The Peter Attia Drive - #169 - Katherine Eban: COVID-19 Lab Leak: Examining all sides of the debate and discussing barriers to a full investigation

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

  Katherine Eban is an award-winning investigative journalist who previously appeared on The Drive to discuss the widespread fraud in the generic drug industry. In this episode, she discusses the content of her recent Vanity Fair article, which examined the evidence for the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a virus lab escape as opposed to a natural virus that came from an animal host. Katherine and Peter walk through the evidence for both theories as well as discuss the long and troubling history of dangerous lab leaks and safety concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  They also talk about the controversy surrounding gain-of-function research and its funding by the US government. Finally, they conclude with a discussion on the likelihood of definitively establishing the origins of the virus given the Chinese government’s lack of cooperation and highlight the fact that the many barriers to performing a full investigation may be the most troubling aspect of the controversy. This episode was originally recorded on July 6, 2021.    We discuss: An overview of the lab leak controversy [1:30]; The troubling history of lab leaks of dangerous pathogens [8:30]; The zoonotic transmission theory: did SARS2 come from a bat? [11:45]; The debate about gain-of-function (GoF) research [26:15]; Questions about US funding of GoF research in China [33:45]; The uncertain significance of the furin cleavage site [51:30]; Discerning what’s most important about both the zoonotic transmission and lab leak theories [1:01:15]; Barriers to a full investigation [1:19:15]; and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/katherineeban2  Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, I'll focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more

now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe. Now without further delay, here's today's episode. My guess this week is Catherine Eban. Catherine is an investigative journalist and also a previous guest on the podcast back in September of 2019 when we spoke about her book, Bottle of Lies, which dug into the prevalence of fraud in the generic drug manufacturing industry, well, Catherine's back again this time to discuss yet another controversial topic. This time around the origins of COVID-19, or the virus responsible for COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2.

Catherine is one of a number of journalists who has written a detailed piece on this, hers in Vanity Fair. And in this episode, we get into a lot of detail about both sides of this. I suspect most of you are at least somewhat familiar with this, but if not, let me provide a little bit of background. There is a brewing controversy around the origins

of the virus responsible for COVID-19. Of course, at the time of the pandemic's arrival, it was viewed as a largely open and shut case that this was a virus of zoonotic origin, meaning this was a virus that occurred in nature. The belief at the time was that this was a virus that originated from bats, transferred to an intermediary, a pangolin, most likely, before ultimately finding its way into humans in the wet markets of Wuhan. While there were some rumblings about the veracity of that theory

in the early parts of 2020, they were met with the sharpest rebukes from both the scientific community and more broadly just the political community that was viewing such statements as xenophobic or otherwise ill-informed and conspiratorial. Since that time, however, there has been a push for greater transparency and basically a push to understand what the real origin of this virus is. And I think there have been basically two factors that have driven that push. The first is that despite the case of SARS-1 and MERS, very similar coronaviruses to the one that resulted in COVID-19, there has yet to be any identified species of origin and or intermediary. In other words, the bat that would have resulted in this virus ultimately going to humans and

or to an intermediary, that animal of those animals have not been identified. And that has not been due to a lack of effort. I think the second factor that has driven this push for greater transparency has been effectively the abject lack of transparency to date. Now, part of that can be understood and explained by understanding that in an autocratic nation like China, transparency is not the norm, and therefore would never be the norm under any circumstance lab leak or otherwise. But I do think that there is enough frustration on the parts of people to at least ask the question,

why did we not take this theory seriously a year ago or 18 months ago, when perhaps it would have been easier to gather information to examine both of these ideas. The idea that the virus originated in nature, or the idea that the virus actually escaped from the lab, where it was presumably being manipulated for some greater good, such as the development of vaccines or disaster preparedness, or other things like that. We do not really get into radical ideas, such as that this virus was developed as a bio-weapon, and unleashed. So regardless of your knowledge level in this space, I think this episode will be interesting, and I will allow you to obviously draw your own conclusions.

So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Catherine Ebene. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey, Catherine, great to have you back on the show here. Awesome to be with you again. Seems we're always discussing something controversial. And by the way, I already know what our third podcast will be about based on other controversial work you've done.

So, yeah, you don't like to write about things that are simple. No, I don't seem to. It is the fate of the investigative journalist. Well, let's start with a broad question, which is what attracted you in particular to this story and why did you decide that you had something to offer, especially in a story where not to let too much out of the bag too soon, but it seems that this is not something that can truly ever be known one way or the other. So it seems a bit of a frustrating exercise.

Yeah. Well, I've been covering the pandemic for a year for Vanity Fair. And as things have come a little bit more under control in the US, at least for the time being, my editor and I were like, what are the big, unanswered questions of the pandemic? And we decided that the biggest is what its origin was. Now, one might

say, well, that was settled a while ago or seemingly settled, right? It came from nature, but we don't know exactly how or where. But it was interesting because the head of the World Health Organization himself said, we still don't know. And all hypotheses remain on the table. So it seemed that with Trump out of office, with the WHO head himself raising this as a question, it was a good time to begin to look into what was the sort of, what's the debate? What's the controversy? What are the questions?

And what I uncovered was a lot more than I had really considered or bargained for when I started my reporting. Maybe for folks we should give a little bit of background on what a lab leak implies. Is there a precedent for such a thing in virology because at the surface it certainly sounds nefarious, right? It sounds like Well, that must be a deliberate thing and it immediately falls into the realm of conspiracy theories But in fact, there's quite a precedent for viruses getting out of labs in the modern era And I would define the modern era. And I would define the modern era as the era of microbiology.

Obviously there weren't lab leaks that accounted for the Spanish flu. But are there any that come to mind as you began your work here or that you had to learn about as a result of your investigation? Yeah, so let me say first that lab leak as it's understood is not a unitary theory.

It ranges all the way from field researchers, went into a bad cave, brought back natural samples into a laboratory, and that natural sample somehow leaked or a laboratory researcher got infected simply through, you know, aerosol transmission, which is what we're talking about. This is not, I mean, the word leak implies like liquid gushing out of a pipe. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about aerosol transmission, but it could have been an infected lab worker. It could have been an infected lab worker, it could have been an infected field researcher bringing a sample back. But the phrase lab leak sort of runs all the way up to the possibility that someone in a laboratory was manipulating viruses potentially in an experiment to make them more infectious, to see if they would become more infectious, and that that new strain,

not a natural strain per se, but one that was genetically modified could have leaked from a laboratory. So it really runs the gamut. It's not a single thing. This is not like, oh, how could that ever happen? In a way, it's like how could it not happen?

Because it's happened over and over and over again. You had very serious lab leak in the Soviet Union, which finally became exposed. It was an anthrax leak. You've had SARS leaks. You've had four SARS lab escapes since the SARS epidemic of 2002. So, this actually is something that happens a lot.

And it seems that one of the most significant examples of this was this Russian flu in 1977, which was an H1N1 flu that had been around in the 40s and 50s. It was being studied in a lab. When it re-emerged, it seemed to target disproportionately people that were younger than 25, which at the time maybe didn't make sense, although after it was clear that this was the same virus that was around sooner, it made sense because obviously the people that were being afflicted were people that did not develop natural immunity. Again, there had been no, to my knowledge, of course, because you wouldn't have had the tools to have done so. There was no gain of function,

not that they could have genetically edited, but I don't believe there was evidence that it had been sort of selectively bred or anything like that. It was simply a question of, this is a virus that's being studied in a lab, and then somehow that led to it getting out. And as you point out, at least four cases

of the early SARS-1 virus escaping. And again, when you read the stories of these, which I've read at one point, all of them, these are mistakes that people can make. These are perhaps viruses that are not being handled with as much care as they should be handled, some shortcuts are being taken with respect to how they could be handled. You know, I think it's important to point out that people talk about BSL-4 labs that are studying these incredibly dangerous pathogens. And so those are the most protective, highest containment labs where all the researchers are working in spacesuits with independent oxygen.

