The Mystery of SARS-CoV-2 & Origins of COVID-19 | Alina Chan | 45

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Nick Jikomes talks to genetic engineer Dr. Alina Chan about the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. They discuss Alina’s new book, “Viral: The Search For the Origin of COVID-19,” (https://linktr.ee/mindandmatter_books) which she co-wrote with Matt Ridley. The book thoroughly documents the events & people relevant to COVID’s origins. They discuss everything from the original SARS-1 epidemic in China, wildlife spillover vs. accidental lab leak hypotheses; pangolins, bats, and other animals; SARS-CoV-2 genome; institutions and people like Francis Collins, the NIH, WHO, and EcoHealth Alliance. 

*Not medical advice.

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[Music] [Music] [Music] Welcome to the Mind and Matter podcast. I’m your host Nick Jaccomus and today I’m speaking with Alina Chan. Alina Chan is a genetic engineer. She currently is a post-doal scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has a background in genetics and virus biology. She’s also the author of the new book Viral, which she co-wrote with Matt Ridley that comes out on Tuesday, November 16th, 2021. Alina is the first guest of the podcast who I’m welcoming back for a second conversation and the reason is the subject which is CO 19. Um if you’ve listened to any of the podcast episodes prior to this one including the one with Alina you know that I have talked to a few people about SARS KV2 the virus as well as the CO 19 pandemic. We’ve talked with various individuals on the podcast about the biology of the virus, what we know about some of the vaccines that are out there, and what we know about the pandemic, including how this virus actually got into humans. That’s the subject of Alina’s book that she explores with Matt Ridley in great detail. The book is not one that comes to a conclusion. We still don’t know whether the virus arose through natural means, meaning that it hopped to humans by way of an intermediate species, another mamalian species, versus the hypothesis that it accidentally leaked from a research lab such as the Wuhan Institute of Urology or another. This is an unresolved problem, but it has obviously been in the news and been very controversial over the last few months. It is a rapidly changing and updating story. Almost every day you hear something new about it. Several months ago, it was considered almost taboo to suggest that this virus may have arisen through an accidental laboratory leak. Now, that idea is taken much more seriously as things have come to light. And one has to consider the possibility that that is true if one cares about the actual truth of the matter. And so, Alina and I discuss the book. We go over many, many key events and people and details in the story and how things have transpired over the last few months. We go all the way back to the SARS 1 pandemic and talked about what happened there and what we learned from it. We talk about the SARS KV2 virus and where we think it started and how it spread. We talk about the Wuhan seafood market and the so-called penglin papers. We talk about the close connection between bats and viruses and why bats are such an important piece of this puzzle. We talk about the idea of a laboratory leak versus a natural zooonautic origin of the virus. We talk about gain of function research and different aspects of the SARS KV2 genome and what they tell us about the virus and where it may have come from. We also talk about institutions such as the NIH and the Ecoalth Alliance and the World Health Organization and the role that they’ve played in different ways in this whole pandemic and how it has played out. We discussed a recent interview with Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, and some things that he said that may not have been fully accurate that we clarify. And we also talk about the role that anonymous internet sleuths, both scientists and non-scientists, have played in uncovering evidence relevant to understanding the origins of CO 19. So, if this is a topic you’re interested in, Alina and I went into a lot of detail. And I highly re highly recommend listening to this episode if you’re interested in getting up to speed on exactly where we’re at and what we still don’t know about where the virus actually originated. 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A large fraction of the population is actually vitamin D deficient, especially in winter months when we get less sun exposure. And vitamin D is super important for the proper function of the immune system and for a variety of other things. And there’s even evidence indicating that vitamin D deficiency is correlated with more severe cases of CO 19 in those who get infected. Every time I go into the doctor each year for a checkup, I’m always told that vitamin D deficiency is very common and I should be supplementing on a daily basis. So, visit athletic greens.com/mindedmatter or click the link in the episode description. You’ll get a free 1-year supply of vitamin D with your first purchase. Today’s show is brought to you in part by Dossist, an allnatural cannabis company specializing in dose controlled cannabis products made with plant-based ingredients. To learn more about Dossist, their products, and where they are available, please visit their website through the link in the episode description. And with that, here’s my conversation with Dr. Alina Chan. [Music] Marina Chan, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for having me for the second time. Yeah, you’re the first uh the first guest who’s come back for a second visit. Um part of the reason you’re back is that what you’re working on and what we’re talking about is just so timely and moving so quickly. We’re of course talking about the origins of the SARS KV2 virus and CO 19 because this is uh it’s obviously a relevant and ongoing mystery and it’s it’s changing very quickly. You guys have written you and Matt Ridley the science writer have written a book called viral the search for the origin of CO 19 and it’s a really interesting book. One of the one of the reasons it’s interesting is because, you know, by the time it comes out, practically within a few weeks or months, you’re going to be probably ready to update it. And I just want to basically start at what you might call the beginning of this story. So, we’re going to be talking about where this virus potentially came from. Before I even ask that, I should just ask, you should just say upfront very quickly, very concisely, do we know the origin of the virus yet? No, we don’t know the origin of the virus yet. So, right now, the focus should be on gathering more information, not guessing where it came from. Exactly. So, that’s one of the things I liked about the book is by the time I got to the end of it, um you guys didn’t end it by saying, you know, this is the end. You you ended it by saying we don’t know yet and this is still an ongoing thing. So from a a scientific perspective, I thought that it was a really, you know, it was really nice to see someone say that and frame everything in those terms because you often don’t see that in in the public sphere. But anyways, the story in some ways starts in this copper mine in southern China. So tell us about this mine and tell us about you’ve got this you you’ve got a literal timeline in the book in the back and the very first entry is 2012 and it says six men are hospitalized in April and May of 2012 after working in a batinfested mine in the southern part of China by a bat virus suspected. the bat a bat virus is suspected and top laboratories including the Wuhan Institute of Urology start to search the mine for viruses. So so what is important about this mine and why does the timeline start there? So let’s picture what’s happening in 2012 in China. Uh about 10 years has passed from the first SARS epidemic uh that occurred in South China in Guangong and there are these teams of scientists in China searching for the natural reservoir. So they already have found the proximal intermediate host of SARS one which are civid cats uh and there’s a strong link uh to the wildlife trade in terms of where the first SARS virus came from. But they haven’t found the natural reservoir. So where did the civet cats get their SARS virus from? So they’re hunting in bats looking all over South China where these viruses tend to be found. And just then they uh hear about these cases. Uh in 2012, six miners uh were admitted to Kuning Hospital. It’s in the capital of uh Yunan province and they present with a mysterious viral pneumonia. So the treat of antifungals doesn’t work. Uh half of them eventually die. Uh miraculously one person was in the hospital for more than 100 days. He recovered after getting anti-coagulants. So anti-b blood clotting uh therapy. So there was some aspects of what disease they had that looked like COVID 19 but not identical because none of these miners passed the disease to anyone else. But you can imagine the attention it drew. So uh the top SARS expert in the country Chong Nan was drawn in. He’s kind of like the Dr. Fouchi of China. And so he comes in and he looks at the case data and he says go to that cave immediately that mine and sample the bats that send them to check for SARS viruses. check the patient samples for SARS antibodies. These antibodies sorry the patient samples are sent off to Wuhan Institute of Biology as well as other places for testing and in a medical thesis as well as a doctoral thesis that came from the uh then uh from from the now director of the Chinese CDC lab we hear that these patient samples tested positive for antibodies and the doctoral thesis says it’s antibodies for SARS virus. So the medical thesis concludes the six people suffered from a SARS like illness and might have been infected by SARS viruses from vets. So it’s 2012. This is after the SARS one epidemic in China that happened earlier earlier on and obviously it’s before today. So it’s before the SARS KV2 epidemic happens. There’s a mine in southern China. It’s filled with bats because it’s just a big cave that bats like to hang out in. And it’s a copper mine. So there’s miners down there doing mining work. Six of them get seriously ill and it looks like a pneumonia type of illness that is not unlike SARS 1 or SARS 2. Half of them die and at the time to reiterate what you were saying. So by 2012 they figured out that the SARS one virus came to humans from civot cats but they didn’t figure out yet how it got to civot cats and they thought it might have come from bats. Mhm. So, these six miners