Lab leak deniers actually thought it was possible | Hour 2

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to vpetcleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, write your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. So in a related story, just three months after a group of scientists published a paper claiming that the COVID LABLA theory was not plausible, several of the researchers began to have doubts. That's according to newly released documents that raise questions about why those researchers continued to defend their conclusion publicly. Yes, I said it's a related story because last hour we were talking about the way Roy Cooper behaved during the COVID lockdowns. Right, one of the things we heard during the COVID era, which seems like, you know, another lifetime ago, but like we are still in basically the COVID era. I am firmly convinced right that the rise of the black pilling, the pessimism, skepticism, the rise of all of this nihilism, the lack of trust in everything, the pursuit of every conspiracy theory. All of this is fallout from COVID. I do believe this. It's I'm not saying it's solely due to COVID, but it all is downstream of COVID because once that happened, people's confidence in you know, the health institutions and the science and data. As was constantly said during that time period, now we have to trust the science. And the science was Fauci right? That Fauci is the science. If you're an attacking me, you're basically attacking the science. Here is the science. And anybody who had any questions, well you're not following the science and data. That's it. That was the mantra that shuts down all conversation and people who were like me, legitimately asking questions and not in a I'm just asking questions kind of way, but in an actual hey I have some questions. Hey, this doesn't make sense. Hey you're saying everybody needs to mask up. Can you show me some of that science and data? Please? Oh after stonewalling for months. Oh, here are the studies that you're citing, and then you look at the studies and the studies actually do not prove that the masking work against a respiratory virus. So why are you citing these studies as proof of the thing that you're doing when the thing that you're doing is the opposite of what they say is effective. Right. So now we find out, thanks to. These newly released documents that a paper that was published in Nature Medicine in March of twenty twenty, so these were this was the very beginning of the outbreak, right. The paper was called the Proximal Origin of SARS COVD two, the proximal origin, and this was the lie that it came from a wet market. That's that's what this paper basically said. It was like, all you moonbats out there, your total racists for saying that it was a lab leak, when actually the non racist to explain it is that the Chinese people eat some crazy things and they kill all these animals and eat some really wild concoctions and that's what did it all. Like, that's the non racist explanation that we were told. Like that should have been the first clue everybody. Yeah, we had a lot of fun with that. I was doing the show during the pandemic. Yeah, Like some of the stuff that people were saying is like do you hear yourselves? Like I'm saying, Hey, you got the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the bat Lady expert that's been interviewed about going into these caves and scooping up batpoop and doing all these experiments, and they're you know, they're doing all of these things at the WIZ and then all of a sudden, people start getting sick that worked at the WIV and in the neighborhoods around the WIZ, And you say that's a racist. Explanation is that they don't have good quarantine control at their lab. And the non racist explanation was that the Chinese eat some crazy foods. Okay, that was That was quite a time. Anyway, back to this piece. This is Britney Bernstein at the National Review reporting on Senator Ran Paul's office releasing private slack messages. These are messages that really don't pull their own weight. They're very lazy and no. Slack is a platform. A lot of organizations use it so they can create these little slack chats, and people can slack off at work while chatting, so the slack messages were between the scientists who authored that paper, the Proximal Origin of sars Kov two that would go on to be widely cited by the journalists and public health officials who would then dismiss the idea that COVID nineteen had emerged from a lab leak. In Wuhan, China, lawmakers would later discover that Anthony the Science Fauci, who was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, that Fauci had prompted researchers to write the paper, and that Fauci was involved in the editing and approval process for the paper's final draft. When asked publicly back in April of twenty twenty, so a month after the paper was released and Fauci was asked whether COVID may have come from a lab. Fauci cited the paper to cast out on the lab leak theory. So he commissions it, he edits it, and then once published, he keeps his name off of it. And then once it's published he cites it as the proof that you're crazy and racist. For