Decoding the Gurus - Lab Leak Groundhog Day: COVID Origins in 2026 with Worobey, Andersen, and Holmes

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

With the Trump administration’s newest political persecution of Anthony Fauci and three years after our first lab-leak special, now seemed like a useful time to return to the topic. Fortunately, you do not have to rely on our knowledge of viruses, as we have somehow managed to convince the same three esteemed virologists, Eddie Holmes, Kristian Andersen and Michael Worobey, to come back for an update.Mike, Kristian and Eddie return and offer us their read on where the scientific evidence on COVID’s origins stands in 2026. They take us through the main lines of evidence and the often overlooked role of the wildlife trade, explaining why the lab-leak story remains so appealing, and how their own assessments have shifted as more evidence has emerged. We also discuss the standard claim that the media suppressed the lab-leak narrative while noting that coverage across both alternative and mainstream outlets remains heavily skewed towards it (and almost entirely detached from the research literature).Finally, we end on a characteristically positive note by discussing the Trump administration’s attacks on science and the ongoing campaigns against high-profile scientists and public health figures. Our guests describe their experience of committing the heinous offence of following the scientific evidence and arriving at conclusions that contradict the preferred views of polemical politicians and prominent media pundits.In short, this episode is our modest attempt to drag the topic back towards the science, while also focusing on the price paid by the people who actually conduct the research and care about the evidence. We are not neutral when it comes to the ongoing attacks on science and scientists and do not pretend to be. LinksOur guests: Michael Worobey, Kristian Andersen, and Eddie HolmesOur previous interview with Worobey, Andersen and HolmesLab Leak Fever with Philipp MarkolinOur earlier interview with Stuart Neil on SARS-CoV-2Sam Harris, Alina Chan and Matt Ridley: Did SARS-CoV-2 Escape from a Lab?Bad Boy of Science: Is the COVID Lab Leak Hypothesis Dead?Kristian Andersen on his early emails, released messages and changing assessmentKristian Andersen’s congressional testimony and document collectionKristian’s thread responding to the use of his Slack messagesMichael Worobey on why his assessment changedWHO SAGO’s 2025 assessment of the origins evidenceThe July 2026 Senate release of the Slack messagesKevin Drum’s reading of the earlier Slack archiveThe current White House lab-leak pageThe July 2026 Fauci hearingNaomi Oreskes on scientific integrity and “ethical pessimism”Nature: Climate scientists report online attacksAlwine et al. on the harms to scientists, research and pandemic preparednessRelevant research papers and reviewsAndersen, K. G., Rambaut, A., Lipkin, W. I., Holmes, E. C., & Garry, R. F. (2020). The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nature Medicine, 26(4), 450–452.Crits-Christoph, A., Levy, J. I., Pekar, J. E., et al. (2024). Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cell, 187(19), 5468–5482.Holmes, E. C. (2024). The emergence and evolution of SARS-CoV-2. Annual Review of Virology, 11(1), 21–42.Liu, W. J., Liu, P., Lei, W., et al. (2023). Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 at the Huanan Seafood Market. Nature, 631(8020), 402–408.Pekar, J. E., Magee, A., Parker, E., et al. (2022). The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2. Science, 377(6609), 960–966.Pekar, J. E., Moshiri, N., Lemey, P., et al. (2025). Recently reported SARS-CoV-2 genomes suggested to be intermediate between the two early main lineages are instead likely derived. Virus Evolution, 11(1).Pekar, J. E., Lytras, S., Ghafari, M., et al. (2025). The recency and geographical origins of the bat viruses ancestral to SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. Cell, 188(12), 3167–3183.Temmam, S., Vongphayloth, K., Baquero, E., et al. (2022). Bat coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2 and infectious for human cells. Nature, 604

and welcome to a special episode of Decoding the Gurus with the Carding the Vanfacologists, me, Chris Kavanaa, the psychologist, status matrician of sorts over there, Matthew Brown. And we are joined today by three returning guests from within the field of virology. So for long-term listeners, they may remember that three years ago, now we did a special episode on the Lave Lake, or COVID origins in general, and we had on that episode, Eddie Holmes, Michael Warburne and Christian Anderson. They all agreed to come back,

despite the dysphoric experience they had three years ago, for a second round in 26. And we're recording this during the ongoing hearings and kind of scrutiny over Anthony Fauci in America and a kind of renewed wave of lab lake discourse, which feels like it will never end. And anybody who hasn't listened, I strongly recommend they go back and look at the original episode

because we go into quite a deep dive around the evidence as it stands in 2023. And the discussion is actually framed around Alina Chan and Matt Ridley's claims about topics and questions that we're all just won't answer. So there is a lot of, of information in that episode and some of it may be recovered here but I would encourage people to go back and listen and to introduce the guests briefly so Michael Warburbray

is a professor and head of oncology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona has studied a range of things including origin evolution and spread of viruses not just COVID but HIV influenza and on a number of key related to the spread of the virus around the wet market in Hunan. Eddie Holmes is the NHMRC Leadership Fellow and Professor of Vrology at University of Sydney, where research focuses, again, on a range of topics, but including pathogen, discovery, viral diversity, and evolution, has done a lot of work in China on emerging viruses there and obviously on SARS-CoVi too. So there's his name in a lot of relevant research prior to the pandemic, during the pandemic,

and has also offered a recent review of the state of the evidence around it. And lastly, Christian G. Anderson, professor at Scripps Research with appointments apparently across translational medicine, immunology, and microbiology, integrative structural and computational biology and the Translational Research Institute where you direct infectious disease genomics. Now, it may sound like I'm reading these from the profiles, but yes, so again, Christian is on a whole range of papers and has studied viruses beyond COVID-2, including Ebola, Zika viruses and so on. And notably, is the lead offer on the much discussed proximal origin.

paper, a short paper, but one that is probably likely to come up in this discussion and forever to be discussed if the discourse is anything to go by. So welcome again, gentlemen, and thanks for agreeing to come back. Thanks, firing us on. Good to be here. And that was all broadly correct. There was no misinformation. I forgot to mention now, I'm the original leaker. That's the claim that I'm not likely for most other people. That's right. I did. not include that we may be speaking to the culprits behind the origin of the virus. That will become clear as the discussion goes on. But back in 2023, we were asking you to summarize, you know, a whole range of diverse evidence and had various questions. So maybe a good one to start with

is just, it's 2026. We still remember the pandemic, but it's been a while. So how does the research around the origins outside of public discourse and media land. How has it evolved in the past couple of years and where does it stand now? I can maybe start. I mean, I think all the last few years we have learned a few new things about the origin of the pandemic and it's only strengthened prior analyses, which is that this came out at the Huanan Sea Food Market and we have narrowed down to which part of the market, maybe even down to which stall it might have been.

But if we just take a little zoom out, right, is that if you think about suenosis, where would you expect to find these? And the answer is that you would find them, you would expect to find them associated with wildlife trade. We have seen this in the past. We know there's a huge risk. And indeed, this is the single most important evidence

that we have, I think, is exactly that, right? Is that we know that the early cases link to that market, and we know that the way in which this was discovered was hospitals realizing that there were these new, Dumonia cases linked to the Huanan Sea Food Market. And that's where we start the journey, I will say. Further of all, we also know is that if you look at the early cases in 2019, so in December in 2019, right, and retroactively looking at those,

is that those cluster around and very close to the market itself. And in fact, no other location in Wuhan show a similar clustering of early cases. If we then zoom into the market, what we find is that within the market itself, when we look at positivity of the virus itself, samples that were taken from the market, from things like the floor, cages, you know, gloves, whatever else was swapped within the market, is that there's clustering of that positivity right in the part of the market in which we now know they were selling animals themselves. And in fact, if we sort of zoom in on that, there is part of that, that part of the market

too where we have really high clustering. And within that, there are five samples that were sampled from a single stall there. And when we then now look inside, those samples, what we find is evidence not just of the virus itself, but we also find evidence of susceptible animals, for example, like raccoon dogs. This is exactly what you would expect. It does not prove that, you know, infected animals carry the virus to the market. But if that's your strongest hypothesis, this is exactly what you would expect. You would find samples in which you find the evidence of the virus and the evidence of the virus itself and susceptible animals. And that's exactly what we have found. And that new is new evidence since we talked to you guys last time, is that that new part there. And so in that sense is that we have extreme, extreme sort of details of what we think happened here. And those are hypotheses that are extremely well supported given the evidence here.

Yeah. And I'll just add when we spoke last time, the state of the discussion about whether animals like raccoon dogs and civets that had been found to have SARS-related viruses in the original. O.G. SARS outbreaks were at the market at the end of 2019 was that there had been this joint China, WHO study into the origins. And there was a pretty strong assertion that essentially nothing to see here, move along, these animals weren't there. And so as Christian said, Last time, we had already discovered multiple lines of evidence, including the geographic clustering, centering of early cases who were not people who worked at the market. The ones who nevertheless were early cases, still, if you take this sort of center point, it's kind of smack dab on the market. There are two early lineages that are separated by a couple of mutations, substitutions. Both of those have now been found at the market.

And the sort of key thing is that the assertions in that WHO report are now obviously incorrect. And that comes actually from China CDC data that samples that had been collected in January of 2020. So as soon as the market closed down, pretty much, hundreds of swabs were taken from all across the market. And then it took two plus years of like a lot of us thinking, boy, sure seems like if there were animals being sold at that market,

that they would be, evidence of those animals would be in these samples. And sure enough, they were and their location actually sort of fit in with a lot of the orthogonal evidence about which stalls were known to be selling these animals and so forth. Yeah, so if you've, this has been, what Mike and Kristen talked about is the Wuhan bit and the market bit. If you zoom out a bit further than that, there's been ongoing work in China and some countries looking at the diversity of viruses in bats that are the closest to SARS-CoV-2. I don't remember whether the banal viruses from Lauer had been published when we last taught. I can't quite recall.