get sick, half of them die. They’re told to go check the cave and they’re collecting bat viruses. So, fill in the blanks there for us. When they go to the cave, how do they actually do that? They have to physically capture the bats and are they sending saliva samples or the blood samples from the bats back to labs? Are they bringing bats physically back to the labs? How does that work? A lot of this information only came to light through the work of like open- source intelligence uh like detectives like internet slopes and detectives. So they were scouring the internet looking for archive pages and documents and thesis from even the uh Institute of Biology. Um and they found that yes they were actually capturing bats uh and sending them up to Uhan Institute of Viology but they were also taking samples so they could lay uh sheets on the ground and collect fecal samples. they could trap the bats of nets and and also just take samples from them. Um they found at least to our knowledge between 2012 and 2015 nine of the closest relatives to SARS coov 2 at the time SARS 2 emerged in Wuhan. So we don’t know how many more viruses they got after 2015. But we know that between 2012 and 2015 they had at least nine of the closest relatives to Saskov 2. Okay. So they they went to this mine they collected bat samples in different ways. And you’re saying uh at the the very first SARS KB2 virus variant that we know about from the current pandemic, they have nine different viruses that are very close relatives to that virus. Yes. At least there could be more. We just don’t know. Yes. And you’re saying that all of that information came to us pretty much from like random people with anonymous accounts on the internet just digging around and finding stuff. There were a few independent scientists uh like Rosanna Sigretto and Mona Rahaka. Uh but by and large it took the work a lot of independent detectives or or analysts. They had to go through all of the papers from these research institutes, go through their grant proposals, go through like leaked documents, uh archived websites and then put it all together. uh sorting through all of the sample ids to see that actually hey we most of the viruses we know about from the Wuhan Institute of Biology were collected before 2016. So after 2016 we it’s just a blank page. We don’t know what they found. I see. So from all of this evidence we deduced that there’s at least these nine viruses but they were captured you know back around 2012. We don’t really know what’s happening since then. And just to fill in the blanks for people here. So you mentioned that they found a lot of this information by digging through the thesis, the thesis that was written by individual medical students or individual graduate students in China. And I just want to say for people that don’t know, nobody goes in, no one reads a thesis of a grad like no one on the internet is going to Google around and just like for fun go read a medical thesis or a PhD student’s thesis. That almost like that essentially never happens. you would have to be like like maybe my mom would go read my thesis or something like that, but like no one’s going to go like look at this stuff. I think even parents don’t read their their children’s thesis. It’s it’s too technical and dry and right but these thesis uh they are really carefully written. It’s not like you can write a blog post and put that down as your thesis like you actually have to have supervisors signing off on it. And so when the medical thesis said that the conclusion after studying all these cases from that mind was that they had been sickened with a SARS like bad corona virus it’s serious like it’s not like he was guessing many people had to sign off on the thesis right like this is the virus I literally spent four years studying it here’s the sequence um it’s very well documented in something like that as obscure as that document might be and so these internet slooh literally independent scientists or even people on the internet who we don’t even necessarily know their identity dug this stuff up and put it on like literally posted it on social media. Is that what we’re talking about here? Yeah. So they they shared all of these documents uh via links on Twitter. Um and it was actually quite surprising how this happened. So it it relates to my work actually. So I had put up a tutorial. So it’s like a a thread on Twitter that goes through uh for example my preprint and it attracted a lot of attention from uh individuals across the world who were really interested in this topic on the origins and they they found each other on this thread and they started talking to each other asking questions like um finding answers for each other other boom like the medical thesis shows up the seeker is is the one who found it. he managed to log in into a Chinese thesis database using uh passwords and usernames he found online and he he posted uh the medical thesis and the doctoral thesis uh showing that describing these cases in great detail. So this is like this guy’s literal his name his Twitter name is the seeker and he’s basically a digital private detective who just took it upon himself to somehow find login credentials to some Chinese database and then personally read through all of this arcane documentation. Yep. And post it on Twitter. The internet it works. Okay. So, this is sort of an organic process. It’s a decentralized process. Individual human beings with names like the seeker um are just digging this stuff up and posting it. What um do we know who that person is actually? Yeah. And we reveal that in our book, but I I won’t go into too much detail uh on on outside of the book. So, you have to find out through the book. We’ll leave we’ll leave it to the book, but it’s it’s an interesting little subplot, I think. Can I now follow the seeker on Twitter? How did social networks so at this time when this is happening and people are put a time to this? What what time um on the timeline are we talking about here when this stuff is starting to bubble up on the internet and how is this being handled by Twitter and by Facebook and by by Reddit and other websites? So this was in May 2020. uh most uh platforms had banned any talk of a lab origin whether like lab accidents or bioeapon they banned it all. Uh it was only on Twitter that you could actually talk about it but even even so it was viewed with a lens of these people are crazy conspiracy theorists. So I mean I I clearly didn’t think so because my preprint uh which we posted online at the beginning of uh May said that we considered it plausible that this virus might have an accidental lamb origin. Mhm. And I mean that’s the thing that is so um fascinating and infuriating I guess about this whole thing is so I’ll just reiterate what you said. We’re in 20 um you said early 2020 at this point still um May 2020. So actually a bit later. So May 2020 at this point it’s considered basically um forbidden to talk about an accidental lab leak as a possibility. So no one was saying like oh my god this definitely leaked from a lab. People were just digging around and people like you and others were saying it could have leaked from a lab. There’s some indications that are consistent with that and we don’t actually know that it was a wildlife spillover yet. Let’s talk about it. And this was sort of like that discussion was more or less banned from large parts of the internet. And you’ve, as you’ve said, you’ve literally got groups of users on Twitter sort of whispering to each other almost online trying to just discuss the possibility. Yeah. So it it was a really lively group of people talking to each other and they eventually found founded a group like an internet sloof team called drastic. Uh but unfortunately since the book was published drastic has fractured into two drastics. So uh what I’ll say about this group of people is that they’re really tenacious and and determined they will like find as much information as they can. Uh but they’re really separate people. So it’s not like they’re all friends with each other and they agree with each other. They they each bring different things to the table both good and bad and we have to acknowledge them for their contributions but also it doesn’t mean that we we say we put them on a pedestal and like everything they do is good. Yeah. Yeah. What does um what does it actually say about the the state of our official like sensemaking bodies that so much of this information has come from anonymous individuals like this? You know, is it is it strange to you or what do you think about the fact that all of this evidence that’s bubbled up and all of you know, the stitching together of what actually happened and when has come from the sort of organic semi- anonymous internet process rather than through our actual official institutional apparatus. So, it’s actually a pretty um sensitive issue amongst the drastic team for example that actually some of them are real scientists. They actually have degrees in in related fields like biology, life sciences. Uh but they have been lumped together as internet slaves and outsiders because none of them are really part of the scientific establishment. Uh and hopefully I can communicate this better, but since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been some scientists, some experts who call themselves the authority. So they’re like, we are the ones who know what’s happening and we can tell you what’s a conspiracy theory or not. and anyone else even other scientists who tell you otherwise are unscientific they are unqualified or they they’re conspiracy theorists. So uh because of the vacuum that the established scientists left um all of these open-source intelligence or internet slopes or independent scientists had to come in and fill that niche to find the origin of CO 19. Mhm. So again May 2020 is where we’re at at this part of the story. This evidence is bubbling up on the on the internet, but at the time the official scientific authorities, science with a capital S, what are they saying at the time about the the plausible origins? Well, they they said it’s a conspiracy theory. Uh there’s even a uh article from from a really well-known infectious diseases institute in America that that cause a lab accident where a natural virus is released. They say that’s a conspiracy theory, too. So, um, they don’t leave any room for the possibility of someone being infected by a virus they collected from nature, accidentally transmitting it to people outside of the lab. I see. So, if they were calling it a conspiracy theory at the time, does that mean that like this has never been observed