https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HIgs6Lsy5hQ
So there’s something about this particular virus that sets it out against other viruses of its type, and it’s this particular ability to use a human enzyme, and you describe that as inserted, and so I presume that could be inserted as a consequence, hypothetically, of natural selection processes, or that there’s other alternative explanations. So what do you see when you look at that? What I mean by inserted here is that it’s an extra piece of genetic information. We can look at 20 or 30 other very similar viruses, and we can line their genomes up and match them up against this one, and the furin cleavage site is not an altered bit, it’s an added bit. It’s an extra chunk that’s been added in the middle of the spike gene. So how do you differentiate between added and different? I presume that’s a consequence of degree of divergence. So you could imagine that there’s a set of viruses that are genetically and evolutionarily similar, so they stem from a similar source, and they have a predictable pattern of variation, and you’re saying that this is an anomaly that exists outside that. Well, you line them up. You align the genetic codes of the viruses, and in this particular part of the spike gene, they all align up quite well. The sequence is mostly the same. You can tell it’s been added, because you can align the genes of the spike genes of other viruses alongside each other, and see that this is an extra piece of RNA, not a changed piece of RNA. It’s about 12 letters long, and this spells out a sequence that allows, it’s called a furin cleavage site, and it allows the virus to use a human enzyme called furin to spread from cell to cell, from tissue to tissue, and effectively makes the virus much more dangerous and much more transmissible. It’s the reason we’re having a pandemic. If the virus didn’t have this furin cleavage site, we’d probably have been able to get it under control very easily early in the pandemic. Now, what’s interesting is that a number of Western virologists, when they first saw the sequence of this virus, said, whoa, it’s got a furin cleavage site in, that’s very unusual for a SARS-like virus. In fact, it’s unique, we’ve never seen one with this before. There are other coronaviruses with furin cleavage sites, but not SARS-like coronaviruses, and they said, I’m afraid that suggests it might have been engineered. Now, they kept those thoughts to themselves. We only know about them now because of leaks of emails that have emerged more than a year later. But they got on a conference call at the beginning of February, US and UK and other virologists, about a dozen of them. Who are these people, this they that you’re referring to, and in the early stages of speculation? Yeah, these are virologists, so senior virologists who’ve been studying this kind of virus or other similar outbreaks. There’s about a dozen of them, 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 Welcome 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. Oh yeah, 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 were 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? 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 put from the Life Center. 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.