American Thought Leaders - Why We Need Legislation to Reduce the Risk of Lab-Generated Pathogens: Dr. Bryce Nickels

Episode Date: October 26, 2024

“We have a problem, just generally, that the scientific community is not actually set up to protect the public from the risk of accidents in labs.”Dr. Bryce Nickels is a professor of genetics at Rutgers University and the co-founder of Biosafety Now, an organization that aims to reduce the public threat of lab-generated pandemics.“Like any person that’s trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, occasionally, what you‘ll do is you’ll say things that are technically correct, but it’s used to deceive. And that’s what’s been going on for this use of the term ‘gain-of-function,’” says Dr. Nickels.In this episode, we discuss the Risky Research Review Act—legislation that, if passed, would establish an independent review board to assess whether the benefits of gain-of-function research outweigh the risks and determine whether that research should be done in the first place.“They believe that what they’re doing is so important that it’s okay to lie,” says Nickels, referring to how scientific and government leaders hid critical information about the origins of COVID from the public. “We want to make there be incentives to tell the truth, not to hide the truth.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

We have a problem that the scientific community is not actually set up to protect the public from the risk of accidents in labs. Dr. Bryce Nichols is a professor of genetics at Rutgers University and the co-founder of Biosafety Now, an organization that aims to reduce the public threat of lab-generated pandemic pathogens. Like any person that's trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, occasionally what you'll do is you'll say things that are technically correct, but it's used to deceive. And that's what's been going on for this use of the term gain-of-function. In this episode, we discuss the Risky Research Review Act. If passed, this legislation will establish an independent review board to assess the risks and benefits of certain gain-of-function

research and determine whether such research should be done in the first place. They believe that what they're doing is so important that it's okay to lie. We want to make there be incentives to tell the truth, not to hide the truth. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Dr. Bryce Nichols, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. I'm Jan Jekielek. Dr. Bryce Nichols, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you. I'm very excited to talk to you today. We were on a panel just recently together, and you came out as a huge proponent of Senator Rand Paul's and Senator Peter's Risky Research Review Act. Briefly get you to tell me what it is and why you're such a supporter.

So the Risky Research Review Act is a historic piece of legislation that would establish for the first time an independent review board, part of the executive branch that would be responsible for doing risk benefit assessment of high risk research that's going up for federal funding. The reason why that's extremely important is because right now and for the last, since, for decades, there has not been any independent risk benefit assessment for research that is high risk. And so just to be clear, what risk benefit assessment is, is a question of whether or not the research should be done or not. It's different from biosafety and biosecurity because those refer to the procedures and processes that you need to have in place for if you perform the research, you make sure that you don't have an accidental or deliberate escape of some pathogen from a lab. We're literally talking about whether or

not an experiment should be done. And that's sort you know, sort of a strange thought to some people because they want to just immediately go to biosafety, you know, but that's referring to can it be done safely, not whether or not it should be done in the first place. Okay. And so, and more specifically, you know, what are the kind of classes of research that fit into this? It's a very, very small subset of all life science research that would involve very high risk pathogens. Pathogens that if you modify them, they could become much more dangerous and cause a pandemic. So they're referred to as potential pandemic pathogens. The bill right now has a very specific list of pathogens that qualify for review under this legislation. And that's really important because it limits the scope of the bill to a very, very small subset of research. And it gets rid of one

of the key concerns, which has been key concerns of researchers, that if you have this board, that it will slow the progress of all life science research. That's not the case. There's only maybe a few dozen projects that would qualify for review under this legislation. And so it will provide protection to the public without any slowing down of essential research. So, Dr. Nichols, tell me a little bit about yourself. Politicians come up with all sorts of legislation for all sorts of reasons. You're putting your reputation on the line with this bill. I want to understand where you're coming from here. To be fair, me putting my reputation on the line is really not that... You can't really put much