before? That a virus has never accidentally leaked from a lab before? No. That that couldn’t be further away from the truth. So, there’s actually quite a few accidental releases of dangerous pathogens. uh for example there’s a statistic in 2019 there were on average more than four accidental releases of select agents in the US so select agents means like the most dangerous of the dangerous pathogens so this is not counting any of the other less dangerous human pathogens and surprisingly MS is not even on that list so we don’t know how many times MS might have been accidentally spilled or uh put someone was exposed to it in labs in the US um and in fact there are there’s so many examples examples like small pox SARS one uh Marborg virus for example and and so I’ll zoom in on the story of Marborg virus because prior to it escaping from a lab no one had ever known about this virus before so the first time it was characterized it was after it had spilled from three separate laboratories around in in Europe because samples from Africa had been sent up there uh from monkeys from monkeys had been sent up there for making vaccines and the the lab personnel that received it didn’t know about the virus and they handled the uh tissues of the monkeys and got sick at three separate institutes so and cause an outbreak. So it’s totally reasonable that when you send samples of pathogens especially across the world and someone on the other end receives it, they might get infected without doing any dangerous research. Yeah. I mean when you say it out loud it almost sounds silly. It’s like when you send viruses around the world from person to person, sometimes they get away or they infect someone. Yeah. So it happens all the time. So viruses leak from labs often. Viruses also jump from one species to another often. These are both common things and we should expect a priori without knowing anything that either scenario is perfectly within the realm of possibility especially when there is a laboratory in the very city of the outbreak that is known for doing that research. So if if there was no lab in that city that was doing that kind of research then you know fine like then it’s not on the table. But in this case there’s a corona virus lab that does this specific work at the location where we think the outbreak first happened. Yeah. Um yeah again when you say it out loud it’s like okay should we should at least consider this. Um so let’s let’s actually um so we just talked about May 2020 and this is sort of beginning sort of the the beginning phase of the pandemic. Um I remember at this time right we were already in the US. I’m on the west coast of the US. So we had already sort of started working from home and everything. Let’s actually back up. So because at that time um there was still a lot of information we didn’t know that we do know now. Let’s talk about like the very first SARS KV2 human infections that we know about. when do we think that happened and where exactly do we think that happened? So one major challenge is that up till today we don’t have very clear data describing the first cases of COVID 19 diagnosed and and or even retrospectively detected in Wuhan. Um and and part of that has to do with political reasons like there have been people in China like really brave people in China who tried to archive all of the news as it was emerging from Wuhan and they were sent to prison. So uh from what is still available online, what has been successfully archived for example on GitHub even, we know that uh some of the earliest cases might have been as early as November 2019 in Wuhan, but according to all of the formal official sources, the first case uh only started showing symptoms in the first week of December 2019. I see. So according to official sources from China, first cases are December 2019. But what you’re saying is there’s other evidence that shows as early as November. And that evidence was put onto the internet into archives by Chinese citizens and they were not supposed to do that. And some of those people are literally in prison right now for for putting that online. Some of them were recently released from prison. Uh but there are some who have disappeared completely. So no one knows where they’ve been taken to. So it’s very serious like that just for preserving the news, just for preserving records of what happened in Wuhan, you can be disappeared. I see. So you feel confident in stating that the first cases of CO 19 probably happened in November of 2019 if not earlier. But the we we can say that at least November 2019 is the probable starting point. Yes. At least. Yeah. I see. Okay. So, this is, you know, that would be 7 years after 2012. So, this is about 7 years after the miners got sick with the mystery virus. Yep. Okay. So, first cases happened in late 2019, we think. Um, what talk to us about the seafood market cuz I remember early on people were talking a lot about this Chinese seafood market and that this was a good candidate for where the jump the the potential jump from one species into humans may have been made. So why were people talking about the seafood market and what do we what do we know about it? So we know for sure that one of the earliest clusters of CO 19 in Wuhan was associated with this Hanan seafood market in central uh Wuhan. So um this was a very large marketplace like on average they said about 10,000 people visited a day like 10,000 people in one market per day. So um however the amount of wildlife train in there was dimunitive. So if you look at the actual data that’s become available this year on average there were about 11 civet cats per month. So across the entire city. So not just this market but other markets in the city. So, central China is not really well known for this kind of uh wild animal life trade, especially like wild mammals. South China is more well known for that. I see. And this is important, right? So, we’re talking about a seafood market. So, there’s probably lots of fish and crabs and like seafood type creatures. Correct me if I’m wrong, but when a virus jumps from one animal into humans, it typically comes from a mammal. So like a civid is a mammal, a bat is a mammal. They’re relatively closely related to us because we’re mammals. So it would be you would not expect a virus like this to come into humans from like a fish or something like that. No. Yeah. So that’s why you mentioned the wildlife trade. So it’s a seafood market, but there is some mamalian species that are being traded in that market. I mean the there has been a pretty fantastical theory floated by uh Chinese government officials that it’s possible the virus came from a batch of frozen lobsters from Maine USA because somehow the seafood market had been receiving shipments of lobsters from Maine USA. But I think anyone who has been who has received the scientific education should know that this is not this is not even possible like it. Yeah. Yeah. And so the idea here is just from an evolutionary perspective for a virus to jump from one species to another it needs to change, right? It needs to adapt to the new species. And in order to have any chance of doing that or any plausible chance of doing that, the two species need to be relatively similar, right? Because like if you go from one mammal to another, most mammals have the same basic cell types, lots of the same receptors, a lot of similar molecular machinery that the virus in one species can um recognize in the other. Now, when you go to more distant evolutionary relatives, like a lobster in this case, they’re just so different from us physiologically that there’s much much much lower chance of that happening. I mean, has anything like that ever happened where you go from a crustaceian or an insect to a mammal? Well, I mean there are insect born uh infectious diseases. Yes. But but not this type. So, not not corona viruses, not not sasaky viruses. These require a more similar animal host. So uh people even wonder whether they can jump from bats directly into humans. That’s why up to today they keep searching for an intermediate host because a lot of people don’t think that a site virus can jump make the huge leap from bats to humans. It’s too different. I see. Um but but that’s the mystery. So when the uh local CDC and the Beijing CDC went to that uh seafood market, they found zero traces of life mammals. They sampled all of the carcasses they could find. They found zero traces of SARS KV2. So the only evidence they found was that in some of the sewage or like environmental surfaces like doors and tables, they found some uh viral content. But this is totally expected. Like if you look at the cruise that was first hit uh by COVID 19, the whole place was plasted with virus on like all the surfaces. Like this is why there was all that hygiene theater earlier in the pandemic. Like everyone was cleaning everything because when the sick people around the virus is in the air, it’s all over the place. I see. Yeah. So seafood market, it’s a candidate location for where this thing may have come from. Probably not where it actually came from for the reasons that you mentioned. So then the other thing that I remember people were talking about were penglins. So you’re going to have to explain what the hell a penglin is because more people do not know what a penglin is. And so walk us through the so-called penglin papers after that. You have an entire chapter in the book called the penglin papers. So penglins are these scaly anteaters. Uh when they encounter a predator, they they can curl up into tiny ball and they have this hard scales. Uh their scales are kind of made like with keratin with our nails, for example. Uh and it protects them from from being mauled by a lion, for example. Uh and they’re found in several places. They’re found in Africa. They’re also found in China and parts of Asia. They’ve been highly trafficked into China especially and in Vietnam because people believe that eating the scales has medicinal properties. M. So, it it’s a really tragic story because you’re just eating nails. You’re eating like keratins, but you’re paying thousands of dollars for these really poor like endangered species that uh unfortunately they get sick along the way as you traffic them out of their home countries into like like really scary dangerous like marketplace in the wildlife trade in China. And so in February 2020, uh there was a news conference in China and some scientists claimed that they had found a 99% match to SAS Kobe 2 in a batch of smuggled penglins. And penguins are mammals, right? Yes, they are mammals. Okay. Yeah. Uh and and that drove the internet