Making Sense with Sam Harris - #311 — Did SARS-CoV-2 Escape from a Lab?

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Matt Ridley and Alina Chan about the origins of the COVID pandemic. They discuss the evidence of a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, media and academic censorship of this topic, the history of collaboration between western scientists and Chinese labs, the risks of "gain-of-function" research, the evidence for the zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2, the initial complacency and denialism of the Chinese, the biosafety levels at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, molecular evidence of a lab leak, the practical constraints on synthesizing viruses, lack of international cooperation, conspiracy theories promulgated by the CCP, EcoHealth Alliance, different kinds of "gain-of-function" research, virus hunting, the history of lab leaks, risk and reward in the search for knowledge, Anthony Fauci, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Well, there's a lot happening with AI these days. The chatbot over at Bing, powered by OpenAI's program called Sydney, apparently, seems to have gone a little crazy. Also, a human just beat a high-level computer at Go, which was previously considered impossible. So it would appear that our robot overlords are looking a little sketchy. I think I'll do another AI-focused podcast pretty soon. Seems like there's a lot to talk about. But today we are talking about the origins of the COVID pandemic. And for that conversation, I have Matt Ridley and Alina Chan. Matt is a writer. His books have been translated into 31 languages and won many awards. They include The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist,

Genome, The Rational Optimist, and The Evolution of Everything. And his new book with Alina Chan is Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. Matt also sat in the House of Lords between 2013 and 2021 and served on the Science and Technology Select Committee there and the Artificial Intelligence Select Committee. He was also the founding chairman of the International Center for Life in Newcastle, and he created the Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal in 2010, and was a columnist there from 2013 to 2018. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Alina Chan is a scientific advisor and viral vector engineer at the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard. She is a recent Broad Ignite Fellow and Human Frontier Science Program Fellow,

with a background in medical genetics, synthetic biology, and genetic engineering. During the pandemic, Dr. Chan investigated the problems relevant to finding the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and in 2022, she joined the Pathogens Project Task Force, which was organized by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. And the purpose of this project was to generate new thinking on high-risk pathogen research and to help prevent future lab-based outbreaks. As I said, the topic today is the origins of COVID, more precisely the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So we discuss the evidence of a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We talk about media and academic censorship of this topic,

the history of collaboration between Western scientists and Chinese labs, the problems with so-called gain-of-function research, the evidence for the zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2, such as it is, the initial complacency and denialism of the Chinese, the biosafety levels at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the molecular evidence of a lab leak, the practical constraints on synthesizing viruses, the lack of international cooperation,

conspiracy theories promulgated by the CCP, the EcoHealth Alliance, different kinds of gain-of-function research, virus hunting, risk and reward in the search for knowledge, Anthony Fauci, and other topics. Anyway, I found it a fascinating and also fairly confounding conversation. This is one of those topics where you just can't believe we're in the situation that we're in, given bad incentives and basic human stupidity. Anyway, Matt and Alina were great guys to the topic, so I hope you find this useful.

And I bring you Matt Ridley and Alina Chan. Matt Ridley and Alina Chan. I am here with Matt Ridley and Alina Chan. Matt, Alina, thanks for joining me. Great to be with you. Same. So we're going to talk about your book that, when did it first come out? It's now out in paperback.

When did you first publish this? I should give the title. It's Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. When was you first publish this? I should give the title, it's Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. When was the book first published? It came out in the fall of 2021 and paperback, which was updated in the spring of 2022. Is that right, Alina, or have I got the name, the years right? Yeah, the paperback came on in June last year. Okay. So obviously we will incorporate any up-to-the-minute findings or thoughts or misgivings or retractions or epiphanies that you might have. And this is a topic that has always been interesting and consequential. I think, let me just put my prior cards on the table. I always felt that speculation about the origins of COVID was more or less irrelevant and perhaps counterproductive at the very beginning. Once we knew we had a pandemic on our hands and we knew

we had sequenced the genome of the virus, it seemed to me that the first order of business for a considerable period of time was to simply design vaccines against that virus, which we did very quickly, and to try to secure as much cooperation as we could in all of our collective efforts to not have the pandemic be as bad as it might be. But obviously, the pushback against speculation about this topic that emerged fairly quickly always seemed crazy and disingenuous. It was never racist to worry that this had leaked out of a lab. And it's obviously quite consequential to get to something like a ground truth consensus about the origins of this pandemic, ultimately, because we need to

figure out how not to do this sort of thing again if we are in any way culpable for the emergence of this virus. So that's where I've always been. It's not that I have not been interested. It's just it's only something like this moment where I feel like, all right, this is a very important project to drill down on this topic, but I'm wondering if my initial disinclination to drill down on the origin story seems questionable to you. It seemed politically inflammatory initially, and it also seemed like when the first job is to design vaccines, it didn't seem quite relevant to know the origin. Is there something that I was missing there? So Sam, I actually started on the same foot as you. So I was more interested in how the virus was causing disease in people before I read that it was not mutating much. And that's when the alarm went off that this might have come from a lab to me. So I was actually more interested in

