirable.
My father's, one of his favorite quotes was from Askless, which was, it's not a crime to make a mistake.
Essentially, the only crime is not admitting that you did it.
The great sin is pride.
And that gets us in so much trouble when people are unwilling to change their minds.
So I know that most people who come from here and my background assume that the government was and the pharmaceutical industry were kind of doing their best.
And it was hard to believe that, you know, and I've watched people, I had to come to my own set of revelations, and over time, I know you had to come to yours.
How many people were on the Wuhan Commission, essentially, the Origins Commission?
Of the task force.
Not the commission, task force, just to use the verbiage.
I think it was 10 to 15.
All of them, by the way, basically handpicked by Daschig.
A lot of those guys...
We're the same virologists and immunologists and biologists who had signed on to the Lancet letter, which it turns out Daszak had secretly orchestrated.
Yeah, so let me just give you the background on that.
I asked each of the task force chairs to organize their task forces under a broad rubric, which was international diversity, gender diversity, professional background diversity and so on.
By and large, out of 11 task forces, 10 did so.
And Daszak surrounded himself by his colleagues, basically.
As time went on, and people immediately attacked me, and I said, by the way, And I meant it from the first moment.
I only want to know what happened.
I only want to know the truth.
There's no setup.
No one forced me to pick Dashing, by the way.
It wasn't Richard Horton or Lanson.
Nobody.
This was my blunder.
So I stepped into it right at the beginning, thinking, well, here's the guy that knows most of what's going on.
So I stepped into it.
He organized around it.
People criticized me in the fall of 2020.
You know, this is a setup job and so forth.
And I said, no, I'm a serious person.
I absolutely have no plan, desire, incentive in any way to steer this other than Towards the truth.
And I promised to do that.
And Republican congressman wrote to me saying, Daszak has to go.
And I said, no, no, no.
But believe me, he's not going to write the final report.
This is for the commission.
He heads a task force.
The commission will judge.
And I'm the chair of the commission.
And you can count on me to make sure that we look at everything.
And, of course, from the first moment, that was my intention.
And then people started to explain some basic facts to me about what was going on, what the research underway in the U.S. and in Wuhan were, the research that was so dangerous, so potentially the source of all of this.
And so at one point early in 2021, I said to Daszak, look, I need to see your research proposals to NIH because I'm hearing a lot of things.
And Daszak said to me, no, no, I can't give those to you.
My lawyers say I can't give those to you.
I said, what do you mean?
We're a transparent commission, and I need to see them.
No, no, no, I can't give them to you.
I said, well, Peter, then you can't be chair of this task force.
You have to stop that.
Then it became more clear in the days ahead.
He was lying to me about a lot of things, about what was and what wasn't going on in terms of dangerous research in Wuhan.
And I said, okay, you can't be on the commission either.
So I pushed him off.
I said, you've got to leave.
This absolutely is impossible.
I'm running a transparent, open, honest commission.
Then, what was interesting, Bobby, is that, of course, the other 10 to 15 members went after me.
What's the matter with you, Sachs, you anti-science, reckless, buying into the right-wing conspiracy theory and every...
Everything you could imagine.
And one of them was a friend of mine for, as I said, for probably about 25 years, who ripped into me personally, like I don't usually experience, but saying how...
He was who he was.
It's because of the personal thing.
Let me just mention the bottom line, though, which was hilarious to me, although a little sad, which was, as he was absolutely furious with my anti-science, out comes one of the FOIA documents, which is one of Daschig's NIH grants.
And who's a co-investigator?
This guy!
Which I had asked him.
I asked all of them, tell me, do you have any relationship?
Not a word.
So the guy's co-investigator.
Of course, it turned out several of them were co-investigators.
That's when I said, okay, this whole task force is being...
Closed.
We're not using this task force.
We're going to find other ways to get to the facts on this.
Oh, well, I can tell you other scientists then said, what are you doing, Sachs?
So reckless, so anti-science, after all of these people had lied.
And had prevaricated and had disguised their conflicts of interest and so on.
And then the next ones start to attack.
And then it turns out, okay, they're in it too.
And it's really quite a web, actually.
So that's one side of it.
I'd say there are three sides of this story that are absolutely fascinating.
One is this kind of web of Connection, conflict, pretty much all of them around NIH grants, around Tony Fauci and his group that he has supported.
