Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Tom Cotton on the Lab Leak Hypothesis of Covid19

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

One piece that we reference throughout both discussions is by former New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade that he published on Medium. Here is the link to Wade’s piece: https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038

Ultimately, this is the responsibility of the Chinese government, and there need to be actions taken to make them pay for it. I mentioned my Li Wenling sanctions bill. I also have legislation that would open federal courts to people who have been injured by the virus, which is basically every American, to seek redress in the same way that we did for the 9-11 victims. There are many ways to make China accountable for what they have done to the world over the last year and a half.

Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. The source of the coronavirus pandemic has been a mystery. One theory that was steamrolled with a scathing response for many in the media and many in the science community was that it might have leaked from a research lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The leading voice in elevating this theory back in February of 2019, which is more of a hypothesis than anything, was U.S. Senator Tom Cotton. The backlash to Senator Cotton was hot. The New York Times declared his remarks, quote, a conspiracy theory. The Washington

Post headlined an article, quote, Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked, close quote. Was it debunked or has more light been shed on it and it now warrants further examination? That's where we are today in which we suddenly find the discussion turning, turning in the press, turning among many in the science community, and also turning with a bipartisan set of voices elevating the hypothesis and calling for a more serious look at it. To be clear, none of these voices are giving much credence to the idea that the leak, even if it came from the Wuhan lab, was some kind of deliberate bioweapons attack, or that bioweapons were even being developed there

that were inadvertently leaked. The question is whether well-intentioned research there was accidentally leaked. And if it was, why can't we get to the bottom of it? Might there have been a cover-up of a potentially innocent error? What are the implications if there was indeed an accident and then a cover-up? To help us understand all of this, we are joined today by Senator Tom Cotton. Senator Cotton serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he's the ranking member for the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism. He's also on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and most importantly for this conversation, the Senate Intelligence Committee. He's a graduate of Harvard at Harvard Law School. He served nearly five years on active duty in the

U.S. Army as an infantry officer. In Iraq, he was with the 101st Airborne. In Afghanistan, he was with a provincial reconstruction team. His military decorations include the Bronze Star Medal, Combat Infantry Brigade, and the Ranger Tab. Between the Army and the Senate, Tom worked for a number of years for McKinsey and also served in the U.S. House of Representatives. But before we bring on Senator Cotton, we wanted to provide you with a short explainer of the facts that we know so far to inform our discussion with the Senator. And to help us, we bring back our friend and science writer, Jim Meggs. Jim is the former editor of Popular Mechanics, where he helped reposition that century-old brand to become a major voice on contemporary tech issues. He currently co-hosts

the How Do We Fix It podcast, and he's working on a book about man-made disasters. Previously, Jim was executive editor at National Geographic Adventure, and he's a monthly columnist for Commentary Magazine, and he's also with the Manhattan Institute, the most important urban policy think tank in the U.S. So here's first our conversation with Jim Meggs to provide us an explainer. And I'm pleased to welcome back science journalist Jim Maggs to the conversation. Jim, welcome to Post Corona. Nice to be here again. Yeah, it's great.

You have a real following with our audience, so there's no one better to help us understand this issue or at least get a little more clarity and a little smarter on the issue before we jump into our conversation with Senator Cotton. So, Jim, just to set this up, as we've discussed, there are basically two theories about the origin of this coronavirus. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to humans. The other is that the virus was under some kind of study in a lab and then it leaked out and escaped from the lab and and the reason we're trying to get to the bottom of this is because it matters a great deal in terms of

preventing this in the future to understand how this happened because according to the nicholas wade piece in medium he says something like they've examined 80 000 animals in the vicinity of wuhan and they can't find a single trace? Right, right. You'd think it would be pretty ubiquitous if it was capable of jumping to people at that rate. So that is very telling. China's made a really strong effort to point the finger anywhere but at the lab. That too is a little bit telling.

It's not, none of this stuff is proof. And this is a hypothesis that needs to be investigated. We can't make any conclusions now, but we can start to see the route that investigations should take and to admit that the press in particular, but the scientific community as well, was alarmingly not only reluctant to take up this line of questioning, but they really suppressed it and they really ridiculed anybody who was willing to bring up this topic, including Senator Cotton, very notably. So in the case of SARS-1 and MERS viruses, there were copious traces in the environment and they found them, I think in one case it was they found it within fourious traces in the environment, and they found them, I think,

in one case, it was they found it within four months. In the other case, they found it in something like nine months. So the fact that we are still now well over a year into this, and they haven't found any sources, and as I said, they examined something like 80,000 samples, that is an important data point. Absolutely. You know, again, it's the absence of evidence, so it's not definitive. So that's the negative argument. We're not gaining evidence for the theory that everyone initially thought was most plausible. Then the second track is, what is the evidence we have? Okay, so let's talk about the lab. So the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So can you explain that that research is all taking place in rooms that use negative pressure. Nothing can get out. And there's only it's one of only two of such labs in the world, right? At that level, I believe. Yeah.

