QAA Podcast - UNLOCKED Premium Episode 129: Lab Leak Hypothesis feat Dr. Alex Greninger

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

We spoke to a clinical pathologist and the assistant director of the clinical virology lab at University of Washington Medical Center. The topic this week is the lab leak hypothesis - which has recently seen a revival in public discussion. ↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓ www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous The Vaccine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/VaccinePodcast / https://twitter.com/vaccinepodcast Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com Episode music by Max Mulder (http://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com) & Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com) SOURCES: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1 https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-man-made-491053 https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_origin_of_COVID-19 https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-broad-institute-coronavirus/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-epidemic-draws-scrutiny-to-labs-handling-deadly-pathogens-11583349777 https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-wet-market.html https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/covid-19-lab-leak-natural-market-theory-conspiracy-theory-1176213/ https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3 https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covid-lab-leak-theory-wuhan-shouldnt-dismissed-column/4765985001/ https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210217/The-origin-of-SARS-CoV-2-furin-cleavage-site-remains-a-mystery.aspx https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments-that-may-have-started-coronavirus-pandemic-1500503

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to Premium Chapter 129 of the Q&ONANANANANANANAS podcast, the Lab Leak Hypothesis episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Field, and Travis Vue.

There's a good chance that at some point during the pandemic, a family or friend sent you a wild article or blurry JPEG about COVID-19. It may have been a fake cure or preventative technique, or even a claim that the numbers of deaths had been exaggerated, or an explanation that the virus doesn't exist at all. Some of these ideas can be traced back to cynical political figures, like Donald Trump, the broader GOP in its media sphere, or even Koch-style the regulators.

At the grassroots level, this has been met with the spread of COVID denialism and the organizing of mass protests and anti-lockdown gatherings, lockdown gatherings, etc. But broader geopolitics have also interacted with how we talk about COVID-19 and who we blame for its death toll and disruption to our lives. I'm speaking of course of the never-ending Cold War. In this context, blaming China is actually strategically useful, just another prong in a both covert and public effort to undermine the perceived foe.

Lab leak theory, the idea that the virus may have been accidentally released from a laboratory, was during the Trump era widely derided by the liberal and mainstream media as a conspiracy theory. But now that Biden is president, we are seeing not just a resurgence of lab leak theory, but a concurrent effort by the new administration to escalate the perceived conflict between the United States and China. Taking into account all of these complex layers, we've set out to explore the lab leak theory in this episode with the help of our guest, Dr. Alex Greninger, a pathology lab scientist and the assistant director of the clinical virology labs at the University of Washington Medical Center. The lab leak hypothesis. To date, we do not.

have a complete, definite account of the origins of COVID-19 in the virus that causes the illness, which is called SARS-CoV-2, which is disappointing to me because I rely on science to give me some sense of stability in this chaotic world, and right now, science is letting me down. There's just too much uncertainty for me personally. Join the club. The most popular theory is that the virus originated in wildlife before spreading to humans. This kind of animal-to-human transmission is called zoonotic spillover. Researchers have some leads that support the natural origin theory. Bats are known carriers of coronaviruses, and scientists have determined that the genome of

SARS-CoV-2 is most similar to two bat coronavuses called R-A-T-G-13 and R-M-Y-N-O-2. However, the genome of R-A-T-G-13 is only 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2's genome, which means that the specific precursor of the virus isn't yet known. Fortunately, scientists have found another clue while observing the receptor binding domain of the spike protein in SARS-CoV-2. Now, when you look at pictures or drawings of the coronavirus and you see those little protrusions, they're coming out of like the sphere of the virus, those are called spike proteins. And they form the crown, which give the coronavirus its name. I actually did not know that. It was called that because it's got a little crown.

Oh, sweet. So it's a king is what you're saying. Yes, it's a king virus. So the presence of these spike proteins is what allows these viruses to penetrate host cells and cause infection. Scientists found out that the receptor binding domain of these spike proteins in Starskov 2 is closely related to an entirely different coronavirus found in Malayan pangolins. And pangolins are these critters that kind of look like small anteaters with scales. Huh. So for this reason, scientists hypothesized that the new coronavirus move through bats and then pangolins before jumping to humans.

I'm told that this is like a good working theory. This is basically what they came up with in the early days. The problem is that scientists have yet to find like a definite smoking gun, such as a panglin virus that has all the right SARS-CoV-2 like elements put together. We only have hints and clues from SARS-Cov-2 that suggest a strong connection. And they have been executing 10,000 penguins a day. As is correct. This feels like the beginning of the hot zone.

Did you ever read that book? I did not, no. Oh. Jake, he read a book. Literally sounds like you picked it up at the airport and it had like a half-nude woman with a gun on the cover. It definitely was like an airport book for sure. But I believe, you know, Michael Crichton maybe. You figure it out, listener.

I'm going to get owned for this on Twitter. However, in the absence of certainty, there is an alternative view that the virus escaped or was even engineered by a laboratory. The main suspect is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As a name suggests, the lab is based in Wuhan, China, which also happens to be where the virus first spread. This is a research facility founded in the 1950s that was the first in China to receive the highest level of biosafety clearance, meaning that it is a research facility. equipped to study the world's highest risk infectious agents and toxins, ones that require the strictest biocontainment measures. So we're talking about, like, you know, the Andromeda strain suits, the contagion suits.

And by the way, the French helped them build this, and then they eventually just like kicked the French out. They were like, eh, we got the facilities now. Thank you very much. Goodbye. And just they've been running it since. Good for them. Which is how you should treat the French.

I totally agree. Now, to make matters more interesting. For five years prior to the pandemic, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have engaged in so-called gain of function research, which is designed to enhance certain properties of viruses for the purpose of anticipating future pandemics. This kind of research is so controversial that back in 2014, the U.S. government paused funding for it. This pause was intended to provide time to address concerns about the risks and benefits of these studies. A statement from the White House about the pause said this. Specifically, the funding pause will apply to gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses, such as the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.

