Morning Wire - This Scientist Claims The Definitive Origin Of Covid 19 — ‘It’s In The Genetic Code’

Episode Date: June 28, 2026

Five years after COVID-19 upended the world, the debate over where the virus came from is far from over. Physician-scientist and author of “The Code as Witness” Dr. Steven Quay joins us to explain why he believes the strongest evidence for a lab leak isn't hidden in government files—it's written into the genetic code of the virus. He lays out the genomic clues behind his case, weighs in on gain-of-function research, and argues what must change to prevent the next pandemic. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.- - -Ep. 2864- - -Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3- - -Today's Sponsors:Fast Growing Trees - Visit https://fastgrowingtrees.com to get 20% off your first purchase when using the code WIRE at checkout.Vanta - Whether you’re a fast-growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta is here to help you automate your security and compliance, and earn and prove trust. Get started today at https://vanta.com/morningwire- - -Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacymorning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The grill is shot. The chairs are held together by optimism. And what happened to the rug? Sounds like your outdoor setup is not ready for patio season. Fix it all with Wayfair. Shop Wayfair for grills, rugs, furniture, and more. With 20 million five-star reviews, room of choice delivery, and experts set up on qualifying orders,

it's never been easier to do more for less. Get 10% off your first eligible purchase. Hurry to Wayfair.com or download the app now. Hey there, it's Wayfair here, where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app, when you spot it, a brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill, too? All right, Wayfair's got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast experts set up on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier.

Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app. Five years after the pandemic began, questions about the origins of COVID-19 remain hotly debated. In our episode today, we speak to a physician, scientist, and author of the new book, The Code as Witness. He argues that the strongest evidence for the lab leak theory comes from the genetic code of the virus itself. And a scandal like that should have huge implications for the scientific community. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley. And this is a weekend episode of Morning Wire. here and your yard probably needs some love after winter. Our sponsor fast-growing trees is America's

largest and most trusted online nursery, with thousands of trees and plants and over 2 million happy customers. Think of it as your local nursery available anywhere, with a bigger selection than you'll find anywhere else. From fruit and privacy trees to flowering varieties, shrubs and houseplants, every plant is grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy. Simply click, order and grow to create your dream yard with options that fit your climate, space, and lifestyle. I ordered two Bambino-fit-a-le-leafigs, so they're small, but they are, so adorable and they arrived in beautiful condition. Healthy, happy, and my living room is forever changed. Their alive and thrive guarantee ensures your plants arrive happy and healthy.

Back by ongoing support from trained plant experts to help you plan, choose, and care for your new greenery. Right now, they have great deals on spring planting essentials, up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20% off their first purchase when using the code wire at checkout. That's an additional 20% off better plants and better growing at fastgrowingtrees.com using the code wire at checkout. Fastgrowing trees.com code wire. Now is the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together.

Use wire to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. Joining us now to discuss the clues pointing to a lab origin found in the virus itself is Dr. Stephen Quay. Dr. Quay, thanks for coming on. Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Georgia.

So, Dr. Quay, it's been five years since the pandemic began, and most people have moved on, but you've actually written an entire book, that questions COVID origins and talks about why that still matters. Why did you choose that as the topic of your book? Well, I mean, I was looking at what was going on in 2020 and seeing two things happening at the same time. One was a representation of where the virus came from that didn't make sense scientifically. And then in a parallel fashion, the science establishment was really censoring

people who had opinions. There wasn't the opportunity to debate, which is the foundation of science. So both of those drove me to write the book. And the third thing is that there may be another pandemic. It could be worse than the 1% SARS-CoV2. We need to be better prepared and we're not. Now, you've argued that the virus itself contains some clues that point to a lab origin. What is the strongest piece of evidence that you've seen that makes you feel like this virus came from a lab leak? Well, it's looking at the virus and comparing it to thousands and thousands of viruses we have from nature. So it has a particular site called the Furin site, which makes it highly transmissible, not found in nature in this class of viruses. It has some unusual adaptations

to the human tissue that are not seen in viruses in nature. Because in nature, viruses are living in animals, you know, bats and other kinds of intermediate hosts. This virus was highly adapted for humans from the beginning. It's also the first respiratory virus that was ever transmitted asymptomatically. And I show that for five years, the one in the biology was studying how to make a virus that could transmit without giving symptoms. Those are the three primary foundations inside the genome that say that it came from a laboratory and was manipulated in that laboratory. When you say that it could be transmitted without symptoms, you mean in that prodrome phase before the symptoms arrive? So a new virus coming from nature is going to cause symptoms in 98, 99% of patients.