on the line if you're putting my reputation on the line. I would say that, so I'm a professor of genetics at Rutgers University. But the reason I'm involved in this issue is because about two years ago, I co-founded a nonprofit organization called Biosafety Now, along with a colleague of mine at Rutgers, Richard Ebright, and another collaborator of mine who's not at Rutgers, who's at Cold Spring Harbor named Justin Kinney, who had to leave the organization in January, this past January. And I guess what I should say is the mission of that nonprofit is to reduce the threat of lab generated pandemics to the public. Fundamentally, that's our main mission. But we also are looking for accountability because one of the course,

the thing we haven't discussed yet is COVID. Where did COVID come from, right? And so right now, even Anthony Fauci himself says, we can't rule out that it came from a lab. Fauci and others, many virologists, think that it came from nature. But even if there was a 0.1% chance that it came from a lab, the fact that it killed millions of people and caused trillions of dollars of economic damage should provide some pause that we should do what we can to prevent that from happening again, even if it was a small chance. Now,

personally, I think it's a much greater than 0.1% chance. I think it's the most likely explanation for the pandemic. But throwing that all aside, a bill like this is a very nice piece of legislation to just finally do something to, you know, address the concerns that the public has had about the pandemic being caused by research. Because if you look at the polling on this, I think it's close to 60% of the public think that the COVID pandemic was caused by lab research. And what's astonishing is that the pandemic broke out, what, four and a half years ago? And there's been no, nothing, literally no change in the regulatory landscape for this type of extremely high-risk research. And so that's just negligent. So finally, this bill is a massive step forward because it will do something that's never been done before, which should be supported by everybody, simply just to say, if I'm doing something that could cause massive harm, maybe that should be looked at by somebody other than

me to make the decision about whether I should proceed. I mean, many people have kind of moved on from the origin question. And that's kind of absurd, given that the conference that we had yesterday, you know, was based on the things that happened downstream of the pandemic. But I'm really curious about your actual research, because you got interested in this because you have an understanding of genetics, an understanding of viruses. Well, so I do basic research. I study bacteria. I study aspects of what's called the central dogma of molecular biology. This is the way in which

DNA is converted into RNA. There's nothing relevant about my research to me supporting this bill. What is relevant, I guess, is the fact that I have a PhD, I run a lab that's funded by the NIH, I have some understanding about the impact this bill will have on life science research, which is minimal. I made a point yesterday on the panel about that we're all still working with limited information, right? And it's not just information that's hidden by China. It's also information hidden by the U.S. that should be not hidden by people in the U.S. Everybody in the U.S. that has some connection to the research that might have caused the pandemic, they have not been fully transparent. They have not been forthcoming with

government officials that are trying to investigate this. There is a concern, of course, because the U.S. government likely have, well, likely has culpability at some level, that there's only so much that the U.S. government wants to sort of dig into this before they're going to, you know, sort of like try to, you know, start spinning their wheels. Like, ah, we can't make any more progress. So since we're having a discussion trying to figure something out and we don't have all the information, it's hard to even, for me personally, to try to weigh probabilities. But I think I said yesterday that the biggest sign to me that this is a lab accident

is the fact that the virology community as a whole seems to be hell-bent on making the public convinced that it's not a lab accident, publishing laughably horrible papers. When we have documentation of private conversations that the virologists were having when they were putting these papers out, and they're stating things in private that are contradicted with papers that they're publishing at the same time, that's a problem. That's a problem. It's a bigger problem too that there's been no call within the scientific community to say well that's wrong.

We should go back and say those should be retracted or, you know, you need to apologize for this. What's fascinating is instead, and I think it was sort of reflected on the panel yesterday, instead the excuse is, oh, that's just the way science occurs. You know, that's just the process of science today. To which I would say, well, that's messed up, right? As a member of the public, you should be outraged that somebody would be admitting that the scientific enterprise itself is corrupted and that the journal publication process is corrupted, the peer review process is corrupted, and that there isn't really an expectation for scientists to wholeheartedly believe information that they put in a scientific paper. That's disgraceful. So when you look at the track record of the people who have been publishing these papers that are supportive of a natural origin, the first paper that came out is this thing called Proximal Origin, or the Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, which was published in March of 2020.