And and it is the researchers are not only is the room protected, the researchers operate in inflatable suits. Everything is, you know, airtight, scrubbed down. It's completely, it's supposed to be completely impervious if they are operating at level four. What we found out, and the Nicholas Wade piece brought this up, all the people defending the lab kept stressing this biosafety level four. What we found out, and the Nicholas Wade piece brought this up, all the people defending the lab kept stressing this biosafety level four, but a lot of the research they do there isn't done at that high level of security. In fact, some of the research they were doing on bat viruses was being conducted at level two, which is, you know, not that different from maybe a, you know, a hospital. Or a dentist's office. I think Dr. Richard Ebright from Rutgers, who's a leading

expert on biosafety, has said that it's level two is the equivalent of the safety and cleanliness of a dentist's office. So now all all of a sudden, this great piece of evidence was supposed to explain why this was so, so unlikely. Now it looks, it's quite the opposite. If they were operated at biosafety level two, then it was highly likely that a virus, one that we now know is so contagious, could jump from mice or in other ways to humans. And then once it infects one worker in the lab, then it could easily travel to others and then break out into the community. So what is then the significance of the newly revealed information that a handful of workers, scientists working at the Wuhan lab had been actually infected with this virus early on?

Well, it might be too soon to say it's a smoking gun, but it sure is starting to look like that because that's exactly the scenario you'd worry about. People are working with this virus. They get infected themselves. We now know that COVID-19 often spreads by people who are not really symptomatic or pre-symptomatic. They go home, they infect other people, they go to the hospital, they might infect hospital workers. You can easily see how this could lead the breakout in the community. So now we've got another piece of the puzzle. Yes, people did get sick at the lab. We don't know. It was so early. It's not confirmed that they had COVID-19, but it certainly seems very persuasive. I mean, the timing is right. The location is right. These pieces was starting to get oxygen by Senator Cotton and others, that the Wuhan lab leak may be a scenario we should look at more closely. There was this strong backlash

from certain factions within the scientific community, including a group of virologists who wrote a piece in the Lancet on February 19th saying, quote, we stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. And then they said that the scientists, I quote, overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife. Why is this piece so significant at that time? It's really striking for two reasons. One is that it was so unscientific. They were basically saying, we'd be really surprised if it came from the lab.

And therefore, it couldn't have come from the lab. That's exactly the opposite of the way science is supposed to work. Science is supposed to challenge our biases and to explore alternate explanations and not be too comfortable that just because people are experts, they get to define reality. That was one part that was quite striking about the letter was how thinly based it was in actual science and how it didn't reflect a real scientific methodology. The second part was the person who organized that letter was a guy named Dr. Peter Daszak, who is president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which is a virus research organization,

which helped fund some of the research at the Wuhan laboratory. And he'd been an early advocate for gain of function research. Yes. We should explain what the gain of function research is. Why don't you do that? Basically, when virologists have something that's either a pathogen or something they think could turn into a pathogen, say a virus from a bat, they will manipulate in various ways and say, this thing seems like something that could evolve. With a few small mutations, this might get much more dangerous, more contagious. So they'll test out all these viruses, and if they

get one that's really dangerous, they'll say, okay, well, that's really bad. We should look out for it. And conceivably, you could use that to design vaccines against viruses that haven't even emerged yet. So there's a rationale for the research. For a lot of other people, it just sounds crazy. Wait, you're taking pathogens and you're making them much more dangerous in the lab just for research. How do you balance the potential benefits and the potential risks of that? If this virus did escape from the Wuhan lab, which is looking more and more likely, then there's going to be a global reconsideration of this kind of gain-of-function research. And there's an interview that Dr. Daszak gave on December 9th of 2019. So before the pandemic, the outbreak of the pandemic was generally known. And he gives this long interview,

making the case for the exact kind of gain of function research that is being pointed to as the source under the lab leak hypothesis. He makes this impassioned case. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, I'm sure he's regretting having given that interview now because he lays out exactly the rationale why the lab would have been doing the work that could have produced this super contagious virus. And obviously there was this long history of viruses escaping from even the best run laboratories, right? The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England, causing numerous deaths. And the viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year. And, you

