Here’s What They Hid in Wuhan | Matt Ridley

Summary

Podcast Summary: American Thought Leaders — “Here’s What They Hid in Wuhan” with Matt Ridley
The Epoch Times, Host: Jana Keller
Guest: Matt Ridley (co-author, “The Search for the Origin of COVID-19”)
Air Date: June 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deeply into the origins of COVID-19, focusing on the "lab leak theory," newly declassified U.S. intelligence files, and the global scientific and political campaign to suppress debate and inquiry around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Matt Ridley, a leading investigator who co-authored a comprehensive book on COVID-19’s origins, joins host Jana Keller for a critical conversation about scientific integrity, government cover-ups, China’s accountability, dangerous biological research, and the failures of the media and the West’s scientific establishment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Wuhan Files & Intelligence Community Cover-up

• Newly Declassified Documents: Released by former DNI Tulsi Gabbard, these documents confirm longstanding suspicions about COVID-19’s potential lab origin and detail an early intelligence focus on a lab leak.
• Political Suppression: Multiple segments—especially involving Anthony Fauci—demonstrate political pressures reversing early assessments in favor of the lab leak, resulting in a narrative controlled “on political rather than scientific grounds” ([02:09], Matt Ridley).
• False Testimony: Dr. Fauci’s repeated public statements denying U.S. funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab are directly contradicted by documentary evidence ([03:16], Matt Ridley: “That just simply is not true.”).

2. Early Evidence Favoring Lab Leak

• Epidemiological Anomalies: Initial investigations never found an infected animal in the Wuhan market—a stark contrast to earlier pandemics like SARS, where infected animals and vendors were rapidly identified ([05:41], Matt Ridley).
• Location Coincidence: The virus emerged in the only city in the world running major gain-of-function research on SARS-like bat coronaviruses, immediately after such an experiment was planned ([06:28], Matt Ridley).

Notable Quote:

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks in a mine. … It is genuinely far less surprising that Rick should run into … [Ilsa] in Casablanca than that this virus should turn up in this one place.”
— Matt Ridley ([06:44])

3. The “Proximal Origins” Scandal

• Nature Medicine Paper: Widely publicized as “proving” a natural origin, the letter was constructed under political pressure, with its own authors privately still believing a lab leak was likely ([09:05]-[10:15]).
• Coordinated Narrative: Communications show Anthony Fauci and others shaped the text, ensured their names were hidden, and pressed for downplaying lab origins ([11:08], Ridley).
• Scientific Community Stonewalling: Hundreds of scientists petitioned for the paper’s retraction, yet received no response—illustrating institutional unwillingness to reflect ([11:49]).

Notable Quote:

“They published a paper that says the very opposite of what they thought in private. … That is a scientific disgrace.”
— Matt Ridley ([11:00])

4. China’s Response and Accountability Failures

• Opacity from China: Despite international appeals, China has revealed “almost nothing” about lab activities, with alarming facts such as hospitalizations and missing data around the outbreak left unexplained ([14:49], Ridley).
• Dual-Purpose Lab: The Wuhan lab functioned with both civilian and military research, making oversight almost impossible ([17:27]).

Notable Quote:

“It happened next to…the only SARS-like beta coronavirus research program in the world.”
— Matt Ridley ([06:25])

5. The Dangers and Ethics of Gain-of-Function Research

• Unsafe Experiments: American and Chinese teams transferred and “improved” coronavirus infectivity in labs with low biosafety standards ([19:23]). Ridley calls this a “gigantic scandal” ([19:54]).
• American Involvement: EcoHealth Alliance and NIH facilitated gain-of-function work in China, later covering up details (the "Defuse proposal") that directly match COVID-19's unique genetic features ([15:17] and [31:43]).
• Failure of Safeguards: Safety panels for this research are weaker than for animal experiments ([41:21], Ridley).

6. Media and Scientific Establishment’s Role

• Groupthink and Censorship: Major journals and scientific organizations refuse to debate or even discuss lab origin possibilities ([14:35]), while media become “willing purveyors of propaganda” ([45:32]).
• Chinese Financial Influence: Western journals have become financially reliant on submissions and publication fees from China, further biasing editorial decisions ([22:01], Ridley).

7. The Failure of Lockdowns & Authoritarian Responses

• Lockdowns Ineffective: Both agree that lockdowns were an abject policy failure and warn against repeating this approach for future pandemics ([24:52], Ridley/Sumption).
• West’s “China Worship”: Academia and media admired and praised China’s top-down control, ignoring liberty and civil rights ([22:49]-[23:42]).

Notable Quote:

“So there is a China worship problem here that doesn’t see the harsh side of that kind of regime and doesn’t think in terms of liberty and personal liberty.”
— Matt Ridley ([24:08])

8. Citizen Science and Independent Investigation

• Amateur Sleuths’ Impact: Drastic and a handful of online researchers (“The Seeker” et al.) uncovered critical evidence, outpacing intelligence agencies and formal scientific bodies ([44:03], Ridley).

Notable Quote:

“They were way better than the CIA, MI6, the Royal Society… the people who make society really work are ordinary people.”
— Matt Ridley ([44:28])

9. Ongoing Biosecurity Threats

• Lax Oversight: Both discuss alarming incidents, such as unauthorized Chinese-run labs identified in California and Las Vegas, highlighting vast vulnerabilities in U.S. biosecurity ([34:05]-[37:01]).
• Global Danger: Lab-based bioweapon development is now easier than ever—yet there’s no international monitoring regime ([20:25]).