finding a way to treat the disease rather than to find out where it came from. But to the question of which is more important, I think that both have to be investigated in parallel. Because if you wait too long, it will become impossible to find the origin of the outbreak. Right. Yeah. Honestly, I had not thought about that part of it, that you sort of lose your connection to the facts if you're not really looking as much as you can look, as early as you can look. Before we jump in, and this really is a fascinating topic which sheds a lot of light on a fair amount of societal dysfunction. We're going to talk about the origins of COVID, but in the background and perhaps explicitly, we're also talking about the political corruption of science

and a fundamental lack of transparency on the part of public health officials and, you know, attendant failures of cooperation. Before we jump in, perhaps both of you can summarize your relevant backgrounds here. Let's start with you, Matt. You and I obviously are quite familiar with one another, though we have not yet met scandalously. I've read several of your books, and I will have introduced you both properly at the beginning here in the intro, but give me your potted bio, Matt. Will do. Yeah, I'm a longtime fan of Sam Harris. That's one thing you can say about me. But my bio is that I'm an evolutionary biologist by training. I did a

DPhil at Oxford in the behavior of birds a very long time ago. I then became a journalist. I then became a book writer, an author, nonfiction author, various other things I did. Ended up in the UK Parliament for nine years in the House of Lords, not in the House of Commons. And the common theme of my career is a fascination with science and with evolutionary biology in particular. So actually coming to this topic, I was especially interested in the story of the bats right from the start, or at least whatever other species it was going to turn out to be. But it very quickly became clear that all these SARS-like viruses are basically found in one genus of bats, the horseshoe bats. And it was writing about that that got me into this topic. I very quickly learned that I could rule out a lab leak as plausible on the basis of

arguments that were being put in what seemed to be authoritative scientific papers. I then later came to question that and thought that those papers were premature. And that's how I got more and more intrigued. And it was Alina's work, really, that tipped me over the edge. Alina? So I've been working in labs for about 14 years. I have a background in biochemistry, medical genetics, genetic engineering, and now gene therapy. So I am a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. And I'd say that the common theme in my research, in my

scientific life, is thinking about how to re-engineer human cells for therapeutic purposes, and now thinking about how viruses interact with their host, with human cells. Wonderful. Well, so you are just the people I want to talk to on this topic. And as chance would have it, you've written a book on it. So how did you come to collaborate on the book together and perhaps just give us its basic thesis? What are you alleging happened or may have happened? And maybe before we, I mean, we're going to track through this, you know, the various arguments for and against the thesis, but you might just say how your thinking may have evolved in the meantime. I mean, have you become more convinced

or less convinced of any particular claim? Yeah, shall I kick off on that? Because I was commissioned by the Wall Street Journal to write an article called The Bats Behind the Pandemic in, I think it was April or May of 2020. And I had by then become intrigued by this story that this virus seems to have come from bats, and that they had already found a very similar relative, but I didn't know where or when. And the more I dug into the topic, the more I began to question the received wisdom at the time, which I had been conveying to other people, that you could rule out a lab origin. And then I came across a paper by Alina and two of her colleagues, which said that this virus had experienced no burst of rapid evolutionary change on first entering the human species in 2019,

which is surprising because the original SARS had shown that, and most viruses do that. They have to evolve pretty fast to suit the new host. And she also tipped me off that the Chinese had now ruled out that it began in the market. George Gao, the head of the Centers for Disease Control in Beijing, had announced that he thought the market was a super spreader event, not a origin event. And that's when I started getting intrigued. And Alina was the first scientist I talked to who said, look, it's an open question. We don't know if it came out of a lab. We don't know if it came out of a market. I got more and more interested in it. I followed her work and other work more and more closely, dug as deeply as I could. And eventually I said to her,

could we collaborate on a book? Because although I know quite a lot about genomics, I've written several books on the topic, I'm basically a writer, not a scientist. And I would need to collaborate with somebody who understood the science. We both, I think, thought, and Alina can confirm this at the start, that it could go either way, that we would probably find out while we were writing the book what the answer was. We were wrong about that, by the way, we still don't know three years later. But we would probably find out that it was either something to do with that seafood market or something to do with that laboratory in Wuhan. And so we devoted roughly equal quantities of text in the book to

each argument. But I think by the end, we were both leaning towards the lab. And then a couple of other things happened. Just as we were about to publish, a document dropped, which we can describe later, which I think tipped us both into the view that the lab was now more likely than the market. What has been your experience touching this topic, trying to publish on it, and publishing, in fact, at a certain point? And has there been a fraught adventure in publishing? And I know you've testified,

