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Oct. 22, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:07:57
Edition 585 - Sharri Markson
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Hey, thank you very much for being part of my show.
Remember, you can always communicate with me by going to the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and send me an email from there.
I love to hear from you.
Thank you to Adam as ever for his work on getting the show out to you and for curating the website.
Couldn't do it without him.
And thank you to you for being part of this.
I'm not going to waste any time here.
What you're about to hear is the complete version of my conversation with Shari Markson, award-winning Australian investigative journalist, works for the Australian newspaper Sky News Australia and others, and her extensive and diligent research under the title of What Really Happened in Wuhan.
It's about the origins of coronavirus, what we have been told, and the great amount that we haven't been told, and personally I think it's a must-hear.
Sherry Markson has clearly given a lot of her time to this and continues to do so and you can hear the results of it.
So this is the conversation that was broadcast on the radio show.
There might be just a little bit more of it here on the podcast.
I put it all together for you to hear, so I'm not going to say any more.
Thank you very much for being part of the show.
Don't forget, please to connect with my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
That's the one with my logo and no other one.
And, you know, you can always use the website to communicate with me.
Please keep checking in on both and tell your friends about this show.
All right, let's get to Australia.
Shari Markson.
Shari, sorry for me going on like that about all of this, but I do feel quite strongly about the fact that questions about coronavirus and its origins seem to have pretty much gone away.
I don't know whether you got that feeling in Australia.
I think you're more on it there than we are.
What do you think?
Well, good evening, Howard.
It's wonderful to be with you and especially to be speaking about this important subject of how the virus started.
I agree with you.
This has been a failure of many aspects, the scientific community, the intelligence community, our governments, but also the media industry.
And I think on the whole, the establishment media globally didn't properly throughout the whole of 2020 investigate whether the virus started as a result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan or there was no proper interrogation into the official Chinese narrative that this was a naturally occurring virus that just innocently happened from human contact with an infected animal.
So I think, you know, that's not to say there weren't journalists who did it and journalists in the UK as well who covered it very well.
Ian Birrell, he writes for the Daily Mail, often he's one of them.
The Sunday Times Insight Team also have done a couple of excellent investigative pieces.
But on the whole, this was a topic that wasn't really touched and it was treated as a debunked conspiracy theory.
And it's absurd that journalists, investigative journalists, the media companies they work for, including the public broadcasters, our ABC, it's the version, it's the equivalent of the BBC, treated this as a conspiracy, even attacked me for investigating this topic.
And how is that appropriate that we just believed China on the origins of the virus when we could see they were spreading misinformation very early on when it came to the outbreak, when it came to things like whether the virus was even contagious and the extent of the situation and the gravity of the situation in Wuhan?
Isn't it strange that some people were not necessarily tackling you for your thesis, but they were tackling you for the fact that you actually asked the questions in the first place?
I don't think there are many cases in history, in recent history, certainly, where we've been in a situation like that.
Well, that's exactly right.
Look, I started investigating this and reporting on it in March and April of 2020.
And at the time, I just started writing straight news stories.
One of them was a world exclusive revealing that intelligence agencies were investigating whether the virus had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That was a straight news story revealing that they were looking at this.
It was a front page story and it went around the world.
And yet for that, as I say, the ABC, our public broadcaster, did a media watch segment that used the word conspiracy five times.
There was a real sense of pushback in The Guardian as well and other kind of liberal left-wing media.
This real pushback to anyone who even wanted to report on the fact that there was an inquiry, that this might have been a laboratory leak.
I ignored those critics and persisted.
My day-to-day job before I wrote this book, I'm the investigations editor at the Australian newspaper.
It's a national broadsheet paper in Australia where I am and host on Sky News Australia as well.
So I persisted.
And the more I looked into this, the more unusual things there were.
And the story just started unraveling.
And it was so huge and it was so complex.
And there were so many cover-ups in different fields, which I'm sure we'll get into, but it was quite extraordinary.
And so it ended up being this all-consuming story.
And it was too big to fit into one newspaper report or even a series of newspaper reports.
So eventually I knew, and I'd never wanted to write a book before.
It had never been an ambition of mine, but I knew I had to write a book because there was no other way to tell this detail, this incredible detail of the cover-up in China than the cover-up in the West as China's official narrative took hold.
The official narrative of the world's largest authoritarian regime took hold at the expense of finding out the truth for why now 5 million people have died and all of our lives have been turned upside down.
People lost their jobs.
Nothing will ever be the same again.
Well, you know, you know, we're reading here in the United Kingdom that various companies, including British Airways, are rehiring people, and we're starting to grind back into something that kind of resembles normality.
You know, until, well, hopefully it won't hit, but until the next wave or problem hits with this.
Let's hope that doesn't happen.
But we seem to be getting there.
But people seem to be sweeping this away.
Now, I want to get into the detail of this then, because it seems to me that this story works on two levels.
The actual narrative itself is quite simple, but the detail around it is incredibly complex.
Let me ask you first of all, your documentary and the book are peppered with interviews, insights, and comments from a lot of important people.
I mean, in the documentary, we see you interviewing Donald Trump.
You talk with the former head of MI6 here in the UK, Sir Richard Dearlove, Mike Pompeo, who used to run the CIA and, of course, was very close to Donald Trump through all of his years.
How did you manage that?
Just before we start unraveling this incredible story, I was just gobsmacked, as we say here in the UK, about how you were able to achieve what you did achieve.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
Thank you very much.
Well, I didn't have these contacts to begin with.
I didn't have these.
I have excellent contacts in Australia, of course, but I didn't have these contacts when I started this journey.
But the more I kept reporting on this, the reporting was recognized internationally.
And because, as I said, not many other people were doing it.
So very quickly, my reporting on this topic, my investigation on this topic, which started in the newspapers and on Sky News, it was seen, it was recognized, it was read by very senior figures in the United States government and the Trump administration.
Intelligence officials became aware of it and many others.
