Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Worobey, Andersen & Holmes: The Lab Leak

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello again and welcome to Decoding the Gurusus the podcast where a psychologist and an anthropologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about i'm professor matt brown with me associate professor chris cavanaugh shortly we'll be talking to three gentlemen about a certain thing that's been in the news recently. Hey, Chris. Yeah, we actually are potentially dealing with great minds today. Yes, we don't even mean it ironically. Yeah, all right. You know, it's scientists, scientists, right? Moderately great, moderately great.

Starting point is 00:00:59 Yeah, let's not get them ahead of their skis or however you put that but yes so reluctantly we are engaging in the lab leak discourse arena now i say reluctantly you have heard us discuss this at various times on the podcast mainly via the interaction of some of the gurus having strong opinions about the origins of COVID and also in regards to media literacy and the way that media covers scientific news stories and stuff. But the reason I preface this saying reluctantly is that there is a lot of heat around this topic. There are people, online communities, who get very exercised around this. And so it isn't a topic that it's greatly enticing to become involved with and potentially a target for.

Starting point is 00:01:59 But I reckon from our point of view, we have a casual interest in this topic because it has a couple of features that are interesting from the point of view of public understanding of science, science communication, and just that kind of folk epistemics that we talked about last episode in terms of how lay people like us in this context can have some hope of figuring out what is likely to be true and not true. And I think it's fair to say that there are some features of this lab leak versus zoonotic spillover debate that has some characteristics in common with previous politicized scientific

Starting point is 00:02:38 discussions, such as climate change, where on one hand, you see a large delta between the opinion of relevant experts and more popular opinion and political spin that's being put on it and the second feature has got in common with that is the I guess accusations of bias accusations of there being some kind of whether orchestrated or not could be grassroots but some kind of soft conspiracy amongst scientists to have their finger on the scales to push things in a particular direction. So, you know, on the face of it, it does look a little bit like climate change. And I think for that reason, it's got our interest. Yeah. And I want to say up front to be clear that this is a controversial topic. It's a technical scientific topic as well, but it is certainly a topic with broad public interest because we all

Starting point is 00:03:33 lived through this pandemic, which killed millions of people worldwide. And the origins of the virus are not just of interest to the scientific community they do have a broader public interest and it is the case that there have been laboratory leaks historically and that there have been consensus positions that are wrong right and another point that i would want to emphasize is that although there definitely is features of the lab leak community online, the kind of people highly invested in the topic, which resemble other conspiracy theorist communities, things like anomaly hunting, focusing on out of context comments and emails and personally attacking scientists and their families. That is not to say that anyone who discusses

Starting point is 00:04:27 the lab leak is a lurid conspiracist. There's a wide array of people with different levels of expertise that hold different opinions. And it is a topic that you should be able to discuss. There have been times when there's been media censorship in regards to like social media, Facebook kind of suggesting, I don't know how heavily it was enforced, but suggesting that promoting that the virus originated from a lab could lead to moderation right now. Most of the people that I know that promoted that were never kicked off Facebook. So I don't know how rigidly it was enforced, but it is true that was a policy for a certain amount of time. So I just want to say that, you know, wherever people fall on this issue, whether you strongly

Starting point is 00:05:17 believe that a lab leak is likely for various reasons that we'll go into in this content, or whether you think the natural origin is more likely. A conversation like the one that we are going to present, where you have three experts and they respond to critical questions to provide their side for why they've reached the conclusions that they have. It should be in everyone's interest, right? The people that are advocating for lab leak as the most likely outcome should also want to hear what the responses are from these particular scientists. So I hope, perhaps too optimistically, that it is taken in that spirit, that it's important when you say that you want people to discuss a topic that you

Starting point is 00:06:08 welcome it when they do discuss it so yeah i hate you know my even before covering this both of us have been alleged just from like making critical comments on twitter to be on the payroll of eco health alliance and like peter dazik stooges so i'm sure this won't do anything to spell that but yeah that's that's the way the cookie crumbles when you deal with this kind of topic i guess yeah yeah so one of the reasons that i think this is an important topic for us to cover is that one presentation of the virologists and scientists involved is interested individuals who are willing to conceal scientific evidence in order to further their own careers or to protect their discipline even at the cost of denying or covering up evidence so So in that case, people who knowingly mislead the public about evidence,

Starting point is 00:07:09 they can be seen as moral monsters, self-interested, just focused on money and lying about the science in that sense. And that gives people license online to target individual scientists in a very personal way, to go after them, to present them as nefarious individuals, and to potentially target their families and collaborators and contacts. as described and they aren't scientists who have been involved in these public health issues and infectious disease topics for decades. This has been their research career and many of them warned about this potential for coronavirus pandemics and then one occurred and then subsequently they themselves are blamed because of their research as the people responsible for the pandemic that has the potential to also be a moral issue where scientists are being vilified unfairly for simply doing their research and so i think it's important to add scientists as people and give them a chance to respond to accusations to talk about the evidence and I think that you could see if you looked at

Starting point is 00:08:34 their publications but as you'll see in the interview that they're not people unwilling to discuss these issues they have been interested in researching the origins and finding out what is true and and they have engaged in very public debate and discussion in the various scientific journals and been having very lively and ongoing debate in more private scientific circles so yeah i agree with you chris i mean uh assuming that there is not some malevolent conspiracy of silence among the virology community, then the kind of accusations that are being thrown around do carry very strong moral condemnation with them. There is this political dimension to it where the Republicans are forming various investigatory committees and so on and it's a hell of a reward for a scientist who has dedicated their entire life really to attempting to understand viruses and how they work in order to promote public health so that's

Starting point is 00:09:39 just something people should keep in mind when insinuations and accusations are being thrown about. Yeah. And, you know, people can take different positions on what they think is likely from the different presentations of the evidence that they hear. I don't think we can adjudicate for people, but I would note that when you hear the experts talking, that they're not always stating things unequivocally, right? They qualify their statements. And as with all the papers that have covered this, they often are clear that possibilities are not ruled out entirely. They do think the vast majority of evidence weighs in a certain way, but they are not

Starting point is 00:10:23 saying that there is no circumstance in which any new evidence could shift probability so it's good to just note that that is the stance that they reiterate but we'll get to that yeah one last thing matt we also should put our cards on the table to say that we have broadly been convinced, primarily by relying on expert opinion and the broad consensus that we feel that we've identified amongst relevant experts, that the majority of evidence points towards it being a natural origin. You can listen to our previous conversation with Stuart Neal from King's College if you want to hear earlier discussions on that point. So we are not pretending that we are coming into this with completely no prior opinion or entirely neutral. But I will say that I think Matt and I and all of the scientists that we discussed the issue with are willing to revise our opinions

Starting point is 00:11:26 depending on what new evidence emerges. So if there was strong evidence that emerged that is currently unknown that changed the equation to point towards a laboratory origin, I would change my assessment. And I strongly believe that most relevant experts would as well. I think the reason that they have a different assessment is because of the current balance of evidence or at least how they weigh it. But just putting the cards on the table, it's not as if we have no position or opinion on this issue. Yeah, the way I'd put it, just speaking for myself, is that I strongly recognize that I wouldn't recognize a fur and cleavage site if it came up and bonked me on the head. And on technical matters like this, my heuristic is to identify reliable sources of information,

Starting point is 00:12:16 people with relevant expertise, gauge a sense of consensus among them. And that's essentially my opinion on the matter, to the extent that my opinion matters in the least, which it does not. So in the case of the lab leak, my assumptions here is that I do tend to put more weight on people that have been working in this specific area for decades, have got qualifications and experience in this specific topic and have not parachuted into the contentious debate shortly after it became a big political and social hullabaloo. I think that's a pretty good heuristic that the reasoning for it kind of speaks for itself. So that's my cards, such that they are on the table. All good. deck nice full deck um yes so we did think that

Starting point is 00:13:07 it was important especially with this recent round of news and coverage of the lab leak entering the discourse and in particular we listened to the episode of sam harris's podcast with alina chan and matt ridley which was covering the evidence for the potential lab leak origin and i think it's fair to say quite strongly lent towards that being the most likely origin and presented other things as well yeah yeah so i think we're going to play some clips from that episode in a moment but i to um presage that a little bit i think when you and i listened to that probably fair to say we thought maybe the reception of sam to those guests was perhaps a little bit on the uncritical side and also perhaps some of the statements that those two interviewees made, you know, showed at least a couple of the guru-esque rhetorical techniques that we see.

Starting point is 00:14:10 And also, we're putting forward quite a few arguments in favor of the lab leak in a very unequivocal fashion. For instance, making the assertion that there was no plausible way in which there could be a zoonotic spill happening in the Wuhan area because it's nowhere near any of the known hotspots for that virus. So a bunch of technical claims were made, which you and I are not in the least bit capable of evaluating. So we thought it would be a good idea to talk to some people who do know what they're talking about. Yeah. So, you know, Sam has quite correctly in recent months staked out a position when it comes to discussing COVID conspiracies and the issues around the vaccine with Brett Weinstein, that

Starting point is 00:14:59 it's very important that people do not do what Joe Rogan does or Brett Weinstein does, which is focus on outlier perspectives and present those without any response from relevant experts. Most people shouldn't be doing their own research. And I'm not saying we should blindly trust the first experts we meet. If you're facing a difficult medical decision, get a second opinion, get a third opinion. But most people shouldn't be jumping on PubMed and reading abstracts from medical journals. Again, depending on the topic, this applies to me too. So the truth is, if I get cancer, I might do a little research, but I'm not going to pretend to be an oncologist. The rational thing for me to do, even with my background in science, is to find the best

Starting point is 00:15:53 oncologists I can find and ask them what they think. Of course, it's true that any specific expert can be wrong or biased, and that's why you get second and third opinions. And it's also why we should be generally guided by scientific consensus, wherever a consensus exists. And this remains the best practice even when we know that there's an infinite number of things we don't know. So while I recognize that the last few years has created a lot of uncertainty and anxiety and given a lot of motivation to contrarianism. And the world of podcasts and newsletters and Twitter threads has exploded as an alternative to institutional sources of information. The truth is we can't do without a culture of real expertise. And we absolutely need the institutions that produce it and communicate it.

Starting point is 00:16:46 Now, Sam may very well be intending to do a follow-up with other people with different opinions to provide the alternative side. But in this case, we thought that since we are often suggesting that the useful thing to do for people is to identify relevant experts and try to canvas the general consensus of opinion amongst them and to put the various points that are raised topics that they are presented as being unwilling to address in public or potentially misleading about so to put those to them and give them the chance to respond or to explain their side and quite fortunately we had three virologists who are very well versed in the topic have published influential papers agreed to come on and discuss it with us and we'll introduce

Starting point is 00:17:40 them in a little bit but maybe before that it would be good to talk about the way that the issue was framed and sam harris's podcast i think is a good example of how the issue is framed online chris shall we now turn to perhaps some of the comments in the sam harris podcast with alina chan and matt ridley that to some degree, we are asking these gentlemen to respond to. Yes, sure. So here is how Sam frames the episode that he released. We're going to talk about the origins of COVID, but in the background, and perhaps explicitly, we're also talking about the political corruption of science and a fundamental lack of transparency on the part of public health officials and, you know, attended failures of

Starting point is 00:18:32 cooperation. So that framing, you know, the implications about the political corruption of science and lack of transparency, it's clear as the interview progresses this is not directed purely at the chinese authorities right it's the chinese scientists and also western researchers or or non-chinese researchers in general that are indicted through the discussion yeah yeah so a clip i have that makes that clear when i first started wondering about where this pandemic had come from, I had no idea about this whole history of collaboration between not just the US, but many other countries across Asia and Europe with labs in China to do quite risky virus work that might have led to this pandemic. So here, it's not just whether Western scientists afraid of, you know, provoking China. It's really a question of are they also complicit in the origin of COVID-19. And over the last few years, we've seen again and again, a lot of support within the US for exactly that type of dangerous virus research that's commonly known now as gain-of-function

Starting point is 00:19:45 research. So if the pandemic did start from a lab in Wuhan, it is not just a Chinese government issue. It is actually an issue that affects multiple countries, many countries who have all supported and endorsed and engaged in this work. And the US is a big funder of it. So they would have almost equal responsibility, I think, in my eyes. So the word used there was complicit, and it is qualified by if the pandemic came out from the lab because of support for risky gain-of-function research from virologists worldwide, they would be complicit, especially figures in the US who may have provided funding for it. So I think that speaks to the notion that this is potentially virologists responding to a threat to their discipline. And Matt Ridley makes that point even clearer. It is a case that Western virology feels worried that its entire research program, indeed the whole of

Starting point is 00:20:49 biotechnology, might lose its funding, might lose its social license if a major accident is revealed to have happened as a result of work in a laboratory. Yeah. So that that theme I think is repeated quite a few times during the interview there is a number of shall we say scientific arguments made in favor of the lab leak regarding the geography the biased sampling is said to occur the lack of mutation that is said to have not occurred in the virus after jumping to humans, regarding the furin cleavage site and the possession of related viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But interspersed throughout those more scientific arguments is an underlying thread of, I guess, levying a kind of...

Starting point is 00:21:40 Implication? Implication, yeah. Like you said at the beginning, there is some qualifications about if it emerged from the lab, then. Also, they take pains at the beginning to emphasize that they are not completely certain about the origins, that it could well be a natural spillover. I have a clip that kind of makes this point clear. So here's Matt Ridley at the beginning of the conversation highlighting that. We both, I think, thought, and Alina can confirm this at the start, that it could go either way. That we would probably find out while we were writing the book what the answer was.

