If Books Could Kill - Bonus： The Lab Leak Goes Mainstream

00:00:00.000 that's you and everyone else in journalism what little dm buddies do you not dm buddy with other

00:00:04.940 journalists no what really they don't talk to me i don't talk to them it's called respect

00:00:09.220 you're not in group chats with mark andresen i thought we were all in group chats with mark

00:00:14.300 andresen i don't even read journalism because that would color my opinion i just experience

00:00:19.640 events zing us peter or are we giving up on the zinger again let's give up what do you know about

00:00:24.000 years two through five of the lab leak i'm gonna be strategically looking for ways to bring back

00:00:29.640 my joke about kissing the cats in the Wuhan market. I was just going to give you shit about 0.99

00:00:34.140 that, that since I listened to the episode again and you didn't, I was going to say whatever joke 0.99

00:00:38.480 you make on this episode, I'm just going to silently go, you said that last time. It's

00:00:42.460 actually what you said last time. I would not be surprised if my brain reproduces jokes thinking

00:00:46.460 that they're original. You know, in Spain, they call it la bleak because it is. That one's good.

00:00:53.920 You're not laughing because of how good it is. That's what I'm getting. That's the signal that

00:00:57.700 i'm getting it's actually so good it is funny that we're like two and a half years later it's like 0.68

00:01:02.140 i still think we could pin this on the chinese if we try 1.00

00:01:05.500 that let's go with that fuck it 0.99

00:01:10.160 so we are once again returning to the lab leak theory this episode is based on two excuses 0.99

00:01:30.700 one of them is that the white house just launched their uh lab leak website which used to be like

00:01:37.920 Like covid19.gov and covid19tests.gov are now pointing to a deranged website that has

00:01:46.080 a like 90s action movie photo of Donald Trump and like lab leak. 0.80

00:01:50.460 It's china.evil is the website.

00:01:54.160 So that just happened.

00:01:55.280 And then also we just did, well, we haven't actually recorded it yet, but we're about

00:01:58.980 to record an episode on In COVID's Wake, which is the, we got everything about COVID wrong

00:02:04.100 book which was featured on the daily and pbs news hour and all these other kind of respectable

00:02:08.420 places but like two inches underneath the surface it's like super reactionary and deranged and they

00:02:15.480 have a whole chapter about the lab leak that would have taken us way off track for that actual

00:02:20.100 episode so this is like a little bonus where we're gonna specifically dive into their claims and

00:02:24.400 for me it's important to talk about like the ways that the lab leak theory has kind of evolved over

00:02:30.120 the last couple of years, so to speak. So we are going to talk about their chapter and then also

00:02:34.920 kind of where the lab leak is. Should we summarize the last episode? I was just going to ask you to

00:02:40.680 do this again, to describe like the lab leak as you understand it. And then what are the pieces

00:02:45.820 of evidence for the lab leak as you understand them? Okay. I'm not going to remember the

00:02:50.540 scientific details because I did not prepare for this episode by listening to our last one,

00:02:55.240 which i would describe as the minimum amount of diligence that a podcaster would do an hour of

00:03:01.580 work to prepare for this but in my defense i've been very sleepy so here i think is the basic

00:03:09.600 lab leak thesis the uh origin point for covid19 as we know it is uh in and around

00:03:18.960 And Wuhan, China, also in Wuhan, China, is a lab that studies coronaviruses.

00:03:28.040 Pretty weird.

00:03:28.740 Pretty weird.

00:03:29.620 As soon as that came out, a lot of people thought, hmm, wouldn't it make sense that

00:03:34.680 they were studying a virus, a virus escaped containment.

00:03:38.440 And I think that the location of the lab has always been the starting point.

00:03:43.660 It's always been the best single piece of evidence.

00:03:46.680 And it's often described as Occam's razor. Like the Occam's razor explanation is you have an

00:03:51.620 outbreak of a coronavirus in this obscure city in China. And in the same obscure city,

00:03:56.680 you also have a lab studying coronaviruses and doing like kind of sketchy work where they're

00:04:02.120 manipulating coronaviruses. So like you put those two things together and like the obvious

00:04:07.000 Bayesian explanation is that like obviously it came from the lab. That is like how the argument

00:04:12.040 usually goes. Yeah. This is just a tiny little city in China of 15 million people. Now, my memory

00:04:20.000 of these sort of basic counter arguments are this. One, you're getting the causation wrong

00:04:28.900 if you think of it as, oh my God, what a crazy coincidence. The reason the lab is in Wuhan is

00:04:35.320 because that is the site of a lot of coronaviruses. So they study them there.

00:04:41.420 That's actually not quite true. I actually hear this a lot online that like that's why the lab was there. They say this is the only BSL-4 high security lab in China, but that's kind of irrelevant to the coronavirus work because none of the coronavirus work was being done at that level of security. That's what they did with like Ebola. So it's a BSL-2, like a moderate kind of medium security virus lab. And every big city in China has medium security virus labs. That's not like a weird thing.

00:05:09.120 many cities in america have medium security virus labs okay that's fair enough and i've already

00:05:14.220 learned something that you forgot to tell me in the first episode you're blaming me i do and then

00:05:21.300 you have a sort of then you have a sort of um assortment of other arguments that make it less

00:05:26.620 and less plausible that there's a lab leak one is that the initial cases cluster around the wet

00:05:34.680 market on the other side of town. Very far away. It's 10 kilometers away. It's like a 30 minute

00:05:39.360 drive. It's not they're not adjacent to each other. Yes. And then the other and I remember

00:05:43.980 this only really vaguely. So I'll have you I'll say something stupid and then you can fill in 0.99

00:05:48.740 the blanks. Essentially, if you look at the work that they were doing, there are like various 0.98

00:05:55.260 conspiracy theories that they were basically like really close to a coronavirus that's

00:06:01.500 functionally identical to COVID-19. But in reality, if you look at the viruses that they

00:06:08.680 were working on, it does not make sense that COVID-19 could have come out of the lab.

00:06:14.440 Yes. I think the most important thing to realize is that we're now five years down the line. This

00:06:19.400 theory has been around for five years, and we still are missing extremely important building

00:06:25.220 blocks. So we still have zero early cases. To this day, there's never been a confirmed case

00:06:32.060 of a lab worker getting COVID in like the early months of the pandemic at all. So that isn't

00:06:37.160 there. We don't have clustering, right? This is a very infectious virus. If a lab worker got it,

00:06:43.360 theoretically, other lab workers would get it, the neighborhood around the lab, the place where

00:06:46.980 people live. We would see some sort of clustering. We don't see that. We see clustering around the

00:06:51.460 market. We also see clustering within the market. We know that live animals were being sold in the

00:06:56.460 southwest corner of the market. That is where the early coronavirus cases are clustered. And we

00:07:02.040 have virus swabs that find COVID in like the drains, like on doorknobs, in the cages of the

00:07:07.920 animals. COVID is all fucking over the place at the market. Still to this day, no sign that COVID 0.97

00:07:13.380 was at the lab at all. It is true that they had something called RATG13, which is a virus that is

00:07:19.920 96% identical to COVID. However, 96% identical in virological terms is not close at all.

00:07:27.020 It's like how bananas share 98% of our DNA or something like that.

00:07:30.520 Exactly. I was thinking like, I am much more than 96% identical to Michael Phelps,

00:07:35.420 but like he can swim much faster than me, right? Like the fast swimming is not something that like

00:07:40.920 sort of happens by accident, right? And we also know from genomic sequences that RATG13

00:07:46.320 could not become COVID. It's not like the grandfather of COVID. It's like a distant

00:07:51.080 cousin. So there's no evidence whatsoever that they had COVID. So to leak something,

00:07:57.140 you have to have it. And in five years, there's no evidence that they had anything that either

00:08:02.600 was COVID or could become COVID. There's no evidence of this whatsoever. And it's easy to

00:08:07.080 say like, well, maybe they had a bunch of viruses that like they didn't tell us about, like other

00:08:10.880 lockers that hadn't been looked at. But there's actually a paper from 2018, from before the COVID

00:08:16.740 pandemic, that went through and cataloged every single virus that they had. This is actually like

00:08:21.080 a project that had taken place. This paper was never published, but this was a lab that had

00:08:27.720 international researchers working there. This was a lab that published in like science and nature.

00:08:32.180 This was very much a part of like the international virological community. In five years,

00:08:38.420 we've had no whistleblowers come forward and say, hey, I did a six-month project in Wuhan and I was

00:08:44.300 really concerned about their safety protocols. We've had no emails, any internal document of

00:08:49.520 any kind indicating a safety event or a secret program. This lab has been subjected to unprecedented

00:08:57.860 scrutiny over the last five years. And it's just turned up nothing.

00:09:03.100 And of course, all of this can be chalked up to the efficiency and secrecy of the dastardly Chinese. 1.00

00:09:10.160 And like this is then the lack of evidence is often cast as evidence. 1.00

00:09:14.180 So kind of famously, people within the lab, when the coronavirus first started spreading at the market or wherever in Wuhan in January, people in the lab were like, oh, shit, is this us?

00:09:24.940 Like they had the same thought as everybody else. 0.99

00:09:26.740 They're like, fuck, there's like a coronavirus spreading. 1.00

00:09:28.640 We do coronavirus work. 1.00

00:09:29.560 They then tested everyone in the lab for antibodies.

00:09:33.100 right? As soon as those tests were available in March of 2020, they're like, every single worker

00:09:36.480 should take one of these things. If you have antibodies, that's a really big problem. That

00:09:40.260 means it might've come from our lab. Everybody tests negative. So according to the people who

00:09:44.960 work in this lab, nobody there tested positive for antibodies. However, the conspiracy theorists

00:09:49.780 are now like, isn't that a little suspicious? Nobody had antibodies in 2020. And it's like,

00:09:55.620 okay, so the lack of evidence is now evidence, right? If they had found antibodies, you'd be

00:09:59.500 saying, ah, that proves it comes from the lab. When they don't find antibodies, you're also

00:10:03.520 saying that proves it comes from the lab. Right. Do you remember, Peter, in our previous lab leak

00:10:08.640 episode, we said there was one good piece of evidence. All the other pieces of evidence are

00:10:13.520 like very circumstantial. It's like the lab is in Wuhan and like lab leaks have happened before,

00:10:17.480 but there was one piece of like actual direct evidence that I characterized as like the best

00:10:22.020 available piece of evidence. Do you remember this? I don't. So basically we have a report

00:10:26.840 originally in the Wall Street Journal, that three workers at the lab got sick in November of 2019.

00:10:33.960 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. I've heard this come up repeatedly from the lab leak truthers.

00:10:40.180 Yes.

00:10:40.400 This appears to just be an internal report of a few sick people in a lab in November,

00:10:46.320 like in the fall.

00:10:47.480 In a year with an infamously bad flu season.

00:10:50.080 Right.

00:10:50.280 Yes. People had symptoms that could be COVID or could be the flu. That's basically the

00:10:53.880 strongest possible version of it. This best evidence for the lab leak has actually become

00:10:58.620 significantly weaker since we recorded that episode because in June of 2023, Matt Taibbi

00:11:04.460 and Michael Schellenberger publish a report naming the three scientists who got sick.