And so that opened a doorway for me to actually be able to conduct interviews with these people because they were aware of my work.
They knew I was investigating this, taking it seriously.
And some of them were grateful that a journalist was probing this area because my investigation has included speaking with whistleblowers in Wuhan, speaking with Chinese sources, Chinese defectors also now in the West.
So I think that was why I was able to get that sort of access.
And often when you, as a journalist, interview one person, then they might say, well, have you spoken to so-and-so?
Or else I would say, would you mind please passing on the private email address or mobile number for whoever it was?
And so I was able to get in touch with others as well.
And that's how, as we know, that is how sometimes the magic happens.
But let's say this right up front, though, three quarters, that's a high proportion of the scientists that you approached for this, did not want to talk with you.
Well, so if I was to make those approaches now, there would be a very different situation.
Now, I would say the majority would be happy to speak.
But remember, when I started investigating this and when I made those approaches, this was considered a conspiracy theory.
And scientists were not speaking publicly about this.
Very few were.
And so that's a reflection of that.
That's not a reflection of me, as some have tried to turn it around, but it's a reflection of when I started making these approaches, when I started writing this book, this was still considered a conspiracy.
Now, there have been groups of scientists who have put their names to letters that they've published in scientific journals and medical journals saying that a lab leak needed to be investigated.
They hadn't done that.
And this is, you know, I personally and many people should feel enormously let down by the scientific community because they knew that a lab leak was possible.
The lab accidents are very common.
They happen all the time.
They knew it was possible, but they didn't say a word throughout the whole of 2020.
They let this Chinese cover up about the potential real origins of this pandemic that was engulfing the world, the first pandemic we've had in a century, to this extent.
And they didn't say a word until after Trump had left office because they were too scared of being seen to side with Trump.
So I think the public should feel very let down by the scientific community.
It seems to me, Shari, that there are a number of key planks in this story.
One of the most important is right up front, because chronologically that's where it happens.
The origins of this are much earlier than we believed.
In fact, they're as early as October and possibly before that.
Talk to me about that because there were three people who got sick, weren't there?
Very, very early on.
And there was also a general hubbub and talk and atmosphere, knowledge that something amiss was going on around Wuhan.
Yes, this is something that I did uncover through the course of my investigation, that actually the outbreak was far earlier than we knew.
So China admitted there was a virus December 31, 2019.
Then the international community had sort of thought that the virus started in November.
But in fact, I found that it most likely began in September.
In the middle of September, the 12th of September, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took its virus database offline.
That's the database that contains the details of 22,000 viruses.
That very same day, they pulled the virus database offline and then they issued a tender for security contract to beef up both security guard, CCTV.
They also spent money on a new air ventilation system, on a new air medical incinerator.
So they start spending a lot of money in a pattern that is, you know, that spending spree isn't replicated in their priced tender procurement data.
These were tenders uncovered by a cybersecurity company, Internet 2.0, and also a China analyst who helped me on this sort of detail for the book.
He's Actually, based in the UK, his name is Luke McWilliams.
And we have to say, Shari, sorry to jump in, that this is a very key part of your investigation because you were able to unearth material that had been or thought to have been erased or disappeared from the internet.
Yeah, no one had access to this material, and so they analyzed it.
They also found that there'd been a buy-up in PCR equipment in 2019 in Wuhan, Wuhan specifically, and the second half of 2019.
So you've got that going on.
The virus database comes offline.
There's suddenly this beefing up of security and replacing of equipment at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And then the next month in October, that's when John Ratcliffe, he's the former head, he's the former director of national intelligence for the United States.
He oversaw the 18 intelligence agencies.
And it's that month in October when he tells me that the workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell sick in what he believes, and Mike Pompeo also told me he believes, was the very first cluster of the pandemic.
But we were told, weren't we, and sorry again to jump in, that case number one was in November, late November 2019.
Exactly.
So this intelligence that the United States uncovered, and I include in my book in great detail how this intelligence was uncovered and when, the moment they found it and who the players were who uncovered it.
And it's quite a dramatic and exciting scene.
But that intelligence is crucial because it takes the pandemic back to the Wuhan Institute of Biology.
And it says that those scientists were the first, well, that's what it says.
That's what John Ratcliffe and Pompeo say.
They believe they are the very first cluster of the pandemic.
And all of this information was disappeared.
Now, this also centers on another pillar of both the book and the documentary is the woman they nicknamed Bat Woman, the woman responsible for overseeing research into bat viruses at the WIV, Xi Jeng Li.
This person, apparently, her team uncovered something that for them would have been gold dust, a great bat virus in a cave.
And it seems that that may be the origins of what, I mean, it's not the whole story by a thousand miles, but it seems that that may have been the origins of what we're talking about here.
Yeah, I mean, look, these trips were crucial because they were going to the Yunnan province to a cave or a disused, abandoned mine, the Mojang mine, and they were collecting bat samples from there and other caves as well.
But in this particular cave, they found a bat coronavirus sample that had a genetic sequence identity of 96.2%.
So it was 96.2% genetically identical to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
So you've got the world's closest virus in that cave.
Now, remembering that the virus database had been pulled offline, so we don't know what other samples they found in that cave, whether there was one that had a closer genetic sequence identity, or whether they were manipulating similar viruses, maybe other relatives, in gain of function experiments.
And they might have created a chimeric virus that could be SARS-CoV-2.
Of course, there's a lot of speculation about, you know, might could, but nevertheless, as you say, the virus from the cave was, I think, 96.2% what we know as coronavirus.
And the mystery is around the 3.8%.
Well, I just want to go back to that might point.
So you have, prior to the pandemic, there were only two laboratories in the world that were doing gain of function research on coronaviruses, only two in the world.
And we have to just say for my listener, gain of function research means that if you modify a virus like this, it changes its ability to do things, including infect people, humans.
Exactly.
So it gains new function.
