TRIGGERnometry - Where Did COVID-19 REALLY Come From? With Matt Ridley

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

Biologist and Author, Matt Ridley joins us in the studio. His latest title, co-authored with Alina Chan, Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, is now available. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. - CHAPTERS: 00:00 Intro 01:46 Lab Leak: Conspiracy Theory to Mainstream 04:12 Why Does it Matter Where COVID Came From? 05:48 The Evidence for Wuhan Lab Leak Theory 15:36 Gain-of-Function Research: Purpose and Risks 29:51 Biosafety at the Wuhan Institute of Biology  34:13 Previous Lab Leaks and Cover-Ups 37:15 How Do We Prevent Another Pandemic? 50:02 Will We Ever Find Out What Happened? 52:57 Biotechnology / De-extinction Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The more we looked into it, the more extraordinary it was they couldn't find any evidence for a connection with the food chain or the market or anything. And the more the experiments and work that was going on in that one laboratory began to look odd. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today, and a returning guest of that, is a writer, a former Lord and the author of a new book called Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, co-author, I should say, with Alain Chan.

Very important, yeah. Former Lord, Matt Ridley. Welcome back to Trigonometry. Thank you so much, Constantine. Great to be with you, yeah. I co-authored this book with Alina Chan, and she's the senior author on the book, but it's a double effort. Fantastic.

Well, we've got you to talk about it. So here you are. before we get into it, just tell a little bit about your background, your areas of expertise, how are you where you are? Right, yeah. Well, I started as a scientist, wasn't very good at it, so became a journalist. It was quite good at that, I think, but after a while I basically became kind of self-employed writer, writing books, newspaper columns, things like that, but always with a particular interest in science.

I got into the House of Lords in 2013. That was a part-time but interesting career. I've dropped out of that because I think actually I can make better use of my time. Now you either do that properly or not at all. And so I see myself as a writer about science. Well, your previous book, which I really enjoyed reading as well, was about innovation. And what I remember of that interview, we did it during one of the lockdowns that we've had. I think it was the first lockdown.

It might have been the first lockdown. And we had a great conversation about innovation. And at the end, as we always do, quite casually, we went, so, Matt, what's the one thing we're not talking about? that we should be, and you said something along the lines of the fact that this virus probably came from a lab or something along those lines. And we both went, oh shit, because this was part of the time when that was still being censored. So you thought, oh my God, we've had a nutter on the program. No, I didn't, actually.

I thought, oh, my God, we had a person who has quite a reasonable point of view that I think should be explored for which we'll be punished. That's what I actually thought. Well, it is staggering looking back, how very much you weren't allowed to talk about that. topic in the early part of the pandemic. It was shut down very quickly in February, March 2020, as a conspiracy theory akin to, you know, it's caused by 5G or something like that. And it's only really in the May of 2021 that there was a sea change because of various things that came together, suddenly the media started saying, actually, we can't rule out the possibility that came out of a laboratory. We need to investigate it properly.

Even the United Nations, sorry, the World Health Organization and the U.S. government, particularly, the Biden administration, said very firmly, yeah, that explanation does have to be on the table and we've got to explain it. So to some extent, we're there still, but there's been quite a lot of pushback recently saying, oh, please, can we just drop this subject? We better not, you know, of course it was natural. Most pandemics are natural, so this one must have been. I started out telling people, no, don't go down that rabbit hell. It's not out of a lab. It's natural.

I've read these papers that say so. I then began to think about the arguments they were using in those papers, began to look at the evidence a bit more. And I said, well, I think it's an open question. It does need to be investigated. Alina Chan and I started writing a book. We both thought that within a few months, it would probably become clear that it was something to do with that market.

But the more we looked into it, the more extraordinary it was, they couldn't find any evidence for a connection with the food chain or the market or anything. And the more the experiments and work that was going on in that one laboratory

began to look odd. Before we get into that, let me ask you a broader question first, which I think, sadly, a lot of people will be asking themselves and people like you and people like us who want to cover this issue. Everyone wants to move on from COVID.

think, except the people who benefit from it massively, which is a significant portion now of people online, particularly. Why does it matter where this virus came from is what some people might say? Yeah. I'm staggered by how many people ask that question. I know you're asking it because it has to be asked, but for me it's obvious why it matters. And you're right that apathy is probably our biggest challenge on this topic in particular. It matters, I think, for three reasons. First, because if we don't understand how this pandemic started, we're less likely to be able to stop the next one.