both testified before the UK Parliament. Just what manner of courting controversy has this been? And how has that political environment around this evolved over the last few years? Yeah, well, we've met all sorts of barriers. You know, this was described as a conspiracy theory that it could have come out of the lab very early on. And it was as a result banned from discussion altogether on places like Facebook. Luckily, on Twitter, it wasn't. You could still speculate and share information on Twitter. So in the social media space, it wasn't easy. That changed a bit in 2021. The world got a bit more open-minded. In terms of the media, we found certain newspapers and broadcast outlets

were very interested in talking about this topic and thought it was an interesting one. Others wouldn't go near it. CNN and the BBC just wouldn't talk about our book at all, for example. And is that still the case? Yes, basically, as far as I know, it is, I think. I think you have been on CNN, Alina, once, but only a long time ago. And I've not been. Well, there was one very, very obscure BBC program had us on before they realized how unfashionable we were. I don't think I've been on CNN. I think they canceled last minute also.

And I think we've seen that a lot. A lot of these more popular news media would reach out saying they want to interview us on the book. And then a few days right before they would say, oh, we can't touch this topic. Our scientific editor is against it, that kind of thing. So there has been, I think, some self-censorship on the part of news reporters on this topic. Yeah. And also it's worth mentioning that we've had a lot of encouragement from scientists privately. An awful lot of people are saying to us, keep going, you're on the right track. But in public, very few of them are prepared to put their heads above the parapet.

And when I pressed, for example, the Royal Society in London, and also the Academy of Medical Sciences, to hold a debate on the origin of a pandemic that's killing north of 10 million people, I was told the topic is too controversial. And we've found something similar in the US that the question of sort of opening it up to a proper conversation is just not acceptable within conventional science. And this is odd because the public generally thinks it came from a lab, if you look at opinion polling and based on anecdotal conversations I have with people, an awful lot of people think, yeah, of course it came out of that lab. Whereas the scientific establishment likes to say that the vast majority of scientists

think it didn't come out of a lab. Now, if that's true, if they think that, and they know the public are, as it were, wrong on this topic, then they ought to be all the more willing to come out and debate it and knock down the theory that it came out of a lab. And for me, it's very odd that we haven't been able to have a very open, wide-ranging conversation in much of the media about this over the last two or three years. Well, one of the things we've seen as well over the last two years is that a lot of emails have been obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, showing that virologists who publicly said, of course, it came from an animal in that market, privately in their

emails, they were worrying whether this virus had been engineered in the Wuhan lab. Okay, well, I want us to explore the nature of the controversy because it is surprising to me that it is this controversial to speculate about the origins of the virus and to worry that it could have leaked out of a lab. I think, just to frame that surprise more fully, first of all, there's been a continuous source of concern. And so we should want to talk about evidence of yet another leak. Also, the Chinese have not been especially cooperative, and their political regime is not so widely respected at the moment. Maybe let's just touch the general question now. Why would people in the Western press and the scientific community in particular be so coddling of Chinese political sensitivities on this topic? I mean, I get why the Chinese don't want to admit or don't want to understand that they, through negligence, have birthed a global pandemic, if in fact they have. And we could argue it's negligence either way, whether it's a wet market or a lab leak. But why would the Western press and the Western scientific community be so eager to protect their self-concept on this point? Alina, do you want to go first on that?

Sure. Chip in. So I'll say first that when I first started wondering about where this pandemic had come from, I had no idea about this whole history of collaboration between not just the US, this whole history of collaboration between not just the US, but many other countries across Asia and Europe, with labs in China to do quite risky virus work that might have led to this pandemic. So here, it's not just whether Western scientists are afraid of, you know, provoking China, it's really a question of are they also complicit in the origin of COVID-19. And over the last few years, we've seen again and again, a lot of support within the US for exactly that type of dangerous virus

research that's commonly known now as gain-of-function research. So if the pandemic did start from a lab in Wuhan, it is not just a Chinese government issue. It is actually an issue that affects multiple countries, many countries who have all supported and endorsed and engaged in this work. And the US is a big funder of it. So they would have almost equal responsibility, I think, in my eyes. Okay, so it's not just China and its political sensitivities. If, in fact, this is the result of laboratory negligence, there's a lot of blame to spread around, and we'll get there. So to start... Sorry, just to chip in there, Sam, if I may,

just to amplify one of the points. It is a case that Western virology feels worried that its entire research program, indeed the whole of biotechnology, might lose its funding, might lose its social license if a major accident is revealed to have happened as a result of work in a laboratory. And I share that concern in a sense i'm pro biotech i'm pro vaccine i'm pro genetic engineering of crops and in medicine as well and it would be a terrible pity if as a result of this the world said right we don't want to do have anything to do with biotechnology ever again it's a disaster but i think truth is more important than consequence. And actually,