thinking this came from a high tech lab in China instead of some disgusting wet market where they kill all sorts of weird. Animals and then eat them. Then in June twenty twenty, so this would have been what Mark ch April May three months later, one of the scientists who was one of the authors of the proximal origin paper a guy who is a evolutionary biologist, Christian Anderson. I don't know if he's related to that. Holland guy that sings about the wooden shoes, but anyway, this evolutionary biologist, Christian Andersen, suggested in private messages with his co authors on that Slack channel that he believed there was a thirty percent chance that the virus had in fact come from a lab, a sharp departure from the conclusion that was presented in the paper, which said that the lab leak was implausible. His other co authors, like Eddie Holmes. Eddie Holmes said he put the lab leak theory at a twenty percent probability, but then he later downgraded that to a ten percent probability. Anderson said, our paper was pretty strong in saying that there's no way that it came from a lab but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage. He said that was in June, but you'll never guess what he was saying publicly after after he says this to his colleagues, his co authors, he then is quoted all over the place disparaging the lab leak theory. Wonder why, all right? For over a year now, you've heard me talking about Create a Video. Great local company in mint Hill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photos, VHS tapes, film reels and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now creative videos helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. 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Check out group travel Videos dot com. That's group travel Videos dot com. Or call seven oh four eight four six seventy eight seventy extension two o six. And when you do that, ask for Katie. But Pete, can I just email? Well, yes you can. You can email Katie Katie at group travel videos dot com. Group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. So National Review this piece titled Scientists behind paper dismissing COVID lab leak privately lost confidence in findings but maintained public step right, And that is that's the core of the issue here, is that you could say that they put out the paper at the very beginning of the COVID outbreak. March twenty twenty and that they were just trying to do their best right, they were trying to provide the best guidance, like even if you give them all of that benefit of the doubt, every benefit of the doubt. Now we see the private messages that within sixty days of the publication of their paper, they're talking to each other saying things like, yeah, I'm not so sure anymore, Like, yeah, we were pretty definitive in saying that it came from the wet market and then jumped to humans, but we don't know how versus this lab leak theory. We've been dismissing the lab leak theory, but now like I'm not so sure. But here's here's the the decision point. What did you do after you started having those doubts when you're telling your co authors and you guys are agreeing that these there are like three of these researchers that the scientists that that wrote the paper outside of Anthony Fauci, right, he just you know, edited it and approved the final draft. But these researchers, scientists that wrote it, they're discussing it and they all are in agreement that, yeah, like we were pretty like definitive in saying it was implausible, but now we're not so sure. What did they do after when they started having the doubts? Did they ever express those doubts to the public. Did they ever say, you know what, we put out this paper. We were dealing with the information we had at that time, but now we're not so sure give it new information. No, they did not. They absolutely did not, so rand Paul's office. Senator Ran Paul's office noted that the Proximal Origin paper argued that purposeful manipulation of the virus was implausible, but one of the researchers, Christian Anderson, the evolutionary biologist, he began to question this assertion that manipulating the virus was implausible. He said, I'm not so sure about this. Now, after a couple of German scientists built a reverse genetics system for SARSKOV two in under two weeks. So they did this thing where they reversed it reverse genetics system, they published their findings and at that point he's like, hmm, well, now not so sure. He also acknowledged that the paper is inaccurate in its claim that that coronavirus research was widely distributed in labs all over the world, a claim that was used to downplay the significance of the virus emerging in such close proximity to the Wuhan lab. He said, quote, we described this in the paper and say that this work is performed all over the world. But that's not true. It has exclusively been going on at the WI, the Wuhun Institute of Virology. So they lied. They said, Oh, I don't know. It's not just batlady. No no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not just her. Everybody's doing it. It's a livably they could government anywhere. Why are you so racist talking about the Chai