So a virus might be able to infect humans when it couldn't before, or it might be able to become airborne, for example, where it couldn't before.
So they're genetically manipulating coronaviruses to give them new functions, to make them more deadly often and more transmissible or infectious.
So only two labs in the world prior to the pandemic that were doing this sort of research on coronaviruses.
And one was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It also had the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses.
And this is the city where, you know, this virus breaks out.
Plus, there's all this unusual activity that I've already detailed and much more, much more in the book.
So it's kind of beyond doubt now that the virus did leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The question is, in my opinion, the question is whether it was a leak of a natural virus that the scientists had collected or whether it was a leak of a genetically modified virus, which, again, in my opinion, is the more likely scenario, given we know that the sort of research they were doing was creating chimeric viruses.
They were messing around with the spike protein.
This is exactly what they were doing.
They were taking genetic sequences from one virus and putting them in a backbone of another virus.
They were using what's called humanized mice to see if the viruses could infect humans.
This is exactly the type of dangerous Frankenstein-like research they were doing.
It isn't, though, asserted.
Well, it's asserted, but it's not proved, stood up, that they weren't doing this as a way to make a bioweapon.
I mean, it would be the perfect bioweapon.
You know, not even Donald Trump believes that that was, you know, that there is evidence to support that assertion.
Right.
So this is a question I, again, delve into in the book and I look at what the facts are.
So the facts are this.
The scientists were doing this research, they said, in order to predict or prevent a pandemic.
They wanted to see which viruses were capable of infecting humans.
Therefore, they were making viruses that could infect humans to see which could cross that threshold.
So, their purpose, their stated purpose, if you believe them, of course, but their stated purpose was to try and prevent or predict a pandemic.
But I also uncovered during the book, and I'm an investigative journalist, so I lead with what I can uncover rather than my opinion or what I think might be the case.
But I do lay bear just factually all of the links between the Chinese military and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And this isn't complicated.
This is, you look at their research papers, you look at the scientists who are authoring the research papers.
And many of their research papers are done, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in conjunction with Chinese military scientists who were working in labs that are run by the PLA, the People's Liberation Army.
So this is not a complicated area.
It is clear.
It is black and white.
This was combined Chinese military and Wuhan Institute of Virology research.
Now, to go back to your question, that doesn't mean it was to develop a bioweapon.
That means you have to ask, why was the Chinese military involved in coronavirus research?
Why were they interested in it?
And again, I then go and present brand new documents that we were able to unearth for the book.
Again, one document was uncovered by another UK-based researcher, Jack Hazelwood.
He found the Chinese government's official submission to the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention in 2011.
That might seem a long time ago, but they only have these conferences every five years.
So this was the second last conference, and it was the last one where China submitted a detailed document, a detailed submission.
I won't go on, but briefly in the book, it details this document.
It is the most horrifying, terrifying document I have ever read in my life.
Official Chinese government submission to the Biological Weapons Convention of 2011, where China talks about how this type of research, man-made pathogens, can pose a latent threat to mankind.
It talks about its bioweapons application.
It talks about even more horrifying, like the most despicable research I have ever heard of in my life, which is modifying viruses to infect certain races and certain genes.
This is what it discusses, right?
It's saying this is what it's worried about.
This is what this technology can do.
And it even talks about laboratory accidents.
There's a whole chapter on this in my book.
So, you know, you just have to look at the facts, irrespective of what anyone says.
The facts show there was Chinese military involvement in this lab.
The scientists seem to have good, honorable intentions.
In my view, the facts indicate that this was a laboratory accident, a leak.
It wasn't intentional because there was such a big cover-up straight afterwards.
You know, the drama of them suddenly pulling the virus database offline and trying to beef up their security.
They kick everyone out of the lab for two weeks when there's this blackout period consistent with a sterilization effort at the lab.
So this is all that's unfolding in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
So, you know, was it part of a bioweapons program?
You can't definitively say no to that question when you look at all the evidence.
Okay.
And you say that that was discussed in that paper that you read with those appalling suggestions in it.
It's one thing to talk about it.
Of course, it's quite another thing to do it.
And that is the moot point at issue here, isn't it?
Exactly.
And will continue to be.
And exactly.
So I quote, but that paper had never been published before.
No one had ever read that paper before.
As I say, that's in my book.
That's a chapter in my book quoting.
I quote the paper so people can read it.
China's own submission.
Did that mean they were doing that research?
No.
But then I go and interview other experts who do say that China was increasingly interested in coronaviruses and viruses as bioweapons and for various reasons.
I mean, I interview them about why that might have been the case.
But, you know, at this point, you can't say for certain one way or another, but we do confidently know, I present the evidence that there was Chinese military involvement in that lab.
And look, and that's one of the things with research in any Chinese laboratory, really.
The scientists might have very honorable intentions, but under Xi Jinping's civil-military fusion, you don't know how that research might be misused for China's military modernization.
So fundamentally, even though there are people, and you know this, who disagree with the take that you have on all of this, but nobody could deny that there is a complete lack of transparency.
And if there was more transparency, we wouldn't need to be asking the questions that you are asking.
Yeah, well, I don't know if people could disagree with it because the facts are there.
And so, and I've been able to uncover them and I present them.
But either way, there is no transparency.
And so that's another whole question in itself.
Why was America, for example, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into coronavirus research at a lab where it had no oversight, where it literally had no way of knowing what viruses were being created?
We still don't have access to that virus database, even though United States funding went into it.
Isn't that astonishing?
Is the Biden administration, as far as you know, addressing that issue?
No one's addressing it.
No one's addressing it.
I mean, Trump stopped the funding for the EcoHealth Alliance.
That's the United States not-for-profit organization.
And the money was given from agencies like the NIH, you know, Fauci's agency.
It was given from his agency to EcoHealth, and then a sub-grant was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Again, for the book research we did for the book, I found that there were 660 scientific papers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that were funded with United States funding, but yet we don't have access to that lab.