What started that paper was a conference call on February 1st, where the core author group of that paper was on a conference call with several virologists, many of whom had participated in doing, you know, that were big proponents of this gain-of-function research of concern. One of them is a very strong proponent of it. His name is Ron Foucher, and he's at Erasmus University. He laid out the case for what the way virologists should handle this moving forward, which was, if this came from a lab, this is going to be bad for our research programs and therefore we should do everything we can to make it clear this didn't come from a lab. It's very simple. There's no incentive for the scientific community to investigate this as a lab leak at all. So we have a

problem just generally that the scientific community is not actually set up to protect the public from the risk of accidents in labs. establishment of systems that are, in fact, designed to detect and deal with, you know, if there is a potential lab accident, for example. Is there an incentive to do that? Of course not, because if there is a lab accident in a community, the university or the public, you know, the private company is going to have a massive liability for causing harm to the public. So what's baked into that system is one where we do research, we ask for money, saying that we're going to save all your lives with this research. And if anything goes wrong, we really should cover it up because if we admit to the public that we had an accident, we're not going to get our money.

It's laid out in those emails. And it's not just laid out in those emails. You see it in the op-eds that the virologists even publish to this day. It's sort of a strange thing that they think that it's okay for them to lie, essentially lie to the public, because if they didn't, it would be bad for their future careers. Or maybe they believe that the research really is important and in the public interest, so they want to make sure to keep being able to do that, right? Right. So they lie. Okay. Right. So exactly. I guess we would say they have a God complex, right? That they believe that what they're doing is so important that it's okay to lie. This idea of a noble lie, I guess, if you believe in noble lies.

I don't know. I mean, I don't know. Do you believe in noble lies? Or am I putting you on the spot? I can tell you that in the last few, I hadn't thought much about noble lies, but in the last few years, I've been thinking a lot about noble lies and concerned about their use, let's say. lies, but in the last few years I've been thinking a lot about noble lies and, you know, concerned about their use, let's say. If somebody is coming to your house and they're looking for somebody to

kill that person, right, and that person is hiding somewhere in your house, I think it's okay to not say, oh, they're upstairs. I would agree that that's an appropriate time to lie. If you really believe that this research is in the public interest, you might believe that if you're unable to do it, the public will be harmed, hence you justifying the noble lie, right? You would need to demonstrate that it had any benefit, which it has not had, right? So any molecular biology lab is going to do gain-of-function research, but they're not doing it on a pathogen that could kill everybody. If you're doing it on something like Ebola or on a coronavirus, that's different. That's a different category. And so

that's why I said that this is really important for the public to understand that this bill and everything about this discussion is a small, small, small, small, small fraction of all life science research, which makes it even more remarkable that the scientific community has sort of, you know, gathered around and protected this very, very tiny piece of the larger life science research. Scientists should be precise with language, but like any person that's trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, occasionally what you'll do is you'll say things that are technically correct, but it's used to deceive. And that's what's been going on for this use of the term gain-of-function, because my lab does a lot of gain-of-function research, but we're doing it on E. coli bacteria,

which is not a pathogen that can... We do it on non-pathogenic form of bacteria that the research, which you would consider gain-of-function, is not going to lead to that bacteria causing disease, causing a pandemic. That's very common across all of life sciences. It accounts for about 99.99% of gain-of-function research at large. So this 0.01%, or maybe a little bit more, is the type of research that occurs on a very specific group of viruses, which have the possibility of if they are mutated, they could kill more people, transmit between people better. And that's the research we're talking about. When the virology community talks about gain of function and talks about the benefits of gain of function, they are talking about the benefits of the 99.99% of gain of function that doesn't fall under the 0.01% that we're talking about, which has had no effect on developing vaccines or therapeutics.

That's just demonstrably true. You could even look when Vincent Racchianello, who's a virologist, who's a big proponent of gain-of-function research, was asked directly in an article that David Zweig wrote for the Free Press about a year and a half, or maybe a year, year and a half ago, Racchianello couldn't answer this question. He did not give an example. David really wanted to know what's the example. Every reporter that covers this issue is like, well, what is the example of a situation where this small fraction of research contributed to the development of a vaccine or therapeutic? And they're given an example that falls over here, not here. So there really is no example.