But the fact of the matter on the ground is that you have research with incredibly dangerous pathogens taking place in laboratories across the world that have much less protection, like BSL2 labs, which are basically the safety standard of an American dentist's office. So you've had live SARS viruses being studied in overcrowded laboratories in China and elsewhere

with very few protections. So there's at least a precedent that a virus that's being studied can make its way out of the lab. In fact, there's a great precedent for it. But of course, that alone doesn't explain what could have happened here. It's probably worth also explaining for folks who haven't been so steeped in this story, or at least for reminding people of the typical way in which a virus can be transmitted between animal hosts and what it means to have an intermediary host and how for example those were identified in the cases of SARS-1 and MERS. had a zoonotic origin, meaning that it spread somehow from an animal and jumped to a human,

or that there was an intermediary animal, so possibly a pangolin, possibly a civet cat, and that it went from a bat reservoir to some intermediary animal to humans. So that is believed to be the case with SARS-CoV-1. That is believed to be the case with MERS, where there was a, a dromedary as an intermediate host. And with the initial animal being presumed to be some sort of bat reservoir. With Ebola, it's believed to have a zoonotic origin,

either a bat or a chimp. It's not certain yet, but that is the long history of these viruses that it has some kind of natural origin, and then evolves and mutates in such a way that it can infect a human. And I think one of the questions here in the case of SARS-1, it didn't take that long. I believe it was, you know, when the order of about six months who identify its intermediary, which is what's it called like a Kovet, like it's sort of like a little... A CIVIT cat, it's very cute.

Is it a CIVIT cat? Yeah. Yes, very cute animal. Yeah. And obviously in MERS cat. Yes, very cute animal. Yeah. And obviously in MERS as you mentioned, a camel. What's relevant about this is that the virus can acquire additional tools in that intermediary host before making that final leap. And then so the question is, how much of the transmission occurs between, say, the cat and the human, or once that transmission occurs, is most of the transmission occurs between, say, the cat and the human, or once that transmission

occurs, is most of the transmission occurring human to human. And so, as of now, which is, directionally, call it a year and nine months post the first infection, we don't yet have an identified intermediary host, which implies that it exists, but it hasn't yet been identified or there wasn't one, and this might have traveled directly from bats to humans for which there's clearly a precedent based on what happened in 2012, right? Well, let me just say that we don't yet have

a designated animal host, and it's not for lack of trying to find one. So Chinese authorities have tested up to 80,000 animal samples to see if they could find a host animal and have not been able to do so. You could think of it as an international back hunt to find the host animal of this virus and none has presented itself yet. Right, so we haven't identified the potential bat source of it. We haven't identified the intermediary of it. There is a close, closest relative that has been identified, correct? Yeah, so that is a sort of complicated question,

but there is a strain, RATG13, which was found in an abandoned mine shaft in Yunnan Province in 2013, which is sort of the closest viral sample to the SARS-CoV-2 sequence. So it's about 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2. What do we know about that, I don't want to say accident, but that experience in 2013 where the miners were exposed to it?

What do we know about their illness and what does that tell us about that virus? So there's a couple of really interesting things about what happened in 2012. First of all, that it happened, what happened, but also how it sort of broke into the public domain. What happened? So just starting out in 2012, there were six miners who were given this very unpleasant assignment, which was to go to this abandoned mineshaft and clean it out, because it was thick with bat guano, which is bat feces, essentially. So they go in there and they dig for days and weeks and they become gravely ill. So they become admitted to the hospital,

conming university hospitals. They get admitted to the hospital. The question is, is it a fungus? Is it a virus? They bring in an expert who analyzed this, says it's a virus. They have pneumonia, it's a virus. They have pneumonia, it's a virus. Their symptoms were almost identical to COVID-19. So he asked, what were they doing? They were digging a bat guano. What kind of bat?

It's this Chinese rufus horseshoe bat, which is the same one that triggered SARS-CoV-1. Three of the miners die, three ultimately recover. So this is a case that should have triggered worldwide alarm because it looked like the beginning of an outbreak again. But the Chinese authorities never reported this to the World Health Organization. It sort of remained below the radar

except that this abandoned mine shaft became a destination for virologists in Asia who were going into this mine shaft and getting samples and bringing it back to their laboratories. Probably the most active samplers from this mine shaft were members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan. They dug up many samples, brought it back to their laboratories, and they sequenced a sample which they called at the time 4991. And that was, as we would find out later, 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2.

Except at the beginning of the outbreak, nobody knew about this mine shaft. Nobody knew that three miners had died and no one knew about 4991. The only way that we ultimately found out about it is because a very curious, unemployed science teacher in eastern India started digging into this database of Chinese masters' thesis and pulled up an entire dissertation about this incident in the mind shaft. Now, to be clear, it would not have been known based on the infection of those six mind shaft workers and that, basically, a 50% mortality, that there was any evidence that that virus could be transmitted human to human. Correct it could have been simply that they acquired it from the bats, which is the

most likely scenario, in the presence of an overwhelming exposure to the virus, but that the virus would not transmit human to human. Would that have been possible? That's right. We have no information that they infected one another. They were all exposed to this bat guano. They went to the hospital. Doesn't appear that the hospital workers got sick.

So, you know, it's not, doesn't appear that they spread it to other people, but they were desperately ill. And it's interesting to note, the oldest minor died first. He was most gravely afflicted. He was in his 60s. So if we look back at this incident in light of COVID-19,

there are a number of aspects of this that do look like SARS-CoV-2 in 2012. Though clearly it's a different virus given that, I mean, I think for a person listening, maybe not familiar with genetic distance, 96.2%, sounds, and that's a perfect match. But of course, that's not remotely a match. I've spoken with virologists who have said, look, to try to take a virus from 96.2% to 100% would take forever. I mean, that would be a very long period of genetic manipulation.

So the point being, it seems unlikely, at least if that's true, that that virus ultimately became SARS-CoV-2. What did your work uncover with respect to that specific concern? The issue is that is one sample that was taken from that mind shaft, but we don't know the whole universe of samples that came from that mind shaft. Now that sample was taken to the Wuhan Institute of

Rology, which you know just to out, is about seven miles away from what was initially identified as the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in this who-Anon seafood market. But the issue is there were hundreds of samples that were taken to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the database that housed these samples was taken off line, weirdly a couple of months before the known start of the COVID-19 outbreak. So publicly, we're not looking at the entire universe of samples that emerged from that line. Now, based on the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated with a number of US institutions, most notably, presumably the University of North Carolina, which I think we'll get to, can we look at any of the grants or publications that came out of those jointly and surmise just how many samples of coronavirus

were extracted from 2013 until 2019? Yeah, I mean, well, we know that there are hundreds of samples that were extracted. And we presume that there was deep sequencing done on these samples. But again, we don't have access to all that information. So we don't know if any of those other samples may have closed the gap from 96.2 to 100 percent, basically. So again, just to ground everybody in the thought process here,

again, just to ground everybody in the thought process here. If there's an argument to be made that SARS-CoV-2 originated, and its final origination came from a lab, you basically have a couple of mechanisms that that could have happened. One would be that the exact version of SARS-CoV-2 was identified in the wild, potentially in this mine, was brought to the lab where it was being studied, but not altered before it infected, presumably a lab worker that ultimately led to the outbreak. Conversely, a very, very, very close cousin to SARS-CoV-2 was identified in the wild, again, potentially in this mine, where it was brought to the lab. And research was done on it, which we'll get to called gain a function research.

