https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=VcNnrL4pgqY
But also on the call was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases in the US and the main advisor to the president on this, and Dr. Jeremy Farah, a senior advisor to the British government and the head of the Wellcome Trust in the UK, which had funded a lot of research of this kind. And they discussed on this call their doubts that this virus was natural and their worry that it might have been engineered. Within two days, however, that same group of virologists started drafting an article, which was eventually published in Nature Medicine, saying it couldn’t possibly have been engineered. The fear in cleavage site will probably turn up in a wild bat virus. Well, it hasn’t so far. And the reason they have given for changing their mind after these emails emerged showing what they were actually thinking in February is that the Chinese had announced they’d found a virus in a pangolin. You probably remember that. A scaly anteater that is trafficked because of the belief that it contributes to good medical health and so on. If you eat its scales, it’s not true. They’re made of the same stuff as fingernails. You might as well eat your fingernails, but still it’s a widely held belief. And as a result, many of these scaly anteaters are trafficked into China. Well, it turns out that a university in China announced in February 2020 that they’d found a very similar virus, a 99% similar virus in pangolin. And people thought, right, case closed. We found the intermediate animal. We know what’s happening. Well, there’s three problems with that. One, when they eventually published the sequence of this pangolin virus, it was not very similar. It was 90% similar. That’s not good enough. It’s nothing like close enough. Two, it didn’t have the furin cleavage site in. And three, there were no pangolins on sale in Wuhan. So it couldn’t have explained how the outbreak happened in Wuhan. Those are problems. Those are big problems. So we’re in this strange situation where this particular feature has alarmed Western virologists, but they’ve kept the information to themselves. We didn’t find out about all this for months, remember. No, it’s worse than that. It’s worse than that because these virologists that you’re talking about include Fauci. And so it’s not just virologists. It’s the virologists who end up being in charge of the entire response. And so the question that emerges for me there is that if they were concerned about this being a lab leak, then why the strenuous attempt to deflect? Now, there’s two possible reasons. One is that they didn’t want to move forward with their presumption that it was a lab leak without a smoking pistol. And that’s fair enough because you might think, well, we’re concerned and we’re incurring, but we’re not going to beat the drum about the lab leak till we’re certain. And then there’s whatever other reasons might be lurking in the background. And I suppose that’s partly what we’re trying to investigate. And so that would be the scandal that would emerge, perhaps, if it was a lab leak and what that might do to Chinese American relationships and what it says about virology research in general. And God only knows what other host of explanations. But it’s very striking to me. So you’ve laid out a story that goes, well, first of all, there was a lab in Wuhan that was doing research that was strikingly similar on viruses that were strikingly similar to the virus that caused the pandemic. And that is the geographical locale of the origin of the pandemic. And then the virus itself has peculiarities that might indicate engineering. And so that’s two pieces of evidence that are starting to converge pretty hard and unlikely convergence. And then you have the virologists themselves, including those who are in charge of the response or who will be eventually, also noting that this looks suspicious, to say the least. And then for some reason, and in a great scientific journal, or at least a once great scientific journal, downplaying their own fears. And so what’s the motivation here? What’s going on precisely? There’s no better way to study scripture and develop a dedicated prayer life than with Hallow. Hallow is the number one Christian prayer app in the US and the number one Catholic app in the world. It’s filled with studies, meditations, and reflections, including the number one Christian podcast, The Bible in a Year. Download Hallow today and try their Advent Pray 25 Challenge, a 25 day journey through Bible stories from both the Old and New Testament, leading up to the birth of Jesus. These meditations are led by cast members from the largest Christian streaming series in history, The Chosen. Advent Pray 25 will help grow your understanding of mankind and develop a disciplined prayer habit during a season when our discipline is put to the test. Download Hallow for three months completely free at Hallow.com slash Jordan. That’s Hallow.com slash Jordan. Give yourself the gift of peace, calm and discipline this Christmas. Go to Hallow.com slash Jordan today. Well, there was an exchange of emails among these scientists