We were funding, not we, when I say we, I mean the West, I'm Australian, but we were funding that lab, but yet now we can't access it.
We can't get its records.
I mean, this is astonishing.
And you look at the bigger picture here.
It's not just about the origins of the virus, although that is extremely important to know why 5 million people have died.
I mean, almost as much, and it will end up being as many as the Jews in World War II.
But the bigger picture here is millions of dollars in Western funding is pouring into Chinese laboratory and the same rules apply.
We don't have access to the records.
We don't have oversight.
We don't have transparency.
And we have no way of knowing how the research is potentially being misused for China's military modernization at a time when China is becoming more aggressive, particularly in our region here, you know, where I sit in Australia.
So we've discussed, Shari, the fact that there was a lot of untransparency, bad word, you know, less than transparency involved in all of this.
Let's take a look, because I'm fascinated by this, at your account of the early stages of recognition of what was going on in China.
You know, there is, I've got 11 pages of notes that I've made on your book here.
There is, especially in the January of 2020, there is a lot of failing to recognize what in particular the United States is dealing with.
You say there was an 11-day delay in the first serious meeting about this in Washington.
The CDC, Center for Disease Control, informed the National Security Council on January 3 they didn't have a meeting about this until the 14th.
That's 11 days when the CDC said there was, quote, no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
That, of course, was discovered to be completely wrong not very long later.
But there were a lot of delays on the Washington, on the Western side, weren't there?
Look, we didn't realize, no one in the West realized just how big of an issue this was.
I mean, viruses emerging in China, that's not particularly uncommon.
And so the people I interviewed who were very senior in the Trump administration thought that this was just going to be a regional issue.
They assumed it would just be contained to China.
And it was only a few people in that administration who saw that this was going to be extremely problematic, partly because they were in touch with the Chinese dissident Wei Jing Sheng, who I interviewed as well as part of my investigation.
And he, well, here's how I start the book.
He found out about the coronavirus in October 2019.
So there were people like Matt Pottinger, Miles Yu, Pete Navarro, Robert O'Brien, and several others, Mike Pompeo as well, who really saw that this was going to be a big problem and were trying hard to warn the president and his other advisors.
And, you know, I interviewed both sides here and I recreate some of those scenes, as you know, in the book, where they were having these arguments in the Oval Office, in the White House, in the situation room.
They were having these arguments about whether to ban travel from China, how big a problem this was going to be, how many deaths this was going to cause.
And so you got a real sense of what I did.
And then I recreated the, you know, I've included the dialogue there so people can see what was happening.
There was a real conflict here.
But there's no question there was a massive failure in the West to put in place measures that could have protected us early.
And my view is that's because China was lying and then the World Health Organization was repeating China's lies.
And it's as simple as that.
The World Health Organization is so culpable here, so responsible for the global spread of this virus.
And it's just extraordinary.
You say effectively in the documentary and the book that the World Health Organization, because of its professional contacts with China in many ways, on many levels, was simply blindsided by this.
So effectively, you say, accepted the narrative of the Chinese.
And you say in the book, and we know this, that in the new year, it was clear that scientists in China were being stopped from talking about all of this.
So that should have raised red flags and alarm bells everywhere.
Well, the World Health Organization was completely and still is completely beholden to China.
And so it was just repeating China's lies.
I mean, for weeks, the World Health Organization and China told the rest of us that the virus wasn't contagious.
There was no human-to-human transmission.
This is the most infectious virus we've ever seen.
It was a lie.
I mean, the World Health Organization put out public statements objecting to travel bans.
And travel bans were what protected countries like Australia from getting the virus for so long.
You know, travel bans, had they put in place in Europe, look, we don't know how things could have turned out differently, but it might have been a much better situation than what we had.
Either way, it was utter misinformation from Dr. Tedros and the World Health Organization.
And indeed, you do remind us that it wasn't until the 11th of March, I'd forgotten this, that the WHO declared coronavirus a pandemic.
I thought it was earlier than that.
I thought it was February.
It wasn't.
Look, it's extraordinary, and yet we are still turning to the WHO to do an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19.
It is incapable of doing such an inquiry.
It is incapable.
It is beholden to China.
It is a useless organization that failed to protect us from a pandemic.
That is literally the World Health Organization's sole job to protect the international community to try and contain pandemic outbreaks, sorry, to try and contain outbreaks to stop them turning into a pandemic.
It literally failed in its only job because Tedros and other senior officials are puppets for the Chinese communist regime.
Of course, they would vigorously and do vigorously deny any such suggestion.
I mean, they would deny that, but you look at the facts and it's exactly what happened.
This is exactly what happened.
So it's an appalling failure of the World Health Organization.
It failed to protect us.
It failed to do its job.
Apart from the headlines in the book, and there are many of those, there are some fascinating sidebar stories that aren't really sidebar stories because they're real eye-openers.
You tell the story of a Chinese journalist, I hope I'm pronouncing this right, Lijie, who sneaked into a locked down Wuhan in February of 2020.
I mean, this Wuhan, the epicenter of it all by that point, they had a real serious problem there, but we were not getting to hear of the scale of it.
And you recount how he talked of being more scared of filming there than he was when he filmed in North Korea.
Can you talk to me about your contact with him and that expedition?
So I have to be very careful because obviously anyone in Wuhan who assists any Western journalists, but particularly me, it would be a grave threat to their life.
So what I did was some of the people I've changed their names.
Some of the whistleblowers I've changed their names.
Others wanted to be completely anonymous.
And, you know, we don't know the true number of people who have gone missing as a result of trying to sound the alarm to the rest of the world about COVID-19.
But there are many, there are potentially hundreds.
There are many people who tried to, and these are citizen journalists, doctors, activists, scientists and others who tried to tell the rest of the world that there was this virus, there was this outbreak of the coronavirus.
It was dangerous.
It was deadly.
China was covering it up.
Many of them were so brave.