And that closed the genetic gap, so to speak, from where it started to where it currently is, and what ultimately led to the outbreak through presumably some contamination within the lab. Is that sort of a safe summation of the possible scenarios? That is. And let me just add that the reason those scenarios exist as questions that remain unanswered is because there has been a fundamental lack

of transparency that has essentially been enforced by the Chinese government. And I mean there to distinguish between the motives of the scientists and the motives of the government. We don't know whether the Chinese scientists would like a full accounting of everything that happened and are being prevented at giving one because the government is restricting it. So the questions can't be resolved because there hasn't been transparency around it.

So who would be the most preeminent scientist or scientists in China with respect to viruses? There's a pretty interesting character who leads the charge there, correct? She even has her own nickname. Yeah, I mean, she does. And you know, it's one of these stories whereas a journalist, you feel like you can't even

make this stuff up, right? Shijeng Li is the lead coronavirus researcher, the foremost coronavirus researcher in China. She is a sort of nationally revered, very well-known figure. So she is the lead coronavirus researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and she has this nickname, Batwoman, and that comes from her fearless exploration

of these Batcaves in Southern China. So, you know, when you see her image, she's often shown wearing this space suit in the BSL-4 lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And she's, you know, she's like among these sort of sparkling firmament of internationally renowned scientists, she's nobody disputes that she's earned her place there.

And she's particularly well-known for a key discovery from the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak, which is she was the first researcher to figure out the mechanism by which humans were infected by that virus, which is through the ACE2 receptors, human lung cells. So she identified the mechanism for transmission. How long has the institute been doing gain a function research? And maybe even before we answer that question, we could take a moment to explain what gain a function is.

It's actually not perfectly, there isn't an exceptional definition for it, but I think we can loosely describe it. Sure. So first of all, there are some people who say that all of verology is gain of function research, which is basically when you study a virus, you are seeing sort of what functions it gains and what functions it loses.

How does it infect? Is it going to become more infectious and by what mechanism is it going to become more infectious? So gain of function research put simply is this idea that you are trying to test whether the pathogen can become more infectious. You're trying to give it attributes that it doesn't possess in nature as a way to gauge its infectiousness to humans. Look at the surface, I think if you're listening to this and you don't dabble in this world, that sounds a bit absurd, right?

We're going to take a virus that may have a certain level of either virulence or lethality or transmissibility, you know, some feature that makes a virus undesirable and we're going to enhance that. So what's the argument for doing that? What's the argument for making a bad virus worse or making a good virus bad? First of all, let me say this is hugely controversial and has sort of divided the field of verology because there are people who say this is absolutely crazy as one source said to me, it's like it's like looking for a gas leak with a lighted match. And there are other people who say

this is absolutely essential. So the argument for why to do it So the argument for why to do it is that in order to gauge the risk from viruses that exist in nature, you have to experiment with how they become infectious to humans. And one of the ways to do that is essentially to soup up that virus. You can, through genetic editing, you can make it more infectious and see if it is, you know, one of these things that it's a determination of where we should put our resources. You know, what do we need to protect against? There are other people who say, all right, we're going to these very remote areas where these viruses are tucked inside these caves. We're taking back samples to laboratories in crowded urban areas.

We are then altering these pathogens to make them more infectious, right? That is, as one person said, to meet the definition of insanity. Is there any evidence that gain a function research has produced victories in the past? And we can even just keep SARS-CoV-2 off the list at the moment because I don't think there's any evidence it's benefited our fight against this virus. But is there any evidence it has aided

with the creation of flu vaccines or other vaccines? So the people who defend it say that you actually do need to do this kind of research in order to help with vaccine development. That this is the way that you figure out how to create resistance is to look at, to experiment with how viruses might mutate. So that, for example, if you wanted to kind of forecast what the variance of SARS-CoV-2 would be, like as I'm sure the audience has heard of the fearsome Delta variant, which is so afflicting many countries in the world and now increasingly our own,

part of what gain-of-function research can help do is forecast the mutations. But there are people who say that there are a lot of other ways to do this kind of research without running the risk of unleashing deadly pathogens that you can't control once they're out in the world. Now, what's the US government's position been on gain-of-function research? Yeah, so this is, let me just say, as a journalist and as an investigative journalist, I had been reporting on the pandemic for a year. And once I got into this question that you just asked, And once I got into this question that you just asked, I was like, wow, I can't believe how controversial and yet how under the radar this whole question has been. So just to back up, in 2011, a scientist named Ron Fosier did gain a function research with the H1N1 virus and created a pathogen that he

said was the most dangerous and infectious the world has ever known through manipulations. So that sparked this outcry in the scientific community, a group called the Cambridge Working Group was formed, which was basically stood in opposition to this kind of research, and their expressions of concern led the U.S. government to impose a moratorium on funding of any kind of gain-of-function research of SARS and MERS pathogens. So then begin a period of review, task forces, reports, analysis, and interestingly, in the very beginning of the Trump administration, in January of 2017, that moratorium was lifted.

But it was replaced with this framework, which had pretty much enough loopholes to drive a truck through. But it basically said, any agency in the US government that wants to fund this kind of research needs to have its own review process in place, and needs to ensure that the entities that are getting US taxpayer dollars are proceeding safely. I know that one of the things that has allowed people to sort of lose faith in the government

has been statements that both Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci have made with respect to this when asked. Both of them have been asked if the United States government or specifically NIH has funded gain-of-function research both have emphatically denied it. I believe the direct quote from Francis Collins, neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported gain-of-function research on coronaviruses that would have supported Gain of Function research on coronavirus that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans. Also in May of 2021, Anthony Fauci told the Senate hearing that NIH and NIAID categorically have not funded Gain of Function

research to be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Lyrology. Can you evaluate the veracity of those statements? So here is where we enter this true semantic marshland. Because the feeling of, and I'm not talking about wing nuts who want to fire Fauci, credible people who have evaluated this say that there is some sort of rhetorical gray area here. First of all, while they haven't funded research, while the government hasn't funded research

at the Wuhan Institute of Virology directly, they have funded basically an intermediary nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has given subgrants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So, yeah, no direct funding, but yeah, indirect funding. Now, part of the obligation of EcoHealth Alliance was to report back to the NIH and say, here's our progress reports. Here is what the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing with some of your grant money. And we ensure that they've been doing this safely. We don't know what's in those progress reports

because NIH has not released them. That smells like a phoa waiting to happen. Oh, I'm, the NIH now is like being buried up to their eyeballs in foyes, absolutely. People want to know what did they know about this research? There are numerous investigations ongoing into that very question right now, including from the HHS Inspector General. So there's a lot of questions around this. And let me just say part of the reporting effort for me was

disentangling conspiracy theories and there's, you know, their wall-to-wall conspiracy theories out there, disentangling the ones that have no basis in reality, and then trying to evaluate the credible questions. So in my investigation there are credible questions about that funding. I mean, why were we giving taxpayer, why were we allowing taxpayer dollars to a high-level Chinese laboratory where we now believe there was actually military scientists working in there.