Starting point is 00:22:19 We were wrong about that, by the way. We still don't know three years later. But we would probably find out that it was either something to do with that seafood market or something to do with that laboratory in Wuhan. And so we devoted roughly equal quantities of text in the book to each argument. But I think by the end, we were both leaning towards the lab. So they mentioned leaning towards the lab. And I will also say that later towards the

Starting point is 00:22:47 end of the interview Alina says this. So there's quite a bit of evidence pointing to it's a lab origin although there's no key direct or definitive evidence for either natural or lab origin. Yeah so some important disclaimers there but I guess that's counterbalanced by the degree to which throughout that conversation, there is the strong implication that if there is a lack of evidence for the lab leak, then that is purportedly due to a conspiracy of silence among researchers. Yeah, although I also think they aren't in general saying there is a lack of evidence. They provide various lines of evidence to suggest that it's likely. And you can hear, for example, in the way Sam responds after hearing some of this evidence. This is Sam talking about the

Starting point is 00:23:38 lack of security at Wavin and the location, and what it indicates. John Stewart famously made the joke that you've got a novel bat coronavirus outbreak, and what do you have in town? You've got the Wuhan Institute of Virology working on precisely these sorts of viruses. Now we find at a level of security that couldn't possibly protect against a leak. On some level, what more do you need to know? So what more do you need to know? And Matt Ridley went discussing a non-funded proposal from EcoHealth Alliance that is often referenced and will be discussed in the interview. Once I saw the defuse proposal, I thought, no, it's more likely now that they took a natural virus, deliberately manipulated it with a furin cleavage site, which made it more infectious. And that's when the pandemic started. So we're not just

Starting point is 00:24:31 talking about a natural virus that leaked. We're talking also about the possibility of a manipulated virus that leaked. And lastly, Alina's summary it just seems like a incredible coincidence that the lab that this virus this extremely unique pandemic virus with a furin cleavage site shows up in the one city in the entire world where there's a lab with that exact plan to define novel cells like viruses and put these novel furin cleavage sites into them. Yeah, yeah. So to a late person like us, Chris, who listened to that episode on the Sam Harris podcast, I think you'd be forgiven for finding it all extremely convincing.

Starting point is 00:25:22 A bunch of scientific arguments are put forward, which makes it sound to someone like me, well, there's just no possible way. It could have been zoonosis. It seems like it absolutely had to have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And people like me are not really equipped to critically respond to any of those claims, which is why we reached out to these three professionals. Yeah, so there's a big distinction from the public perception on this issue and the general consensus amongst relevant experts. And it is not just me that notices or is editorializing that. Matt Ridley himself made this point at the beginning of the

Starting point is 00:26:01 interview with Sam. You know, the question of sort of opening it up to a proper conversation is just not acceptable within conventional science. And this is odd because the public generally thinks it came from a lab, if you look at opinion polling and based on anecdotal conversations I have with people, an awful lot of people think, yeah, of course it came out of that lab. Whereas the scientific establishment likes to say that the

Starting point is 00:26:29 vast majority of scientists think it didn't come out of a lab. Now, if that's true, if they think that and they know the public are, as it were, wrong on this topic, then they ought to be all the more willing to come out and debate it and knock down the theory that it came out of a lab. to come out and debate it and knock down the theory that it came out of a lab. And for me, it's very odd that we haven't been able to have a very open, wide-ranging conversation in much of the media about this over the last two or three years. Very good. So I think that sums up pretty nicely why we invited these three virologists to speak to us and allow us to put to them some of the points that were made by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan in that podcast episode. And so we get to have the

Starting point is 00:27:12 public discussion and public explanation that Matt Ridley has just called for there. Yeah. So what Matt Ridley is calling for is what we hope to achieve with this episode yeah yeah well we're mere servants of the discourse chris we got to do what we got to do so should we tell the people a little bit about the scientists we are talking to and the reason why we're talking to them would you like to go first sure so we have three scientists and there's a bunch of people we could have canvassed. These are quite eminent scientists within the field and they bring different areas of expertise but in particular each of them have in different ways been focused in this lab-league discourse. In Christian Anderson's case it often revolves around an early paper published in Nature, the proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Starting point is 00:28:08 This was an early paper which presented the evidence that it was not a laboratory manufactured virus. And Christian's emails are now a favorite topic of interest because in earlier emails that he sent to other virologists and other public health experts, he indicated concern that the virus might have been manufactured. He changed his assessment and published the reasons for that change of assessment in the paper, but it's often presented that he initially had all these suspicions and then he was instructed to present false information. So Christian is focused on for those reasons. Eddie Holmes, our second guest, has been involved in virology research and infectious

Starting point is 00:28:53 diseases for decades, and in particular, has specialized in China and Southeast Asia. So he likewise is involved in a bunch of papers exploring the topic, was on the paper that provided the first sequence of the virus. And Michael Warbe, originally somebody who was a signatory for a letter published in Science that called for more attention to be given to the possibility of a lab leak in investigations into the origins of covid 19 so he was originally a signatory on that but since then has been on a number of papers which have pointed to various lines of evidence showing the hunan seafood market as the most likely, what do you call it? The epicenter source?

Starting point is 00:29:48 Yeah, the source of the outbreak. So we'll get into that evidence. But all three of them have published highly influential papers on the topic of COVID origins. All three of them have been presented as potential agents of the conspiracy, you know, promoting this information. And so it seemed that these were good experts and they were all willing to come to talk to us, which is another important qualifier. Yeah. So just to give a little rundown on their CVs, we'll start with Christian Anderson. He's a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research. He's also got joint appointments at the Department of Integrative

Starting point is 00:30:29 Structural and Computational Biology in the Scripps Research Translational Institute. He focuses on the relationships between pathogens and their host. He does fieldwork, sequencing, experimentation, and computational biology. And he's led a number of international collaborations that has looked at the emergence and spread of pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, Zika virus, Ebola virus, West Nile virus, and Lassa virus. Yeah. And Eddie Holmes has worked for decades on a variety of topic, is known for his work on the evolution and emergence of a variety of infectious diseases, particularly the mechanisms by which RNA viruses jump species boundaries to emerge in humans or other animals. He holds currently NHMRC leadership fellowship and is a professor of virology at the University

Starting point is 00:31:19 of Sydney, your neck of the woods, Matt. Well, you know, your continent. And he studied the emergence and spread of pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, dengue virus, HIV, hepatitis C, and various other various names that I can pronounce. It was the offer, the lead offer on a critical review of the evidence for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 published in Cell in 2021. Oh, and due to fieldwork, has been instrumental in providing photographic evidence related to the seafood market and so on, because he's done a lot of work in China. So he has a lot of familiarity with the geographical context and just in general, the context over there. So that's Eddie.

Starting point is 00:32:10 Yeah, it should be clear. All three of these people are not pundits or people commenting on this from the outside, but are actually leading figures in terms of actually doing the hands-on experimental laboratory and field work regarding SARS. So last we have Michael Warrabee. Now he's the department head of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of

Starting point is 00:32:30 Arizona. He also looks at genetic sequences of viruses using molecular and computational biology. His focus is on looking at the origin, emergence and control of pandemics. He did work on how and where HIV originated and spread worldwide, on influenza, looking at historical stuff, including the 1918 pandemic. And recently, his work on SARS-CoV-2 has focused on how and when the virus originated, how the pandemic was ignited in China, and how it then emerged and took hold in North America and Europe. So he, again, authored a paper called the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan in science. And same for the molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2. So these are topics that we get into in the interview.

Starting point is 00:33:21 Yep. So there we go. That's our panel. Very experienced and qualified experts in this specific area. So without further ado, let's see how we get on. So we have with us today, a couple of new faces, guests, Christian, Eddie, and Michael. We'll speak to them in a minute, but we're having this call at all different times of the day. So thank you, those of you who are staying up late and enjoying intercontinental scheduling fun. But we are here today for a slightly different episode to discuss a topic

Starting point is 00:34:01 which remains very popular in discourse land. I suspect the three of you might be slightly sick of discussing that, but in any case, it's the origins of COVID, and in particular, whether it is likely that it originated from a laboratory leak and what the relevant evidence is. So this is a topic that it's alleged most recently by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley on Sam Harris's popular podcast that it's taboo, cannot be discussed by relevant experts, and that indeed there might be a corrosive campaign

Starting point is 00:34:38 of silence to prevent discussing it. And we hopefully will demonstrate that that is not exactly the case. People could look at your publication record or just look at podcasts on YouTube. But in any case, thank you all for coming. And yeah, Matt, is there anything you'd like to add before I move on to questions? Nothing to add, Chris. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for coming. on the questions. Nothing to add, Chris. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for coming. So Matt and I are going to play the role of people just asking questions or posing concerns that people might have. But for that, it might be useful for people we've already introduced you. But if we take each of you individually, would it be possible just to briefly summarize what your main academic area of expertise is and how you are involved with this topic of covid origins maybe if we go

Starting point is 00:35:36 clockwise so for me eddie that's you at the start yeah yeah hi chris so i was involved i'm an i'm a virologist and evolutionary biologist university of sydney i've been working on viruses for over 30 years now emerging viruses like this this is one of a chain that i've been looking at and i got involved in this because i was involved some of you may know this i was involved in the very early release of the genome sequence of the virus back in the early January 2020 and then shortly after that I was hooked into this topic I'm sure we'll get to this by by Christian and people at Jeremy Farah and I've been involved in in every day since every day since January every single day this has been this has been an interest to me so that's that's kind of my background then next Michael yeah so I'm a professor and head of the department of ecology

Starting point is 00:36:34 and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona and I actually worked with Eddie in Oxford on virus evolution. And I'm getting close to 25 years into the same line of work. Have done a lot of work specifically on the emergence of this pandemic was into how it started spreading in Europe and North America and some of the techniques, methodology that my colleagues and I developed for that work has then carried through to a series of studies, including ones with Eddie and Christian, that have helped elucidate the most likely scenario for how this pandemic started. And Michael, just before I ask Christian, I think it might be useful for people to know as well that we'll get into details, but there's been a bunch of, you know, various controversial letters and publications. But is it fair to say that initially that you were relatively more positively disposed to the the possibility about a laboratory or possible origin or naturally again that your position has evolved over time because i remember that you were on the letter in science, which was encouraging people with Alina Chan, actually,

Starting point is 00:38:07 that we need to look into the issue seriously. Yeah, and in fact, I proposed that letter, and it is correct to say that relatively speaking, my views have changed pretty dramatically away from thinking that that was a plausible scenario to thinking that it's, you know, while still possible, not really plausible at this point with the evidence that we have. But I should say also, and some of the reporting has kind of garbled this, that I never thought that that scenario was more likely than a natural, well zoonotic origin i always thought it was a long

Starting point is 00:38:46 shot but a long shot worth taking seriously yeah given that you all collectively often portrayed as you know being unwilling to discuss the topic it would be unusual that you would write a letter saying that we should discuss the topic if that was your goal. But anyway, Christian, how about your background? Yeah, so my background is a little different. I actually trained as an immunologist, but I spent the last 10, 15 years or so studying infectious diseases, trying to understand the emergence of infectious diseases, understanding the evolution and understanding the spread. And much of that work has been focused on work we've done in West Africa with a focus

Starting point is 00:39:30 on Ebola and Lassa in particular. And then with the emergence of Zika in the Americas, that became a big focus of ours to understand the emergence of Zika, both in the Americas, but also importantly here in the United States. And I actually, you know, the reason why I changed into infectious diseases and more sort of a global health focus was that I was actually reading Eddie's books and papers and Mike's papers on virus evolution and thought that it was really interesting and thought that that was something I wanted to do for my postdoc and for the rest of my career.

Starting point is 00:40:04 interesting and thought that that was something I wanted to do for my postdoc and for the rest of my career. And that sort of got me on to studying the viruses, again, understanding where they're coming from and how are they evolving and how do they spread around. And I obviously, with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, became very interested in the question of where did this come from? And again, we have the two hypotheses, which we'll talk about today. And I will say, I thought in the beginning that there was too quick dismissal of the lab leak specifically, because there is a reason why in particular for this particular pandemic, it's really important to consider. And that's why I reached out to Eddie and Eddie and I sort of got this process started. I think from my perspective, having done this type of work in the lab during my PhD, for example, understood a lot about the biology going on and the Wuhan Institute of Neurology.

Starting point is 00:40:53 And then, of course, with Eddie's much bigger expertise on just viral evolution of an emergence to get those questions started. I just have one quick follow up for all of you. question started. I just have one quick follow-up for all of you. So the coronaviruses in particular, was this an area that you've all published on the COVID obviously, but also COVID origins now, but were coronaviruses something that you were working with in advance of the pandemic or did you like switch the focus afterwards? Yeah, maybe I can answer that first because the answer to that is no. I obviously knew about coronaviruses and, you know, looked at SARS-1 and others, but generally speaking, no, not published anything on coronaviruses and by no means a coronavirus expert at the time of the start of the pandemic. Of course, what I was an expert on is understanding emergence of viruses

Starting point is 00:41:49 and importantly, very diverse viruses like Lassa, Ebola and Zika, for example, that are very different viruses. But from my perspective, no expertise and experience with coronavirus prior to the pandemic. Similar for me. No publications on coronaviruses before the pandemic similar uh similar for me no no publications on coronaviruses before the pandemic i had a few not a huge number but i had published one paper on coronaviruses in china in fact my background of viruses in china so i had some background in that but like mike and christian my background is in broad moral emergence but we're a little bit on coronaviruses.

Starting point is 00:42:27 I should add, though, that talking about our first paper on this proximal origin is that both Andrew and Bob Gehry, so Andrew Rambeau and Bob Gehry, did both have pretty significant expertise with coronaviruses. For example, Andrew Rambeau has kind of delineated the emergence of MERS and how that repeatedly spills over from camels. And Andrew has done some of that work on that. So certainly Andrew and Eddie and Bob had much more experience than, for example, I had an experience. Yeah, I was involved in the MERS work as well, which I forgot about. I forgot a lot these days.

Starting point is 00:42:59 Eddie, don't play that, honestly, for sure. That's great. So I suppose it's fair to say, so your research networks and collaborations included specialists in coronaviruses. Okay, that's great. So starting off, what we might do is just pose to you guys some of the arguments that we've heard floating around the discourse, which I think sound reasonably plausible to dummies like us, lay people in general. So I'll go first and start with the geography issue. The first argument that we tend to hear in favor of a lab leak origin really starts with pointing to something that intuitively everyone gets, which is, it seems like a coincidence that this virus emerged in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Starting point is 00:43:45 It's been claimed that the WIV was actively gathering and manipulating similar viruses, and also that that particular area is nowhere close to known hotspots for the naturally occurring virus. So putting those two pieces together, the claim follows that the WIV should therefore be treated as the most obvious or prime candidate for the virus origin because the natural origins in that location are kind of implausible, according to the argument, and the WV is there and is one of the very few laboratories that specialize in this kind of virus. Maybe I can start because it's the wrong question to ask, right? The question you really have to ask yourself is why Wuhan?