That's really, really an unpleasant part of this.
The second thing that we learn Is from the FOIA releases themselves that, and you know it, but it's amazing to see, actually.
I find it pretty low life.
I don't expect more of government in general, but when it is in the scientific side, I kind of still hoped that there was more integrity there.
But from the first day that we know of NIH Taking its hand on the public response, which I put it, February 1, 2020.
It may predate that, but February 1, 2020 is a now notorious secret phone call that Francis Collins and Tony Fauci organized with Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome Trust and a group of virologists.
And that group Pretty much all of them said on February 1, hmm, that looks a lot like a lab creation.
Not just a lab release, a lab creation.
And it's interesting and important for people to understand why.
And so I'll digress for one moment.
This SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is like SARS-1.
But it's got one little bit of its genome that makes it really infective and very dangerous, and that is what's called the furin cleavage site or the proteolytic cleavage site.
And four amino acids in this long or 12 nucleotides in this 30,000 nucleotide virus make it far more dangerous than SARS-CoV-1.
What happened at the beginning when this virus was sequenced and people looked at it, they said, oh, this thing has a furin cleavage site.
And they said, whoa, where'd that come from?
And one of the immediate hypotheses is, well, someone stuck it in there because the furin cleavage site is an intense object of scientific research interest because it was known Actually,
since SARS-1, that if you take a SARS-like virus and you stick in a furin cleavage site at what's called the S1-S2 junction, boy, you make that virus potentially a lot more lethal, a lot more pathogenic, a lot more transmissible.
So it was an object of scientific interest that went back to SARS, the original outbreak.
And it was a real intensive object of interest of The NIH-funded group from 2015 onward.
So the point is, on February 1, 2020, the virologists looked at this and said, whoa, whoa, furin cleavage site, that's the only FCS, the only furin cleavage site in a sarbicovirus that is a SARS-like virus that we know of, and boy, that really suggests maybe someone stuck that in there.
Now, as you know, by February 3, the official story was, this is out of nature.
And by February 4, the first draft of what became a very influential paper called The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2, which was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, This is absolutely a natural spillover.
And by the way, it was that paper that I read that said, yeah, look, the scientists say it's a natural spillover.
It didn't come out of a lab.
But it was concocted.
So the narrative was concocted.
Within hours, basically, of a first phone call which held exactly the opposite view.
So that's the behavioral side.
And then the third part is the real research agenda.
So one is the strange behavior of the scientists around Fauci.
The second is the concoction of a narrative.
And the third is...
What was going on in science in the years leading up to this pandemic?
What we know is that there was a lot of focus on manipulating SARS-CoVs or sarbicoviruses and looking at whether they had furin cleavage sites or proteolytic cleavage sites and doing experiments to insert furin cleavage sites, what is called gain-of-function research, which we hear so much about.
That was not a small program.
That was a quite extensive program, and it was a program in which American really ingenious, though a bit terrifying science, with a lot of ingenuity,
was stitching together chimeric viruses, that is taking different parts to make a new virus, Or consensus viruses, building viruses by their genetic code, basically kind of as an average of known viruses, and inserting genes into existing viruses to change their, or to test their so-called spillover potential.
And that research program is just, NIH has done everything to keep it hidden from view, and we should thank groups like US Right to Know and The Intercept, which have done fantastic work to let us see what that's all about.
And as you know, Bobby, the shocker of all is a particular proposal called the DEFUSE proposal that was made by this partnership of EcoHealth Alliance, that's Dashix Group, University of North Carolina in the lab led by Ralph Baric,
and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so the three groups, to take Previously unreported strains of Sarbico viruses, and the grant proposal says that they have, this team has more than 180 previously unreported strains, and to test them for their spillover potential.
And what makes one's hair stand on end, at least mine, is that on the next page after saying we've got this whole portfolio of previously unreported viruses, it says, we're going to examine these viruses for whether they have a proteolytic cleavage site, and where there is a mismatch, we're going to insert one.
Well, at that point, the red blaring lights should go on because that's basically what SARS-CoV-2 is.
So if you needed a cookbook opened up to say, how do you make SARS-CoV-2, the DEFUSE grant actually does that.
And so what is the answer?
Oh, well, they didn't fund that, as if that's an answer.