So basically, it's been bat sampling's ongoing. I'm involved with someone. I'll discuss in a second. And what they basically, I think, have shown is that, first of all, of the group of bats that have the viruses closest are these rhinophilus bats these horseshoe bats, right? Can I know that? But there's a bit of a biogeographic split in that the SARS-1-like viruses, so 2000-2-203 outbreak. They are from, like, the Yunnan province in China going northwards. And the SARS-2-like viruses are from Yunnan going southwards, particularly southern Yunnan, and then into Lao, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand,

that area, okay? And that's where some of these rhinophilus species live. So there's quite a narrow focus on maybe the bat ancestor actually is not even from China. Maybe it's from a slight country bordering China to the south. And it's a nice bi-dography on that. So it's quite a lot of work. The closest virus that's published to SARS-CoB2 is from Lao, okay? And it's about three or three-half percent different from SARS-Co-2, lots of a combination that's gone on in that genome. Just to give you a hint about stuff that's coming, I'm involved with some big projects in China. We've sequenced 11,000 bats. I think six and a thousand of those are Rennophilus bats, mainly from Yunnan.

And there are more viruses that are related to SARS-CoV-2 going to come, okay, from southern Yunnan. I can't tell you at the moment any more detail about what they will, you have to wait for that. But it's worth, it'll be worth the way, I can tell you that much. But again, they're pointing to an origin right at the south of Yunnan and the border area of Laa, Myanmar, that kind of region is kind of the hot spot for the biodiversity of this virus. And my strong suspicion is that there'll be other animals in there as well, in that natural ecosystem that may be infected. For example, we've now got more pangolin viruses. You may well recall that some people claim that that panglin virus was faked, okay, by some clever piece of

engineering that I was involved in. We now have multiple lineages of pangolin viruses. circulating in a variety of countries. And the fact there's multiple lineages tells me that they're probably not just picked up in the wildlife trade. They may actually be naturally in pangolines as they're exposed to bats, okay. So I reckon it's probably an ecosystem of these viruses and bats and animals,

bits out of China, that maybe if we can get into these places, we could really find out what, you know, the diversity of these viruses and how they've got into wildlife trade and how those animals then get trafficked into Wuhan. And that, to me, is what's going on. That to me is what process is driven this pandemic.

So there's more coming, okay? Yeah. So before we leave the science, I guess I've got another double-barreled question for all of you. So we've got this whole arc of time from 2020, right at the very beginning, then 23 when we've spoken now. And maybe all three of you could just briefly recapitulate where your opinion stood about the relative weight of evidence for the two. explanations at those three times, including now. And secondly, just to check, because I've done my

naive survey of the literature too, and saw what you guys have described, which is a gradually increasing corpus of evidence supporting zoonosis. But I thought I'd check with you guys. Maybe something's come up, which maybe has supported the alternative explanation. Maybe it has. You can tell me. So who'd like to go first? It seems like Chris, you should go first. regional or maybe a go for it. You've got the most fun arc, so let's start with you. Probably the one that sort of swings the most, certainly in the beginning, right? Which is a typical trait.

And of course, as all knows, is that I came from the direction of saying, like, well, that's one hell of a coincidence. The Wuhan is theology with the kind of work that they were doing and then we have an outbreak in Wuhan. I mean, what are the chances, seriously? Now, it turns out that when you think a little bit more about the question that just said, what are the chances seriously is that it's not that unlikely, right? I mean, Wuhan is a pretty big city. It's more than 11 million people. They have wildlife trade. In fact, if you're looking at

central China, it's the capital of wildlife trade. If we're looking at SARS 1 and back in time, is that we've, you know, one in zoology, for example, we're looking for farms in which they found evidence of SARS-Co-1, and that was found outside Wuhan, and in fact only found outside in Hubei province. It wasn't found in, for example, Guangdong province. None of those farms tested positive for the virus. It was at the restaurants and the wildlife markets. So to that first question where I saw, well, that seems like a wild coincidence is actually not that wild coincidence. But of course, like still, you know, you got to look into that. And I'll say during 2020, first we, for example, initially I thought lab leak, right, then sort of like actually that doesn't

make sense at the time of publishing Proximal Origin, for example, we're like, nope, that really does not make sense. But of course, during 2020, there were, you know, as part of the discourse, there were sort of spikes of saying, like, oh, actually, now we have found these things. And one of the first examples of that is actually right after we published Proximal Origin, all of a sudden there's these rumors that there have been cables discovered from the Wuhan Institute of Rology that very much pointed to a lap leak and unsafe practices and all these different things. And I remember we saw that and I was like, oh, but wait a minute, because actually could that be and maybe we were wrong in our conclusions? Now, it turned out that those cables were nothing, which we also did say and it's like, well, probably this is nothing, but obviously we should take it seriously.

Turns out that those cables just show the kind of work that goes on in BSO4 Lab and the kind of regulation that they do so there really was nothing to it. Later on, I think in 2021, the diffuse proposal, for example, comes out with all of a sudden now is a new, is a new evidence point in which they're describing in unfunded grants, but describing work around SARS-1 like coronaviruses, including Furing-Cleavitt sites I actually mentioned in that proposal. And I think that proposal certainly had all of us stumped for minutes and said, like, well, let's just wait a minute here. Let's just take a closer look at what's going on. Let's make sure that, you know, whatever we have said in the past, does that actually still hold up? And I think most of us at that time, at least just paused for me and said, like, look, we obviously need to take this seriously.

I can't just dismiss that out of hand. But I will say that, you know, of course, we did look into it, realize that actually that still doesn't make any sense. You still have to be able to explain the evidence we do have, including the early cases and all the different things that we're looking at, right? And the matter of a fact is that the lab leak just explains that really poorly. But since then, and especially as we started investigating what ended up in the Warreveed all paper, Mike's paper there as well as the Picard alt paper, is that it became very clear that actually this is not just coincidences, right? It clearly is the market in which this came from.

And I will say ever since then, it's just been clear that like, no, obviously this is natural in origin, right? And there has been nothing on the intelligent side, on the lab leak side, the more they look, the more they don't find. And in fact, the stuff that they do find just shows it like, look, guys, there really is nothing, right? The Wuhan Institute neurologist just did not have that virus prior to the pandemic, which in fact is also the conclusions from the intelligence communities.

So since those papers and since that is that there's just been no questioning, I think, on any of our minds, because it just, it just does not make sense, given the evidence. If I can just follow up on that point about them not having the virus, So one of the other thing that happened, again, I can't remember if we, I don't think you discuss this, I don't even remember the timeline, but one thing that happened in 2023 was a bunch of sequences got dumped on Gen Bank from the Wuhan group, the Zhenglii Shi group, okay? And incredibly, I was one of the authors on one of these sequences, and I couldn't, for the

life from me, remember what this was. And then, of course, I was getting, my name was being banded around as hiding stuff. But then when I actually looked into it, it's the complete counterfactual to what they wanted. So the story is actually very instructive. The story was that in March or so, 2018, my former, I had a former postdoc called Jay Kure, and he went to work in Wuhan in the lab of Zhang Liang Shi. And he was doing more evolutionary kind of molecular epistemology kind of stuff. And he, in 2018, his student, Ping Yu, is one of the people that's been claimed to be one of the first three, three,

cases and a guy called Ben Hu and various other authors, including myself and Zhengli Shi, wrote this paper about the evolution of SARS-like viruses in bats, particularly they kind of followed geography across China, okay? And since 2018, okay? The paper eventually was rejected by three journals because they wanted complete genomes rather than just, we had a fragment, the kind of polymerase, and they wanted to complete genomes. So it got pulled. The paper got withdrawn because then Zhang Ling Xi wanted to get full genomes. Now, what's really interesting, if you actually look at this paper and the data, this is 2018, so it's before the pandemic, and they have a tree of the viruses they're working on, and there's

no SARS-CoB-2 in there, right? Now, there's no reason to hide anything. This is before the pandemic. RATG-13 is there, the one that they've always said is the closest, had a different name then, that's there. There is lineage for viruses, and they mention this one sentence. I actually got the paper here. There's one sentence, and it says, finally, lineage.

for comprised nine far more divergent SARS-Cubby viruses sampled in UNAN. And that's it. That's the entire discussion, right? Not only all the viruses are SARS-1-like, because they were the ones that had caused the prior outbreak. They were the ones that they had isolated. And they were the ones they were working on. Not some random freaky bat virus lineage that was completely undescribed.

Okay, so A, in that paper, The bulk of the viruses, a SARS-1, they're the ones they would have worked on. If they'd engineered a virus, it had been a SARS-1-like virus one. Because that would have given the heavy-hitting science paper, not a random, divergent bat virus. And two, SARS-2-light virus isn't there. It's simply not in that paper. And there was no reason to hide it.

If it had been there, game over. But it's not there. So where is it? Okay. So you're saying they were hiding it before the pandemic to do something? some crazy, you know, bio weapon. It's just idiotic, right? Now, I've sent this paper on published,

but I've sent it to various people who need to see it, like the intelligence agents, they've got it, WHO have got it. And to me, this shows that, you know, again, where are the emails, where are the cables, where is the data, they've got SARS-2-like virus in that lab. Six and a half years of investigation of a lab, by intelligence agencies that have recovered absolutely nothing.

And this is, this paper's a little time capsule on what they had and what they were working on. And it's not there. Because it's never been there. That's the reason why. I think, Eddie, one key point there is that because the sequences have been submitted at the time. Oh, yeah. On the embargo, right. That's right.