Starting point is 00:44:26 Is it so surprising that Wuhan itself became epicenter of a pandemic? And I think the answer to that is that if we look at Wuhan, it's the biggest city in central China, right? It's a very connected city, one of the most connected cities in China. If we look at SARS-1, for example, we know that SARS-1 was found on farms just outside Wuhan in Hubei province and elsewhere. So from that perspective is that it's not actually, you know, while Wuhan might not be on the top of that list, it's certainly in top 10 probably of risks of cities in China that, you know, where the next pandemic could start. And

Starting point is 00:45:03 of course, pandemic starts somewhere. Then you can additionally ask yourself the question, what are the likelihoods of having a lab studying coronaviruses in that same city? And again, there are many, many labs that study coronaviruses, certainly across Southeast Asia, because there's a lot of coronaviruses there. So from that perspective, I think it's not so unusual. But the Wuhan Institute of Urology is special for a few different reasons. First of all, it's the only BSL-4 lab in China. But that's irrelevant to the conversations here because coronaviruses are not manipulated in BSL-4 labs. So that's totally irrelevant.

Starting point is 00:45:40 But they were studying. but they were studying yeah just before you move on there for anybody who doesn't know bsl4 refers to biosafety level yeah sorry yeah so these are the biosafety levels they go from one to four where four is the highest and four is where we handle other viruses that we study like ebola and lassa for example are handled in BSL-4, but there's very few viruses in general that is studied at BSL-4. When we talk about the coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2 here, is that most tissue culture work with these kinds of bat coronaviruses will be done in BSL-2, where a lot of general lab work is being done. Some people have compared this to a dentist's office, which is just outright untrue. These are good containment labs, but they're BSL-2,

Starting point is 00:46:34 so it's still relatively low. Things like animal work, where you might grow viruses at rather higher titers, so you have more virus around, you're dealing with animals. This is typically done in BSL-3, which is a level at which a lot of work today is being done with SARS-CoV-2. I think most countries will have BSL-3 for SARS-CoV-2. So again, Wuhan Institute of Urology has a BSL-4 lab, or they have a BSL-4 lab, but they also have all the other levels, 1 to 4. And again, coronaviruses are not manipulated in BSL-4, so that's entirely irrelevant. And so I'll follow on from there. And the first thing I would like to say is for any listeners out there, I don't think anyone should be criticized for wondering about the possible coincidence between the Wuhan Institute of

Starting point is 00:47:26 Virology and the origin of this virus. It's a perfectly natural thing to think. All three of us considered it. We all came to conclusions at different time points. For me, some of my own research and research in collaboration with Joel Wertheim and Jonathan Pekar at UCSD, who led this work. So that for me, there were a couple of crucial things that really reframed my view of this supposed crazy coincidence. The first is that this virus was going to emerge in a big city. That if you drop a virus with the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2 circa late 2019 into a rural part of China, 99% of the time, it's not going to establish itself. It really requires being put in the middle of a big city where there's lots of people closely

Starting point is 00:48:19 connected for this to take hold. So really, the question should be, what are the chances that one of the top 10 cities in China has a coronavirus lab or, you know, a virus that studies bat labs or emerging viruses? And this is something I've been looking into just over the last few days in more detail. And eight out of the 10 top 10 cities plus Hong Kong on the periphery, you know, not in mainland China, have labs that you could, after the fact, point to and say, this is a crazy coincidence. So if this virus had emerged in Beijing, there are four labs in Beijing that you could point to and say, what a crazy coincidence, including one that has ties to EcoHealth Alliance, sampled at the Mojang mine that some readers will be familiar with that was

Starting point is 00:49:07 in the early days before goalposts shifted part of the lab leak narrative. And so, you know, while it starts at a reasonable place, when you look at it with the evidence that's accumulated, it actually is not such a strange thing. The strange thing turns out to be that this virus is so connected to a wildlife market in the middle of Wuhan. Yeah, that to me is, let's see, when I see this outbreak, what I see is not Wuhan. I see live animal markets. And that's exactly what happened in SARS-1. You had to pick any place in Wuhan for it to emerge. If it was zoonotic, it would be the live animal market. And lo and behold, it emerged in the live animal market. I mean, that to me would be an even bigger

Starting point is 00:49:57 coincidence. To me, it's extraordinarily positive, powerful observation. Then you're asking yourself, what's the odds if the virus was in fact from a lab? What are the probability that then it first appears in a live animal market 30k away? And I would suggest to you that probability is infinitesimally small. I wonder if you've actually been to Wuhan and I've been to this live animal market. And it's not a particularly busy place. It's not a hub hub not a mass of humanity there are far busier places in wuhan so why there and the reason why is because like sars one that market was selling particular wildlife species that we know are reservoirs for the virus okay and that

Starting point is 00:50:39 to me is what what i'm absolutely drawn to every single time. The other thing about Wuhan is, although it's, as Christian said, it's one of the biggest cities in China, it ends very abruptly. And then you are in the wild. It's really quite extraordinary. And around Wuhan, it's very agricultural. And a variety of other viruses have emerged in the Wuhan area. It's not a great kind of sprawl. It's not like Tokyo can sprawl on and on and on and on. It's a very distinct city, and then nature and wildlife. It's a wetland area. There's lots of rivers and lakes around there. It's not hard to imagine that those areas carry viruses. And I should also say that, again, one of the great arguments is most of these viruses

Starting point is 00:51:23 come from the Yunnan province, which is in the southwestern China in Hubei we know there are bats that carry corona SARS like coronaviruses and there are some bats that they have a recombinant virus it's called like a hybrid chimera virus and some of the genes in those hybrid viruses from bats in Hubei are SARS-CoV-2 like. Okay. So, the idea that this is an island away from anywhere where the hub of the virus is, is just completely untrue. It's just absolutely not true. And bats have been sampled a fair bit in China, but there's a huge sampling and ascertain bias towards bats from Yunnan province. That's a really good place to go bias towards bats from Yunnan province. That happens to be a really good place to go and sample bats.

Starting point is 00:52:11 But there are bats, these rhinolophus bats, these horseshoe bats, are all over China, including around Wuhan. Okay. Again, you don't hear that, but that is actually the case. And if I could just follow up with one other thing you touched on. You know, let's just assume that the closest bat relative of these viruses came from Yunnan. And actually, some not yet peer-reviewed work, but work that we've shared on virological.org, shows that of the non-recombinant, so of one of these fragments of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that doesn't have a sort of chimeric history of its own. There's a piece that's only a few years separated from bat viruses from Yunnan. It's

Starting point is 00:52:55 actually Yunnan bat viruses are the closest relative, even closer than these banal viruses that were discovered in Laos. And if you just look at a map of China, and you look at Yunnan in the south, and then Guangdong, where SARS-CoV-1 emerged, versus Hubei, where SARS-CoV-2 emerged, the distance between Yunnan, which was the closest bat virus for SARS-1, was in Yunnan. The distance between Yunnan and Guangdong is almost identical to Yunnan and Hubei. And so I actually find it hard to believe that people who are persistently making this argument that there's something just inexplicable about how far the closest known bat viruses are from Hubei are acting in good faith. They're either deeply ignorant

Starting point is 00:53:47 or acting in bad faith. Eddie, you must be in some sense like a conspiracy theorist's dream, because I believe you had some photos of the marketing question that people have used as evidence and involved in publishing the early sequence of the virus. And so you specifically must, because of doing work in China, be the kind of nice lynch node that can be added into most conspiracies. It's been argued, in fact, that I actually took those photographs that were kind of faked some years ago, so in the future they could be used to point to the market. You know, this is the level they could be used to point to the market you know this is the level

Starting point is 00:54:25 that it's it's it's got to but the reality is right the reason why i went to that market is because the local public health authorities knew this was an area where diseases might emerge that's why we went there the reason why i and christian and andrew and michael are so involved in this and all these papers is because that's what we do for a living. Amazingly, that's why we get grant money to work on it, because we work in the area, not because we're paid off by Tony Fauci. This is the problem. So I work with virologists in China on emerging viruses. So by definition, I'm going to be involved when there are outbreaks in China. And I went to that market and I took some photographs of this live animal market and they've proven to be of great interest.

Starting point is 00:55:11 And I should say, I mean, you may know this story, but when the Wichoe team first went to Wuhan in February 2021, I sent them the photographs that I took and the Chinese delegation claimed that I'd faked them at the time, because they didn't want it to be seen that the markets were selling wildlife. When the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, Matt, went over the story very well. So, actually, one month after the Proxima Origin paper, he asked for an inquiry into COVID origins. So, back to where I think I could start, Chris, you said that Proxima Origin's paper has prevented people discussing the lab theory. I mean, it's complete nonsense, right? start, Chris, you said that Procter & Rodgers paper has prevented people discussing the lab theory. I mean, it's complete nonsense, right?

Starting point is 00:55:48 So Morrison, our prime minister, asked one month, April 2020, for an inquiry into COVID origins. In response to that, the Chinese consulate in Sydney said there are no live animal markets in China, right? Even though I've been there, I've taken photographs and I've given it to them. So there's so much misinformation going around and i understand it for people who are not versed in this it is complex to get this to understand what's going on but yeah so it's no surprise that i was there it's no surprise i took photographs there quite frankly i think just one thing to add there because it's really important to understand that the virology field, the part of the virology field that I study emerging viruses and study the evolution of these viruses, right, is a very small field.

Starting point is 00:56:33 It's not a huge number of people doing this type of work. And Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance, for example, is another actor in this, right? But they have studied this for many years. Health Alliance, for example, is another actor in this, right? But they have studied this for many years. And that's why our names keep coming up again, because it's the same people who have been doing this for decades, right? And the problem is that people see these coincidences. One of the new ones is the Ebola lab leak, which also is being blamed on us because we have been studying Ebola in Kenema and Sierra Leone. And lo and behold, Ebola emerged just a few miles from there in 2014, right? Obviously across the border in Guinea, but it's maybe 100 miles or so away.

Starting point is 00:57:17 And people then put that together and say, oh, so that Ebola must have been a lab leak too. And it was Robert Gary and Christian Anderson again. And the reason why these names keep coming up and the reason why we get grant money to study infectious diseases is because we study infectious diseases and have done so for many, many decades. And that's why the names keep coming up again, right? It's not because there's some major conspiracy theory here where all of us have been sort of fiddling with the fields well prior to the pandemic, right? It just doesn't make any sense. I don't even understand how you can make that connection. It just doesn't make any sense.

Starting point is 00:57:57 That's really helpful. I think the common thing with all of these things is a confusion of cause and effect right and misinterpreting associations so you guys have explained there were two key claims that related to this coincidence of the wiv and wuhan and you know you guys have explained that these types of coronaviruses and the animals that carry them are not unknown in those areas that major outbreaks occur not in some isolated hamlet somewhere but almost by definition need to happen in a relatively major population center these labs that study viruses you know there are many of them you explained and that they're probably going to be located in countries and regions where these viruses are of concern so that makes perfect sense to me so thank you for that so there's a bunch of related

Starting point is 00:58:46 questions that but i i guess to stay on the issue of the the wuhan institute of virology to get that out of the way first so one of the points that you have touched on is closely related viruses, right? Potentially related viruses, or whether they're ancestral or not, maybe you can help explain, but it's been claimed that another feature about the Wuhan Institute, which makes it particularly unusual, right, or suspicious,

Starting point is 00:59:20 is the possession of the RATG13, along with, Matt Ridley summarized nine other close relatives, similar viruses. Eddie, take it as an aid. Aid, actually, but who's counting? Yeah, you can correct any of this afterwards. And there's also the claim made that there was a database, an online database of viruses that was taken down, used to be freely available and then was removed. And this has been not put back online. The World Health Organization has not been provided access to it when it went over.

Starting point is 00:59:57 So it's basically implied that the possession of related viruses make the lab an obvious candidate. viruses make the lab an obvious candidate and the related suggestion is if this deleted database was provided it could exonerate the Wuhan institute and the fact that they won't do that and have referenced hacking means that we should be suspicious about what's going on so how about that line of argument I can start with a little personal history here that I can't remember if I've talked about this publicly. And it was a good exercise in me for thinking about my own treatment of Shizhongli in particular and Chinese scientists who have been blamed for the pandemic in general. So you mentioned these other viruses that Shizhong Li's lab had possession of. And in fact, indeed, there were eight other

Starting point is 01:00:55 SARS-related viruses that were collected by Shizhong Li's lab in this so-called Mojang mine, a mine in Mojang County in Yunnan province in southern China, where RATG13, which early on was the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2, was also sampled. And these genomes, the genome sequences were referred to in an addendum to the article, Shi Zhengli's article about RATG13 in nature. And so after the letter to science came out, I was kind of sort of toying with the conspiracy theory that Shi Zhengli was actually hiding these other ones because one of them actually was basically identical to SARS-CoV-2. And so I got in contact with Nature and said, listen, you know, the genome sequences are mentioned in the addendum, you know, it's not part of the main paper, but it's pretty clear that Nature's policy is that

Starting point is 01:01:57 if things are talked about in the journal, they have to be made public. So could you please get in touch with and ask that those sequences be shared and sure enough nature was good enough to do that and within like two days maybe three days tops zhang li had shared the accession numbers of those with nature who shared them with me and for like 16 hours when i was out at my cabin on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I was, I think, the only other person in the world who had access to these genome sequences. And they weren't the smoking gun. All of these were quite distantly related,

Starting point is 01:02:33 much more distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 than RATG-13. Were they SARS-CoV-1 like, Mike? They were... No, they were still SARS-CoV-2 like unless I'm forgetting something but quite way further away than RATG-13 and then that ends up being RATG-15 right Mike okay yeah are these the ones that then end up being called RATG-13 sorry RATG-15 I don't know about that nomenclature system but at any rate like two days after or like 16 hours after I had them Zheng Lixue put out a pre-print basically saying the same thing that I had seen which were they're not actually very interesting at all and certainly not the smoking

Starting point is 01:03:21 gun and so I was then faced with this, okay, what have I engaged in here? I've engaged in kind of entertaining the thought that she was basically lying. And that kind of chastened me and made me realize that that letter that I published in Science that in a very uncritical way, just sort of bought into the idea that maybe there was a big cover up and conspiracy was pretty naive, which a good friend of mine at one time told me might be the case michael can i just ask a follow-up like for a layman there so yeah why would it be the case that the sequences that she sent you that i think people would say well but you know if she wanted to hide the sequences that she had she could just mock up non-existent ones or something

Starting point is 01:04:16 like that or she has other ones that you know is not providing so why is it that you have confidence that these are what they say they are and everything that they had? Yeah, well, first of all, Eddie has some good information where you would need a time machine to travel back and organize this cover up. But I'll say two things. First of all, now when I think about it, everything that Zhongli Xue has said has actually been backed up by other evidence. There's nothing that she's said anywhere along the way where there's any evidence that she's been lying, dishonest, covering anything up or anything else. And then second, yeah, I would hand it over to Eddie to talk about why there's very good reason and reason importantly that the DOE, the FBI, the intelligence

Starting point is 01:05:14 community hasn't been privy to in making their assessments on how this pandemic started. So this relates to the Twitter thread that Chris has already mentioned that I posted yesterday. And what this is about, and I mentioned this story before, it's about a paper, an unpublished paper from 2018. And very briefly, it's my first record on that, but very briefly, I had a postdoc called Jay Kier, who was with me for a while. And then he went to, ran in serology for a few years, and now he's in Shanghai. And while he was at, when he was in serology, he did some work on bat coronaviruses. And he was interested in the evolution of these bat coronaviruses. He was interested to find out where SARS-1 came from, okay?