What we know is there was a recipe, there was a desire, there was a large scientific program, there was a technical capability, and one day there was a furin cleavage site that has never been seen before in a Sarbico virus.
And that's where we are today.
And everything from NIH is don't look in that direction, Look over here.
Look at the market.
Well, we don't find any animals there.
We couldn't find any infected animals.
We don't have any idea how a fur and cleavage site could have come in.
Oh, there were two spillovers to make the timing work right.
But don't look over here, which is a...
Rather straightforward, parsimonious explanation that there was a large research program backed by Fauci, by the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Disease, NIAID, part of NIH, that planned, that hoped To insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-CoVs and to test for their spillover potential.
So that's, to my mind, amazing.
One of the problems, you mentioned that February 1st meeting, that teleconference that they had with Fauci and Perrar and Rambo and a couple of the other virologists, Chris Anderson.
The problem they had was that As you said, the COVID-19 virus was the same as existing viruses that they had.
In fact, it was 96.2% identical to another virus that they had from China.
And the entire difference, the entire 3.8% difference It was accounted by that fur and cleave site and the spike protein.
And as you say, that feature did not exist in previous coronaviruses of this family, but it did exist elsewhere.
It existed in some MERS viruses, etc., other types of coronavirus.
You could theoretically evolve that feature through mutations.
However, 100% of the mutations in coronavirus are on that cleave site, on that spike protein.
And if it was the product of natural evolution, you would see an equal number of mutations throughout the entire virus.
Oh, it makes it almost conclusive that all the mutations are just on that.
I actually was not that impressed by that diffuse proposal because I've been looking at the proposals going back to 2013 and they were doing Ralph Baric who is Tony Fauci's most favored fundee, he's received, I think, 187 grants, totaling probably $44 million or more from NIH. And he's the one that invented that technology.
He's the one that discovered how you could engineer, take the spike protein, Either create it from scratch or take it off an existing infectious virus and put it into a non-infectious virus and taught that to Shi Zhengli The Bat Lady from Wuhan and her boss, Lin Fan Wang.
And they were doing it back and forth since 2013, and they were describing it very openly.
So not only that, but Barrick taught her something even more sinister because there's no conceivable good purpose to it, which is a technique called seamless legation.
Which is a way of then hiding the human engineering of that virus.
Now there's no reason to do that unless you want to create mischief.
I mean, it's the inverse.
Of what you'd want to do if you were actually interested in public health.
You'd want to put red flags all over the human insertions.
But here they were weaponizing a virus, and then they were fingering out, they devised a way to hide the tampering that had weaponized them.
And Bobby, there's another thing that really, I know you know, and again, it was one of the things I did not know and should have known.
And that is that part of Fauci's responsibility is biodefense.
So after 9-11, DOD, Defense Department, moved in its biodefense, whatever that entails, whatever bioweaponry or whatever else it entails, but the biodefense department Into an IAID. So a lot of this work is around the biodefense, highly classified environment.
And of course, that means that the transparency, the understanding of what is going on here is so much less indeed than it might otherwise have been.
And I was rather shocked because I went back...
Again, I was very friendly with Fauci.
More than 20 years ago, I headed a commission for the World Health Organization in 2000, 2001, pressing to get antiretroviral drugs to poor Africans who were dying of HIV-AIDS. And Fauci was very helpful on that, and I helped to conceive of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.
And I worked with him on that.
And so we had a friendly relationship.
I had no idea that biodefense was under his authority until I started to hear all these doubts.
And I said to a scientist, I don't get it.
Why would Fauci be so insistent on whatever the particular issue was?
Is it because of his determination to make a vaccine?
He said, Jeff, it's because of his biodefense portfolio.
And so there's a part of this that we are having a very hard time hearing about and knowing about.
It's notable that Barrick wrote about even the potential Biowarfare with SARS-CoVs already back more than 15 years ago.
So when the first SARS came out, Barrick wrote a paper soon afterwards about bioweaponry and biowarfare.
He said one of the viruses that could be useful for this would be a SARS-CoV.
Well, is that what's going on?
Is that the agenda?
I don't know.
I'm not making...
Those claims.
But what I am saying is that we're not seeing the story.
And NIH is not telling us the story.