And then you just forgot about it. Yeah, no. So what happened? And I've got emails from the author saying, what's happened? So what happened was when they submitted the paper, when they were trying to get it published in 2018, they sent the sequences to NTI and GenBank. and you're given various embargo, I think, possibilities. They put four years on, okay? And then they literally forgot, right?

And then four years later, the sequences appear. And they all thought, what the hell is this? And I forgot about it. The first author, the senior author, Jake, he forgot about it, right? And suddenly they hit on Gem back because they just put a four-year time limit on. And that's simply all it was, right? And all these things normally it's cock up over conspiracy. And this was simply a cock-up.

It's actually quite amusing. But then, of course, then it was span into, you know, they're hiding these data. They're hiding these. It's the complete opposite. It was simply the paper was not published. I forgot about it. Everyone forgot about it.

And there it is. But in fact, I wish I hadn't forgot about it. Because that actually tells us, I can say it's a window what they were doing. And they were doing a lot of things. They certainly did not have SARS COVID-2 in that lab at that time. Michael, we don't want to miss you. Sorry. Yeah, yeah.

So my sort of trajectory, I want to actually hit on three things that are still, they're important to my thinking, and they're still really underappreciated, I think, in part because they're not fancy scientific things, some of them. So until the summer of 2021, I wasn't thinking a huge amount about origins, but I was thinking that, A, like a lot of people, including John Stewart, I thought, oh, it does seem a little bit weird that. This pandemic seems to start in the city with the lab that studies these viruses. And at any point, I could have actually thought this one through and then Doug did some digging. And eventually when I thought about it and did some digging, it took me like three hours to find that if you look at any of like the top 10 largest cities in China, you know, in three hours, I think I found seven of them had a lab or multiple labs. But after the fact, if it had started in Beijing, well, there's three labs that we're studying that you could point to in Beijing. One of them even collaborated with Peter Dashak and EcoHealth Alliance. I don't know.

I think there may have even been a Tony Fauci tie in there. Another city was doing actual culturing of viruses from pangolins. And so this is a really important point that I think the intelligence community hasn't quite grassy. this yet. Most scientists who haven't thought about it too much, I think maybe don't grasp it either, but one of the things that Joel Wertheim and Jonathan Picard and I showed was that if you took a virus with the transmission ability of early SARS-CoB-2 and you dropped it into a rural place in China, it had virtually no chance of taking hold and becoming established. 99 times out of 100, it would, even if it got into that first person, it's not going to go anywhere.

You needed it to get into someone in a city for there to be still less than 50% chance per person that you seed it in a city, but at least, you know, appreciable chance of starting a chain of transmission. And so this is a really key point that if this virus was going to be noticed, it was probably going to be noticed because it got to a city and started transmitting. And that means that you really need to just think about the places that it's most likely to emerge are the biggest cities in China. And if you look at the biggest cities in China, pretty much all of them have a lab that you could point to after that had happened from wildlife and say, it came from that lab. Case closed.

So I still cringe whenever I hear John Stewart talk on Stephen Colbert, like the damage done just with that one little attempt to get a laugh is still going on. At the same time, it's a pretty natural thing to, you know, if you don't spend a lot of time thinking of it, it makes sense to come at it that way. I came at it that way. So understanding that was one of the things that took me from thinking, it's still unlikely to have been a lab leak,

but certainly I was amongst the scientists who was like, I think it's possible. We still don't know. Two other things that we didn't know. First of all, whether the early association of people with this virus, getting sick from the virus, working at the Juanon seafood market, was actually a real pattern or whether it was some sort of ascertainment bias. And I was told by a colleague, you know, no, no, don't pay any attention to the early cases

being linked to that market. China does surveillance on markets all the time to make sure they find people who are getting sick from the next SARS virus. That turns out to be utterly untrue, complete bullshit. No one was looking at the market. No one was looking at the market until multiple people had shown up at a couple of hospitals near the market with something that looked like SARS. And so some physicians who had worked on the original SARS were like, wow, this kind of seems like maybe some new virus that's jumped in. The first cases weren't even linked to the market.

they were just like a family who all had lesions in their lung that looked to the doctor like SARS. Once they realized that there was maybe something new, then they noticed, okay, the next four, five people who came into the hospital who had that, when we asked a few questions, it turned out they all worked at one work site in the city of 11 million people. And so that, to me, was an important, you know, before I did the work to put that all together and understand, okay, that's how it came to be linked to the market. I was still thinking, could maybe it's ascertainment bias? And then the other thing is down to a couple of Chinese scientists in Wuhan

who had been interested in ticks that they could collect from wildlife at markets and look at viruses in collaboration with some colleagues at the University of Oxford. But this was like the craziest thing. After the WHO, China joint study comes out and basically says, you know, animals, they, these animals weren't here. And you still have people saying, you know, China's the totalitarian regime that like no information that would point to a lab leak would ever have been let out. Well, it turns out these guys published a paper that came out in 2021 saying, oh, yeah, no, actually, by the way, we've been to the four and only four markets in the city. that had sustained sales of wildlife, including raccoon dogs, civets, and on and on and on.

And every month, we talk to the guys selling them. We count up how many raccoon dogs and civets. We see how many they sold last month, and we have data going back for years and years. And so there's that. And then the key thing that, again, is not like a sophisticated scientific analysis, but it's crucially important.

And in my thinking, this was a major, turning point. Until they publish that paper and we realized from first-hand accounts that there really are only four places in the city that are selling that kind of wildlife, I still thought, hey, it's possible that any place you throw a dart on the map of Wuhan, you're going to land next, you know, maybe they're selling raccoon dogs in every little corner store and anywhere it starts, you're going to be able, much like the, it's sort of like the reverse of the John Stewart fallacy, that I didn't know until that paper came out that any place you point to is not close to somewhere that was selling these animals. And not only is the Huanan market one of only four

places, but it was the biggest location selling this sort of wildlife. And if the intelligence community could grasp just that point, I think they would have a very different sort of set of conclusions. Can I, Mike, can I say that a tenets to the community, they're not interested in the natural origin whatsoever. What they want to do is prove the lab league. That is their entire focus. All their evidence gathering is, can we prove as a lab leak?

They are not interested in proving the natural origin at all. And that's why it's so quite. Because, I mean, that's what I was trying to do really early on too, right? And it's actually really easy to prove a lab leak. Like, historically, you look at lab leaks, being able to prove them have been very easy, right? Because like, well, here's the virus, and that's what they're looking. That's what they're working with in the lab. There you go.

And I think, like, there could have been so many opportunities to prove it, right? Any evidence of SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic would do it, right? But all emails, you know, all thesis, papers, whatever you might have, is that that is one opportunity. single time, and we have thousands and thousands of thousands of these documents, and none of them have it, right? For the simple reason that the Wuhan Instituteurology didn't have SARS-COVID COVID-2 prior to the pandemic. And I do want to add that the intelligence community people are well-meaning, and a lot of them like super nice people, but they just fall into the same cognitive traps that I fell into until I thought a bit deeper about it. And then, you know, it turns out that even really

sharp people who are analysts at different icy elements, if you don't have like real deep expertise in some of the analyses that are done, then, you know, there aren't that many people who like really spent their 30, 40 years of their career understanding the intricacies of how to root a phylogenetic tree and so forth. And so I always like to use the analogy of, it's not that it's like insane that we're like so much smarter than other people. It's just like when I go to the dentist, I'm very happy that my dentist has expertise in knowing where to find the nerve and put anesthesia before he does a root canal. And, you know, the intelligence community might want to weigh in on the best way to do a root canal and they would give it a good shot,

but I wouldn't want them being the final word on that either. I don't know. I've seen that happen quite a few. It seems pretty easy to me. The next time you have a root canal, I'll be there and I'll show you. I can do. I do think this is really important, right? Because the intelligence community, of course, has an extremely important role to play here

because we can't, you know, gather intelligence, right? we can't get access to emails and to all these different things that, you know, are not in the public domain. We don't have access to any of that. And only the intelligence community can really do that. And that is a super critical role, right? Because had this been a lab leak, it would be in there. No question. So from that perspective is that I think that that is a really crucial role for them to play. But let's not mistake that for them then being the authority of the science of trying to understand how this emerged. that's where scientific expertise and long-term experience studying exactly these kinds of questions are super critical. And the answer is just that the intelligence communities, for pretty obvious

reasons, just don't have that expertise at the level required to do these types of studies. And I think it's where this point is that both have a face-to-part, right, where there's the science being done and intelligence gathering being done. You guys have kind of answered something that I was going to re-is, but I'll still put it to you anyway, because there might be more that you want to say. But given what you've outlined, right, with the increasing growth across multiple lines of scientific evidence that point to natural origin, right? And that's the impression that Matt and I have both gotten from, you know, amateur reading

of the literature, and that in various surveys seems to reflect the consensus position of the majority of professional virologists as well. Yeah, there is quite an obvious divergence. One, like you've talked about, the intelligence communities, they aren't universally arguing that the evidence supports lab leak, but there's more of a split than certainly there is in the scientific evidence and absolutely in media and discourse and public conversation. The scientific consensus has not really filtered down, right?

if anything, it's possibly the opposite, that it's become received wisdom that Bilab Lake was completely dismissed, and now the evidence is increasingly growing to show that it was likely and was unfairly dismissed. And I'm wondering, in the popular presentation with a lot of you guys and Christian, for example, you're presented as having like a public position, which is very categorically denying, but then in private, saying, oh, I see this as likely. Now, that's how much sits at odds with the fact that the Slack messages that are referenced, even which are taken as illustrating this, they are saying in mid-2020, putting 70-30, right? And this is before many of these lines of evidence that we've discussed. And Eddie, you're at 90-10, right? So there is a day, in your private

informal discussions where, you know, you're assigning quite informal percentages, that to me is still very clearly not, you know, you're saying, oh, it's 50-50, no idea. But, um, you're saying, Why do you think, apart from the reasons that you've discussed, right, there is this divergence? Because when it comes to the intelligence community, I take all the points you're saying, but I would also imagine that intelligence communities also have access to scientists and they have access to, you know, people that can summarize the evidence for them. It's not in their interest to misrepresent what the consensus on an issue is, unless, of course, you know, might be said different in America in the current political environment.