So just reiterate, there's no definite evidence that SARS-Cov-2 was produced via gain-of-function research, anything like that. but is something that people pointed out, and it's caused a lot of concern and has mentioned on Tucker Carlson a lot. In the early days of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was dismissed as poorly evidenced at best in a wild conspiracy theory at worst. And it didn't help that the main proponents of this theory were people like President Trump, Republican Senator Tom Cotton, and Jake. That really was a strike to its credibility, that third. The first two, look, there's a little bit of leeway, but once you get to that third guy, if he's pushing it, you know, you grew it in a cup of water, you know? One thing that really didn't help in terms of its credibility was just how often the kind of

lab leak theory was kind of also pushed alongside this like bio weapon kind of idea, right? It had deliberately been unleashed. Because leaking from the lab doesn't mean shit. It doesn't mean it's designed. It doesn't mean it's on purpose that they're leaking it. there's various like assumptions there yeah yeah quite often people would say like deliberate engineered virus and like we discussed in the coronavirus conspiracy theory episode there's really no evidence of that whatsoever but i mean the fact that was that was kind of like conflated with

i guess the more reasonable sort of lab leak hypothesis meant that people tend to reject both those theories you know out of hand well of course and there's the line from dustin hoffman in uh the 1990s film Outbreak where he says, you know, I don't want this thing walking out on the bottom of somebody's shoe, you know, so we know that. It makes you think of that line, yeah. However, as time went on, scientists became more willing to voice support for at least the possibility of the lab leak theory. This is perhaps best embodied in the recent letter published in the journal Science, which

is titled, Investigate the Origins of COVID-19. In that letter, a group of 17 scientists say, theories of accidental release from a lab and Zoonotic spillover, both remain viable. On May 26, President Joe Biden issued a statement saying that when he first entered office, he tasked the intelligence community with determining whether the virus, quote, emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident. When that analysis proved inconclusive, he asked the intelligence community to redouble their efforts and report back in 90 days. That report apparently is forthcoming. Apparently, these are the kinds of calls you make when you're present. You ask people to do something, and when they

don't or they can't, you just tell them to do it again, but you try harder this time. The lab leak theory is also less taboo in the media. In a recent appearance on late night with Stephen Colbert, comedian John Stewart joked about the lab leak theory. There's a chance that this was created in a lab. There's an investigation. A chance. Well, if there's evidence, I'd love to hear it, I just don't know. There's a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask. the Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab.

That's just a little too weird, don't you think? And then they asked those scientists, they're like, how did this, so wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan respiratory coronavirus lab. How did this happen? And they're like, a pangolin kissed a turtle. And you're like, no.

The name of your lab, if you look at the name, Look at the name. Can I... Let me see your business card. Show me your business card. Oh, I work at the coronavirus lab in Wuhan. Oh, because there's a coronavirus loose in Wuhan. How did that happen?

Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili. And now we all have coronavirus. Okay, wait a second, wait a second. What about this? What about this? Listen to this. Wait a second.

This is Info Wars. This is fucking important. John Stewart is, well, has been shit for a while, but man, this is a dumb as Rock's argument. Yeah, I mean, like, that is how so many diseases have started. And it's like, actually, there's even a theory that when there was contact with a new world and the old world, that the reason that so many diseases seem to go one way, basically from Europe and Asia. and all these other countries to the new world and we didn't really seem to get many back was because of animal husbandry

was because Europeans lived among animals and bred them and stuff like that whereas not many civilizations in the Americas did that so we had like way more diseases to give them essentially than they had to give us so it's not like it's not crazy he's like making it sound sort of like you know someone's just like yeah

kind of like randomly picking up different animals that could but that is how lots and lots of human diseases begin. And he's just basically being like, oh, there's a lab that studies this stuff in Wuhan, and the first outbreak was in Wuhan. Same name. It's the same name. It's the same name.

That's not how science or research or investigation works at all. It's Jake Logic at best. Right. Yeah, like I explained earlier, the whole bat panglin theory that's based on genomic analysis. They weren't like picking animals at random. Now, I was really intrigued by these shifting attitudes on the origin of the coronavirus. So I thought I'd like dive into the evidence as best as I could to see why the lab leak theory has gained more interest. As always, I want to include the disclaimer that I'm not a scientist, none of us are.

And he's the closest because she's a doctor. She has a great podcast about viruses and inoculations and whatnot. But I will include links to my sources in the show notes of this episode. But before I proceed, I want to address the real question on everyone's mind. Will I be thoroughly owned if the lab leak theory turns out to be true? And I would submit that I will not be owned necessarily. Okay. So early in 2020, I relied on scientific papers published at the time to deny that the virus was engineered in the lab.

But I did allow for the possibility of the lab leak hypothesis. In April of 2020, I tweeted this in response to criticism from longtime friend of the show, Neon Revolt. I said, quote, so this episode is just a defense episode. I thought this was going to be a little different, Travis. No, no, no. I was like... It always delves back down into the mud. That's right.

People misinterpreted your words, did they? Over a year ago, I tweeted, Neon seems to be confusing two distinct questions. One, was SARS-Kov-2 constructed in the laboratory? And two, did SARS-Kov-2 escape from the laboratory? As a retweeted article explains, the genomic evidence shows that the answer to question number one is no. But the fact that the virus is natural doesn't eliminate the possibility that he escaped from the

Woonhawn Institute of Virology. The article I retweeted doesn't address that question. The lab escape theory is possible, but lacks evidence at the moment. First of all, calling it escape makes it sound like the virus built like a series of pillows and sheets tied together and scaled the wall of the wound up. That's why he put escaped in quotes. A daring escape. So as always, my secret to never being wrong is never believing in anything.

Now, one of the big reasons that the lab leak theory is getting more pleasant. is that the investigation so far haven't been conclusive. And this is in contrast to investigations into previous coronaviruses. For example, the intermediary host species of SARS-1 was identified within four months of the epidemic's outbreak. This was all the way back in the early 2000s. The host species of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, was identified within nine months. Now it's been over a year and a half since the pandemic began, and researchers have failed to

find either the original bat population or the intermediate species to which SARS 2 might have jumped to humans. The first official report from the World Health Organization on the origins of the virus came from an international team of scientists who traveled to Wuhan at the beginning of the year. During their 28-day trip, the scientists tried to reconstruct the early moments of the outbreak and the possible pathways for the emergence of the virus. The final report titled Who Convened Global Study of the Origins of SARS-Kov-2 was, issued on March 30th and failed to offer any definite conclusions. The authors concluded that it was most likely that the virus was introduced to humans by an animal, which acted as an intermediate

host. That study dubbed the possibility that the virus came from a lab as extremely unlikely. However, there was widespread concern about how the study was conducted. Specifically, there are concerns that China wasn't being as transparent as they could be. The World Health Organization's Director General, even called out China for not being more transparent and raised concerns that scientists were unable to get unfettered access to biological samples and raw data that was relevant to the investigation. The first report was intended to be the starting point for the Joint Hu-China probe with a second phase of more in-depth studies to follow. But since the phase one that covered so little, it's unclear apparently what phase two is going to look like at the

moment. Now, with all that being said, I do want to mention that there have been scientists who took the lab leak theory seriously in 2020. One of the earliest scientists who posit the lab leak theory was Bautau Ziao from the South China University of Technology. In February of 2020, he published a brief article in Research Gate titled The Possible Origins of 2019 in Kov-Coronavirus. It concludes In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high-risk biohazardous laboratories.