They're obviously an adversary, as one person said to me, hey, what's wrong with the Louis Pasteur Institute? I mean, maybe we should make more of an effort to restrict our research dollars to the science laboratories of allies and not adversaries. Tell me a little bit about eco-health alliance. Why are they acting run by a zoologist named Peter Dashik and has a very laudable goal, which is basically to map the viruses in the natural world and use that information in part to preserve wild spaces. If we continue on the path of habitat destruction and we end up sort of cheek by jowl close to these viruses like Ebola,

it's, you know, we're both extinguishing the natural world and endangering our own health and safety on this planet. So that is the goal of eco-health alliance, but the organization was pushing very, very hard for big funding dollars, not just to fund this research on a small scale, but had their eyes on something called the Global Virom Project, which was basically a massive mapping of the world's viral strains. And as one of my sources said, then it's not just looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.

It's looking for a gas leak with a blowtorch, right? If you're going into all of these wild spaces and you're pulling back, bringing back all of these dangerous viruses and potentially unleashing pathogens, the scientific question here is, do we need to know all the answers to this? Or can we just kind of leave the caves to themselves and make sure that we closely regulate all of this activity? So fast forward to the Trump administration. in the middle of the COVID outbreak, Trump gets asked at a news conference by a journalist from a right-wing media outlet called Newsmax.

Why is the U.S. government giving money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Which was inaccurate, but Trump answered, we know about that and we're going to shut it down. About a week later, the NIH is forced by the White House to sever or to stop the grant to eco-health alliance. So at that moment, it looked very much like, wow, the Trump administration is really interfering with the science. This is critically important research in a time of COVID-19. But as the story has evolved, you know, there are real questions about what was going on in the

Wuhan Institute of Virology, what our taxpayer dollars was funding there, and because of the lack of transparency, it's very hard to evaluate that. So let's go back to sort of January 2020 when the virus was identified sequenced. I think it still looked somewhat contained, at least contained to China. They had shut down Wuhan. You mentioned that in September, I believe, of 2019, the database of all viruses extracted from the mine, presumably the database would have contained all viruses that they had been

working on as well. That had been taken down. That is right. And we don't know why. And it hasn't been put up since then. So what was presumably this transparent hub of international science with Xi Jinping doing these research experiments and collaborating with scientists around the world, suddenly it was like the steel doors in front of this institute

just were shut tight tight and nobody can see into what strains they had. I mean there was a Lancet paper that came out in February of 2020 that very aggressively made the case that any suggestion that this didn't originate in nature was ridiculous. Was that a peer-reviewed paper? Was it an editorial? What was the nature of that paper? Was it an opinion piece? Yeah. So, you know, it's important to note, it was not a peer-reviewed paper. It was a statement which was published by 27 scientists who said basically anybody who is saying that this could have had a lab origin is siding with, is trafficking in conspiracy theories and we stand with our fellow scientists in China to say that this had a natural origin. So it was a big piece of branding that suddenly raising

the question of the lab leak was aiding in a bedding, Donald Trump's xenophobic agenda, aiding in a bedding conspiracy theorists. And as the one of my sources said, it was like it was nailed to the church door. It became the orthodoxy, and it really shut down debate. But there was something more consequential that emerged from that Lancet statement. The scientists who signed it asserted that they had no conflicts of interest. The problem was the person who had sort of designed

and orchestrated the statement was Peter Dashik, who is the president of EcoHealth Alliance. A number of the scientists who also signed were either employees of him or Ed received grant money. And even though he's saying that he has no conflicts of interest, he was providing money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So it was not a kind of neutral value-free assertion. He has a stake in this. He definitely has a stake in this, as somebody pointed out, if it turns out to have been a lab leak, it could do to the field of Virology what Chernobyl did to the world of nuclear science research, right? Transform the whole thing, shutdowns, restrictions, moratoriums.

So Peter Dashik, as the recipient of a million, well, not personally, but eco-health alliance, as the recipient of millions of dollars in grant money, definitely had a horse in this race. Besides NIH, who else would be funding this type of research? Would the DOD be funding any of this research? It has. DOD gave grants to eco-health alliance. So, as I spoke with investigators inside the U.S. government

who were looking at COVID origins over the last year, what they found is that there is a big, they called it, gain of function bureaucracy inside the federal government. There are a lot of people who are invested in this kind of research, who are giving grant money for this kind of research, so they have committed to this kind of very aggressive viral research, and so they have an interest in the outcome of this question, and as these investigators told me, it had an enormous impact on their ability to just neutrally evaluate the question of origin.

This is more of a question of speculation, but do you think that had all of this taken place in a world where it had not been politicized? In other words, if politicians, including the president of the United States had never weighed in on this, if this were a discussion that we're only going to take place in the scientific community,

do you think the reaction would have been as polarizing? It would have made a huge difference. I mean, partly, this became so polarized because President Trump, at that point, lacking a lot of evidence in April 2020 announced it was a lab leak. That he was certain it was a lab leak. Is there any evidence that he had intelligence to suggest that or was this simply an off-the-cuff statement? Right. So, according to my sources, the most significant information that the US government obtained came in the fall of 2020,

late summer fall of 2020. So April of 2020 really predates a lot of the significant information that the government collected. Couple that with the fact that on the same day that he declared he was certain it was a lab leak, hours earlier, his own intelligence agencies put out a statement saying, we are certain that this was not genetically modified. As it turns out, they didn't particularly have evidence for that either.

But, you know, it's clear that elements of the U.S. government were sort of ping-ponging off of these xenophobic declarations that President Trump was making, not necessarily as a good faith effort to get to the bottom of it, but more as a way to to get to the bottom of it, but more as a way to bludgeon China. And as you know, he labeled the COVID-19 Kung Flu. He made a lot of very sort of negative assertions. And it had this tremendous effect. It created, as one source told me, an antibody response within the federal government to the idea that it was a lab leak. Was there censoring for these ideas or questions on social media?

I wasn't particularly paying attention in the spring of 2022 this, but was this the type of thing that if you had posted something about this on Facebook, where is it going to be taken down? I mean, what was the level of curiosity around this and how much was being explored? Well, it's interesting because some social media sites, I believe, including Facebook, were labeling posts like this as conspiracy theories. And there has been some reversal since then, you know, also in the media,

where you have now sites like Vox that were posting disclaimers about conspiracy theories are now lifting those statements as the idea of a lab leak has gained in some credibility. So let's march through the government a little bit more here in terms of the efforts that were made to sort of try to get to the bottom of this because really everything we're talking about is not really front and center, right? I mean, front and center is containing this virus, vaccine development. I mean, there are real crises going on here and presumably one could argue, we'll look at this point. And by this point, I mean, say in the spring and early summer of 2020, it doesn't as much

matter what the origin of this virus is as what our response is going to be. And obviously, a year over a year ago, there was great uncertainty about that. Is the window missed, even by that point? Do we have evidence that things that records were destroyed, where attempts made to go and do site visits, collect antibody? Because to me, it seems like the most interesting thing you'd want to do is gather serum samples and understand the seropositivity of people within that vicinity and try to get a signature that way.

Any efforts made by the WHO or others to do that or the CDC in China? You know, this is very interesting because I interviewed Dr. Robert Redfield for this story and he was the head of the US CDC. He said to me that from minute one of his learning of this virus, he began thinking about the Wuhan Institute of Virology

because he knew of this risky gain of function research they were doing and wanted to rule them out as a potential source. And he offered to send in a team of experts to do exactly what you're saying, you know, to do this widespread testing, to do antibody testing of all the researchers there. As he said to me, had we sent in a team of experts, I could have presumably, if the laboratory was not a source, I could have ruled it out in a couple of weeks.