Second, because bad actors are watching this and saying, we could do a lot of damage with a highly transmissible virus. It doesn't even need to be very virulent. And actually, the WHO is going to come in and say, well, it probably happened naturally. So we wouldn't even get blamed. You know, so unless we pinned up, what happened, we're encouraging these bad actors. And the third reason, which I think is important,

is that we've got between 5 and 15 million people dead now. We do owe it to them in some sense, I think, morally, if not otherwise, to find out what happened and how this happened. It's a great point. And when you told me about this that people were saying it's not important, I found it baffling. But let's actually now look into the virus. What makes you think that there is a good chance the virus was created in a lab? Well, there's two main strands to answering that question. The first is the lack of evidence for the alternative natural hypothesis. In the case of SARS, within a couple of months, it was clear that food handlers had antibodies or had the virus, that the animals in the markets, particularly the palm civvets,

had the virus, et cetera, et cetera. A very clear pattern emerged. Today, with much superfluous, technology, you know, much better genetic testing equipment, we haven't been able to find a single infected animal, not one. I mean, sure, cats are catching it now, but they're catching it from people. You know, nobody prior to the first human infection, no animal had it, and no food handlers, no chefs, none of the stuff we had with SARS. So the normal pattern you'd expect, and this happened with, you know, with Nipa, too, which is a virus that was found in Malaysia, some time ago, you know, pigs were getting it from fruit bats. You know, it was very clear how it was happening.

So none of that has happened in this case, and they've tested 80,000 animals in China or claimed to have done, and they've not found a single one with it. On the other hand, on the positive side, you have to take into account the fact that the laboratory that was doing the most research on SARS-like viruses in bats in the world, by a mile, was in Wuhan. The laboratory that published most papers on this topic is the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The laboratory that deposited most SARS-like bat genomes, SARS-like virus genomes into databases, is in Wuhan. That's not because this virus is found in bats around Wuhan. They've tested over 10,000 bats around Wuhan, and they've never found a virus like this in the bats there. So it's not a local issue. It's thousands of miles away But, you know, it's Here's an analogy 2007 there was an outbreak of foot and mouth

On a farm in Surrey It was less than 13 miles From the world's leading reference Laboratory for studying foot and mouth disease At Purbright Right, that turned out not to be a coincidence There was a leaking pipe at the Perbright lab The contractor had come into MEND

It had gone straight to a farm nearby and the cattle caught it there. So, you know, if foot and mouth turns up in Purb, right, you don't say, well, that's just a coincidence. It's pretty similar. A SARS-like outbreak in Wuhan is much the same. Well, this is one of the things that I think I didn't know, and I think most people don't know, is actually things leak from labs regularly. I mean, not regularly, like every day regularly, but they do leak from labs, right?

it would not be an out of this world once in a millennium occurrence, would it? Correct. And so, you know, smallpox in 1978, in Birmingham, brucellosis in 2019 in China, infected 10,000 people as a result of a laboratory accident. Now, that's a bacterium, not a virus, but still. But the most striking examples are SARS, because when the SARS epidemic was over in 2003-4, there were, over that winter, there were at least six, we think, cases of laboratory workers getting infected in the lab while studying SARS.

One in Singapore, one in Taiwan, and four in Beijing. And in five of those cases, nobody knew how it happened. So it wasn't as if there was a drop test tube or a punctured glove or something like that. So, you know, it's very easy for these things to happen. And even in the best run laboratories, you know, of course most laboratories are safe most of the time. But there are inevitably opportunities for these, particularly a thing as transmissible as this, to be caught in a lab. Or in the field, you know, one of the ironies of this work, what the Wuhan Institute of Arilogy was doing was, let's prevent the next pandemic by going out and finding all the, viruses that might cause it in the wild

and bringing them back to a lab in a city to study them. How could that go wrong? Well, it's been described by someone as looking for a gas leak with a lighted match. But Matt, and that was, because there was an incident in 2012, which is key to your hypothesis as to why perhaps it could have leaked from a lab.

Could you delve into that a little bit, please? Yes, when the virus was first described in January of 2020, it was compared by the world, hand scientists in a paper to a virus they'd found in their own freezer, which was 96.2% the same. And that was very interesting. It was called RATG-13. And I spent a day and a half trying to work out where they'd found it because they said it's been found in your noun. There was no reference, no link, nothing. The name RATG-13 didn't appear anywhere on the internet before that date.

So I said, what's going on here? They say they found it before, but there's no report of where they found it, how they found it. And it was over a month later that as a result of an anonymous tip-off to an Italian scientist called Rosanna Sogretto, Rosana Secret, her name is, that we were able to link it to the outbreak of a pneumonia-like viral illness that killed three out of six people who caught it while shoveling bat guano in a disused mind. shaft in southern Yunnan, roughly 1,800 kilometres by road from Wuhan, which had led to very strong suspicions that it was caused by a SARS-like virus, and that had led to the Wuhan Institute of Virology sending seven expeditions over two years to this mine shaft to collect bats and bring

back samples, one of which turned out to have this sample in it, which they renamed just before the pandemic, which is a bit weird. And it took another six months and a brilliant Spaniard on the internet called Francisco Ribeira before we were all suddenly able to say, hang on, didn't you find eight other viruses that are very similar in that mine shaft?

