Jamie Metzl Questions the Origins of Covid 19

So you were a part of this open letter recently about COVID-19 where you want to get to the bottom of the origins of it. And this is something we've talked about on the podcast before, and a lot of people have been talking about it lately. Now that Trump's out of office, it's sort of freed up the discussion. For the longest time, discussing that in terms of like it not being just some sort of a random mutation from bats and coronaviruses that it may have been a lab leak was so taboo because it was what Trump was pushing. And it's so crazy that something which is science, it's a scientific discussion and inquiry that it could be stunted by these political ideas when someone is so polarizing like Trump that people just completely want to reject like very plausible and possible ideas just because of him. It's exactly right. I was the lead drafter with a community of other people and lead scientists around the world of this letter. And since the beginning of last year, 2020, I had maybe the leading website in the world that was just stating what is the evidence about the origins of COVID-19, particularly the evidence for a lab leak. And the evidence is actually really strong. It's all circumstantial evidence, but we don't have any evidence of the other hypotheses of where COVID comes from like this series of jumps through different animals in the wild. And so I for a long time, more than a year, have been saying, hey, we need to look really seriously at this, not because we know or certainly I don't know for sure that's where COVID comes from. But in my view, it's the most likely hypothesis worthy of a full investigation. And so there was a World Health Organization organized an independent advisory committee, and they went on a study mission to China in earlier this year, 2021. And then they came out with a, they had a press event in Wuhan, which was a joint press event between this committee and their Chinese government counterparts. And in that press event, what they said was we don't support investigating the possibility of a lab leak any further, but we should investigate what seems like a much less likely hypothesis that COVID started with frozen foods being shipped to Wuhan. And so we already had a community of scientists and others who'd been meeting virtually for a while trying to say, to really say, where does this come from? What's the evidence? We had academic presentations challenging the data, trying to figure out where are the gaps. And we looked at that, we said that can't be right. And we decided we needed to put out an open letter, which we recently released, and it was covered in newspapers all around the world. And the letter made kind of key points. One is that this is a terrible pandemic. We have to understand where it came from. Two, that this current investigation is not the kind of full investigation that's needed. And three, here's what a full investigation looks like. And we call on governments to do it. But your point that it's been taboo for the year is exactly right. And it's just crazy because it seems, this is a really, in my view, likely possibility. I can't say for sure. We should be investigating all hypotheses, not saying we can't even look at something that really could be the real story here. And it's also really unfortunate that a lot of people are not trusting anything that the World Health Organization says anymore. Because the World Health Organization, I'm sure you saw the spokesperson for the World Health Organization speaking with a reporter, and he wouldn't even mention the name Taiwan. Did you see that? Yeah, no. I did see that. And he logs off and then comes back on. And then she asks him again about Taiwan's response to COVID-19. And he says, well, China has done an amazing job. And let's just change subjects. And the woman keeps getting back to Taiwan. And he won't recognize Taiwan because China doesn't recognize Taiwan. And China has some sort of strange, I don't know what it is, but there's some sort of political influence on the World Health Organization. Yeah, so there's a lot there. So first, full disclosure, I'm a member of the World Health Organization International Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing. You were into this podcast. What's that? I said you were up in the podcast. Exactly, exactly. Bring it on. I'm the Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing. And so I'm actually a real supporter of the World Health Organization. But there's a big problem. And that problem is being realized, and we're seeing it through the course of this pandemic. So first, in the earliest days of the pandemic, why was it that World Health Organization inspectors weren't able to go to Wuhan? And the reason was the Chinese government wouldn't give them visas, and there was nothing the WHO could do. Why was it that the WHO was just essentially, unfortunately parroting the reporting from the Chinese government in the earliest days? And part of that, at least, is because they don't even have the authority to have their own surveillance network. Why is it, referencing your point about Taiwan, that Taiwan has all kinds of expertise in treating and responding to terrible outbreaks like this, which is why they've only had nine COVID deaths in Taiwan since the very beginning? Why is it that the WHO is in this weird position? It's in part because the WHO is created by these member states that have a lot of influence. And it's terrible, and we're all suffering because Taiwan didn't have a full voice. On December 31st, 2019, Taiwan declared a national emergency on COVID. That was way before we did. I wish Taiwan had had a bigger voice. So WHO is in a really, really difficult position because on one hand, we're asking them to investigate and call out a member state. On the other hand, their governing body essentially is made up of member states, including China. Yeah, it's just so strange to see scientific inquiry and analysis pushed and manipulated by politics. Well, that's the whole story here. That's unfortunately the story of COVID is that. It was politics that made it so that you could have this outbreak, and we can talk more about where the outbreak started. But wherever it started, whether it was a lab leak or something else, if you had had a fully functioning system, if it hadn't been Chinese politics and the national instinct or the natural instinct hadn't been to cover up, to silence the whistleblowers, to lie essentially to the World Health Organization and the international community, it could well have been possible to