know, there were leaks from laboratories of SARS-1 in Singapore, Taiwan, numerous times. So this is, this is not a new phenomenon. Right. And the thing about a lab, it's sort of like what they used to say about defending against a terrorist attack. You have to protect the public every day. The terrorists only have to get lucky once. The virus only has to get lucky once. If your lab is handling dangerous things and you do an excellent job every single day for years on end, and then one day somebody makes a tiny mistake, that could be enough. But the other thing about this paper- The Lancet paper. The Lancet paper, and that was just one of several things from scientists condemning this notion. They use the word conspiracy theory. They took something that Senator Cotton and others were

asking as a question, was there possibly an accidental release of a virus? And they immediately characterized that argument in its most extreme or most ridiculous fashion. And yet those letters and papers were taken as gospel by the press, who immediately slapped the label debunked on any claim that we should look into the lab leak possibility. And Peter Daszak, again, as we now know, organized the Lancet letter, organized the signatories, and the end of the letter concluded, quote, we declare no competing interests, meaning there is no conflict of interest, which we now know no one was on the hook as much, perhaps other than the Chinese government. No one was on the hook as much as Peter Daszak. So the idea that he didn't have a conflict of interest here was ludicrous. Yes. And in fact, to make matters even more complex and dicey, that EcoHealth Alliance

received some funding from the U.S. government, partly under the direction of Anthony Fauci, for various periods. And to do various types of research, Fauci has been hotly denying that they funded the gain of function research at the Wuhan labs. But my reading of it is it's a little, it's not so clear cut. And there's some debates about the exact definition of gain of function. But clearly some money from the U.S. went to, through EcoHealth Alliance, to the in wuhan to be used in bat virus research so just be clear so the funding was uh the grants were made by the national institute of allergy and infectious disease diseases which which fauci heads right correct which is a part of the nih the national institutes of health and the grant proposals were through the EcoHealth Alliance, as you said, to fund the work of Dr. Shi Zheng Li, or she's commonly referred in a lot of the scientific literature and also in the political commentary, political reporting is, quote unquote, the bat lady.

So why is Dr. Shi Zheng Li the bat lady and why is she such a central figure here? Well, she is the leading expert on bat viruses in China, perhaps one of the top experts in the world who has collected samples from thousands of bats in caves all over China. So if you think about the fact that more of these viruses were probably moving through her part of the laboratory than anywhere else in the world. Maybe again, it's not so surprising or so unlikely that if a new virus was to emerge from a laboratory, the odds are pretty high that it would be her laboratory. We don't know that. There's still a lot of work to be done to confirm this,

but certainly this was the hot zone for research into new coronaviruses, especially ones coming from bats. And what was the significance of the State Department visit to the Wuhan lab in 2018? Yeah, that's really interesting. There was a visit from some biosecurity experts, and they were very alarmed by the conditions at the lab and sent back a memo saying that the recommended not cooperating with the lab. And they thought that they weren't really properly prepared to do biosafety level four research as they claim. So that was a real early warning shot. As you start piecing the evidence together on this lab, you start seeing no one of these things is definitive, but one after another, we start seeing these things line up to suggest that there was a real possibility that the work

at that lab was not being done properly and had strong potential to allow a leak out to the public. One question about the geography here. So the first cases of COVID-19 occurred in September that we know of when the temperatures in the Hubei province in Wuhan were already cold enough to send, you know, bats into hibernation. So, so that's one confusing part. And then there's a confusing piece of information. And the other confusing piece of information is these bats or these, the various options for, for the origin animals are typically found nowhere near Wuhan. Like they're like all the way in, you know, Southern China. Yeah. So can you explain? So, yeah. So no, I mean, the idea that a bat from, from hundreds of miles away in a very, very different climate and ecosystem

would affect people in, in Wuhan, it's a stretch. Initially, when everybody heard about the wet markets, it led to a lot of speculation that people are eating all kinds of weird, raw animals and stuff. And so to Americans who don't necessarily, we're not experts on this, that sounded really plausible that some weird thing happened with some kind of animal in the market. But you could also speculate that in terms of the lab leak hypothesis, if a bunch of people were getting sick but didn't know it yet, where's a likely place where they would be interacting and spreading the virus from one person to another? Maybe a market is one of the first places you'd expect to see transmission. And then they spread out through the community. It's not so far-fetched.