00:11:10.440 They present this as like a smoking gun, right? We have the names. This is, of course, based on

00:11:14.520 anonymous government sources. Chinese government? American government. Okay. It's fairly weak

00:11:19.400 anyway. But what's so interesting is by naming these specific people who got sick in fall of

00:11:25.940 2019, they actually ended up weakening their case because Science, the magazine, contacts these

00:11:31.300 researchers and two of them say, like, I didn't get sick at all. So originally we thought like,

00:11:36.660 oh, they got sick in November of 2019, but like, whatever, it could be anything. These people are

00:11:40.500 saying we didn't get sick at all. And one of them, very importantly, one of the people who is named

00:11:45.040 as being like the genesis of this doesn't even work in the lab. This is a person who does like

00:11:49.920 computer modeling. And she's like, well, that doesn't even make sense. Like I couldn't have

00:11:53.640 caught it from a live virus because I don't work on live viruses. Like I talked to another person

00:11:58.500 who's done collaborations with them and he was like, I don't know if she's ever actually been

00:12:02.020 to the lab, like the part where they're doing the virus manipulation. So that's like the best piece

00:12:07.000 of evidence is now even weaker than it was. And it was never particularly strong. The really

00:12:11.860 important thing that I want to talk about in this episode is that if you actually follow like the

00:12:16.280 lab leak people, like people that are really bought into this, they're shedding credibility

00:12:21.060 the way that people shed coronaviruses. But at the same time, we've had this weird recasting of

00:12:28.240 the lab leak from people on the left, including people I like genuinely really respect.

00:12:32.260 Say their names.

00:12:33.960 We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. That like people on the left, like us,

00:12:38.280 like really fucked up in dismissing the lab leak. 0.90

00:12:42.120 So this is from Naomi Klein's book, Doppelganger, 0.96

00:12:43.880 which we talked about on this show,

00:12:45.360 but we didn't get a chance to get to this part.

00:12:47.100 Like most of us, I don't know

00:12:48.500 where the COVID-19 virus originated,

00:12:50.740 but I do realize in retrospect

00:12:52.020 that I was too quick to take the official story

00:12:54.120 that it came from a wet market

00:12:55.620 where wild animals were sold at face value.

00:12:58.380 If I'm honest, I accepted it

00:12:59.760 because it served my own motivated reasoning

00:13:01.540 and reinforced my worldview.

00:13:03.100 The pandemic was a little less frightening to me

00:13:04.940 if it was yet another example

00:13:06.300 of humans overstressing nature 1.00

00:13:07.980 and getting bitten in the ass for it. Then, as time went on, the lab leak theory became a key 0.99

00:13:12.780 talking point from people like Naomi Wolf and Steve Bannon, where it was mixed with baseless

00:13:16.860 claims about bioweapons, along with plenty of anti-Asian racism. Those seemed to be further

00:13:21.860 reason not to take another look at the facts. Even though more and more facts and documents

00:13:25.880 were piling up that supported a serious consideration of the lab leak hypothesis,

00:13:29.640 most liberals and leftists didn't bother looking for months because we didn't want to be like them

00:13:33.960 in the same way that I didn't want to be like her.

00:13:36.700 In an odd way, their over-the-top conspiracies fed our credulity.

00:13:40.900 Their question everything led to many of us not questioning enough.

00:13:44.080 So this is becoming a very standard narrative.

00:13:45.640 We were reacting to the fact that conspiracy theorists believed this

00:13:49.500 by not believing it without investigating the evidence.

00:13:53.420 We were basically writing them off because they were kooky,

00:13:55.920 but we wrote off the entire theory, right?

00:13:58.380 Rather than saying, okay, the bioweapon stuff is a little silly,

00:14:00.920 but this could have been an accidental lab leak.

00:14:02.540 This is something worth looking into.

00:14:03.960 And so in May of 2021, we had this huge explosion of articles being like the media really fucked this up.

00:14:10.100 Like Iglesias writes a piece called The Media's Lab Leak Fiasco.

00:14:13.360 It was a fiasco the way that we treated this as a conspiracy theory when it actually deserved a lot more consideration.

00:14:19.520 Maybe that explains the fact that now the lab leak is like the American public's leading hypothesis.

00:14:26.420 There's a poll from March 2023 that's around 65 percent of Americans believe that it's true.

00:14:30.900 It's it's 35 percent of Democrats, which is not the majority of Democrats, but still pretty, pretty strong.

00:14:36.240 This is what's so frustrating about some of this discourse where people are like, we really messed up when we didn't consider this enough.

00:14:41.680 And it's sort of like, well, if the public believes it at a 65 percent clip, that's about as close to consensus as you're going to get in modern America on something that has a sort of political valence.

00:14:54.280 Yeah.

00:14:54.840 Then like what exactly is the journalistic concern?

00:14:58.360 It sounds to me like if what you believe is that the lab leak is a likely hypothesis, then you did fine. 0.96

00:15:07.000 Journalists didn't fuck up. 0.73

00:15:08.040 People believe it. 0.99

00:15:08.780 So what else do you want?

00:15:09.940 I just don't quite get it.

00:15:11.160 I don't want to come for Naomi Klein.

00:15:12.300 Like I said, I really like her. 0.79

00:15:13.440 I like that book.

00:15:14.380 But I think this narrative does not hold up to the facts, right?

00:15:19.400 If you look at the actual timeline of when the lab leak theory emerged and the way that it was treated in the early months,

00:15:24.000 People treat it as a conspiracy theory in the early months of the pandemic because it was being pushed by conspiracy theorists, right?

00:15:30.540 It was Tom Cotton on Fox News saying that the market origin had been debunked, which was completely not true. 0.81

00:15:37.340 It was also coming from the fucking Zero Hedge blog, which is like a infamous conspiracy peddler. 0.68

00:15:43.220 So people were saying, oh, this is a conspiracy theory because conspiracy theorists were saying it. 0.97

00:15:48.280 Right. And also, by the way, it was like even if we believed that like subsequent evidence showed that lab leak was the most likely explanation in early 2020, that evidence didn't exist.

00:16:03.780 So this is always so hard for people to process. But like if you guess something correctly and insist before knowing that it's true, that's not actually evidence that you're reasoning correctly.

00:16:18.280 This is a fucked up comparison, but I always think about the episode that me and Sarah did about the Duke La Crosse rape case where that did turn out to be a false accusation. 0.94

00:16:26.920 But there were a ton of people who basically the minute they heard a rape allegation, they're like, she's lying. 0.99

00:16:32.200 And then it eventually turned out she was lying.

00:16:34.020 And they're like, I was vindicated. 0.95

00:16:35.300 But it's like, you just think all women are lying about being raped at all times. 1.00

00:16:38.620 Like once again, I was correct. 1.00

00:16:41.360 of the 25 women I've accused of making up sexual assault claims, the third has been proven 0.82

00:16:49.340 correctly. It's not, you don't get to do this. I think this sort of, again, on the surface

00:16:55.380 feels like an important thing to do of like, yes, there is groupthink on the left. And I also think

00:17:00.740 after something is proven to be true, like once we found out that Lance Armstrong was fucking 0.96

00:17:06.040 using steroids, it's like worth going back and being like, wait a minute, on what basis 0.97

00:17:10.460 were people saying that they were lying.

00:17:11.960 Like, what can we learn from the trajectory of this piece of information?

00:17:15.360 And like, did we wait too long before accepting it?

00:17:17.860 I think those kinds of mechanics are like actually really important.

00:17:20.740 Right.

00:17:20.960 But the problem with the lab leak is that we're missing the part where it's true.

00:17:24.480 And I don't even really know what they're talking about half the time.

00:17:28.500 Because in the circles that I ran in, which I admit are not a particularly representative

00:17:34.660 cross-section of American society.

00:17:36.540 It's like the 37th international.

00:17:37.780 When I was discussing this stuff with friends in 2020, the widespread belief was like, yeah, maybe.

00:17:46.480 Yeah, yeah, totally.

00:17:47.260 Maybe it came out of the lab.

00:17:47.960 Yeah, yeah.

00:17:48.360 The idea that there was like this aggressive dismissal.

00:17:52.440 I'm sure that in some circles you could find it, but I just didn't see it.

00:17:55.960 So for the rest of the episode, we're going to talk about the chapter of In COVID's Wake

00:17:59.740 that talks about the lab leak theory itself and all of the groupthink that led to the theory being dismissed.

00:18:06.720 Okay.

00:18:06.940 I guess I should say we haven't actually recorded the episode yet, but In COVID's Wake is a book by Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee, who are both researchers at Princeton, basically saying that liberal groupthink is why we did all of these, quote unquote, ineffective policies during the COVID pandemic, things like lockdowns and mask mandates.

00:18:25.740 It's the entire premise of the book is false.

00:18:28.920 They're just totally wrong on the data.

00:18:31.800 They have long sections that are about like debate was suppressed.

00:18:34.640 And then all of the debate is just like people who were lying or totally wrong.

00:18:39.980 And people on the internet basically pointing that out.

00:18:41.740 Like the book is just a reactionary tract.

00:18:45.160 Hell yeah.

00:18:45.360 We will get into it in great detail in like a main feed episode.

00:18:48.300 But for now, here is the first paragraph of their sort of substantive discussion of the lab leak.

00:18:54.620 It is widely accepted that the COVID coronavirus arose in or around Wuhan in the Hubei province of the People's Republic of China.

00:19:02.360 Wuhan is home to both a live animal and seafood market, which is common in Chinese cities, and something quite uncommon,

00:19:09.240 the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an elite research institute that specializes in coronavirus research.

00:19:15.140 So, not a great sign that the first paragraph of their substantive discussion of the lab leak begins with a screaming lie.

00:19:24.620 One thing that I don't think has been communicated to the American public is that live animal

00:19:28.600 markets are not common in China.

00:19:30.720 In the city of Wuhan, which is around 11 million, 15 million, it's hard to measure the size

00:19:34.360 of cities, but a very large city, there's only four markets that were selling live animals.

00:19:39.700 China had the SARS outbreak in 2003 that was from live animals.

00:19:43.300 They have attempted to crack down on the wildlife trade because they know that it's a ticking

00:19:47.820 time bomb for coronaviruses.

00:19:49.620 It is also very profitable.

00:19:51.360 And the local authorities often look the other way.

00:19:54.180 But that's a relatively narrow phenomenon. So if we're going to talk about Occam's razor for the start of a pandemic, in a city of 11 million people, we have early cases of a virus clustered around one of only four places where animals and humans are interacting in close quarters. That's pretty strong Occam's razor for zoonotic spillover.

00:20:16.840 unless someone at the lab yes likes after work to go pet the animals you're doing it you're doing

00:20:26.620 it get there get there peter you you finish up your work at the lab you forget to wash your

00:20:31.860 hands because you're really excited to go check out the wet market you drive across town break

00:20:36.800 next speed you run over there and you find your favorite bat and you just roll around together

00:20:42.600 for a couple of hours, and then you go home to your wife.

00:20:45.460 And you put your lips over its snout, and you breathe in. 0.64

00:20:48.240 You breathe in its mucus, and then you spit in its mouth, and it's just normal friendship 0.97

00:20:55.280 with a bat sort of stuff. 0.99

00:20:56.720 So one of the scientists I talked to for this, Eddie Holmes, has actually been to the market.