But in general, that isn't what they want to do. So why do you guys think there's such a divergence between the scientific perspective and the kind of political intelligence and media discourse around the topic? Yeah, I mean, I think there's several things that play here, right? I think all of us start this lab leap journey with what are the chances? Again, the Wuhanese Tudorology and then you have an outbreak. It's just some people then move on from there, right, and saying like, okay, let's just answer that question, like, what are the chances?

But maybe let's also look at what does the evidence actually tell us and does that even make sense? And then we all get on a journey, right? And that differ from person to person. But a lot of what you see with the Laplique discourse is that it never gets away from that one single thing. Never. Any level of evidence get dismissed out of hand, right? saying it's not perfect, it's biased, it's ascertainment biases, all these different things, despite the fact that we well know that actually it isn't. And I think that's the main thing.

And again, I get it because that's where I started to in early 2020. It's just for some of us now being in 2026, again, we have sort of moved on from there because we have actually studied the question itself. And I think when you're looking at what's happening is that people just can't move on from that one single fact. And I understand say it is a very human thing. Right. But then, of course, on top of that is the immense amount of misinformation and disinformation. I mean, we're at the stage at which many people honestly believe that the virus was made in America by Tony Fauci and Ralph Barrett sent to China to be unleashed on the world such that they could make money from the vaccines that were then going to create. And Eddie and myself and others covered that up. Not then going to be created.

They already had been created. It already had been created, yes. I can't describe it other than saying that this is insane, right? Like believing that that is actually true, which I think many people do generally believe that, is insane to me. And the question is, how do we get from like, oh, it could have been a lab leak to there's this major cabal of all of our big virology and big pharma and big everything. I honestly still don't quite understand that bit, other than saying that whole discourse is completely disconnected from facts, evidence, science and sort of just a rational view.

It just immediately goes to elites, China, all these different things. And the latest one, Christian, I heard, was that Ian Lipkin, who's one the authors of the poetry paper, was in fact working for the CIA. The CIA transplant into our group. plants on our paper. I've been accused of being a plant as well because I was like not only took it seriously, but was actually the person that suggested that a group of us send something to science that became this very influential letter that kind of made the lab leak idea a hot topic. So yeah.

So you're, I think. You are a potential origin. In that conspiracy, you were planted to increase the prominence of Love Lake. I just like it's sometimes hard to follow. The idea is so that, let's see, I could make it seem like I was credible because I had been at the forefront of saying, hey, dude, let's take this seriously. And Christian and Eddie are maybe jumping to conclusions too quickly. think the idea was that once I then published papers actually after having just done 16 hours

of work every day for three years. Well, Michael, I have a question specifically for you on that. So in that case, I imagine that given the waves of discourse that have surrounded this topic and the degree to which Lab Lake has become politicized, but also, you know, like a squeaky toy for the media in general, that whenever you were a prominent figure initially calling for more attention to be paid to, you know, the possibility of a lab leak, that that would have led to, you know, perhaps the lab leak community and so on having, you know, I would imagine a positive perspective on you. And then when you're later, as you described, you know, earlier, going through the evidence and finding actually, you know,

my initial suspicions or concerns, they're not as reasonable as they first appear, the more I look into that and then becoming a offer on influential papers which are arguing for the market as the initial outbreak source. Let me jump in and say not arguing for that hypothesis and we're not proponents of a hypothesis but just following the data and the data is what's arguing for that. Yes. Well, but in that likely scenario. Yes, but I don't think that caveat will make much difference to you being painted as a villain in that case. And so I'm kind of wanting, just in your experience, how's that being, or has it been like that, that you are a figure that is villainized now, or have you been forgotten about it? Because it seems like you

have a trajectory that is likely to result in you getting attention for good or for else. So I'm just curious how that experience has been. It depends on sort of what community you're looking at. So in terms of people who are still on Twitter, I think they will easily fall into the thing. You know, I was a plant and I was disingenuous the whole time and some part of some big plot. Certainly lots of people. I mean, I'm part of the cabal of powerful scientists that supposedly now don't let other people even countenance the idea of a lab leak, which if you're a scientists, the idea that you would publish a paper, an opinion piece saying, we think that the lab leak hypothesis is very unlikely. And then other scientists whose job it is to try to figure out what the truth is and then tell people about it, that's literally their job would be like, okay, Christian and Eddie said this. So, you know, maybe to some extent for junior colleagues, Fair enough, there might be some element of that, but like we like nothing more than telling other people that they've got it wrong in the scientific literature.

And we try to figure it out when we've been wrong before other people take that opportunity to do that. But then in other sort of communities, like in some ways with like congressional committees, I think that my trajectory has very much been taken as a mark of credibility that I use. to come down much more favorably on lab leak stuff and if the data as I looked at it more and more had supported that rather than the other idea I think a lot of people understand that that's what I would be saying that the data said and I'm not in a I haven't suffered nearly the the level of being cast as the villain as particularly Christian and Eddie in part because I wasn't on this proximal origins paper that just happened, you know, the big mistake was writing something that whatever 20,000 people cited.

Well, it's good for your H-Index anyway. Well, look, Eddie's fortunate to live in God's own country, Australia, but what about you, Christian? How's the personal experience, I guess, of dealing with the whirlwind? Yeah. I think I probably also said this last time, right, is that it's not great, right? I mean, this sucks. When I think back at the pandemic is, first of all, most of my work was not focused on the origin of the pandemic, right? Most of my work was focused on other aspects of the

pandemic, including establishing genomic sequencing, establishing testing, you know, advising on lots of different committees and doing science in all of this. And of course, the origin question was a key component of that too, but it was by no means the biggest. But when I look back at that whole journey is that it's, you know, it's great work. I'm proud of that work. In fact, I'm very proud of that work. I'm very proud of the teams that we got together to really investigate these questions, which, you know, the more I think about it, the more realize that it is actually a really important question. It is certainly one of the questions that when a major pandemic like this happens, you do want to answer the questions or how did that all happen?

And that's actually what this research does. And it does that with a really diverse group of international researchers. We started as just to four of us, right? In fact, I just started with Eddie and I talking about this and then pretty quickly, including Bob and Andrew on this as well, and then Ian Lipkin a little later. But I think like from that whole journey is that as I look back on that and said, you know, would I do it again or not? The answer is that absolutely I would do it again. There's no question about that because it is good science. I think we have built some tremendous collaborations as part of this. And the science is holding up. The fact that this has become politicized, you know, it sucks. It really does, right? And there's

not much I can do about that. And seeing my name splashed all over, you know, social media, but also more specifically in normal media, basically furthering this idea that Tony Fauci instructed international scientists to have a preferred narrative, all those aspects are false, right? Dr. Fauci did not have a preferred narrative. And he did not instruct anything to say anything. It's just that's where the science led us. And again, one thing is to see that on social media, but another is to see that in the normal media as well is, is deeply disappointing. And I think with what is happening today where, you know, we heard about Dr. Fauci's diary, for example, which, you know, it's not actually diary, but it is personal notes, which is splashed all over the internet. And you hear article after article

after article talking about what Dr. Fauci did and did not say. And I think I find that deeply problematic because the real story is the fact that why are Dr. Fauci's personal notes all of a sudden all over the internet so we can read them? Why are our own personal private communications splashed all over the internet so everybody can read them? Why did Dr. Fauci have to plead the fifth in front of Congress with questions on which she certainly could answer those, no problem, yet he still had to take the fifth, is that that's the real story, right? The story there is that why is all of this happening?

And I don't see those articles. I see the articles saying, then Christian said this, then Eddie said that, then Dr. Fauci said this, then he didn't say that, then he was fawning over himself. It's like, that does not matter, at least not to me. Right?

I think the bigger discourse there, I think, is really the key, which is that clearly scientists are being targeted here over something which is grounded in conspiracy theories. And that's pretty scary. I mean, he's facing, you know, criminal charges as was held in contempt of Congress earlier today, right, is that this is no joke. And I think that's, that's, you know, so when I look at that and look at my own role in that and saying, what did I do during this whole period is that, well, I tried to do the best science of process we could do. and I think we did do very good science. Did I make some mistakes along the way?

Of course I did. Have I grown as a result of that whole experience? Of course I have. Because none of us are perfect and none of us can say, well, if we went back and did it all again, would you do everything exactly the way which you did it? And there are a few things that I would probably change. But by and large, is to say, like, yes, that is the way should have done it,

because I truly do believe that it's the best way we could have done it. Well, I mean, you guys are virologists rather than sociologists or psychologists. But the sad answer is that when a highly salient and slightly traumatic event occurs, there's natural human reaction to want to find someone to blame. So you see the finger going around. Sometimes it's China. Sometimes it's Fauci. Sometimes it's you guys.

Sometimes it's something else. but that psychological need to find the villains, and it's very psychologically dissatisfying, unsatisfying that it's a natural origin. It's the same habit of HIV and might remember it very well, exactly the same thing. It was who can we blame for this outbreak? I agree, Matt.