you know, science would be better off saying, no, let's find out. And if this did go wrong, let's learn lessons and make sure we don't do it again. Yeah, well, I think one could well wonder whether we want to have anything to do with gain of function research, which we'll talk about. I mean, this is something that I've touched on this podcast once before. My friend Rob Reed did a special episode on this research. So that part is especially worth worrying about, in my view, but we'll get there. So let's take it from the top here. What is the best argument for the natural origins of this virus? I mean, if memory serves, at the beginning, and perhaps this is still the case, there was evidence that it started spreading from the wet market,

whatever its initial origins might have been. You just referred to it as possibly a super spreader event. So there was a pattern of spread with the wet market as its epicenter. And I forget what it was. It was something like 27 first cases that were detected there. Try to give the. In the case of SARS, in 2003, there was a very clear link to markets, food handlers, and that kind of thing. So when this one cropped up, and it's a very, very similar virus, it's very closely related to SARS, and it was first noticed in and around a food market, it seemed to be very much the same story. And that remains a possibility. There were mammals on sale in that market, not nearly as many as you would find in southern China. This is an area of China where you don't have the same habit of buying live animals in markets to the same degree. But there were mammals on sale in that market. And people did seem to get

infected in that market. And the geographical proximity of the outbreak to a major food market does look a bit like SARS in 2003. The problem was they never found an infected animal, whereas they easily found them in the case of SARS. And although they found evidence of the virus in the market, it was on things like doorknobs, countertops, and in the sewage. It was the human version of the virus being spread around by people. So yeah, it remains a possibility that this was very much like SARS. It started in that market, and that somebody was selling bamboo rats, which had been kept in a cave where bats had been defecating on them, or something like that. And yes, you know, we would expect something like that to happen every now and then, because we know that these viruses are circulating in wild bats,

and people are coming into contact with them in the wild. And is it true that there was no possible progenitor virus found in any animal in the market? Yes, that's true. Right, interesting. I think that there are many lessons to be learned from how this pandemic was traced, in terms of how the local investigators in Wuhan tried to find the source of the virus. So what had happened was there were hospitals in Wuhan, in the middle of Wuhan, and they were seeing cases of unexplained pneumonia. So they didn't know what was

infecting these people. And then doctors started realizing that they were seeing some cases from this market, from the seafood market that sold some number of live animals. So they called in investigators and then those investigators thought maybe it's SARS-1 happening again. And at that time, they were not so sure about human to human transmission yet. So what they did was they looked at the animals in the market or supply chain. They went straight to the market and they wrote all this down in their notes, in their publications in early 2020. They said, we are just going to look at the market, we're going to look at the hospitals near the market, and we're going to look in the neighborhood of the market. So they completely focused their search on people with either links to the market, or if they had no links to the market, they had to live near the market. So what this did was it

led to this looking under the bright light, but not looking live near the market. So what this did was it led to this looking under the bright light, but not looking around in the dark kind of analogy, where they ended up confining their search prematurely to one hypothesis, such that if there had been earlier cases not linked to the market or living far away from the market, they would have been missed completely. So in this sense, this led to this great unknown that persists to today. Are there earlier cases in the market? Are there cases in November, for example, that we don't know about? And if the Chinese government knows, they have not told us.

They have not shared that information with us. Just to restate that so people don't miss it. What you're describing is a kind of selection bias. If you look for cases associated with the market, if you find anything, you're only going to find cases associated with the market. And then if you populate a map with those red dots, well, then you're going to have created a map that looks like the market was the epicenter of everything you found. But that could, in fact, be an artifact of just how you went looking for data. And obviously it doesn't differentiate the market as origin thesis from the market as amplifier thesis.

Is there more there, Elena? Yeah, you're exactly right. And just to reiterate, at the time, people were not allowed to acknowledge that the virus was spreading from human to human. There are anecdotes, reports from Wuhan, where doctors, for example, were not allowed to wear masks because they were told that this virus is not spreading human to human. So to wear a mask would acknowledge that they could catch it from their patients.

So in that sense, investigators were not allowed to look for people who just caught it from other people. They were looking for people who had exposure to animals, had eaten at a restaurant where there was a live animal, for example. Well, that's an amazing change because when you describe it that way, it seems like a political maneuver to want to put the bravest face possible on the top of this pandemic. But obviously, the Chinese have changed their behavior rather markedly since. They've gone so far as to, I believe, weld people into their apartments, and their zero-COVID policy, to the eyes of the rest of

the world, has looked, for now several years, fairly berserk. So what are you actually saying about the political, social, cultural attitude of the Chinese in the first months of the pandemic? I think we're saying that it flipped. It went from extraordinary complacency and false reassurance, the period up till roughly the middle of January 2020, when they were insisting there was no human-to-human transmission, telling the World Health Organization to spread that message, and also saying they had it under control and that they hadn't had any deaths for 10 days or something. So there really was a period in January 2020 when probably local officials were desperate not to get into trouble with