No, I'm waiting for one. Now that we have a bill, what we can do is say, all right, give us an example of the type of research that you think is useful, that has shown value in generating a vaccine or therapeutic. All right, now we can just say, all right, let's run an exercise using this bill to see if that would have passed through this committee. And the answer will be yes. The committee would say, okay, yeah, you can proceed with this experiment because it's not presenting an existential threat to humanity. So the nice thing about this bill too, is it allows us to, we can actually take the examples of gain of function that supposedly created these these amazing discoveries that help humanity and see if they would pass that. And the ones that actually benefited humanity would. The ones that they're trying to protect wouldn't.

There's been a huge loss of trust in experts over the last few years. But you're basically saying you want a panel of nine experts to make these decisions. How is the public to trust these nine experts? I love this question. We all agree that most people sort of are genuinely good people. But you have a lot of corrupt institutions because the incentives within these institutions create situations where good people make bad decisions. This is the type of thing where you're actually creating a system that will work, where good people will make good decisions because of the way this is structured.

If everybody is corrupt, then nothing's going to work. So we all have the potential to do really, really bad things if we're put into situations where the incentives are to do bad things. This is a committee that removes the incentives to make bad decisions because of the reporting, for one. The panel will be known to the public. The decisions will be known to the public. You always need to be critical. You always should be holding people accountable and making sure that they know you're watching. If and when this passes, right, if it's not me, it'll be somebody else that are monitoring this panel to make sure that the decisions that

come out of it look like they are done on the up and up. And frankly, the Paul office had a bill with a lot of stuff that was modified in this amended version, so much so that it actually passed out of the Homeland Security Government Affairs Committee with a near unanimous bipartisan vote. It was eight to one. There was one dissenting vote, a senator here in California. And maybe, maybe that senator just accidentally said no, and she meant to say yes. I don't know. We tried to call her office to get a comment, and we have not. But the point is that if you believe that we should work together across political divide, if you believe that there was a possibility, however small, that there was a research-related incident that led to a pandemic.

If you believe that people should not be able to decide to do whatever the hell they want with really dangerous pathogens, you should support this. If a lawmaker doesn't support this, that lawmaker needs to explain exactly why they voted against this simple, simple, simple, simple common sense thing to just independently review. Also, going back to my central point, this bill is not about the researcher. This bill is about public safety. So to hell with what researchers want. What does the public want? And this is publicly funded research. Sorry to point at you. My bad. I didn't want to, you know, I felt a little intimidated. I said the red tie is a little bit intimidating, but it's literally just a very, very minor thing for a few grants to go through an extra layer of review that will make the public sleep better at night. Unless I'm missing something, it's possible I'm missing something. I don't see any problems with the bill in its current form. And I also see a bill that was highly amended in response to prior criticisms, which I thought

was great. I thought it was really, really cool how this bill is something that now is different because it got input from people that opposed it. So that's why I say I don't see how people can oppose it now because it is very, very specific in its scope, limited to a very, very small amount of research and only subjecting it to a panel to look at it, to just give it an additional layer of scrutiny to say, okay, this research, the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks to this research, right? I think a number of guests on the show would say

if it has passed out of the Senate, that's a good sign that it's almost not terribly controversial. There's huge bipartisan support for it. So in a way, maybe it's just me being paranoid, thinking that there's a lot of people that are going to try to tank it because of what I've seen in the space since I entered it. Look, I'm not a lobbyist. I'm just a concerned citizen in this case. Trust is established through being open, transparency. And right now we don't even have reporting of where labs are. So the public doesn't know where bio labs are in their communities. It's not something that there is mandated reporting. So not only do they not know where the labs are, but they don't know what pathogens are being worked on in those labs.

