Judging Freedom - Origin of Covid & Whistleblowing w/Jeffrey Sachs

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

Origin of Covid & Whistleblowing w/Jeffrey SachsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, September 22nd, 2023. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us from Columbia University. Professor, just to sort of reintroduce all of this, you and I were chatting about your own research on the origins of COVID and any genetic manipulation or political manipulation that may have caused the general perceptions of of covid when we had Internet problems. And a lot of people got to see the edited version, but a lot more would prefer the more complete version. So here we are. We will then segue into your general impressions of President Biden and President Zelensky since you were there at the UN this week. So let's start with your views on the origins of COVID. Now, you are not a virologist, you are not an MD, you are a world-class economist, you are one of the smartest people I know, and you've done some research on your own.

Well, I headed a commission, a commission that was for a medical journal, the British medical journal Lancet. We had 28 commissioners and we had 10 task forces, and one of them was looking into the COVID origins. intensive work on this, where I reached out to a lot of the scientific community, got a lot of good tutorials about what might be the origin of the virus. And I have a lot of experience in how governments work, having advised dozens and dozens of governments around the world. So all of this is to say, in a nutshell, the odds are that this virus was a virus that was genetically manipulated in the laboratory to increase its transmissibility, and that it escaped accidentally from the laboratory. From which laboratory, Professor Sachs? It probably escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, most likely, but it may have been

created in a U.S. laboratory because viruses get sent all over the world. And the research that was underway was a US funded joint US China research program. So it could have been created in the United States, it could have been created in China, it was funded most likely by the National Institutes of Health, specifically Tony Fauci's unit, the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease. I just got to stop you right here. It would be, in your view, inconceivable that Dr. Fauci would not know about this. Inconceivable. Well, he certainly knows that what I'm saying, that it may well, and I think likely, came out of a laboratory. Without doubt, he knows that. And without doubt, he was worried about that fact from the very beginning. And without doubt, he participated in a narrative creation to tell us that it could not be so or was unlikely to be so. So he knew from the beginning that

something bad out of U.S. government-backed research may have happened. It is possible, by the way, and I can explain in detail, it's possible that they really don't know for sure what happened because one scenario is that a U.S.-funded, U.S.-China program ended up being completed by China in ways that we don't know. But there's another scenario that is quite possible, and that is that we do know, and that the government has covered it up as it does so many other things. So Dr. Fauci testified under oath numerous times. Dr. Fauci advised the President of the United States, Donald Trump, at the time, numerous times. Dr. Fauci advised the president of the United States, Donald Trump,

at the time, numerous times. And you're suggesting that the narrative he gave under oath and to the president was false and created and deceptive. I have no idea what he said to the president, but I can say what he said to the Congress was absolutely deceptive and was not forthcoming and did not explain the fears that scientists had behind the scenes and that they had, even as they were telling us that it was nearly certain that it came from nature. They were not telling us their own fears. We only learned about their fears by Freedom of Information Act releases of partially redacted or non-redacted emails and Slack messages and other social media. And we also learned a lot about what the U.S. government was doing in this sphere that they never told us about. And we learned about that by whistleblowers who posted things on websites, including, most importantly, posting an absolutely shocking document, which was a research proposal being made to the Defense Department to do laid out a scenario of how

this virus precisely may have been created. And that was in 2018. And the virus showed up sometime around September or October 2019. Do you believe that any Americans were engaged in genetic manipulation which produced this virus? I think it's very, very possible, yes. And do you believe that Dr. Fauci must have known about that? Well, he funded a research program for many years. We don't really know the full extent and the full purpose of it, but there was an active research program to study and manipulate SARS-like viruses. By that, I mean a class of viruses called sarvicoviruses, which are in bat populations related to the original SARS outbreak in 2003-4 in principally China and East

Asia. After that outbreak, that's a coronavirus, but a specific type of coronavirus. After that, there was a lot of scientific research, much of it funded by the U.S. government. And from already 2005, scientists were trying to understand how this type of virus might become even more dangerous, because the fact about SARS was that it killed a lot of people. I don't remember the exact numbers, but in the low thousands, but it didn't spread like a pandemic. And so already back in 2005, 2006, there were scientific experiments to see what would make such a virus more transmissible. And there was a focus on a particular part of the genetics of the virus already back to 2005, 2006, that plays a major role all the way through to the emergence of the virus. Technically, it's a piece of the genetic code that is called a furin cleavage site.