wild because people had been looking for the intermediate host really hard like scientists had been telling them even in February 2020, don’t worry, we will find it soon. There are so many smart scientists in China. They independently found the intermediate host of SARS one. So there’s no reason why they shouldn’t find the intermediate host of SARS 2 like immediately. So everyone was just like on edge waiting for the intermediate host to be found. And when they heard that 99% matched with penguins had been found, they they would just erupted on the internet. Like all the scientists uh journal editors, they all wanted a penguin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And and it fit like the the story that had been told a million times, right? like people are bad. We traffic like pitiful animals. We we are horrendous to them and now we get sick because we have these univilized behaviors. So it fit the story that we’ve been told again and again by scientists by the media. Um but when those penglin papers four of them got released from China within a span of three days when they came out actually it showed that that penglin corona virus wasn’t that closely related to uh SARS kov v2 and actually all four papers described the same penglin corona virus from a single batch of sick pengalins. So even though there were just papers everywhere like everyone was talking about pengalins actually it was a single batch like only two or three sick pengalins that resulted in this data that was just marketed across multiple papers. So you’re saying it was not when you actually scrutinized the data it was not close enough to be the culprit here. Yeah. Not at all. Okay. So but but you said it was a 99% match. Was it less than 99 or is that is that misleading to focus on the 99% match? So it turned out not to be a 99% match. The scientists who gave that number the news conference might have been too excited and they gave the wrong number. So when it came out it was actually spoke. Yeah. Yeah. So but but they the effect of that news conference and all these papers was to drive the media into a frenzy about pengalins. Yeah. And then afterwards, China seemed to suggest that they would curb the wildlife trade. But actually they they banned the consumption of wild animals, but they actually didn’t ban the trafficking of animals for medicine, for medicinal purposes. And we know that penguins are not trafficked for their meat. They’re trafficked for the for the scales, for the medicine. So in effect, nothing happened. Yeah. In effect, nothing happened. The regulations are not the kind of regulations one would need to prevent this from happening again. Why do you think that is? Is it because probably so many people in that part of the world including the government officials that would be responsible for crafting these regulations might themselves believe that there are medicinal properties to these things? I’m sure that there is a small number of people who still believe that eating penguin skills has some health benefit like probably that just the most desperate situation possible where they think it can cure cancer or something. Mhm. Uh but the wildlife trade in China over the years is it has evolved. So the the consumption of these wild animals and their products is actually part of a rich person culture. So only rich people will spend thousands of dollars on these things just to show off that hey like I have all these wild animals that we eating for dinner tonight consumption. Yeah. It’s not it’s not like uh I don’t have pork today so I’m going to eat some raccoon dog. No, it’s not like that. Like it’s I see it’s very wealthy people showing off their wealth. Yeah. Like I have all these exotic game on my table and I can pay like $2,000 to eat half a pengalin. So it’s uh it’s not what it used to be where people were just living sustenance off the land like hunting wild animals for game. Yeah. Interesting. So this wildlife trafficking uh network which is probably quite vast over there um it really it really hasn’t been um tamped down at all. I don’t think that they believe SARS KV2 came from penglins. So for the people who have made a fashion out of eating penglins like this is like that why would we change anything? Okay. So, let’s circle back to to bats and talk a little bit more about why bats are so often tied to to viral outbreaks like this. So, you mentioned that, you know, we often go from bats, the virus will a virus will often hop from a bat to another mammal to us. But why is it that bats seem to be especially associated with viruses? Is that actually true? Is there something about the biology of bats that makes them good reservoirs for viruses like this? Yes. So bats are really good reservoirs for viruses. And it was a debate for a long time amongst specialists in that field about whether bats have more viruses than other animals. And recently it was proven yes, they actually do carry much more viral diversity compared to other animals. Uh they they’re the source of like Marberg, Ebola, NEPA, corona viruses like SAS M you could go on for days. um they have a very unique immune system that they have evolved to be able to handle the kind of damage that viruses do to your body. So they they don’t uh over respond to viruses which is sometimes the thing that kills you. It’s it’s not that the virus is killing you, it’s that your body is over responding to it. So in bats they’ve adapted over the years to not over respond. Um, and so it was pretty hilarious to me when there was a grant document leaked recently, uh, like September 2021 from the Eco Health Alliance in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Biology and partners elsewhere around the world where they wanted to vaccinate bats and and I thought they don’t need to be vaccinated. They are fine where they are. We do not need to be spraying bats with vaccines. So, oh, okay. So, this organization called Eco Health Alliance in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Urology wanted to do something that you basically just said was a silly idea, which is vaccinate bats. And let’s take you at your word for a sec. That’s silly. So, we’ve got some people with grant money just doing these really bizarre experiments or proposing to do them. What is the Eco Health Alliance? how how do they come into this and what should people know about this organization and how it actually operates? So the Ecoalth Alliance uh emerged from a different wildlife conservation uh organization. So they rebranded themselves as eco health. So like like this one health idea where ecosystems and human uh populations uh depend on each other, right? And so they formed an international network of collaborations and particularly with China with the Wuhan Institute of Biology. And one of their main goals was to build the the biggest database of wildlife viruses you could have. And the purpose of this database after you sample like millions of viruses or at least tens of thousands of viruses, uh you would try to use that data to predict what future pandemics might happen. So trying to predict what viruses might spill over from bats or other animals into humans and cause a pandemic. Um the problem is when the pandemic actually happened that database that was hosted by the Wuhan Institute of Biology was not only taken offline but has since then never been shared publicly or with anyone in the US as far as I can tell. So a database built for pandemic response was taken away when the pandemic happened. So, I mean, this is just so striking I have to say it back to you out loud. So, you’re saying that the Eco Health Alliance, which which is a US-based organization, was working with the Wuhan Institute of Biology and a number of other uh labs probably. And the entire point of doing all of this work of going around the world and collecting all these viruses and bringing them to one place and tinkering with them in the lab was to create a database that we could look at and use um in a preventative manner. We could say look here’s all the viruses that we know that are out there. Here’s all the ones that we think could jump from another animal to humans. And we should be using this as a kind of um uh strategic playbook of some kind to help prepare ourselves for another pandemic, prevent them from happening or at least respond to them when they do happen. And you’re saying that database which was supposed to be used for that exact reason just disappeared. Yeah. So no one no one has access to it at least outside of China. Yeah. As far as we can tell, no one has produced a copy of this database which can exist as an Excel sheet. So it’s it’s really stunning that the prototype for what would become a global VOM project, a global collection of viruses, uh that prototype just suddenly the the experts who had raised all these funds to to build this database said there was nothing useful in there. You don’t need to see it. Like they didn’t even ask for it when they went to Wuhan to visit this institute. Yeah. How how when you talk about the funding, how much money was spent, you know, order of magnitude ballpark, how much money was spent putting together this database and doing the related research and where do places like Eco Health get their funding from? At least hundreds of millions. So that’s the range. Yeah. And they had proposed and they tried to raise up to a billion after the pandemic. They they wanted to raise more money for more of this work to produce databases that disappear when a pandemic happens. So um so they They raised hundreds of millions of dollars to create a database for a pandemic. A pandemic happened. The database disappeared because someone chose to make it disappear. And the response to that from the same organizations that put together this database that disappeared was to raise even more money to create more databases. Yeah. But without sharing the data when a pandemic happens. I mean, I just have to keep saying it out loud because it it like it it’s stunning. Yeah. So, Eco Health, where do they get their money from? They get their money from from a variety of sources. Uh many of the biggest funders are are US government agencies. So like DoD, DAPA, um the Pentagon, uh but also from from the NIH and NIDA. So there’s so many abbreviations here, but uh yeah, so Department of Defense, um DARPA, places like that. And that kind of makes sense, right? If the idea here is to prevent some kind of pandemic or deal with it, that’s a that is a matter of national defense, that makes sense. Um, National Institutes of Health, um, that also makes sense because, right, this is a this is a health global