kams, which, by the way, that was one of the reasons why, like I was skeptical of this wet market idea from the beginning because the kami said it. And rule number one about kamis never trust a kami. They lie, ex commis lie. So when communists China wasn't didn't want to be blamed for killing millions of people all over the world by releasing this virus, right, they just lied. Oh no, no, you know us, we do love our bat soup so much. No, I came from a pangolin, whatever the hell that thing was. Some animal. Never even heard of a pangolin. Sounds like some sort of arts and craft material, you know. Anyway, So even when they had these doubts, when when they get the German research, when when they're like, hey, you know there's this thing here that everybody's doing this testing, but actually or this research when actually it's just the. Bat lady at the with. Even then, Anderson continued to defend the proximal origin paper and criticized another paper that came out from a British clinical scientist named Angus Dalgleish along with Berger Sorensen. So Angus and Berger realated, like that their names are Angus and Berger. This whoever wrote this season is a little ridiculous, Okay, like it's just not believable. Now we got Angus Berger cranking out oppo paper. Anyway, So Angus. And Berger they put out a paper that raises the pos And by the way, one's is a clinical scientist. Berger Sorensen is the chairman of a Norwegian company called Immunoor, so they work in the field and their paper raised the possibility that the virus had been manipulated in a lab. And so what does Christian Andersen say no, no, no. The angus Berger work is complete nonsense, unintelligible, and not even remotely scientific, leading the authors to make unfounded and unsupported conclusions about the origin of Sorrow's COVID two. He then added, as we describe in our paper, all the data strongly suggests that this is a natural virus. No scientific data has been put forward suggesting otherwise, including in the present quote study put it in, put it in the scare quotes, so it's not really a study. Much of his public commentary on the virus has now been wiped from the Internet. He deleted five thousand tweets after media outlets published an email that he had sent to Anthony Fauci on January thirty first, twenty twenty that indicated some of the SARS COVID two features potentially looked engineered, his words potentially look engineered. He said that in January of twenty twenty, and when that information got leaked, he wiped his entire Twitter footprint, and then they put the paper out going over the latest in a now a what a six year old story that we are finally learning some of the confirmation about what we suspected was that the people who were out there telling us that the science and DAYA all showed or proved or you know, made it more plausible that COVID came from a wet market and then just jumped magically sciency data like to humans from pangolins or whatever. And you crazy people, racisty people that say, no, no, no, it was this biotech lab that you know, they were working on this research and it you know, probably leaked out of the lab. It broke containment. And by the way, like there are people and I remember this at the time, there were people that were saying that China released it on purpose. And I did not find that to be a plausible theory. I'm not saying it's well, I'm not saying it's impossible. I just don't just the way it spread and the Chinese reaction to it. They seemed to have not been prepared for it either. Oh no, but that's the way they wanted it to look like. I don't know. I remember when I first knew that something really wrong was going on. I remember seeing a video that somehow made it out of China at the time where a guy was like he literally rammed his vehicle through a police barricade to try to get out of a city, and like, I don't know a lot about Chinese law, but knowing what I know about commis like, that's not a very good thing to do, you know, like you're going to get into a lot of trouble. And then I remember seeing. The video that they were welding people into their apartments. They were welding the doors closed to quarantine people. So that doesn't look like something that they purposefully released, right, It looked like something they were trying to contain. Maybe that was all propaganda to I don't know, but the spread of the thing to me looked like this was something that broke containment. And then you find out later on that the Wuhan Institute was not the I forget what the level system is now, is it like a level four that is like that's the top security lab that can do this kind of work, and they were like a level two something like that. They shouldn't have been doing it. And then you had the military in there working on stuff. And then anyway, so the people who were saying that I was somehow crazy for seeing these dots and making some what I thought were obvious connections, I was crazy to see that and that the scientists were like, no, no, no, Look we have a paper and this paper says you're crazy. It came from bat Soup. Later, in September twenty twenty one, details of a grant proposal submitted three years earlier by