So it's a way that the spike protein, which we came to know about, gets of these SARS-like viruses of the hundreds that have been found genetic code, it would make it much more infectious because it's a way that viruses enter the cell, thereby causing the infection. So there was a lot of interest in this specific issue called protease cleavage Site for 15 years. How does- And lo and behold, Judge, if I could just, the shocker, the biggest shock of all of this was in 2021, late in 2021, I believe, a whistleblower posted this proposal, research proposal online that blew everyone's

mind because it said in this proposal, which was a proposal that linked the University of North Carolina, where there's a brilliant lead researcher on coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the following. It says that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has collected more than 180 previously unreported SARS-like viruses, and that this research project will test those viruses, examine their properties, and test them for transmissibility. And one of the things that it will do is to see whether there is a furin cleavage site in the virus. And if there isn't, it will insert a furin cleavage site in order to examine whether that would increase its transmissibility. Now, this is like... That's the genetic manipulation. That is exactly the codebook for making SARS-CoV-2. Because SARS-CoV-2 is a SARS-like virus that has a furin cleavage site, the likes of which have never been seen before in any other SARS-like virus.

Who in the United States government knew about this and what role did the CIA play? So in terms of this original research, there is a group of virologists that have been engaged in this kind of genetic manipulation, centered at University of North Carolina. It's brilliant work, let me say, from a technical point of view, because they were able to create what they called a reverse genetic system that could do the following, if you really want to just understand the manipulative power that the scientists have right now. This SARS-like virus, and I'll get to the answer, but I just want to explain how powerful this work is. You're captivating, so please continue. This SARS-like virus, and specifically SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID, has 30,000 base pairs or nucleotides. And these

are these letters, A, G, C, T, that are coding the genetic code. And it's 30,000 long. And people will know the double helix. It's those letters, which are nucleic acids, which code for the genes of this virus. What this scientist, Ralph Baric, who's the lead of the laboratory at UNC, developed brilliantly was the capacity to be given a list of 30,000 letters, like A-A-G-C-A-G-G-A-A-C-C-A, and so forth, 30,000 times, just as a list of letters, not as a biological entity, and turn it into an actual live infectious virus. That's pretty amazing. He could construct not only the gene, but make it actually inserted into a cell and then have the cell machinery produce the viruses, harvest the viruses, and then show that they are infectious in human tissue. So he was creating new SARS-like viruses.

It's amazing. And he had an approach, has an approach called creating a consensus virus, where if you're given, for example, 10 different SARS-like viruses, nine of them may have an A in the 18th location, and one of them has a G in that location. That is a slight difference in the genetic code. He'd say, well, the consensus in that 18th place is an A, and then go to the 19th place, and maybe the consensus is a G. And just, I know, I don't want to go, you know, overboard, but just to say, he not only could bring a virus to life, but he could create a kind of virus never seen before, and he could insert a furin cleavage site in that virus. Now, why would he do that? Because he knew better than probably any other scientist in the entire world that introducing that furin cleavage site would most likely make the virus more infectious, more transmissible. And he was very interested in what would make such viruses more dangerous, more transmissible, more infectious. So that was the cookbook.