Now, the evidence cited in the paper, which was very brief, included lab locations in Wuhan reference to past incidents of mishandled pathogens elsewhere in China and the fact that a Wuhan researcher connected to the Institute was famous for collecting thousands of bats and sometimes getting bitten, which I know reasons. Don't do that. He gets bitten by bats. You know, what are you going to do? Just don't do that.

Just choose not to do that if you're a guy doing the viruses in the lab. Don't become Batman. You don't need your dark night of the soul. You don't need to be forged in the darkness and become what potentially, I mean, honestly, though, 3.2 million. I don't disagree. Everyone needs a hobby, and why not collect thousands of that? If the real Batman has a death toll of 3.2 million, this is going to be crazy. Now, that author actually did retract that paper, and he later told the Wall Street Journal that he withdrew the paper because it was not supported by direct proofs. We also recently learned that top health experts in the U.S. government seriously considered the possibility that the virus is engineered.

And this is thanks to emails that were released under the Freedom of Information Act from Dr. Fauci. Now, one such expert who voiced concerns privately is Dr. Christian Anderson, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He also happens to be one of the most outspoken proponents of the theory that the coronavirus originated from a natural spillover from animals to humans. In a January 2020 email to Dr. Fauci, Anderson wrote this. The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome, less than 0.1%. So one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features potentially look engineered. He also wrote that he thought the virus's genome was. Inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.

When these emails were published, a lot of bad faith actors suggested that this was evidence that Anderson knew that the lab leak theory was true privately. but he publicly never voiced this opinion. Anderson was targeted for harassment on Twitter, which led to him deactivating his account. Now, obviously, I think government transparency, good thing. I'm glad that these emails were released. This was done by BuzzFeed. But it's a shame that scientists are targeted like this just for exploring the theory. This guy, Dr. Christian Anderson, he also wrote a really influential paper called the proximate origin of SARS-Koff 2, which suggested it was natural.

And it shows that even people who promote the theory that it was natural, they weren't dogmatic about it. They were seriously considering the possibility that was lab engineered or a lab leak. They just didn't come to that conclusion when they're ready to publish their findings publicly. Yeah. I mean, they just did what like any like responsible academics should do to just not like speculate out loud, right? Right. You kind of have to like amass the evidence and then come to a conclusion before you're willing to just like publish every single thought you have on a subject. I suppose so, but it's funny because I guess the virus put us up against the wall in terms of time.

And so we have had, you know, even vaccines that were potentially more dangerous or less effective than others. And we had to discard those or come back on them in many countries. But creating a theory and then testing it out is part of science as well. And we were kind of pushed into a state where we all had to kind of, I guess, hopefully pool our theories and pool our data and pool the scientific facts so we can eliminate and prove ruin away the ones that are useless. But there was, I think, a certain level of repression against those ideas or being able to mention them or discuss them for good reason, because people were like, it's incredibly dangerous if part of our population starts to think this one

thing that might not be true yet, and then it'll change their behavior in regards to how they practice safety and all of that and increase the death count. So it's a fucking awful situation we've been put in. Yeah, especially since there was so much, like, antagonism to, like, Asian people in, like, so many different countries as well. It's, like, really not just kind of an idea. You just want to, like, idly speculate on out loud, do you know? Dr. Anderson later explained to the New York Times that the features in SARS-CoV-2 that initially suggested possible engineering were identified in related coronaviruses, meaning that the features that initially looked unusual to him actually weren't. Many of these analyses were

completed in a matter of days, which allowed him to reject the preliminary hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered while leaving other lab-based scenarios on the table. On November 2, 2020, David A. Rellman, a Stanford University microbiologists, wrote an opinion piece in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled, To Stop the Next Pandemic, we need to unravel the origins of COVID-19. In the letter, Relman laments how little had been discovered through genomic analysis alone. In an effort to reveal the origins of the pandemic, researchers so far have focused on the SARS-Cove 2 genome sequence. However, the sequence of the pandemic virus tells us only so much. First, the closest known relatives, R-A-T-G-13 and

R-M-Y-N-Zer2, are not that close. Second, there is probably more than one recent ancestral lineage that contributes to SARS-Cove 2 because its genome shows evidence of recombination between different parental viruses. In nature, recombination is common among coronavirus. But it's also common in some research laboratories where recombinant engineering is used to study those viruses. The bottom line is simple. We need to identify the immediate parents of SARS-CoV-2 and they are missing.

One of the most vocal scientists promoting the possibility of a lab leak is Dr. Alina Chan, who is a fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her research focused on the genetic blueprint of the virus. She studied SARS-CoV-1, which spread to humans back in 2003 and is closely related to SARS-Cov 2. What Chan found interesting is that the new virus wasn't having to adapt in order to rapidly spread in the same way that SARS-Kov-1 did. According to the paper, she authored with fellow scientist Xing Hezon, this implied that the new virus developed partly in a lab. A Boston magazine profile of Chan explains her reasons. It was clear that the first SARS evolved rapidly during its first three months of existence,

constantly fine-tuning its ability to infect humans, and settling down only during the later stages of the epidemic. In contrast, the new virus looked a lot more like late-stage SARS. It's almost as if we're missing the early phase, Chan marveled to Zan, or, as she put it in their paper, as if it was already well adapted for human transmission. That was a profoundly provocative line. Chan was implying that the virus was already familiar with human physiology

when it had its coming-out party in Wuhan in late 2019. If so, there were three possible explanations. Perhaps it was just staggeringly bad luck. The mutations had all occurred in an earlier host species and just happened to be the perfect genetic arrangement for an invasion of humanity. But that made no sense. Those mutations would have been disadvantageous in the old host. Maybe the virus had been circulating undetecting,

undetected in humans for months, working out the kinks, and nobody had noticed. Also unlikely. China's health officials would not have missed it, and even if they had, they'd be able to go back now through stored samples to find the trail of earlier versions, and they weren't coming up with anything. That left a third possibility. The missing phase had happened in a lab, when the virus had been trained on human cells. Chan knew this was the third rail of potential explanations. At the time, conspiracy theorists were spinning bioweapon fantasies, and Chan was loath to give them any more ammunition. But she also didn't want to play politics by withholding her findings. In a recent interview, Chan said that political rhetoric about the virus under the Trump

administration made some scientists reluctant to discuss the lab leak theory. She said this. At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origin. Further circumstantial evidence of the lab leak hypothesis was added in May of 2021 thanks to a Wall Street Journal article. It reported about a U.S. intelligence report, which identified three researchers at the Wuhan lab who sought treatment at a hospital after falling ill in November of 2019. This report echoed a U.S. State Department fact sheet released shortly before the end of the Trump administration, which said this. The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019 before the first identified case of the outbreak with symptoms consistent with both

COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Xi Zhang Li's public claim that there was zero infection among the WIV staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses. Now, I'm not saying that this story is necessarily true just because the Wall Street Journal or the State Department under the Trump administration says it's true. I'm not saying it's false either. But I do want to briefly make the observation that one of the authors of that Wall Street Journal report is a journalist named Michael R. Gordon. And all the way back, we take the time machine back to early 2000s. In 2002, Michael R. Gordon happened to co-author a report for the New York Times headlined threats and responses, the Iraqis.