Right. The two closest known, according to Wade, the two closest known relatives of SARS-V2 were collected from bats living in caves in Yunnan. So that's the province of southern China. If the virus had infected people living around those caves in Yunnan. So that's the province of southern China. If the virus had infected people living around those caves in that southern province, that could strongly support the idea that the virus had spilled over to people naturally. But that's not what happened. We didn't find it. Right. The pandemic broke out 1,500 kilometers away in Wuhan. Yeah. So we're not seeing that pattern, again, that you would see with Ebola and a lot of other diseases, where you find people were cleaning bat guano out of a mine shaft

and all came down with a serious respiratory illness, we later learned that Dr. Shi went to that mine and then samples from that mine were brought back to the Wuhan laboratory. Okay. Well, Jim, thank you for this quick tutorial. Very complicated stuff. I'm sure this is not the last time we're going to talk to you about this issue. So we'll have you come on again. But before we jump into our conversation with Senator Cotton, we need a little bit of a crash course here. So thank you. Oh, it's my pleasure. And I'm pleased to welcome Senator Tom Cotton to this conversation. Senator, good to see you.

Thanks, Dan. Good to be on with you. So you have been at the center of this debate now for well over a year. The issue has become hot again, or maybe hot for the first time, because of the whole issue of the lab leak hypothesis, because of information originally released by the State Department in the last administration, and then later confirmed to some degree by the current administration, and suggests that there's a basis for this hypothesis that should be investigated. So before we get going, walk us through the basis for the lab leak hypothesis,

both what you were focused on over a year ago and where your head is at on it today. Today, I believe more firmly than ever that the most likely explanation for the origin of this virus is a leak from the laboratories in Wuhan. I believe that really from the very beginning. So now I'll go back to the beginning. It was during the impeachment trial in January of 2020 that I began following closely news of an unknown viral pneumonia in central China, in Wuhan. That was all public source information. Some of it was obscure, health journals or East Asian English language news sources.

Not much of that was coming from my role on the Armed Services or the Intelligence Committee. And one thing I took very seriously was the possibility that this had leaked from a laboratory. Again, not based on any super secret intelligence or advanced scientific knowledge, but just common sense. China claimed that this was a coronavirus that had moved from bats to humans or bats to an intermediate host of humans in a food market in Wuhan. Wuhan is larger than New York City. And it has labs just down the street that research coronaviruses. One of the two level four labs, right, in China, if not in the world. Yeah, and you combine that with the Chinese duplicity from the very beginning. That's first how I knew that this was potentially going to be a very deadly pandemic, because on the one hand, China was saying, we have this under control, no cause for alarm, WHO, you shouldn't declare that it's a global

health emergency. On the other hand, they were locking down provinces that had more than the combined population of our entire West Coast. They were welding people shut into their apartment buildings. And they were lying about the wet market. I mean, that was established last January, Dan. The Lancet, which is not exactly a bastion of right-wing journalism, published a study that showed that the first 40 or so persons known to be infected with the coronavirus, almost half of them, had no contact with the wet market at all. So that wet market, because of its conditions, may have acted as an accelerant to spread the virus, but the virus went into that market before

it came out of the market. And again, since this is a large metropolitan city with these laboratories far away from any bats that are known to carry coronaviruses, just the inherent logic of the common sense says the most likely explanation is a leak from these laboratories. And there, you know, there's some other points that have have come out from the scientific community since then, is that bats in wet markets as part of a diet is not a Wuhan, it's not known for Wuhan, it's much more phenomenon in like southern China. Yeah, I think that's right. I think subsequent evidence and reporting has suggested that there were not even bats present in that food market, which again suggests it acted as an accelerant for human to human transmission. It was not the origin of the virus and that the Chinese Communist Party conveniently pointed the finger at it as a cover story to something else.

And other coronaviruses have broken out, but typically in these tropical areas and, you know, and even even still at that time of year, the bats would have been hibernating. So the idea, it was just a lot that just didn't happen. These are all correct. And look, Xi Jinping, the scientist who researches bat-based coronaviruses, had put out a documentary earlier about how they were researching these bats and they were collecting them and bringing them back to the Wuhan laboratories. And he said, you know, what I believe then, what I believe now, the evidence has only continued to advance. Now it's all circumstantial evidence. We obviously don't have direct evidence. Intelligence rarely works that way. But for instance, after SARS, it only took about four months to find the original host species based on scientific evaluation. After MERS, it took about nine months.

Well, we are now almost 18 months on into this pandemic and still no host species. So again, all this evidence is circumstantial, but it continues to pile up on what we already knew and suggests that what your common sense would tell you from the very beginning is the result is this pandemic most likely results from a laboratory leak. You in your public statements have not been suggesting that there was anything sinister about the leak. It wasn't some part of some, you know, bioterror plot, or it was sloppiness, incompetence. That's kind of where the facts are leading you to now. Well, that's right. So I'd say the lab is the most likely source of this virus.