Now, who knew about that? I'm sure, of course, the virologists, the funders, which is NIAID, Tony Fauci, the Wuhan Institute of V scientists looked at, they almost went straight to this specific site. You have 30,000 letters, but they went to three of them right away and said, whoa, how did that furin cleavage site get in there? And when the group of scientists was originally canvassed privately by Fauci, they said, one of them said, I don't see how nature does that. And another said, whoa, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but 60-40 out of a lab, you know, only 40% of the nature. We've never seen that before. And so this was an alarm bell ringing to see that there. And it was an alarm bell not only because a Furin-Cleavitt site would make the virus more dangerous, but because these insiders knew that's an object of intense research. That's an object of study. That's an object of

lab manipulation. Okay. Tell me how the CIA gets involved in this. The CIA gets involved when it is asked to examine the question of where this virus came from. And when there were early reports, and it's unclear to me exactly what kind of investigation was done in 2020. But when President Biden came in, he called for the intelligence community to look at this question, where did this virus come from? Of course, the public has never seen, nor has the scientific community ever seen the basis of any conclusions or the kind of data that were made or the interviews or the lab records that were or were not collected. We'd never seen any of it. But what we did see was about two pages, a two-page note that said that there's some division, the FBI and the Department of Energy, which runs scientific laboratories, so that's why DOE is in this, lean towards a lab possibility, whereas other agencies, including the CIA, lean towards natural or

conclude overwhelmingly likely natural. So the CIA was apparently on the side of natural release until a couple of weeks ago when when when what happened a whistleblower came forward to the house committee of oversight which is investigating this and this is just a adding parentheses fascinating the democrats won't touch this in either house. It's amazing. They've turned this into a partisan issue, which is so absurd. What could be less partisan than the question of where a pandemic that killed an estimated 18 million people actually came from? But they turned it into a partisan issue. So the House, which has a majority Republican, took on the investigation. In the Senate, they won't touch this because the Democratic-controlled Senate absolutely blocks- I don't know how this could become partisan, but let's put that aside.

Okay, put it aside. What did this CIA whistleblower say? did he say that other CIA people were lying? Yes. He said that we concluded. Now, this is from a press release of the House Investigation Committee. We've not seen the CIA agent. We've not seen testimony. We've not seen anything other than the press release by the committee, which is called now for further

witnesses. But the statement by the committee is that a whistleblower has come forward to claim that the original seven members of the CIA investigating committee had leaned, I believe it is six to one in favor of laboratory leak as the most likely explanation. And this whistleblower is claiming that his colleagues were bribed with substantial substantial payments by the CIA to reverse their conclusion. The CIA bribed its own agents. That is what is being alleged. Wow. John Ratcliffe, you may know him, was the director of national intelligence, I think, in the last year or 18 months of the Trump administration had a piece in the Wall Street Journal's editorial page Tuesday saying essentially what you just said and suggesting how reprehensible it is.

Now, if this happened, it happened under his watch. He didn't know about it. But here you have the director of national intelligence warning the American public of the dangers of a CIA that can bribe its own agents to make certain statements. Where did the CIA even get the confidence? I thought they were spies who steal information. Where did they even get the confidence to make a determination about the origins of COVID? We do not know what the government has or has not investigated. Those of us on the outside, and there are a group of scientists that have been really rattling the cage for years saying, show us data, evidence, lab books, let scientists look at this. This is a scientific question. This isn't a partisan question. This is a scientific question. But we haven't seen

the details other than what has been garnered by leaks, whistleblowers, and Freedom of Information Act accounts. Professor Sachs, you should testify before that committee. I don't know that the committee members have an understanding of the way you just explained this. I just want to switch gears. We only have a few minutes left. You were at the U.N. most of this week. The two most talked about speeches were President Biden's and President Zelensky's. I think you were physically present in the General Assembly when President Biden spoke. Your impressions, first, of President Biden, how his Russia is the monster that must