And six months after that, they published an addendum to their nature paper saying, yeah, we did find eight other viruses that are very similar. But we didn't think it was important. to tell you about that. So getting information about what happened between 2012 and 2019 was pretty difficult. And one of the things that they implied that they had only sequenced the new, the bat virus in 2020 when the pandemic started. But it later emerged on the, when they deposited the

genome database, it had a date label on it, which said that they'd sequenced it in 2017 and 2018. So they'd thawed it a couple of years before the pandemic in order to study it. Now why? What were they doing with it? They've never told us. It's important that we know this kind of stuff. It might be irrelevant. And if it is, they should share all the information they've got. But they've never shared what viral sequences they had in that lab after 2016. And that's what we need to know. And this is a point, I think, because the Chinese government have been very, very secretive and, you know, have been obstructing investigations,

have been outright denial. And you look at them. And even as a casual observer, you think to yourself, there's something shady going on because you're not being completely honest. Well, if it wasn't anything to do with the laboratory, then the best way of convincing us of that

is to share the database of everything that was in that lab. There is a database. it's got 22,000 entries in it, samples, sequences, you know, where things were found, what they were, about 15,000 of them relate to bats. It was available up until the 12th of September 2019 for outsiders to check, although part of it was password protected. Since then, it's been offline. Now, the purpose of that database was to help prevent the next pandemic.

And so, as Alina puts it, which pandemic are they waiting for? You know, I mean, this is surely the moment you produce this. They say, well, people have been trying to hack it. Well, what does that mean? Were they trying to hack it in 2019? In September 2019? It doesn't seem very likely. And anyway, what's the problem with someone hacking it?

You know, it's information that you collected in order to share with the world to help prevent a pandemic. So why would you mind if it got into the public domain? So there's a lot here that badly needs. answering. And yes, scientists were gagged right at the start. They were told any Chinese scientists who published anything about this virus was without permission of the state was going to be punished. So there's been a, you know, far from being open and transparent, which they were praised by the World Health Organization for being at the start, ironically, they haven't been. And as I say, if there's nothing to hide, then don't hide it.

One of the questions that this raises, Matt, and I think for a lot of lay people like us, it's really a question that I think is important to address is, what is the benefit of these laboratories doing this work, particularly when you're talking about gain of function research, which I think a lot of people have questions about. Maybe can you just explain to people why are these labs doing this? What is gain of function? What are the benefits of doing that, if there are any, et cetera?

Yeah. Well, there was quite a lively debate, actually, in about 2018, between one group of virologists who said, this is what we've got to do, we've got to prevent the next pandemic by going out there and finding the threats and studying them. And another group of scientists who said, that ain't going to work. You're not going to be able to find the virus that's likely to cause the next pandemic, because you've no idea among the millions of viruses out there, which is the one that's really dangerous. And actually, you're playing with fire. You might make it worse. So this was a live argument within, you know, within. virology. And so what have they been doing? They've been collecting viruses in bats in this case, bringing them to the lab, sequencing their genomes. Then they've been doing two other things.

First of all, trying to grow one of these viruses alive in the lab, which is not at all easy. You know, you get evidence that there's a virus in the sample, but it's not in a state where it can replicate in a human cell in the lab. But they did manage with a virus. a couple of viruses called WIV1 and WIV16 to to so-called isolate or at least, you know, rear the virus, you know, get it to grow and reproduce, which is, you know, a little risky, but it's interesting. They did this at biosecurity level two, which is basically wearing gloves and maybe a mask. You know, it's not much more than that, which is probably not ideal. but then for the ones they couldn't grow in the lab they thought we want to know how dangerous these are

we can sequence them we can see what the sequence of the genome is but it's too fragmented to be able to grow as a creature so let's synthesize the key bit of the spike gene that causes it to be able to get inside cells and let's swap that into one of these viruses we can grow, WIV1 or WIV-16. And then let's test how dangerous that one is. These are so-called chimera viruses or hybrid viruses. And some of those experiments resulted in viruses that were 10,000 times more transmissible between cells.

That's great. And some of them resulted in ones that were three or four times more lethal to humanized mice. That's mice with human genes. So these were significant gains of function in the sense of, you know, have you made the virus more able to infect human beings and human cells? And remember, every time you put it into human-airway epithelial cells, so cells taken from the lungs and cultured in labs, every time you do that, you're giving the virus a lesson in how to attack this new host. and it's going to not just stay the same, it's going to mutate and evolve and say, hmm, oh, I'll try this.