But China, whether they were covering up a lab leak or because they were just reacting the way an authoritarian government does, they immediately circled the wagons, they refused to let in the team of experts, and they did start destroying records. That is absolutely part of what they did. So there is no question that we have lost

massive ground in our ability to understand the origin. And has the Chinese government allowed anyone to go back to the caves in Yuhan where the original samples were identified where RATG13 was found to continue bioprospecting? Yeah, I mean not only have they not allowed it, they have actively arrested journalists who have tried to go there. The BBC sent a team of journalists there in December of 2020. They were tailed by Chinese police.

They found a big truck blocking access to the mineshaft. Wall Street Journal sent a reporter in on a bicycle and he was detained by Chinese police in question for about five hours. His notes were confiscated. So the Chinese government has been blocking access to this mine shaft. Let's talk about some of the lines of evidence both foreign against this. I mean, I think what's clear here is one,

there's a precedent for this happening, right? So it's an absolutely plausible scenario to unfortunately, because of the nature of the Chinese government's behavior and by extension, the US government's behavior, there's ample reason to believe in a conspiracy, but by no means is that necessary. In other words, this virus could have completely occurred

in nature, and the Chinese government would probably still behave the exact way it did, and the US government would have behaved exactly the same way it did. So, unfortunately, those things don't really, I think, move the thinking or the evidence one way or the other more than the other. But now, let's talk about some of the features of the virus, because I think this is where it gets very... I mean, not that what we've said hasn't gotten interesting, but the biology of this is also quite interesting, right? Yeah. So there is no information that is in the public domain, either regarding the viral sequence and the sort of oddities of the viral sequence, or regarding other circumstantial

evidence that can answer this question one way or another. When I started reporting this, there was, you know, there were plenty of articles that were like, well, maybe this and maybe that, but the information that is in the public domain doesn't get you there. Some attention or a lot of attention has been focused on what is called a furan cleavage site in the sequence. And that is part of the strain that one

virologist told me is a sort of signature of genetic editing of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That in a number of the strains they've worked on and manipulated and published papers about, you see the insertion of a fear and cleavage site in the viral sequence. And that is the spot on the sequence that makes it more infectious to humans. So Nick Wade, who's a former New York Times reporter, he published a long piece sort of analyzing the question of the science and the lab leak.

And he quoted, you know, this incredibly famous scientist, David Baltimore, saying, as soon as he heard about the fear and cleavage site, he told his wife that was the smoking gun. And then he knew it was genetically edited. Since Nick Wade's piece came out and got a lot of attention, David Baltimore sort of walked that back and said, well, not really. And then other people have come out and said, well, you find fewer and cleavage sites and sequences in nature. And it doesn't necessarily have to be reflective of genetic editing. That's been my find as well. I mean,

I've spent far more time on this than I wanted to because it's one of those. Everybody does. Yeah, it's one of those things. You sort of think, well, look, I'm going to just read these three articles. But then you have to read every single reference to those articles. And truthfully, I'm going out of my mind at this point, and I don't want to read any more on this because it's too much. But that's one of the rabbit holes I went incredibly far down. And there's just outright contradictory information there.

Now, I haven't spoken to Nicholas Wade, but in his piece, he says, there is no evidence of fur and cleavage sites in any beta coronaviruses that are SARS-like. And yet, I actually found several references for papers that contradict that, including a paper published in 2018 that found a furan cleavage site in MERS, which is a SARS-like beta coronavirus. So to me, the presence of the furan cleavage site, which to your point, makes this much more infectious than SARS-1. You had commented that SARS-1 transmits through the ACE2 receptor.

Well this is on the order of magnitude more transmissible because that S1, S2 subunit is cleaved and now it has an enormous affinity for that A2 receptor. So a more interesting question to me is the nature of the codons that exist there. So the furing cleavage site, actually I believe it is exclusively a proline, arginine, arginine, alineine sequence, and not to bore people with too much biochemistry, but you have three nucleotides that make up each codon. So you have redundancy in the system because there's only 20 amino acids, but you have 64

combinations with all of the nucleotides. You have more than one way to get an amino acid. So what I think also got a lot of attention in NICWADES piece was the, I think it's a CGG arginine, and that is a very unusual arginine. It's only typically present in 5% of coronavirus, is meaning only 5% of the time when a coronavirus needs to make an arginine. Does it use a, I think it's CCG or CGG? Okay, but when you go and look more deeply in the literature, it turns out that you saw that in other fear and cleavage sites of other coronaviruses that also had very little of that. In other words, there was another coronavirus that I saw

that only had 3% of its arginines being either CCG or CGG, but it still showed up in its fear and cleavage site, and there's no ambiguity about whether that was naturally occurring or not. So does that mean it occurred to nature? Does that mean it was manipulated in a lab? It's still very hard to know. does that mean it was manipulated in a lab? It's still very hard to know.

So I don't think really in any dimension of this, there is no smoking gun per se. What there is is smoke coming out of a lot of windows. That's what I saw as I was reporting. There is enough smoke coming out of enough windows that we cannot take the lab leak hypothesis off the table. For me, the most credible people on this, they're not saying it was a lab leak. What they're saying is, why can't we have a full investigation?

That's what we don't have. We have not had a forensic investigation. And so if we haven't had a forensic investigation, why are the scientists acting so unscientific by saying it wasn't a lab leak? How do they know? They don't actually know. Just like we don't know, we don't know that it was or it wasn't.

But there's enough of a suspicious fact pattern that it requires investigation. Yeah, of all the things that I have read, and I think at this point, I don't know what I haven't read. I feel like it's just so overwhelming. Welcome to the club, yes. I think the most compelling, mechanistic answer.

So there's lots of circumstantial reasons, right? The Occam's Razor says, in the middle of fall, slash winter, so in Q4 of 2019, when there are no bats, they're all hibernating, you have a breakout in a major population center that's doing research on it. All of those things aside, from a purely biological mechanistic standpoint, I think the most convincing piece of evidence for a lab leak is that for about a year post this virus being in humans, it didn't change. We're only now seeing variants of this virus, right? Like the Delta variant you mentioned earlier. That strikes me as interesting, given the

ubiquity of this virus, so how many people were infected, suggesting just how stable this thing was by the time it got into humans, meaning a lot of the tinkering got taken out of it sooner. So one argument would be, if this were a virus that got manipulated and naturally selected through humanized mice, which is to say mice that have ACE2 receptors in their lungs, which are the exact mice you would use to do this type of research. In fact, the mice which we know were being used

for this type of research, that makes sense to me that you know, you could easily have a virus that has now reached its state of maturation. It gets out now into the wild, and it takes quite a while to evolve into its new variant. What about you? Where does that stack up in terms of biological reasoning in favor of a lab leak versus not?

So one scientist, Alina Chan. She's at the Broad, right? Yeah, she's at the Broad Institute and she has really advanced that idea and had a preprint paper to that effect, which is the idea that this virus seemed immediately ready to infect humans and didn't appear to undergo

the sort of all the early mutations that you saw in SARS-CoV-1. So it seemed sort of primed for human transmission, which in her view argued for a lab leak. But then you have scientists on the other side of that who say, actually, if you look at this strain, this is not maximized for human infectivity. If you were going to set out to create this in a laboratory to maximize human infectivity, this isn't it. So I think those are again two competing versions of this.

But they're saying very different things. Like I don't think that Elisa is an Elisa Chen is her name. Alina. Elina Chen. I don't think her argument is that it's maximized in its potential. I think if I'm understanding her argument correctly, it's that it's reached a steady state. It's in an equilibrium.