00:21:00.640 He went there in 2019 and took photos of cages showing that live animals were being

00:21:05.780 sold at the market.

00:21:07.020 One thing he mentioned was that, again, because people don't know much about Chinese cities,

00:21:11.320 What you often hear is that, oh, this could just be a super spreader event, not necessarily the origin of the virus.

00:21:18.280 And again, sure, it could be.

00:21:20.540 However, one thing he mentioned is that the seafood market was not particularly crowded.

00:21:24.620 This wasn't like some sort of like Times Square, Olive Garden packed situation.

00:21:30.640 If we were going to have somebody from the lab spread it in Wuhan, there's extraordinarily crowded train stations, shopping malls.

00:21:40.200 there's so many other places that are extremely plausible as super spreader events at the

00:21:45.960 beginning of this pandemic. And, you know, the kind of core argument for the lab leak has really

00:21:50.700 always been like, isn't it a weird coincidence that this coronavirus emerges in the same city

00:21:57.560 as a coronavirus lab? Sure. And it is a genuinely weird coincidence. I am happy to grant that.

00:22:04.060 However, for the lab leak theory to work, you have to believe that somebody from the lab got

00:22:09.280 the virus and then happened to go to one of only four places in Wuhan where they were selling

00:22:16.780 like raccoon dogs. That's also a huge coincidence. Sorry, uh, what? Raccoon dogs? Is that one animal

00:22:24.780 or is that raccoon comma dogs? No, right. You don't know about raccoon dogs? What's a raccoon

00:22:29.240 dog? Bro. Okay. Google, go on Google right now and Google raccoon dog. A raccoon dog is exactly

00:22:33.740 what it sounds like. It's like a little dog that looks like a raccoon. They're so cute. Oh my God.

00:22:37.760 what the fuck is this i know they're so cute this is a dog i don't know exactly what they are yeah 1.00

00:22:42.120 well i'm going to the wuhan market i'm getting myself a raccoon dog it's kind of fucked up that 0.99

00:22:46.280 the reason they sell live animals at these markets is for either pets or meat another thing i didn't

00:22:51.180 even mention yet is in march of 2023 just after we released our lab leak episode we get a study

00:22:56.180 that finds in the market there's they took a bunch of swabs from the market where they found covid

00:23:00.520 those same swabs also found the dna of raccoon dogs so that doesn't prove that like zoonotic

00:23:06.920 spillover is real like you don't want to overdo it yeah but it does at least show that in the

00:23:11.640 place where covid was circulating they were selling raccoon dogs which we know are a vector

00:23:16.240 for coronaviruses we know they can catch it we know they can spread it they were also selling

00:23:20.460 civets although there was less of that genetic material and civets are also extremely cute

00:23:24.340 and a vector for coronaviruses i didn't hear a lot of that because i've just been looking at

00:23:28.740 the wikipedia for raccoon dogs aren't they cute wow really cute why are they in europe and also

00:23:34.960 east asia and also why are they not in my home right now because they're hella cute and i want

00:23:38.740 like seven of them yeah i would like to go grab one and then if it's nice i'll keep it and if it's

00:23:43.840 not i will eat it or just put your mouth over its snout and milk and then we'll find the new disease

00:23:48.400 they then continue peter i'm gonna send you the next couple paragraphs you're looking at the dogs

00:23:54.860 aren't you what no look at civets though civets are hella cute too how do i spell that c-i-v-e-t

00:24:00.940 oh look at his little fur whoa look at this guy little babies mine's showing me little babies oh

00:24:08.540 they get weird looking oh yeah some of them are some of them are a little weird but the babies

00:24:13.320 are cute gain of function research such as that conducted at the wuhan institute has long been

00:24:19.480 controversial as the national institutes of health website explains gain of function research

00:24:24.640 involves experimentation that aims or is expected to increase the transmissibility and or virulence

00:24:30.620 of pathogens. Although research into dangerous pathogens may lead to advances in the control of

00:24:35.980 natural outbreaks, the research itself is also clearly adjacent to biowarfare. This is also

00:24:41.800 something that has happened among the lab leak movement in the last two years. They're just

00:24:45.460 openly promoting the bioweapon theory, which originally they were like, well, obviously that's

00:24:50.620 fake. Like the thing that like the conspiracy theorists were saying in March of 2020, that's

00:24:54.760 not real. That is a conspiracy theory. But the accidental lab leak, that's not a conspiracy

00:24:59.040 theory and you shouldn't have treated it as one but they're now spouting the actual fucking 0.90

00:25:02.840 conspiracy theory this is just like lazy faux journalism like yeah the research itself is 0.75

00:25:08.440 clearly adjacent to biowarfare i mean i you could very abstractly make the argument that any

00:25:16.840 virology research is adjacent to biowarfare yeah completely what does that even mean it's also this 0.93

00:25:23.420 chicken shit reactionary centers thing where they're like well i didn't say it was a bioweapon 0.99

00:25:27.140 program i just said it was adjacent because you fucking can't yeah because you can't but you kind 0.99

00:25:32.440 of want to so here is the next couple paragraphs which we're going to dig into in a bit more detail 0.97

00:25:37.860 eminent scientists had warned for years of the dangers of gain of function research of the sort

00:25:42.720 conducted at wuhan institute where biosecurity levels were inadequate numerous lab leaks of

00:25:48.280 dangerous pathogens have been documented or strongly suspected over the years a 1995 epidemic

00:25:53.520 of equine encephalitis, multiple cases of SARS in Beijing in 2004, a 2007 outbreak of

00:26:00.520 foot and mouth disease in the United Kingdom, an anthrax escape that killed 60 in Russia,

00:26:06.060 and a 2019 lab leak of Bruxelles that infected more than 10,000 people in China.

00:26:11.320 This is something that I really want to address because this is another piece of quote-unquote

00:26:15.620 evidence that is often cited for the lab leak, that lab leaks have happened before.

00:26:19.240 I see what they're going for here, but I don't quite get it as like support for a theory because it's like, what's my evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered?

00:26:27.660 Well, people have been murdered before.

00:26:29.400 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:26:29.820 I should use a different example because I do believe Jeffrey Epstein was murdered.

00:26:32.660 I was just trying to think of a different metaphor.

00:26:34.240 You know what I'm saying.

00:26:35.560 Well, I was thinking, I mean, some of this Occam's razor stuff, what frustrates me about it is like if you're a detective and you find a woman who's been murdered, the Occam's razor explanation is that her boyfriend or her husband did it.

00:26:45.220 Yeah, yeah.

00:26:45.680 Like 99 times out of 100, it's her boyfriend or her husband.

00:26:47.900 But then if you go and investigate the husband, right?

00:26:50.780 OK, where were you last night?

00:26:52.300 And he's like, oh, I was at a party where like hundreds of people saw me.

00:26:55.080 You can't then just say, well, Occam's razor is that you killed her.

00:26:58.120 Right.

00:26:58.400 No, no, no, no, no.

00:26:59.100 You need evidence.

00:27:00.220 I almost think you're underselling it.

00:27:01.540 Like the reason that you think when you find a woman who's been murdered, oh, let's go

00:27:06.420 check out the significant other is because a very, very large percentage of the time.

00:27:13.120 Right.

00:27:13.380 That's who it is.

00:27:14.520 Right.

00:27:14.740 So the question isn't have there been lab leaks before?

00:27:18.240 It's like when we find a new virus, how often is it a lab leak?

00:27:22.900 Yeah, it's like sometimes it's like as strong as you can get.

00:27:26.440 But then also it's so much worse than that because there's no reason anybody would sort

00:27:30.380 of notice this.

00:27:31.340 But in this paragraph where they're listing all these dangerous pathogens that have leaked

00:27:34.080 from labs, all of these are existing viruses, right?

00:27:37.920 These are viruses that are human that can infect human hosts.

00:27:41.520 We have never had a leak of a novel virus.

00:27:44.980 Oh, interesting.

00:27:45.980 The closest thing that we have is there was an outbreak of the Marburg virus in 1967,

00:27:49.280 where there were monkeys that were infected with this virus in the lab,

00:27:52.760 and lab workers got it from live monkeys.

00:27:54.820 Like, they were breathing in, like, it's basically a zoonotic spillover,

00:27:57.220 but it happens to have taken place in a lab.

00:27:58.880 That's kind of as close as we get.

00:28:00.360 This thing where you're taking an existing virus from an animal,

00:28:03.800 you're swapping in and out parts,

00:28:05.920 you're testing how it affects mice or trying to grow it in a petri dish,

00:28:10.040 this has never leaked from a lab. So could it have happened? Maybe. But the fact that there

00:28:15.700 have been lab leaks of existing viruses is actually very different from a lab creating

00:28:22.220 COVID and then having it leak. Those are very distinct scenarios.

00:28:26.280 This requires the lab tech on roller skates with a tray of vials. That's what they are imagining

00:28:34.680 here. The other thing in this quote that I really want to zoom in on is it says,

00:28:38.440 gain-of-function research of the sort conducted at Wuhan Institute where biosecurity levels were

00:28:43.340 inadequate. So this is yet another argument for the lab leak that like we know they had safety

00:28:48.540 problems. There have been concerns about safety for years. So there's essentially three pieces

00:28:52.740 of evidence for this. One of them was, remember we talked about the ProPublica article about,

00:28:58.360 there was this guy who said that he could translate Chinese better than Chinese people,

00:29:02.820 like an american guy and he's like they did a safety training in november of 2019 and the reason

00:29:09.580 they did the safety training was because like there had been a biosecurity incident but that's

00:29:14.200 really weak and this guy has like no credibility and it's just really weird so that we're kind of

00:29:17.900 putting that piece of quote evidence beside because it's so weak the other argument for this

00:29:22.740 is that the lab was doing work at bsl2 rather than bsl3 so at a lower security level it's out of four

00:29:29.780 levels. BSL-4 is the highest. BSL-1 is essentially no security precautions. BSL-2 is kind of,

00:29:34.880 I've heard it described as like dental hygienist level precautions. So the argument is that this

00:29:39.880 lab was doing this work at BSL-2 when they should have been doing it at BSL-3. There's a really good

00:29:44.600 episode of This Week in Virology where it's actual virologists talking about this. And they say that

00:29:48.440 work on measles is done at BSL-2 and work on rabies, which is 100% fatal to humans, is often

00:29:55.220 done at BSL-2. And so people at the lab were doing work at BSL-2. It appears some people in the field

00:30:01.320 do this kind of work at BSL-3. Other people do it at BSL-2. There's really no evidence that this

00:30:05.820 is like a rogue lab that was acting totally out of step with existing practices. And there's like

00:30:12.180 an actual debate about like what level of safety you should do this kind of work at.

00:30:15.800 Can I bring my pet raccoon dog to the lab? At level two, it's allowed.

00:30:22.700 So the thing I really want to dive into is in this paragraph where they're talking about

00:30:26.880 the poor biosafety standards at the lab, In COVID's Wake has a citation to a Washington

00:30:35.320 Post article from April of 2020.

00:30:37.440 This article is called State Department Cables Warned of Safety Issues at Wuhan Lab Studying

00:30:42.780 Bat Coronaviruses.