You know, well, of course it doesn't. I'm not trying to pretend it's conscious, but do you see what, it's called passageing. Yes. You know, and it does adapt to the new host. So it was very interesting when a few weeks ago, we finally got hold of the content of some key emails between Anthony Fauci and America and Jeremy Farrow in the UK

and a bunch of other senior virologists, in which they all basically said there are features of this virus that looks like it might have been passaged in human cells and we can't explain them any other way and this particularly relates to a thing called the furian cleavage site which I can get into if you want

but maybe you know I think we can just leave that there but the question you haven't answered is what are the potential benefits of this kind of research I'm sorry you're quite right to press me on that And so the purpose of the research, as I say, was to predict and prevent the next pandemic. But what's the mechanism by which that happens? The mechanism by which that was going to happen was going to be by saying,

we've identified that this strain of virus is dangerous. And we need to start doing surveillance for it. We need to go and check whether anybody's catching it in the forest near the cave where we found the bat. And they even put in a proposal to the Pentagon to spray experimental vaccines into bat caves in the hope that it would immunise the bats, which is pretty wacky stuff, frankly. I mean, I can't believe they didn't get the money for that.

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That's right, go to synthetic apps.com and use our code trigonometry to get 25% off. They do talk in recent years, particularly more and more about vaccines, about the idea is eventually we might be able to develop a vaccine against SARS and a vaccine against any SARS-like or indeed any coronavirus because SARS-like viruses are only a small fraction of coronaviruses. So the ultimate aim would have been to come up with a vaccine that they had ready to stop a pandemic when it suddenly started. Now, you can imagine if you were in charge of that kind of research,

how horrifying it would be to be accused of starting the pandemic instead of preventing it. So no wonder they have a very strong incentive to resist that explanation. But even on its own terms, you know, remember the purpose of this research over the last 10 years, was to prevent the next pandemic. Well, it didn't do that, did it? But Matt, how is it?

And again, you're talking to an absolute layman here. You get this virus, right? You make it more lethal, more transmissible by 10,000 times, 12 times more lethal. Three to four times. Or three to four times more lethal, whatever it is. Are you just not, you're not playing with fire here? Well, if you read the papers that are coming out of the Wuhan Institute,

through virology, you don't get the impression that they are particularly worried about that. With one exception, there's a paper in 2015 co-authored with Ralph Barrick of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is the sort of godfather of this kind of research. He started that kind of work, but mostly on other kinds of coronaviruses. He only got into SARS-like ones with the help of the Wuhan Institute. And what that paper says, and Xi Jinping Li of the Wuhan Institute of Arulogy as a co-author on it, says, hang on a minute, some of these experiments are dangerous, and we do need to stop and think about whether they're worth the risk. And this 2015 is key, because that's right in the middle of a very live debate in the US about gain of function,

which was started by some influenza experiments, a guy called Ron Fauci in the Netherlands and another team in Wisconsin, had done these experiments in which they turned a bird flu into a mammal flu effectively. They made it possible for ferrets to give flu to other ferrets, a flu that previously could only be transmitted from bird to bird, through the air, not an aerial infection. The experiment was done in incredibly safe conditions, a huge amount of preparation to make sure that it was safe. And the answer it gave was,

it's much easier for this virus to turn into a mammal flu than we thought. So that's a warning and we're glad we did the experiment so that we know that. But there was a bunch of other scientists who said, should you really be doing this? I mean, didn't we know it was possible for this to happen? What if it were to escape? You know, how dangerous would that be? You've basically trained a virus to attack mammals,

which it wasn't expecting to do. So that's what the gain of function. Pause was all about. A pause in federal funding between 2014 and 2017 saying let's not fund these kinds of experiments and let's not publish the details of how we did them so that other people can't pick up on them. And then in 2017, under Donald Trump,

but was it Anthony Fauci who wanted it changed? Because he'd always argued against the pause. We don't know. that the pause was ended. But meanwhile, during the pause, some American money had gone to fund similar experiments in Wuhan. This is something, Francis, I'm just sorry. I just want to pick up on this one point,

which is, I know this isn't strictly about the virus, but it is about the other stuff. Can you, again, to the layman, me. And me. Why are the United States? States funding research of this kind in China? Why is this thing happening?

Aren't countries like, do you show I'm getting that? Yes. And the answer, which is superficially sensible, is that emerging pandemics are not going to come out of North Carolina. Well, they might, but not necessarily. There's every chance they're going to come out of tropical regions, particularly forested regions, places, lots of bats. Bats as a source of dangerous viruses has clearly come up the agenda in the last 20 years

because Ebola is in bats, Nyper's in bats, henders from bats, rabies is from bats. There's bats seem to carry a lot of diseases that might spark pandemics. So let's go to where these viruses live and let's study them. And let's fund researchers in those countries to work on them. So there's an organisation called EcoHealth Alliance, which is a New York-based foundation, which grew out of a wildlife charity founded by Gerald Daryl, funnily enough. And very entrepreneurially, a guy called Peter Dazzax spotted this opportunity and said, in the wake of SARS, there's suddenly a lot of money for this project of going out and looking for infected animals in the wild.