The symptoms are fever, you know, sweating, red cheeks and the like, because it runs into what's called the innate immune system because it's not used to, you know, to being in humans. This virus was 40 to 50% asymptomatic in its patients. We missed that for a few months because we never expected it to be asymptomatic. And that was one of the two or three things that contributed most to making it a pandemic, a worldwide condition where it has infected probably every person on the planet. And you say there was evidence that they were working on making something exactly like that in the lab? Yes, there's a particular gene called an accessory gene. It has the fancy name of Orphate. I'm being facetious there.

but orphate is responsible for suppressing the immune system so that the body doesn't react to it. On the front end of an infection, it makes it asymptomatic. And on the back end, it makes it hard to make antibodies against the virus. We've seen this virus, you know, affect people over and over again. And part of that is this protein called orphate that's actually suppressing the immune system at the end of an infection. Now, the title of your book that you often use, and it's a phrase in your book, is the code as witness. Can you just unpack that phrase a little bit? And what aspects of the virus are you referring to there?

And it might be the aspects that you just discussed. Yeah, I mean, the title is to indicate that there's been a lot of what I would all call he said, she said evidence around where the virus came from. So we have virologists talking about that it came from a market publicly, and then through FOIA and other means, gotten access to their private statements where they say, guys, this could really have been engineered in a laboratory. I don't use that evidence. I use the evidence inside the virus itself because that's apolitical and really is the best place to find the evidence.

This virus has features that have never been seen in thousands and thousands of viruses from nature. And those features are specifically the kind that have been used over the last 20 years to make viruses more infective, infective in the laboratory. So it's circumstantial evidence, but much like fingerprints are circumstantial evidence. This points to a lab origin and a manipulation of the virus in the lab. Now, how large are these gene sequences that you're referring to? Could some people say, oh, they just arose spontaneously or just mathematically, does that not make sense based on how large there. Well, there are different sizes. So the fur and cleavage site, the thing that makes it so transmissible, is 12 specific new letters in the virus that have never been seen in a thousand years

in viruses from this class. The adaptation to humans is up to 100 different sites on the spike protein that are ideal for the human receptor, but not for the bat receptor, not for other host receptors. If it came from bats, would you see some evidence in its genome of where it historically would have favored latching onto bats? Well, yeah. So what you're describing are two exact incidents. So this is a coronavirus. And in 2014, we had a coronavirus epidemic. In 2003, we had a coronavirus epidemic. Both of those came directly from animals to humans. In one case, something called a civet cat in markets in China and the other from camels to humans in the Middle East. And those viruses had the hallmarks of having been in respectively civet cats and

camels. And so that kind of evidence is what you should see in a natural spillover, which are completely absent in SARS-CoV-2. Well, that brings me to the next question because some people who disagree with you say the evidence does favor that natural spillover. Can you just explain a little bit what that term spillover means and then your response to that critique? Yeah, so let's back up a little and do a little biology training here. A zoonosis has the word zoo in it. It involves three entities, a human, an animal, and a virus, or perhaps a bacteria. If you hear about a new spillover in China, for example, or in Asia, it is eight to one

likely that it's a natural event coming from nature versus a laboratory event, because that's the incidence that happened in Asia. And that's why I build the case that it's beyond a reasonable doubt that this came from a laboratory. Every year, there are, on average, eight natural spillovers from nature to humans that end up in the hospital or, you know, in a clinic that we can detect. And in that same time, every year, there's approximately one lab incident where someone in a laboratory gets infected. They go out into the world. They begin to infect other people. So it's eight to one in favor of nature.