U.S. says Hussein intensified's quest for a bomb parts. That report relayed the belief from U.S. officials that Iraqis saw aluminum tubes, which the officials believed were part of an atomic bomb program. The aluminum tubes apparently were real, but the suspected use for them was way off. That report was followed up two years later by another New York Times report rebutting it. It was headlined the aluminum tube story, a special report, how the White House embraced suspect Iraq arms intelligence. It turns out that the top experts in government actually believe that the Those aluminum tubes were intended for small artillery rockets and not weapons of mass destruction.

Oh, no. So the New York Times is doing some sort of like Cold War manipulation stuff around crucial events. Weird. I will say, you know, it seems like one of the authors of the Wall Street Journal report claiming that three of the Wuhan lab employees got sick. At one point in the past, thoughtlessly repeated bad U.S. intelligence in New York Times report during the lead up to the Iraq war. That's just a. I'm not saying, I'm not providing any analysis of those facts, but this is just the facts of the matter. Yeah, but if you made a mistake like that, the first time around, you'd be sure as hell to never make it again. That's right. He learned the first time. And also,

the worst that we can say about Mr. Gordon is that when he gets his CIA contact on the phone, he's an incredible pushover and a huge rube. There's also an interesting social media angle regarding the whole lab leak theory saga. Facebook announced in February of 2020 that had expanded the list of misleading health claims that it would ban. Specifically, it removed claims asserting that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured. However, in May of this year, Facebook updated its policy. The company said this in an email.

In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will not. no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps. We're continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge. We apologize to both Joe M and Fuckface 5D for suspending their account. All Q&ON accounts will now be reinstated and given priority. I mean, yeah, you know how much I believe in the badhammer, but I think that, I mean, this is, I think perhaps the greatest illustration about, you know, the issues around moderating misinformation because, you know, what happens if something appears to be, you know, wild misinformation, but then later it becomes more plausible as more evidence emergence and all of a sudden Facebook has to go, well, maybe we're not going to ban you anymore. Sorry about that. Yeah, and what happens when state actors or other powerful actors decide to use the mechanisms that have been put in place to identify disinformation to purposefully push a narrative?

Then we'll make QAnon people right, and that's going to be awesome. Yeah, I mean, essentially the question here is like, what happens if, like, the QAnon people get one thing right? Which, listen, here and there, who hasn't had a taste of a QAnon belief where you're like, this one, though? Which, by the way, it's still too early to determine. I mean, the fact that people are, I guess, more openly talking about the possibility has caused a lot of conspiracy theorists to take, like, a victory lap. Even though that's not the favorite, even though the lab leak is still not the favorite hypothesis, there's not still not a smoking gun. Oh, no. I just meant that they were going to be right about, you know, these actors, these state actors, etc., using the disinformation mechanisms to push false narratives.

Yeah, fair. Yeah, but I don't think, I don't think, you know, they should get a hand. clap for that. No. Like any moron can sell that one. Please. What did you just say about me? Researching this whole thing as really frustrating because obviously from a public

health perspective, it's obviously important to have a definite account of how the virus originated. But you always get the feeling that you're being screwed with. There's like all these powerful actors, whether it's like, you know, powerful governments or scientists, they all have an agenda and they're all trying to influence people's opinions for one reason or another. And there are really, really high stakes, you know. If it turns out that it is a, you know, a lab leak,

that will be devastating for scientific research because all of a sudden there will be heightened scrutiny on a laboratory doing these research. There'll be heightened tensions with China. And there are lots of really, you know, there's lots of politics at play. And all these politics make the scientific debate, which is already, you know, impenetrable to the layman, practically,

even murkier. Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, none of us are scientists. That's why we are joined now by Dr. Alex Greeniger. He is a pathology lab scientist and assistant director of the Clinical Virology Labs at the University of Washington Medical Center. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Now, without ruling out any possibility, it's my understanding that most researchers think that the most plausible scenario for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is that it jumped directly from an animal to a human. So why has that been the theory that scientists have leaned towards?

Well, I think that that's probably the theory that most scientists have leaned towards because it's basically got the longest track record for most viruses. And we have an incredible appreciation for all of the viruses that exist in bats, the coronavirus that exists in bats as well, that we just do not know about. So it really is, again, for all of these things, it's such an unsatisfying scientific topic to talk about because it is really an appreciation of the limits of our knowledge that sort of gives you that sort of basis to think about, all right, well, how could we truly, truly know what's what's going on here?

And so that I think is one of the major things that's driving this, is we just know that there are so many SAR Becoviruses, SARS-like coronaviruses, that exist in these in these bat reservoirs that we do not know about. And so it's just, it's entirely possible this would come from an animal, and that's where it would come from. You know, that's where we expected to come out. That's the a priori, you know, place you would start from. Would it be fair to say that scientists have become, like, more open to voicing the possibility of the lab leak hypothesis, more so now than their early days of the pandemic? Yeah.

And here, I think there's a little bit of sort of just a continued sort of absence of evidence. And I think one of the things that I've say is, is I find to be interesting is I, is I think that no matter what, where the virus came from, you would want to profile these bat reservoirs, as well as other animal reservoirs in southeastern China and around the world. Actually, right now, the U.S. is putting out, there's a grant proposal for sort of more of this work to be able to look for new coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses and phyloviruses. And I think one of the things it's odd is just we haven't. expect there'd be a lot more movement on this topic. And there's been actually quite little.