And I think that's a very different argument to the one that's being posed in the other direction, which is that, oh, well, if you were going to make this, you could make a much better job. I think that maybe gives a little too much credit to scientists. Like, you know, that's sort of like saying, well, you know, when those bombs dropped on Hiroshima, I mean, they were good, but they weren't as good as they could have been. I mean, come on, they could have been way more lethal. You know, I have to say that it is sort of a red herring

argument because, okay, so let's say it's not like the perfect bio weapon to infect all of humanity overnight. That wasn't its intended purpose. Right, the credible people who talk about a lab leak are not necessarily saying it was a bio weapon. It could be the accident of a sloppy, you know, a moment of a, a momentary lapse.

Yeah. So again, I've always found that argument to be completely nonsensical because one, if we believe in the broad idea of gain a function research, it's not bio weaponry to, even if you say, well, no, but if you're going to go to the trouble of doing gain a function research, you should try to make the most virulent, deadly strain imaginable. Okay, but are you going to make that in the first, you know, let's assume it takes a hundred steps to make that. And what happened if we were at step 60 when this leak occurred? Does that mean we weren't on a path to making it better? So again, to me that argument is meaningless, actually. Right. There are a lot of red herrings in this debate.

On both sides. Yeah. So given all this sort of loose smoke that's sort of diffusing from the ground out of windows here and there, how would you think about trying to synthesize the arguments that most favor the consensus view that this virus occurred naturally versus the contrarian view for lack of a better word that this virus emerged from a lab? What would you say are the most compelling features that favor the former? this virus emerged from a lab. What would you say are the most compelling features that favor the former?

First, let me just say that I actually don't think there is a consensus view at this time. I think the consensus has been shattered and the scientific community is really divided. That said, I think the strongest argument for a zoonotic origin is the precedent of previous SARS outbreaks, you know, SARS-CoV-1, and MERS, and you look at those, and yeah, those are SARS outbreaks that have a zoonotic origin that has been identified. So it would make perfect sense that this is the big one. This has come on the heels of those outbreaks. And you add

into that, you don't have any specific smoking gun evidence to contradict that, even though a host animal has not been found, a neat intermediate animal has not been found. So I think that in and of itself is sort of the most basic argument for it. And to build on that really, SARS-1 traveled something like 900 to a thousand miles from its original site using two intermediary hosts. So to your point, the argument that, well, if this originated in a bat, in a cave, 1,000 miles away, there is no way it could make it to this populated area. No, that's not true.

It certainly happened in the past, right? It certainly has happened in the past, but let me just say that is added to the mystery here because what people are saying is, well, if it started in southern China in Yunnan Province, why don't we see a trail of infections up to Wuhan? We don't. So it looks like Wuhan in central China is the origin of this outbreak, why? So the original theory was there is a host

animal and it could have been a sample at the seafood market in Wuhan, but no, you know, all of this testing has not turned that up. So in order to account for a natural origin, you have to find a way to argue how in the dead of winter, in central China, in a market that didn't sell bats, didn't have bats. At a time when most bats are hibernating, how do you have this outbreak? And then Chinese scientists themselves were like, oh, we know where it came from. It came from these labs. Two Chinese scientists very early on in the outbreak, posted a preprint paper saying, well, we surveyed the area around the seafood market

and there are these two laboratories that have all these bad samples. So we think it came from them. And that preprint paper was immediately taken down. But you have this problem of how to account for how it started in Wuhan. Now, again, to go back to evidence in favor of the Zoonotic origin, because I don't think anybody disputes that the bats weren't transmitting it to people in the fall or winter. I think everybody agrees that by the time September,

October, November rolled around, the bats themselves would have been in hibernation. So the probability that a bat directly transmitted it to a human in, say, November, December exceedingly low. Of course, the bats could have passed it on to intermediaries before then, and or the bats could have passed it on to intermediaries before then, and or the bats could have transmitted it on to a person, or persons before then who didn't really become that ill, but somehow managed to make their way to Wuhan, correct?

Yes, although there is a wild card in this, which is that the virus in many cases is asymptomatic. So there are people who are arguing for an even earlier origin than we knew. Such as the summer of 2019. Right. Like Dr. Redfield is one of those people who has said that he thinks the origin is actually a lot earlier, and that it's very hard

to pinpoint a date because of the problem of asymptomatic transmission. Right. And you've got to take a step back and remember what it was like circa May of 2020 when the very first papers were coming out looking at zero positivity suggesting that the case fatality rate was infinitely lower than it had been previously identified. So, you know, when we were first thinking about this as, oh my gosh, like two percent of people or eight percent of people who are getting this or dying, and it's, you know, the realization was,

no, it's, you know, eight percent of people who are wildly symptomatic are dying or, and then The more we began to test people, the more that number began to fall. But it wasn't until serology was being done on asymptomatic people. This was done in Santa Clara, a very controversial study by John Ioñez. It was done in New York. You basically began to see, look, this has got a lethality of about one in a thousand people infected. So if you then extract that back to China, I think there's a scenario in which 500 people are infected, none of whom really get sick or think anything of it beyond, you know, it's just a regular cold,

but someone threads that needle of getting up to Wuhan. So there's at least a plausibility of bat to human to Wuhan in that time frame, correct? Correct, that is right, yes. If that were the case, it would still be interesting to identify the bat of origin, but it sounds like that's not happening yet. So let's chalk that up to first on our wish list, right? So we were creating a wish list

of how one would get to the bottom of this. It would be a full court press to identify, to do basically an amazing prospecting exercise to look for the bat host potentially. But just to say that in a way has been done. Right. It's potentially what's in the database that was taken out in September of 2019. But even since the COVID outbreak, and so that is post dating, what was in the database, there has been a huge hunt and widespread testing of wildlife samples.

I mean, there has been a big, big hunt for the host animal, which has not been found. And has that hunt been carried out mostly by Chinese scientists or has been a worldwide effort? It's been a worldwide effort, but the Chinese authorities have tested, I mean, the accountant and the WHO report talks about this, something like 80,000 animal samples have been tested in search of a point of origin and has not been found. Okay, so then on the heels of that, another scenario is that a bat infected an intermediary,

which either infected humans or another intermediary, which ultimately infected humans. Several of those animals have been proposed, and several of those animals could have existed at the Wuhan market in the winter, still alive, not necessarily kept in the most sanitary conditions. That seems like a very viable scenario, and the biggest challenge to that is that very few stones have been left unturned in the search

for what those animals might be, and yet that has turned up empty handed. That's exactly right. That is a very logical scenario, except that there's no evidence for it. That's the problem. Other than precedent. Correct. Yeah. So, I just want to make sure I'm not missing a scenario. Is there any other scenario that involves this virus infecting people having not been to a lab first? You know, one thing that has been talked about is the people who live around these backcapes, the people who live around these backcapes, who have had exposure, who have tested positive and larger numbers previously

for SARS antibodies. But you still have the same problem of, if that is a possible origin, is a natural escape, in location in Southern China, to villagers who live around those minds, how does it get up to Wuhan without leaving a trail of infection that could be documented? That's the problem. Right.