more powerful central bureaucrats and were giving out false reassurance about what was happening. Don't worry, we've closed the market and there's no human transmission. The cases that are in hospitals will either recover or die and then it'll peter out. And then by the end of January, they suddenly realized because of the flood of people coming into the hospitals, that that's wrong, that people are giving it to each other on a massive scale, that it's spreading like mad and that it's killing people. And so they then reacted with very, very draconian lockdowns, as you say, that sort of worked to start with, with the relatively less infectious version of COVID that was then spreading. Wouldn't have worked with Omicron, for example, two years later. But it worked. Wuhan did manage to stamp it out,

but with extraordinarily draconian measures, as you say, welding doors shut and things like that. And then that persisted for a couple of years until towards the end of last year, that even that became untenable. They could not stop these milder but more infectious versions of the virus spreading very rapidly, and they simply took the lid off. So there's been two changes in China, both of which have probably gone too far in the wrong direction. Yeah, this is the first time I've thought about this, but it just suggests to me that, I mean, given the alacrity with which they started locking down in earnest, it suggests to me that those first months of denialism had to have been based on a sincere belief

that there was no human-to-human transmission, or at least it wasn't going to get out of hand, because the moment that seemed to be the case, then they went fairly crazy in the other direction. Well, I had to jump in here because actually in the first week of January 2020, the sequence of the virus was being auctioned off to people who make diagnostics and to people who make vaccines. And we know that by, I think, January 4th, the vaccine production for this virus had jumped into high gear by one of these companies in China. So I think the people there were kind of operating on two truths at the same time. On the one hand, they had to accept what they were being told, that the virus was not spreading human to human.

But on the other hand, they also had to manufacture wartime level amounts of vaccine for the virus. So I don't think there was a unified consensus, of course, across this entire huge country, but there were separate groups of people acting on different, almost acting as if they had to accept both truths, the truth that wasn't spreading human to human, but also they had to prepare for a pandemic. Yeah, well, the timeline of Chinese vaccine development I know is peculiar, given what they claim to have known or not known, and I think it relates to the origin thesis. Maybe we should jump there now.

What are the various anomalies that suggest a non-natural, that is, non-zoonotic, non-wet market origin for the virus? And I know these anomalies exist at various levels. There are molecular anomalies with respect to the virus itself, and then there are things like the timeline of Chinese response and vaccine development. And then this is probably the best place to talk about the various grant proposals that implicate Western involvement, EcoHealth Alliance, etc. But I don't know who wants to take this first, but walk me through the evidence for non-natural origin. Well, I think I could talk about this for hours. So there's quite a bit of evidence pointing to

it's a lab origin, although there's no key direct or definitive evidence for either natural or lab origin. So I'll try and be brief. So I think that the main key points for a lab origin is one, the location. So Wuhan is a place where even the top SARS virus researchers didn't believe that an outbreak would occur. So when the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists, who have spent like the last decade collecting these viruses, first heard of this outbreak in her city, she said, could it have come from my lab? Because we never believed that, you know, a SARS-like virus would break out in Wuhan city. They in fact used their own city as a negative control. So a place where they would expect zero, zero people to be exposed to this type of bad coronavirus. And yet, this was the location of

arguably the largest collection and manipulation center of SARS-like viruses from that region, resembling this pandemic virus. So we've got the location. Let me just make sure I understand what you're saying there. So you're saying that Wuhan is not a place where you would expect a natural ambient level of SARS viruses because the horseshoe bats don't live locally? Is that what you're saying? No. So the horseshoe bats do live there. But to find that type of SARS-like virus, these scientists had to make trips every year far down south.

So they had to travel thousands of kilometers down south to South China, to Yunnan. They even went across borders to Southeast Asia down south. So they were collecting across eight different countries, South China and seven Southeast Asian countries in that belt where they predicted there was the highest prevalence of these type of viruses. So that type of bat, the horseshoe bats, do live broadly across China. But to find those viruses, you have to go very far down south. And so even if you look at the EcoHealth Alliance, so this is a New York-based US non-profit that channels money from the US

government to that Wuhan lab and other places, they recently published a map of the risk of being exposed to these viruses, and Wuhan is nowhere near the hot zone. All right. Okay, so I derailed you. Please continue. Oh, no worries. So on the other hand, this lab, they had an extremely unique research program, so it's very hard to find this type of research program in any other lab. So you have labs that go out there and collect tens of thousands of samples from bats, from animals in the wildlife trade, and even from sick people. So this lab was doing that. But they also took it one step further.