It's a completely natural thing. In this case, it's also you've got, you know, you've got the relationship between the US and China that's playing over this, and China comes across to many people, was the easy natural enemy, right? And anyone who works in China must be the same, you know, enemy status. And that is extremely, what's racist for a start,

unfortunate thing that's kind of driven so much of this. And COVID origins has now just been used as a political football. And the really irritating thing is how it's being used for individual people on their particular agendas, right? So it's being used as anti-gainer function by people who are anti-gainer function anyway. It's being used by people to griff to make money, to sell books and to keep in social media. And it's used by politicians having to go at Fauci, which is more about a libertarian view, and about how governments intervened in public health than about COVID origins.

And it's been used as an anti-China vehicle as well. So that's what it's become. And that's part of the reason why the conspiracy theories have grown so high, because it's used for these other reasons too, right? Yeah. The bizarre thing is for folks who, who do want to blame China. I don't think blame is the best way to think about this,

but I do think it's important to do a post-mortem and understand how this happened. And there's actually a real case to be made that the things that China said it was doing to limit the possibility of a repeat of the original SARS from wildlife into people in Syria. were not done. Now, we saw with H5N1 in cattle that it's not just China who is not keen to share data early and be transparent, let alone do the kind of testing of large agricultural food chains

for viruses that we have the technology to pick up without waiting until it's six months into a new outbreak. And that's the really annoying thing, because, as Kristen said, it is important to figure out how these things happen, is that when's the last time you heard a U.S. politician or a major news outlet talk about, here's what I want to do to limit the chance that a future pandemic jumps from wildlife into people. but we've heard a lot about, you know, stopping gain of function work. We've heard a lot about lab safety and fair enough.

We should always be trying to make this kind of work as safe as possible and find limits to what we should do and what we shouldn't do. But there's literally just been nothing for six years constructive done by the people who are either making money or gaining influence with the lab leak discussion. to make the world safer from this. And it's gonna happen again. This way.

I mean, this is the key thing, right? Yeah. Like in a wildlife, you know, unregulated wildlife trade is going to cause this to happen again. I mean, I think like one key thing here, right, is that I think like we have always been interested in this question because we're interested in understanding already in the pandemic.

That's it, right? There's no other reasons for us to look at this. But a lot of this has been co-opted. as both Mike Gide and you mentioned, right, for other reasons, blaming somebody or finding a way in which to like explain the suffering or whatever. But I think this idea that like the lab leak is very specifically tied to this idea of blaming China is a red herring because if you want to, you know, blame China for the pandemic, let's talk about the unregulated wildlife trade, right?

This is a 50 plus billion dollar industry, poverty, at least. deviation industry by Xi Jinping himself. And this wasn't supposed to happen post-South COVID-1, right? This was supposed to be like with surveillance and with regulations that this was not supposed to happen again. And it did. And so in terms of like blaming if that's your purpose, again, that's not my purpose. My purpose is to understand the origin of the pandemic is that it does not matter if it's one or the other. Right. So I think like it's completely misconstrued this idea that China is covering up and hiding the evidence because it's a lab leak and they don't want to be blamed for it, it just does not hold up because it does not matter what we're talking

about one or the other. And I think it's a really key thing, right? Because I think a lot of that gets sucked into like the lab leak is somehow synonymous with exactly that. And of course it isn't. Well, Mike, I know you have a hard out and Christian and Eddie will be able to stick around a bit. But just in finishing off, Michael, is there anything that you wanted to mention or that you didn't get a chance to bring up before you depart? There's all the things we might ask you, but I'm happy with what we covered. Glad to be here with Christian and Eddie reminiscing about some of the stuff that we've done and appreciate the attention from you guys to the topic. Yeah, and for people interested, I mean, they can't go read your papers, right? As you said, that's where you lay like the evidence and arguments, right? A lot of that, again, is super simple stuff, like just, you know, from cell phone data, how many people were visiting this market compared to like shopping malls?

And it turns out there's a lot more people visiting shopping malls. And so, again, it's just, you know, odd that it would be a wildlife market of all places where this pattern starts unless that. that's where it started. And I just said that I would say I would really highly encourage people to actually read the papers if you do care about this particular question, right? And certainly if you care about blaming, you know, the cover-up on proximate origin, I mean, start by reading the paper. Like what was actually said in that paper would be a really good starting point, I think.

All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Michael. So actually, Eddie and Christian, the mention of proximal origins brings me to your point that I want to wanted to raise which. So on the one hand, Christian, like you talked about, you know, the somewhat unprecedented coverage over personal messages, email, Slack, right? The level at which this has occurred around this topic is probably unprecedented. But we have seen in other occasions, right, for example, with the climate scientists or around 9-11. Similarly, this kind of focus on what was

said in emails, what were people discussing in private and so on. So to me, that pattern is quite familiar that Matt and I have seen in all our conspiracy communities where there's a kind of quote mining thing where people, instead of focusing on the science or the overall like strength of evidence in the literature, they look for a statement where a scientist has said something in an email and use that to say, well, that means you can't trust any of the, scientific evidence, right, be it around evolution, climate change, or whatever the case might be. And in your case, then, you are living in the long tradition of people who, people don't read the papers and instead focus on discussions or informal comments in Slack or

around the papers. And I read Proximal Origins. It's a very short paper. I'm not a specialist in it, right. But when I read the discussion section, which has this paragraph, which I'm still for my sins, copying pasting on Twitter, where there is the assessment given by you guys saying, based on the current evidence and our evaluation of it, we find this to be the intentional creation in the lab to be like not plausible. And then there's an immediate paragraph after it says, However, you know, we're in the early days of the pandemic. As more evidence emerges, the probabilities can be revised according to additional things. You give some suggestions for the relevant evidence, right?

And this is presented as if it was a battening down and kind of prohibiting any future research. But what we've just talked about with all of you, including Michael, is that people did go on to continue investigating, to continue looking at evidence. So to me, it reflects this thing where if the proximal origin paper was even what they said, right, it was completely Fauci ordered you all to do it and it was like a completely politicized document that didn't represent the facts, right? So you just disregard proximal origins. The entire literature is still there.

All of this evidence that we discussed, but it often becomes these totemic figures or papers that stand in for like if they can get proximal origins retracted or undermine it, that that will, you know, basically make the whole gengatar fall down. And it's the same to me when people are talking about evolution or climate change or these kind of things that maybe some scientists in a message said something too strongly or in a paper even overstated because you said in the Slack messages, you know, maybe we were too categorical about this or we might have stated it too strongly. in the basis of new evidence that you were looking at.

But that's normal. I know I'm not posing the question here, but I'm kind of raising the point that you guys, you know, you're a scientist, but you're allowed to have personal opinions and discussions. And to me, looking at the evidence, it doesn't seem that, you know, all these things that are pointed as smoking guns

are ultimately you guys discussing possibilities, which all the people say you're never willing to entertain. And then when it comes out, you do entertain it, you're presented, uh-huh. See, they did entertain it, but they didn't do it in public. But then your paper say, you know, we're interested in the possibility. So I don't know. It's just, let's say, in the Slack messages,

some new piece of data come along. We said, right, not discussing it. It must be wrong. Next bit, no, not discuss it. It must be wrong. If we'd have done that, we'd have been done for not discussing it at all, right? So whatever we do, we'd have been hung, right, for either refuse to discuss it or discussing as we did.

And as you're a scientist, you evaluate data that comes along, right? And you change your view of the hypothesis given the data. And that's all that we're doing. In politics, I think, you can't do that. I mean, you're hung out to drive. You change your opinion, right? That's the kind of like polemic of politics. So, you know, you see so many discourse and politicians.

that are attacked because they've changed their view. In science, you are meant to change your view, given the data. And that's all we're doing, that we say we're going to do in proximate origins, and yet we do, right? And whatever we'd have done, we'd have been hung out, but you're right. If proximal origins has taken on this, I don't know, kind of mythical power, that somehow, as opposed to all of science in history, stopped anyone else talking about it.

And then if we managed to retract proximate origins, suddenly that would be the whole edifice of natural origin collapsing. And both of those views are absolute nonsense, right? So it's a bizarre, it's a bizarre situation. Let's just say for a moment that if that was the purpose, was to shut down the lap late, right? Then we did a really poor job. Yeah, we were really clever.

But also, if you recall, we said it into nature. Nature, one of the reasons why I got retro for nature initially, is because we raise the possibility of a lab leak at all. And the review was said, you're muddying the waters by discussing the possible lab origin, right? I think, like, I mean, it comes back to my point about reading the paper, right? Because, you know, a lot of what you hear is that you will hear that our paper, we call, you know, anybody believing in a lap leak conspiracy theorists.

It was used to label everybody believes in a, you know, as conspiracy theorists. We didn't even consider a lap leak. We didn't talk about BSL2. you know, all these different things. And the thing is that all, like, first of all, we don't talk about conspiracy theories or conspiracy theorists in the paper because it's not relevant to the discussion

that we have in the paper, right? It frames the possible scenarios in which we should think about the origin of the pandemic, including a lab leak, which is our scenario three. Ultimately, we end up concluding that in our opinion, we did not find it plausible that it came from a lab. Well, we stated as our opinion, right? And then as you said, Chris, is that we then follow that up with, however, new data,

yada, yada. And we talk about what some of that new data might be. And in fact, some of the data we talk about, we have gotten since and only further strengthened the natural origin scenarios we talk about. So I think it's that, right? And then this whole, like, saying one thing in private versus saying one thing in public is that you hear a lot about that these days. It doesn't really matter what the discourse is about is that it's always about like somebody saying something in private and something saying something in public.