I don't know what was going on in the lab. I don't know if it came from the lab, how it came from the lab. It could have been a relatively simple mistake, like not following proper safety protocols. Another thing we know by now is that although it has a level four laboratory, which for a layman, just imagine you're wearing space suits with oxygen lines hooked up to the ceilings, that sort of thing. But in many cases, they were doing this research in what you would call level two procedures,

which is really nothing more than you have. It's like the dentist's office, white lab coat, face shield, and latex gloves. So either hypothesis is possible. it could just be an innocent leak it could be something more nefarious we don't know and won't know unless China ever comes clean or a defector comes out one reason why there's so much media controversy over this though is just the sloppiness of most mainstream reporters their willingness to jump to conclusions whenever the person speaking doesn't share their politics and frankly frankly, they're ignorant about these things. They took originating in a lab as a manufactured bioweapon. Well, hold on. Let's break it down. When you said it was possible, when you about over a year ago said it's possible that it was originating in the lab, the skeptics in the press came back and said, how dare he say it was part of a plot?

They misrepresented the questions I was asking about an entirely plausible hypothesis, and then refuted the misrepresentation without ever addressing what I actually said, which is laboratories are the most likely location from which this virus came. And to be clear, under that hypothesis, it wasn't necessarily a uniquely Chinese government accident because this was a project that had a multilateral, multi-stakeholder scientific community basis for it, right? There were a lot of funders for this work in these labs, including a body of the NIH in the U.S., which was one of the granting agencies

for the work going on in that lab. Well, so it's not a coincidence that this did originate in a lab. It's a Chinese lab, in my opinion, in part because China has a long record of shoddy safety practices in their laboratories, you know, a version of SARS escaped from the labs back in the 2000s. But you're also right that this was funded through multilateral sources, including Tony Fauci's agency inside the National Institutes of Health. Over the last few weeks, Dr. Fauci has been what I would charitably call playing word games about the facts here, what some people might call misleading the American people. There is no question that his agency funded, through an American organization, research at the Wuhan labs. There is no question the so-called bat lady was

conducting research into ways to manipulate these viruses, make them more contagious, therefore more dangerous. That's all a matter of public record. Now, Dr. Fauci, in the last few days, having been caught red-handed on this, is beginning to back away from his assertions that the NIH never funded any gain-of-function research into Wuhan labs. And now he's saying, well, yeah, of course we had the research in there. That's where coronaviruses emerged from. We weren't aware of gain of function research. But if that's the case, then we have to raise the uncomfortable question is like, where is the oversight of his grant making process? Where is the quality control and quality assurance that American taxpayer dollars are not going to fund this kind of research. And finally, a third point I would add, this happened after the Obama White House

explicitly prohibited this kind of very risky research. Now, they added one very narrow exception that could possibly apply here. But if Tony Fauci and the NIH were funding this research in violation of at least the spirit of President Obama's directive, if not the letter itself, I think they have a lot of explaining to do to the American people. So the Obama administration was tuned into this, specifically with the gain-of-function research? I think it was back in 2013 or 2014, there was a lot of growing media, or I should say, growing concern in the media, you know, reported journalism about gain-of-function research, not just specifically in the Wuhan laboratories, but more broadly, whether or not the gains to

scientific knowledge were worth the risk of exactly something like this happening. And therefore, the Obama administration in 2014 imposed a moratorium on this kind of funding. Again, they did allow certain very narrow exceptions, and you can't get a straight answer yet out of Tony Fauci, but it seems that the NIH continued funding this research in Wuhan using one of those exceptions, apparently without informing their political supervisors at HHS or the Obama White House. Again, I don't know that that's the case. It just appears to be the case in part because Tony Fauci has been dancing around these questions, I think, trying to protect his reputation, the reputation of his agency, and frankly,

his relationships with scientists around the country and around the world. You know, that Nicholas Wade article a few weeks ago, I thought was very effective in pointing out where the incentives lie here. And as they usually do, they lie with money and keeping the flow of research money going. And for any epidemiologist or scientist or grant making organization to blow the whistle on any of this going back seven years or to be a dissident or certainly to do anything that might help Donald Trump in his reelection campaign would put at risk his or her funding in the future, when his peers were sitting on a peer review panel for his grants in the future.