Once they had all these very interesting novel viruses, they would then dissect them in the lab. They would break them down, recombine them seamlessly, so leaving no scar or trace of having engineered them, and try to see how these viruses could one day infect people. So they were trying to predict pandemics and try to come up with therapeutics and vaccines for potential pandemics in the future. But to do that, they had to bring some of these viruses closer to that type of pandemic potential. And we've seen from some of the released progress reports sent to the NIH that in some cases, they accidentally really

enhanced some of these viruses in the lab in animal models of human disease. So they had this very unique program where quite risky research was being done. And it was only found out later after the pandemic started that much of this research, including involving live viruses, had been done at quite low biosafety, at a biosafety that could not have protected them from being infected by viruses like the pandemic virus. Let's linger on that point. So what is the biosafety level of the lab and how does that relate to biosafety levels elsewhere? So Matt, do you want me to take this? Yes, keep going. You're doing a very good job, Alina.

Yeah. So when the outbreak was first detected, lots of people were just thinking about the top biosafety lab in Wuhan, so their BSL-4, the maximum biosafety level. But the truth was, all of their research on these bad coronaviruses, including the SARS-like viruses, had been done at lower levels at BSL-2 and BSL-3. So they worked with live viruses even at BSL-2. And at this level, you cannot be protected from an infectious airborne SARS-like virus. And there's no requirement, even if people are sick, even if they fall sick, they don't have to report it, they don't have to quarantine. So there would have been no record of someone being infected in the lab by such a virus.

Wow. Well, that's pretty damning in its own right. You know, Jon Stewart famously made the joke that you've got a novel bat coronavirus outbreak, and what do you have in town? You've got the Wuhan Institute of Virology working on precisely these sorts of viruses. Now we find at a level of security that couldn't possibly protect against a leak. On some level, what more do you need to know? I know there is more to know. We'll talk about the molecular evidence. But that alone, isn't that damning?

Can I just add to that point? This wasn't just one of the Chinese virology labs. This was pretty well the leading virology lab in China, with the possible exception of one or two others, and certainly the leading one for SARS-like coronavirus. This was the lab that had tracked down where the SARS virus came from that caused the 2003 epidemic. And they were very proud of that fact. They'd found a cave in Yunnan with horseshoe bats in it, in which very close relatives of the SARS virus were circulating. So, you know, this is not just any lab. This is the main SARS-like coronavirus research lab in the world, effectively. And the particular striking feature is that when this pandemic broke out, they announced that they already had in their possession in that lab,

a very close relative of this new virus they called it ratg13 we later found that they changed the name just before this so it took us a long time to connect that name to an outbreak of pneumonia that killed three people and sickened three others in a mine shaft in yunnan in 2012 and they had made seven expeditions to that mine shaft. And they'd come back not just with that one close relative of SARS-CoV-2, but we later found out, not till the middle of 2020, but we eventually found out that they'd brought back eight other very closely related viruses.

And so up till the middle of 2020, the nine closest relatives of this pandemic virus had been collected more than a thousand miles from Wuhan by Wuhan scientists and brought to Wuhan. And that, you know, was a pretty striking fact. What then transpired was that the pandemic virus had a unique feature in it. And I think Alina is probably a better place to explain what this feature is. It's called a furin cleavage site. It's a short text of DNA or RNA rather, which enables the virus to use a human enzyme called furin. And it greatly enhances its infectivity. It's the reason we're having a pandemic. And when they published the virus, they didn't draw attention to this fact, even though

it was the first, and to this day, the only SARS-like coronavirus that had this feature in it. And I think Alina should be the one to give a rather good metaphor for why this was surprising that they didn't draw attention to this. Well, let's jump there next. But Alina, perhaps you can start by explaining, if an explanation is possible, why they would have been working with these viruses at a level 2 condition as opposed to the level 4 condition that was available to them in the same lab. Yeah, so I think this lab had been searching and hunting and collecting these viruses for so many years that they really let their guards down.

So up until the pandemic started, there was no evidence that a bad virus, a bad SARS-like virus, could jump into a person and immediately cause an outbreak. Normally, it takes a while for the virus to become capable of causing massive outbreaks in people.

It needs to adapt, find the right combination of mutations to make it capable of first infecting a person, creating enough copies of itself to spread from person to person and potentially through the air. So in this case, these scientists had been going to all these bad caves, sometimes without masks, without any protective gear. And they've been doing it for so many years and nothing bad happened. So why would they need to upgrade to a higher biosafety level?

Because once you go from BSL-2 to BSL-3, it's a lot. It's a lot more of cost, time, training. You have all these special requirements. It becomes very challenging to do the experiment and very costly. So if you are the scientist and you don't really fear these viruses anymore, is there really a need to expend all that extra money and cost and personnel for this extra safety? But aren't we now talking about manipulations to the virus that, by definition, make it more likely to infect humans? I mean, we're going to talk about a

furin cleavage site and any other molecular evidence now, but isn't the allegation that they were performing gain-of-function research of some sort, which should by definition have made them more concerned about getting infected themselves when working with these viruses? variants of that virus weren't very good at causing outbreaks in people. It was only at a later stage, once it had collected the correct set of mutations that made it well adapted for people, that it was capable of causing outbreaks. So for these scientists, they had collected some close relatives of the SARS-1 virus. And they were working with these also at low biosafety levels. But I suspect that they didn't feel threatened. They didn't feel like, you know, even if I spill this, it's going to cause an outbreak. So they probably had this perception that it would require quite a few steps, quite a period of time, repeated spill overs, repeated

infections before it would reach a pandemic level. They were also working with diverse SARS-like viruses. They were going out and intentionally looking for SARS-like viruses that were different from the SARS-1 virus. And it was with these viruses that they were doing experiments to see how they might eventually also cause outbreaks in people.