suppress COVID in the first few weeks, and we wouldn't be having any of this. And then it was politics that made China, again, whatever the origin, carry out this massive cover up over the course of the last year where they destroyed samples, eliminated or removed databases, imprisoned journalists, Chinese journalists asking tough questions and put a universal gag order on their scientists, making it impossible for them to speak about any of this stuff. That's pretty incredible that that's not really well known. Yeah. So for me, it's been more than a year and I have it on my Jamie Metzl website, and I've been trying to tell everybody not to point fingers, but to say like, we have a real problem here unless we can just be really honest about what's the problem that we're facing, how are we possibly going to address it? Now what is the circumstantial evidence? Sorry. So let me start from the beginning of this. So we know we have a long history of these pathogenic outbreaks, and they tend to happen in more tropical parts of China and Southeast Asia and just tropical parts of the world. So when SARS, when this outbreak began, for me, I had a little bit of background. One of the reasons why I started to get suspicious very early on is I'd recently before then been in Wuhan, and I knew what Wuhan was into place where a bunch of yokels are eating bats. Wuhan is a really sophisticated city. It's there Chicago. And I knew that they didn't have horseshoe bats in Wuhan. As a matter of fact, when the outbreak happened, it was winter there, and so there weren't bats there. And I knew early on that this whole story of the wet market was a lie, and as the Chinese government knew, and they for many, many months pushed that story, even knowing it wasn't true. How'd you know it was a lie? The Wuhan story? Because there was a paper that came out in the Lancet in January of 2020, and in that paper it made clear that around a third of the first COVID cases had no exposure to that market. And so if everything started in the market, you would have expected all of the early cases to have had a market exposure. And so that was known, their government knew that in January, but they didn't admit it until May of last year. Was there a common denominator for all the people that were exposed? That's the big question. Now, so the finding patient, so-called patient zero, that's the essential question. If the lab leak hypothesis is true, then either patient zero would be someone who works at one of these Chinese virology institutes, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or it would be someone who was exposed to a virus that had somehow escaped from that, whether it was through waste or maybe an animal escaped or something like that. If the alternative story that many scientists believe and could also could well be true, that the patient zero, it comes from a series, there was animal to animal, what are called intermediate hosts. It started with a bat, and then went bat to a pangolin or whatever, and eventually to a human, then you would find a patient zero somewhere that was that first human. But if, I mean, I think this is a really important point, if that's the case, you'd have to say, well, what are the chances that that patient zero from this series of animal to animal to human transmissions, it just happens to be, it shows up in Wuhan, which is the only city in China with a level four virology institute that has the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses that is doing gain of function research, trying to make those viruses more virulent, particularly by making them more able to infect human cells. So it might mean if patient zero is just somebody who had an exposure to an animal, you have the mathematical odds of that person just showing up in Wuhan would be actually kind of absurd. There's also an issue with the actual structure of the virus itself, right? Yes. Yeah. So, well, this is a virus that is ready-made for getting to humans. For the first SARS, we were able to track how it jumped, and you could see in retrospect how you could see it got closer and closer, and as the virus mutated, it became more able to infect humans. This virus showed up fully able to infect humans. As a matter of fact, in the comparative studies of different animals, including humans, humans are the most susceptible to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So somehow, you have to explain how this virus shows up kind of seemingly out of nowhere in Wuhan ready for action, ready to fully infect humans. Now this level four virology lab that's in Wuhan, what are they doing those studies for? Like what is the intent? It's a really important question because there are a lot of people who are saying things that I don't agree with, that, oh, this is some kind of military bio weapon, and say what you want about Chinese government. They're not stupid. For them, I truly believe, if you had to ask me what's the most likely story, I believe that they recognized that these kinds of pathogens are a big threat to humans, and that we're getting more and more, the frequency of these kinds of outbreaks is growing. Rather than being behind the curve and waiting for some terrible outbreak, the idea was, well, can we predict how these viruses will evolve? Can we get ahead of the game in developing treatments and vaccines for what we think may be coming? And that's what this gain of function research is about. And so we know that the Chinese government, I'm sorry, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing this kind of gain of function research. Some of it was actually funded with United States government money through the NIH, and I know you'll get a lot of action in the Twitter sphere on this. And I truly believe that there was well-intentioned work trying to develop vaccines and treatments, trying to understand how the most dangerous pathogens might develop. And if my hypothesis is true, I think there was an accident. And there's a whole history of people who were warning, saying, well, we're trying to prevent some kind of future threat, but in our effort to prevent it, we're actually increasing the likelihood of it happening. Isn't that lab cited in 2018 for safety violations as well? Yes. So the US Embassy sent a small delegation. They visited the lab, and then there were two cables about this saying, hey, this is really dangerous. They're doing experimentation with these dangerous coronaviruses, and their safety protocols aren't up to snuff. So there was a lot of warning and a lot of fear. 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