health related um, topic. The NIH being a funer of ecoalth who’s doing all of this stuff, that brings me to another question I have, which is Francis Collins. So Francis Collins um is the head of the NIH, the National Institutes of Health in the United States. He has been for some time. Um he, you know, he’s obviously a major player in and how all of this funding gets distributed. The reason I want to bring him up is because I recently heard him speak on another podcast about this very topic. And we were just talking about origins of the virus. We were talking about, you know, uh civot cats and pengalins and viruses jumping from bats to other species to humans. We were talking about that in comparison to the idea that it leaked accidentally from a lab. And at the very beginning of this conversation, Francis Collins said a couple of things that jumped out to me. Um, let me look at my notes here. So, he was asked whether he thought there was a reasonable chance that the virus leaked from a lab. Just a reasonable chance. He said he couldn’t exclude that, but he thinks it’s fairly unlikely. So, he favors the uh so-called natural origins hypothesis that it jumped from another species into humans. And he said something that made me pause. I actually went back and listened to it again to make sure I got it right before having this conversation. According to Francis Collins, he said it took 14 years to identify that civets, that mamalian species, um that we talked about before, that civets were the intermediate host species for SARS 1. But that contradicted something that Nicholas Wade told me in a conversation I had with him just a few weeks ago. Is that accurate? Did it take 14 years for us to to identify civot cats as the intermediate host species for SARS 1? No. He must have misspoke uh or misremembered and that happens a lot on interviews, right? You you say something and then later you go back and you read your notes and you like I confuse these two facts. So I don’t blame him for it, but I do think a correction is necessary that Yeah. But but he did say I just want to dwell on this for a second because he he did say 14 years but he also said in the context of mentioning that particular time frame he said you know these things take time it’s going to take you know a while to identify any intermediate host species that’s out there. So he did basically emphasize that it takes time and we need more time and that’s perfectly fair. But just for context, how long did it take us to find that intermediate host species for SARS one? Two months. Two months from two months from when? So when do you start counting? Two months. Two months from knowing that the virus was a SARS was a corona virus. So two months from isolating the virus in culture. So being able to to to see this this is the virus that’s causing the disease. So 2 months from that even using the technologies which were way more basic like 20 years ago it took them only 2 months to find not just animals but lots of animal traders who had pre-existing immunity to site viruses. So the the scientists in China independently and rapidly established this really robust link between the animal trading uh activities in Guangong to the outbreaks. I see. And so and that is my understanding that once you isolate a virus and you identify it, finding any intermediate host species from which it jumped into humans takes months typically when you when you actually start looking for it. It took them days the second round. So SARS one actually spilled over again at the end of 2003 and one of the index cases was a waitress and they asked her are there civid cats in your restaurant and she said no they didn’t care they just went straight to her restaurant anyway and then there were cages. Yeah. So they sampled the animals there. They sampled her co-workers and just stars everywhere. So it it took them a week. Yeah. So so SARS one actually leaked twice. Yeah. From nature. Jump from nature. but six times from a lab. So it it takes it take it usually takes a few months. That’s not to say that there might not be cases where it could take longer. But you know it’s now been how long has it been since we identified SARS KV2 and how long have people been looking for this intermediate host species? It’s been close to two years, right, since if we think that the earliest cases were November. But if we count from when it was first isolated, so December or early January 2020, then it it it’s still been close to two years and like zero signs like zero leads, no no sign of SARS like viruses circulating in animal trading community in up there in central China. Um, and the thing is this city, this city of Wuhan, it houses the world’s foremost expertise on tracking SARS outbreaks. Like, so you’ve got the most the most qualified human beings on the planet for doing something like this. Everyone, I mean, on both s on the US side of this and on the China side of this are completely motivated to find this intermediate host species for various reasons and yet we haven’t done it yet. So either that to me that means one of two things is true. Either there is no intermediate host species because this is not how the virus came into humans or for reasons that really you can’t explain right now it’s been really really difficult to track down this intermediate host because this virus is somehow unlike the other viruses that have done this before. Yeah. uh and and the the problem here is that some extremely basic routes of inquiry have either not been done or they have been done but we haven’t been told what the outcomes are. So for example, some of the farms that were supplying the low levels of wild animals to uh they were shut down by the Chinese government and apparently didn’t even test those farms for SAS KV2. So why the first thing you should do is test those farms first, right? They didn’t even want to shut them down so you definitively identify the source of the virus. Uh, another thing is the first cases like why didn’t they contact trace the first cases like this the most obvious thing to do is to figure out like have you been exposed to someone who worked in a lab uh you know and and taking samples from the animal trading community there to see whether are there many other SARS viruses circulating in the city? Is this a place that you expect a novel SARS virus to emerge? But so far it looks like nothing. There’s zero evidence to suggest that Wuhan would be a place where SARS like viruses are emerging. I mean, one of the major themes here is just that like people people lie so often. I mean, you mentioned you mentioned the waitress from the SARS one outbreak. Are there civic cats in your restaurant? Nope. And then you go and there are you you know you mentioned already stories of um you know people claiming that certain lines of inquiry were just off limits and and we can’t ask those questions that certain things were just preposterous like a lab leak even though that those people at the time that they said that knew that this stuff you know happens all of the time basically. And so you know people are are basically just lying or or withholding information everywhere that that you look in the story. I mean I this doesn’t mean that there is a giant conspiracy. So I just want to make that that’s an important point. Yeah. So what what does it mean? So if it’s not if it’s not a giant conspiracy, how do you explain something like this and and what kind of language would you use to do that? Because I do think this is an important point for most for many people. So let’s look at the virus itself too. This virus is extremely stealthy. like you a lot of people have had COVID but not knowing that they had CO and a lot of people who might not have had CO but had similar illnesses think that they had COVID. So it has it presents a range of symptoms like you have sore throat, fever, diarrhea like loss of smell or you might have no symptoms that you felt at the time. Uh it can spread before someone develops symptoms or when they have only mild symptoms. So even if a virus like this spilled over at a market or in a lab, the first people who were sick may not have known. Uh and that’s why contact tracing the first detected cases is so important, but somehow hasn’t been done. It’s it’s pretty bizarre. Um if people don’t know for sure that they were the first cases, why would you go out there and put yourself out for the firing squad? So um no, no one seems to be looking and no one wants to find the answer. Why would you volunteer yourself out there to take the heat? Mhm. Okay. So, let’s um let’s zoom out a bit. So, let’s sort of step away from um the human controversy and like the politics and all of that stuff and let’s let’s think about this like scientists. We’ve got sort of two uh plausible explanations for where the virus came from. One is that it jumped into humans from another mamleian species potentially jumping into that species from yet uh another species and that’s called the wildlife spillover hypothesis happens often. We have many cases in history where that’s happened. Um the other is the lab leak hypothesis that there was an accidental leak from a virus leak of a virus from a lab and that also happened. So these are both plausible and let’s think about how we compare and contrast the plausibility of these two by considering what we know about the virus itself. So let’s go inside the virus and talk about what its genome looks like. What characteristics are salient to you about the genome of this virus? So the genome of SARS K2 looks mostly very natural. So by that I mean it looks very similar to other SARS like viruses that have been found in the wild. There’s no like humongous appendage in there saying that I came from a lab. So there’s only one very minor but unique feature called a furine cleavage site and this is a feature that lies inside the spike of a corona virus. So the spike gene encodes a spike protein that sticks out of the corona virus particle and it latches onto whole cells and unlocks the door or window to get into the cell and let the virus uh hijack the cell and make more copies of itself. So this in this family of SARS like viruses no one has ever seen a furine cleavage site insertion in the spike like this one. So none none of the other sars like viruses have a furine cleavage site there at that junction in the spike. But there has become a trend like a fashion in in research for scientists to insert these fur cleavage sites into novel viruses, novel corona viruses in the lab to to see how does this novel feature impact the infectiousness of the virus. And so when when the genome of SARS COV 2 was first