So these different SARS-like viruses were seen as low-risk viruses. So they weren't seen as close relatives of the first SARS virus, likely to spill over into people at any time. But they were seen as things that you could manipulate in the lab and not be so worried that you would cause a pandemic. Okay, so let's talk about the virus itself. And you described manipulations that were seamless and undetectable. What is detectable? When you look at a virus of this kind, what are the signs

that it may have been manipulated? And what signs exist in the SARS-CoV-2 virus as we have come to know it? It's incredibly difficult to distinguish a lab-engineered virus from a natural virus, because any lab-engineered virus has to be derived from a virus that was found in nature. Scientists don't have a magical ability to just conjure novel viruses, the entire blueprint by themselves. They have to base it on something they found in nature. And the problem, the challenge is that nowadays,

the technology to build these viruses, to entirely synthesize their genome is so advanced that you can do it leaving no trace. And for example, when this virus, when the pandemic virus, its sequence was posted, it took very little time for several groups of scientists around the world to just synthetically create it from scratch with no trace of them having engineered it. In fact, they had to deliberately put in traces of them engineering it. They deliberately put in a few mutations so that they could tell when someone in the lab had been infected by the virus in the lab or had caught the natural pandemic virus in

the train or the coffee shop. Just to be clear, Alina, so you just started saying that scientists cannot manufacture viruses out of whole cloth. They have to piece things together from naturally occurring viruses. But then you just said that scientists, once we had the genome sequenced, they built their versions of SARS-CoV-2 from scratch using nothing but base pairs. Can you square those two claims? Yes. So once you know what the code is, the code is usually from nature.

You can synthetically create the virus. But what I mean by you can't conjure a virus out of thin air is you can't just make something that has never been seen before. It's like based on nothing. So you have to use sequences that you found in nature to make this artificial virus in the lab. Yeah. And just to give you an example, Sam, that might be helpful. What we're mainly talking about here is manipulations to one of the genes, the spike gene. So there's about, is it 15 genes

roughly in these SARS-like coronaviruses? They're strung out like beads on a string, although they do overlap, so it's a bit confusing in some ways. There's one gene that codes for the spike, the thing that sticks out of the surface of the virus and that binds onto human cells. And nearly all the genetic manipulation experiments have involved the spike gene. And so what they've done is they've said, we've just collected this virus in the wild. We've read its sequence. It's got a different spike gene from the one that we're used to. We're going to synthesize a piece of RNA, or you'll start with DNA, but then you'll change it into RNA, that is that spike gene from this

wild virus. We're going to synthesize that from scratch, but based on the exact sequence that we've seen in nature. We're going to then swap that into a virus that we've already got growing in the lab, taking out that virus's spike gene and putting in this new one. You've now got a manipulated virus that has a brand new, well, it has a different spike gene than it would normally have, but it's got the same other genes as it would normally have. So it's very much a sort of jigsaw puzzle of genes here that is mainly going on. But there's another level, which is to insert or delete sequences within the spike gene. And that's where the furin cleavage site comes in. So is the only sign of synthetic manipulation

that you can't find analogous sequences in the wild? I'm just speculating here. I don't know if this is true, but let's just say that there is no example, and Alina, tell me if this is in fact the case. There is no example of a fern cleavage site in a horseshoe bat found in the wild. Therefore, there's no appropriate story of how this could have been zoonotic once you see this piece of molecular evidence. I mean, either it's there and you haven't found it, or it's just not there,

and by definition it had to have been the result of human manipulation. Well, I think there's a fundamental challenge here, which is that we don't know what viruses and what sequences the Wuhan lab had found. So if you don't know what the references are, how do you know what might have been engineered in that lab? And maybe an analogy I can make is with AI. So nowadays, AI is so sophisticated that it can write its own stories from like completely create new stories by itself. So in that sense, it's hard to tell whether a particular story was written by an AI

or by a person. But in science, in terms of writing virus genomes, we are not at that level yet. We're still at a level where you have to copy and paste pieces that you've found from pre-existing stories, let's say pre-existing virus sequences. So without having access to that database of sequences, how do you know if something was derived from that, or whether it just comes from nature? And we don't have access simply because of a lack of cooperation at this point with the Chinese, correct? Yes, and the database in question, which Alina refers to, is, as far as we know, a pretty well complete database of all the viruses they had collected