And so he started getting huge American government grants and distributing them to partners in other parts of the world. And his biggest partner was the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and one of his best friends was Xi Zheng Li, the head of the key laboratory there. And they went on many expeditions together to bat caves and on protective equipment and caught bats and things like that. So it's very much a collaboration. And remember, scientists love international collaborations.

and, you know, they think it's a good idea. But the paper that describes some of these chimeric virus experiments that resulted in greater infectivity by Ben Hu and colleagues, 2017, clearly acknowledges an American grant. Now, that wasn't a big part of the funding. It was quite a small part of the funding. Most of the money came from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. But, you know, there is no doubt that American funding,

was going to this, not, I think, necessarily to get around the pause on doing the work in America. Might have been a bit of that. But just because everyone is making an argument, this is stuff we should be funding because we're going to prevent the next pandemic. And I don't think they'd really thought it through myself. I personally think I'm a huge fan of science. I'm a big pro biotech person. But I think scientists need to rethink what experiments are going to damage. their own reputation, if they go wrong, at the very least. Don't you think it also betrays a certain arrogance among scientists, you know, playing with these things, playing God, if you will,

without realizing that you're human and being human, you're going to make mistakes? It doesn't matter how many systems you put in place. It doesn't matter how rigorous the systems are, the safety checks. It's human beings running this. They're fallible. They're going to make a mistake. And if something like that gets out, well, we're going to be even more problems and we are already.

Yeah, and, you know, Ralph Barrick, who, as I say, is the kind of godfather of this, has been implicitly critical of the fact that some of these experiments were being done at low biosecurity levels. China was in the process of building its first biosecurity level four lab during these years. What does that mean? Okay, well, biosecurity level two. Just take us through all the levels. Yeah, biosecurity level two, you're wearing gloves, probably a mask, you're being a bit

careful. It's like being in central London, basically. Exactly. Biossecurity level, and that's the level they did experiments on cells on. When they went to infecting live mice with viruses, they went up a level to biosecurity level three. Now, what that's doing is you've got a cabinet with negative air pressure, so that, you know, the air is sort of going in and not coming out at you. And you're working on them with gloves that are sort of built into the cabinet. Yes.

Okay, so that's pretty good. Yeah. And you've seen that. Basically, level four, you're doing that, but you're also wearing a space suit. And the space suit has positive air pressure in it. So you inflate like the Michelin Man. And that's so that if you puncture your suit, the air goes out and not in. So nothing can get into you.

And you shower before you take the suit off. And you shower after you take the suit off. And you then put your clothes on. So your clothes have not even been. in the lab, et cetera, et cetera. And the lab has no sharp edges, and it has no corners in which you can't clean and things like that.

And the air handling is absolutely critical. So these are really difficult labs to build. And this one was built in Wuhan with French help. The French agreed to give them the technology for how to build it, the contract for which, fun enough, was signed by a man called Michel Barnier when he was French Foreign Secretary.

But the French then got very annoyed because the Chinese, having got the engineering details, basically said, well, we're not going to involve any French firms, and we're not going to invite any French scientists after all. We're just going to do it ourselves. So that doesn't sound like them. Big row about that. But when Ben Hu's paper came out, the American embassy sent some experts to Wuhan saying,

could we come and have a look around? because you've asked for help from the University of Texas Galveston Medical Branch to improve the functioning of this biosecurity level four lab. We'd like to come and, you know, see around. And they wrote a pretty scathing report saying that procedures are not good, the training is not good, the equipment is not as good as it should be. And that was in 2018. So there were concerns.

But it's not necessarily relevant to this story, Because the experiments that I'm talking about were done at virus degree level three and two. And they were done on the old campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is about 10 miles from the new campus. When the World Health Organization team went a year ago, pretty well exactly, to Wuhan, they only visited the new campus. They didn't go to the campus where these experiments were actually done. Right.

Well, I do think it's relevant, actually, Matt, because, again, as a layman, it just sounds to me like you're not dealing with a counterpart party in China that has the same attitude to this level of safety that you might do elsewhere. And as a Russian, I'm allowed to say this. Not all of the world operates and thinks exactly like we do here in the West, right? And attitudes to safety, attitudes to care, attitudes to precision of engineering, not quite the same in some countries as they are in others. So I think what it may be that it didn't happen there, it might have happened elsewhere. But I think what it speaks to is the fact that these are not necessarily people that can be trusted with

this level of threat. Well, yes, we've got to be careful here. These are perfectly good scientists doing pioneering work and technology and engineering is as good as many places in the world, but of course it may not be quite the, particularly if you're, you know, this is your first foray into this kind of level of work. But just going back to a Russian, example, there was a city called Svedlosk, now Katerinberg, where about 68 people died suddenly. And there's a plant in the city that the West said was a bio-warfab plant. Could it have been a leak of anthrax? The Soviets said, don't be ridiculous, they died of food poisoning.