I mean, there were some sequences and other coronaviruses that came out sort of early in the pandemic, sort of that very early part where it's like, okay, well, here's this rat G13 and here's the few other coronaviruses that came out. But there haven't been, like, given the profound diversity and number of these types of viruses that we, here's a funny thing. So there actually was a group that basically went for the last like five or six years. did little sequencing of little tiny 300 nucleotide, 400 nucleotide chunks of these viruses called the Predict Project. And they found almost 100 new coronaviruses. And they didn't find this one, but there's still so many, they haven't even sequenced whole genomes of these. So we don't have,

we only have that little portion of the genome. So in every sort of viral discovery effort in this space finds the same sort of thing where we just sort of just find just the little tip of the sort of what we call it a rare faction curve of how well we're sampling to capture the number of viruses that are there. And these efforts have only really begun in earnest in the last, you know, decade. There's a little bit of explosion after the SARS sort of 2003 SARS. But we just, there's just so much out there that we have not sampled. And that is, you know, I think really what drives that sort of the overall sort of lack of, you know, hey, this is a conclusive, this is what it is. We have to appreciate that nature is going to be the most common place that it's going to come from. And there's all

those other viruses, all those interactions that we don't capture that we do not have good eyes on. So what would be an example of like some information or evidence that would be a smoking gun? Like what could we find that would that would make either people say, okay, yes, definitely it came from nature and a debate or it was from a lab leak, end of debate. Well, I'm going to start first with what's, you know, the sort of unsatisfying part to answer your question, which is, you know, coronaviruses have reversed genetic systems, which basically means that you can clone out the entire genome, the RNA of a coronavirus is potentially infectious if you put it into a cell. And so if you get the whole thing in there. And so you actually, in some ways, it's a question of intent. And you can't really know whether something came naturally because I can synthetically make something that was natural, you know, in a lab. So both are equally possible

given the same sort of sequence in some ways. Now that's just a, that's a little bit of a dodge from your question, but I think it's worth appreciating that that's currently the scientific. That's where we're at right now with this. It's helpful to know what was in the lab, what's been inventoried. I think one of the things that, you know, I went to Shanghai a few years ago, and I'd just been blown away by sort of the leapfrog nature of a lot of the technology there. They have incredible genome sequencing operations, and genomes is how we sort of try to suss out this information. That sequence data can travel far and wide, just as like we can be, you know, it's digital, we can be in different rooms talking here to each other and you can sort of look at sequence from an isolate that was

found, you know, on the other side of the world and you can have that in your inbox in the second. And so, you know, having those, they have those capabilities and we want to know, I have that have every single isolate that's gone into the labs as well as a greater, a stronger sampling effort on the animal reservoirs that we know for coronaviruses. So it really comes down to sort of what, you know, from a smoking gun started from the lab side. You want to know what's in the lab. It's not a smoking gun, though. It just means, hey, it was just there.

Both things that could equally come out of nature and come from the lab as well in that way. And then what would also be helpful from a nature standpoint is better sampling of these reservoirs where you find something. The closest ancestors that we currently have right now is about, we estimate 50 years, 50 to 70 years is the closest virus that we have to this one currently. wait 50 to 70 years old uh yeah so like they last saw each other so it'd be like you and like your like grandfather or you know you're you have a different generation size right so it's not appropriate to say in that way you know say 20 25 year generation size this sucker has you know like a much faster generation size but that's if you if you look at the genome diversity how far they are apart from each other and we sort of know how fast coronavirus is evolved and you can sort

of you know there's some wide air bars on it but you can say like most of yes have said that the RATG 13 and the SARS-CoV-2 last saw each other about 19 and 1950s. So this might seem like a silly or an obvious question, but would like a potential, if not smoking gun, but a gun that's on its way to smoking, would that be, I guess, essentially like we could find a sample of the bat which has got like a coronavirus which is closer in between the sample we have from 50 years ago and the sample we have now? Yes, exactly. So you want to find closer ancestors. Presumably this thing, you know, SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-CoFi-2 like progenitor, you know,

is able to spread well in some sort of other reservoir, whatever animal reservoir or bat reservoir it is. And so you'd expect to find more of those and that are sort of closer than that 50-year time frame. I would say that this is somewhat complicated by the broad tropism of these viruses. So, you know, if it's too close, you actually can't necessarily, it's hard to tell, like if it's only like a year or two years apart, like it's too close, you can't tell that we want to have given it, like the minks, right? Like, you know, you know the minks that got infected by SARS-CoV-2. Well, we pretty much think that the humans infected the minks. It's not the minks that gave it to the humans. And so you look at the virus and the minks and you're like,

oh, it's really close to SARS-Covie-2. It doesn't mean it came from the minks. So sometimes the directionality can be a little bit difficult in these sort of questions. But certainly if you found something that was, you know, sort of 10 years apart in that way or so just a little bit closer than that sort of 50 years. That said, from some of the more recent coronavirus discoveries, we've also found sort of the thing people get very excited about this fear and cleavage site. We find fear and cleavage sites and other beta coronaviruses.

As well, that's been known for a while, but as well as some of these Sarbecoviruses as well. And so it starts to make it more and more sort of like, hey, nature's thought of this. I mean, I think that's what another thing that a lot of scientists, you know, again, it's our, it's a little bit of humility. in the sense of we don't really know how to engineer these things well enough,

and nature has such a population size, the amount of virus, the number of different viruses, and the amount of virus that gets created in nature is far exceeds what we do in the laboratory. And you can see that right now, even in the human populations, like what this delta variant that came out, that seems to come out of India. You know, you spotted a huge population size. to grow in, and it will sample the evolutionary space, and it will find a solution to its

problems. And we see that just when we're restricted to the human population, and we don't bring in all of the bats and all of the other animals that this virus can spread in, which is also quite a large population size and a niche for the virus. Has uncovering the origins of this pandemic been, you think, I guess, unusually difficult compared to, you know, I guess, past sort of research investigations or as about as tough as we thought it would be. No, we're on par. I mean, if anything, I mean, I would say here's the thing. I want to keep saying to this.

I think that I've been surprised at how few new coronaviruses have been sequenced in the last year and a half. Like, I would think that you would go to town on those reservoirs given what's going on. Now, I understand there's a biosafety and biosecurity risk, right? Like, you actually could. By doing that work, you do potentially hasten the emergence into human populations. if you don't do it under the correct biosafety work. But, you know, if you're out there swabbing, you know, bat, you know, rectums or whatever, you know, that actually is, that is a risk factor for, you know, creating a new zoo and osies in some ways if you don't do it in the context of the right biosafety.

But I think that there's a huge premium on doing that kind of work. It'd be really important to understand that. We've shown that we don't know where SARS-CoV-3 is sort of coming from as well in the next one. And we sort of, we've definitely, when you look back, it's a very different story. We tell ourselves when it comes to SARS 2003, when it comes to MERS, you know, when it comes to these coronaviruses, we know that they have a true pandemic potential. Or before we sort of told ourselves, you know, nice evening, like bedtime stories about how we were stronger, better, faster than these viruses. And they weren't really going to do this to us. And so now it's like, all right, it's on.