be stopped argument resonated, and your impression, secondly, of President Zelensky and his, it's Russia against the world and you have to join us, argument resonated. You know, in both cases, I don't think this argument has any chance in the world community. Most of the world sees this as a proxy war between the United States and Russia. Most of the world does not see this as Vladimir Putin in a fit of delusion, believing that he's Peter the Great, woke up one day and decided that it was necessary to invade Ukraine. Most of the world sees this as a battle, a contest between the U.S. and Russia for political and military influence or even control in Ukraine. And most of the world wants that battle between the two biggest nuclear superpowers to stop. So I don't think that either President Biden or President Zelensky made any headway

in swaying the 80% of the world population that says, would you stop the fighting? You're hurting everybody, you're endangering everybody by getting them to take sides. Zelensky, of course, comes with, in the context of both a failed, disastrously failed counteroffensive of the last three months, a completely unrealistic claim that Ukraine is going to defeat Russia on the battlefield and push Russia out of every bit of territory, but also with an absolute rejection of negotiations other than on this completely unrealistic line. So I don't think Zelensky also made any headway or had much credibility. He did not speak to a packed hall. I wasn't there by then, but a lot of others weren't there by then

either. And the reports are that it's a pretty forlorn Zelensky right now because the claims, I think, pumped into him by U.S. generals, often who do this, told him all the wonderful things that were going to happen, and nothing wonderful happened except the massive number of deaths of his countrymen in recent weeks. So he couldn't carry any credibility in these claims other than what they now say is, well, we're in this war for years and people don't want to be in a war for years. This war is dangerous. It's costly. It's bleeding Ukraine. It's killing Ukrainians. And in massive numbers, they're not winning. They're not going to defeat Russia. In fact, this was quite clear to objective observers, not those listening to

American spin, but to objective observers for a very long time and observers and people that you have interviewed, Judge, repeatedly who have been very clear about this point. And it's playing out just as those people said, who said, don't listen to the U.S. propaganda, to the U.S. narrative, to the U.S. spin. Look at reality. And the reality is very different. I want to play a clip of someone whom I have not interviewed, although I've met him many times, and who accepts the U.S. spin. And I want to play the clip because it's almost slapstick. I don't know if you've seen this. This is President Zelensky shaking hands with majority leader, Senate Majority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer. Watch this. I've never seen a bow like that. And of course, we are in your corner as a double entendre because Zelensky's painted

himself into a corner and Joe Biden and this crazy foreign policy is more or less in a corner that they can't get out of. And what McConnell said, because we saw McConnell there as well. Did you hear what he said? Yeah, what McConnell said, because I read it today, didn't hear it on this tape, but what he said, maybe standing up at a podium afterwards, was you're fighting the good fight and this is America's fight. It shows China that we are standing strong. And I went to look. There is one after another. Senator Blumenthal is another one. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. Mitt Romney is another one who literally say this is good value for America because it shows China how strong we are. Right. It's money well spent because we're killing Russians and they're not killing Americans. That's the stated differently version of this. Yes. And I could never have

imagined in a million years, frankly, that the mass deaths and destruction of Ukraine is so America can look tough to China. This is so mind-bogglingly wrongheaded. And this is exactly what McConnell said. But then when I went to look, boy, he's not alone. This is yet perhaps another one of these narrative statements that you're fed and then you repeat. And it's so shockingly awful. But it is actually said by these grownups who profess to represent us. And they don't represent us. I don't think they represent the views of Americans at all on this. They represent the military, industrial, congressional, banker, warfare complex. We all know that.

Professor Sachs, it's always a pleasure. Great to be with you. warfare complex. We all know that. Professor Sachs, it's always a pleasure. You have an incredible ability just to keep speaking in a lucid and compelling way. Thank you for joining us. Have a great weekend. I hope you can come back next week. Absolutely. Great to be with you. Thank you. There you have it. More as we get it. 4.30 today, Eastern. Ask the judge. Type in your question. If it intrigues me, if I like it, I know there's going to be more questions than we have time for. I can only go for about half an hour because I have another broadcast to do at 5.10. I'll answer, and I'll put your name up there or what you say your name is.

See you then. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.