Starting point is 01:05:59 And the idea they were interested in was, did SARS-1 come from, it was found in Guangdong originally, did it come from Yunnan, right? Which is kind of like what everyone's asking now. That was their idea. So what they did was they went to their database of viruses and they got some sequences. And some of those sequences are from RATG13. And they would have liked to have got whole genome sequences. But in fact, that was actually pretty hard to do. So they ended up getting just individual genes for some of these viruses. And for this RATG30, the closest one from the Wuhan lab, they got the complete polymerase gene for that. And they did some analysis.

Starting point is 01:06:38 And that paper was submitted to a number of journals in 2018, three journals. And they rejected it, right? They just didn't think it was very interesting. Yeah, journals, and they rejected it, right? They just didn't think it was very interesting. Yeah, I think they regret that now, right? But anyway, so it was just rejected. And the reviewers said, okay, it's kind of cool, but it was just an evolutionary story, but we want whole genomes. That's what they wanted. And they couldn't do it because it was just too hard. So eventually the paper was pulled in October 2018 because they couldn't get whole genomes. And then what happened was then we just forgot about it.

Starting point is 01:07:09 I forgot about it. Jay forgot about it. The first author forgot about it completely. When they submitted the paper in 2018, though, they sent the sequences to GenBank. And they put like an arbitrary four-year embargo on release of the sequences. When you submit, you often put an embargo saying, because when the paper's published, you've relaxed that embargo, and the sequences go up.

Starting point is 01:07:30 But they put a four-year one, an arbitrary four-year date. So in July 2022, these sequences appear suddenly on GenBank, these background of our sequence through initialology, with my name on the submission form. So suddenly, again, there he is. He's everywhere, right? Coming from the past. It must be him, coming from the past, right?

Starting point is 01:07:50 And I honestly, I thought, what is this? When I first saw it, I thought, GenBank must just have got this wrong. Why am I on this? And then I went back and I found my records. I actually was on this paper. And I found the paper and I've given all the documents in the paper,

Starting point is 01:08:05 all the emails, a variety of people to look at. And what it shows, the great thing is, it really is a time machine. It's what they were doing in 2018 before the pandemic. At which point, of course, there was no need to hide anything. They could just submit what they were working on. And lo and behold, is SARS-CoV-2 in there? No. Is there a closer epigenetic virus in there? No. Is there RITG13? Yes, but only one gene. And that backs up what Zhengli Shi has said. And it shows you very, very clearly, this is what they had, what they were

Starting point is 01:08:39 working on. And the virus is just not there. Now, if we found if we'd have found our it's SARS-CoV-2 or very correlative in that data set it's game over right that would be that would be high confidence evidence it comes from that lab but it's simply not there it's this is like an independent analysis it's what the FBI want to do and I kind of did it inadvertently because my memory's really bad and I forgot about papers paper. And there it actually is, right? So, you know, and then that fits her story. It fits that they had trouble sequencing. They got it a bit, I think they got it, they finished it in 2019, that particular virus.

Starting point is 01:09:14 They got more sequences. But there's just nothing else. This whole Mojang mind, there's no more sequences. That database you referred to, that went on and offline over a variety of months and weeks. It's not a simple story. They took it down. That was it. It went on and offline. So it's actually much more complicated than people say. So look, if you can put that virus in that lab, I would happily believe a lab leak. I absolutely would. I absolutely would. But since the three years this has been going on, there's been analyses of PhD theses, emails, social media, unpublished papers, and there's nothing.

Starting point is 01:09:51 Absolutely nothing. And are you telling me that in all that time, these scientists didn't say, tell anybody anything or write anything down about the work they were doing that created this forest? Not a single thing ever? Long before they had any reason to hide yeah yeah at the same time they forgot that their sequences were to get released in gem bank in four years time right so these master criminals made this elementary mistake of forgetting that yet covered it up so perfectly i mean mean, no, if you think about it rationally for a few seconds, it's just nonsense, right? There should be a trace somewhere.

Starting point is 01:10:32 Someone should have said something, emails or messaged something. There should be something there, but it's not. Yeah, I get you. I just want to emphasize, like, what you're saying is in this counterfactual universe where COVID escaped from this lab and then they did not know that that was going to happen back in 2018 2019 all the way up there was no reason to operate in secrecy there was no reason although i bet you absolutely i can guarantee matt someone would have proposed that they were actually doing it in secret you know

Starting point is 01:11:04 longer that i mean i've i've actually written down 14 different variants of the lab leak theory Absolutely. I can guarantee, Matt, someone would have proposed that they were actually doing it in secret, you know, longer. I mean, I've actually written down 14 different variants of the lab leak theory. OK, and you can choose any one you want. R-A-T-G is real, it's fake. So someone at some point would have proposed, oh, they were doing it in secret for years and years. That's definitely out there. Oh, I believe we look at conspiracy theories a lot on the show and that there is an explanation for everything, of course. Everything, yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:26 No, no, I'm just addressing the normal people in this. I think a few things that are important here, right? If we talk about this RITD-15 and to the question of have the Wuhan Institute of Virology, do we know of all the viruses that were ever sequenced? And I think the answer to that almost certainly is no, we don't, right? But what's really important here is that if you look at RITG15, I think these eight viruses we're referring to, I believe those are RITG15, right? Yeah, yeah, I looked it up and you're right.

Starting point is 01:11:57 One of them is RITG15 and they're actually almost identical genomes, right? They're not SARS-CoV-2. I think, are they the lineage, sorry, they're the lineage for viruses in that paper. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that all fits. It all fits absolutely perfectly.

Starting point is 01:12:12 Oh, yeah. But what's important here, right, is that the reason why people knew that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had sequences of these sequences, not the actual virus, right? It's not an isolate. It's just the sequence of the virus. The reason why people got so obsessed with that is that it was mentioned in Church's paper, and she had given talks where she had phylogenetic trees showing that, oh, there's these viruses that you haven't actually seen that are out there. The problem is that if you look at that slide that she has given, first of all, she's presenting the data saying, look, we have these other viruses. She's not trying to hide it.

Starting point is 01:12:50 But if you look at those slides and you actually know what you're looking at, you can very clearly see that those viruses are not SARS-2. Not even close. They are somewhat close deliberated to SARS-2, but there's absolutely no way that they could be SARS-2. Hence, the question of what are those particular viruses and what are they hiding is totally irrelevant because it's not SARS-2, right? So then the reason why they're, quote unquote, hiding it when I got this question is that, well, it's probably because they're waiting to publish a paper on it. Maybe they're writing the paper right now, right?

Starting point is 01:13:24 And then, lo and behold, the paper comes out and everybody can see, oh it. Maybe they're writing the paper right now, right? And then lo and behold, the paper comes out and everybody can see, oh yeah, they're not actually related to SaaS2, so let's move on to the next and move the goalpost again. And to me, it's such a perfect litmus test that if you're sort of, in your frame of mind is that they're hiding everything, and then they show you the evidence and it's really trivial and it's completely unrelated you just move the the goalposts and saying look whatever else are they hiding and yeah since alina chan for example is is one of the ones you're focusing on for this particular one the perfect example of this too from her was that all my emails with tony fauci was released out in the

Starting point is 01:14:02 public domain right and you can see all the emails there. You can see the correspondence about, you know, after this famous February 1 conference call. And what you can see is just scientists talking about science. Alina's question to this is that, oh, but where are the emails where they talk about the cover? It's like, yeah, those emails don't exist, right? Because there is no cover up here. But the problem with this sort of obsession with like they're hiding, they need to show everything. As soon as you show them these things, the goalpost just moves to the next thing and saying, oh, there must be something over here that they're hiding, right?

Starting point is 01:14:38 And it never ends. It absolutely never ends because you can't prove a negative, right? It's impossible. And I think these RITD-15 and this whole farce around these eight missing genomes, right, is such a perfect example on that. There's simply nothing for them to hide there. And they were just writing a paper and then they published it and then you have all the sequences. And lo and behold, unrelated to SARS-2. And our colleague Flo DeBar, who's the most knowledgeable and authoritative person in France on the origins of COVID-19, actually dug up recently evidence that Zhengli Shi had posted those sequences

Starting point is 01:15:19 in March of 2021, long before I got in touch with Nature. And she only released them later on in the summer, but they were already submitted. And I'm sure that her preprint was basically done before I coincidentally got in touch right around that same time. So I think I can a little bit devil's advocate for you, the position of, I think people that would be would still so you've set the case out very well for why virologists for example think that it's

Starting point is 01:15:55 very unlikely you'd have to be planning you'd have to have this kind of program which was hidden for years in advance and and yet also be publishing various things which are closely related seemingly without concern but so china i think everybody here would agree is a fairly authoritarian regime right a single state country. And it has a history, including the COVID pandemic, of censoring and suppressing information that reflects negatively on it. I think some of you have argued that Chinese authorities, although they have supplied certain information, they've also held stuff back, right?

Starting point is 01:16:40 Metagenomic data for environmental sampling. And so how about that issue that if this is correct, then that database, just for example, it is a canard on the lab-like side. So why wouldn't the Wuhan Institute just give it and from their point of view view they're often saying that you know that is the thing that would allow them of course it wouldn't right they would like you're saying Christian just move on to the next thing but if the information would support their case

Starting point is 01:17:17 why wouldn't they release it I would strongly suggest they're not releasing it because they're not allowed to release it okay and I think that's that's the key problem and i think what you're seeing now and i've heard this directly from some people who collaborate that with that lab is that china clearly are pushing and the idea that the virus is not from china in any way at all okay and there's definitely it's not china and i think that's for domestic politics i think that's mean xi jinping is basically doing a let's make China great again kind of policy. And wants to come across as a strong leader. And China is not to blame for this.

Starting point is 01:17:53 And I think that means that anything that can pin in any way the virus to China, and I don't think the database does have to say, but anything that makes China look bad, they're not going to allow it out. So I don't think that lab is allowed to give it but anything that makes China look bad, they're not going to allow it out. So I don't think that lab is allowed to give it. That's my strong impression what's going on. So basically, Eddie, you're saying that China doesn't just willingly share everything we ask for? I mean, this argument keeps coming up, right? And it is an absolutely ridiculous argument because, of course, China is obfuscating.

Starting point is 01:18:26 But are they obfuscating because of a lab leak? No, none of this is special to a lab leak. And what is really important here, too, is that we have to... China is not just China. When you're talking about this being a lab leak, you're not talking about the Chinese authorities, you're talking about Chinese scientists, human beings, and you're accusing them specifically, at the moment, specifically of having created the virus and having covered it all up. It's a specific allegation, right? It's not led well by Chinese authorities.

Starting point is 01:19:06 And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're being very specific here when you're talking about a lab leak. And that's one of the aspects of this, which I think, you know, I had a long conversation with Mike about this around the science letter, the Bloom It All science letter. the bloom it all science letter because this is the part to me that we really have to be careful right that when you go out there and you make straight up allegations when you now actually have evidence to inform what you think is the most likely scenarios here is that you have to remember specifically what it is that you're doing and very specifically what you were saying is that chinese scientist xia zhang li and others are lying out about it and there's a major cover-up around this right and we can never forget that that's what it is it's not just like well maybe it's this or maybe

Starting point is 01:19:57 it's that right and the question itself could it have come from the lab, is a very reasonable question to ask yourself, given, again, you have the Wuhan Institute of Urology. Early on in the pandemic, where we had very little data on what was going on here, asking yourself the question, could this have come from the lab, is a very legitimate question. The problem is, of course, that since then, we have gotten a lot of evidence. And we also have to remember, again, that for a virus to leak out of a lab, it has to be in that lab to begin with. And you don't just go out and randomly pick up the next pandemic virus, right? Pandemic viruses are very rare. Hence, we don't have pandemics all the time. Or the other version of this, which is that they created the virus specifically,

Starting point is 01:20:50 in which the cover-up is a lot larger, right, is that those possibilities, a priori giving no evidence, are quite unlikely but not impossible. But then you have all the evidence that point directly to that market in the middle of the city. And that's why you then have to say like, oh, actually, I don't have any evidence that Xu Shengli has been lying about this. I don't have any evidence whatsoever that this was in the lab prior to the pandemic. And let's not forget that it's not from a lack of trying to find evidence of that, including the example that Eddie gave that, oh, the sequences in papers, whatever it is, right? That every time we come up negative for any evidence of that virus

Starting point is 01:21:47 having been in the lab prior to the pandemic, that's the one side, right? And then on the other side, you can look at, but what about the cases? What about the hospitalizations? What about that market? And all of that just points straight to that market in the middle of Wuhan, right?