And that's your starting point. and that's a starting point in the book. But with the evidence, it actually flips so that it's greater than 95% likely it came from a laboratory. The flip side is, to be sure everyone understands that, that there are thousands of laboratory accidents around the world, you know, in the last decade, for example, where people have actually died from laboratory experiments they were conducting. So having an accident in a laboratory is actually not that rare, given the large number of laboratories doing this kind of work.

and the pervasiveness of the microbes themselves. What's the fastest growing business risk right now? It's not inflation, it's not regulation, it's AI risk. Every new AI tool, every new software integration, each one creates another opportunity for something to go wrong. Most security programs weren't built for the speed at which AI is changing business. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the number one agentic trust platform

used by more than 16,000 companies to help stay audit-ready and manage security and compliance more efficiently. But what makes Vanta especially useful is that it doesn't just help during audits. It helps companies monitor the risks that show up between audits too. The Vanta agent works in the background like a 24-7 GRC engineer, identifying issues, drafting fixes, and reducing vendor assessment time by up to 50%. Whether you're a fast-growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta is here to help you automate your security and compliance and earn improved trust.

Get started today at Vanta.com slash morningwire. That's V-A-N-T-A-com slash morning wire. Now, looking back, when it comes to the largest failures with COVID that led to all those deaths, would you point the finger at science and sloppy lab work? Do you think it was a political issue, or do you think it was institutional, like the guard dog institutions failed in their position? Yeah, so, I mean, let's unpack it. that that's a complicated question. So the two features of the virus that were unexpected for the frontline doctors, and had they known they would have acted differently, and had they acted differently, we would not have probably had a pandemic, is the rapid human to human spread and the fact that

about half the infections are asymptomatic. I spoke before about eight natural zoonosis per year in Asia, for example. When they happen, one person gets sick and maybe gets very sick and maybe even dies, but because the pathogen, the virus is not adapted to humans, it doesn't go beyond there. It very seldom infects another person at all. And so the frontline doctors, when this came out, were expecting a virus that yes, was going to be, you know, dangerous for the people who had it, but wasn't that transmissible. And having the fact that it clearly shows that 99% of its recognition site for the human ACE2 were pre-adapted, made it a highly humid to human pathogen from the beginning. And then the other thing is, again, only 1% of viruses from nature

are asymptomatic. And so none of our people expected that there was asymptomatic transmission, which would have changed how we treated, you know, airport surveillance or shutting down travel and those kind of things. Yeah. Now, is gain of function research still happening? And if so, how should it be governed and how should it be managed? Yeah, I mean, I think it still is occurring. It's defined as changing the properties of a pathogen, a human pathogen, making it more infective, so it takes a smaller amount, making it more pathogenic or likely to kill you and the like.

And it is going on now. And as part of the provisions that I suggest in the book is putting all of that under an independent, you know, national surveillance group, a research study group that would look at this research and weigh whether it's expected to cause benefit or it's just too risky to do. Right now, the people who are funding the research and doing the research are part of the people who decide whether the grants are appropriate or not. And that's, there's too much self-interest in that current cycle. Now, it's possible that a lot of the information was either hidden or destroyed, but if you or we were somehow able to gain access to 100% of the lab data, all of the correspondence,

emails, internal records, et cetera, what do you think we would learn that still hasn't been exposed today? Well, I mean, I think the chain of custody on a natural virus that gets manipulated in a lab in two or three ways, including, you know, a fear and cleavage site, including adaption to the ACE2, I think that if you had the laboratory no books, you would see the steady progress, probably take six to 12 months to do those activities. So you'd see the steps along the way that led to all of that work. And that would probably blow the lid off of where this specific virus came from. Well, I think, you know, I've done an analysis because to remind, you know, your viewers,

the techniques for manipulating coronaviruses were developed at the University of North Carolina by a scientist called Ralph Berwick. And, you know, it really is very inventive and creative fundamental research that he did in terms of making consensus viruses, so growing viruses and couldn't grow before, being able to do reverse genetics in the laboratory so you can manipulate them and make large quantities of them and doing seamless transmission so you can prevent the detection of the work itself. He called it the no-seum technology where you can't actually detect viruses being done. So all of the work was done in North America, but when you publish it becomes available to

everyone in the world. My analysis was that given the location of the initial cases and the early spread and in the proximity of the cases in China, in Wuhan itself, that is the 70, 30, or 80, 20, likely location of the laboratory that did the work, the Wuhan Institute of Rology in Wuhan, China. All right. Well, Dr. Quay, thank you so much for coming on and explaining all of this to us. Thank you, Georgia. That was physician, scientist, and author, Dr. Stephen Quay, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if.

Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.