And we've investigated. Forget it. And so the American said, well, could we send Matt Mezzleson a Nobel Prize winner and a bunch of other people to confirm what you've said? This is the – this is – 19709 was the incident. Mezzleson and Co. went. They said, the Russians are right. There's nothing to see here. The Soviet Union then collapsed. And some of the scientists who worked in that bio-warfare plant, and it was a biowulfair plant, then came forward and said, actually, that was a leak.

it was anthrax that killed 68 people. We left a filter off an exhaust pipe, and we left a note for the next shift saying, remember to put the filter back on before you do it, and they didn't read the note. And we sent a bloom of anthrax over a suburb. So it took a change of regime before we found out what really happened.

Well, this is my point, Matt. I wasn't trying to insult scientists who are doing the work or whatever. I just know that kind of regime, right? And the Chinese Communist Party does not seem to me to be a million miles away from the party under which I lived the early part of my life. These are people, by and large, who will do everything to cover up the truth if it means not losing face in the West and to avoid responsibility for things that have been done. That doesn't mean they are responsible.

But I certainly don't have a lot of faith or trust in that kind of institution. Well, we tell us a slightly amusing story in our book about a leak that happened in May 2020 in San Francisco. China and this was a leak of leopards okay there was a guy out in this field one day on the edge of a city I can't remember which city in China and suddenly there's a leopard sitting in his field and he goes whoa I just seen a leopard never see you can't see the leopard there's no leopards around here you know I saw a leopard and somebody else says I've seen a leopard and suddenly there's all this you know people are seeing leopards and he doesn't dare report it because he thinks well I'll probably get told off

if I report this. But eventually the news reaches a media organization which ring up the local zoo and said, have you lost any leopards? No, we haven't lost any leopards? More sightings, more leopards. They ring them back and say, have you lost any leopards?

Well, actually, yeah, we did lose some leopards. Why? Have you seen them? But the point is, nobody wanted to own up. Yeah. And under that kind of regime, that happens. There is no, there's no upside to blowing a whistle. No.

Then there's no transparency as a result. But that makes me think, Matt, everything that you have said, everything that we've talked about means, in my mind, it's inevitable that this is going to happen again. Well, one thing we in our book argue is that there's not been much evidence of anyone saying, let's change our proceedings. procedures as a result of this so as to make sure it doesn't happen again. That's true of the markets as well.

We're not seeing a huge crackdown on the sale of wildlife in markets for traditional Chinese medicine or for food. And you'd think if that was the cause, we would be seeing that. And the one thing we have seen, interestingly, is a change in the rules in China to make the fines for selling experimental animals in the market bigger. Okay? So if you want to market some, if you want to take mice home at the end of your shift and make a little money by selling them for food in the market,

I mean, don't look and be like that. Why would you do anyway? Do you see what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Then suddenly they've put the fines up for that. Okay. Why would they suddenly put the fines up for that? Does that mean that they suspect that's what happened?

Probably not. Maybe they're just being careful. But, you know, the world needs to stop and think, which experiments, whether this came out of a lab or not, which experiments should we revisit and say, let's not do those kind of experiments? When biotechnology started in the mid-1970s, scientists got together at a place called Azillamar in California and said, let's draw up some rules to reassure the world that we're not going to do crazy stuff with this new genetic engineering.

And one of the rules they came up with was we shouldn't work on highly pathogenic organisms. We should work on e-coli, which is mostly a friendly organism. And there is a disease you can get from e-coli. But they were saying, let's work on the pathogenic strains. Let's work on the safe strains. Well, they're quite, in those days it was all about bacteria.

You know, it wasn't about viruses. But, you know, when did that change and how far did we go to the point where we're doing risky experiments with dangerous viruses? I mean, I consider myself well-educated in genomics and biotechnology, although I'm no great expert. I didn't know this kind of work was going on until the pandemic started. And I think I'd have been quite shocked if I'd read some of those papers and seen how much a SARS-like virus had been. increased in infectivity or virulence. And the fact that I find even more worrying is that it seems to be business as normal. But there's another way that we can create a type of pandemic virus.