So just for our listeners, what Senator Cotton just referred to is Nicholas Wade, who's a former New York Times science reporter, who wrote a long piece for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, in which he very non-ideologically, non-emotionally, just very analytically looked at the lab leak hypothesis and kind of laid out the case for that, and then obviously laid out a more natural origin hypothesis. And basically, he just laid both out and came out

that the lab leak looks far more credible uh than we had thought and in just in terms of this term gain of function because it's a term now that's being thrown around just so our listeners understand exactly what because there's a debate about it within the scientific community um and what it basically is is going to remote places in nature and collecting all sorts of dangerous pathogens and bringing them to one spot a lab in this case this this wuhan lab if in fact this is where it originally originated to to try and analyze and predict the potential danger of these pathogens spilling over to humans so you, you know, as you said, there's an

upside case, I guess, and a downside case. The upside case is if we think these dangerous pathogens can ultimately spill over to humans, don't we want to know, get ahead of it, ahead of time before it actually happens so we can be prepared that's one reason to do the gain of function research the downside is there's a risk that you're going to trigger the accidental release of something terrible by doing this research and cause a pandemic that if this is actually how it originated you know resulted in close to 600,000 dead Americans over three million people dead around the world and trillions and trillions of economic costs. And that's a robust debate within the scientific community. And you're

saying the Obama administration was already concerned about it. Yeah, in 2014, the concerns had grown serious enough that they imposed this moratorium. And we've seen now for 15 months how these public health bureaucrats, epidemiologists, other scientists want to purport to cut off public debate among normal citizens on some of these questions, which is antithetical to our constitutional form of government. The American people didn't trust experts, or I'm sorry, the founders did not trust experts of any kind. They trusted the American people in their good common sense and judgment to elect people to make these decisions for them. So we should never see decision-making authority

to these public health experts or scientists. We should listen to them, but in the same way that, you know, as the saying goes, war is too important to leave to the generals. I mean, these questions about public health and the balance of various factors in public health and economic livelihoods and so forth have to be made by the American people through their representatives. Gain of function is one example of that. I mean, look, there can be, as you say, a robust scientific debate, but it's pretty simple. And it's said right there in the name, you know, you're going to gain functions that make a dangerous pathogen more dangerous. There's two simple ways you can do that. You can make it more contagious, or you can make it more deadly. And you laid out the pros and cons for that. The Obama administration decided the cons outweighed

the pros. But it appears that Dr. Fauci's agency inside the Institutes of Health went ahead with this funding anyway. And again, to my knowledge, they did not get approval on that from either the Department of Health and Human Services or the Obama White House. When it comes, I mean, spending U.S. taxpayer dollars in a Chinese communist lab while the Obama White House has prohibited that, I mean, if I were in that position, I would seek approval from the electorally accountable officials who had issued that directive. But it looks like they may have gone with asking for forgiveness instead of seeking permission. So leading scientists and government officials

across party lines, elected leaders, technocratic officials in the various agencies here and around the world are now calling for a large-scale investigation into the origin of SARS-CoV-2 so what are the chances that this investigation like what what does this investigation actually look like and what's the likelihood that it will actually take place to the point that someone like you is satisfied? Well, it doesn't look like what President Biden said on Wednesday. He put in a statement directing the American intelligence community to spend 90 days looking more closely at the matter. I mean, that's fine. They should continue to look closely at the matter, as I know they have, but the impetus should not be on America's intelligence officials. It should be on the Chinese Communist Party, and we should be demanding transparency from them.

But look, I mean, the super secretive and very controlling Communist Party is not going to allow U.S. government inspectors on the ground. The World Health Organization inspections so far have been something of a farce. I mean, even if you let Americans or Western scientists get in, they've probably long since discovered every shred of evidence. So I'm not sure we're ever going to actually get concrete, direct evidence that the virus originated in these labs or that it originated from animal to human transmission in the wild, so to speak. But again, I think the onus should be on the Chinese Communist Party, and we should do everything we can to highlight just how responsible they are for this pandemic the world has endured.

And we should take actions to hold them accountable as well, like sanctioning the Chinese officials who covered it up. I introduced legislation named after Dr. Li Wenling, one of the first whistleblowers in Wuhan who regrettably died from coronavirus in the early days of this pandemic. So your view is hope for an investigation, pressure the administration and other agencies and governments around the world for a robust investigation. But you're not terribly optimistic that it will see itself through. So we should just there are enough bad facts here, even if we even if we can't completely nail down the lab leak theory to take action? Look, yeah, these are Chinese communists. This is not some American corporation who is involved in a scandal that fires a CEO