Peter Dejak of Eco Health Alliance along with Jengli Chi that's the bat lady of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, along with Ralph Barrick from UNCR. Details of the grand proposal were leaked to the public. The DARPA diffuse submission proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into stars related bat coronaviruses. What is the furin cleavage site? I had no idea at the time, but then I remember reading up about it and according to Rand Paul's office, they describe it as such. Quote, the furin cleavage site is a feature in the stars COVID two spike protein. So we have all seen that little thing with the spikes on it. You know the image that was used to scar ever. But it was like a round ball with all these spiky things coming out of it. The furin cleavage site is a feature of the spike protein that enhances how efficiently the virus enters human cells, and its presence became one of the central reasons many scientists suspected that the virus had been engineered. You wouldn't have that furin cleavage site. You wouldn't have it if it wasn't engineered. Again, I'm not a scientist, but when scientists say that, then I'm gonna be okay. Well, then it seems pretty clear then that somebody was messing around with this. The grant proposal was made public after a whistle blow or complaint was leaked. This was at the end of September twenty twenty one. This group of scientists that were involved in the paper, they had a little slack channel that they were writing to each other, and they also began preparing for future Freedom of Information Act requests. One of them told his colleagues stay off email and quote carefully curate some emails for the FOI records, right, because you don't want to have nothing. You can't delete all of your emails because if you delete everything and then you get a Freedom of Information request and you have nothing to give them, people are going to be like, mmmmmm, no, you probably scrapped a bunch of them, right, You probably deleted them or you wiped it like with a cloth. You know, you wiped your server. So don't say anything else on emails and maybe go through and like grab some stuff and have it ready to go. That's not going to get us into trouble. One of them, Uh, this person's name is Andrew rambat rambau out rambot ramboot rambou Rambo. He suggested that they jump on a cold to discuss quote what our strategy should be so we don't get associated with these bleepers, referring to the quote Barrick Dajack poop show. So these researchers that wrote the paper, even they knew the problems that Barrick and Dejak and bat Lady like with that grant becoming public, they recognized we don't want anything to do with them. We got to stay out of that orbit. We don't want any of that on us. Yuri Dagan, a biotech entrepreneur, says there was a coordinated effort to prematurely credit and suppressed the Lablik hypothesis. That was the true Lablak conspiracy. The suppression of the Lablik theory was the Lablik conspiracy. I mentioned this earlier that we are still basically in the fallout of the COVID pandemic. So we're still basically COVID era, and maybe it'll be referred to as that in the future, you know, this like decade from you know, twenty twenty through twenty thirty or something, because the impacts of COVID with you know, the economic impacts, the educational loss right, the kids that were kept out of school, the all of the anxiety and all of that, but also the loss of trust in institutions, and I get it. You know, couple that with the the Russia collusion hoax, and it becomes very difficult now for a lot of people on the right to have any confidence in anything that anybody says in any position of authority or expertise. But you know, the the response, this is my opinion, the response I think to those abuses, to the misinformation, to the lies, the response should not be I don't think it's a healthy response to say, Okay, now I'm just going to not believe everything. Not everything you say you know, FAUCI or everything you say FBI, whatever, but everything everybody says. And I think this is part of why, like the can conspiracy theories regarding Charlie Kirk's murder. I think it's why some of those things gained so much purchase is because people are now going they're just swinging wildly the other direction. And I've had this debate with people during the week when we had the hearing for in the Tyler Robinson trial, and we're getting the evidence, we're seeing all the actual evidence, and it's just dismantling all of these crazy conspiracy theories that have been promoted. And I'm not saying people asking questions. I'm not saying like why you know people are like, I don't understand why didn't anybody guard the rooftop, Right, that's a legitimate question. But when you. Start talking about secret tunnels underneath the stage and the masade, and like, when you start throwing out the wild conspiracies, none of you know, Tyler Robinson is being aimed and all of this other stuff, and you are ignoring all the other evidence because I can't trust anybody after COVID or after the Russia collusion hoax. Like, that's not a healthy response. You should be skeptical. I'm not arguing