published uh in early January 2020, a lot of the scientists who saw this feature got really concerned and and you can see it from leaked emails or like freedom of information acquired emails that they were all talking about it privately. They’re like this is chilling. This is like could it be potentially engineered? Um there are some scientists who are even more strongly convinced that it it’s a smoking gun maybe or that it’s it’s so highly unusual that perhaps a engineered origin of this site should be the default. I see. So this this aspect of the genome, this thing called the furine cleavage site, it has characteristics that are quite easy to explain. If you suppose that a scientist took a natural virus and inserted this thing into that viral genome because this is the type of thing that happens all the time in labs like this. Um, but it’s not so so unusual that it could not possibly have arisen naturally. It is possible that it arose naturally. Yes. So the issue is that there there are two types of scientists at this point. That’s the type of scientist that said if it looks natural then it must be natural and and that’s the other side that says even if it looks natural it could still be engineered because the technology today is so good we can just throw in things like uh in whatever approach we want leaving no trace of engineering. So no matter how how the frame shifts or no matter what code is used uh you cannot rule out an engineered origin or a natural origin of this furing clear site. So basically, genetics is so advanced these days that when we do engineer things artificially into a genome, we’re so good at doing that that we can just like smoothly put stuff into a genome such that it looks perfectly natural. And therefore, we can’t really distinguish whether something was of natural origin or artificial origin just by looking at the genome itself. Yeah. And this was really problematic in early 2020 because people so desperately wanted to know whether this genome was of SARS 2 was genetically engineered that they threw it to some scientists who quite I think maybe overly confidently. They they said that yeah we ran a few minutes of machine learning and and can rule out a genetic engineering origin of this genome. But in parallel at the same time scientists in Europe and scientists in the US separately within two weeks recreated the entire genome of SARS COV 2 from scratch. So exactly uh like they had to put in mutations to differentiate it from the parent because they were so good at making these synthetic coronavirus genomes. So you can’t tell you can’t tell if maybe a scientist collected a rare uh specimens in nature and just synthesized the virus. It would just look natural. Okay. So identifying something like the spiran cleavage site inside of the genome of this virus can’t definitively tell you one way or the other whether or not it was a natural thing or whether it was an artificial thing. What do we know about you know was the Wuhan Institute of Verology or anyone else doing or planning to do exactly this type of experiment where we would put in this type of site into uh corona virus? Yeah. Yeah. So, I can tell you’ve read the book because at the end at the end of the book uh and we had to rush this off for printing in in September uh this year um bombshell documents leaked onto the internet. So, this one these batch of documents were not even obtained via Freedom of Information Act. They were they were leaked. Yeah. From from where? We don’t know but they were leaked through the drastic internet sleuth uh group. um and they posted it online and uh in those documents which were grant proposals from early 2018 submitted by the Eco Health Alliance in collaboration with the Yuan Institute of Biology and other collaborators, they had proposed searching for novel furine cleavage sites or other cleavage sites in nature in natural viruses and inserting these into novel SARS like viruses in the laboratory. So this was a an idea proposed in early 2018. And even though the proposal wasn’t funded by that uh application, so the application didn’t go through partly because the the reviewer said this research looks kind of dangerous. Um but it doesn’t mean that they didn’t get the money from elsewhere. This was a very highly funded like group of scientists that got hundreds of millions of dollars. The other thing that’s important to mention here, and I I went over this in my discussion with Nicholas Wade, is if you know anything about the mechanics of how science actually happens and how that connects to the grant proposals you write. When you write a grant proposal, that doesn’t mean that this is all stuff in the future. Often times, you write a grant proposal to get additional funding to do stuff that you’ve already started to do and you have some preliminary evidence for. Yeah. And if you read this grant proposal, it’s actually I I feel like it’s quite clear or at least very reasonable to to deduce that they had already started because they said, “Yeah, we are reviewing our sequencing data and there are these novel rare cleavage sites we see in novel SAS viruses.” So if they hadn’t already seen this, how could they predict that and write write it into their grant because no one has has observed these sites before. Mhm. So tell me if this is accurate. So now I want to connect this to something that we mentioned earlier about that that database that disappeared. So if I’m the Ecoalth Alliance and I’m the Wuhan Institute of Urology at the time that they wrote this grant proposal, the basic thought I’m having and what I’m justifying this work to do is I’m saying, hey, we want to tinker around with these viruses. We’ve collected a bunch of these viruses. We’ve put them all in the same spot. We are doing experiments and messing around with their genomes. And it’s all in good faith, right? But it’s all done with the idea that we are going to identify how these viruses work and how they can change in order to be able to play defense to prevent an actual outbreak from happening. And all of that data is going to be put into this giant database which will be our pandemic prevention database. And that sort of would have been the thinking around why they were trying to do this. Yes. I I believe that the scientists engaging in this type of work believed in their noble mission. So they weren’t like crazy mad scientists like the stereotype like oh sorry uh my Google calendar popped up something sorry let me go back to that um they were like the scientists in Jurassic World or something you know you’re splicing together all these dangerous animals to create the most ferocious like dinosaur chimera possible but they they actually were trying to understand basic viral biology and develop therapeutics and vaccines against novel emerging pathogens. And then um okay so that that grant proposal goes out it gets rejected. Who who’s who’s rejecting it? Is that happening in the US? Where does that rejection come from? Yes. So it was DAPA that received this proposal and rejected it. Um, and so the the question is why didn’t all of the scientists who are in this proposal tell the rest of the world in January 2020 when a novel SARS like virus with a novel furing cleavage site burst upon the doorsteps of the Wuhan Institute of Biology in Wuhan city. So did any of them even have a moment where they were like you know back in in 2018 in early 2018 we had a pitch looking for these sites and putting them into normal site viruses like could this SARS 2 virus have come from those research experiments. Okay. Um is there anything else in so this was a question that came online that I thought was really good. So aside from the spherin cleavage site which is very interesting and is an important sort of piece of the puzzle here but it’s not definitive. We can’t really conclude anything from the spiran cleavage site. Is there anything else about the SARS 2 genome that either the lab leak proponents or the wildlife spillover proponents claim is evidence for for either hypothesis. Unless you’re talking about the debunked like HIV insights. I’m not sure what else. You might have to prime me. No no no I’m not either. I’m genuinely asking. So, so in your in your view, there’s nothing else about the genome that’s salient that that would sort of favor a natural origin versus a lab leak. Not one genome by itself, but if you look at all of the genomes that have been collected to date, um I’d say that the genetic evidence points to the seafood market being a secondary site of infection. So, a place where a human had brought the virus into the market. Sorry, there’s a motorcycle. Yeah, let’s keep going. So, a human had brought the virus into the market and caused an outbreak there. Um, but other than that, the genome, it doesn’t tell us that, hey, I’m from a lab. Why Why do you think the seafood Why do you say that the seafood market is like a secondary site and that’s not where it really started? So this is going to bring us on a on a long journey into into a fantastical realm of a hypothesis called the multimarket hypothesis. So uh recently uh scientists started discussing in more at greater length that uh several early variants of SARS coov 2 were found outside of the market. So these other variants early very early variants from December January uh 2020 they looked more similar to the bad viruses related to SARS cof 2. So many scientists uh speculated that this means that the earliest version of SARS COV 2 never made its way into the seafood market. So the seafood market had its own variant that uh uh was found on on the surfaces in in the cluster the seafood market but it didn’t have all these other earlier variants found in other parts of the city. So a reasonable assumption is that the virus had started spreading way before the market and one of the variants made its way into into the market and cause a cluster there. Some scientists who insist on the natural origin or they insist that the natural origin of SARS CO 2 is the most likely they they have now been pushing this hypothesis that that not only was there one market where there was a natural spiller but there were multiple markets in the city where multiple animals was spreading the virus. So no evidence for a single market where there was a single animal spreading it. But now we are hearing that these experts think there were multiple markets where there was natural spillover happening. Man, I mean to me this is just like you know capernicus and epicycles like it’s it’s just you know the the hypothesis is becoming more complicated. They’re just raising they can’t even prove the natural origin and they’re