So then on the other side, we have a scenario where researchers are identifying this virus by identifying its original host, and themselves get infected through that, bring the bats or the virus itself into the lab, and early in their tenure with these animals, or with the virus rather, there's a contamination. I mean, I really think of these as two sides of the same coin, which is gain a function versus no gain a function research, but nevertheless, the virus has been brought into the lab. I mean, that's basically the other side of this coin. The most compelling argument for that appears to be, at least to my reading,

the contrapositive of what we just said, i.e. it's the absence of either the original bat or the intermediary host, coupled with the argument made earlier about the relative lack of genetic drift or mutation once the virus took hold in late 2019. The stability of the virus, basically. Fritfold, there is a lot of precedent for a lab leak, as we've seen. I mean, there is a long history of this. There is a proximity argument, which is why Wuhan? Well, here are these laboratories that have the largest collection of bat samples really in the world who were doing some of the most aggressive testing. So there's that smoke coming out of that window. We know that they were doing aggressive gain of function research in which they were manipulating pathogens. And we also know that they were doing it not just in a BSL force setting,

but in a BSL two setting. And then you do have the Alina Chan argument that you do not see the sort of wide range of mutations initially in transmission that you did with SARS-CoV-1. So I think there's those arguments. You could almost break this down into two arguments, which is, what's the likelihood that this virus was brought into or created in a lab versus what's the likelihood it escaped? The second problem, so you could break this down into two probabilities, probability that this virus was brought into a lab. And then really a third one, probability that this was manipulated in a lab and then probability that this thing escaped, or could have escaped. So if that's P1, P2, P3, P3 is like close to one. That could be taken as a foregone conclusion.

Meaning the probability that a virus in a lab can get out is very high. We know about the bad ones that have happened, but what we don't know is how many times has research been done on a virus in a lab that is of totally no consequence to humans and it gets out. We wouldn't know about it, but that could happen all the time. So if you're supposed to be functioning at BSL4, and by the way, I'm not saying this to sort of pick on the people doing it, BSL4 is a miserable environment. Like, you couldn't pay me enough to be a viral researcher working in a BSL4 environment. I would rather be painting roofs with tar in July than I would be working in a BSL4

lab. So can totally understand why there's a natural human inclination to take shortcuts with procedure there. So I almost think of like that third step of could this have escaped the lab as of course it could have. So it's really just a question of what's the likelihood that this thing made its way into a lab and got tweaked? And that's where you get into these other questions of, boy, the people who claim it didn't

aren't doing themselves any favors in the way they're acting. You know, the eco-health alliance, the Lancet paper doesn't look good in the light of day. No, it does not look good, which is back to one of the groups that I talk about in my vanity fair article is this group that calls themselves drastic, which are these scientists who are independent researchers scattered around the globe who became curious about this, obsessed by this, wanted to get to the bottom of it.

And I interviewed a number of them. How many of them are anonymous versus identified, by the way? There's a handful who are anonymous, and I did not write about any of those who are anonymous, who I didn't speak with, because you really cannot assess the agenda of someone who is anonymous, and you're not interviewing. I mean, you don't know whether it's Steve Bannon

hiding behind a pseudonym. But for example, the Indian researcher who calls himself the seeker on Twitter. He's a science teacher in Eastern India who was the one who uncovered this Chinese master's thesis. I was able to interview him. A lot of those people I interviewed, they said the same thing to me. I got into this because I wanted to know why the scientists were acting so on scientific. Why do you take a hypothesis off the table without evidence? If you're having an investigation, don't you pursue all hypotheses in an equal fashion until you have real evidence? And in fact, the World Health Organization partnered with a group of experts who went to China

and were basically sort of led on this highly restricted tour by the Chinese authorities and issued a report in which they said, oh, the lab leak hypothesis is highly unlikely. I obtained a US government analysis of that report which said, the report is essentially ridiculous. It concludes that on the basis of no evidence. And in fact, one of the lead researchers on that expedition was Peter Dashik of Eco Health Alliance. Wasn't Peter Dashik the only American brought in? Wasn't he the only American scientist brought in? Yes, he was. So there has not been a neutral conflict-free, forensic evaluation of all possibilities of origin at this time.

of all possibilities of origin at this time. Do you have confidence that such a thing will happen? The Biden administration recently requested such a report to be delivered within no less than 90 days if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, it is going to take a huge act of political will and really unity by many, many different countries to essentially force the Chinese to be more transparent. It's not necessarily a fight that the Biden administration wants to have.

It's really inconvenient. I think it would be a whole lot easier to say, well, it must be zoanotic and we can't find the animal host, bummer. So I don't know if we're going to be able to surmount all of the political hurdles and the evidentiary hurdles that lay in our way to have a real investigation into this. What would be required of full transparency?

What would be asked for that would demonstrate conclusively one way or the other? Well, part of that is what probably will never happen. China says, you know what? We're changing our minds, full transparency. We're putting back the database. Here's a record of all the samples. Here are the lab notebooks. Come to a tour. Here's the medical records of all the researchers who

are in the laboratory. That is very, very unlikely to happen. We, by the way, have no serology on the three people who worked in the lab who got sick in the late summer, early fall of 2019, correct? My understanding is that we don't, or if we do, if our intelligence agencies have something more definitive, it's definitely not in the public domain. So that information is not available. But plan B, assuming that China is not going to be more

of forthcoming, is for the countries of the world to basically look in their own research files. You know, that there is a lot of information that is potentially available to us if we are really to dig into our own filing cabinets. That is essentially what Joe Biden has called for. He's told the intelligence agencies to go back to the drawing board, inventory, what they have, and see if they can't come to some sort of closer conclusion.

There was recently an important paper put forth by Jesse Bloom, who is an esteemed virologist, who said that there were sequences that were in an NIH database that were taken offline at the request of Chinese scientists that had some early sequences from Wuhan. So potentially, you know, there is information that our own government for whatever reason has either buried or ignored or removed, which can be analyzed. So given all the time you've spent on this so far, how has your own probability shifted

from Zoonotic versus Lab Origin over the past year. Starting out, when anybody mentioned the possibility of a lab leak, I was very dismissive because it sounded to me just like conspiracy theories. And there were a lot of conspiracy theories associated with that. But I think what's happened is, as time has gone on, and no host animal has been found. And Trump has been removed, and so there's a sort of space to ask this question without necessarily aiding what's viewed as a racist agenda. And China has failed to be transparent,

and conflicts of interest have been exposed. From my own reporting now, I understand that a full investigation within the U.S. government was essentially blocked or restricted. I kind of give it even odds at this point. I think it's this possibility. I don't have a definite conclusion. If a host animal was found tomorrow, I would be like, okay, but I think there are just too many questions

to be ignored right now. One of the things about conspiracy theories is they require cover-ups. One of the conspiracy theories that's always obsessed me as the Kennedy assassination. Ever since I was a kid. And I don't know, probably by the time I was in my mid-30s, I'd seen enough red enough that I concluded, there's simply no way it was anything other than Le Harvie Oswald. Like I really just decided despite what Oliver Stone would have you believe, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

And there are many reasons I could bore you with that include a more accurate look at the forensics of the ballistics and things like that. But a big part of it is how hard would it be to keep everybody quiet if this were some CIA plot or some mob plot or one of the other crazy ideas that's put forth. And I guess that's one of the things that kind of nags at me here a little bit with this one, which is if this in fact came from a lab, how many people have to know that? It's not the case, by the way, that Peter Dashie would necessarily know that, right? He wouldn't necessarily know that.

I mean, he might have a huge incentive to hope that it's not happened, but he wouldn't necessarily know that. But presumably more than one person would be covering this up. And I guess that speaks to the bigger that number of people, the harder this thing becomes over time. If indeed that's the case. So let me say a couple of things about this. First of all, the question of COVID origin is the ultimate grassy null, right?