in which some of them said, it’s important that we don’t damage international harmony. That was the phrase used by Francis Collins, the head of the NIH in these emails. And another one says, we mustn’t damage the reputation of science and of Chinese science in particular. Now at the same time, another letter was being prepared for the light season. You mean by pointing out that something unbelievably and God-offly and unforgivably dangerous had actually happened. That was how we were gonna damage the reputation, so to speak, by just admitting that something catastrophic had happened. And so it was reputation management. Yes, but clearly, you know, if you, there is a risk that the world rushes off and comes to the conclusion it came out of a lab and this damages biotechnology and it’s not true. It might have came out in a natural way. And then we’ve done unnecessary damage to science, which is a great pity. And I’m a big fan of biotechnology. I would think that was a problem. So that is one risk. But the other risk is that we are so worried about doing damage to the reputation of science that we overlook the possibility that this thing did start in the laboratory. Now at the same time, also in February, 2020, the closest collaborator of the Wuhan lab in the West, a man named Peter Dazak who runs an organization called the EcoHealth Alliance, which had funneled millions of dollars from US taxpayers to this research in Wuhan over the years. He was preparing a letter for the Lancet, which he got 27 scientists to sign, saying it couldn’t possibly have come from a lab and we’ve got to shut down that possibility. He didn’t reveal his role in orchestrating that. He was just one of the signatures. He didn’t note his conflict of interest in that letter, the fact that he was a very close collaborator and friend of the Wuhan lab. It took 18 months before the Lancet published a statement of conflict of interest under pressure on that. But more important than any of that, the one crucial thing that Peter Dazak didn’t reveal and that we didn’t find out until September, 2021 was that he had put in an application to the Pentagon, to DARPA, the research arm of the Pentagon. In 2018, in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, among others, to do experiments on SARS-like viruses that they found in bats. And those experiments were to include, if they found ones that weren’t very similar to SARS-1, that were new, were to include putting a furin cleavage site into such a virus. Now, that is a major discovery. And as I say, we found that out from a leaked document. It’s called the Project Diffuse. It came to light in September, 2021, because someone in DARPA, I think, leaked it to people who were investigating this. And Peter Dazak hadn’t bothered to tell us that he was the lead investigator on exactly this proposal. Now, for me, as a citizen of the planet Earth, that’s pretty annoying. As a scientist and a writer about science, it’s even more annoying. Because we all want to know what happened here. I don’t go into this wanting it to be a lab leak. I just want to know the truth. And it seems absolutely vital to get us as much information as we can. Now, some of that information’s in China, and they’re not being very forthcoming. But information that is in America ought to be volunteered in this case. The other thing, but the thing that the Chinese have failed to do is tell us what’s in their database. They had a database with 22,000 entries in it at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was wildlife pathogens. It was bacteria and viruses that affected the wildlife, about 15,000 of them related to bats. And most of those were viruses. So these were the viruses they’d been collecting from mostly not from Wuhan, but from a long way away from southern China and Laos and other neighboring countries. And they’d been collecting thousands of these viruses and they’d been sequencing them and they’d been characterizing them and describing them. And they had a database. And the purpose of this database, partly funded with US money, was to predict and prevent future pandemics. On the 12th of September 2019, that is about two months before the pandemic started, as far as we can tell, at two o’clock in the morning, that database went offline. It’s never come back online. We’ve never therefore been able to access it and look at what viruses they had in that lab. Now, when we asked them, why won’t you show us that database, which after all, the purpose of which was to share with the world so that we could predict pandemics, remember. They say, oh, well, people might hack it. Well, that’s a meaningless statement. If you’re going to share it, you don’t need to worry about people hacking it. It’s a sort of circular non-argument, if you like. And remember, showing us what’s in that database would be the quickest way to exonerate the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because it would show, look, they didn’t have a virus resembling SARS-CoV-2 in their database, and so case closed, but they won’t show us that document. And that, for me, is a very, very important piece of information. Thank you.