They did it in videos on YouTube.
They showed their faces.
And we know some of them have never been seen again, ever.
One of the people I highlight was Cheng Kuishi.
He's a young lawyer.
I highlight him both in the book and the documentary.
And he was amazing.
He went into Wuhan.
He got the last train into Wuhan.
He was uploading videos to YouTube.
Literally, he was going into hospitals and filming the dead bodies.
And at the same time, China was giving fake statistics about how it didn't really have a problem and the situation was contained, et cetera.
And he was showing the world.
And eventually he disappeared.
I highlighted his case, as I say, in the book and in the documentary because, and I chose him out of so many, just because of his bravery just resonated and touched my soul.
And I wanted to honor him because he was so brave, right?
Gave up his life.
And then a week after the book and documentary came out, he resurfaced for the first time in 600 days in the back of a friend's video.
And he said something like, I can't tell you where I've, I can't talk about some of what happened to me, but, you know, I'm okay or something.
It was some scripted line.
And then now it's quiet again.
So we don't know whether the Chinese Communist Party just produced him to counter the book and the documentary or whether he genuinely is okay now.
You know, again, he's disappeared.
He resurfaced for that brief moment in the video.
And now we don't know what's happened to him.
So it's, I think this is just one of the most heartbreaking things that there were so many people in China who gave up their lives or risked their lives to tell us what was going on.
And yet we disrespected them by just blindly believing the word of the Communist Party regime that this was a natural outbreak, an innocent outbreak, instead of questioning it and listening to what the whistleblowers were trying to tell us.
And, you know, Shari, even if I have listeners, and I'm sure I will, who say they don't care about what happens in China, that's a matter for them.
If they want to be secretive about stuff, well, you know, my life goes on.
I can still see my favorite programmes on the TV.
Why should I worry?
Well, they should worry because the point you make very clearly with an expert in Australia that is a key plank of both the documentary and the book, the point that you make is that we lost, because of that secrecy, because of that cover-up, however all of this emerged, whatever the mechanics of it were, we lost vital weeks in which this threat could have been not exactly neutralized, but certainly made an awful lot easier on all of us if we had had those vital weeks.
Now, that's not to excuse the politicians in countries like this one who didn't respond properly, but the essence of it, as you say, is right there.
I mean, the problem is what happens in every Chinese laboratory could affect every single one of us.
That's the whole point.
These viruses are so contagious, so deadly, so infectious, and then they're messing around with them to make them even more deadly, even more contagious, even more infectious, and on top of that, able to infect humans when they couldn't before.
So what happens in every remote Chinese lab can affect every single person on this planet.
And that's what we've seen potentially with this pandemic.
And so it is a problem.
And, you know, we might be emerging from the lockdowns now, but heaven forbid, what if there's another variant that is more deadly?
Like we don't know where we're going to be in two years' time, five years' time, 10 years' time.
As Nikolai Petrovsky, the scientist you refer to, as he says in the documentary, our children's children will still be dealing with this.
And they will say, as you just said, why didn't they contain it in the early days?
And if China had been transparent, if they had said there's an outbreak, if we had closed their borders, And of course, this is another point that I'm sure your listeners know about: that at the exact same time that Wuhan was in lockdown and people were literally being nailed into their homes, it was such a strict lockdown, China was still allowing international flights out, spreading the virus around the world.
Oh, you won't tell us about it here in the UK.
We got them.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
So, look, that's the problem.
Even if this was a complete accident, even if it was a natural virus, totally innocent, no blame on the Chinese Communist Party, the decision to allow it to spread around the world was deliberate because those international flights were still happening while people were being nailed into their homes in Wuhan.
And why is all of this important now?
Well, the reason is, as Professor Petrovsky told you, I thought he was an excellent guest in your documentary and an excellent person to quote in your book.
The fact is that this is the perfect virus.
We now have the Delta varius giving the world a headache.
Who knows what's coming down the track?
And as he and people don't want to, a lot of people don't want to accept this.
But the fact of the matter is that this thing has found a great host in us and is not going to let go of us easily.
Absolutely.
And that's what I just said.
We don't know about whether there might be another variant that's even more deadly or more infectious.
Heaven forbid that there's not.
But he says there might be because this is already a virus that when it emerged was perfectly adapted to infect humans and it can't infect bats, Petrovsky says, yet it was perfectly adapted to infect humans over and above any other animal.
That was something he found out as a result of his research and his simulations with the supercomputer early last year.
But he couldn't get his research published because the scientific journals were blocking from publication science that questioned a natural origin.
They said it needed to be peer-reviewed.
But yet other science that said a loud lake was a conspiracy that was opinion, that was a letter.
They did some of the most prestigious journals in the world did allow that to be published.
And a question that we raised at the beginning of this, and I'd never heard before, is that from all of that data that had been erased from the internet, but you were able to unearth again, to resurrect, you discovered that the Chinese had been buying coronavirus testing equipment, high-level coronavirus testing equipment, very early on in all of this.
And one of those units went to the lab in Wuhan.
Exactly.
So this was Internet 2.0, the cybersecurity experts who have advised the Australian and United States governments before.
They analyzed the procurement data for all of China going back years and specifically looking at, well, they were looking at a range of things, but one of the things they looked at was PCR equipment, coronavirus testing machines, and to test for other pathogens and DNA sequencing as well.
And they found that there was a huge buy up in Wuhan specifically in the second half of 2019.
So that's a really interesting data point.
And it's not conclusive on its own, but you put it in with all of the other evidence that I've been able to find out as part of my investigation and that has come to light.
And we need answers.
Why was China buying PCR equipment in the second half of 2019?
What was going on at that time?
When did the outbreak first start?
Of course, you say we need answers and we do.
But if it's decided that we won't get answers, then there's not a lot further we can take any of this, is there?
No, absolutely there is.
I mean, this is the problem.
There were a lot of people in the West who were funding the research at the Wuhan Institute of Biology and also were working in conjunction, doing the research with them.