This is one for the ages. I think the question of a cover-up, it's very different to consider a cover-up in the U.S. with a tradition of freedom of speech and protection of whistleblowers, and to consider a cover-up in China with an authoritarian government that has control over everybody's lives and can absolutely wreak havoc, not just on a whistleblower, but on a whistleblower's family. So, for example, the anthrax lab leak in the Soviet Union in the 70s only became disclosed after the fall

of the Soviet Union. Once this sort of authoritarian structure around it crumbled, then it could be disclosed. But China has incredible control over its citizens, and could even if, let's say, Xiuzheng Li thinks it was a lab leak, or knows it was a lab leak, is she free to say that? Well, certainly not well in China, not well her families in China. Right. So that said, I'm always mindful of this expression we have in investigative journalism. Never assume conspiracy when incompetence is an option. In other words, it's easy to

say conspiracy, but that's always a more unlikely possibility. Yeah, conspiracy doesn't make a lot of sense here, and I think it detracts from an honest look at the facts. It should really be viewed as two competing hypotheses, and one of them that got largely ignored because it was politically inconvenient to consider. Yes, that's right. I side with that analysis 100%. Are you optimistic that a year from now we're going to have much more insight because the reality of it is if you look at what we know today versus what we knew six months ago, virtually nothing new,

right? Very little new information. There's just been more attention paid to old information, which is always concerning when you're trying to think about this, right? Because, you know, it's more interesting if oh my goodness, there is more information that is emerging here, we are learning more, but that's not really the case. We're learning more on the basis of old information,

and at some point we're going to saturate our knowledge based on that. Are you optimistic that we're going to learn more in the next year, or is this going to become simply more of a polarizing discussion? Well, I have no doubt that it will be a polarizing discussion and continue to be one. I think the real question, the way I see it, is how much political capital does the Biden administration want to spend on this? The Biden administration and the other powerful governments of the world. How far are they willing to push China to demand answers?

Looks someone in China knows some answer, presumably presumably like they know it was or wasn't a lab leak or they can guess that how far are the governments of the world prepared to go to push for an answer for this. Besides the United States which governments would have the most persuasion? Well you know a lot of this is going to be fought economically. So for example, originally, the government of Australia of Scott Morrison was pushing to have the question of a lab leak as part of one of the facets of the World Health Organization inquiry into this.

They wanted to make sure that that possibility got on the agenda. China's retaliation was very swift and they were immediately blocked. I believe it was import of Australian goods into China. So there is a lot of economic retaliation that can occur in the push for answers. And as we've already kind of identified, there's no scenario under which a lab leak occurred and the United States doesn't have blood on its hands as well through both direct contribution of funding and also collaboration from a research perspective, correct? I mean, in other words, if there's a lab leak, you can't just say, well, it's just the

fall to the Wuhan Institute of Virology because it's just bad luck that it occurred there. The reality is this could have easily taken place at the University of North Carolina or the University of Galveston, in Texas, where similar research goes on. The bigger issue is this was in some ways a joint effort between the United States and China, correct? Well, let me just say there is one other laboratory that is right near the Huanan seafood market, which is the Chinese Centers for Disease Control

and Prevention, which had moved right next to the seafood market shortly before the outbreak began. They had a coronavirus researcher who was very gung ho had collected a lot of viral samples. So I guess in theory it is possible that this came from a laboratory that had nothing to do with US funding. But I would say regardless, I still take your point that the lab leak scenario raises a lot of thorny questions for the national institutes of health, for how scientific research is funded. It would be hell to pay in the field of virology if the effort to identify viruses ended up unleashing them. Yeah, it's interesting to think how this will unfold

over the coming decade, the economic damage, the loss of life, et cetera. Do you get a sense of how this will impact gain a function research, at least in the United States? It's interesting because this whole debate has spotlighted this kind of tucked away corner of scientific research that the public really didn't know anything about. And so I certainly think that any agency now prepared to give a grant to this research

is really going to think carefully about this. I'm going to think about who are they giving grants to, who are the subgrantees downstream? What are the hazards, the dangers of the kind of research they're doing? So this really has been spotlighted, and I think it will, even without a definitive answer, I think it will have an impact on this kind of research.

Yeah, it's certainly clear that gain-of-function research didn't help here, even if this was a zoonotic origin. It's not like gain-of-function did anything to prevent it or more rapidly thwart it. Let me just say this, which is, you know, eco-health alliances whole argument for existence is if we partner with these far-flung laboratories and we go out to these remote back caves and we find these samples and we bring it in and we do this research,

we are going to have a way to potentially prevent outbreaks. Okay, we spent millions, you know, US government spent millions of dollars on that argument. What did we gain? Didn't prevent COVID-19, right? So where's the benefit? What's the upside? What's the argument for the continuation of this? That's a question that has not been answered. Well, I wish I had a stronger point of view on this,

but I think I'm in your camp, Catherine. I'm, I can talk myself into both of these scenarios, and the only thing I find myself really hoping for is the open and honest evaluation of this, which unfortunately requires getting new information. And I think the majority of that information probably lies outside of our borders, and therefore is going to be limited. So I'm not sure if we're gonna be any further along in a year.

I do believe that eventually one day we will know, is it gonna be in our lifetime? Not sure about that. Well, it's funny, right? At some point, if no intermediary host and or species of origin is ever identified, like, is there some asymptote to that or tail where you say, well, gosh, if it hasn't been found in like a hundred years, it really doesn't exist.

Or you, you know, in theory, you would imagine even if this was all done through gain a function research, you'd need to find something in nature that was 99.8% close to it, and then you would say that that last 0.2% had to be done in the lab. But then you could probably equally convince yourself that no, that 0.2, that variation of 0.2% took place in the first few people that were never identified. So again, I just, I go back and forth and I talk myself in and out of this. And I'm frustrated that this is something that should be knowable and is not known, which is generally more frustrating to me that things that are unknown that maybe can't be knowable.

But for example, I have no idea if there is life beyond earth. But I'm not as frustrated by that because that seems a lot harder to know. This seems like something that is knowable and I probably will never know it. Well, let's put it this way, regardless of whether there is life beyond earth, the answer to that didn't force you to stay inside for a year and not see friends and family. So this one for all of us, and I'm really struck by this, feels so personal, of course, because it is. And so, you know, people are obsessed with this question. And once you start looking into it, as you've experienced, and as I did reporting it, you just go down this rabbit hole in which like night is day and day is night and

and you cannot get to the bottom of it no matter how many rocks you turn over. Okay, Arthur and maybe the next time we get together we can talk about the consultants that unleashed torture upon the US government and the CIA and their efforts in Iraq. Would that be a would that be a great falloff discussion? Sure, I'll do that one. I know my goodness. Do you ever write about things that aren't upsetting? Do you ever write happy stories?

You can guess from my silence, I have to really think about that. It's not a lot of unicorns and rainbows over here, no. But I tend to gravitate towards the things that fascinate me. And you're fascinated by the macabre. You really don't like good things, do you? In my own life, I do, but I do, you know, I do set out to try to get to the bottom of things that do not have easy answers, and sometimes those can be quite dark. Well, Katherine, if it wasn't bad enough to talk about

generic drugs and the corruption that goes on there, you put a bow on it this time. Thank you. And again, I think the bow is less about whether or not this did or did not come from a lab, but more about the fact that there is, there has been and likely will be forever an enormous obstruction to get to the truth about it. Yes. Unfortunately, that is absolutely true. Yep.

Well, thank you very much for your work on this and for making time to chat about it today. Thanks. Great to talk to you as always, Peter. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you more in-depth, exclusive content without relying on paid ads. It's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription.

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