Josh Rogin on Anthony Fauci's Influence

So they hired the best friends of the lab to investigate the lab. It's like hiring Robert Kardashian to investigate O.J. You know what I mean? It's like, and when they interviewed these guys on TV, they always say the same thing. Don't you want the best friends of the lab to interview the lab? Isn't that, we know the most about it. We're doing the research. It would be like Robert Kardashian being like, I know O.J. really well. You know, let me do the investigation. I'll figure out the truth. I'll get to the bottom of this. Right. So anyway, so they go to the lab for three hours, talk to their best friends, look them straight and they're like, did you do it? No, we didn't do it. OK, case closed. And then they concluded in their WHO report that the lab theory is very unlikely. We don't need to look into the lab. Case closed. And everybody was like, oh, that doesn't make any sense. We can't have that. These guys have a conflict of interest. Their careers are tied to this lab. If the lab were found to be guilty again, we don't know. I don't know. You don't know. Peter Daszak doesn't know. Well, maybe he knows, but I don't think he knows, you know, their legacy, this entire project of two hundred billion dollars, two hundred million dollars rather, to dig up viruses all over the world would be kaput. It would have to necessarily be stopped. This whole industry. OK, now here's the part where I'm going to get a little controversial. Are you ready? Is it OK? Sure. OK. So if I've gotten you that far again, just to say that I don't blame anyone out there for having this notion that like this lab theory, is kind of a kooky thing that like was cooked up by Mike Pompeo or something like that. I get why you think that. But now Trump's not he's not here anymore. Right. We don't have to argue about Trump anymore, hopefully ever again. Right. And we can just look at the piles of circumstantial evidence and there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it could come. There's some circumstantial evidence that could come from nature. I feel that the lab theory has more compelling circumstantial evidence because, again, they were doing that kind of research. They also there's a huge cover up in the virus database went mysteriously offline somehow in December 2019. There's also the evolution of the virus itself. Right. That's what Robert. So Robert Redfield, who is the CDC director at the time, a trained virologist, he says, I took a look at this virus and I concluded that is so powerful that it must have been evolved in a lab setting. And he pointed to the gain of function research and they called him a racist conspiracy theorist and all the rest. Yeah. All right. Now, here's the controversial part that the godfather of that industry, the head of the of the pyramid is a guy you may have heard of called Anthony Fauci. I've heard of that guy. Right. Yeah. Do you want to hear more? Yeah. OK. So Anthony Fauci, the hero of the pandemic, is the most important person in the world of gain of function research. There is in other words, he is not just him. There's Francis Collins at the NIH and some other people. But basically, he he is the one dispersing all of the grants for this. He is the one who pushed to turn it back on after Obama turned it back off. That's a whole nother crazy story. He turned it back on without really consulting the White House. That's breaking news. Never been reported. Just broke some news on your show right now. Yes. He consulted the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is like a part of the White House. But he didn't you know, the White House put a pause on it and then he like undid the pause. The details are a little sketchy. I'm not saying that he did anything necessarily wrong or illegal. I'm just saying that a lot of people that I know inside the Trump administration had no idea this had turned back, turned back on. He found a way to turn it back on in the mess of the Trump administration because the Trump administration is full of a bunch of clowns. Right. So at the end, you could get stuff done if you just knew how to work. The system thought she is the head of that system. Why? What was his incentive? That's his that's everything. That's his whole career. That's so what he would say. And to be fair, again, to be perfectly fair to him, he's trying to predict the next pandemic. He thinks this is the way that you predict the next pandemic by digging up all these viruses. We got to dig up more and more viruses and play around with them because we're going to find how they evolve. Then we're going to come up with therapeutics and vaccines and all this stuff. But there were no therapeutics. Right. But we did have vaccines quicker than most because the DARPA funded a program to make our mRNA vaccines 10 years ago that actually worked. You know, that was a military funded program, but we can get to that in a second. But that's not related to this. Right. So that's that's a very fair observation. In other words, the the two hundred million dollar program to predict and preempt the pandemic failed to predict and preempt the pandemic. But it may have also sparked the pandemic. May have sparked. But here's my question. When I read all about the research they were doing, I didn't see what they were doing to prevent it. I just saw they were what they were doing was examining these viruses and trying to find out how they work and trying to see what happens when they get more virulent. But what I didn't see is that the invention of therapeutics or I hear what you're saying. I'm I'm I'm willing to give these scientists the benefit of the doubt that their honest goal was to create do good science to prevent predict. I am, too. That's not what I'm saying. Well, I don't know if they produce therapeutics. What I'm saying. But did they have a lack of funding in that department? Was all the funding. I don't know. I allocated towards examining the viruses themselves and not towards developing some sort of a therapeutic. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. OK. But what I do know is that the majority of their time was spent digging up viruses in the wild and bringing them back to these labs. But Fauci, when he started it back up, did he started back up with the intent to just uncover more information so we'd be better informed? His argument was this is vital research. The longer we pause it, the more danger that we're in. I'm trying to save the world. And so we got to turn this stuff back on because this is how we're going to save the world from the next pandemic, which I'm sure he believed. I'm sure a lot of these people believed. But there is another school of thought out there. And the other school of thought is, hey, instead of taking 200 million dollars to dig up viruses and make them more dangerous, why don't you put that money into monitoring surveillance in the places where the bats are? In other words, if you put resources where the outbreaks are likely to occur, then you can squelch them when they pop up because actually viruses change every day and trying to predict the pandemic is a fool's error. That's another scientific school of thought. That's not the one that Fauci's in. But the reason that there's no debate about this is because the NIH and NIAID structure is such that everyone gets funded by them. They're funding everybody. So if you are in the field of virology, there's a 99.99% chance that you're getting money from Anthony Fauci in one way or another. Your grants, your careers, your chairmanship. So there's no dissent allowed in that community. I learned a lot about the scientific community and the virology community. No dissent allowed. So no debate? I talk to scientists all the time. We say, I think this gain of function research is really dangerous. I can't say anything. I'm going to lose my grant. I'm going to lose my career. This happens to me all the time. And when Robert Redfield spoke up because he's a big mocker and he's a head of the CDC, he said it's my opinion that it came from the lab because he can't declassify. He can't declassify a bunch of classified information on CNN. But he's talking about what he knows. It's obvious to everyone who's in the know that he's seen the intelligence and he's not just talking out of his ass. He's not some Joe Schmo virologist. He was the head of the CDC. He's seen all of the secret, secret stuff, even the stuff I never got a whiff of. And he went on TV and said, hey, I think this probably came from the lab. We should probably look at the lab. And he was called a racist in a conspiracy. But Fauci's disagreed with him publicly. Right. So that's the thing. So if you if you just think about it just for once again, I'm begging people out there just like think again, whatever you thought about the lab accident, it doesn't matter. Whatever you tweeted in 2020 March, it doesn't. Nobody cares. Right. And the same thing for the video. Yeah, because it's all confirmation bias now. Like, oh, I I said I tweeted this in March 2020 and I want it to hold up. Nobody cares what you tweeted in March 2020. Let's just have a rational moratorium conversation about what are the likely ways we got into this horrible crisis that we're in. And so for people in the know who are listening to Robert Redfield, it's clear that he's calling out Anthony Fauci. In other words, he's pointing to the gain of function research, which he knows because he's the head of the CDC reports up to Fauci. He knows that. Right. Right. But he's not saying that because even that's too hot for him to say. And the scientists are not going to say that either. Now you have a lot of people sort of on the on the right wing media and the MAGA media who've been saying that for a long time, but they don't have any credibility with the mainstream media. And I'm just like in that weird space where like I wrote a book about, you know, US China relationship. So I had all these this good reporting and I'm not maga media because I criticize Trump and my columns all the time. So I am mainstream media, but I'm saying we should look at the lab and it messes with people's minds because they're like, oh, why is he doing this? Why is Josh pushing the lab? I'm not pushing the lab. That's the problem today with these rigid ideologies. Exactly. Everyone's on teams. It's all functional. Yes. Yes. But I don't care. I don't even care if the lab accident theory is true. If the natural origin theory is true, then great. I will leave the ticker tape parade celebrating Peter Daszak and Anthony Fauci through down, you know, fifth Avenue. I'm happy to do that. All I'm saying is that we have to also look into this lab, these labs rather, and that we can't hire the best friends of the lab to look into the labs. They have a clear conflict of interest and they fucked it up already. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan experience.