Starting point is 01:22:03 That's true evidence. It's not the absence of evidence for that. Yeah, and I think we probably will move to that in just a second. So, Christian, just to summarize for some of the people that might not be as much in the weeds, there was a letter early published in February 2020 in The Lancet where a group of scholars, I think the important thing is the context that you just provided, right? That they are responding to allegations that they're

Starting point is 01:22:33 seeing directed at scientists who they know. The way that I read that letter, and I know various people have read it differently, was that it was expressing support for scientists in the face of the kind of conspiratorial allegations at them. So that letter is sometimes presented as an attempt to shut down any research into the laboratory origins. And there is a paper which you are the lead author on which followed in nature in March the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 and that looks at a range of evidence and is sometimes presented as like another effort to shut down the conversation but for anybody can go and look at the paper it's quite short and it's very clear in the conclusion you lay out you know more scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis or another so

Starting point is 01:23:31 rather than completely settling it you simply said this is the evidence that we have the date that that shows that so i i think those are important and And then there is the additional letter, Michael, with the one that you suggested, which appears in science, saying that there needs to be investigations of the origin. So there's a lot of letters, a lot of papers that people might not be familiar with. But maybe the positive evidence for why the lab leak is less likely would be good to focus on.

Starting point is 01:24:07 Yeah, yeah. I'll put that to you, gentlemen. We might try to kill two bats with one stone. And I'll hit you with them both at once. So the first argument that we've seen is kind of dismissing some of that evidence you mentioned about the infection nucleus being located on the wet market it's claimed that that's just an artifact of biased sampling that you know essentially all the sampling was done in the vicinity of the market because the research is expected to be around the market and so if that's the only place you look then that's the only place you're going to find positive data points the the second argument that's made is around the lack of mutation. And this one is actually an interesting one because it's claimed that zoonotic viruses typically show

Starting point is 01:24:51 vast mutations after making the leap to human hosts as they optimize for the novel conditions in the human body. And since it's claimed that this was not observed for SARS-CoV-2, it's suggested that it therefore follows that the virus must have been engineered and was therefore pre-adapted before spreading in humans in the wild. So who would like to go first with these two? For the listeners who can't see their faces, I just say that everybody was kind of shaking their heads. I can start with the geographical evidence and the claims, mostly on Twitter, notably not in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. More than a year after our results were first made public that they are compromised by these sorts of biases. And so first thing, I actually spent many months producing a perspective, a paper in science that predated the actual statistical analyses that Christian and Eddie

Starting point is 01:25:55 and I and many other co-authors followed up with in science, looking at the question of what scientists call ascertainment bias. This issue of is the pattern that you're seeing a real pattern or is it really just because all of the cases that you're finding are being found because that's the only place you're looking? And so for me, this was like a central question that I spent months working on. And as scientists, we're kind of supposed to try to falsify hypotheses. So there was epidemiological evidence that a lot of the early cases were linked to this one market with 1500 workers in a city of 12 million people, you know, something around half of the early cases. And that's just a really remarkable fraction of early cases to be linked with

Starting point is 01:26:46 one workplace. But one way I could see that this could just be completely misleading would be if that was actually just a result of possibly surveillance for new mysterious pneumonia cases being focused on markets, because that's where SARS-1 cases were known to be linked to. And I was told this by a colleague who has links to China, you know, don't worry, don't make anything about the fact that a bunch of the early cases were linked to the market. It's just because that's where the pneumonia of unknown etiology program was focused. So that turns out to be totally not true. There was no prior observation and surveillance of markets selling live animals. And, you know,

Starting point is 01:27:34 when you peel back from studies that were done after the time where there could have been ascertainment bias that leaked in because people were aware of the link to the market. You get back to these early reports in newspapers where the pandemic, the outbreak, was discovered by doctors. And in particular, Dr. Zhixian Zhang at the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, Xinhua Hospital for short. December 27th, she saw the CT scans of an elderly couple who had pneumonia and had tested negative for every known pathogen, looked at them and said, boy, this looks a lot like SARS, which she dealt with 20 years before, forced their son, who was feeling fine, to have a CT scan. He

Starting point is 01:28:26 had lesions as well. And so right then and there, she thought to herself, probably a new SARS-like virus, probably human-to-human transmissible because it's gone through this whole family, and probably you can be asymptomatic and have this virus. Lessons that took the rest of the world, have this virus. Lessons that took the rest of the world, including China as a whole, many, many weeks and months to really absorb, unfortunately. But none of these people were connected to the market. And it was only in the next two days when she and other doctors at that hospital were on the lookout for people with similar signs and symptoms, that the next four people showed up and turned out to be workers at the market that that link was made. And so it's clear that before anyone could have been

Starting point is 01:29:13 finding a bunch of cases because of a bias toward the market, there were already lots of, you know, more than half at this hospital, more than half at another hospital. So then Christian and I co-led this Kuan On Market study with Eddie and Andrew and lots of others, where we dissected the residential locations, which Chinese scientists had generated and were published in the WHO China report that was published in 2021. And again, you know, we had concerns about ascertainment bias affecting those results. But what we homed in on was, you know, forget about the cases that we knew were epidemiologically linked to the market. What about the many cases who were asked, did you work there? Did you visit there? Did you have any contact with anyone who, knowing contact with anyone

Starting point is 01:30:13 who could have been connected to there? And all these people said no, no, and no to those questions. And yet they were clustered even more strongly around the market than cases that were epidemiologically linked to the market. And there are very few explanations for why that could be other than the epidemic actually started at the market and started bleeding into the local community from that market. And explanations that have been, or criticisms that have been put forward are just actually not correct. That, for example, there was a bias, or there was either a bias or deliberately hidden data to things that you can read about widely. There's no evidence that either of those things are correct.

Starting point is 01:31:03 read about widely. There's no evidence that either of those things are correct. And how about, Michael, the lineage? So I think this is genetic evidence and maybe a little bit complex, but there's reference to two lineages being present and that this is positive evidence against a lab leak. So what do the lineages refer to and why is that taken as evidence against a lab leak? Yeah, slightly complicated, but absolutely crucial. And here we published a companion article led by Jonathan Picard and Joel Wertheim, and co-led by Christian and me and Mark Souchard. So there are these two early lineages of the virus, lineage A and lineage B, that differ at two sites across their almost 30,000 nucleotides. And to cut a long story short, in that paper, we show that there's almost 100% probability

Starting point is 01:32:02 that these lineages had separate origins into humans in the Picard et al paper. In the other paper on the geography, what we realized is we had fortunately access to geographical information about the two earliest lineage A viruses. two earliest lineage A viruses. Lineage B was already well accepted to be at the market, but lineage A had not been shown to be connected to the market either epidemiologically or geographically. Our paper showed that those two early lineage A cases were both near the market in a way that's statistically, you know, virtually inexplicable by chance, if they hadn't started from there. And then George Gao from the China CDC, right before we pulled the trigger on our preprint, published a paper just demonstrating what we had come to the conclusion of, and showed

Starting point is 01:33:02 that sure enough, Linea J was at the market after all, which our geographical and genomic analyses together had shown was virtually a lock. And this goes back to the unlikelihood, first of all, that you would have even one lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology leave no trace in terms of epidemiology, in terms of people infected at the WIV or around it, and make it to the western section of the Huanan market, one of only four sites known to be selling these sorts of animals, and the part of the market that sold the live raccoon dogs and so forth. But now you have to explain almost certainly that these accidents, unprecedented in human history, happened twice over the course of a couple weeks. And each time

Starting point is 01:33:52 those people made a beeline 15 kilometers across town, and actually, of all the 10,000 other places they could have initiated the first chains of you know the first noticed clusters of a new respiratory disease both times it happened at the one-on-market is it at all surprising that there would be so if i'm following correct it suggests that there were two like leaps of the virus two separate lineages so is it mean? Two jumps, yeah. So is that surprising that you would have the virus jump twice in the same location? Or does that kind of thing happen if the virus, I guess, is quite close to making that leap? Christian, do you want to channel Joel here? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:34:42 Yeah, I mean, so a few things here to do first to answer that specific question right is that it's basically like if you look at mount mount everest and here i am challenging joel wertheim if you look at mount everest has always been there and then we started trying to climb it but we couldn't right and we tried many times and we just couldn't climb it. And then in one day, two people did. And then after that, of course, several people actually summoned it. Everest, right? The reason here is that when we're talking about two lineages, we're talking about two lineages that we see evidence of, but likely there are many other spillovers that almost immediately die out that we never see. You can also have multiple spillovers of exactly the same lineage because the virus does

Starting point is 01:35:35 not actually mutate that fast, right? So it's possible that lineage A, for example, might have spilled over from a single animal, for example, into 10 different individuals. Maybe only two of those individuals gave rise to other cases. And out of those, maybe only one of them did. Or maybe both of them did, but now the lineages are basically identical for that spillover, so you can't distinguish them. And what is really important here is that people are so obsessed with like, oh, but they're only different by two mutations, right? So that could have happened anywhere. Is the perfect litmus test for like, what does that data actually show? And why is it actually important that you know how to do these kinds of analyses properly. And the reason for that is that if you look at lineage

Starting point is 01:36:26 A and lineage B, yes, they only differ by two mutations. Lineage B is more prevalent than lineage A. Lineage A looks to be the quote-unquote older lineage, yet we see evidence that it spills over later. So when we're looking at when does the spillover at A start versus when does the spillover at B start, it looks like B gets going first and then A later on, despite the fact that A actually appears to be older than lineage B, right? And you have to take all of that evidence and saying like, well, now we look at these two mutations and we look at the cases and we look at the genomes and we look at what's actually going on with these two lineages. You take all of that information, and then you ask yourself the question, what best explain this,

Starting point is 01:37:15 including, I should say, too, that we don't see intermediate between A and B in humans, right? Is you take all of that evidence, and then you sort of replay the tape and saying like, right, is you take all of that evidence and then you sort of replay the tape and saying, well, actually, what do we see with SARS-CoV-2 out in the population when these kinds of new transmission chains start, is that the exact picture that we see early on at the Huanan Seafood Market with Lineage A and Lineage B is extremely, extremely rare that we see exactly that event in humans, right?

Starting point is 01:37:49 And that's why, based on that paper, why it's not a proof and why it doesn't show it with 100% certainty that it's spilled over twice, if we look at the evidence, it just shows very strongly, yes, there is very strong evidence that it did in fact spill over twice. And importantly, both of those are associated with the one on seafood market. And can I just jump in with one thing that is pretty vexing here, which is some of our scientific colleagues who have pretty strong voices in this debate, keep going back to this argument, but no, you know, a single individual can have two mutations accumulate within the period of a single infection. And so the fact that there's two mutations separating lineage A and lineage B

Starting point is 01:38:41 is just not unexpected at all. Well, first of all, we talk about in the paper how we're well aware of this, and this is actually very much part of the simulations that we do. But the point is not that it's possible for some viruses in the course of a single infection to accumulate two mutations. The point is that it's not just that there are two mutations separating at lineage A and lineage B, it's that lineage A and lineage B account for giant proportions of the first 750 genome sequences that we sample in the pandemic, something like one third lineage A and two thirds lineage B, and each of them to go into the weeds has a giant polytomy at their root, where there's a sort of root sequence of lineage A. And then from that sequence, it's clear that

Starting point is 01:39:42 there are a whole bunch of genome sequences that are like one mutation away from that sequence, it's clear that there are a whole bunch of genome sequences that are like one mutation away from that, but they're all a different mutation away. And same thing for lineage B. There's a whole bunch of lineage B genome sequences that are one mutation away from the lineage B root, but they're all a different mutation away. And it's that pattern, as we spell out in the paper, that is deeply, deeply unlikely to observe unless the virus jumped twice. Not to mention the fact that lineage A has accumulated so few mutations compared to lineage B that it breaks the molecular clock. It's not consistent with lineage A like ancestor being the single original source of the virus that then evolved into lineage B. So all of this is in the paper, and this is a sort of common theme in the criticism. Almost all of the main

Starting point is 01:40:40 talking points are addressed in the paper, but they're either, people are either unaware of them or they're aware of them, but they're counting on their followers to not read the paper. I mean, also one important point here is that it's highly technical, right? I mean, being able to do these, like, I mean, being able to do these analyses right is not simple, right? That's where expertise and experience actually comes in. I mean, I'm not, you know, I fix stuff on my car, right? But I'm not going to go build a jumbo jet tomorrow. And it really is important that when you're sitting there, it's not just that there are two mutations, right? It's we have all these other observations that we say, let's put them

Starting point is 01:41:21 into a meaningful framework in which we can test different hypotheses of what might explain the data. And that's exactly what the paper is. And necessarily, it's technical. And it's all in there. If you actually understand what you're looking at, you should be able to interpret and saying, yeah, okay. Right? But most people just can't for the simple reason that they just don't have the expertise. most people just can't for the simple reason that they just don't have the expertise yeah a new thing like eddie because you have another rejected paper right which actually becomes the perfect test

Starting point is 01:41:52 of this lineage a lineage b split two and i think it would be worth mentioning that yeah so this one i have not yet shared i sent it to various people so this. So this one was, again, rejected. There's a lot of rejection of papers in 2021. And it was a paper looking at the early spread of the virus in Wuhan. And the key thing is this was written long before our two science papers. So, again, it's like our time machine is back in action. And what they did was take these sequences from early Wuhan, from patient sample in January 2020.

Starting point is 01:42:29 Some infections would have been acquired in December 2019, but sequences January 2020, and they did analysis. And what you find is, lo and behold, there are two lineages, A and B, that have different names, but they are completely distinct with no intermediates. So again, we've gone back in time, tested the hypothesis, and there it is. It works. Okay. Interesting also, you mentioned the pre-adaptation question.

Starting point is 01:42:55 So very briefly on that, this virus has evolved remarkably, actually rapidly, phenotypically over the last three years. It's picked up numerous changes. They're the variants of concern that we've seen. The first one is a mutation called D614G. That appears in Wuhan. It's in these early samples from January 2020. Also, pre-adaptation, that's as much in the lab leak scenario as it is in the natural scenario.