over 15 years or so, and their sequences, their locations, their other features of them. And that database was online until the 12th of September 2019. It then went offline. It came back briefly online in early 2020, but only internally, not available to the outside world, which it had been before, although not all of it. There was a password-protected section. There was a paper published by the EcoHealth Alliance in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which came out in 2020, but was written before the pandemic began, which listed a very large number of viruses they had worked on up until the end of 2015, the beginning of 2016. And so we think we have a fairly complete idea of which viruses they had collected up until that point. But if you look

at the published sequences of viruses that they found in 2016, 17, 18, and 19, there's very, very little information available at all. And we think it's, we know it's in that database. That database is not being made available. We've asked for it repeatedly in every way that we can think of and said, wouldn't it be the perfect way to exonerate the lab, is to show us exactly what you had in the lab, and show that you did not have any virus that could have been used as a backbone or a template for making SARS-CoV-2. And the answer comes back, well, if we shared it, people might hack it, which is frankly a meaningless thing to say, because if you share something, it doesn't matter who hacks it.

You know, hacking is for secret stuff. So we just don't understand why they don't share that database. And when you say we, you're talking about Western governments have requested this of the Chinese or journalists or the scientific establishment? So it's actually been quite astonishing. So the World Health Organization sent a team of scientists in, in early 2021, to Wuhan to investigate the origin of COVID-19. And that team included the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborates with

the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And when they went there, they were given this nice tour of the top biosafety level lab in Wuhan. They weren't shown the lower biosafety labs. And the EcoHealth president said he didn't ask for the database because he knows that there's nothing useful in there. So he asserted without sharing the data that we don't need to see this database. Can I just interrupt there just to answer your question about we? Because, yes, I do mean literally Alina and I trying to put questions to Shi Jingli herself or Jane Kew, who's a journalist who has access to her and not getting anywhere in terms of responses. But I also mean a sort of community of people who are interested in this subject

some of whom are extremely knowledgeable some of whom are as it were amateurs who've come to this from outside they're just good at handling data or looking into databases and things like that and they've also been trying to pose these questions on social media directly, and as you say, through governments, through journalists, and so on. And it's really been an uphill struggle. You know, if mainstream journalists or mainstream politicians were to sort of take this up and do a little bit of research and get to the point where they could ask these tough questions, it's not impossible that we could make a little progress here. But when it's just a bunch of sleuths with no particular institutional background putting the pressure on, it's very easy to ignore the question. It's easy to see how conversation has proved impossible.

Wasn't it the case at one point that the CCP was alleging that the virus had been spread to Wuhan by the Americans? I mean, it was an act of bioterrorism that came from outside of China? I mean, didn't things break down that much? There was an athletics tournament in Wuhan in October 2019, the World Military Games, in which lots of countries sent military athletes. And the suggestion was made fairly obliquely by the Chinese authorities that this might have been how the virus got there, and that it might indeed have been a bioweapon from Fort Detrick. They even mentioned the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which is another coronavirus research center that collaborates with Wuhan. And, you know, this is only one of many really rather flimsy theories that have been put out

there by the Chinese regime. The most notorious one, of course, is the one that they got the World Health Organization to briefly endorse at a rather farcical press conference two years ago this week, which was that it had reached China on frozen food from overseas, frozen seafood in particular, for which there is no evidence. And when you think about it, it makes absolutely no sense because A, it's not a very good vehicle for transporting viruses. And B, it would infect whoever else is getting frozen food from those sources elsewhere in the world. It wouldn't turn up in just one city. So, you know, there've been some fairly desperate alibis put out there by the Chinese authorities to try and deflect questions about the lab in Wuhan and also about the market in Wuhan. I mean, we shouldn't forget that the Chinese regime doesn't want it to be blamed on the habit of selling live animals in markets in China either.

Yeah. As I said at the top, there's negligence, there's a story of negligence either way, whether it's a wet market or a lab. And in some ways, they're equally damning, although of different cultural practices. Alina, is there more to say about the molecular evidence or lack thereof before we move on to the political story and the story of bad incentives and questionable research? Yeah, so first thing I want to say about the WHO investigation was that it was extremely useful for the Chinese government to use that and say, look, the World Health Organization says this virus might have come in on frozen food, so it didn't start from China, it's not China's fault. It's also a story

that they're not just telling the outside world, but they're telling people inside of China. And we know from a lot of emails and actually from early publications in 2020, that people inside of China were the first to say, maybe this is from that lab in Wuhan that's collecting these bad viruses and doing risky research with them. And so this whole issue of the virus database being taken offline, being made inaccessible, it just makes no sense

because these virus hunters have spent more than a decade collecting all these viruses, putting together the database, which they launched in 2019, right before the pandemic. They said this database is for other scientists

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