Like, we need to know every single one, you know, the name rank and serial number for all of these guys. We need to have history to know where they've come from, you know, what their ability is. I mean, we can actually, you've seen, this is the thing you've seen also when it comes to COVID is, you know, we've never really had in our lifetimes this sort of experience of watching this coronavirus, tarbeco virus, like, adapt to humans in this way. I mean, it's actually remarkable. When we talk to Delta, the Delta variant, we're actually talking about really like almost three. rounds of replacement that have happening. Right now, we're in the middle of sort of the delta replacement of the alpha lineage. The alpha became the highest in the United States. Before that, it was the B1 lineage, and before that it was the original sort of Wuhan. And so, you know,

we're watching this virus adapt to humans in real time and seeing the things that lead it to spread better, which we sort of knew about before from sort of from Ebola virus work and other viruses that they, as they adapt, their glycoproteins are able to bind to human receptors better. They might be able to get cleaved a little bit better. There's obviously some innate immune regulation work going on as well. But most of the action is really at that spike glycoprotein, the attachment protein of the virus as it learns to interact with the human receptor. And that seems to be a major determinant. And we've watched those sort of replacements occur, you know, over and over and over. And so we know if we go into those animal reservoirs and we look at the, the, the, the, the, the, we sequence viruses and we can look to see how well that those, uh, those spike, those glycoproteins, as attachment proteins, uh, bind to human receptors. And that could be a great way to sort of, you know, triage these things or understand how they're going. We could also figure out how well our current vaccines that we're currently making can cross-neutralize other ones, right? We actually have a real opportunity to make some, um, you know, pan saraheco virus vaccines, pan sarbeco virus monoclone.

We have the ability. We actually have this incredible. I mean, even with the story of the last year and a half. Sorry, I'm really going off here. Yeah, but like the story of the last year and a half has been all these insipient technologies that we've had and have been ready to use, you know, pre-fusion locked, proline locked, pre-fusion glycoproteins, MRI vaccines, rapid, rapid testing, you know, we've got all of these abilities of nanoparticle vaccines.

We've got all these incipient technologies that have been. been sort of made, but there just wasn't a market. I can't tell you how little attention or effort there was paid into the coronavirus. Here, I'll offer you one example. All right? Right now, over this last week, just a past two million SARS-CoV-2 genomes that have been sequenced. It's just one proxy, all right, of sort of attention and effort that's been put into this. Going into the pandemic, our clinical lab at the University of Washington was the leading sequencer, I believe, in the world of seasonal coronaviruses, the four seasonal coronaviruses, and we had done 57 genomes. Like, that's what it took to be the leading sequence from the world versus now just a year

and a half later, you're talking about two million total sequences that have been done and the amount of effort that has been put into these. Before this, there was not, there was interest in flu and influenza. There was interested in sort of a pan influenza vaccine. There was a little interest in RSV. There was very little interest in per influenza, very little interest in their coronaviruses. They're very little interest in metamovirus. There just was not the same sort of.

And we also were able to do trials and work in a speed and move the field forward and try a lot of different hypotheses. I mean, just look at the CureVAC data that came out this last week, where you're looking at sort of a slightly different MRNA construct, a slightly different dose. You know, we're able to learn really fast and say, that's not going to work very well. But, you know, our initial sort of MRN. We got very lucky that our first vaccines out of the gates were so good. I'm very, very lucky in that regard. But the story of this pandemic in one angle, many different stories and angles here, but one of them has just been, you know, a very impressive triumph of science in certain areas.

Now we've got to globalize it for these incipient technologies that have basically been around and were ready to be actionable, you know, they were actionable, you know, in the first weeks and months of the pandemic. Yeah, talking a little bit about speculations about origins of the pandemic. You hear, we hear a lot of people, like sometimes mentioned in the Fox News, they talk about gain of function research in reference to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Now, is that at all relevant in investigating the origins of the pandemic? Or is this, I mean, just pure speculation. I mean, a lot of it's speculation.

It's relevant in this sense, all of this is relevant in a sense because the possibility that it could have happened makes it something that we, even if it says didn't happen, the possibility that it could have happened, and the fact that these viruses are so well to spread in people, such as if you did have a laboratory accident with SARS-CoB-2, could you actually, might it take off? Well, certainly, very few countries or spaces have been able to stop the spread of this thing. So we've really been able to see sort of almost in real time what a great goo problem would look like as it sort of happened.

And so, you know, I think that whether or not that's exactly how it happened, we're going to have renewed attention to the biosecurity in labs and sort of ready for that. And one of these questions is this gain of function stuff, which, you know, gain a function, I hate that term because it's like, there's so many things that we do in the lab that, like, are you gain a function. You replace a gene with GFP. It gained the function, like, you know, glow green. But that's not what people are talking about when they're talking about gain a function. They're talking about transmissibility. So enhancing transmittability in humans, potentially in other animal models as well. So watching to adapt to that. And then pathogenesis. So obviously if you're like, hey, like this one gene is not doing much. let's replace it with something like cholera toxin. Like, what we don't, we do not need a SARS-CoV-2 that spreads cholera toxin, right? I mean, like, that's just not something that, like, we need. And so, you know, there's sort of those examples here. It's ridiculous, reductive, I'm sort of them, but still, you know, you can do those sort of

replacement technologies. And I think what's hard, though, here, though, is that, you know, before I sort of present you a very clear sort of hypothesis or answer for sort of one of the determinants of spread in terms of like spike protein adaptation to humans, but we do. have a very incredible opportunity here, which is to understand, you know, why was SARS-CoB-2 so different than SARS-CoV, the 2003 version, right? Those suckers are 80% by nucleotide. They're very, very close. I mean, right, it was very clear when this virus came out that it was going to be it was SARS-2. And so, you know, would it be a good idea to swap some genes between these

guys and try to understand, like, hey, how does it spread in the hamster or how does it spread in vitro or like, you know, I think that we, there's a compelling argument. There's often a lot of compelling arguments for gain of function research, um, uh, for certain types. It just has to be conducted at a very high, um, bio, biosafety, um, sort of level. Uh, and that's, that's, that's, that's one of the major concerns. So, you know, the NIH and other groups have, have sort of rules for reviewing that. Um, certainly, you know, we don't get to review that sort of, you know, information. And it is, I mean, it's almost like, there's also an angle here that's also sort of like, you know, CRISPR sort of embryos, right?

Or like that story came out of China where someone had, you know, a scientist had done that work. And it's like, you know, you can't, sometimes you can't actually control everything at a, at a, you can't control at an individual, like, level. There's always a chance of something like that could happen as well. So, you know, I, it's a, it's a, it's a very difficult question.

And that's why we try to, that's why the current response, I think, is very reasonable, which is sort of like, hey, when someone, the scientist wants to do this, wants to do some certain experiment, you get together and you talk about it and, you know, the other people come in and make you sort of really rationalize what kind of work you want to do. And I think both the pandemic, you know, both increases, I think what ultimately will happen. I mean, hopefully, I really think we, that's why it's so important to understand the origins. I mean, we need to understand, we need cooperation from, from China and from

the labs. And we also need a redoubled effort to go find all of the coronavirus. in these animal reservoirs and bat reservoirs. It will answer a lot of these questions. And that to me is the thing, that's what I'm surprised there hasn't been more effort in the last year, year and a half in that particular space. Do you think there is already a kind of appropriate level of scrutiny for gain of function research?