Fauci, you'd be hearing this all the time. And A, it's just not true, right, is that if you look at the consistency of, like, what's said in private versus what's said in public is that they are very consistent. But also because, like, of course, I have private conversations. I don't, like, you know, every single brain fart I ever have, I don't go on Twitter and it's like, oh my God, like, that was this, right? is nobody does that. Well, Elon Musk. Maybe. Any normal person does not do that.

And I think what's also really important is that, like, as part of my career, I've always loved to play the devil's advocate. Whether it's about my own conclusions or it's somebody else's conclusions, you can trust I'll be in there and I'll challenge those conclusions, even if I ultimately agree with them. But I was like, let us just narrow in here. And of course, during 2020 in particular, again, we had limited evidence early on. But then more, again, these rumors were coming up about evidence. And of course, every single time that happens, of course we have to question our own conclusions. If you didn't, then you're very poor scientists. So of course we did that.

But also really importantly, when all of a sudden I'm saying like, oh, but wait a minute, I don't actually believe this anymore. And maybe we should think about these because all these different. things and then I realized, well, of the list of like eight things I might have mentioned, three of them might have been wrong, right? It might actually just not have been correct what I was saying. It's not that it was actually like that. It was, I was just me being wrong in that moment. But also importantly is that it's not like one day I say like, oh, let's just when, then we go 70, 30, you know, natural versus Laplie. And then two days later, probably

and back to, you know what? 70, 30, what I'm talking about? Like it's 99. but it's not like I then go into the Slack channel and saying like, hey, hey guys, by the way, I'm actually back to 991, right? Because that's not how private communication works, right? But of course you can read the whole thing instead of just one single thing set in a single point in time. And you can understand how people might change their minds over time or how they might learn new things, how they might get more confidence in conclusions, how they might question earlier conclusions and so on and so And I think this is like exactly that. Yeah.

Right. But it's this like belief that like, oh, if you said 70, 30 back in June of 2020, then clearly today you still don't believe your own conclusions. It's ludicrous. Chances are that a day later, two hours later, 10 minutes later, I realize it's like, oh, I was actually wrong about that. But it's not like, again, it was like, oh, for the record, let me just do this. Black channel.

is completely upset. Because it's not, the Slack thing's not a lab notebook, right? It's us chatting in this very intense atmosphere. And it was like a kind of, you know, pressure release for us, right, as well. Because we all remember what it was like in 2020, 2020. It was a difficult time for everyone, right?

And I think that just gave us, that was some sort of therapy just writing these things out on this Slack channel. It's not meant to be just this, discussion of that origins, you know, in a kind of precise way. It's us chatting in this kind of release mechanism, right? And people, I mean, like you say, all they're doing, they just quote mining. And I think what's now, I think you've seen also.

It's the same with the Tony Fowci stuff. Because there's nothing in there, because there's not one place where it says, oh, Fouti told us, let's change on mine, all this sort of thing. Because they're not there. They're now saying, well, maybe there's an extra slatch and we haven't seen. or maybe Fahy's got some other diaries that we don't know. I mean, this is just, this is classic conspiracy thinking, right? And so, you know, they...

I mean, now the new thing is they have his phone, right? To show you all the things we haven't found yet, it's got to be in the phone. It's got to be somewhere. And now they want Ralph Barrett's lab notebooks because that must be hidden there. You know, and it's just going to go on and on and on. And it's, it's irrefutable, right? It's not science because there's going to keep saying it must be hidden somewhere.

It must be hidden somewhere. And you can never, I mean, you know, what can you do? The gold post is shifting. They're on wheels, right? There's shifting continuously to satisfy this, this frenzy of getting the ideas validated. But six and a half years, there's absolutely nothing, right? And they focus on our bad language, and quite frankly, it is pretty bad. I'm glad my mother's not reading them because, if I'm sorry, Mom, because focusing on the

bad language, because there's nothing else. focus on because there's no smoking gun there's nowhere we're discussing how we tricked them didn't they how it was great it's not there right so then they try and paint us as these kind of laddish louts who are just you know just talking nonsense because there's that's all they've got so why not if you can't prove your conspiracy just try just try and trash our reputations because that helps as well but there are I mean one of the things that people should note if they were went and read it because I think you're right that like a lot almost what you'll see quoted is like

four or five lines right and and you will see a document on which is thousands of messages or hundreds of four or five lines are not in time order Chris as well right oh no no not at all and and often like accompanied by ran Paul's editorial right and that is cited as well and genuinely that makes a difference because the thing is that it's it's kind of like there's a tranche of information which most normal people, for legitimate reasons, are not going to read. Even the conspiracy-minded, there aren't that many of them

that spend their time reading that. It's really articles taken from that, and they will take sections out. But when you read the messages, including from you guys, like you talked about, you know, it is an invasion of privacy, but if you set that aside, you don't see a cabal of phorologists

who are operating to create, like a fee consensus. You see you guys referring to other people as bastards and saying, like, you know, those guys are, were they doing that? I don't know. You know, like, and considering the possibilities. And you too right here, who are friends, her scientists, arguing back and forth about, you know, oh, I think isn't that a bit odd?

And you already saying, no, what's odd? Like, what do you mean? I see this all the time here and there. And to me, reading it as someone, like, not in science in the way that you've, guys are, but, you know, in academia and writing papers and debating ideas with people and working on quantitative data, it's the same kind of thing. Like, people put ideas, people respond, and so on. And it feels genuinely a bit Orwellian that you guys are being, like, reeked over at the colds and presented as, like, having these nefarious agenda. While the political bodies

that are doing that and that, like, are hauling farcey up to give testimony, after he's retired, or then, you know, the White House has a website, which is specifically about COVID and says the truth in big letters. Lovely. Yeah. And you have RFK Jr., somebody that's promoted, you know, anti-vaccine advocacy or rhetoric for decades, just like a very politicized administration and one that is absolutely hostile to science in reducing funding and so on.

But it's somehow in the discourse, and like you said, Christian, this includes the kind of liberal media that the scientists tend to be the ones that are getting, you know, the majority of media attention or presented that they did something wrong by having opinions, by discussing things

and that kind of stuff. And like, I was watching the discourse around this and I went back and looked at my old, Twitter threads around, you know, previous times, like the time we had you guys on, or just other times when something has come out. And the thing that struck me is, it doesn't really matter. The evidence, like the strength of the evidence or the degree to which whatever is in the material, it just gets fed into the same narrative and repeated. And this will not be the end of it. Like, you know, it's six years now, but from what I know with other conspiracy communities and

so on. Maybe when the Trump administration is gone, some of the energy will dissipate, but the same kind of thing will happen every time there is some release or some journalist publishes a new article about it. And it does feel like for me that I'm living at Ground Day in terms of like, you know, looking at gurus talking about it. But you guys are scientists who want to be doing science, but it just seems like from my perspective that you're kind of caught in your field becoming relevant, which seems like the greatest curse that the scientist might have personally, even though, you know, the work that you guys have done is important and useful. So, yeah. I do think it's also, it's an very American disease, right?

I've got to say. And Matt, I mean, Matt mentioned living in Australia, and it's just not, the focus this isn't here. There was a bit a few years ago, we're in particular journalists on Sky and writing for some newspapers were discussing it. And there's a couple of, you know, rogue senators that discuss it. But it's not, it's not on the agenda, right? And I do, I do not suffer like Christian and Bob Garrow. I mean, it's a completely different narrative here. And it's not, it's not, it's just not in the press here at all. It really is not that. Most countries is like that. Yet the US is going through this cathartic experience, right? But Eddie, don't you think there's a great irony there because, correct me if I'm wrong,

but my understanding is that compared to a lot of other comparable countries like Australia, the United States had a large number of excess deaths from COVID. Yeah. It can be largely attributed to them not taking vaccines, using stuff like Ivermectin instead, and not having or not following the sort of public health type restrictions that were done elsewhere. So it's just ironic that, It was a traumatic event on a social level. Yes, you can understand the impulse to point the finger at someone to blame it. But if there's anyone to blame for unnecessary deaths, then it's pretty clear to me who should be blamed.

Well, I think the problem is that so public health itself involves almost by definition some sort of government programs that are going to help the populace, right? And in many, in some parts of the US, the word government is a swear word, right? And anything that kind of. pertains to government intervention, be it mask wearing or vaccines. It's hating. This is why Fauci is in the foreign line at the moment. Okay. And that's and whereas the countries did well, they're often Asian countries where government is not viewed in that way. Government people kind of like trust the governments and very completely different narratives. So yeah, but I do think this is very much an American issue. Other countries have got a little bit going on, a bit in France, but in the UK, but nothing like it was going on in the US. Like Germany, Netherlands, like, I mean, there are definitely, you know, other countries in which this is part of the discourse too.

Scientists being on trial, though, I mean, effectively, you being hauled in front of Congress. Yeah, no, it's clearly weaponized in the US, a degree in which we don't see in other countries, right? But, but, and I think like, you know, going to the blame part of this again, right, is that it's not actually, in the beginning it might have been about blaming China or whatever. But that's not what it is anymore. You don't hear China mention with Fauci stuff, right? You hear about the virus was created in the U.S. sent to China or whatever. But the blame is to blame science and scientists for this, much more so than China, for example. And I think that's a general thing.