So that's the next thing I'd like to try to work on, to try to get support for basically public transparency, reporting of where the labs are and what's in the labs. So could you give me a little bit of a sense of the history of the development of this type of research? All of this goes back, and there's a lot of people who've talked about this, is that it really began under Dick Cheney and the Bush administration in the wake of the 9-11 terror attacks coupled with the anthrax mailings that occurred in the U.S. shortly after 9-11. In response to the hysteria that occurred, having like two terrorist attacks, I mean, that was a crazy time. I don't know, were you living in the country? Where were you? I was in Canada. Okay, yeah. But it was also,

I think it was a crazy time for everybody, not just Americans. Yeah. So it seems so odd because the fact is, what was it, a couple weeks after 9-11, anthrax started being mailed all across the U.S. That was very, like, I mean, of course the public has got to be, like, scared. And that was used as justification to say, well, we need to ramp up our biodefense capabilities. We need to be prepared for a biological weapons attack in the U.S. They took this research, which is, it's biodefense, but really what the gain of function component of it is creating new agents that can be used as bioweapons. They moved it into the NIH and they anointed Anthony Fauci as the head of U.S. biodefense. And so if you look at the amount of money that was poured

into the NIAID, which is the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious disease that Anthony Fauci was the head of for several decades, you can see, like in 2002 and beyond, you had billions and billions of dollars poured into this U.S. biodefense network that included building new high containment biolabs, funding research. Anybody that was doing this high risk research was sought after so that they could give them money to do research projects, right? So by throwing money. So once you dangle money, you create a group of scientists that are simply used to doing that type of research.

So they dangled money to academic scientists to do high-risk research. Those scientists had labs, they trained PhD students who were basically doing like bioweapons research but thinking it was like normal science. I mean it could be both, right? Like, this is kind of this, you hear the term dual use, right? It could be both, but when you're in a lab as a grad student, I don't think a lot of them want to think I'm doing something that has a military application. So I don't know what it's like for virology students in labs that are doing experiments that are dual use, if they actually think, well, this could, this could have military applications. I don't know. Um, but you did create this whole ecosystem of researchers, like professors, PhD students, postdocs trained

in an area that is very, very high risk. In fact, so I mentioned Richard Ebright, who was instrumental in getting me involved in these issues. In 2004, he got about 750 scientists to sign a letter that the U.S. increase in biodefense spending was coming at the cost of research in basic science that was more valuable. 750. This actually, this letter led to Richard getting profiled in the New York Times as a hero. You can look back. It's kind of interesting that back in 2004, it's actually an article called, I Beg to Differ. You know, a lonely one scientist stand against this Dick Cheney fueled biodefense boom. So Anthony Fauci's role in biodefense occurred, you know, as a consequence of decisions made by Dick Cheney

and George Bush. So in 2004, he sends that letter. Remember, 750 scientists, three, I think three Nobel Prize winners. And the response from Fauci brushed it aside, like they don't know what they're talking about. 750 scientists signed that letter, and it was brushed aside by one person. It strikes me that a pivotal moment was, I think, was it in 2010 when the, you know, sort of augmented avian influenza was published? That occurred around 2011, 2012. But before that, so before that was the concern I raised on the panel yesterday about the reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic virus, the 1918 or the Spanish flu or whatever. So I think I began by saying, hey, audience members, I know it's late in the day, but I'd like you to participate in a vote. Is it a good idea to take

something that killed 20 to 50 million people and then no longer exists on the planet to just make it again. And people, they just laughed. They're like, you know, they laughed because it's absurd. And then I said, well, do you think that if somebody wanted to do that, should that person have some oversight? Should we allow that person to make their case?