And those people haven't ever been called to any inquiry.
There's been no subpoenas.
No one's investigated their documents, looked at their emails.
It's been up to journalists to put in Freedom of Information requests to get scraps of information.
And often a lot of it is redacted.
And this shouldn't be how this unfolds.
I mean, you think back to the downing of flight MH17 by Russia.
We had an international investigation.
Russia is no more transparent than China.
It's also authoritarian regime, totalitarian regime.
And we were able to get answers there.
There was an international inquiry.
This hasn't happened yet with China.
I mean, the WHO is not independent.
We already know that.
So we've had no independent investigation.
And at the very same time that places like America and Britain and others are criticizing China for its lack of transparency, well, America's own agencies who have a lot of information are not being transparent either.
So I think this is a really big problem.
This is very hypocritical and we need a proper inquiry that looks at the information that is available to us in the West.
And particularly, just as one example, EcoHealth Alliance, as I said, that group that was sending the sub-grant, the funding to the Wuhan Institute of Biology, it had put in proposals for funding to one of the defense agencies in the United States that was rejected.
But that proposal had some very risky experiments, very risky.
And, you know, we don't know, did that research end up going ahead?
Who funded it?
These are still questions that we don't know, but every day we're getting more information.
And of course, gain of function research, there's that term again, was banned under Obama, as you chronicle and document, and then resurrected for a period under the Trump administration, but then the funding for that was pretty quickly cut down, closed off, as Donald Trump himself said to you.
Yeah, well, so there was a debate in the United States about whether to ban gain of function Research for some years.
It's very controversial.
And there's a group of scientists, they set up a group called the Cambridge Working Group, and they were objecting to gain of function research, or research.
It's not just gain of function, it's also research involving potential, sorry, potential pandemic pathogens or pathogens basically that have the potential to cause a pandemic.
And so eventually in the United States in 2014, there was a pause on gain of function research in 22 fields, which included coronaviruses.
Then that was lifted in 2017 in the Trump administration.
And I asked Donald Trump, you know, I put the question to him why he allowed that to happen.
And, you know, he said it was Fauci's decision and the decision of others working for him.
And I again pressed him on it because this is very risky research.
But I do have to say that while that was a failing of his administration, that was categorically a failure of his administration, even when the ban was in place under the Barmer administration, the problem is that funding was still flowing through to China to do this research.
So this risky research was banned in the US, but yet it was still flowing through to China, where these dangerous experiments were happening.
And Anthony Fauci has said in an interview that the research, the coronavirus research was being funded in China to avoid an outbreak in America.
That's exactly what he said.
He said.
Well, that's the whole crux of the whole thing, isn't it?
The reason that you might do research like that is to try and see what threats might be coming down the track so that you can counter them before they emerge.
But many scientists say that has never happened.
No pandemic has ever been prevented by creating a new virus that is so deadly that it can now transmit to humans.
That has never been shown to actually prevent any outbreak or preventative treatments.
So they question the benefits in the first place.
But secondly, that point of Fauci is that he was funding the research, his agency and the NIH and other agencies were funding the research in China to prevent an outbreak, as Anthony Fauci said in Hoboken, New Jersey or Fairfax, Virginia.
I mean, again, that's just such a failure to understand public health, because as we've seen, an outbreak in Wuhan leads to an outbreak in every corner of this earth.
As we have discovered to our cost, and let's hope that the scale and speed of this is going to decline further, but we simply don't know.
Shari Markson, we're talking about what really happened in Wuhan.
And Shari, I think you would agree with me that the important issue here is the asking of the questions.
You know, we are pretty much two years into this crisis as far as we know.
And it seems to me that the number of people who are actively asking questions appears to be, well, all I have is the media that I read and look at, appears to be diminishing.
So, you know, I think, and this is a personal view, it's vital that people like you ask the questions.
Otherwise, where are we going to be left?
I think it's such a problem that our governments seem prepared to move on and that there's not much political will to get to the bottom of how this virus started and that they're just happy to let the WHO do another inquiry, even though the WHO failed in its first attempt.
And I think it's worth remembering that Australia was the first country to call for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
And the person who did that was our foreign minister, Maurice Payne.
And when she called for the inquiry, she specifically said that it shouldn't be conducted by the WHO, that it should be some other independent organization.
And yet we still haven't had that.
And, you know, in a couple of months, it's going to be two years since we found out about the outbreak.
It's already two years since the outbreak, according to the information I've uncovered.
So how long until we're actually going to have an investigation?
And is there going to be any information left at that point?
I wonder if, and we can only speculate, part of the problem is you say in the book that one of the reasons the media didn't get hold of this, certainly in America, to the extent that they should have, was that these questions were associated in an election campaigning year with Donald Trump.
And the American media, a lot of it saw Donald Trump then as toxic.
And if he was advocating something, they weren't going to talk about it or they were going to belittle it.
And you make the point in the book, that was a major facet in the key questions not being asked.
Yes.
So look, it was already dismissed as a conspiracy theory from the very start of 2020 by conflicted and compromised scientists who had been working with the Wuhan lab.
Donald Trump was asked about this at a press conference in April 2020.
And that was the first time he said there was evidence that the virus leaked from a lab in response to a question at a press conference, April 2020, four months in.
At that point, you know, you can't separate this issue from the fact that it was an election year and just, and you can't separate it from the fact, from just how hated Donald Trump is and was by the media and by the scientific establishment and by, you know, well, half the population.
America is very divided.
And so because Trump had said there was evidence of a lab leak, that meant that the media and everyone who hated him was intent on dismissing it and ridiculing it and saying it wasn't true.
Now, you know, Sir Richard Dearlove's words, when I interviewed him, he said...
Yes, he said that in a sense, Trump contaminated the issue.
That was the phrase he used.
And, you know, that's obviously accurate.
But another way of looking at it, which I suppose I do because I'm a journalist and I expect I want politicians to be honest.