Again, the climate scientists are extremely familiar with that dynamic. And of course, we are seeing that again, right, surging climate science denialism that we're seeing across many countries, certainly the US. And I'll say early on, when all of this sort of really kicked off, right, is that first I didn't quite understand what was happening because I was sort of looking at this and was like, but that doesn't make sense? Like, why would you think that there would be a conspiracy

involving the highest level of government and then Eddie Holmes and myself? I mean, it just doesn't make sense, right? And initially, I was sort of like, I just need to explain it better. And if I can explain it better, then people will understand it. Of course, that was hopelessly naive on my part, right? That's not actually what's going on here. And I would say talking at the time to several climate scientists that had found themselves

in this very situation, you know, decades prior was very helpful because they're basically like, welcome to the club. And that was really helpful, right? Because it's sort of all of a sudden I understood the dynamics of what was really going on. But of course, what we're seeing now is completely supercharged, right? It's across the board. It's much more violent in the sense that they are literally talking about jailing somebody like Dr. Fauci, who has spent his career dedicated to public health. That's scary, right?

When you have show trials like the ones that we just showed directed at him and other scientists, it is scary. Yeah. The broader picture, as you say, is sort of not so much like a geopolitical China thing, but actually more connected to that groundswell of anti-institutional. institutional sentiment. It's probably the great sort of tectonic political change over the last couple of decades. And science is seen as part of the establishment, rightly or wrongly. I mean, I think, like, I mean, the sort of sad thing about this is that, you know, I do think that we need to scrutinize the role of science during the pandemic, right? I think that's important. We should scrutinize all of it, public health science, how science was, you know, made into decision making, so and so

I think all of these things are really key, right? Because other lessons that we could learn as part of that, of course, they are. But that's not what is happening, right? Right now is not to go in and saying, like, how could we have done that better? It is literally like on one side that it wasn't a problem at all. COVID was completely blown out of proportions of what was the problem. To scientists created their deadliest bioweapon ever in the lab. And it's the same people saying both things.

And of course, science is caught in the middle of that. And in the meantime, people like Eddie and myself are trying to continue to do that science to try and figure out how did all of this really happen. Because again, we have nailed it down to a very high degree of certainty to be that market and the animals in that market. But we don't know the upstream of all of this, right? We don't know which animal from where, how did they get in there, how were the co-house, what about all the markets, what about the transmission chain upstream of that?

There's a lot of things that still need to be figured out, which is. really key for the question of like the legal by-life trade is a is a liability here and this is going to happen again. So how can we prevent that better from happening in future? And that requires much more understanding of the upstream effects. But of course, there's no way to actually touch on any of that. Well, there's a piece of the puzzle, Christine, relates to something you raised earlier about the kind of eagerness to attach things to like Fauci personally, right? And how that's become like a mean focus of the current discourse. And that is one thing that like on this podcast we see a lot that like scientific issues in general and political issues, but but scientific issues

this certainly happens with, they have a tendency to become personified. Like whoever, any figure, there's hundreds, if not thousands of Tony Fauci's all over the different countries, right, working in public health. But why is his name? known when, you know, the minister in Norway or Denmark isn't, right? And you have that need and that, like Matt talked about, that people tend to want to find like a person, right, a culprit. But also, that is often how science is imagined to operate. And a lot of the gurus that we see paint that picture that it is these individual geniuses working and that they make, you know, lead forwards or they have a theory, a brilliant theory, and that is like the thing which becomes the dogma,

you're not allowed to question. Anybody working in science knows that that is not the keyest, right? Of course, there are people of brilliant theories and so on, but like it is very much more a collaborative endeavor with thousands of people disagreeing institutions, like during the pandemic, like you talked about, there's lots of things you can talk about, but there's so many different countries and institutions that had different policies and ideas and recommendations, right? And there was consistency across like the general public health bodies about, you know, the broad picture, the benefits of social distancing and so on. And that is now taken as like something that is highly questionable. But in doing that, I think one of the issues is that scientists,

like the evidence we talked about at the start of the podcast, it doesn't really cut through that much. I would say very, very few people are aware of the current strength of evidence for Zoonotic. They would at best see it. 50-50 and more likely lean the other way. So what that means is that you do need scientists who are willing to come and be scientific communicators or public figures argue the case for what they did and point out that they're being targeted. But in so doing, you're essentially making yourself likely to become a figure that is targeted,

that features and conspiracies and so on. And I don't know, like from my perspective, The only thing I can say is that I am glad that there are scientists still willing to do it in the environment that is currently there, right? Because it's not without cost and it's not without risk. But it really does need, because of the way discourse works, that there are people who are good communicators and willing to appear and argue back and try and get their positions and the weight of the scientific. evidence into the discourse and maybe the climate change thing is a slight cause for optimism in that while there is a lot of denialism it generally is now that the denialism has moved from dismissing all the science right maybe that's me being optimistic but it feels like

there's been a shift to a recognition that maybe the science says that but we should still you know like ignore it for whatever reason but they're not denying the science says that Whereas with like COVID, we're still very much at the stage that a lot of the science is just not acknowledged or recognized. So yeah, in a way, I'm commending you guys for being willing to talk to us or other people much bigger than us and to risk the kind of cost that comes with that. But I think that is unfortunately what you need to counter some of this stuff because otherwise you just have soundbouts of Rand Paul. and Fauci pleading the fifth, which is a completely understandable thing to do, but it's very easy to spin as, well, why would he plead the fifth if he's, you know, got nothing to hide? Yeah, and I've had emails and phone calls from people after he played the fifth saying,

oh, he must be covering up then. Okay, and that was being the number one kind of narrative that I've had. I think about your point, Chris, about, you know, what I'm concerned about now is whether what were the young people want to go into his profession in technology given what's happened to us and particularly in the US like Christian right I mean you would you would definitely think twice right you really would are you prepared to deal with this sort of backlash you know like like looking at me and saying like yeah I want to I want to do what Christian does would be a little insane right let alone saying like looking at somebody like Fauci and saying like yeah I want to do that yeah in

all honestly, I don't, like, people in the right mind would not say that. Yeah. And that is bad, right? That is, that is truly really bad because this work is, of course, important. Like Dr. Fauci and the role he played and, you know, his leadership at Naya over the years as it comes to many different pandemics, HIV being one of the main ones, right? And of course, COVID-192 is incredibly important work. And I think public service in general is incredibly important work. But now you're looking at that and saying, like, is that my future, while I could end up being a target and facing a federal government that is going to charge me for trying to do good science or doing good work? That, I think, is pretty scary.

I mean, the HIV program literally saved millions of lives, literally better. One of the greatest health interventions ever. Now it's dismantled, and a man who's done this, is 85, right, is, you know, potentially facing jail. It's literally unbelievable to be. saying these were literally unbelievable. I mean, it's not potentially he is. Yeah. It's just I mean, it's incredible that we were at this point. I can barely begin to understand how this has happened. A man who's done more, you know, incredible work saving lives in undeveloped countries for aides, you know, amazing funding coming through him and it was DW Bush that put this through, working with numerous presidents on a public and sign,

who he got him really well with, you know, phenomenal, right? And Ebola, I mean, all these outbreaks, influenza, his legacy for helping population and for folding public health is is unsurpassed in the last, you know, 50, 60 years. And there he is. For doing his job, doing his job, literally doing his job, following the science, he is now facing jail. It is how we've got to this point in history is unbelievable.

I do hope, you know, in years of come, scholars will look at this and they will see what a black day this is, right? For everyone involved, you know, it's just an absolute disgrace and insult, you know, globally. And the other thing, Eddie, I would say, is like, and this got to me particularly, I mean, everything that you said about the persecution of scientists and kind of like the vilification for for doing public health, right? It's a terrible precedent to say and a bad atmosphere. But personally, one of the things that got to me the most about this. And Matt and I have been talking with Phil Markillan about this is that online, of course you had the Republican MAGA community

fall in line behind this because this is part of the prevalent narrative. There's a lot of anti-vaccine rhetoric on that side with RFK Jr., you know, being the public health figure and so on. But what I found incredibly annoying was that people presented it like by talking about the lab leak or criticizing Fauci, that you're doing something brave and potentially costly, when in fact it is now absolutely the dominant thing, right, and in alternative and mainstream media. So if you come out arguing that the evidence does not strongly align with LabLick, that is the thing that is actually socially costly for most people in media and discourse, right? Maybe not CNN, but even there, I think, you know, in general, you know, you see with figures like John Stewart and Trevor Noor or whoever, right? They tend to follow it just in terms of the discourse wave.

And maybe they don't buy everything Ram Paul is saying, but they're often like swept along with the notion that the evidence is like constantly shifting in somewhere 50-50. So the thing that I find this useful is how much people preem as if they're these brave truth tellers who are taking this huge cost. And the cost is attention, support, Elon Musk retweeting you, you know, and maybe Trump adding you under some commission or whatever the case might. be, as opposed to the scientists who've been hauled up in front of committees and presented as if they are people purely motivated by greed. And the question I had for you, given the situation

that you've described, maybe this will be optimistic or pessimistic, but you know, you guys are still primarily doing science, working on research and you head, you know, labs or are working with researchers and post-doctoral students and so on. So given what you discussed, do you see any change amongst the students, the younger scholars or, you know, young researchers who are coming up? Or is it still within the discipline that you have a lot of energy, you have like the field becoming relevant in a lot of ways that it wasn't, or at least was not publicly perceived because of the pandemic. So what is the impact on your research teams and the next generation of researchers? Cause for optimism, cause for pacifism.

I don't actually know if like the effect feels specific as in like people are like, oh, I'm not doing biology. But the matter of the fact is that if that was the case, I probably wouldn't notice it just because I only get people that are interested in that. And there are still people that are interested in that, right? But what I do see visibly is the shift in just wanting to be an academic scientist or be a public servant, right? Where in the past, people were certainly looking at careers of places like the NIH, at careers of universities and research institutions, and seeing that as the career trajectory.