and brings in a new CEO who's going to clean house and hires outside auditors and a law firm to investigate itself and report to the public and to its shareholders and employees. We shouldn't expect that of the Chinese Communist Party. I suspect that whatever direct evidence once exists has probably been destroyed. I mean, I don't think we're going to discover a secret server in Wuhan that tells us that that lady created this virus or that her employees were negligent in their safety practices and unleashed it out into downtown Wuhan when they went out to go shopping at the wet market. I mean, I'd welcome that, but I just don't think we're going to find it. Now, the one possibility we may find one day, I don't know, is a Chinese whistleblower,

someone who was present, someone who fell ill, someone who was visited by the secret police in the early days, who tipped their hand. In the same way, if you recall, in the fall of 2019, the New York Times got its hands on a trove of documents about the genocidal practices against religious and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang province that came from inside the Chinese Communist Party. It must be very alarming to Xi Jinping that someone had access to those documents and provided them to the New York Times. So if we ever got concrete direct

evidence that this virus came from the lab, I think it would probably be something along those lines, not the result of a formal investigations. But again, as you say, even in the absence of concrete direct evidence, all of the circumstantial evidence, I don't mean the weight of it, the preponderance of it, all of the circumstantial evidence points directly at those labs, not at some animal roaming around downtown Wolfhands. Okay, I just want to come back to the previous point you made about whistleblowers. So, you know, it is conceivable that some of the scientists working in that lab were well-intentioned, and they saw stuff that would—they saw activities that would worry them,

or they saw potential cover-up that would doubly worry them. So those scientists would, if we want to get them to cooperate, would need some kind of immunity. We need to incentivize whistleblowers. We may need financial incentives. We would need witness protection. I mean, it seems like you need a pretty robust effort to, it's the, I mean, from a layman's perspective, that's the only way to really start cracking this thing open, to your point. Go ahead. And no, you're right about that. And that's why I said, I mean, that's the most, again, I don't think any kind of like formal investigation is going to be

allowed by the Chinese communists. And I don't think that even if it occurred, they would have any evidence left to discover. So someone who was involved in the research at the lab, someone who treated the early patients, someone inside the Chinese security apparatus is probably going to have to be the source of any kind of confirmation. That would still not be direct evidence. I mean, again, I doubt they're going to be carrying the original samples from patient zero or the lab server from inside Wuhan, but it would lend even more weight to all the other evidence we already have. What you're essentially talking about, Dan,

is a defector, to use the old Cold War term, that always poses challenges because they're worried about their own safety and their own family and their extended family inside of China. So I don't necessarily hold out a ton of hope that we're going to have that kind of whistleblower in the future, but that's probably the most likely way we would get

the most direct confirmation we ever will get. Gain of function research used to be something that say requires significant resources that only governments could provide. Now the technology for this research has become pretty cheap. So now there's some scientists who are saying you can basically set up a lab for like $100,000 to create a virus like COVID, you know, something like it and set it free. So what, like from your perch at the Senate Intelligence Committee, what kind of monitoring and surveillance infrastructure could be put into place to control for biological disasters, which much like terrorism and the way we did surveillance and intelligence gathering for terrorist plots after 9-11, the ease of setting up a terrorist

plot was so, the barriers to entry were low. The capabilities were so widely dispersed. The costs were not obstacles, the financial costs. We're heading into a world that is similar with this gain of function research if you have really bad malevolent actors, which is not what we necessarily were dealing with in Wuhan, but could be dealing with in the future. Are we set up for this? We are getting better at it. And I think the last year and a half has shown that we have to continue to improve. I mean, this is something that is a genuine threat from the nation-state adversaries we have, like China. You know, synthetic biology is one of the 10 focus areas of China's so-called maiden China 2025 blueprint for economic espionage and the People's Liberation Army, has written about the military struggle in the domain of biology and considered the

possibility of genetically selective bioweapons. Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, specifically emphasized that threat in her public testimony to the Intelligence Committee last month. But you're also right that as this technology gets less expensive and more scaled down, it's something that could be done by non-nation state actors with the right skill sets and enough freedom of action. So that's one reason why it's important that we, you know, keep groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS pinned down, that we don't give them freedom of action, that we don't create safe havens in the world for which they can set up what are still reasonably sized laboratories, if not the size of, you know, the Wuhan Institute of Virology,

and that we recognize that they've been able to see over the last year and a half just how massively disruptive a relatively, you know, small little virus could be, not just to the United States, but to the entire Western world. Another thing we need to do is harden our defenses. I mean, one reason why we haven't had a major terrorist attack like 9-11 since 9-11 is that we've kept our foot on the throat of Al-Qaeda and ISIS and other Islamic terror organizations. But another reason is that we have hardened up our defenses. It should be much harder to execute that Operation Day, even if a terrorist group had freedom of action. So we need to continue to harden our pandemic defenses for the future, to strengthen our controls and