raising you to multiple natural origins. This is crazy. So, so when I spoke to Nicholas Wade who who’s written um very nicely on this subject, the point that he made was he was like, look, given that we know how SARS 1 and MS and other viruses have have um arisen in the past, we know that once you identify the culprit virus, it takes just usually a few months, if not less, as you pointed out, even just a few days to identify when there is an intermediate host species if it did in fact jump to humans from another species. So his argument was every day that goes by makes it just that much more likely that this was in fact a lab leak as long as you keep um failing to identify that intermediate host species. Do you think that’s a reasonable argument? Is that is that where we sit where as more time goes on the spillover hypothesis becomes less and less likely to be true? I can see why some people would want to uh favor that that mindset. Uh but the I’d say the rival hypothesis to that or the rival mindset to that is that some natural origin proponents have said that maybe China is covering up a natural origin. So they say maybe China has actually found the wild animals that were the source of SARS 2 but for some reason they’re hiding it to try and pitch a foreign origin like the the main lobster hypothesis. I see to deflect all blame from China. I see. Well, I mean, we’re we’re in the realm of speculation here, but I I mean, I would have said I would have thought naturally like, well, wouldn’t China be motivated to show that it is of natural origin because it looks that’s what I think, too. Looks way better. It that looks way better than that it leaked from a laboratory that was, you know, due to basically human failings. Um, but you’re saying that people counter that and say like, well, that may be true, but they actually want to show that it originated naturally from another country. Mhm. Um, again, that’s that’s rank speculation. Um, but at the very least, as you pointed out, it’s been almost two years. No intermediate host species has been identified. So, it seems like the only two explanations on the table for that are either there’s no intermediate host species, or human beings, in this case in China, are actively covering up what the intermediate host species is. Or or the last option is that the intermediate host species was being experimented with in a laboratory. I see. So we know that labs in Wuhan were using a variety of animal models. So they had kind of obscured the fact that they were catching bats and bringing these back into the lab for experimenting with with SARS like viruses. They were also experimenting with civic cats, the intermediate host of the first SARS pandemic or epidemic. And they were also working with humanized mice. So mice that carry the A2 uh entry receptor for the SARS virus from humans. You’re talking about the Wuhan Institute of Biology. Yes. So, they’ve got bats physically there. They’ve got civic cats physically there. They’ve got viruses physically there. They’ve got humanized mice. All of this stuff is in one place. You’ve already told us and I’ve already learned from other people that these laboratory accidental laboratory leaks happen all of the time. We know that they happen every year, multiple times, even with more dangerous pathogens. Can you talk to me about the security stringy in this lab? Is it even possible? Is it can a reasonable person conclude that you can do this kind of work and completely avoid a leak or is it inevitable? So even the first SARS virus after it started being studied in labs escaped from a BSL4 the highest biosafety lab once in Taiwan. Uh and just due to luck the person who had traveled across out of the country out of Taiwan to Singapore for a conference and came back to Taiwan on another international flight. He only developed symptoms after he returned home. But if he had developed symptoms just a day before he returned home like it would have been another outbreak in across multiple countries. So um the biosafety level of a lab it matters yes but it’s not foolproof. So even if you did the work at the bios highest biosafety level it doesn’t mean that you never have an accident like all it takes is one mistake like one day you’re just really rushed you want to get out of the lab and you do one thing wrong like you’re exposed. Uh but here’s here’s the thing. A lot of the dangerous virus research unfortunately was done at low biosafety levels in Wuhan. It was done at BSL 2. So two levels below BSL4. And this level most viologists will tell you that it is not acceptable for working with airborne pathogens cuz your only protection is essentially gloves. There will be times when you take your samples in and out of the tissue culture hood. Uh you’re looking at it under microscope. You might even do like uh you know things that could aerosolize the sample at BSL2. Like this is just I mean it it’s not surprising to me that if you were working with hundreds of salac viruses and maybe putting in advantageous features that one of them might spill. Okay. So to summarize all of that, what you’re saying is that it’s common practice at certain laboratories in the world to bring in intermediate or potential intermediate host species to bring in viruses you’ve collected from samples outside the lab to tinker with all of these things in different ways inside the lab. And to to do that inside of a set of security protocols which no reasonable person would conclude will actually contain any pathogen in a foolproof way. Yeah. And that’s just that’s just simply where we’re at. That’s just what happens in in this neck of the woods in a city where you can take a plane to almost any other major city in the world. So, it’s it’s like throwing a gender reveal party in a in a place that hasn’t rained for many many months in a forest, right? It’s just it’s extremely dangerous. I I think that these uh laboratories should be moved out of urban centers, moved away from like airports, international airports. And why why are they in urban centers? And there there’s probably a very simple reason for this, but let’s just make it very clear to people. Why isn’t that already true? So a lot of scientists say that if you move these prestigious laboratories out of major city centers then you won’t be able to recruit the best scientists to do do this work. I think that’s kind of a lazy excuse to be honest. Like we could be building this like fantastic beautiful like city in the middle of nowhere where scientists all around the world can come and do their risky pathogen research, quarantine, get tested and then go home. Uh so if you did that, you would localize all these hundreds of different groups doing risky pathogen research under different standards. Bring them all into one place where you can actually monitor and surveil for escapes and then just make this place just a wonderful place to be, right? Don’t don’t put it in the middle of like the tundras or something. Make it a place where scientists actually want to come. Then everyone will be writing grunts and proposing to bring their work there. This just brings the the consequences of a potential escape, a lab escape down by magnitudes because even if someone there gets sick in this isolated city, it’s not like they’re going to hop on the plane immediately and bring it to like New York or like Barcelona or Rome. Yeah. So you wrote you and Matt wrote near to the end of the book. You said quote if another pandemic of ambiguous origins occurs in the next decade you can call it SARS KV3 MS KV2 influenza whatever then unless we learn key lessons from this pandemic we will make the same mistakes. So in your view what are the key lessons that we should be learning based on what we know today? So we have to even if this virus came from the wildlife trade, it doesn’t mean that in the future no pandemics and no outbreaks will come from labs. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly frequent like more likely because we are getting more labs and more money for hunting for novel viruses. And so we have to start putting in new measures like ASAP to make this type of pathogen research more transparent and accountable and safer. So things like localizing all of that research to one place on the planet when people have good quarantine protocols. I think that that should be done and and more transparent so that there are things you can do like uh penalizing people who hold on to pathogen data for years without telling anybody. uh encouraging people to to publish as quickly as possible in in the top journals like just journals shouldn’t be telling people to accumulate data for years and years so that when the pandemic happens you you suddenly realize I have no insight to any of the viruses collected in the past 5 years like there should be new protocols in place so all the data gets uploaded to an international database where nobody can just take it offline immediately um that there’s so many things you can do um so What would um at this point what would definitive evidence for a lab leak or definitive evidence from for a wildlife spillover actually look like? So I am not sure that we will get definitive evidence unless a whistleblower comes forward and that may not happen for like years. It may not happen for decades. I’m sure someone feels safe enough to share that secret. Um it it wouldn’t require a lot of people to know frankly if people have suspicions right but who has that actual evidence who has the actual like notebook or like health record or animal test that shows that the virus actually came from here probably only a handful of people have that definitive evidence. So everyone else is just kept in the dark. They have their doubts but they don’t know enough to become a whistleblower. Um, but I do think that there is plenty of evidence out here in the United States that should be evaluated as soon as possible. U, we shouldn’t be banking on a whistleblower to come out. Like you you can’t do that. You shouldn’t uh put all your hopes on one person. Well, what could the government be doing? So, for example, the Eco Health Alliance is a US organization. It correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s entirely reasonable to suspect that they have a copy of that missing database that we mentioned earlier. Can’t Congress just just walk in and say, “We’re going to pick apart everything in your building and you know, we we’re going to take your laptops and we’re simply just going to see what you have.” Is that is that reasonable? There’s certainly people in government who are calling for the Eco Health Alliance and even biologists are