00:30:44.220 It's by Josh Rogan.

00:30:45.760 And I'm going to send you the first couple of paragraphs.

00:30:48.740 Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S.

00:30:51.980 embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and

00:30:56.720 sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was

00:31:01.480 conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. But the U.S. officials learned during their

00:31:07.120 visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as sensitive but

00:31:11.640 unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV

00:31:17.940 lab and propose more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that

00:31:23.480 the lab's work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk

00:31:28.240 of a new SARS-like pandemic. So basically, this is like people from the U.S. State Department

00:31:32.300 visited this lab and they were so concerned that they're like, holy shit, we're going to send a 0.96

00:31:37.180 dispatch back to Washington being like, we really need to be worried about this. They alerted 0.94

00:31:41.320 Washington. Yes, exactly. So there's two cables in question. The author of this piece, Josh

00:31:47.840 Rogan, is given access to the first cable. And he says like, OK, there's very worrying stuff in

00:31:51.900 there. He doesn't get access to the second cable, but he does talk to an unnamed government source

00:31:57.720 that has read it and describes the contents to him. So here's the description of the second cable.

00:32:03.800 Sources familiar with the cable said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety

00:32:07.860 concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bad coronaviruses. The embassy

00:32:13.020 officials were calling for more U.S. attention to this lab and more support for it to help it fix

00:32:17.680 its problems fix its problems the cable was a warning shot one u.s official said they were

00:32:22.720 begging people to pay attention to what was going on this paints a very like clear and worrying

00:32:27.660 picture of the lab yeah i've always found this like very convincing and and yeah what i was like

00:32:32.300 ready to say is that like bad safety practices in general do not mean that this virus leaked from

00:32:40.880 this lab on like this specific date this is this is a actually i mean it's a very roundabout or

00:32:45.860 Assuming this is correct, which I imagine you're about to tell me it's not really, but this would be, if true, like a very, very circumstantial piece of evidence.

00:32:55.900 It's not decisive, right?

00:32:57.220 What I didn't know until I was researching this episode is that we now have these cables.

00:33:02.420 The Washington Post sued the Trump administration to get access to these cables, and we can now read them.

00:33:07.900 there are two cables, one on January 19th of 2018, one on April 19th of 2018. And you are going to

00:33:15.000 read the first couple paragraphs of them. In addition to accreditation, the lab must also

00:33:19.820 receive permission from the National Health and Family Planning Commission to initiate research

00:33:23.540 on specific highly contagious pathogens. To date, the Institute has obtained permission for research

00:33:28.380 on three viruses, Ebola virus, Nipah virus, and Xinjiang hemorrhagic fever virus. Despite this

00:33:34.900 permission, however, the Chinese government has not allowed the Institute to import Ebola viruses

00:33:39.400 for study in the BSL-4 lab. Therefore, scientists are frustrated and have pointed out that they

00:33:44.680 won't be able to conduct a research project with Ebola viruses at the new BSL-4 lab, despite the

00:33:50.600 permission. Nothing, no safety concerns at this point. It's more like they should get access to

00:33:55.500 Ebola, right? That's something you wouldn't say if you were gravely concerned. Give them the Ebola.

00:33:59.320 Give everybody the Ebola. Yeah, you guys got that Ebola?

00:34:02.800 So, and then here is the only mention of safety in the entire document.

00:34:07.620 During interactions with scientists at the Wuhan laboratory, they noted that the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high containment laboratory.

00:34:18.400 So, they need staff.

00:34:20.300 Yeah.

00:34:20.820 Without the staff, they won't be able to operate safely.

00:34:23.080 So, I mean, I think you could characterize this as a safety concern, right?

00:34:26.120 Yeah.

00:34:26.280 They're saying there's a lack of safety-related infrastructure.

00:34:28.960 Yeah, that feels like a fair characterization.

00:34:30.680 Although I should say the summary of this cable says scientists hope the lab will contribute to the development of new antiviral drugs and vaccines, but its current productivity is limited by a shortage of the highly trained technicians and investigators required to safely operate a BSL-4 laboratory and a lack of clarity in Chinese government policies and guidelines.

00:34:50.760 So it does seem like it's less a concern about the lab operating unsafely, but rather that it can't operate at all.

00:34:59.260 Right.

00:34:59.420 Right.

00:34:59.600 Because they can't get the viruses they need and they don't have the staff that they need.

00:35:02.140 Right.

00:35:02.240 So that's essentially the only mention of safety.

00:35:05.040 The document then goes on to say like they're working with like the University of Texas and trying to get more collaborators.

00:35:11.080 And like the U.S. government should help this lab and like should push the government to adequately staff this lab.

00:35:15.840 That's basically the point of the cable.

00:35:17.520 It then goes on to praise the lab.

00:35:21.600 So here's the next couple paragraphs.

00:35:23.340 Despite limitations, WIV researchers produce SARS discoveries.

00:35:26.900 The ability of WIV scientists to undertake productive research, despite limitations on

00:35:32.100 the use of the new BSL-4 facility, is demonstrated by a recent publication on the origins of SARS.

00:35:37.340 There's then a fairly long description of a study that they published in 2017, basically

00:35:42.240 cataloging all of these viruses they found in this bat cave.

00:35:45.820 they found that many of them do appear to have this ACE2 receptor binding domain,

00:35:51.200 which indicates they could leap over to humans.

00:35:54.200 And then here's the conclusion of the paragraph.

00:35:57.300 From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats

00:36:02.380 and study of human-animal interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.

00:36:09.160 So to return to the excerpt we read earlier,

00:36:11.900 Josh Rogan's article says, the first cable warns that the lab's work on bat coronaviruses

00:36:17.680 and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

00:36:23.600 That is the opposite of what this section of the cable says. The cable actually says

00:36:28.880 that their work could prevent a new SARS-like pandemic. This paragraph is talking about

00:36:35.080 the viruses that they are finding in bat caves could spill over to humans and cause a pandemic

00:36:40.880 At no point is it saying that the lab's work represents a risk of a new pandemic.

00:36:47.720 The overall purpose of the cable is to try to rally support and capacity for this lab.

00:36:54.740 That is not something you do when you have grave safety concerns.

00:36:58.720 No, it seems like they are basically saying, yeah, this is like critical work.

00:37:04.560 Several people there said that they're understaffed.

00:37:07.480 That's it.

00:37:08.020 The, like, overarching purpose of the cable doesn't appear to be safety-related.

00:37:13.280 There's a brief comment that you could fairly characterize as safety-related.

00:37:18.380 So Josh Rogan, in this Washington Post article, got access to this first cable.

00:37:22.660 He read this and he said, okay, the contents concern safety, right?

00:37:26.180 This is about their work on SARS coronaviruses.

00:37:28.840 But then the second, he didn't get access to the second cable.

00:37:31.820 And this anonymous source within the government says, well, the second cable, it's really, you know,

00:37:36.600 they're talking about grave safety concerns, right? The point of these cables was to sound

00:37:41.180 an alarm. So this is the only mention of the word safety in the second cable.

00:37:48.120 China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, a global leader in virus research, is a key partner for

00:37:52.460 the United States in protecting global health security. Its role as operator of the just-launched

00:37:56.860 Biosafety Level 4 lab, the first such lab in China, opens up even more opportunities for

00:38:01.840 expert exchange, especially in light of the lab's shortage of trained staff.

00:38:05.980 This is the only place the word safety appears.

00:38:09.100 They launched a biosafety level four lab.

00:38:11.160 It's just an adjective about the lab.

00:38:13.120 There's literally no concern about safety expressed in this cable.

00:38:18.500 And in the first cable, there is only the most tangentially safety related concern expressed.

00:38:24.360 The original article expressed this as the U.S. State Department was so concerned about

00:38:27.980 safety that they went down there, they investigated, and they sent grave alarms back to Washington. 0.99

00:38:33.660 That is a fucking lie. 0.98

00:38:35.260 In reality, they sent a cable saying functionally that we should be sending Americans over there, which would be a ludicrous thing to say if you really thought that the safety was egregiously bad. 0.99

00:38:46.240 Basically, Josh Rogan got worked by his sources.

00:38:48.920 Which will never happen to us.

00:38:51.540 Because we're not in DMs with any journalist.

00:38:53.520 We're not talking to anybody.

00:38:54.480 Because I don't talk to journalists.

00:38:56.340 I found this in other areas, too, where it's like conspiracy theorists are so worried about like a conspiracy to cover up the lab leak, whatever.

00:39:01.680 there was a literal conspiracy to promote the lab leak to journalists from within the Trump

00:39:08.220 administration. So Donald Trump, as early as May 2020, was openly promoting the lab leak theory.

00:39:14.960 Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state at the time, is like super in on lab leak. All he fucking does 0.99

00:39:21.120 is tweet about lab leak now. And as early as April of 2020, he was saying we really need to 0.99

00:39:25.740 hammer the Chinese on this because it's their fault. And all of this information about like

00:39:29.480 The sick researchers, the cables, all of this stuff is coming from Donald Trump's State

00:39:35.660 Department. 0.99

00:39:36.460 And journalists are just fucking falling for it, hook, line, and sinker, and basically 0.96

00:39:41.380 publishing exactly what they want you to publish, right? 0.91

00:39:44.180 These are anonymous sources who are telling you, oh, yeah, the cables are really bad,

00:39:47.620 man.

00:39:47.980 If you look at the second cable.

00:39:49.640 Oh, my God.

00:39:50.160 They wouldn't even show me the second cable.

00:39:52.200 It was so bad. 0.99

00:39:52.940 That's how fucking bad it was. 0.99

00:39:54.040 And you're publishing this and just getting fucking worked by these people who are like 0.98

00:39:58.460 pretty on record as not liking china right are we just supposed to ignore this like this is what's 0.83

00:40:03.840 so fucking weird to me about this like we didn't take the lab leak seriously enough we're all just

00:40:08.520 gonna pretend that the u.s government at that time was just like sticking up for scientific 0.97

00:40:13.560 integrity they just like wanted to know how the virus originated are you fucking kidding me i think 0.95

00:40:17.660 it's very interesting that the way that the mea culpa about lab leak shit has developed among 0.97

00:40:25.100 journalists is like journalism as a whole got this wrong like we didn't take it seriously enough 0.59

00:40:32.140 but josh rogan publishing this specific bit of information that turns out to be untrue is

00:40:39.060 something that actually should warrant correction yes and some some self-flagellation right like 0.61

00:40:45.620 you you actually had someone dangling some bullshit in front of you and you leapt at it 0.96

00:40:50.420 Yeah. There's also, Peter, this gets even worse. So in January of this year, we get a book by 0.99

00:40:55.480 Don McNeil, who is a New York Times health reporter, who's now like a big lab leak guy,

00:41:00.620 and he has like a chapter on the lab leak, and it's really bad. But sort of in passing,

00:41:05.000 he mentions, oh, hey, I wrote an article for the New York Times saying that like the lab leak

00:41:10.460 wasn't very plausible, and the New York Times killed it. And instead, they publish an article

00:41:14.680 that was promoting the lab leak. So here's his description of this.

00:41:17.540 Inside the Times, we had a fierce debate.