And so when he was asked that question at the press conference, I mean, should he have lied?
Should he have not said there was evidence for a lab leak?
When there was, when we know there was, we've seen some of that intelligence now.
It's been declassified and I've also uncovered other parts of it.
So he, you know, of course he had to be transparent.
It's just unfortunate that this issue became so politicized.
That's the devastating thing, that this issue became politicized.
So that anything that came out of Donald Trump's mouth, and look, you know, people have differing views about Donald Trump.
We know that some people love him and some people intensely dislike him.
He polarizes people, as you said.
But because those words were coming from Donald Trump's mouth, they were not getting the kind of coverage.
I think that's a point in your book that stands up very well, I think.
I did say at the beginning of this that not everybody buys the narrative that you put together here.
I mean, you must have spent every living moment of months and months and months researching this, Shar.
It's a very impressive work.
Let's say this right up here.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I read a review in The Guardian.
You referenced it yourself.
Professor Dominic Dwyer in Sydney told The Guardian, quotes, I understand such theories arising in the very early stages of the pandemic, but even since the WHO visit to Wuhan early this year, there has been continuing emerging evidence for animal links and none for biowarfare.
People confuse investigations into the origins of the outbreak with assessment of the responses to the pandemic.
That's what he said.
They also quote an Australian virologist, Danielle Anderson at Melbourne's Doherty Institute, who worked at the Wuhan Institute on bat viruses, and she's spoken very highly of the professional standards in place there.
So there are two pushbacks against what you're saying here.
What do you make of those things?
Well, firstly, Dominic Dwyer was commenting on my book when he hadn't read my book.
He says in that piece, he hasn't read my book.
So I don't know how you can comment on something you haven't read.
Secondly, he was part of the failed WHO team.
He's a World Health Organization investigator.
He went into Wuhan.
He was part of the team that produced this nonsense, rubbish, discredited report.
Well, of course, on the other side, it means he has seen it from the inside, which you haven't.
But they failed.
No, they failed.
He failed.
They failed.
They were in Wuhan for two weeks.
They spent three hours at the lab.
They said that that was just to address conspiracy theories.
They never asked to see the virus database.
How can you not ask to have access to the virus database?
They never asked.
That WHO team was also comprised of, you know, Peter Dajik, who'd been working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and funding their research for 15 years.
He's from EcoHealth Alliance.
On the China team, there was someone who was literally involved in China's cover-up of the virus.
He had issued the gag order to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and others not to talk about the virus.
Like this is such a compromise study.
So, you know, I don't know Dominic Dreyer, but my book is extremely, and I have been extremely critical of that report, along with many other people all around the world.
Every nation on earth, virtually, except for New Zealand, you know, condemned the World Health Organization's inquiry, saying that it wasn't good enough.
Even Tedros walked away from it the day it came out.
This isn't just me criticizing it.
The director general of the WHO, the day that their report came out, he said they didn't investigate the possibility this was a laboratory accident adequately and there needs to be another investigation.
So that's Dominic Dwyer.
And of course, the point about professional standards at the lab.
Well, you know, we're down to point by Danielle Anderson.
We don't have to, we don't need to disagree with that, but I'm sure accidents and difficulties happen at any laboratory, however professional it is.
Of course they do.
They happen in America and the UK and Australia.
They happen all the time.
They're very common.
But the point also is that Danielle Anderson was working in the BSL4 lab, and most of Shizengli's research into coronaviruses was in BSL2 or BSL3.
So she wasn't in the same laboratory as Shi Zheng Li.
You're very close to this story now for understandable reasons.
I mean, your book is 400 tightly packed pages.
I know that because I went through it yesterday.
The documentary is incredibly detailed.
As I said, you've lived and breathed this for a year and a half by the looks of it.
Yes.
It doesn't strike me that you're going to let this go now.
Are you going to take this further?
Is there more research that you can do?
Yes, absolutely.
I think there's a lot of avenues, not just me.
Some of the things that need to happen, it's not in my ability.
I don't have the ability to do that.
For example, we know that the military world games in October 2019, we know that many athletes fell sick after they attended those games in Wuhan.
Now, athletes have blood samples taken all the time.
Someone needs to go back to the blood samples that were taken.
And as you say at those Wuhan military games in October 2019, there were, I didn't realize this, there were representatives from not just a few, but 100 countries.
Exactly, all over the world.
So someone needs to go back and test those blood samples, confirm, you know, confirm whether those athletes did have COVID-19 as they believed.
Like that's just one, you know, starting point that's accessible to us in the West that we don't need China's cooperation for.
As I say, that's not something I personally have the ability to do, but I'm just using that as an example of there's so many more areas of research available to all of us, not just me.
There are other things that I am pursuing still.
I'm breaking stories all of the time on this topic, but there are things that I don't have the physical ability to do to get hold of their blood samples and test them.
But that needs to happen as one example.
And I think in our own lives, and you must know people, I know people and have been affected by this Myself.
There are those of us who've had, very early on in all of this, very weird bugs, as we called them.
And, you know, I'm still, I mean, look, let's take my own case.
I don't miss shows.
The show that my listener is listening to now has been on every single Sunday night on talk radio for five and a half years.
I do not miss shows.
You know, if I can't be there very, very, very occasionally, then I'll make sure I record something, but I'm always on.
At the very beginning of February 2020, I had the weirdest virus I've ever had in my life.
I even, for a very short period, lost my sense of taste.
And I thought, this is weird.
Because normally you lose your sense of taste when you're really bugged up with the flu or a cold or something and you lose it for a while.
I lost my sense of taste for half a day with being able to breathe clearly, but feeling really, really sick.
It made me terribly ill for 10 days.
10 days I was out of it.
I never really got any answers.
But in my gut, I've always felt this was here and moving amongst us here in the UK much earlier than we have been told.
So, you know, let's add another question to the pile.
When did it start to get into countries like the one that I live in?
