What Started Pushback Against Wuhan "Lab Leak" Theory?

Have any of the people that were initially skeptical or pushing back against the idea that it came from this level four lab, are they coming around or are they still digging their heels in? So some are coming around. And so certainly there are people like Matt Ridley, who's a member of the House of Lords in the UK, a kind of very well-known science communicator. He was firmly on the other side, and now he started to be more open and actually has been quite vocal. What was his motivation for being on the other side? Yeah, I think that it's a really interesting story because in the earliest days of the pandemic, there was a concerted effort by a relatively small number of high-profile scientists, virologists, who recognized that if the story was that this came from a series of what are called zoonotic jumps between animal hosts in the wild, that was going to lead to a kind of a positive outcome where we'd say, hey, let's be very mindful of our encroachment into wild spaces, climate change, all those things that we should be very mindful of. But they were, I think, probably worried that if this story became dominant of an accidental lab leak, I mean, that would have huge implications for all of the research that people are doing. And a lot of it is very well intentioned. So early last year, there was a process where a series of scientists did two things. One, they came out with a letter in the British medical journal, Valancit, which we've subsequently learned was highly manipulated by a small number of people who may have had vested interests. And there was an academic paper in a journal called Nature Communications, and both made the case, oh, this isn't a lab leak. And then there was a concerted effort to label anybody else as a conspiracy theorist. And so I kind of spent last year in that uncomfortable space. I mean, I don't live my life as a conspiracy theorist. I try to be data-driven in everything that I do. But I really felt that this was a very real possibility, and it deserved a full investigation. And it was only in the beginning of this year, 2021, that that started to turn. I know I had I wrote some things, someone named Nicholson Baker. He had a great piece in New York magazine. The Wall Street Journal did a great job covering this. And so the space was starting to open up. Then they had that really, in my mind, ill-fated press event in Wuhan, where it was this independent committee and the Chinese government. And they said, don't investigate lab leak, investigate the frozen food hypothesis. And then in every newspaper around the world, the headline was the World Health Organization says lab leak is not possible, essentially. And so I immediately sent messages to my friends at the World Health Organization and saying, look, this is being misreported. The World Health Organization hasn't said this. And the position of the WHO must be we have to investigate all hypotheses. And I was very pleased that three days later, so the press event was on a Tuesday, that Friday, Tedros Adonom, who's the director general, he then said in a press event that we believe that every hypothesis needs to be investigated, which implicitly meant the lab leak hypothesis. And then our letter came out, which was just just last week. I mean, it feels it's been such a whirlwind since then. And that's been picked up in newspapers all around the world. So now I feel like there is an opening and I hope that we can continue. And the goal in my mind isn't to prove like I don't I don't feel like I need to. If it's provable, I'd love to prove it, but it is not to prove that right at this point that it is a lab leak or isn't. But we at least need to have the most thorough, unrestricted, unpoliticized investigation into what happened with access to all the lab records, all the samples. There are tons of scientists in China who were working on these issues. Very, very few of them have been interviewed. We don't have access to them. And frankly, I think a lot of them are afraid that if they speak up, they'll be imprisoned or worse. Yeah, that is the problem, right? The people that were initially very vocal and biased towards the idea that it wasn't a lab leak. And you said they were highly motivated and they labeled all the folks a conspiracy theorist. What what was motivating them? Yeah, so this it's a really tricky point. And so there's been a lot of controversy around a guy named Peter Dasek. And Peter is an interesting figure because if you had asked me a year ago, a year and a half ago, who are the people who you respect most in the field of virology? He would be really at the top of my list. He was one of the heroes of understanding where the first SARS came from. He has an organization called EcoHealth Alliance that was really trying to get ahead of the curve on understanding these these pathogens. But he also, through EcoHealth Alliance, was a funder of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, specifically the gain of function research that was being done there. And I truly believe it wasn't anything nefarious. It was the idea was, well, if we want to understand dangerous pathogens, we have to do it in the place where those dangerous pathogens are. Then under the Obama administration, there was a moratorium on this kind of gain of function research. And then it was lifted in the Trump