It's the way that we keep animals when we transport them, particularly things like chickens, etc. How much of a danger is that? Yeah, well, there was a crash on a freeway in America last week. and all these cul-ball boxes were all over the freeway. They contained monkeys, live monkeys, that were being transported from a port where they'd been imported from Mauritius

to be used in experiments in a lab somewhere. And luckily, monkeys didn't escape or anything like that. But you're right, there's all sorts of risks in the handling of animals. There's no question about that. I mean, there's actually quite a significant bird flu epidemic going on in the UK at the moment. It's affecting barnacle geese in parts of Scotland, and they're dying in pretty large numbers. As far as we can tell, that's entirely natural.

It's not come because of chicken farms, but if it were to get into chicken farms, it could be quite unfunny, if you see what I mean. So, you know, we actually, I don't want to sound too alarming. here because I think with the technology we have for detecting things with our general high standards which are getting higher all the time, the chances

of a pandemic getting going in the human race are pretty low. Now that may sound a crazy thing to say in the middle of a pandemic but my point is that this one might be a bit of an exception which was caused by something that wouldn't normally be

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Sign up for their newsletter, access of easy that tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. So, Matt, what should we take away from this? Because here's the counter argument maybe to everything we've been saying. And this is just the devil's advocate point of view. But let's say that this way of doing things, this gain of function thing, where you create a much worse virus than the one you started with. And then you go, oh, let's see if we can make a vaccine for this. and then when this virus naturally occurs, you've already got a vaccine, let's say.

Let's say this had produced a vaccine that prevented the next pandemic. I think we'd all be in favor of that, right? Correct. So what is the lesson here? This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new elixir collection, featuring three perfume intense scents,

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coincidence that this lab was in Wuhan but it had nothing to do with the outbreak and it had the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 in its freezer but that's just a coincidence and it just happened to be that a bloke was importing hog badgers from somewhere in a farm on southern Yunnan and

he stopped in a roadside cave and there were bats in the cave and they got picked it up and he then went nowhere else and he only took his hog badges to Wuhan, not to Guangzhou, which is where most hog badges are sold, interestingly, etc. Okay, I'm making it sound a bit too implausible, but do you see what I mean? It's possible that there's a perfectly innocent explanation here that involves the food chain. And we can't rule that out. We actually have a chapter at the end of our book, making the strongest case we can for that, you know, and we say things like, of course the scientists

were studying this because they were expecting it to happen, you know, and things like that. where was I going? Well, I was saying what is the lesson here? Oh, yeah, what is the lesson? Well, if that's the case, and it's a huge coincidence, then we've had a lucky escape with the labs. It turned out not to be relevant, but we know enough to know that if this virus had been in a biosecurity level two lab,

in an experiment, and one of the researchers would be almost bound to have got infected. You know, it's so infectious this thing, as we know, from our daily lives at the moment, that you really shouldn't be having such a thing in a lab, whether it caused this pandemic or not. So let's have a real hard think about how we regulate experiments. And let's also have a real hard think about how transparent we are, after a pandemic starts

because it's not good enough to have all this secrecy yet again like we had with SARS. When an airliner crashes, the information from the black box and other sources is shared all across the industry. Everybody gets to know what

happened so that you can learn the lessons. It feels to us like that ought to happen in these cases. If there's a incident in a lab because somebody punctures a glove, there ought to be an automatic Well, every lab in the world gets to hear about how that happened without, you know, wanting to send the guy to jail for puncturing his glove, just saying, beware, we've discovered that,

you know, it's not sensible to have hypodermic needles next to gloves or whatever it might be, you know, you know, because that's what you do in the airline industry. You say, we've discovered a little glitch that we didn't realize it was risky, but it is. Let's do that. But isn't this the central flaw of the argument, which is, I think we can all accept, we can't trust the CCP. They're not going to be honest. They're not going to be forthcoming. So this is just going to happen again, isn't it? Because we're never going to learn these lessons. Well, but what if America, Britain, Australia, European countries, Japan, all got together and said, here's a treaty in which we

all agree to share information when this kind of thing happens. We share every incident from every lab in our countries with you. Everybody who signs this treaty gets to hear about what happens at Purbright when we have a leaking pipe with a foot and mouth virus in it. And more and more countries sign it. Eventually we shamed China into signing it. Now, I don't know how you do that. That's way above my pay grade. But do you get the point, you know, that a pandemic treaty that we build up in that way

might be the way of making sure that even communist regimes are shamed into... Would the Soviet Union have signed a treaty like that, Matt? That's my question. You tell me. No. No way. There is no way a regime like that would share all of their secrets, particularly their mess-ups. No, but it does at least put some pressure on them.

It does at least show that, you know, it shines up the fact that they're not collaborating, not cooperating. Maybe if it came with not giving the money to do it anymore and whatever. But I guess what I'm hearing is you're not suggesting a blanket ban on this type of research. You're saying it should be done in a more secure lab. There should be more supervision. There should be more transparency after the fact. That's your position. Well, I'd go a little bit further than that.