Starting point is 01:43:25 If you take RATG13 and you put in this famous furring cleavage site, these four amino acids in the hinge, it's a spike, it's got a hinge, okay? And he put that little cleavage site at that hinge. You don't get a pandemic virus, okay? You get RATG13 with a fururing cleavage side in okay the reason why this worked is because they the virus that got spreading happened to have exactly the right receptor binding domain the bit where the virus attaches to the host cell that gets it going and that receptor binding domain is in nature okay we found it in pangolins we found it in these these viruses from from lab

Starting point is 01:44:06 so they had to have picked up by complete chance in this lab exactly the right virus with exactly the right set of biome pre-adapted then put in front cleaver site for its for its have got going so that's a pre-adaptation scenario okay and we know that sequence is from nature so i think that pre-adaptation argument just it's just a non-starter just absolutely a non-starter yeah i think maybe just add a little to this because this one keeps coming up and i expect robert breadfield our former cdc director will give testimony on one wednesday and this is his favorite, you know, this pre-adaptation. But there's several questions you have to ask yourself. First of all, you have to understand that SARS-2 is a pandemic virus. So there's something special about it. If it wasn't special, it wouldn't be a

Starting point is 01:44:59 pandemic, right? So the survivor bias here is enormous,, in fact, it is the first pandemic of a highly severe SARS-like coronaviruses that we know of, right? So from the get-go, SARS-2 is special. It had to have a good receptor binding domain that could recognize human ACE2 receptors. Maybe it had to have that furin cleavage site like a lot of other common coronaviruses do, for example. Maybe it had to have all of these. But importantly, it had to be the full SARS-2 virus, right? Well, it's not just the RPD, the receptor binding domain, or the furin cleavage site,

Starting point is 01:45:37 or the RPD with the furin cleavage site together. It's the whole virus, right? That's what creates a pandemic virus, which today we now know as SARS-2. And out in nature, these viruses try to spill over constantly, right? And many people end up getting infected with coronaviruses we have never heard of, but then they don't lead to onward transmissions, or maybe they lead to one or two, right? But then they die off and we never hear about them. This happens on a daily basis all over the world, just to be clear, not just with coronavirus.

Starting point is 01:46:08 Just to say, there's a paper published online the other day from Myanmar making exactly that point, showing that SARS-CoV-2-like viruses, people are getting them all the time. 12% of people they surveyed were infected with the SARS-CoV-2-like virus. So that's a bit of a process. People who worked closely with bad exposures. Yeah, in the wildlife, yeah. Exactly, yeah.

Starting point is 01:46:32 So people are exposed. Sorry, Christian. Yeah, so again, these viruses try to become pandemics all the time, right? But very rarely does it happen. SARS-CoV-2 is that one virus, right? So it is special. That's important. But again, it's the whole virus. So that's the first thing you need to understand. The next thing you then need to understand is that is it specially adapted to humans? And the answer to that clearly is no, actually it isn't. And the reason why I'm saying

Starting point is 01:47:01 that is we can see during the pandemic that this is capable of causing infections and episiotics in all kinds of other animals. White-tailed deer, they had a way bigger epidemic than we did here in the United States, for example, with most of them exposed. And even at one time, 40% of them being positive for the virus. At the same time, are you kidding me? That is ginormous, right? Mink farms we have heard about, of course. We have a zoo here in San Diego, and we had tons of animals that have been infected, right? So this virus is not uniquely adapted, quote-unquote adapted to humans, right? It's just a generalist virus which is capable of infecting a lot of different species.

Starting point is 01:47:52 Now, what is important to add to that, too, is during the pandemic, it's become much better, that whole human-to-human transmission. We have seen that with the emergence of variants of concern with Alpha, Delta, and now Omicron. So clearly, there has a lot more potential. So that whole idea that it's sort of specific to human and that it was pushed in that direction is disproven. This is not speculation. It's disproven by the evidence we have obtained on this virus during the pandemic. But then you have the last aspect of this, which is that let's just say that it's special to humans. Well, it's a generalist virus. say that it's special to humans, well, it's a generalist virus, would anything in the lab cause it to be that passage in animals, for example, or passage in tissue culture? And the answer to that very clearly is no. Typically, when you do those things, you de-adapt for things like transmission, right? Because now it becomes adapted to an environment in a tissue

Starting point is 01:48:44 culture, for example, which is very much unlike what it would experience out in the real world, right? So the whole argument, no matter how you look at it, no matter how you look at it, is disproven. And this is specific. This is special for when we're talking about the lab leak, because there's many things we can't disprove, as we have said in all our papers, right? We can find them highly unlikely. We can find them implausible, whatever you want to say, improbable, right? Use whatever word you want to use. But when it comes to this

Starting point is 01:49:16 pre-adaptation hypothesis, it is disproven by the available evidence that we have. And it just doesn't make any sense that that would even link back to a lab, right? Because actually what was going on in the lab, you would assume that the opposite would happen. So I don't understand why this hypothesis that it's so special that it might have come out of a lab, it just doesn't make any sense, right? It's so special because it's the pandemic virus,

Starting point is 01:49:46 right? This is what pandemic viruses do. And this whole discussion, unfortunately, started with a misunderstanding about the first SARS virus. And if you compare all of the SARS virus genomes that were sequenced from humans from 2002 and 2003, they're pretty different. There's a lot of substitutions that differ between them. But what is sometimes not appreciated is that almost certainly those represent actually distinct cross-species transmissions. These are not many, many, many substitutions that evolved after a single transmission into humans and then a long pre-adaptation stage before it became a more successful human virus. And so the whole idea is predicated on an elementary misunderstanding of viral emergence and evolution.

Starting point is 01:50:48 It would be quite difficult to summarize that amount of evidence that you've went through, but it's fair to say, I think for anybody listening, that it's clear that this is not based on an unwillingness to consider different lines of evidence, but rather that there's a lot of positive evidence, genetic, geographic, that points towards it. But Christian, one thing that did come up for me, and maybe it was Eddie and Christian when you were talking about it. So you did a good job of outlining why we have seen features similar in wild viruses and why the claims made about it being, you know, uniquely pre-adapted don't hold up. But this whole focus around the foreign cleavage site, right? And like you say, there's a survivorship bias about this being the thing

Starting point is 01:51:42 which reached the pandemic. So now it seems very notable, right, that this virus has this particular feature. But two things. One is that people in the lablet community point to the unfunded diffuse proposal from EcoHealth, right, which in some component of it has mentioned, or at least is claimed to mention of inserting furor and cleavage site to corona viruses so lab like proponents have argued well this is a smoking gun this is the group associated with the wuhan institute we're saying they're

Starting point is 01:52:20 going to put this feature which is, into the specific virus that caused the pandemic. So how is this not a smoking gun? And related to that, maybe, is that, Christian, you in particular, you know, your emails are a constant source of fascination for the world, it seems. But in various occasions, relevant experts did identify features in the virus that they initially thought made them suspicious that it could be engineered or there could be a passage in a lab. So the question I have is around that. So the diffuse proposal, why is that not the smoking gun that is claimed and secondly given all of the things that are described why were there a significant amount of people that seemed concerned about the possibility for being an engineered virus i mean let's let's

Starting point is 01:53:20 so these are separate questions right let's deal with diffuse first, because I think what's important is that, first of all, what's described in diffuse is described by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina and describing work that would be done there, right? And the important aspect of this is that Ralph Baric has papers showing that furin cleavage sites appear to be important to lowering host barriers. Now, so that was a prediction saying that, look, and we know this again from many of the common cold coronaviruses, for example, they have furin cleavage site. We know from highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses, for example, is the hallmark of them becoming highly pathogenic is that they have furin gain, furin cleavage sites, I should say. And, you know, now you have a pandemic which is caused by a virus which also has a fear and cleavage site. Well, it's probably because the reason why it has a fear and cleavage site is because we already knew that that's one of those risk factors that if you actually,

Starting point is 01:54:21 if you are the next pandemic virus, chances are that you have a proteolytic cleavage site in the S1, S2, the part of the spike protein which gets cleaved, right? So it's no surprise that you have the experts talking about the importance of furin cleavage sites. And then the fact that what they were talking about actually turns out to be true when we talk about SARS-2, right, is that that had a furin cleavage site too. But this comes back to my point that, look, it's not just a furin cleavage site that makes this a pandemic virus. The idea that it's a pandemic virus because of the furin cleavage site is ridiculous. It's a pandemic virus because it's SARS-2 and SARS-1 is different and that didn't become a pandemic. Although had we been slower back then and had given that some more runway, I'm actually not

Starting point is 01:55:11 quite sure if it could have come because of all the evolution we have seen in SARS-2 and also so on SARS-1 during that epidemic, right? So, you know, diffuse, I think it's an important consideration that we need to take into consideration as we're discussing this. But to me, it adds very little because, again, it's not even the relevant people, right? And they're talking about features which they'd already predicted to be important for the emergence of viruses. And then we see a virus emerge and it has that feature. No surprise. Now, to your other question around, like, what is it with these features? And why was it that people like myself talked about, like, oh, my God, it has these features and maybe it came from a lab, right? versus what did we know just a few days later after tons of conversations with our colleagues

Starting point is 01:56:07 versus new evidence coming in, more analyses being done, all these different things, plus what do we know now today, right? This is not the same thing. In the beginning of the pandemic, very early on, we're talking about the first month of the pandemic here, it's saying you see a novel virus, it emerges, and it seems like it's spreading like wildfire. Asking yourself the questions like, what's unique about this virus? Because we haven't seen this before, is a very reasonable question to ask, right? And then you add the additional, again, at Wuhanuhan institute of urology and chimeric virus

Starting point is 01:56:46 work there and bat sampling and things like that you put all of that together right and it gives you this very early on in the absence of other any other evidence and ignorance on my part because again i was not a coronavirus specialist right is that i looked at this and i said you know what i think we very seriously need to consider that the lab could be the source of this particular virus. And then you start the scientific process, right? And that scientific process is me educating myself, tons of conversations among colleagues and saying, look, what does this really mean? What evidence do we actually have that we haven't considered yet? Are we looking at this correctly? Bringing in

Starting point is 01:57:32 people like Christian Drostens and Ron Fouchier and Marion Koopsman, for example, that know a lot more about coronaviruses than we did, for example, where, of course, we learn from those conversations with colleagues. But there's also many other conversations with colleagues. I mean, you would be shocked to know that 99.999% of my conversations are secret and private, right? Because I don't publish them on the internet. I don't tweet about the conversations I have with my colleagues, right? Not because I'm hiding anything, but because that's what I do. I'm a scientist, right? And when we then separate those things out, where, again, you ask that initial question,

Starting point is 01:58:15 you look at what makes this special. Some people like myself got spooked by this and said, we need to understand this better. I'm not willing to just dismiss this out of hand that this could have come from the lab because I think that's the wrong thing to do. And in fact, Chris, going back to you talked about the letters. The first you mentioned was the Lancet letter, for example, which did in fact dismiss the possibility, not fully dismiss the possibility, but use stronger language around this didn't come from the lab that I felt comfortable with at the time for the very simple reason that they hadn't actually looked at it. But then we

Starting point is 01:58:50 look at it and then you change your mind. And then when you look at all the different hypotheses from bioweapon down to a, you know, accidental infection in a researcher in the field, right, is that you can start knocking the first ones off here pretty quickly and say, you know what, we look closer at that furin cleavage site, you're like, we have never seen that being used in labs before. Actually, it's not a great site. Actually, it's also out of frame. Like all of these things, which we didn't realize the first time we saw it, right, comes that realization, some of which are pretty fast, right? And then additional layers like that receptor binding domain, for example, lo and behold, it was actually

Starting point is 01:59:32 the exact, almost exact same one was found in pangolin coronaviruses. So that's clearly a natural feature. And that's just a stepwise process of scientific progress, right, which you then do among colleagues. And of course, Eddie and I, with Bob and Andrew, had tons and tons and tons of conversations. And we are on many different time zones here. Eddie is in Australia. I am in San Diego. Bob Gary is at Tulane, New Orleans. And Andrew Rambeau is in Edinburgh. And this means that that process never stops because some people are always awake, right? And that means that that early on, you can get a ton of stuff done very quickly

Starting point is 02:00:14 and your realization that, you know what, what we said in the beginning, it doesn't actually make sense when we look more closely at the evidence and we understand more of these coronaviruses out there. And that's what the emails show. They just show that ongoing dialogue. And what you're seeing in the GOP, and they've very blatantly chosen emails to support their particular narrative, they've not shown you all the other ones where I say, I think it's natural because of the pangolin virus all those are not

Starting point is 02:00:45 in there so that's an end that's an engineered narrative okay it's part of a ploy it's only really about taking down Tony Fauci and we're kind of collateral damage in that so that's a scandalous thing and they're taking our emails completely deliberately manipulating what we're saying by not showing you the full discourse can I say one more thing about the Ferry and Cleaver site very briefly and that's another thing that I've heard is that it's remarkable people say that Zhengling Qi in her first Nature paper didn't mention the Furring Cleaver site, right? And somehow they try to cover it up by not mentioning it. So cover it up by submitting a paper to Nature and putting the genome sequence on a database. Now, let me just tell you briefly. So I was also

Starting point is 02:01:24 on one of the first of the earliest papers nature paper on on on sars-cov-2 and we didn't see it either right and i'll tell you why we didn't see it and jang lin see didn't see it is because everyone was in that first few weeks they were in a race to write those papers okay as well as being you know that very early on in january the fact that it's we didn we didn't know what it would turn out to be. We didn't know it would be this pandemic. And people, human ego drove a lot of this. People wanted to be on the first paper describing that virus.

Starting point is 02:01:57 So, Zhang Zhengzhang, George Gao, and Zheng Lingxi. And those papers were done very quickly. And you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of postdocs and graduate students i know from our paper were doing the work and it was done let's get this out as quick as possible okay partly because we want to get the data out there also because we want to be the first and so that's why not everything was mentioned we didn't see it either and i didn't know anything i didn't even cross my mind until christine told me about later on that so the idea that you would you would actually then you're responsible for the outbreak and you then you you publish one of the first papers and let me try and hide your involvement

Starting point is 02:02:36 by putting the sequence online i mean it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever it's it's a ludicrous suggestion completely ludicrous suggestion so anyway and i think again you can if you want you can read all these things into it and say they're doing that but just just think about it's just about it's the way scientists behave and that's what you've seen all the way through this this these early weeks what you saw were scientists scrambling to understand these data we weren't told so by tony fauci he didn't tell us what to think he didn't tell us to write the paper he didn't write the paper we did it and we just wanted to understand the science we thought it's important

Starting point is 02:03:16 to get the message out there quickly and coherently and that's what our paper is right and unfortunately that's now being spun in a in a in a blatant attempt to drive a political message right that's completely wrong okay so i guess very much related to the stuff you guys have been talking about is the claim that basically you guys and anyone else who is working in virology who is saying that it likely wasn't a lab leak, that you're essentially compromised because you have an inherent strong conflict of interest. Because if it were to be commonly accepted that it was a lab leak, then your careers, your field generally in virology and your funding would be jeopardized. So, I'd like to... So, this is a very unfavourable...