And the extent of that research, which you're right, goes back all the way to SARS-1 because it wasn't so soon after the first SARS outbreak that a A very clever scientist put in the FCS into SARS-CoV-1 and said, whoa, that increased the effectiveness a lot.
And then in 2009, they did it again.
And then Barrett, as you say, created this so-called reverse genetic system, which made it possible to manipulate these viruses.
And as you say, the seamless ligation, he calls it the no-see-um method.
It's the artist that doesn't sign his name to the painting, the virologist that doesn't put his signature into the virus to let us know whether or not it is produced naturally or emerging naturally or whether it is produced in a laboratory.
All of it says, my God, there was really a big, very risky research agenda underway.
And what's amazing to me Again, I'm sorry to say it because amazing sounds so naive in this context, but, you know, that's how I came to it.
I found it amazing, each step.
If you look at the original origins paper, it was the first published narrative, published in March of 2021 in Nature Medicine.
It set the narrative that this is natural.
It's ludicrous because when it comes to the question, could this have come out of a lab, it's almost unbelievable what is said.
It says, no, it was not out of a lab because the virus we see was not previously reported.
And then there's a footnote, number 20, which people can look up because all of this can be found online.
Footnote 20, Bobby said, is to a 2014 article, 2014, that they're using to disprove a lab outbreak in late 2019.
And that got published and was, by what I've heard, the most cited biomedical article of the year 2020.
Frankly, it's garbage.
Because on the crucial question, a real scientist would say, gee, we don't know what's going on here.
Could it have been from a lab?
Yeah, it's absolutely possible.
Here's how it would have done.
But I, the author, or we, the group of authors, don't know because we're not privy to the information of what was actually going on in the labs.
That would have been a scientific statement.
But instead, there is a narrative.
A willful misdirection because no serious scientist could say, no, it's not out of a lab because I cite a 2014 paper.
It's almost a joke.
Maybe it was a joke to them.
Let's see what we can get away with.
But they made a narrative out of...
Whole cloth or whole viruses or something to tell us, don't look in that direction.
And when you go to look back at that article, it's absurd, even on its face.
You don't have to be a virologist to look and say, that's ridiculous.
And then there's a new, a next article in 2021 in Cell, which is another very esteemed journal.
It's another game because in 2021, even at After the revelations of these dangerous experiments, this one says, well, this virus is not like The three or so reported viruses that were under research at WIV and then they have the audacity to say in that cell article in 2021 and
it would be illogical to use an untested virus They actually say that as if grown-ups are going to read this and say, oh, well, that puts any concern to rest.
And what's funny about...
I mean, it's not funny.
All of this is deadly serious.
Almost 18 million people dead from this pandemic, according to solid estimates.
What's amazing about this is that we know that they should have been curious about all of this and never showed one moment of curiosity.
And the specific point, I lost my train of thought for a moment, was that Barrick actually said, he explained the opposite of what was claimed in Cell, where the Cell article said, why would you use something new?
And Barrick, in a fascinating interview, by the way, in 2015, explains, oh, if you want a really powerful vaccine or drug, you need something that's really broad based.
So you have to hit it with every virus you can find.
He explains precisely the opposite of what is said in Cell as supposedly the reason why it's not a lab release.
Barrick says no.
I want to have every virus that I can get my hands on to test my drugs and my vaccines against because we know that nature is going to mix up all of this stuff.
So we have to get something that is quite general in its efficacy, not specific to one particular strain.
So Barrick was especially interested In that whole library approach, let's look at a whole big range of viruses.
He was also absolutely keen on the furin cleavage site because, oh, that's what makes this really dangerous.
So stick it in there, and then we'll see whether my drug works or my vaccine works, because he's trying to make antidotes or biodefense or whatever it is that he's actually trying to do.
So he wants the FCS, the fur and cleavage site, in there to be able to see whether his drugs work.
And there's another fascinating editorial by Beric, I think in 2017 or 2018, written as an editorial in a biomedical journal.
And Bobby, in that editorial by Barak, he says, why are they doing all of this control over our research?
UNC invested a lot of money in my BSL-3 facility and all this red tape.
Don't they understand how essential this work is for drug development?
And then he touts the fact that he's working with Gilead on remdesivir.
And he says, so, you know, we need to know.
We need to test it.
We need to do all these experiments because of all of this.