administration. So that's one one piece of it. And so for Peter, I understand that his whole experience of his life has been, well, this is where these kinds of outbreaks come from. And but this could be just a very different story. And for me personally, that's I think one of the reasons why I was able to see this a little earlier, perhaps, than other people is that, you know, part of a big chunk of my life has been in the world of science. But another big chunk of my life has been in the world of understanding China. And so I think if you're just in the world of science, you don't understand China, you think, well, the Chinese government says that this isn't from a lab leak. It must not be from a lab leak. But I know that in the Chinese government, they've totally suppressed the entire basically history of Mao and all the deep millions of people who died under Mao when they got their speed trains going. The first train had this terrible crash and they just buried the whole train and pretended like it never happened until there was an outcry and they had to dig it up. So I feel like I understood a little bit more about the pathology of the Chinese government. So but coming back, I think there were people in the kind of more traditional virology world who felt like we're going to open up a whole can of worms if we say, well, maybe it was a zoonotic jump and maybe it was a lab leak. So this one guy and his influence shaped the way the entire world was addressing this outbreak? I wouldn't say it's one guy, but it was, I think, a relatively small number of people because they certainly that the the Lancet letter and it was all kinds of big luminaries who signed it. That really shaped things. And so definitely, if if the story in the beginning had been maybe this comes from a zoonotic jump, maybe it comes from a lab leak, we need to look at both options. I think that would have been a much healthier place because there would have been more pressure on China. So it wasn't just one guy, but Peter certainly was was very influential. And then, in spite of this conflict of interest, he's actually was selected as a member of this World Health Organization Independent Advisory Committee. So one of the people who went on this mission to China was Peter. He also is the chairman of the Lancet, the same British journal that I mentioned. They have a study study group. He's the chairman of that. And I'm not saying he's doing anything wrong. I'm just saying if you have that kind of conflict of interest, you shouldn't be in those kinds of roles. It's just always so disturbing to someone like me who's a non-scientist who relies on scientists to be unbiased and to just look at the data. When you find out that things are being influenced by very human factors like ego and financial gain and relationships with foreign powers and laboratories that they're involved with. And that scares the shit out of me. Well, you know this better than most anybody, Joe, because you kind of are here every day looking into people's psyche and people are people, even scientists. And everybody in the world has a story that explains what they're doing and why. And so I'm sure that you could, maybe even should, have Peter on the show and he'll give you his story. But at least from the outside looking in, the way I would see it is, well, he's invested his entire life into doing the right thing, trying to protect us from this terrible threat of a pathogenic outbreak. He correctly recognizes that encroachment into wild areas and climate change are big threats. Wherever COVID-19 starts to come from, still those are good things to do. He has a long-standing relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a friendship with the people who work there. And so you can see how he, my guess, and I can't speak for him, he's become kind of a stakeholder in this story. But we shouldn't, this isn't just about Peter. I mean, there are lots of very prominent scientists. I would say there are more prominent scientists who believe that this comes from a series of zoonotic jumps through intermediate animal hosts in the wild than there are who believe that it's more likely to come from a lab lake. But what I will say, I get a lot, I'm in touch with lots of people who are world famous scientists, scientists who many, many people will know who are privately telling me, well, we think that there's a 90% chance that it comes from a lab, but really don't want to speak up because we don't want to get pulled into the muck. You were talking about Trump before. People remember the Iraq War, where there were all kinds of experts who were saying, oh, they definitely have nuclear weapons and then we invaded the country. It's like, oh, oops, they don't have it. So people didn't want it to justify any kind of bad things. And as scientists, I mean, the problem is the scientists rely on data and there wasn't data because China was covering it up. And the journalists require scientists to make, to legitimate claims about the origins. And so there was this weird thing that's lasted for a year. And our hope is and we're starting to see that our letter has opened up some space where we can have a real honest conversation about let's look deeply into all the possibilities and try to get to the right answer. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. 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