Starting point is 02:04:04 So, why did we raise it in the first place there, Matt? If that was the truth, why did we then raise the possibility of lab leak in the first place? Next question. Yeah. It's a silly question, frankly, and unfortunately – I'll absolutely guarantee this. If we had analyzed those data and we'd have been convinced after teleconference and our discussion, we'd have been convinced that this was out of a lab,

Starting point is 02:04:29 we'd have said so, right? The idea, the actual idea that we would have, we were told to, or we thought it was a good idea to cover up because that jeopardises our funding is absolute rubbish. And I actually strongly object to that. i don't people believe what i don't i don't mind what people believe they want to be out of the lab they're absolutely welcome to that where i draw the line is the accusation that we're involved in a cover-up and somehow have been forced to do this or decided ourselves to cover up and manipulate evidence to protect ourselves that's absolute rubbish and it's not a single statement that we've made or written that said that right so i mean i i think one important aspect here too right is that even suggested i mean even if this was true i mean why would our funding be dependent on this

Starting point is 02:05:16 must be a natural virus right my funding is not i in fact, I have grants written about biosecurity and potential pathogens. That whole thing from the get-go is just false. But also, Eddie has different funding sources than Andrew does, than Bob does, than I do. and then invite Christian Drosten and Ron Fouchier and Marion Koopsman and others from Europe on a conference call like this, is that the basic idea here of the cover just doesn't make sense from that. But what has to be very clear is that underlying all of this lies, it's that the lab leak was disfavored and the natural origin was favored that must be true right because if that isn't actually true everything else falls away but here's the thing

Starting point is 02:06:16 it is untrue right there is no favored hypothesis here i into, again, as you've seen from my emails, believing quite strongly in the lab leak and so did Eddie, right? And the suggestion that, look, whatever you guys find, you should consider writing a paper on it, right? Because that's how science works. And I was not really in favor of the paper early on. I actually just wanted to have the conversations, right? But Eddie, for example, was quite like, no, we really got to write a paper on this. And Eddie is clearly more senior than me, right? So he's the higher ups in sort of the field of virology. And Eddie was absolutely right, I should add, is that it was actually important to get that paper out, right? But I was a little like, yeah, you know, I should add, is that it was actually important to get that paper out, right?

Starting point is 02:07:05 But I was a little like, yeah, you know, I just kind of want to talk about this for now, and then we take it from there. But this idea that there is a favored hypothesis because of funding, because of like, it's just false. It's flat out false, right? yeah and and and again it just doesn't make any sense when you look at the makeup of for example of the paper or the conference call because everybody comes from different places and have different funding right so that conference call was not there was not designed to write the prox origins paper it was designed to understand where this virus came from that's where we had the teleconference discussions the paper and i've heard again in the GOP, they've said that Fauci,

Starting point is 02:07:48 he started this teleconference to write the proximate papers. Absolutely false. Categorically false. We wanted to determine the origins. So we had a meeting, we discussed it. We wrote summaries, then quite late on in the process,

Starting point is 02:08:02 it all came together very quickly, quite late on in the process, we decided, let's write a paper. That was a proper scientific discussion. That's how scientists work. You change your mind on the basis of data. I changed my mind pretty quickly, actually, on the basis of data. If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have been a scientist.

Starting point is 02:08:19 I don't regret a single thing that we did in those weeks. That was the right thing to do. Yeah, and just to be clear, right, is that there's a difference between when you start writing your paper and when you have a final paper, right? It's not the same day. I mean, Eddie writes well and fast, right? But it's not like you start a paper on February 4, and then all of a sudden that's the day we wrote the paper, right? And the paper was with exactly the same conclusions on the final published paper that's not how the scientific process works

Starting point is 02:08:51 it really isn't and and again if you want to take these out of context and quote mine emails and quote mine what people have said sure you can you can build a story whichever way you want but if you look at the actual emails now you have all the drafts of the papers and the summaries, and all of this has been released too, right? And what you can see is clearly a stepwise process from early on scrambling to try and understand what's going on here to a gradual increase in the understanding of, you know what, here is what our current thinking is on this. And then importantly, that comes with a peer-reviewed published paper in the end, right? Not a Medium post, not a Twitter thread,

Starting point is 02:09:38 not a whatever, peer-reviewed published papers. And we have since have three others of those that sort of continues that process. And we have since have three others of those that sort of continues that process. And we're not done yet, right? Because, you know, it points straight to that market in the middle of Wuhan, right? But what happened upstream in that market? What animals are we talking about? What farms are we talking about? All these different things we don't actually understand, right? And of course, that's important to get a more full understanding of why did this actually happen? And of course, we're important to get a more full understanding of why did this actually happen?

Starting point is 02:10:06 And of course, we're continuing to investigate these questions. This is not a process that just stops. It continues. And just briefly for my own part, if I was being driven by sort of my own personal incentives, sort of my own personal incentives, having proposed that letter in science saying, we've got to take the lab leak hypothesis seriously. If I was just going to make data up, I think it would have worked out better if I had, you know...

Starting point is 02:10:38 You'd be playing nine-dimensional chess, Michael. You had said, we need to investigate it. The evidence were going to break one way or the other. It would have been probably better for how I sort of came off in this whole thing if it had broken in favor of the lab leak, because I was the person who proposed that letter, which was kind of the big turning point in how it was publicly viewed. And I had done a similar thing with the origin of HIV, where, you know, there was this idea that it was also a lab leak. And I'd actually traveled to the Eastern Congo during the Civil War, almost died. And unfortunately, my colleague Bill Hamilton did die on that trip. And again, I would have looked pretty clever if we had found that in the eastern Congo connected to this lab, there had been the descendants of those animals were clearly the had viruses showing that that population was the source of the AIDS pandemic.

Starting point is 02:11:38 Evidence didn't work out that way. out that way and just the whole notion that people like eddie and christian and i that have spent our careers just trying to pin down how these things are going to emerge so that we can try to um do our best in whatever we way we can to prevent or at least mitigate these things from happening in the future would not just try to figure out how this pandemic occurred is just that's a posture yeah yeah yeah so yeah i kind of sickening but you know i might actually interject here because we don't have much commentary to make on virology because chris and i know nothing it. But one thing I do know something about being a researcher for 20 something years and gotten research funding myself is about incentives and academia and just generally how it works, the sociology of it. So I certainly did cringe

Starting point is 02:12:37 having to ask you guys that question because it portrays a cartoonish image of the various incentives at play. And as you said mike being the contrarian being the person that goes aha guys actually you're discounting the lab but it is it could be the lab like or whatever some alternative explanation that is gold in terms of our reputation i mean in psychology we recently had this thing called the replication crisis where we absolutely We recently had this thing called the replication crisis, where we absolutely demolished the reputation of our field generally, and of some fields in particular. And the people who did it were psychologists, right? They weren't people from outside the field, sort of amateurs, you know, figuring out what's

Starting point is 02:13:17 going on. And of course, why on earth would people like yourselves, who have got no personal connection to actually handling these purported viruses and labs in lab in Wuhan there's obviously no social costs involved in it turning out that way so I think the only incentive here right is to do good science I mean that that's I mean we are all pretty well published researchers that have studied the emergence of viruses for a long time. And he is sort of, you know, I wouldn't call him that. I mean, yeah, right. But what's important here is that we have built our careers on doing good

Starting point is 02:14:01 work. And good work comes down to what is the evidence and how do we analyze it properly and how do we interpret it properly. And that's why, again, disconnecting, asking the question, could this have come from the lab versus once you have asked that question, what do you then do next? And if what the next thing you do is that you talk about the cabal of virologists or how everybody is covering up or deleting things and doing whatever, is that now you're not doing science. Even if you have a PhD, right, that doesn't matter. That's not science. That's speculation and innuendo. And here, again, it's also an accusation of individual scientists, right? Is that there, the incentive structure

Starting point is 02:14:48 for us is not that it must be this or it must be that. It is that whatever we do, it's got to be solid science, right? There's just no other way than that solid science. And that's why, again, when you look at our studies, they're peer reviewed and they're published in good journals. And we make all of our conclusions available that way. And that's a slow process, right? I can't compete like some of these people spend all day on Twitter having contributed nothing to the understanding of this pandemic, the origin of this pandemic, or previous pandemics or epidemics, outbreaks, anything, because it's not what they did prior to this pandemic. And that's not an ad hominem. I can't say that. Okay. On those individuals, it's simply just pointing out that there are

Starting point is 02:15:39 people that have spent their entire careers asking these kinds of questions, right? And then there are people that haven't, but gotten very, very obsessed with this lab leak. But again, you look at the quote-unquote evidence they bring forward, like the diffuse proposal, for example, is that it's meaningless, right? It's absolute demeanors. It's not scientific. Matt and I, you know know we have expertise in different things but one of the things that we spend a lot of time around maybe you are starting to spend the same amount of time but is conspiracy communities and the way that they treat experts right and the patterns that we've seen in the way that virologists are treated in the pandemic it's

Starting point is 02:16:23 exact same as climate scientists were treated exact same as the way that virologists are treated in the pandemic. It's the exact same as climate scientists were treated, exact same as the way structural engineers were treated with the 9-11 collapse. So I'm showing my hands a little bit, but there's a clear playbook and it involves taking emails out of context, portraying things as conflicts of interest, whereas the scientists are constantly referring to, no, it's because of all these lines of evidence that are coming together to the conclusion that global warming is real that the towers collapsed and because of the planes that flew into them and so on and uh i feel again i'm very conflicted about putting this point to you but i i think it's important because the one aspect which does get brought up is that even if you set aside the more

Starting point is 02:17:07 lurid conspiracism around you know that you're all just trying to get grants from Tony Fauci and that's what it's all about that so you you covered up a global pandemic like I think for most people they should realize when they spend time speaking to or seeing just experts instead of seeing them on Fox News clips that it is a ludicrous presentation. But one of the lines of argument that I think probably has more purchase is that virologists have been involved, some virologists at least, in gain of function research. Taking pathogens and making them potentially more infective to possibly, or very, very likely with good motives to try and ascertain how to prevent future pandemics. But the argument is made that, okay, so if this was ongoing, wherever, maybe Wuhan or wherever, that virologists would have a collective interest in trying to make sure that that work is not prohibited, right? Because whatever way you were on to present it, that people are like arrogantly

Starting point is 02:18:12 thinking that they can do so without consequence or that it's an important thing to do to stop future pandemics. But in that case, I've noticed from listening to virologists that there's a whole host of different opinions about the relative trade-offs with gain-of-function research. And there's a consistent through line that everybody agrees we need good safety protocols.

Starting point is 02:18:39 We should be closely regulating this research. But I wonder for each of you, the gain of function research issue, is that separate to this or is it interrelated? Like, are you all three in agreement on the relative trade-offs for gain of function research? Or is that question so politicized now that it basically is impossible to answer? First of all, gain-of-function research is a bit of a nebulous term, right? Not all of our ology is gain-of-function, right? If you look at like true and true gain-of-function research is actually pretty rare, but it depends on how you define it, right? The J&J vaccine, for example,

Starting point is 02:19:24 as a result of gain-of-function, right? Because J&J vaccine, for example, as a result of gain of function, right? Because you attain a new function in creating that vaccine, for example. But it's also loss of function because it's no longer the function of the old virus, right? But I think what's important here is that, of course, we all care about biosafety and biosecurity. And that is important to all of us. And none of us do gain-of- function research, right? And most of us work on computers and do computational research. My lab is a little different, but most of that is to focus on that. But then there's a separate conversation around biosafety, for example. Nobody wants to do anything unsafely, but you can believe that it actually came out of nature and think that biosafety is important too.

Starting point is 02:20:11 And even you can believe too that in the light of the pandemic, for example, we have learned a lot about how common these SARS-like coronaviruses and SARS-2-like coronaviruses are. We have learned about, you know, how much they can recombine and how prevalent they are. So, for example, to the question of should we manipulate these viruses in biosafety level 2 conditions, for example, is a good conversation to have. In the light of the pandemic that we now saw a major pandemic

Starting point is 02:20:44 of a SARS-like coronavirus, should we maybe rethink our biosafety regulation around how we sample these viruses, how we manipulate them in the lab? And I think this is an example of, I don't, I'm undecided on these questions, right? But I think this is an example on which a conversation and discussion is critically important, but it's fully unrelated to understanding the origin of this pandemic, right? They're totally separate conversations, and you would be shocked to learn that, you know, biologists are actually capable of having both of that, right? Again, these are not mutually exclusive. Of course, biosafety is important and i think anybody would

Starting point is 02:21:25 agree would agree on that well we've we've taken a lot of your time today and you've been extremely indulgent there's there is minor other things that we could get into but i think in you know in hold that anybody that's listened this far they should have a better understanding of why it is that there it's presented in in for example the matt ridley and the lena chan interview that there's this big divergent between virologists and the public and why is that and their answer is conflict of interests, like naivety and dealing with the authorities. But I think that after listening to this, hopefully people have a better understanding that no, it's because of scientific evidence and the processes of science. But I did have a question that I wanted to ask each of you, because you've each continued

Starting point is 02:22:22 to publish on this topic in various ways. You're presented as conspiracy members or with varied degrees of responsibility. And I'm just curious, like for you personally, as scientists who have like been working on viruses how has the pandemic been with being targeted and dealing with the conspiracy communities is it has it like not had much of that much of an impact on your life or is it something you have to deal with every day and i'm just curious how far you're able you know what the personal impact is on you and how far you're able to kind of hold it at arm's length. Eddie, maybe start with you. Well, better than I was.