00:41:19.920 Washington-based national security reporters had sources insisting it was a lab leak.

00:41:24.600 But their sources were anonymous, offered zero evidence other than take our word for it,

00:41:28.740 and to me seemed clearly part of the Trump administration's campaign to blame China instead of admitting its own failures.

00:41:34.780 My sources, by contrast, were respected scientists, spoke on the record, and laid out their arguments in exhaustive detail.

00:41:41.340 They seemed more credible.

00:41:42.500 And then he talks about this eventually article coming out.

00:41:45.420 At some point, probably in early April, my Washington colleagues drafted an article quoting their anonymous sources.

00:41:51.680 They were shown my draft.

00:41:52.880 They reduced my detailed arguments to two short, some scientists disagree paragraphs. 0.97

00:41:57.960 So again, we have a conspiracy within the Trump administration to tell journalists that it was a lab leak and journalists fucking falling for it. 0.95

00:42:07.500 Right. 0.90

00:42:07.740 They killed an article about the scientific basis showing the lab leak was not plausible. 0.96

00:42:12.280 They fucking killed that, and they ran a, ooh, anonymous sources say it's a lab leak article. 0.99

00:42:17.360 What fucking groupthink are we meant to be dissecting at this point? 1.00

00:42:20.420 Well, this is the thing is that the mainstream media, the Times especially, in their minds, journalism is this very rigid thing. 0.99

00:42:28.840 Like officials say, right?

00:42:30.600 Like that's a good source, right?

00:42:32.920 Any judgment about what their agenda might be, that would be implicit editorializing.

00:42:39.000 So you can't do that.

00:42:40.080 They're just a respected government official.

00:42:42.460 It's a respected position.

00:42:43.460 We're going to print what they say, and then if scientists disagree, they get the little caveat, and that's that.

00:42:47.760 And the fact that they lie constantly and the fact that they clearly just, like, have it in for China, those two things are not necessary context.

00:42:53.800 Right.

00:42:54.220 And to take those into consideration would, again, be a form of editorializing.

00:42:58.720 One of the key characteristics of conspiracy theories is that they don't have internal coherence.

00:43:03.440 They're typically just, like, bundles of discrepancies.

00:43:05.900 And oftentimes people kind of toggle back and forth between different explanations.

00:43:10.540 And I've noticed this with a lab leak, that the same person will cite evidence that it

00:43:14.240 was gain-of-function research, they'll cite evidence that it was a bioweapon, and they'll

00:43:17.760 cite evidence that it was like a virus from like bat poo that accidentally leaked.

00:43:21.920 In like the same conversation, they'll kind of go back and forth, right?

00:43:24.400 This is a big component, important component of conspiracy theories.

00:43:28.920 Their ability to explain their own theories is much less important than their desire to demonstrate that there is a grand lie.

00:43:40.900 And I think what really clicked in my brain when I was looking into this was just there's a really good article in the MIT Technology Review that just describes like in factual terms what the lab was doing.

00:43:51.820 And once you start to sort of play out like how a lab leak would work, there is no scenario that works.

00:43:58.920 So the first thing the lab was doing was just cataloging viruses.

00:44:02.800 So this is the famous thing where they went to these mines in 2012 and 2013.

00:44:06.700 They got a bunch of swabs.

00:44:08.060 They, like, found bats.

00:44:08.900 They got swabs of their saliva. 0.99

00:44:10.000 They did swabs of their butt. 1.00

00:44:11.080 They collected a bunch of bat poo. 1.00

00:44:12.740 And then they bring it back to the lab, and then they sort of just, like, store all of 0.97

00:44:15.420 this stuff.

00:44:16.100 And then they start cataloging it because they're like, okay, what kinds of viruses

00:44:19.280 do these bats have?

00:44:20.820 And this is where they find this RATG13 virus that is, like, 96% identical to COVID, right?

00:44:25.320 This is in this kind of database.

00:44:26.460 The thing to know about this kind of work is that these viruses can't really leak.

00:44:32.920 So I was talking to Alex Kristof, who wrote the paper about the raccoon dogs, and he said

00:44:38.220 that when they store and catalog these viruses, they store them in like a solution, like a

00:44:42.500 little test tube full of juice that breaks them apart into like their constituent parts

00:44:46.720 because what they're trying to do is get the genomic sequence, like the actual DNA.

00:44:50.720 And so to do that, you break apart the virus and you isolate the DNA and then you put in

00:44:54.540 little machine and the machine reads it is like gtacgc blah blah blah blah right but once the

00:44:59.480 virus is in this little solution you can't catch it it's not meaningfully airborne he said you'd 0.99

00:45:06.120 have to like maybe drink this solution and maybe you'd get sick like one in a million fucking 0.94

00:45:11.860 chance but also these are bat viruses that's why maybe someone thought they were safe to drink 0.94

00:45:17.200 just one by one just doing shots we're understaffed no one's bringing me water 0.98

00:45:22.600 I'm just going to drink the virus liquid.

00:45:25.200 Oftentimes there's not enough like virus in these tubes to, like you need large viral

00:45:30.740 counts to catch a virus and you need live virus.

00:45:34.220 When we've had lab leaks before, these are typically labs that are growing large quantities

00:45:37.780 of, for example, SARS.

00:45:38.840 Like you grow huge cultures of these viruses to then, you know, use them to develop a vaccine,

00:45:44.600 use them for whatever you're doing.

00:45:46.020 These were not live viruses. 0.76

00:45:47.200 These were years old samples of like bat poo, bat saliva, et cetera.

00:45:51.700 Like, is it possible somebody got infected from one of these?

00:45:55.360 Alex is a scientist, so of course he says, like, yes, it is possible that this could happen, right?

00:46:00.020 You're transferring it from one test tube to the other.

00:46:03.140 There's maybe, like, a 10-second period potentially where it's airborne.

00:46:08.600 Like, you can come up with sort of theoretical scenarios for this, but a case of this has never been documented.

00:46:14.760 What if you brought your pet raccoon dog to work?

00:46:18.300 And fed it the test tube?

00:46:19.720 You're doing work.

00:46:20.860 you turn around uh-oh sparky has gotten into the test tubes and you're like well this is bad news 0.96

00:46:29.940 for me i know how i can get out of this i'm gonna go sell them at the wet market damn it i was gonna

00:46:36.140 debunk the lab leak but now i believe in it is that lab leak or is it zoonotic i don't know

00:46:42.560 it's a it's a merger that i think will make everyone happy so again if you try to actually

00:46:47.700 spell out these scenarios, the one where like somebody catches a virus from these random

00:46:52.880 sequences like doesn't really work mechanically. So then you have the gain of function work. So

00:46:56.940 the other thing that the virus lab was doing was they were creating chimeric viruses, which are

00:47:02.280 like they're kind of mixing and matching different elements of viruses to see whether or not they

00:47:06.260 infect cells, right? So the other thing to know about this is that like to take a sort of a dead

00:47:12.440 virus, like these samples in bat poo, and then turn them into a live virus. This is called 0.98

00:47:18.860 isolating them. To turn them into a live virus that you can then culture and grow and see,

00:47:23.240 you know, do various other forms of research is really fucking hard. So of all of the hundreds 0.88

00:47:27.660 of samples that they had from this cave, they only managed to isolate three of the samples.

00:47:32.500 So once you isolate the samples, that is where you then do get into territory where like somebody

00:47:37.120 could catch an isolated virus. This is how people caught SARS and labs, et cetera, right? So now

00:47:41.140 we're in the territory, we're like, okay, this could have caused a lab leak, right? The thing

00:47:44.840 to know about this work is that what they were doing when they were going through all of these

00:47:48.480 samples is they were looking for viruses that were close to SARS-1 because they were trying to

00:47:54.080 solve SARS-1. They were trying to respond to the previous pandemic. So when they found RATG-13,

00:48:00.900 which was relatively close to what we now know of as COVID, they were like, that's weird. And

00:48:04.720 they put it back in the fridge because there's no reason before 2020, you would find anything

00:48:10.520 interesting about covid you'd be like oh that's a weird virus right so even if they had found covid

00:48:15.600 there's no reason why they would think it was particularly interesting and so you throw you

00:48:20.540 take the sample with covid you throw it into the trash can trash guy takes it out gives it to his

00:48:27.560 raccoon dog local raccoon dog gets into it yeah from what i know about raccoon dogs senator holly

00:48:33.380 they'll eat anything so basically they were doing various experiments on these viruses they'd

00:48:40.920 isolated some of the were bat viruses they were also doing work on human viruses this is we can

00:48:45.400 get into details about this kind of stuff it's actually that kind of interesting but also they

00:48:49.620 were interested in SARS-1 if one of these viruses had leaked it would be something very similar to

00:48:56.540 SARS-1, it would not be a leak of COVID. There's a finite number of scenarios by which there could

00:49:03.640 have been a lab leak. And both of the scenarios from the Wuhan lab do not make sense, right?

00:49:09.180 Either it was like random samples of bat poo, which basically can't get out,

00:49:12.140 or it was gain of function research, which was on SARS-1. SARS-1 and SARS-2 are actually very 0.53

00:49:17.240 dissimilar. They're only about 75% similar. Much less than you and Michael Phelps.

00:49:21.160 So the only scenario you're left with is that they were doing some completely secret plan.

00:49:27.580 Right.

00:49:27.760 They went into that caves.

00:49:28.880 They found COVID.

00:49:30.200 Somehow they identified COVID as like, ooh, this could be something, right?

00:49:34.700 Either they found it and were able to isolate it and then were able to catch it, right?

00:49:39.100 Or they found something that was relatively similar to COVID and they manipulated it.

00:49:43.740 They added a spike protein, whatever.

00:49:45.540 And then that gain of function work leaked.

00:49:47.280 But this is what I think you told me in the first episode that stuck with me, which is in order for this to have happened, it likely would have had to be a secret.

00:49:57.180 Yes.

00:49:57.680 But why would they be keeping it a secret before any leak occurs?

00:50:03.100 Yes.

00:50:03.300 Right?

00:50:03.460 It doesn't make sense.

00:50:04.600 It's also not accidental.

00:50:06.660 Right.

00:50:07.040 There is no reason to keep something like this secret if you're like a legitimate academic.

00:50:11.040 If you are proposing this theory, the only scenario for the lab leak that works, you're essentially saying China set out to create a bioweapon.

00:50:19.300 Which they unleashed upon themselves. 0.84

00:50:21.400 Right.

00:50:21.780 And also in all of the years of like this premeditated massive project, I mean, the virologist that I talked to said like this would be a years long thing.

00:50:30.820 No one ever talks about it.

00:50:32.240 There's no documents about it.

00:50:33.620 Yeah.

00:50:33.920 No one ever says like, oh, hey, I'm doing this project in Wuhan, but like I can't really talk about it.

00:50:37.880 There's nothing.

00:50:38.440 And also the other thing that the scientist mentioned to me was that like the idea, like

00:50:43.080 if you were trying to bioengineer a virus, you would take something existing and you'd

00:50:48.820 make like one tweak to it.