So there's a lot of fascinating stuff to learn that we have not even begun to have a serious look at in this country because we've been told very simply, look the other way.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, and one of the things you didn't mention was that Barrick also developed a humanized mouse that he bred to have the ACE2 receptors in their lungs to test not only whether you could give them the disease, but then induce them to cough and sneeze and pass it through respiratory vectors to other animals in the colony.
And he took those mice and he shared them with Xingzhen Li so that she had her own colony.
To do these terrible experiments on, which, you know, of course, there's no evidence that any of these experiments have ever done anything to develop a vaccine or avoid the pandemic.
I want to just fill in some of the history, which I'm sure you know about, so our listeners will know.
We had a huge bioweapons program in this country until 1969.
And Richard Nixon did something extraordinary, which he needs to get a lot of historical credit for, which is he stood up and said, we're getting rid of all of our biological weapons.
He didn't believe in them, and he thought they actually put us at disadvantage because America had nuclear weapons, and biological weapons could be made so cheaply, and they had nuclear efficacy.
So they were kind of a poor man's nuke.
And so he wanted to end the program.
They shut the labs and they got rid of the stocks, except the CIA secretly retained stocks and continued to illegally do these.
So we signed a bioweapons treaty at that point.
Then we had the anthrax attacks in 2001, one week after 9-11.
And the anthrax, as it turns out, came from Fort Detrick, which was a CIA military facility.
You can't make this stuff up, as they say.
Two people it was sent to were the two guys who were blocking the Patriot Act, which is Tom Dagenal and Patrick Leahy.
We shut down government, blamed it on Saddam.
We went to war against Iraq, and we reopened...
Are secretly...
One of the things that people don't understand is when they passed the Patriot Act, which they did directly because of the anthrax attacks, In the Patriotite, buried in those 1,300 pages, is a provision that essentially repudiates the Bioweapons Treaty.
It doesn't actually say the treaty no longer is operative, but it says no government official who is doing these kind of weapons development, U.S. government official, can be prosecuted for it.
So it gave the whole U.S. government immunity.
So the military, the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies wanted to get back into it, but they were nervous because under the original treaty, you could do vaccine development and defensive weapon development.
It was called dual use.
And the kind of science that you need to develop a vaccine is the exact science you need to develop a weapon.
So they were doing this kind of backdoor weapons development the whole time.
But the Pentagon was nervous about doing it themselves because they said nobody's going to believe that we're actually interested in public health.
So they began funneling the money through NIH and it went to Tony Fauci.
And he got $2.2 billion to do essentially weapons development.
Yeah, exactly.
It became the biggest part of NIH, just the giant there.
At the same time, the military gave him a 68% raise.
He became the highest paid person in the federal government.
His annual salary is $437,000, and the President of the United States gets $400,000.
Oh, but his continuation of that salary is dependent on him doing this weapons development.
And that's part of, you know, that's all part of the mix.
You know what?
Bobby, one of the things that's come out is one of the people that was hugely attacking me.
How can you say it possibly came out of a lab?
It's so unscientific and blah, blah, blah.
It turns out, had an NIH grant exactly for biodefense against laboratory creation or bioweapons use in addition to natural spillovers.
Yeah, I saw Peter Hotez.
Attacking you.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And that was part of his research agenda, was that you could have SARS-CoV come out of bioweaponry or out of a lab.
And he's attacking me even when I say it's possible.
No, no, it's not possible, not possible.
So it's...
It's really dismayed, but I thank you for that history.
You credit me too much because I actually did not know a lot of that, especially about the Richard Nixon part.
I was not aware.
Funny things.
But from 2001 onward, we know where all of this work is being done, and it's troubling because it's completely intermixed, intermeshed with this issue.
Yeah, and let me ask you one thing.
I don't know if you've been following this at all, but NIH was one of the big funders of the Wuhan lab, NIH and NIAID. But the much bigger funder is USAID. Yeah, yeah.
And then DARPA, the military.
The biggest is USAID, which is regarded by everybody as a CIA front.
Now, Andrew Huff, Who was the vice president of EcoHealth Alliance under Dayzak, and Dayzak's close friend, and who was a former intelligence officer himself.
He says that in 2015, during the Obama moratorium, when they began really laundering all of this money through Dayzak, because they wanted to get it out of this country, because Obama said, you can't do it anymore.