Because, you know, I've only just learned about what gain of function research is in the past few months as I think everybody else has. I'm not like really aware of like I suppose like where it fits in the kind of wider virology research community like is it is essential for like creating vaccines fast and that sort of stuff is it like heavily regulated yeah it's pretty it's pretty heavily it's I mean I say regulation science can be kind of you know it can be mixed and sort of like for instance if I read a paper as a reviewer so a paper gets submitted to a journal you know I actually have to click a button that says

whether or not there's any biosecurity or sort of, I'll say, gain of function considerations that should be brought in before this paper is published, every single paper, right? So is that regulation? Not really. It's actually sort of the community sort of policing itself, but at the same time, it's built in sort of that, you know, everyone is thinking about this sort of question in the microbiological sciences. Certainly when it comes to grant review time, if you're proposing anything, I mean, that's sort

of that. The one I talked about review is sort of, the client's already been done, but, you know, they want the systems. There's like multiple Swiss cheese models. So there's multiple sort of like checks of sort of like, all right, hey, throughout the system. I mean, I think that it's, it's, I think there's a compelling reason to have to answer many of these questions.

And so I've always thought, I always thought that, you know, when they sort of did that sort of pause or, you know, ban or what they wanted to say from like in 2015, 2016, around that time, it seemed a little bit, a little bit strong. But it was a good time to get everyone together and make this realization. I think the other limitation with a lot of the sort of, I would say there's a lot of gain of function sort of research is the models that you use it in. I mean, they're not, they're not perfect, they're cell lines, it's mice, it's hamsters, it's non-human primates. I mean, it's not even actually people. And so what you see a lot of the community do, also just because it's a hassle to work with any of these pathogenic agents in the context of their actual like full, you know, full virus.

Like, actually, I don't work with SARS-CoV-2, the virus, because I have to go to a BSL-3, and that would take, you know, even more time, and you have to do more paperwork, and there's more audit. There's a lot of that stuff. So people will work in sort of more biochemical function, sort of assays. And so, you know, just where they isolate a single protein and look at, you know, so one of the things that's been very impressive, and I don't think it's, I wouldn't call it gain of function because it's not causing the virus to spread better, but it's been very good at predicting what mutations will help it spread better. is sort of some of this deep mutational scanning work

here by Jesse Bloom with the Fred Hutch on glycoproteins. So basically you make every single mutation that possibly could be made in the context of the glycoprotein, you ask how well does it bind, or the spike protein, how well does it bind to human receptors? And that's been very helpful

in terms of understanding that's actually anticipated some of the mutations that we're seeing by some of these variants. And it allows us to interpret, you know, when we see a new variant, so you see like C-37 in Peru or something like that, just name any old variant you see that's increasing in property,

in prevalence, you can sort of go to these big resources to say, OK, which mutation do you think it is that's actually helping the virus undo this? And it helps the interpretation in real time. So I'm not going to calling that by any means gain of function work, but there's an angle there that's like it helps us understand how the virus becomes more transmissible. And that's very, very helpful without creating

a virus that is actually becoming more transmissible in the same work. And so it's really a lot of it comes down to that biosecurity and biosafety level that's being worked out as well. well. But you ultimately don't know until you, you know, you put it in the context of a full virus, right? I mean, there's so many open questions, so many open questions when it comes to this particular virus that we don't, we don't understand. And I think, you know, if you,

if you have this huge pool of other Sarbeco viruses spreading in bats in Southeast Asia, there is now increasingly a compelling interest to understand how these things truly behave. I have two, two questions. One kind of scary. and then one dumb, fun one, because I probably won't ever get to speak to a virologist, a real one ever again. The first question is, do you think, in your opinion, is this, are we going to be dealing with this for the next couple years? I mean, are we going to be seeing new variants spring up, and it's just going to be a matter of mitigating this, this kind of, this latest pandemic? Or do you think that with the vaccine and as it gets further and further out into the world, that things will start to calm down a little bit? Define this.

Oh, God. Fear of interacting with strangers. Fear of interacting, yeah. By personal paranoia about heightened, being heightened, you know. So zoolineal anxiety. Yeah, we'll be dealing with that for a long time. I think every generation going forward will be more anxious than the prior one, but I don't know if that's related to virology.

Could you prescribe Jake, you know, maybe an anti-anxiety? can you get him some pills for what he's feeling you don't want a pathologist to prescribe you anything that's for certain but no I mean so big picture we have never been good at getting rid of viruses so from a first door that's why I asked the this part

it wasn't just being glib it's like from a virus standpoint I mean it's I think a very you look at the history you've got to look at the history and say you're going to be doing with this the rest of our lives you know it's here and we don't have we're not good at getting everyone vaccinated We've got great vaccines.

Time is evolution, so the faster that we move, the better will be in a space to get vaccine. But, you know, you look at this, you look at the history here, and you wouldn't say that we're, you know, like 2009 H1N1 emerged. I remember on the news here in Seattle and, you know, increasingly like influence, it becomes a better analogy for this coronavirus. You say, okay, 2009 H1N1 emerged and they shut the schools down and we realized it wasn't actually, you know, as pathogenic as we feared. And the newscaster asked us, so what happened? with that? And I'm like, well, it's still here 10 years later. And you're probably killed 15,000 people last year. And people don't really just care or no or want to follow it. And I mean, I think that's one of the things. It's probably the most likely thing for this virus. It depends on

how fast we can get these vaccines manufactured and made. There's definitely a techno-optimism argument to be made, but it has to interact with our political system as well. And that's why it's so important to come here and talk with y'all. And the work that you guys are doing is very important, right? the leading predictor of getting vaccinated now is basically once political affiliation in the United States. Right. And so that's a real, real, real, real issue that we have to suss out how we spread information. I mean, this is our, this is our evolutionary advantage is that we can get together and talk. It's not like the virus gets to call up. It's, you know, it's cousin in the Philippines and say, hey, you've got to try this E484K mutation. Like, it's really awesome. And it can do

it on demands. Like, we get to do this. We could do this with masks. We could do this vaccines we can do this behavior and this is how we we fight um and that's why it's so important but but i do think that this virus will be with us probably the rest of our lives and because it is and because of it because of that it will be it's going to be it's going to be concerning it's just going to be difficult to deal with because it's always sort of on the agenda um it's always there when you get a cold a fever you know like you're always going to wonder it's going to be back of your mind and that's just what's going on right now so but the most important thing right now is what what we do in the next year like it's the current time is the most highly leveraged time because right

now this virus starts at a point and it starts to spread out in different lineages and certain ones get better and better and better but if you can try to like just contain as much as possible you know we're seeing what are we having to deal with now we're having to deal with the fact that a bunch of people in the South Asia were not vaccinated as of three months ago and that's going to soon be the dominant strain in the US

and so like it's just it really comes down to sort of getting those vaccines out there as fast as possible and especially our really really good ones but but anyway it's it's I wish I were more optimistic

but we just never shown the ability to do this before it doesn't mean we can't yeah does not mean it's not it's not so I'm not like four I want to forecast anything about this is what should happen I just sort of of, it's more just sort of, this is what has happened.