Starting point is 02:23:12 I mean, I was initially very shocked by the hate that was coming through. the hate that was coming through and during a bit middle of 2021 um it became a bit too much for me i think i just i couldn't i mean it was continuous right and i just didn't i i didn't i had a lot of you know threats it was bad so i went off i went off twitter for a long long long time in that off period i've kind of become a bit harder you know and all grown so weird i don't care anymore so i'm much less bothered by it and it's still continuous after i published this thread yesterday on twitter right i'll just get you this tsunami of stuff comes back to me it doesn't it now it doesn't affect me as much as it did for a while right i think i think for all of us i i i don't like being the public eye at all i don't i don't that's not my natural position i want to be kind of a back i'm

Starting point is 02:24:08 a backroom person and suddenly being in the forefront every single time right it's a bit weird it's because i work on emerging viruses and so yeah yeah i think it's a very long-winded answer i i think i struggled for a bit but now i'm kind of you know i'm okay with it yeah it uh it definitely uh can sap your energy even if you want to treat it like you know it's water off a duck's back when when you're reading horrible things that are untrue it still kind of gets to you but almost worse than than that because at the end of the day you can kind of remind yourself that as bill hamilton's sister mary once said to me about similar stuff happening with lab leak theories with HIV these jibes are beneath you so I sometimes just to remind myself that that that that's the case but it's such a huge time sink away from doing productive scientific research to try to sort of do these rear guard attempts to

Starting point is 02:25:30 to deal with the stuff that is you know the misinformation and particularly the disinformation and just the amount of projects that i would have been able to do and are still on my to-do list that I haven't been able to do because so much of my time has been eaten up with that is really depressing. And I think that's the case for a lot of us who work on pandemic origins, that there's been a huge chunk of discovery and collaboration that's just been taken off the table because of uh of this stuff and that's uh frustrating yeah i think i mean from from my perspective i'll say it has been hard and and it is hard and and and you know it's it's not just it's not just me my it's it's And, you know, it's not just me.

Starting point is 02:26:27 It's my family too. It's my lab as well. And I think people need to understand that, you know, I have a job, right? I have a lab of 25 people that have very diverse projects, most of which are not on SARS-CoV-2 or COVID. And we have whole programs here in San Diego around wastewater surveillance. We are building programs like outbreak.info, some people can go in and understand variants, for example. And I lead our programs in Africa too,

Starting point is 02:27:00 which are focused on Lassa and Ebola, for example. And I have to spend all my time on that. And the time I spend on origin research and that I've been spending on origin research is relatively small compared to what I've been spending on all the other stuff, which is trying to understand what the hell is going on with this pandemic and with this virus, right? to understand what the hell is going on with this pandemic and with this virus, right? And building the tools and working with public health and working in global health to make these things happen is hard work. And then at the same time, having to deal with the misinformation and the disinformation,

Starting point is 02:27:39 much of which is directly targeted at me, but also targeted towards my colleagues, is of course that's hard, right? I'll say I'm relatively good at just tuning out the crazy, right? But it ultimately gets to you because you have to deal with it. And now I very specifically do have to deal with a lot of it. And importantly too, is that I'm not, when I'm talking about conspiracy theorists, I'm not talking about people who believe that this came out of a lab. There's many reasons why people might believe this came out of a lab, and that's fine, right? Again, the question itself is fine. And if you haven't looked at the evidence or you get all your information from Fox News or other news media, right, is that you and you're not, you know, expert in viral evolution and emergence is that you could be excused of thinking that this, you know, likely came from the lab. And that doesn't make you a conspiracy theorist.

Starting point is 02:28:46 conspiracy theorists. The problem is that if you're looking at a lot of the amplifiers out here that talk about this on Twitter constantly, all the time, they are conspiracy theorists. And they're very specifically conspiracy theorists because they're talking about how myself and my colleagues and, well, now it's all of science, right? Because the conspiracy only gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, is that somehow there's this cover-up in these cabals, right? That if that's what you are spending your time on to try and bolster your claim that you believe this came from the lab, right, then you are a conspiracy theorist by definition. And that's where, again, many of these people,

Starting point is 02:29:27 they don't seem like they have anything other than to sit on Twitter all day and spew hate, attack colleagues, never have any of them produced any primary research on trying to understand the origin of this pandemic, right? Or any other pandemic, because as I'm saying, most of these people, if not all of them, in fact, never studied these kinds of questions prior to the pandemic, right? They come from completely unrelated fields and have no expertise, many of them. And that's obviously tiring, right? Because we are here trying to do good work. We publish it in scientific journals, but we care about the science communication aspect of this. I was very active on Twitter. And the reason I was active on Twitter was basically three different reasons. One was

Starting point is 02:30:18 that I really enjoyed talking to colleagues and meeting new potential collaborators on Twitter. That was awesome, right? I couldn't do that anymore. Then I thought it was important to tell about our research, our findings here from San Diego, our findings from Africa as part of our research. What are we actually finding? And just communicating around that and the pandemic itself and my opinion on that.

Starting point is 02:30:43 I thought that was important too. And then the last aspect of that,. I thought that was important too. And then the last aspect of that, which I thought was really important, which is just engaging with the public. Because there are a lot of people out there that have very reasonable questions around a lab leak. For example, have reasonable questions about the vaccines or about the pandemic or should we wear face masks

Starting point is 02:31:02 and all these things. And these are very reasonable questions. And I was there to engage with the public to give my view on this. All of these things were very enjoyable. The problem is that in the end, I couldn't do that because it got completely drowned out by the crazy conspiracy theories on a daily basis. And then Twitter leadership came in and then now we're going to change everything. It's like, you know what, this is actually my cue to get off this platform because I'm not actually capable of fighting the conspiracy theories or trying to make it better or people better understand the mere fact that I am here contributing to this particular platform means that I've become part of the problem. So when I realized that I was like,

Starting point is 02:31:51 I just have to leave now because I can't spend time trying to do this, right? It's a losing battle. So from that perspective, yes, it has obviously affected me. I'll say it upended my life, right? And it's continuing. And it's not just affecting me it's affecting again everybody in my lab my colleagues my family right based on conspiracy theories based on the fact we wrote a paper christian exactly based on the fact that we have had the nerve to write scientific papers on primary research and understanding the origin of the pandemic right right? I mean, that is incredibly frustrating. And yes, of course, that's tiring.

Starting point is 02:32:31 And I will just say, I feel like what Zhengli Shi has experienced is certainly on a totally different level than me. I mean, what Christian has experienced and Eddie is on a different level than me i mean what christian has experienced and eddie is on a different level than me but uh i think is on a different level all together and uh so i don't feel sorry for myself but i certainly my heart goes out to to her i mean i think this this is also an important aspect of this right because? Because we are very privileged. We have good jobs. We have kept those jobs during the pandemic. We can work from home. We can do all these things, right? So it also brings up this like, well, but who am I to, you know, think that this is tough? Because there's a lot of other people out there that have it a lot tougher than we do, right? Whether it has to do with the conspiracy theories or just dealing with the pandemic in general. But that doesn't change the fact that while all of that is absolutely true, it doesn't change the fact that while specifically what we are dealing with here too is art, right? And I think acknowledging that I do think is important because at the end of the day, you can sit there and spew hate on Twitter and constant attacks, right?

Starting point is 02:33:49 And you can talk about how the virus was engineered or whatever, but it brings it back to the scientists. You are people. It's that this is not just a little hypothesis that you have. No, it's a very specific accusation. And I think that's important because at the end of that accusation, they're actual people, right? Xu Zhengli, very specifically, has been trying to understand these viruses for the best part of her career and has then come to

Starting point is 02:34:17 focus here. Yeah, it's definitely very sad to see. Yeah, that's the kind of reward you get, I guess, for specializing in an important field for 30 years but you know i think it's great to wrap up on that point which which is those personal reflections i mean and also that that role about science communication and we're very much aware that you've spent over two hours talking with us answering somewhat stupid questions in the pursuit of this and you know most of the time when people go on podcasts or on social media generally, they're promoting a popular book they're hoping to sell lots of copies of, or they are hoping to do some sort of cross-promotion for their social media profile. But working scientists like yourselves, and we'll flatter ourselves of including ourselves

Starting point is 02:35:01 here too, I mean, there's no benefit to this in spending two hours of your life talking with us so thank you all for getting up early or staying up late as the case may be yeah and just to say that i know christian you've retreated for very good reasons from twitter but on behalf of myself and I suspect I speak for many people, I have found the work that you guys have done and the science communication efforts that you've been put in extremely valuable. So I think there's many people that are not the conspiracy minded people that you might hear from a lot that have benefited from the efforts that you've put in. And the only thing I can say is that it's likely something else will come along in a couple of years that will attract

Starting point is 02:35:53 the attention because this is what tends to happen. So it's not really any consolation for what you're dealing with now, but nonetheless, hopefully it'll pass. yeah just to echo matt thanks so much for spending the time to explain to us and to the audience and hopefully people have a better grasp about the scientific issues and the relevant evidence around it and and now it should at least be put to bed even for the the hardcore lab leg people you you are okay to talk about this and you have responded to the point so i know this is potentially the hundredth time you've done so but it just keeps being said that you don't do this but you clearly do so um so yeah thanks thank you yeah thank you everybody okay matt so that was a quite in-depth discussion maybe ending on a slightly depressing note by talking about how

Starting point is 02:36:54 people have been personally affected by the you know accusations leveled against them but you know i i think it would be good to give broad takeaways from the discussion just before we finish. We won't do our usual review of reviews and all that. We'll keep this as a kind of self-contained episode. But I would just point out that after listening to Eddie, Christian, and Michael for an extended period of time, that I would hope that what people take away is that whether you agree with their assessment or not or you know the way that they weigh different aspects of evidence what's clear is they are weighing scientific evidence they have clear reasons for their conclusions and their

Starting point is 02:37:40 expertise is obvious these are not cartoonish villains who are out to mislead people and to lie about what their opinions are. They're scientific experts who have arrived at the conclusions they have from their assessment of the evidence. important because in a lot of the discourse and i would again point back to sam harris's episode it's presented that no right thinking individual who's looking at the evidence in total could reach the conclusion that it's anything but a lab leak and i i think it's quite clear from the preceding discussion that that is not correct there are are good reasons. There are multiple lines of evidence. And yeah, and it is a scientific topic that if you don't have the relevant expertise, it's very hard to parse some of the technical debates and issues. So my main takeaway is that, you know, this is a scientific topic, much as climate change is and it is important for researchers to communicate about the research but ultimately the general lay public are often not in a position to

Starting point is 02:38:54 assess the technical evidence about very specific points of genetic sequences and this kind of thing yeah yeah i think my takeaway was quite similar, apart from being just generally sad, I guess, to observe the kind of sociology of this in terms of how the scientists who are in any way associated with the topic are being vilified to one degree or another to differing extents by various voices, political and otherwise, out there in the discourse.

Starting point is 02:39:24 The other thing that I'd say is that in hearing these quite detailed responses to the various arguments made in favour of the lab leak, the substantive arguments, not the conspiratorial ones, that we heard previously, I would have to say that if the information given by these three experts is accurate, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, then the representation of those arguments in the Sam Harris episode, to my mind, was quite misleading. That's just, for what it's worth, my impression as a member of the lay public who doesn't know much about foreign cleavage sites or how much we should expect viruses to mutate, etc., I will just point out that there's a big difference between the kind of narrative we heard on the Sam Harris podcast and the kind of information that was given just then. most reasonable people would agree with is that vilification targeting individual people and going after them personally targeting their acquaintances and potentially you know much worse their their families or that kind of thing it's completely not appropriate and it doesn't

Starting point is 02:40:41 matter which side you're talking about you know even if people are strongly in favor of the lab like people should not be targeting individuals personally in that kind of way it should be a scientific debate and i think that debate is going on you can see from all the research that is being cited, all of these papers that are discussed or that exist debating the evidence and different lines of evidence and critical commentaries on this and that, people having different assessments. There is good science going on. This is not a topic that researchers are unwilling to touch and unwilling to address in a scientific framework. They are. So just those two points, like the call for anybody on any side to not engage in the kind of personal targeting,

Starting point is 02:41:38 abusive targeting that is very common online, very common amongst in conspiracy communities. And also that it's clear, despite the public presentation, there has been lots of scientific work on the topic. There continues to be scientific investigations. And in some respects, these have to be done in the context of dealing with an authoritarian state, which is China. And that means that complete transparency is a pipe dream, right? It will never be achieved because China will not submit itself to that kind of transparency, just by the nature of the state. So you have to factor that in as the baseline and not use that to automatically smear all Chinese scientists or all scientists who collaborate

Starting point is 02:42:26 with scientists in China. They're dealing with the context of China, that's true. The party in China does like to control information and whatnot, but the Chinese Communist Party is attempting to say that China is not the source in any respect, neither from a lab or from the seafood market, right? So it's important to note that people are right to be suspicious of the Chinese authorities, but yeah, it cuts both ways. Yeah, it's kind of ironic, isn't it, that from we just heard how probably the CCP has been most active in suppressing information about evidence pointing towards the wet market. So, because that is equally undesirable, I think, from their point of view. But look, Chris, I think those are good thoughts to finish up on. There'll be no hot takes about

Starting point is 02:43:17 the origin of the virus from you or me on the show. Lord knows we are not qualified. It was leprechauns. I didn't want to bring it up but you know those tricky buggers yeah but i like what you said i think probably the best thing for most people to do is maintain a polite interest in the topic by all means but for heaven's sake just let the scientists do their work let them write write their articles, do their sequencing, publish and communicate with each other in nature and in science and the New England Journal of Medicine and in other places. And the mists will clear in due course. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:43:57 Here's hoping. So I'm sure this episode will bring no hassle to us as a result. episode will bring no hassle to us as a result and yeah people will just be happy that we provided responses from experts to commonly asked questions that that's what will happen so thanks everyone for listening chris made me do it by the way in case anyone is thinking about targeting us chris made me do it that's not true this is true. Matt was saying he received a large advance in a big bag with a money sign on it. So I'm expecting those funds to be disimbursed, Matt. We'll just cut this. Don't worry.

Starting point is 02:44:37 Don't worry. It won't be there. All right. Yes. All right. That's enough, lad. I never want to see another fur and cleavage site, but here it mentioned in my presence for as long as I live. Good luck to the scientists investigating this conspiracy theorist.

Starting point is 02:44:51 Please find something else to focus on. Goodbye and good luck. Yeah. Yeah. So the very last thing I'll say is if you're anticipating that we will be now focusing on this topic moving forward, you're going to be sadly disappointed no this is our magnum opus for this particular topic this is us one song we are out yeah we are done yeah

Starting point is 02:45:14 let's see if this come back to bite us but nevertheless everybody have a good day note the distributed idea suppression complex and the gated institutional narratives and never those two acronyms more appropriate bye Thank you.

Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Worobey, Andersen & Holmes: The Lab Leak

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