00:50:50.160 Like that's, it's very difficult to manipulate viruses and do this kind of gain of function

00:50:53.380 work. 0.95

00:50:54.060 You wouldn't just get a random virus from a cave and be like, let's start fucking with 0.99

00:50:58.620 it. 0.99

00:50:58.900 Right.

00:50:59.060 Like that doesn't make any sense.

00:51:00.540 Researchers want to publish things.

00:51:02.280 Researchers want to advance in their careers.

00:51:05.120 If you were doing this accidentally, like I'm just going to manipulate a random virus, 0.98

00:51:07.900 That makes no fucking sense. 0.93

00:51:09.260 COVID wouldn't have like stuck out to you even if you had found it in the cave. 0.99

00:51:12.040 There's no fucking evidence that they found it in the cave. 0.94

00:51:13.820 If you were making a bioweapon, you wouldn't use a random virus that you found in a cave. 0.99

00:51:18.460 You'd take something that we already knew caused harm and make small tweaks to it.

00:51:22.840 So the whole theory makes no sense.

00:51:24.960 I don't understand like the implication is like, yeah, this was a lab with subpar safety,

00:51:32.960 but also within this lab, but like lack safety standards, they are conducting an incredibly

00:51:41.440 secretive. Yes. Biowarfare initiative. Yes. And no information about it has ever leaked. No,

00:51:48.920 no, nothing verifiable has ever gotten out. Oh, the other thing I love, you know,

00:51:53.040 we talked about RITG 13 earlier, this 96% similar virus. The only reason we know about this

00:51:59.620 is because the Wuhan lab in February of 2020 published it. When the virus was spreading

00:52:05.000 around, COVID was spreading around, they said, hey, we've got a lot of bat viruses. Here's what 0.66

00:52:09.280 we have in case this helps with anything. Right. So like the conspiracy goes so deep. There's this

00:52:13.980 massive cover up. They're doing all this manipulation. And also voluntarily, they said,

00:52:19.060 hey, guys, we've got this virus that's pretty close to COVID. Again, it just feels like there's

00:52:23.720 only one version of the lab leak that ends up making sense. And it's like the vast dark

00:52:29.860 conspiracy. Yes. That just can't be a valid reason to believe that it happened. The idea that perhaps

00:52:35.740 there is an incredibly well covered up conspiracy on behalf of the Chinese government. It just

00:52:43.400 doesn't make a lot of sense. I really think this is a journalism story. I mean, to the extent

00:52:47.360 there's journalistic failures here. I think that there there's so much commentary and so little

00:52:52.540 reporting, right? I read dozens of articles about the lab leak. It was literally only this one

00:52:58.420 article from the MIT technology review that just described what the lab was doing and talked to

00:53:04.140 people in the lab. Just a clear description. Like that's when it really clicked in my brain

00:53:08.100 because like, I also thought like, yeah, maybe there's like a, something got dropped or some

00:53:12.000 airborne stuff. It's only once you understand the actual logistics of the lab, what they were

00:53:16.700 trying to do, what they were actually doing. It's like, oh, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense.

00:53:20.560 And it's the fact that I don't know how a fucking virus lab works that made me think it was much more plausible than it was. 0.89

00:53:27.140 But we don't have very many journalists who know this stuff or are interested, right? 0.97

00:53:31.540 We have all this commentary, but we don't have journalists that are like, hey, I'm just going to talk to some virologists about like how these labs work day to day.

00:53:39.180 And the minute you get to the basic fact, it's like so implausible, like absurdly implausible.

00:53:44.220 Right. Or maybe maybe a simple a simpler way to think of it is just like there's no particular reason to believe that this happened. Right. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that we're basically at a point where the only real evidence is circumstantial shit. Right.

00:53:59.660 There are various very tangible and specific reasons to believe that this did not happen or that it was very unlikely.

00:54:09.800 And yet we have a journalistic apparatus all talking about how, you know, we think this happened now.

00:54:18.940 And not only that, but we need to reflect on why we didn't think it happened five years ago.

00:54:23.440 And 65 percent of the American public believes it happened. 0.61

00:54:26.800 I mean, just a catastrophic fuck-up of journalism. 0.98

00:54:30.540 And they think they fucked it up in the other direction. 0.80

00:54:33.300 What you often find from lab leak people is this retreat to like, well, it could have happened.

00:54:37.500 It could have happened.

00:54:38.420 And like as a responsible person, especially if you're an actual scientist, you have to admit, yeah, it could have happened.

00:54:44.640 Yeah, yeah.

00:54:45.260 But the problem with that is there's essentially an infinite number of scenarios that could have happened.

00:54:49.660 Right, right.

00:54:50.240 So the Chinese theory, of course, is that it is a lab leak, but it's a lab leak from the U.S.

00:54:54.900 Well, that also could have happened.

00:54:56.540 There's no evidence whatsoever that it leaked from Fort Detrick.

00:54:59.060 We don't really have raccoon dogs.

00:55:00.600 So my theory goes away.

00:55:02.200 My unfalsifiable and also unassailable theory.

00:55:05.740 But like, I could say that like, oh, it was P. Diddy flew to Wuhan and spread it to distract

00:55:10.300 from the allegations against him.

00:55:11.540 That also could have happened.

00:55:13.000 You can name any scenario.

00:55:14.560 I can't rule that out.

00:55:15.880 There's no proof that P. Diddy didn't do it.

00:55:17.580 I do think it was suspicious that Diddy had his last freak off in the Wuhan wet market.

00:55:23.120 Okay, Peter, that was like the lab kind of stuff on the merits.

00:55:29.500 Are you ready to talk about the cover-up?

00:55:31.100 Let's talk about the cover-up.

00:55:31.960 We have to talk about the cover-up.

00:55:33.020 So we now are going to turn to the creation of a paper called

00:55:38.020 The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.

00:55:41.000 This is the description from in COVID's wake.

00:55:46.620 The record is clear that the NIH and the NIAID funded gain-of-function research

00:55:50.940 that was performed in part at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had known

00:55:55.100 biosecurity deficiencies. After the COVID pandemic began, scientists with complex and

00:56:00.720 mixed motives engaged in an extensive and unacknowledged effort to deflect attention

00:56:04.780 from the Chinese lab to the city's wet market and thereby shape public perceptions of COVID's

00:56:10.360 origins. Scientists with complex and mixed motives. I was just about to circle back to

00:56:14.940 that complex and mixed motives like even in your telling of the conspiracy your retrospective

00:56:21.840 telling of the conspiracy you can't explain why they did this because you're making it up so then

00:56:27.220 and then this is a more detailed description this is from an op-ed by zeynep tufecki in the new york

00:56:33.340 times op-ed section in march a march 2020 paper in the journal nature medicine written by five

00:56:40.660 prominent scientists declared that no, quote, laboratory-based scenario for the pandemic virus

00:56:46.000 was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations

00:56:50.460 that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of

00:56:55.620 its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible, but likely. One of the authors of that

00:57:00.760 paper, evolutionary biologist Christian Anderson, wrote in these Slack messages, quote, the lab

00:57:06.200 escape version of this is so friggin likely to have happened because they were already doing

00:57:10.280 this type of work. And the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.

00:57:14.820 So scientists wrote a paper saying this wasn't a lab leak. But in their private Slack communications,

00:57:20.560 they are caught in 4K saying this was a lab leak.

00:57:24.100 I remember the Slack leaks when they happened. Big deal for the lab leak folks.

00:57:29.420 This proximal origins subplot is central to the lab leakers now. So if you read

00:57:36.100 the House subcommittee report on COVID origins, which is 600 pages long. The number one finding

00:57:42.220 of the report is SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, likely emerged because of a

00:57:46.740 laboratory or research-related accident. That's four pages long. That's finding one. We know it's

00:57:51.540 a lab leak. Finding two, the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 was prompted by Dr. Anthony Fauci

00:57:57.420 to disprove the lab leak theory. And then they spend 51 pages on the creation of this report.

00:58:04.480 My God, this screams to me, we have no scientists on our side because they realize that like the more prominent scientists side against them. So what they have to do is create a story where secretly they agree with us. Secretly, they know we're right, but they're covering it up.

00:58:24.660 So one thing you really notice if you read like anti-vax literature is if you're like,

00:58:28.820 oh, okay, so you say that vaccines cause autism.

00:58:31.700 Why do you think that?

00:58:32.860 And they'll be like, in 1991, a whistleblower report was suppressed.

00:58:36.040 And you're like, sorry, tell me the primary evidence for your central claim, right?

00:58:41.780 Every conspiracy theory eventually becomes the Cimmerillion. 0.98

00:58:45.560 It's like a bunch of fucking footnotes. 0.97

00:58:47.300 It's a bunch of weird subplots. 0.99

00:58:49.040 In COVID's wake, the chapter they have in the lab league is 30 pages long.

00:58:52.520 15 of those pages are dedicated to a description of how the Proximal Origins paper came about.

00:58:58.220 Another 10 pages are dedicated to how Fauci suppressed debate about the lab leak.

00:59:03.000 Only five pages of a 30-page chapter are dedicated to actual evidence for and against the lab leak.

00:59:08.920 And it's the last five pages.

00:59:10.360 It's also a way of like fighting off lay people.

00:59:14.500 Yeah.

00:59:14.620 It's like they have a hundred disparate, isolated pieces of evidence and they can just throw them at you in any order at any time and put you in a position where you're like explaining context, which always looks like losing a debate, whether it actually is or not.

00:59:31.920 To describe the sort of more complete timeline of what actually happened with putting together

00:59:36.500 this paper, we need to rewind to January 29th of 2020, where there is a biologist named

00:59:43.340 Christian Anderson.

00:59:44.560 He is looking at the reports coming out of Wuhan.

00:59:47.280 There's this coronavirus spreading around.

00:59:49.140 We get the genome, and he sees two things that worry him in the genome.

00:59:54.800 The first thing is a foreign cleavage site, which is very rare in bat coronaviruses and

00:59:59.820 is something that labs are able to engineer. And then the second thing he sees is a receptor

01:00:04.480 binding domain, which is typically characteristic of a virus that is like very well adapted to

01:00:09.060 humans. So he sees these two things in the genome of COVID. And he basically is like,

01:00:13.760 oh, shit, this could be engineered. So he emails Eddie Holmes, who's another virologist. 0.99

01:00:21.300 And he says, all these emails, of course, have been FOIA'd. He says, Eddie, can we talk? I need

01:00:25.860 to be pulled off a ledge and then eddie holmes looks at the genome and go and says fuck this is 0.98

01:00:31.980 bad so they then reach out to jeremy farrar who at the time is at the welcome trust but will 0.96

01:00:36.760 eventually be at the who he then loops in anthony fauci fauci says cover it up 0.99

01:00:42.760 he has a raccoon dog in his lap that he's like he's stroking it like like like like fucking 0.99

01:00:51.260 Dr. Evil and his cat. So they then sort of have some calls back and forth. And then Fauci sends 1.00

01:00:58.220 Peter the smoking gun email. My raccoon dog must eat.

01:01:05.800 This is this is an in COVID's wake. This is this full screen grab is shown in the Senate report.

01:01:12.680 Jeremy, I just got off the phone with Christian Anderson and he related to me his concern about

01:01:15.940 the furin site mutation in the spike protein of the currently circulating 2019 NCOV, COVID-19.