Like, oh, I think we should do it this way? Shouldn't somebody else, you know, an independent body assess whether that person should be allowed to resurrect a virus that killed 20 to 50 million people? So that resurrecting of that virus, I think the year, I think it was around 2005 that happened, maybe 2005 to 2007. That was like the first thing that kind of made people go, whoa, how did these people just get permission to or like make this decision to reconstruct this strain of this deadly virus? The next event that sort of signaled that we need to maybe do something on the regulatory landscape was the incident that you're mentioning, which is that they took the H5N1 virus and they tried to figure out a way they could get it to

transmit more effectively through air between ferrets. And this was experimentation that involved Ron Fouché, who I mentioned earlier, and Yoshi Kawaoka, who has a lab in Wisconsin. And also, actually, Kawaoka was involved in the research reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic strain. One of the things that led to that controversy was the fact that when Ron Fouché first presented it, I think it was at a Malta conference, he got up and said something of the effect like, I did something really stupid. I mean there's some quote, I wish I remembered it off the top of my head, but he kind of got up in front of everybody and was bragging about having done an experiment that was really,

really high risk and really stupid as a way of getting interest in this. So you have a situation where there had to be some damage control done. So that's when they started having discussions about the research and whether or not the mutations that led to it being more transmissible between ferrets should even be reported to the public. Was it a danger? Was that information in and of itself a danger? What finally led to the pause, which you're probably familiar with, which occurred in 2014, was that there were accidents that occurred at the CDC. There was mishandling of anthrax samples, at which point the Obama administration, I guess, said enough is enough. Now, if you're a conspiratorial thinker, it turns out that was around the same time of

the Ebola outbreak in Africa. People are suspicious that might have also been caused by a lab accident, although I'm not claiming that to be the case. I'm just saying that there were suspicions, and still to this day are suspicions, that that came out of a lab accident, although I'm not claiming that to be the case. I'm just saying that there were suspicions that, and still to this day are suspicions, that that came out of a lab. So in 2014, the government said, if you're working with these high-risk pathogens, you should stop doing that. And then out of that pause, there were some deliberations. And then there was this framework that came out of that in 2017 called the P3CO, named because the person

that wrote it was a Star Wars fan. And that was the framework that is still actually in place to this day about how high-risk research. And again, what we're talking about is bio-risk management. It's the evaluation of should the project be performed, not can the project be done safely, which is another thing that the virology community likes to conflate because it's difficult to separate the two. P3CO is what we're talking about. The replacement for the P3CO is what we're talking about right now. And that's where this Ris research review act comes in. The White House announced a policy to replace the P3CO in May, earlier this year. That would be implemented in May of next year. Members of Biosafety Now came out very, very strong against it because it's still a policy

that allows for the researchers to make the decisions about whether or not this research is too high risk. Basically a self-policing. Self-policing. All I could say about the P3CO, right? So it was in effect for since 2017, it has reviewed a total of four proposals. So that already tells you that the research, that mechanism was flawed because it missed dozens of proposals that should have been reviewed under that framework. I could go into why, but I don't think it really is. It matters. What really matters is the fact that you had from 2017 to this day, only four research projects were ever reviewed under this P3CO framework.

How much discussion of gain of function research has there been? There's been hundreds and hundreds of hours of discussion and volumes of text written and meeting upon meetings. Four projects were reviewed under that framework, which means that there's a lot of other research that was missed. That's why it's like a historic time because we have the ability to finally put in place an independent body to assess whether or not certain research should not proceed. People who have been very strong against gain-of-function research on high-risk pathogens mysteriously have come out in opposition to this bill. The people who are paid to do this, the biosafety professionals, are failing the public in a way that I couldn't appreciate until I got involved in this.

The fact that any biosafety professional who has been very, very strong on opposing, you know, or saying we need to very carefully regulate gain of function, blah, blah, blah. For them to oppose this bill, I was astonished. The reason is they are viewing the effect on the research, not the public. When we're talking about laws that are on biosafety, biosecurity, bio-risk management, the first stakeholder there, the customer there is the public, not the researcher. So that, the tell, as I said, I think I said the tell is if you hear somebody talk about these legislation,

if they lead with the scientists, they affect on the scientists, that tells you everything you need to know. Lead with the public, start with the public first, and then go back and talk about the scientists, that tells you everything you need to know. Lead with the public. Start with the public first and then go back and talk about the scientists. Many people who have been on this program would say that we live in a very safety-oriented society. In fact, perhaps too safety-oriented. But the picture that you're painting, at least in this area, seems to be the opposite. The point is, if that's true, if we do live in an overly safetyist society, it's just curious. I mean, I think you've already made the case that safety hasn't been the primary concern in this area, right? But what I'm asking