borders and ports of entry be more willing to shut down travel uh from effective errors rapidly uh despite prize against it as you saw from the democrats last year even though they now admit that it was um appropriate um and we need to uh be sure that things like our national stockpile are um are replenished and and also have the flexibility for the future so we're not, you know, investing in the wrong kind of thing. You know, it turned out for a time that most doctors wanted to use ventilators on coronavirus patients. That may not have been the best course of action, but that's what most people were worried about running out of in March and April. Well, the next

time around, it may be some other kind of medical device or some other kind of medicine that we need. And we need to have a kind of baseline capacity, not just what we have stockpiled, but what we can rapidly produce in the United States. And that's one reason why it's so important that we reshore some of this relatively simple but vital manufacturing capability from places like China. OK, last question for you. Let's assume that at some point, I know you think it's unlikely, but assume at some point that proof is obtainable and that an investigation can prove that this was indeed a negligent lab leak that cost the lives, as I said earlier, of 3 million plus people, trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in economic loss. What then?

Do you hang a bill of trillions of dollars and millions of lives lost around the world and hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the U.S.? Do you hang that on the Chinese Communist Party? Do you hang that on the Wuhan lab? Do you hang that on the scientific community that was behind this gain-of-function research at this level for biosafety lab in China but had multiple parties from around the world? Where do we go at that point? You hang that on the Chinese Communist Party. Now, as you say, there needs to be accounting for others who might have been involved in what was happening in that laboratory, to include our own government, Dr. Fauci's agency at the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, the role they played,

especially in the early days of accepting Chinese propaganda. But ultimately, this is the responsibility of the Chinese government, and there need to be actions taken to make them pay for it. I mentioned my Li Wenlang sanctions bill. I also have legislation that would open federal courts to people who have been injured by the virus, which is basically every American, to seek redress in the same way that we did for the 9-11 victims, to further isolate China diplomatically, for instance, to re-bid the Winter Olympics before 2022, to cut off Chinese investments into other countries, especially allied countries, to stop the spread of Chinese information technology and telecommunications technology. There are many ways to make China

accountable for what they have done to the world over the last year and a half. And finally, do you think you would get buy-in for this from other major Western countries? It does seem to me during coronavirus that China's public diplomacy and just general reputation and influence, at least at the peak of the crisis, diminished in places, countries throughout Europe and elsewhere. Do you, A, do you think that that sustains? And B, do you think that those governments join with the U.S. in taking these kinds of actions? I do think it will sustain itself. I mean, if you look at what's just happened in Europe, China trumpeted a big trade and investment deal with the EU in the final days of the Trump administration, which was held up as a great example of how China is overcoming its black sheep status after the coronavirus

and a thumb in the eye to both the outgoing and the incoming administration. Well, that trade deal is largely on ice now because EU members of parliament condemned China for its genocide against its own people in Xinjiang province. China sanctioned those MPs. And just a few days ago, the European parliament voted overwhelmingly, like 90 to 10% of the parliament, not to proceed with the implementation of that deal. Imagine, imagine in that context, piling on what they've done to Hong Kong. If you pile on conclusive proof, acceptable to public opinion in general around the world, that this virus was no accidental virus that just occurred, but was the result of Chinese negligence in those labs, and then Chinese deceitfulness in covering up what had happened in

those labs. Senator Cotton, you were a clear and sober and analytical voice on this crisis early on, and I think our listeners got to hear some of that as well today, well over a year into it, and we will hopefully have you back to let us know how you are seeing things as they develop as we learn more as hopefully there are real investigations as we form a coherent coherent view on what happened so thanks for joining us thank you dan thanks for having me on that's our show for today there's a ton to read on this topic, but one of the many pieces we strongly recommend is one I referred to several times on this episode, which was Nicholas Wade's recent piece on Medium. Nick's a former New York Times science reporter. His piece is a long one, but again, highly recommend it.

We'll post the link on the show notes. If you want to follow Jim Meggs, you can follow him on Twitter. He's at James Meggs, J-A-M-E-S-M-E-I-G-S. You can also find his work on Commentary Magazine and at Manhattan Institute, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to follow Senator Tom Cotton, best is to start on Twitter at sendtomcotton, S-E-N-T-O-M-C-O-T-T-O-N. And of course, you can also read latest news about and by Senator Cotton on his website. If you have questions or ideas for future episodes, tweet at me, at Dan Senor. Post-Corona is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.