calling for the Eco Health Alliance to release all of their documents, data, emails with the Wuhan Institute of Biology and other people working with site viruses. Um for me I think that this is such a fastmoving issue. Just just remember that in May of this year it was still basically a conspiracy theory according to Tom X Vince right so we are like half a year out uh lots of stuff are being leaked lots of stuff are being foyer freedom information acted uh most of it has come out in the last two months in September and October so I think we’re far from done so like you said the book that I wrote with Matt Redley it’s not a conclusion at the end of the book we’re really saying that there’s so much more coming out like this you need to get caught up on all that’s already happened so that you can understand the significance of new developments. One of the things that I thought was interesting is when I looked at the acknowledgements section of the book, typically you get to the end of the book and you probably don’t even look at the acknowledgements because it’s just you know I want to thank my parents and my girlfriend and my editor and you know the people that I worked with. Um but but you say you know that a lot of people helped you ranging from scientists to junior researchers to intelligence officials to anonymous individuals to journalists, politicians, etc., etc. You said bec quote because it would be unwise and unhelpful, possibly even dangerous to name some of them, we have taken the unusual decision to name none of them. And I I think we understand what that means given what we’ve discussed. I’m curious how you being involved in this whole thing is impacting you and your trajectory your career trajectory as a scientist. So you’re a posttock which for people that don’t know that means you completed your PhD you’ve now moved on and you’re doing another line of research as a posttock and typically on the the normal academic track the next step would be to apply to become an assistant professor at a major university. So what what sort of trajectory are you on and how is this book and everything you’ve done on this topic affecting all of that? So I’ll first say that this book will offend and threaten a lot of powerful people unfortunately and this was never our intention. You know, we just want to help people learn about what has been found relating to the origin of COVID 19. But it will disturb a lot of people who will say that we are racist or or say that we are anti-China. Uh it will it will it might offend the Chinese government. Honestly, I I suspect that it will offend them. And so, for example, when the seeker, the key internet sleuth who’s been contributing the search for the origin, he he went radio silence on Twitter for about two weeks and everyone has been freaking out because they’re worried that someone got him. So, it it’s real like we worried about each other. Like we’re worried that maybe one day there will be like a clampdown that anyone named in acknowledgements, anyone seen as a key contributor to to letting the lab leak or lab or rich in hypothesis see the light of day, they might get they might get taken down in some way like they might get hacked, they might get disappeared, they might get abducted. So these are real fears are real concerns. But on top of that, on top of enraging possibly the most powerful country on earth, the most scariest government on earth, um it will also offend a lot of scientists and science journalists. So people who are more establishment who control the flow of money and publications in in research, they have been calling the lab origin a conspiracy theory for more than a year. they have lost a lot of face. Uh when when the Biden administration uh called for the intelligence community to to produce a report on both uh lab and natural origins, it it I think it humiliated a lot of these establishment scientists who had been telling everyone that you must be crazy to think this come from a lab. Maybe not even just crazy but racist to think it comes from a lab. And then now that suddenly they they’re shown wrong. They have had to slowly shift their opinion from conspiracy theory to possible but not plausible to plausible but not probable to does it even matter. So I mean it’s kind of um the book will offend them. I expect to see a lot of flames. In fact I I hope that a copy of this book reaches the Eco Health Alliance and other biologists who have tried to shut down this course on this topic. Um but for me as a junior like early career researcher I think well I’ll use the words of my my friends who have said you’ve committed career suicide. Um, yeah, I I will have to watch my back in the future and and I don’t think I can use my name on like applications for things anymore because you never know who is the one reviewing your grant application or your publication. And tell people um where are you from and where’s your family from? Oh. Um, I was born in Canada, but I grew up in Singapore and then I moved back to Canada and now I I’m based in Boston. And so, how would this has this impacted whether or not, for example, you might go visit family in Singapore or something like that? I I am cautious because I have seen, for example, the Chinese state media have branded people calling for an investigation of lab origins. They’ve called them terrorist. And we know what China does to people they call terrorists. So it’s not it’s not a joke, you know, like these people being tortured and then put in camps. So I I’m worried like I I it’s not like I can just decide to go home anymore or to visit family and friends in Singapore. So what um what do you think comes next? is basically the the next thing to do for people that are working or following this uh mystery is is it just to wait for more documents to get foyed and or leaked? What’s sort of the next step or or what are you working on right now? So I think it is very important to organize formal and and uh international uh investigations of the origin of covid 19. So right now the world health organization has just set up its own uh scientific advisory group uh for the origins work called sago. Uh but this team is extremely imbalanced. It has most of the team members from the previous team which failed spectacularly. Uh several of the team members have called the lab origin a conspiracy theory. Uh a classic conspiracy theory. And so they and many of them have vested interest in making sure this virus doesn’t come from a lab because they could lose funding. they could be blamed for the pandemic even. Um so we cannot rely on this WHO investigation that there have to be in parallel independent investigations. Uh it’s already very shocking to me that two years post outbreak there is still no formal investigation of the origin of COVID 19. I mean, when you think about, you know, global official organizations like the World Health Organization, when you think about other agencies that we could talk about, what has this whole episode, how’s it how does it make you feel about the um the state of those institutions? Is it have you lost confidence in them and their ability to do what they’re supposed to be doing? and and if so, what does that say about the future? Yeah, you can actually see this transition or change in mind in my tweets over the past year and a half. Like in May 2020, uh when other people were telling me the WHO can’t do this, like they are buyers, they are puppets or like they, you know, they have no influence. I actually tweeted something like, “No, the WHO is the only organization that can do this.” And today I’m like, “They are the organization that cannot do this.” like they they’ve demonstrated time and again that they they lack the influence, the mandate and and any power to to to stand up against a member state like China. So they were completely constrained. They they were forced to uh participate. Well, okay, let me let me take back that word forced. They they they agreed to participate in in like a circus like a Potamkin uh visit to Wuhan City where they were shown like the cold storage area of a seafood market and like told to sign off on the report that said frozen cold chain like frozen seafood were more likely to be the source of this pandemic than a lab accident. So it just cannot be trusted to do this investigation again. Um we we need a real investigation. So like we need one that is ideally uh has the power to subpoena or obtain documents from let’s say the Eco Health Alliance uh has international support because a lot of these documents are not just in the US they spread out around the world. There were many people collaborating with the UAN institute of biology. We know now from leaked documents that seven countries were sending SARS like virus samples up to Wuhan city in the years leading up to the pandemic. Seven countries. So like we we we cannot do this just like America alone. There needs to be an international agreement to investigate but not through the World Health Organization. Yep. Right. Well, Alina, thank you for your time. Um thank you and Matt for putting together the book. I mean, if anyone is interested in what we actually know at this point about all of the major events um associated with CO 19, this book basically documents all of them um very meticulously. There’s even, as I mentioned before, a really nice timeline, literally a timeline in the back that has all of the key events in order, and it really sort of spells out where we’re at. And even though the the book doesn’t come to a conclusion, it’s really an ongoing mystery. Um it really probably is the best resource for actually understanding all of the all of the pieces here and there are many. So um I’ll just thank you for your time and if there’s any final thoughts you have, uh feel free to share them now. No, thank you so much for the praise for the book. We had written it to be the book on the origin of COVID 19. And so we had each decided to take on the risk of offending powerful players in order to write this book so that as many people as possible around the world can have a resource to understand what has been found both in terms of the chances of this virus coming from the wildlife trade versus from research activities. And and one last time, what’s the title of the book? When does it come out and and where do you get it? The title is viral, the search for the origin of covid 19. The book releases on November 16, Tuesday. So in 5 days from now, very exciting uh very exhausting journey, but I’m glad that it is paying off. Like I I hope lots of people read the book and I look forward to both positive and negative feedback. [Music]