you, would you agree that that's unusual in our society, and why would that be? Well, what's really unusual about this particular issue is the people that are trying to get legislation to fix it are the ones that are probably most in lockstep with what you just said, that we over-regulate, the government's too big. So Rand Paul is the champion of this bill. The other legislators in states, so Senator Bob Hall in Texas, is very much into limited government. But he wanted to ban gain-of-function because he thinks it's an individual liberty issue. He thinks that this is affecting people's ability to live their lives. Because you could look at the people that are promoting the legislation who would agree

with you wholeheartedly that we have overregulation, we need to reduce regulation, reduce government. They think this is the minimal government we need. We need this. Very briefly, tell me what Biosafety Now is up to, aside from obviously championing this bill. Safety Now is up to, aside from obviously championing this bill? Right. So Biosafety Now right now is focused on trying to get public to engage with this Risky Research Review Act. And as I said, we're also going to be interested in looking to get public transparency measures. In October, there should be a film that will be, you know, many members of Biosafety Now are involved in. It's a documentary that is going to be hopefully a call to action for the public to really do something. The hope would be that Biosafety Now could go from this sort of like

little, you know, running on fumes, like, to something that could actually operate at scale. You know, because we really have like a systemic issue in the sciences about like the culture. The culture has to change if somebody is on stage saying that that's just the way science works. The journals are corrupt, the peer review systems corrupt, we have to like, you know, fudge data to get grants. That's not okay. So it has to be a cultural change within all of academia that's a huge massive you know thing to do a lot of people at the conference recognize this as well i think we want to incentivize the truth we want to make there be incentives to tell the truth not to hide the truth. And then to apply appropriate

safety or cost-benefit analysis. So biosafety is one of many things that we need to address. There's the science communication, science funding, there's you know animal welfare, environmental you know effects on the environment, that type of thing. So we're gonna start a foundation frankly it's gonna be called Biosafety Now Foundation and it's gonna be something that we'll be able to do a lot more because we will hopefully be able to fund not just, you know, a non-profit working on biosafety, but we'll have something in an academic institution like a science policy center. We'll have research, archival hub, and a media component. Trying to make, you know, be able to create this

ecosystem that works together to be able to not only, you know, address issues but communicate it mass, you know, on scale with the public. Wait, so what's the name of the film? The name of the film is Thank You Dr. Fauci and it's made by Jenner First. And he is a very, very distinguished documentary filmmaker. He's I think he's he was nominated for an Emmy twice. I think he's won like four Peabody Awards. And he's made some very like influential films, including like The Pharmacist, The Murdoch Murders. He made a film about Trayvon Martin,

and then he made one of the Fire, he's gonna be upset, I think he made Fire Fraud. There were two Fire Festival movies. He made the better one, let's just be honest. But he is making a film that I believe will have an impact because it'll resonate with people and help them understand that there

are imminent threats to their safety if we don't do something. So where can people find out more about biosafety now and this risky research review act? Oh, so we have a petition that is simply to get the risky research review act to the floor for a vote. That's it, just for a vote. And that can be found on change.org. But you can find links to the petition on both our website and on our Substack page and on our Twitter. Oh, we are on Twitter. So, yeah, follow us on Twitter.

But, yeah, I think there's a lot of things that are going to happen quickly. I mean, the election is coming up, too. And I don't know how that's going to change the landscape of this issue. But that's actually a very interesting question about what's going to happen in this space once the election happens. I don't know where the film is going to be, but I believe it'll be online on some website and people can go and watch it. But there'll be a massive media campaign, and we'll certainly be pushing for as many eyes to see that as possible across the world. This is a global issue. This isn't just a US issue, even though I am just an American thought leader. But I hope next time we talk that I've gone global. Well, I guess we'll find out soon.

We will. And Dr. Bryce Nichols, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate the time and I hope we can do this again. Thank you all for joining Dr. Bryce Nichols and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.