The Questions Around Gain of Function Research

Did you read the email leaks? The emails from Peter Gatsik? Intercept. And yeah, all the different discussions that they had about their concerns, that they were responsible for this through gain of function research. They applied for a grant to specifically do a, to insert a furin cleavage site, which is that particular part of the virus that raised so much concern. Yeah. I mean, look, the thing is like, this gets back to the same thing. I think we're dancing around a little bit, which is I don't know sometimes what to do with this. It's highly suspicious. I think of this in sometimes the way I think about my teenage kids. They're not telling me everything here. Now, do I automatically assume they're totally guilty of everything I think they're guilty of or is there something else going on here? I think China has not ... Part of being prepared in my World War C book is that we have to have a world health organization that's actually empowered to be able to do things. It's too beholden, I think, to China. There was a letter that came out from Peter Datsik in February of last year that he wrote in The Lancet along with a bunch of other people saying, this thing, this is ridiculous to suggest that this had somehow been bioengineered at a lab. Meanwhile, the internal email suggested that he had very different concerns. That's worrisome. I said to Peter, this is not making sense. What did he say? He said, hey, there's no evidence that the virus ever existed in this lab. There's no evidence that it leaked out of the lab. Well, that's because they destroyed a lot of evidence. This is concerning. They deleted ... How much evidence did they delete in 2019? Some stunning amount. Well, the entire database went down. Yeah, exactly. Now, I said to him, you were part of the WHO investigation. Did you see the database now? It's been over a year later. He said, no. When I said, is that not of concern to you? He said, look. He goes, it was a public database. They were worried about hacking and so that's why they took it down. I said, if it was a public database, why were they worried about hacking? What were they trying to hide? I don't know, Joe, what to make of it. There's clearly, as you said earlier, I think you said, where there's smoke, there's fire probably, but can I say conclusively? No. Part of me thinks we may never know. We don't have a system in place at a global level to mandate that these things actually come to light. We don't treat this like we treat Department of Defense issues. We should be thinking about this more from a defense standpoint rather than a public health preventive standpoint. That's interesting. When you see Fauci being grilled by Rand Paul and he denies that they were doing gain-of-function research, what are your thoughts on that? By any definition, that was gain-of-function research. Gain-of-function research is taking a virus. We should probably Google the exact definition, but what my impression is that gain-of-function means you're imparting new ability to this virus to infect humans. The idea is that you're juicing it up and making it more contagious. That type of research has been done and in fact, I think it was in 2015, I think in the Netherlands somewhere. If the NIH was giving funding to EcoHealth Alliance and EcoHealth Alliance was funding that kind of research and then Fauci is not being honest about that. I think the NIH is clearly funding EcoHealth Alliance and EcoHealth Alliance is clearly giving grants to Wuhan Institute of Virology. Here's how they answer the question when I ask them, including Francis Collins, who's the head of the NIH. They define gain-of-function research as this. You have a known bad contagious pathogen and you're going to essentially use the backbone of another known bad pathogen and you're going to splice them together essentially. You're taking one thing that you know to be bad and contagious and splicing it with something else that you know to be bad. That is you're expecting this to be worse than what you started with. If you're taking a novel virus and you don't know how contagious this is and you're basically saying, look, I want to isolate the spike protein on this new virus. I'm going to put it on the backbone of something I do know. Make it contagious to humans. We'll see how it behaves at that point. Does this actually start to behave as something super contagious or not? The possibility is that it could, but they're not sure. This is nuanced and a lot of people have taken issue with it, including scientists who work in the field. The strict definition is that you got to know for gain-of-function research, you know that it's going to lead to gain-of-function. I think the problem is using the term gain-of-function. If we instead abandon any sort of nomenclature that might be problematic and say, were they doing experiments to make viruses more contagious to people? The answer would be yes. Yeah. Were they doing experiments that could lead to viruses being more contagious? Yes. I think that that's right. That is research that is done to try and figure out. A lot of these pathogens they examine, they're not contagious. They put the spike protein and they put some component of the virus onto the backbone of a known thing and it doesn't do much. They say, we don't have to worry about this. It could turn into a situation where you take a component of a new virus, you put it on the backbone of a known virus and it does lead to something much more contagious. That's what a lot of people are concerned about here. There was part of those emails, as you know, Joe, were emails that were sent to Fauci January of last year where Christian Anderson raised this concern. He subsequently wrote a paper saying, hey, those changes that we saw, I thought that was clear evidence of bioengineering, but now I've seen evidence of those same abnormalities in existing naturally occurring viruses. Now I don't think that's the problem. It's going back and forth and frankly, we may never know for sure. Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.