Yeah, no, that is, that was a incredible answer to a kind of unclear question. So that's, thank you for that. And then my second question is dumb. And it's of the fictional virus movies. I'm talking the adrometer strain outbreak in the 90s and the latest one, Contagion, which was your favorite slash thought was most realistic? I mean, I got to go with Contagion because it was shot. I was in the lab.

One of the labs where it was sort of shot. No way, really? They came into UCSF, and they renamed all the building. They renamed it Mendel Hall. And, you know, I remember all of the, I'll say it, sorry, but all the women in the lab got very excited because Jude Love was in the building. Oh, yeah, I mean, whatever year it was.

And so they were all trying to find the shot. And I remember that shot, the shot that they did, one of the shots they did that one of the days were like, they had a delay and delay and people just got so tired. Like everyone got, everyone's experience of movie making of just like waiting around for the perfect light. to sort of they've solved. But Jude Law, Jude Law was the conspiracy theorist.

So you're saying that there are female virologists who were perhaps thirsting for the conspiracy theory guy. Well, we didn't know. I didn't know. I don't know if they had told, they had to really cast it out that strongly. But at the time, they were very excited that Jude Law was in the building. And if they could go find, you know, see where he was at.

And they kind of, like, hid a lot of the cast in sort of some of the conference rooms until, like, the light was perfect. So it wasn't really easy to see. But it was kind of cool. see that and they did give a nice shout out to sort of what the work that was going on in the Bay Area at that time well in my country it's like the reason

that our government actually did their like vaccine response so well because Matt Hancock who's like our minister of health here he was asked in a radio interview you know oh how did you know before any vaccines had like properly been made to procure so many from so many different companies and he literally was just like oh I

watched Contagion on Netflix and it seemed like it was like a real big issue in the movie that like all the countries are scrambling to get the vaccine once they've been made. So I just thought I'd do some pre-orders. And like, fair enough, he was right. That's right. Life imitates art. God damn it.

We're speaking with Dr. Alex Greenger. Thank you so much for enlightening us today. Is there anything you'd like to plug before we let you go? The vaccine. The vaccine is awesome. The MRA vaccine is awesome. I mean, there's, like, very seldom in vaccinology. Do you get to make a vaccine that induces the vaccine?

like, even such a better response than actually getting infected with the virus. I mean, this is really an important thing. I think people don't really totally grok. Like, you know, typically they'd be like, oh, you're not typically. It's not saying, but like, you know, other people will be like, oh, I'm going to go get, you know, a chicken pox or something like that. And I'll get immunity, you know, like, all right, well, you still get chicken pox, but they're focused on the immunity.

But this one, it's like not only do you not have to go through, you know, the entire, actually getting COVID, the risk of long COVID, you know, all the other, you know, risk of dying, the risk of passing it on to your loved ones, you don't have to go through that, and you get a better immune response than if you'd even gone through all of that, which is just nuts. And so that's one of the things that's just so amazing about these things. That's why you keep seeing over and over and over. I mean, like, you know, a new variant comes out, and they're like, it's still good.

Like, all right, it induces such a strong response that even when a new virus comes out that's going to, you know, literally decimate it. I mean, take it down, take the response down by the 90%. potentially, it's still high enough provide protection at a high level. But we have some really great vaccines and we just got to make a bunch of them. We got to convince people or not convinced. I don't mean, that's the wrong. Like a transitive verb. It's just like understand what people are concerned about them. We got to get them through full FDA licensure and we got to keep monitoring these guys. But I mean, that's, there's no, there's nothing bigger right now on what

you can do and what we have with these vaccines. I got to plug something. It's like it's number one, two and three. No, this was really, really fascinating. I think really, really enlightening. And it was a pleasure having you on. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us. Well, thank you so much for having me. I mean, I really, I do want to, I really appreciate what you guys do. And also the help to help understand what people are thinking about when it comes to sort of this virus, because it takes all kinds. And it's, humans are funky. And it's really hard to try to help people understand what's going on with this virus. Even after, you know, whatever, 18 months of talking about it, that it can always be changing things. There's

always something new with it. So I really appreciate what you guys do. Thanks for listening to another premium episode of the Q&N Anonymous podcast. Your support keeps us advertising free and editorially independent. We usually stream twice a week at twitch.tv slash QAnononanonymous. And for everything else, there's QAnononanonymous.com where you'll find merch, a link to the Discord, access to the lost episodes, music from the show, all that good stuff. Annie, where can people find Vaccine, the Human Story, your new podcast that I believe already has an episode out, right? Maybe even two? It's got one episode out, yeah, and the episode two is actually being uploaded as we speak.

So it will almost certainly be out by the time this episode is. And, yeah, you can find the podcast account on Twitter at Twitter.com slash vaccine podcast, and you can find us on Spotify, iTunes, Google Music. YouTube is understandably a little bit lairy of a show, which has got vaccine in the title, but you can find the links to the accompanying videos on the social media. Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. It's not a conspiracy, it's fact. And now, today's AutoCube.

Here's my song. Here's my focus song right from here in Manchester. You can stick your new world order up your ass You can stick your new world order up your ass You can stick your new world order Well the sun don't shine but otter Stick your new world order up your ass Thinking we are the 99%

We are the 99% Sticking we are the 90 Together we are mighty We are the 99% The Queen O'Bearrested in her dressing gown Queen of be arrested in a dressing gown Queen will be arrested in her Because she is such a sinner

But be arrested in her dressing gown If you can stick the 5G tower up your heart You can stick your 5G tower up your art You can stick your 5G tower It's a microwave on full power Sticky 5g tower up your eyes Singing we are the night We are 99%.

Come on Singing we are the 99%. Singing we are the 90 Together we are mighty We are the 99% With blue skies when the chem trails are all dark There'll be blue skies when the camp trails are all done There'll be blue skies when the chem trails are all done.

And their evil plan fails. Root skies where the can cells are all gone. You can stick your coronavirus, shut your on. You can stick your coronavirus up your off. You can stick your coronavirus. They're known and proven liars. Stick your coronavirus up your heart.