01:01:23.420 Yeah, they don't have a name for it yet.

01:01:24.540 I told him that as soon as possible, he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary

01:01:28.040 biologists together to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns are

01:01:32.720 validated.

01:01:33.180 He should do this very quickly, and if everyone agrees with his concern, they should report

01:01:36.020 it to the appropriate authorities.

01:01:37.440 I would imagine that in the USA, this would be the FBI, and in the UK, it would be the

01:01:41.480 MI5.

01:01:42.540 It would be important to quickly get confirmation of the cause of his concern by experts in the

01:01:46.800 field of coronaviruses and evolutionary biology. In the meantime, I will alert my U.S. government

01:01:51.960 official colleagues in my conversation with you and Christian and determine what further

01:01:55.080 investigation they recommend. Let us stay in touch. Best regards, Tony.

01:01:59.060 So, Tony, caught red-handed.

01:02:00.620 Right away, they're cutting out evolutionary psychologists.

01:02:05.180 Evolutionary psychologists is like, yes, men have been making coronaviruses to impress women

01:02:10.520 for many years so what do you make of this i mean it seems extremely obvious what's happening here

01:02:16.500 if you just look at this in a vacuum i which i'll try to do a couple of these guys look at

01:02:23.020 covid19 they see a couple of initial indications that it could be lab created they escalate it

01:02:29.700 fauci says get some scientists on this we will alert the authorities if the need be so like this 0.87

01:02:37.660 is the most boring fucking email i've ever seen in my life it's like yeah you guys should look into 0.92

01:02:41.140 it and like if it's a big deal we should really talk to government agencies about it i actually 0.99

01:02:45.180 think what's impressive about this email is how clear it is and what's happening it's very obvious

01:02:49.380 that he's they're just like let's look into this and potentially alert authorities because yeah

01:02:53.840 isn't his job as sort of like a point of contact between like the scientific communities and the 0.98

01:03:00.980 government apparatus he's the head of a government agency of course he's gonna bring the fucking

01:03:04.120 government into it right so of course he's like like let's get the science down and then we'll 0.89

01:03:08.400 talk to the government also i don't know how it is in corporate world but in human rights world 0.87

01:03:12.260 when i did international development it's like every fucking email is like this you're like oh 0.78

01:03:16.820 let's loop in like jeff over at this agency like let's make sure to tell this person yeah like 0.88

01:03:21.080 that's what bosses do essentially is like bring people together and like say like let's get all

01:03:25.180 our ducks in a row diplomatically with who needs to know about this yeah thus begins like the most

01:03:30.940 boring series of slack chats i've ever fucking read that's that's that's a high bar so there's 0.85

01:03:35.980 four scientists that then join these slack chats which have then been now released it's 140 pages 0.92

01:03:41.980 pdf of like their fucking slack chats i will read them all to you luckily they're like there's a lot

01:03:47.560 of graphics and stuff they're sharing so it's like relatively quick to get through but like what's 0.90

01:03:51.480 weird about this as a smoking gun is they actually prove the opposite of what the lab leakers think

01:03:57.420 they prove because the New York Times article quotes Christian Anderson as saying a lab leak

01:04:04.300 is so frigging likely that we need to look into this. So these are scientists who are like, okay,

01:04:09.160 this might be a lab leak. Let's investigate the possibility. So that was the first thing I thought

01:04:13.300 when you sent the quote from the book that sort of is like, they publish this thing saying it's

01:04:19.360 not a lab leak, but here's a quote from him saying that it was. My first thought was, well,

01:04:24.260 When was that quote?

01:04:25.220 Yeah, no, exactly.

01:04:25.820 Was that from way earlier?

01:04:27.340 Yeah.

01:04:27.480 Because that's substantially different.

01:04:30.280 Yeah. 1.00

01:04:30.460 I think the most damning thing in the slacks was when they published the chart where the 1.00

01:04:33.940 x-axis is lies we're telling the public and the y-axis is conspiracies we're doing. 1.00

01:04:40.620 And the line is just going up and to the right.

01:04:43.280 It is really striking.

01:04:44.120 In the Slack chats, this quote where Christian Anderson says it's so freaking likely is February

01:04:49.580 2nd and the paper does not come out until March 17th.

01:04:53.680 So there's a six week period in between him saying this is really likely and then gathering

01:04:59.540 data and then eventually saying this is not likely.

01:05:05.040 That's not what science is.

01:05:06.120 Science is about taking your first impression and then running with that forever.

01:05:10.880 It's also so weird that like Christian Anderson has become like almost as big as Fauci, like

01:05:16.060 a huge target of these like deranged lab leakers.

01:05:19.700 But in the documents, he's the most pro-lab leak person.

01:05:24.660 At one point, he says, the main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely.

01:05:29.420 It's not some fringe theory.

01:05:30.860 I absolutely agree that we can't prove one way or another, but we'll never be able to.

01:05:34.740 However, that doesn't mean by default the data is currently much more suggestive of natural origin.

01:05:39.360 So this guy should be the friend of the lab leakers.

01:05:41.920 This is actually evidence.

01:05:43.360 People within the scientific establishment took this very seriously.

01:05:47.320 Right. That's the real takeaway when I see this email is like that they were not being dismissive of this theory, but were in fact looking into it, taking it seriously.

01:05:58.980 Yes.

01:05:59.220 The fact that something was once the leading theory and then eventually faded does not.

01:06:04.560 It doesn't mean anything. 0.98

01:06:06.100 It's just like normal science shit. 0.97

01:06:07.820 This is also such a sign of like where the lab leak people have gone because like this is this is really like DVD extra stuff. 0.99

01:06:14.640 Yeah.

01:06:14.900 You're like looking into Slack chats of people who wrote a paper and you're like, they initially believed something and then eventually their paper didn't agree with them.

01:06:23.660 It's like the only way to see this as a scandal is basically to lie about what the behind the scenes emails contain.

01:06:30.200 If there was like a top down cover up, you'd see some trickling into the Slack.

01:06:36.420 Yeah, completely.

01:06:36.740 There would have to be some indication that that's what was happening.

01:06:39.760 So much of the stuff is just like very baldly taken out of context.

01:06:43.120 So here is another excerpt from In COVID's Wake.

01:06:48.440 Anderson described the group's work in an email on February 8th to Christian Drotzen at the German Center for Infection Research this way.

01:06:55.180 Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory.

01:07:00.480 But we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn't conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered.

01:07:07.640 And then, unquote, this is then the interpretation by the In COVID's Wake authors. 0.97

01:07:11.980 Inconclusive scientific evidence, one way or the other, had to be manipulated using an inapt legal standard, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, in order to prevent, quote, the shit show. 0.98

01:07:20.980 That's a reference to they said this would be a shit show politically if this turned out to be a lab leak. 0.98

01:07:25.880 That's just like kind of a statement of fact. 0.99

01:07:27.520 Like, yeah, this would be a really big deal.

01:07:28.760 Therefore, we need to, like, get all our ducks in a row.

01:07:30.360 Right.

01:07:30.700 So, like, I guess they're just nitpicking the way that he's phrasing this, right?

01:07:34.300 Yeah, they don't like to disprove.

01:07:35.680 We're trying to disprove it.

01:07:37.420 It's like, ah, that's not real science, which is true.

01:07:39.480 But, yeah, that's just a guy.

01:07:40.540 That's not true, though.

01:07:40.780 You formulate a hypothesis and then you aim to disprove it.

01:07:44.040 This is like how scientists talk about their work.

01:07:46.000 I guess that's right.

01:07:46.920 I guess that's right.

01:07:47.640 Yeah.

01:07:48.260 But like I guess that what there is – I guess that you could like frame it in a more neutral way theoretically where like the end goal is not to disprove the lab leak theory.

01:08:00.620 The end goal is to find out what happened.

01:08:03.220 Right.

01:08:03.320 But yeah.

01:08:04.000 But right.

01:08:04.480 He's speaking more narrowly about the immediate work where you work to disprove something and that's how you rule something out.

01:08:10.300 It's how this sort of science works.

01:08:12.100 It would be a genuine scandal if we found these scientists saying like, this is true,

01:08:16.980 but we shouldn't publish it because it will be not politically expedient, right?

01:08:20.580 Of course.

01:08:21.140 Or if they sent something to Fauci where they're like, oh, we found this.

01:08:24.380 And Fauci was like, no, no, no, say the opposite.

01:08:26.120 If there was any indication that you know it would be all over the Senate report, it

01:08:30.100 would be everywhere if they could find that.

01:08:31.700 The only thing they have is you use the word disprove to another like virologist.

01:08:38.440 Right.

01:08:38.520 You could argue maybe, maybe don't use a word like that. 0.98

01:08:40.700 But like, are we really nitpicking about the fucking use of one word? 0.99

01:08:43.680 Maybe don't use a word like that if you think that your fucking emails are going to get 0.99

01:08:48.020 subpoenaed by Congress. 1.00

01:08:49.600 By like bad faith actors who will twist this shit in any way they can. 0.99

01:08:52.960 And so you have to like speak like a politician, even though you're a scientist. 0.99

01:08:56.440 It's just embarrassing.

01:08:57.480 God, I have like 10 more examples of this, Peter.

01:08:59.160 But like, there's no, there's other, there's, people make a lot of hay about the fact that

01:09:03.820 Christian Anderson in one of his emails, he said like, this is to one of the editors

01:09:06.860 of Nature.

01:09:07.340 the paper is eventually rejected by nature. And when he sort of, I believe this is when he

01:09:11.740 resubmits it to nature medicine, he says like, a bunch of evolutionary biologists prompted by

01:09:17.020 Fauci looked into this. And people are like, oh, you were prompted by Fauci. Oh, so Fauci was the

01:09:22.980 puppet master. Fauci prompted a bunch of scientists to create. And it's like, again, have you had a

01:09:29.040 job? This is how people talk. Have you ever had a job? Or maybe he was kind of name dropping the

01:09:33.320 name fauci to be like this is something with like a little bit of institutional imprimatur 0.75

01:09:37.680 who fucking cares yeah the term prompted does not mean like forced for the record when there's an 0.60

01:09:43.700 elaborate top-down conspiracy to hide what would be career destroying fraud a literal conspiracy 0.97

01:09:53.380 you probably wouldn't just talk about the conspiracy like that right like there would

01:09:58.580 be a cover story like there would be something else but then what's amazing so for this i talked

01:10:04.240 to both christian anderson and eddie holmes two of the people who were in the slack chats

01:10:08.320 this is extremely useful just to get like the kind of basic human parameters of this both of

01:10:14.000 them are completely fucking baffled by this whole thing it's so weird to be like poor christian

01:10:19.040 anderson is a hauled in front of congress like numerous times he's spent like tens of thousands 0.97

01:10:22.820 of dollars on his own money on like legal defense he's getting death threats these people are at

01:10:27.600 the center of essentially like a right-wing conspiracy and have been completely abandoned

01:10:32.380 by the entire left, right? The fact that we have like New York Times columns saying that like we

01:10:37.340 were misled about the origins of the pandemic and all this stuff, no one is sticking up for these

01:10:41.980 guys. And it's like a very obvious witch hunt, right? The Republicans wanted to link Fauci