I'd say let's not do gain of function experiments on dangerous viruses that are related to viruses that could cause human disease. Yeah, I mean, there's also lots of chemical and biological weapons that are completely banned that are being researched in Russia in China at the moment. So it's great news all around, mate. The future is bright. The future is pandemic. your future's one giant pathogen.

Yes, I know. Let me make a slightly optimistic point, which is that when this started, there was a lot of stuff about, oh, this is, you know, our own punishment for raping the earth, you know, and there's a sort of ecological angle to this. And I pointed out that actually the one place that isn't deforestation, because deforestation is the key link here, the one place that isn't deforestation, well, lots of places aren't, but the place that's reforesting faster than almost anywhere on the planet is southern China. Actually, there's an enormous growth in the amount of green vegetation in that area. People are leaving the countryside and going into the cities, abandoning farms,

they're getting overgrown with vegetation, etc. This is a huge trend there. So if anything, the problem is too much forest and too many bats. It's not that we're destroying their habitat and they're all having to move into town. These bats don't live in buildings anyway. They live in caves. They horseshoe bats do mostly. So if this turns out to be an exception as a result of a human error,

then in some ways it's reassuring in the sense that all we have to do is not do the human error and we might not get a future pandemic. Matt, isn't the problem going to be, and look, you're an optimist, I'm a miserable pessimist, isn't the problem going to be that we're never going to find out? Alina and I both take the view that we will eventually find out. We think enough people know, one way or the other. I mean, there might be information about the market that hasn't come out. There might be information about the lab that hasn't come out.

But at some point, maybe after the fall of Xi Jinping's regime, somebody's going to come forward and say, here's what happened. there must be people who could blow the whistle and tell us more. Now at the moment it's far too difficult for them to do so and we're probably not welcoming enough for them in the West. Alina makes this point quite often. You know, we need to, as it were, roll out the red carpet for somebody who comes and talks.

But I think it's amazing how stuff does eventually trickle out. And we're having a constant trickle at the moment. I mean, we had a key document break in September, another one just a few weeks ago. Here's a little story that happened in November. There's a paper came out from a French group saying we've found a very similar virus in bats in Laos. It's slightly more similar than that one from the mine,

which if it's flitting around in bats in Laos, that's likely takes the Wuhan Institute virology off the hook, doesn't it? And I pointed out that, yeah, but Eco Health Alliance has been collecting bats in Laos and sending them to Wuhan for analysis. An EcoHealth Alliance tweeted, you're wrong, we've never done that. And so I tweeted back, well, here's an entry in a genome database of a virus collected in Laos by the EcoHealth Alliance and deposited in Wuhan. Please tell me what I'm misunderstanding here.

Blocked and reported? Pretty well, not replied to. and I repeated the question several days in a row, never got an answer. You know, so the stuff we need to know. And it's not just in the China, in the West there's stuff we need to know. So there's more stuff can come out. The truth is out there. Matt Ridley, it's been great having you back on the show.

I'm normally more on your side, optimistic, but as ever, you've made me much sad about the future. Thank you very much for that. Listen, the book is called Viral. Search for the origin of COVID-19. There you go. I forgot the subtitle. It's a great read and very important book, and I do hope you're right that we will eventually get to the truth, maybe even before the next pandemic.

Matt, thank you so much for coming on. We've got, as always, questions for our locals-only supporters, which will do in a second. But before that, we have a final question. Which is always, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? I think it's very important that we don't lose sight of the big benefits of biotech. So despite everything I've said about the dangers of this viral research,

I'm not hearing a good conversation in Britain in particular about the enormous benefits of doing gene editing on agriculture, on medicine, on all sorts of things. Yeah, he'd say, okay, so here's my answer. Why aren't we talking about de-extinction more? Do you know about de-extinction? No. The idea that we could... It'd make for a far worse rebellion, I think. The de-extinction rebellion.

Everything's fine. There's more species again. Yeah, that's right. What is de-extinction? The de-extinction is simply bringing back the mammoth or bringing back the passenger pigeon or the great or gregor. You know, something that's gone extinct. Four steps. Read the genome.

done that in lots of these cases. We've got ancient DNA from samples. We know what the genome of these creatures looks like. Second, take a living genome from a related species and edit it, so it's the same. Third, somehow get that into a living creature, turn that cell into a embryo and then into a creature, and fourth release it to the wild.

Fantastic. So not only are we getting the pandemic, we're getting Jurassic Park as well. That'd be great. That'd be great. Yeah, that's what we need, some COVID-infected dinosaurs. Thanks, Matt. Brilliant stuff. All right, I hope you've enjoyed.

This is probably the last episode in the history of the world. Thank you very much for watching. We'll see you soon. Or not. Bye. I should probably have said that, but there we are.