Well, exactly.
And if it's the case that as some officials I interviewed for the documentary in the book believe that the military games was the first so-called super spreader event, then, you know, it could have been circulating in other countries after that in very late October and November 2019.
But again, you know, we can get answers to those questions if we go back and test the blood samples that were taken of those athletes at the time.
So there's so much more that we can do to actually get to the bottom of this.
And it's not what the World Health Organization is doing.
They're not doing that.
I wish I could devise an inquiry with some other journalists or experts.
Or indeed some kind of independently impaneled expert body that's independent of everybody, governments included, to look into this.
I don't know how you would do it, but we do it after wars.
So we should certainly be doing it for this because this has been like a war.
It still is.
Exactly.
One of the kickers in the documentary and in the book was the revelation that there are still a welter of classified documents.
There is classified information outside China.
I'm talking on our side, the Western side.
There are classified documents that would add further fuel to this gathering fire.
We're not getting to hear about them.
So that's another aspect that you have unearthed.
Yes, that was a revelation from John Ratcliffe, who was the director of national intelligence in the United States.
As I said, oversaw the 18 intelligence agencies.
And I said to him, is there more evidence that hasn't been publicly released yet?
And he said there is.
He said, there's significant intelligence and evidence that hasn't been declassified.
And then I, you know, in the interview that wasn't played on the documentary, because you can't fit everything in.
And of course, with each of the people I interviewed, there was actually a very long interview behind the scenes.
And I interviewed John Ratcliffe for well over, I think it was probably close to an hour and a half.
And so he said to me that when he and Pompeo and others made the decision to declassify some of the intelligence, that, for example, the workers had been sick with COVID-like symptoms and that there was Chinese military involvement in the lab, you know, they took that decision, but they didn't declassify other intelligence at the time because it would have risked the sources.
So the human sources or he, you know, he didn't go into it, but it would have risked their intelligence gathering capability.
But that's always going to be a problem, isn't it?
The sources of this information, if they are within China, are always going to be at some risk.
Exactly.
Or it could have exposed, if it wasn't people, it could have exposed their methods.
But his view was that when they put that out, they expected that there would be a strong reaction from China, that China would go, oh, wow, you guys now know the virus started at the lab and that these people got sick and were the first cluster, these scientists.
And they, you know, John Ratcliffe told me in this interview that wasn't broadcast, that was the part of it that hasn't been broadcast yet.
He said that they expected some sort of cooperation from China after that, but it never came.
And so his view is that now that now that we can see China was not going to cooperate, his view is more of the intelligence, whatever that bombshell intelligence is, more of that, and that's my word, not his bombshell, more of that strong evidence should be declassified.
That's his view now is that it's now China's not going to cooperate.
We've seen that.
So now the Biden administration needs to declassify more of it.
And he did say that on camera, of course.
It's difficult, just at the very end of this, Sherry, for reasons that we understand.
China is a very important power and questioning China is a difficult thing because for starters, I'm sitting here in my apartment surrounded by equipment.
The microphone that I'm speaking into was made by a famous American manufacturer of broadcast gear, but it was assembled in China.
A lot of the electronics that I'm looking at right now, including the computer that I'm using at this moment, was made in China.
I've got some bits of British and American gear too.
But our ties with China are deep, very, very deep.
So this is going to be very difficult to do without opening cans of worms that we might later wish remained unopened, don't you think?
Well, I think 5 million people have died.
I think, you know, you think about it, when one person is murdered, the whole community demands answers.
There's uprisings.
There's calls for justice.
And of course, that's the way it should be.
But this isn't the case of one person being murdered.
This is the death of nearly 5 million people.
So, you know, we don't have an option here.
And it's not just the deaths, but it's how everyone's life has been impacted.
And, you know, we're only emerging right now out of lockdown in Sydney, Australia, by the way.
And that's not even to talk about the economies that have been decimated as well.
So we don't have a choice.
We have to get to the bottom of this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, you've only got to look at the UK shari to see the issues.
And, you know, in my own personal life and in everybody's life here, you know, I've had virtually two years sucked out of it all.
I don't know where the two years went.
And that, I think, for everybody leaves, a lot of people talk about mental health issues.
I think for a lot of people, there is a mental health issue here.
If they didn't, if they were lucky enough not to lose somebody or have somebody seriously impaired, I've got a friend I worked with.
She's young and vibrant and talented.
And she has been debilitated to the point of having to use a walking stick by long COVID.
It has affected everybody everywhere.
So, you know, in my humble opinion, and I'm sure billions of other people agree, we do need to investigate more and we do need answers.
Yes, we need to move on.
But, you know, I agree with you.
We need to be on this and on this and you can do that more.
Yes.
You can do both.
You can move on with your lives while demanding answers for why that happened.
And as you say, there are so many people who have serious mental health issues as a result of the isolation and the lockdowns.
And I don't know about you guys, but we had an increase in teenage suicides here because of the lockdowns.
And so it has affected everyone in different ways.
Shari, thank you very much for giving me your time.
I know the world and his wife, as we say here, want to interview you.
So I was very lucky to get this conversation with you.
And I can hear that you've worked so hard on this.
I will say to my listener that the book has to be read.
If you have the time to read a 400 page detailed book, then what really happens?
It's very readable.
That's the first thing.
It's a story.
In my ton of notes here, one of the first things I've got written down is that the book is excellent and it reads like a thriller.
You know, it doesn't read like just a dry account.
It reads like a thriller.
And this really happened.
That's why the book has to be read.
And the documentary is just excellent.
Sherry Markson, thank you very much.
No, thank you so much for a wonderful conversation.
I really appreciate your interest.
Shari Markson, who I have to say I have huge respect for for the amount of work and the diligence and determination that she's displayed in all of this.
Your thoughts, welcome as ever.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link, and you can email me from there.
And when you do email me, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Thank you for being part of it.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe in this world.
Stay calm.
Above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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