That bit has changed dramatically in recent years, both as you're talking to graduate students and postdocs, where they just can't see that future ahead of them anymore. So they are looking to industry, right? They're saying like, where can I go work for an AI company? Where can I go work for a farmer company? Where can I go work for these things? And, you know, in general, that's obviously fine, right? Because people need to have a diversity of interests.

But what is very visible in this is that a lot of people just don't see that path, the academic path anymore as a viable strategy for a future career. And that is very, very, very, very visible on my side, I would say. And that's, again, graduate students and postdocs. And the same is true for people that might have considered careers in public health departments, careers of the NIH, for example. I don't think I've heard anybody wanting to go that path recently. Yeah, I totally agree.

It's palpable. You can feel it absolutely. The other thing in that context was back in the 80s when I was a graduate student, we used to joke about once you did your PhD, the next. degree you got was called the BTA beam to America, right? Because that was like, you know, you had to prove yourself. You had to prove yourself, like the Beatles had to go to the US in 1964, otherwise they'd never been great rights. You've got to go to the US to prove yourself, right? You need that number one in the US. That's gone. That degree is gone, right?

A, because US science is being decimated. B, you can't get a visa to get in the first place now, right? So it's that there's been this a massive shift in the kind of geographic distribution and how science is being done. And as Christian says, I think academic science, what I see is a decay. It's a decay. And pathways are being closed off. And people looking more industry as a career.

So they get skills for PhD, but they don't become academics. And frankly, who can blame at the moment, right? So, you know, definitely, definitely impact. That last part, I think, is because, you know, I love this country. I mean, I've lived in America for quite a while, right, since 2009 and I'm an American, Danish American citizen.

And I think science is and has been extremely rewarding, right? And the academic society, the academic community here in the United States and just science in general is awesome, right? I mean, it has been, it's been arrived. And I think like there's definitely still parts of that, right? I don't think that the whole, like everything has just been decimated, right? But I do think that we at a juncture in which that that is actively happening. And of course, it's not that, you know, when young scientists today look at the future careers

and saying, like, I don't see myself doing academic science is that it's not something that is, you know, day one, everything is running 100%. Day two, it all fell apart. It's something that takes a generation. And we're going to see that. And I think we are already seeing, you know, a lot of that happening already. But of course, if that course does not get reversed, then it will only get worse with time. And I think that's a tremendous loss because the matter of the fact is that the U.S. scientific community is that that just is nothing that can replace it.

That really isn't. It's not like one, the European Union can step up and say, well, you should come here and then you do the same here. The European Union has, as, you know, defining. science for decades now, right? And just have not been to the point that it's been in the United States. And I hope and I think it can be reversed, right? But it's not just something that will magically happen unless people actually start and scientists actively start working to ensure that it's going on.

I think this is a good message to leave on, maybe not quite as pessimistic as Eddie's. But, you know, hopefully that we can change course. I flew all night in from Singapore. I'm pretty tired. Maybe a function of lack of sleep. It is a bit grumpy at the moment. Don't listen. Not that.

No, I mean, obviously things have trended in a very bad direction with regard to public understanding of science and the public sponsoring good science in recent years, especially in the United States, but we can be hopeful that this can be turned around. What about something good? There must be stuff you guys are working on that is excited. you know important new developments you've really explained very well I think

why it's so important to get to the bottom of the causes and antecedents of viral outbreaks like SARS COVID what other stuff are you working on that you might want to share and to give you a minute to think about it and just add a postscript the Matt's point I would invite our audience to note the general enthusiasm and level of excitement when discussing the scientific evidence and research at the beginning of the conversation versus talking about media and politics and discourse and, you know, the constraints that scientists are facing currently from the administration. Because to me, I think it's clear that like you guys are much more eager and interested

in the science than the politics. But, you know, that's what you're dragged on to. So, Matt's question is a good one to end on to ask you about the science or research. You know, go first Christian, or shall I ever go? So I guess the stuff that I like the most is the stuff that's the kind of most useless, right? And so that's looking at... Good funding, pitch. I do the kind of, you know, the virus origin stuff is a one's area. But I quite like looking about how, at heart my evolutionary biologist, how big changes in the evolution of hosts, right?

So going from, say, being invertebrate, to a vertebrate, often unicellular to be multicella, how that changed what viruses were around and how they worked, okay? And so one thing we've been doing is looking at host species that are kind of marked big transitions in evolution, big innovations, right? So for example, we're looking at the most basal chordates, okay? First thing, the note of cordonies like tunicuts, like sea squirts, okay, or the first you, the first animal, which may be. will be a comb jelly or a sponge and seeing what viruses they have and how that changed to what they had before them. Okay. So for example, and so I'm some, I'm going to live in Australia, we have access to lots of wacky stuff, particularly in our oceans, right? And so I find lots of very weird, new, wonderful viruses that look like nothing we've ever seen before, giant genomes,

crazy things in sponges. Or tunicots, sea squirts, we found things like influenza virus. in sea squirts. So influenza virus turns out to be not saying that's disappeared in birds or jumps to humans, but it may be 550 million years old. So it's an old thing. So I really like that looking at how the relationship between how hosts have evolved and how viruses have changed with them. So that's my big thing. I'm still chewing on this one because, I mean, because I came across this quote from Nomi Orenski. She's a, she's a professor at Harvard. And what what she said is that I think it's borderline, and I'm quoting her here, is that I think it's borderline on ethical to focus on the positive and really troubling things are happening that hurt people. What's ethical

is being honest about problems, confronting them clearly and asking what we can realistically do. And I think it's not a positive quote to end on, but I think she's right on, right? And I will say, like, you know, when I get to work every day is that what I am excited about is, of course, seeing people in my lab working on interesting research. But interesting is we have to remind ourselves that I work on viruses that kill people. So things that are interesting is that like, you know, figuring out like, oh, the origin of these measles outbreak, for example. I would rather we didn't have measles outbreaks.

And again, from my own perspective is that it is honestly difficult to sort of focus on like what are the positive things that I can see in the future. given everything that's going on. Because my main worry is that if we don't get turned around what is happening right now to science and to the way in which science is funded in the United States, I'm selfish, this is where I am, right? But the way in which science has been funded

and the best science, and you have to be very competitive to that, to changing to a system in which these can basically political decision making is scary. And I think, you know, facing that reality and saying like, oh, well, we should be positive about X, and we should be positive about why is that I just don't think I can do that. But again, it doesn't mean that I can't walk into work in the morning and see students and postdocs and staff scientists in my lab working a really cool science because that is continuing.

And that does give me the energy and saying like, well, you know, this is worth fighting for, right? Because it's important. And we have to because I don't know, like I used to work at the post office, right? And I have had many jobs over the years. But I've been a scientist for. for a while. And if all of a sudden it's like I shouldn't be a scientist anymore, I don't know what I would do. I'm sure I'll figure something out. But figuring out like how can I continue to do effective science, giving everything that's going on is honestly pretty difficult. And I think that needs to be a realization, right? That's seeing a positive path through that right now with everything going on truly is, is difficult. Well, thanks, Christian. It's not a, you're right. It's not a positive

note, but it is actually a good note to end on. And you got me thinking about the historical times and places where politics has had a very influential role in science and it never ends well. It does not end well. Look, I can still round off to an uncharacteristically positive note from me, Matt, on this, which is if the people listening to this are interested, genuinely interested in the topics that we talked about around COVID origins and around the kind of discourse we, were related to it, I would encourage people to actually go and read the papers. Now, we are often cautioning the people reading empirical scientific papers. There is a foundation that you need there

to do that. But for example, Eddie's review of the evidence, as it currently exists, right, for the COVID origins, is a very readable paper that you could read without expertise and you would get a general overview of the, you know, the state of evidence as it exists. And if you are in a strong pro-lably camp or whatever the case might be, I think it behooves you to do things like not read Matt Ridley and Alina Chan's Twitter threads, but go read the Proximal Origins paper. If that's what you really want to focus on now, six years later, at least read the paper and at least read treatments and in-depth interviews with people where they are talking about the actual research. And as far as discourse and that kind of thing goes, we always give the message that whatever

discourse that you're consuming or podcasts that you're consuming, you should be looking at it critically. And that includes around lab-lick narratives and so on. And then lastly, if you find science and supportive science important, then as much as we say, is important for scientists to be out there arguing their case and kind of standing up for science like you guys do to regret out. It's also important for the people that support and recognize the importance of science to push back in whatever way you can just in terms of like supporting or countering the ramping conspiracyism. So all the answers you gave Eddie and Christian,

they're perfectly held and we shouldn't try to put a pretty bowl on the situation as it exists. But there are still a lot of people out there that care about science, recognize what scientists are doing and are not chanting Lachemar up Fauci or that kind of thing. So, yeah, maybe there's still cause for some optimism. One key thing there is that it is the majority. I'm pretty sure. I don't think that the majority is chanting Lachop Fauci. You know, there is the discourse that's what's going on in Twitter and on X or whatever these days.

right and in conspiratorial circles, but that doesn't mean that that's the majority of people. I think most people in a place like America wants to see science continue to succeed because it's good for the economy, it's good for all these different things, right? I think people want to see good vaccines in future. I think they want to see development some new cancer therapies and so on and so forth. I think most people want that. And I do think we need to remember that too. It is, you know, easy to forget sometimes.

absolutely for somebody like me, but I think really is, it is key. All right. That's a good note to end on, and we appreciate you guys coming back and talking to us again. See you in three years when the next love like we have it. Let's hope that. But yeah, we'll be happy to speak to you guys again. And maybe it won't always be around the endless discourse waves of lovely. God will be.

Let's hope so. Thanks. All right. Thank you both. Thanks guys.