01:10:45.540 to the lab leak. They wanted to link Fauci to fucking anything they could blame him for. 0.99

01:10:49.840 And if you talk to Christian Anderson, what he says is like, at first he was like, yeah, 0.97

01:10:54.160 this receptor binding domain, this fur and cleavage site, they both look really suspicious

01:10:57.940 to me. He then looks into it. They find a similar receptor binding domain in the wild

01:11:02.560 in pangolins. So he's like, oh, okay. So it can occur in the wild. And then they look into the

01:11:06.920 fur and cleavage site of COVID. And they're like, this is a really shit fur and cleavage site. It 1.00

01:11:11.480 just sort of sucks. Like the letters are not lined up. It's not very efficient. And it doesn't fit 0.88

01:11:16.560 the genome of like the kind of fur and cleavage site that they do when they're doing gain of

01:11:19.620 function research, which just indicates evolution. Like this just looks like the messy process

01:11:25.260 of evolution. And the other big thing is they look into the genome of COVID and they don't

01:11:30.460 find any backbone of any existing virus. It's not SARS-1. It's not anything that's ever been

01:11:36.420 seen in a virus lab before. And if you were going to design something in a lab, you would use a

01:11:40.160 backbone and you would make a sort of a series of, you know, three, four, whatever, discrete

01:11:43.360 changes. They find no evidence of this whatsoever. Then they eventually publish this. They publish

01:11:49.080 it first kind of as a preprint in February 20th, and they published like a better, more finalized

01:11:54.000 version, March 17th. The thing that I cannot get over, 51 pages of the fucking Senate report are 0.98

01:11:59.440 dedicated to this paper, right? Nothing in this paper has been disproven. It's not like, oh, 0.98

01:12:05.820 they put out this paper, a hastily, shoddily constructed paper. Fauci's like, just print

01:12:10.780 lies to suppress debate. They published an article that was true. So what exactly is the scandal

01:12:18.560 here i think when you're talking about the lab leak itself i i try to retain some humility because

01:12:23.560 i don't know what you're talking about like just make raccoon dog jokes peter it's fine the

01:12:30.540 information that you are providing me is like a huge percentage of the information i have you

01:12:35.220 know what i mean yeah and so i try to retain that part of my brain that's sort of like you can you

01:12:39.960 could very well be wrong about this right you like you you could very well be wrong about this

01:12:43.500 This is not your field of expertise.

01:12:46.180 But then you see this stuff and it makes me feel more confident in the science stuff that I don't know about inherently. 0.94

01:12:56.540 Because surely, if their scientific evidence was clear, all of these books would be about all the various talented scientists who have spectacular reasons for believing that the lab leak happened, rather than this absolutely god-awful, baby-brained conspiracy bullshit.

01:13:14.660 Okay, so we're going to end by you and I going over the Trump administration lab leak website.

01:13:23.020 Here's this.

01:13:23.820 we're going to go to whitehouse.gov slash lab leak or whatever dude i wish that we could 0.96

01:13:29.280 adequately explain what this what the fucking banner looks like it's it's lab leak in like 0.95

01:13:37.480 in like fucking word art and it like pops onto the screen it's like a little flash animation 0.97

01:13:41.360 yeah in the middle of it is just donald trump walking towards the camera looking stern i know 0.97

01:13:48.420 And then in the corner, it says the true origins of COVID-19, but it says the true origins of,

01:13:55.120 and then COVID-19 for some reason is in like a scripted font.

01:13:59.760 Like a wedding invitation.

01:14:01.260 Like we COVID-19 invite you.

01:14:04.680 It's such a graphic design is my passion situation. 0.92

01:14:08.020 Like some fucking one of those Doge interns was like, I'll do it. 0.95

01:14:11.600 Also, okay. 0.98

01:14:12.060 Read the first paragraph here.

01:14:13.980 This is the number one message on like lableak.gov.

01:14:17.300 Oh my God.

01:14:18.420 The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 publication, which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab leak theory, was prompted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated naturally. 0.98

01:14:32.540 The first thing they mention is this fucking paper.

01:14:35.680 And this is what this is, again, such a classic indicator of a conspiracy theory. 1.00

01:14:41.820 It's so fucking nuts. 0.93

01:14:42.620 The first thing is not evidence for a lab leak. 0.99

01:14:46.280 Yeah.

01:14:46.480 It's conspiratorial rambling about a cover up about suppressing debate. 0.90

01:14:50.840 The other thing that Eddie Holmes mentioned to me was that it's so fucking bizarre to 0.58

01:14:54.640 be accused of suppressing debate when like the paper is debate. 0.80

01:14:58.680 Like we said, we don't think it's a lab leak.

01:15:01.340 That's a picking a position in a debate. 1.00

01:15:03.260 Publish your own bitch. 1.00

01:15:04.500 Yeah. 1.00

01:15:04.700 If I say the minimum wage should be higher, that's debate.

01:15:07.680 That's not me suppressing debate.

01:15:09.280 Right.

01:15:09.760 But I could then publish a piece saying that in private correspondence, you have

01:15:15.580 consistently told me that you think the minimum wage should be low. 0.97

01:15:19.680 You would fucking do that if I published anything like that. 0.98

01:15:21.880 Tell the truth? 0.99

01:15:22.540 Yes.

01:15:24.740 This was a paper published in Nature Medicine. 0.99

01:15:27.900 If somebody wanted to publish a response or a fucking op-ed or something, 0.98

01:15:31.520 they could have published it. 0.98

01:15:32.640 There's no suppression.

01:15:33.840 What about the numbers after that on the LabLeak website?

01:15:36.620 It says the virus possesses a biological characteristic that all italics is not found in nature.

01:15:43.860 I know. I love that the first thing is just a bald faced lie. I love it. It's just so fucking perfect. Like there's never been a furring cleavage site found in nature, except for all the times it was found in nature.

01:15:54.660 This just reads like conspiratorial rambling.

01:15:58.180 So it's really bleak.

01:15:59.060 It's just like a little paragraph for gain of function research. There's a little paragraph that says NIH failures.

01:16:05.260 there's a part that says the social distancing the six feet apart social distancing recommendation

01:16:11.100 which shut down schools and small businesses across the country was arbitrary and not based

01:16:15.140 on science dude trump was in office like i know it's crazy how much that gets memory hold such

01:16:22.340 that even when like we're talking about it it has to be brought up repeatedly because

01:16:27.600 it is just not incongruent with like the public's understanding of it. And also like this story

01:16:36.080 that Republicans tell about this. There's also we didn't even have time to get into it. But

01:16:40.360 there's also this eco health obstruction. There was a proposal for the Wuhan lab and a guy in

01:16:46.520 North Carolina to do some gain of function work. This was not funded. This didn't happen. But it's

01:16:53.000 like this is now seen as like evidence that they were doing gain of function work. But like we

01:16:57.500 already know they were doing gain-of-function work in the lab. That's not secret. They were

01:17:00.460 publishing it. And this eco-health proposal wasn't funded and the only gain-of-function

01:17:05.680 research was going to take place in North Carolina. So even if it had been funded,

01:17:09.280 it would be irrelevant. And also it was on the SARS-1 backbone. So if it had leaked,

01:17:14.540 it would be in fucking North Carolina and it would be SARS-1 that leaked. 0.97

01:17:17.660 But like, again, it's just like the document wasn't public and they like were able to find 0.97

01:17:22.400 it in some archive of some random, you know, somewhere online that like people didn't want

01:17:26.820 to get to it and anything that is secret people tell themselves is like important so like oh the 0.69

01:17:32.960 the defuse proposal wasn't made public it's like why would a fucking failed funding proposal be 0.87

01:17:39.280 public i've worked on a million funding proposals that didn't go anywhere and they're just on my 0.90

01:17:42.520 hard drive at my human rights institution right it's not like a cover-up it's just like this

01:17:45.740 isn't that fucking interesting and also even if it had been funded it wouldn't mean anything for 0.99

01:17:50.000 covid god what a bunch of absolute jesus fucking dipshits so i i just want to end by talking about 0.98

01:17:55.620 two sort of common talking points about the lab leak. And I think a lot of people haven't really 0.99

01:18:00.820 followed this all that closely. And honestly, if you're someone who's kind of picked up by

01:18:04.640 osmosis, the lab leak theory, you see it around, you're like, yeah, there's probably some good

01:18:07.920 evidence for that. I don't really like begrudge anybody that. I think this is really a media

01:18:11.240 failure. One thing you find a lot when you talk to like kind of normal people about this is that

01:18:15.320 people will say like, well, neither theory is proven. We haven't proved the market. We haven't

01:18:19.200 proved the lab. That's true in the abstract, but that also implies that there's like a 50-50 chance.

01:18:24.780 yeah there is no evidence for a lab leak there's evidence against it there's tons of evidence for

01:18:30.220 zoonosis like there's better evidence for zoonosis than for a lot of origins of viruses ebola hiv both

01:18:36.660 very murky how they actually originated the other thing that you hear a lot about the lab leak thing

01:18:41.640 is like it doesn't what does it matter yeah i even said a version of this on our previous

01:18:45.940 episode which i now regret saying and like you can say on one hand it doesn't matter for like

01:18:51.080 america's pandemic response which is true right even if this was a chinese bioweapon if this was

01:18:56.120 a random thing that happened either way like america's response was garbage so on some level 0.74

01:19:00.940 fine it doesn't matter but also like this is i think a really core part of the right-wing assault

01:19:06.860 on science right trump signed an executive order right after he came into office banning gain of 0.92

01:19:11.320 function research oh my god it's not that i really give that much of a shit about gain of function 0.72

01:19:15.820 research but like the people pushing the lab leak theory have a specific set of policies that they 0.74

01:19:20.700 want to pass, right? And if we give in to the lab leakers, and if we sort of allow this to gain

01:19:27.080 purchase, they're going to pass policies that are going to make it harder to develop vaccines and

01:19:31.780 treatments. And they're going to ignore the wildlife trade, which is a fucking huge problem 0.96

01:19:36.920 and probably will start the next pandemic because it started to last like three. This matters as 0.91

01:19:42.480 far as the actual outcomes and policies that people are pushing for. You know, you can't have

01:19:47.780 this sort of like anti-science conspiracy-minded movement let loose without negative repercussions

01:19:58.180 exactly like even if you think they're right about lab leak their solutions to these problems 0.99

01:20:03.260 will be anti-scientific yeah anti-intellectual nonsense yeah these people are fucking lying in 0.98

01:20:09.720 the first bullet point of their fucking congressional report right there's a weird 0.99

01:20:14.280 of thing we're like in this rush to condemn groupthink it's like we're now engaging in a 0.99

01:20:19.320 kind of groupthink yeah i i don't know why this has caught the imagination of lefties all i'll

01:20:25.260 say is that in like 2023 there was a media panic about organized retail crime and then i put out

01:20:34.400 a bonus episode debunking it and the panic faded away yep whereas you put out an episode about the 1.00

01:20:43.680 lab leak fuck you fuck you and it got worse people want to argue with you so much that 0.99

01:20:50.960 they started believing in the lab leak conspiracy 1.00

If Books Could Kill - June 05, 2025

Bonus： The Lab Leak Goes Mainstream

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