So they began funneling it to the Wuhan lab so they could do it out of the sight, out of reach of the White House.
And at that point, Huff, who was at that time the vice president, immediately the second officer, says that the CIA moved in and recruited DAZAC and EcoHealth Alliance as a CIA operation to do espionage, essentially, against says that the CIA moved in and recruited DAZAC and EcoHealth Alliance as a CIA And it's a complicated issue because you see the intelligence footprints all over this.
And Catherine Eben did these incredible stories for Family Fair, really good reporting, in which she said there were five State Department agencies who were investigating the potential origins of Wuhan.
And suddenly, essentially, an intelligence officer, Chris Park, shows up at one of those meetings and shuts the whole thing down and says, we cannot investigate Wuhan because U.S. intelligence agencies were funding the work over there.
And Park was also one of the participants in the monkeypox simulation.
And he's been involved for 20 years in all this biodefense stuff.
So then Biden turns to the intelligence agency.
So the State Department investigation is killed.
He turns to the intelligence agencies in the spring of 2021.
And he said, I want an answer within 90 days.
90 days.
And they come back and say, hey, we don't know what's happening.
So it's a whitewash and it's signed by April Haynes.
Yeah, by the way, amazing.
They say it's actually even the one public page is revealing, saying, you know, it might have come out of a lab, and then not a word from there.
That's the end.
As if, okay, well, that's interesting.
You actually, you just can't make this up.
The intelligence community said there's something to worry about here.
And then mum, as if You know, as if someone let in the skunk in the room and we're not going to talk about that at all.
So I read that stuff by Huff and I have no idea.
No one's telling me, but it was concerning.
And I found it interesting just to add another little piece to this.
You know, the British side, of course, which is tied into all of this with Welcome Trust and Jeremy Farrar, even in Jeremy Farrar's book about this in Spike, the first thing he says, oh, I heard about this.
So I picked up the phone and I called my deputy, who was the former head of MI5. And you say, oh, Welcome Trust's executive director is the former head of MI5. Why?
Exactly.
Exactly.
What are you doing?
This is supposed to be public health.
No, exactly.
And that's taken as natural.
That's a little weird.
And then someone said to me, a scientist said to me...
Before you continue...
Jeremy Farrar, throughout that book, is talking about how he was told by Dame, you know, Mannheim Bueller, who was the former MI5, who's his boss, that he needs to get a burner phone and He needs to destroy his contact list and they need to talk to each other through encryption from, you know, during the management of the pandemic.
And you would think during a pandemic you want transparency, you want public involvement, you want democracy, you want guidance and everything was secret.
Yeah, I asked one of the scientists.
I asked one of the scientists in all of this something about Farrar in the early days.
He said, yeah, Farrar's spook friends.
He told them that it could have come out of a lab.
Spook friends?
This is natural for the head of Wellcome Trust.
Obviously, there is an intelligence community part of this in one way or another in shutting down the discussions, or far worse, that we haven't heard about.
But all of it, again, points to the essential point which we, both of us, keep coming back to, which is that the parsimonious, absolutely plausible philosophy Frightening explanation of the origin of this virus is not being looked into.
We're told, do not look in that direction.
And there's a lot more to learn.
I'm going to let you go, Jeffrey, and this has been an amazing discussion.
Let me just ask you a couple of really quick questions.
Sure.
Did you have any contact with Tedros?
Yeah, a little bit.
Friendly contact, because I know him for a long time.
Okay.
But, you know, my sense, I don't speak for him, but my sense is he knows that this is an open issue.
I'm pretty clear about that.
Okay.
And how about Richard Orton?
Well, I talked to Richard, absolutely, because as head of the commission, I absolutely talked to Richard.
And let me be very clear about that.
I have run the commission as I've seen fit, and Richard has backed me to run the commission as I've seen fit.
And I really appreciate that very much.
So Richard has backed me.
I've gone after this issue.
I've tried to open it up.
And Richard has been supportive of me as chair all the way through.
And how about Bill Gates?
I haven't talked to Bill Gates about this.
That's it.
Hey, good.
Thank you so much.
Hey, that was good.
I really, really want you to read my book on Fauci as a skeptic or whatever, because I think you would really be interested in the HIV section.
Okay, good.
I'm sure.
And the whole African section, I think you would be...