against skepticism, right, the old mine, you know, if your mother tells you she loves you, trust but verify, get a second opinion. Right, But the answer cannot be I'm now not going to trust every single person in any kind of official capacity, because everybody they're all individuals. And that's like saying, okay, so now every single cop has bad every single prosecutor, every single judge, right, every single politician. Okay, well that one may be that one, I kidd. Yeah, but it's to deny that individuals have agency and that there are some people. There are a lot of people that do things correctly, and they're trying to do the right thing, and they're not lying to you about stuff, and they're trying to actually prosecute the person that the evidence suggests. And my belief is it proves, you know, that this guy did the crime. So this this wild overreaction to COVID, like we are still seeing it, and I don't think you would have seen that kind of reaction but for COVID, but for the framing of Trump and the you know, the way that we have seen government weaponized against people during the Trump era. So this this guy that was quoted in the National Review piece Uri Dagan or Dagan biotech entrepreneur. He was one of the early guys who was talking about the lab league theory. He says, what's particularly striking is the gap between the sign entists private and public statements. Christian Anderson and some of his co authors privately acknowledged that a lab origin was a substantial possibility, yet publicly treated the hypothesis as a crazy conspiracy theory. It appears that whatever their genuine scientific uncertainty, they ultimately felt compelled to fall in line with the prevailing institutional position. And I think that's right. I think that is it. I think there are a lot of people that are more comfortable in the herd. Right if everyone, if everybody around you is saying like, oh, this is what happened, and then it's like, okay, well then that's what happened. I'm just going to kind of go with the herd. It's just easier, especially if you've got, you know, professional status that may be impacted. Maybe you don't get grants or something. You don't want to cross the powers that be, and it's easier. I mean, it's just easier. And people think that, oh, if I had all that kind of money and status, like I would be able to say screw you to these people, when actually a lot of times it's the opposite. People become afraid of losing the status, losing the income. They've achieved this status or wealth, and now they're afraid that they lose it if they go against the prevailing sentiment. Senator Ran Paul on. Twitter talking about doctor Ralph Barrick from UNC. He apparently sat for a transcribed interview with Congressional staff. He's the ram Pole, says, he is the scientist who designed the furin cleavage site work for the DARPA defuse proposal. Today, I'm releasing the transcript. Here's what he admitted. On the DARPA solicitation, which asked researchers to learn what makes a virus jump species down to the nucleotide level, Barreck said, there's only one honest answer. Quote. That's a gain of function experiment. There's no other way to think about it. On the proposally submitted with EcoHealth Alliances Peter Dajak and shngle She of the WIV the Bat Lady, Barrick confirmed the step of inserting a furin cleavage site into a viral backbone would be done by him. Directly admitting that part would be done by me. The fur and cleavage site is the exact feature of sarskvy two that first drew lab origin scrutiny and rand Paul has been talking about the fur and cleavage site for six years. He was the guy that was asking about this during congressional hearings six years ago. Right, he's the guy that I first heard the term from. Paul says, here's the part that should worry every scientist who called lab origin a conspiracy theory. The Proximal Origin paper argued COVID wasn't engineered because the virus does not grip human cells in the ideal way that an engineer would design it to. Barrick had already run an experiment as far back as twenty ten, and it showed that assumption was wrong. A virus that grips too efficiently gets stuck and spreads worse. A knowledgeable designer would deliberately avoid that ideal grip, meaning the very thing that the Proximal Origin paper called proof of nature is something that an expert engineer might purposefully choose. Barack said. He reported the experiment to the National Institute of Health, and then he destroyed the materials. Barrick was on the February first, twenty twenty call with Fauci, Francis Collins, Jeremy Farrar, and the Proximal Origin authors, but he's not on the invitation list, nor could he recall who invited him. He said, I couldn't find out how I knew about the meeting. Some of the participants say they didn't even know that Ralph Barrack was there, and he gave contradictory accounts of whether he spoke, first saying that no, no, I stayed silent, but then he said he was surprised that nobody knew he wasn't there because he introduced himself. So which was it? All right? That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetekallanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.