10. The Need for Change

• International Safety Regimes: Ridley suggests aviation-style investigation and transparency for laboratory accidents ([21:35]).
• Reform in Scientific Funding and Policy: Urges definitive bans on truly dangerous gain-of-function research, and candid reflection within the scientific community ([32:12]).

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Selected Timestamps for Key Segments

• Lab Leak Theory & Early Intelligence – [00:20]–[03:16]
• Proximal Origins Paper & Scientific Cover-Up – [07:23]–[11:49]
• Declassified Files & Establishment Resistance – [13:44]–[14:39]
• China’s Secrecy & Dual-Use Nature of Wuhan Lab – [14:49]–[17:27]
• Biosecurity Lapses in the US – [34:05]–[37:01]
• Failures of Lockdown & Authoritarianism – [24:52]–[25:53]
• Impact of Citizen Investigators – [44:03]–[44:28]
• Critique of the Media’s Role – [45:32]–[46:10]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Scientific Integrity:
  “When I was in science… you do not publish papers that say the opposite of what you think. He didn’t change his mind, he changed his line.”
  — Matt Ridley ([10:15])

• On Policy Lessons:
  “Next time we have a highly infectious viral pandemic, we must not reach for locking down the population.”
  — Jonathan Sumption ([25:31])

• On Media’s Shift:
  “A lot of the media became willing purveyors of propaganda during the pandemic… that was a real shock to most of us.”
  — Jonathan Sumption ([45:32])

• On Accountability:
  “We can't move on. 20 million people are dead.”
  — Matt Ridley ([20:04])

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Conclusion

In this eye-opening conversation, Jana Keller and Matt Ridley argue that the evidence overwhelmingly suggests a lab-related origin of COVID-19, compounded by a global suppression of inquiry, scientific groupthink, and catastrophic policy missteps. They expose how political, financial, and ideological interests stifled genuine scientific debate—while citizen investigators did what experts would not. Both call on the West to reform biosecurity oversight, reject censorship, and hold all relevant actors accountable—for the sake of truth, trust in science, and humanity’s future safety.

Transcript

[Matt Ridley]

It's a gigantic scandal and most of

[Jonathan Sumption]

the world wants to say, well yeah, probably a lab leak, but move on.

[Matt Ridley]

I'm sorry, we can't move on. 20 million people are dead.

[Jana Keller]

Matt Ridley is the co author of the Search for The Origin of COVID 19. His book is one of the most

[Sponsor/Announcer]

comprehensive arguments for the lab leak theory.

[Matt Ridley]

Going and finding bat viruses in a cave in your nano Laos and bringing them 1,000 miles north to a big city with 11 million people in it, giving them an extra feature that makes them much more infectious in human cells and doing all that at a low biosafety level. Even if that hadn't led to a pandemic, now we know they were doing that, we should be absolutely horrified.

[Jana Keller]

Today he joins me to unpack the files that Tulsi Gabbard just declassified and the coordinated campaign to bury the truth about what happened in Wuhan.

[Jonathan Sumption]

It's quite extraordinary that China has been allowed to get away with revealing almost nothing about what went on in that laboratory.

[Matt Ridley]

And instead of saying that's a disgrace,

[Jonathan Sumption]

we can't cooperate with you scientifically until you clear this up. The world has said, oh fine, let's go on having scientific collaborations with you as much as you want.

[Jana Keller]

This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jana Keller. Matt Ridley, Such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Thank you, Jan, for having me on.

[Jana Keller]

In her last days as Director of National Intelligence, Tilsi Gabbard released a series of documents related to a cover up around the Wuhan lab around gain of function research. I know you've been following this closely. Explain to me the significance of these documents.

[Matt Ridley]

Well, they add confirmation to what we

[Jonathan Sumption]

already knew, that there was strong intelligence pointing the intelligence agencies towards a lab leak as the cause of the pandemic almost from the very start.

[Matt Ridley]

And then they also add what we suspected, that which is that there was then a strong pushback from somebody within the administration, the US Administration, to make sure those conclusions didn't get out to us, the public, and indeed were sort

[Jonathan Sumption]

of reversed on political rather than scientific grounds. Now I haven't mentioned any names in

[Matt Ridley]

there, but

[Jonathan Sumption]

the thing that has stood out for me is that the briefing of the CIA that caused it to change its mind was effectively done by Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, who was

[Matt Ridley]

very conflicted because he had been defending

[Jonathan Sumption]

gain of function research.

[Matt Ridley]

He had made sure that it got

[Jonathan Sumption]

allowed again after a moratorium in America

[Matt Ridley]

and he had made sure that funds went to supporting that work in China,

[Jonathan Sumption]

not just in the United States.

[Matt Ridley]

So this really does show that. When he told Senator Rand Paul in

[Jonathan Sumption]

testimony on oath that they were not funding gain of function research in China,

[Matt Ridley]

that just simply is not true.

[Jana Keller]

I find this whole situation

[Guest/Commentator]

almost bizarre. Right.

[Jana Keller]

Because very early in the pandemic, April of 2020, we created a documentary looking, I believe it was called Tracing the Origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus. It was still okay to call it the Wuhan Coronavirus at the time, which would have been a normal name for it. Right?

[Jonathan Sumption]

Yeah.

[Jana Keller]

And essentially the argument in the documentary was looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, probably a duck. Right. It wasn't conclusive, but there was already enough evidence to point to a much more likely lab scenario than the other kind of wet market scenario that was brandished about. And here we are, we're still kind of arguing the same issue. There's still people that think it was a wet market at this point.

[Matt Ridley]

Yes.

[Jonathan Sumption]

You were onto it before. I was in February and March of 2020, and even through April, I was still telling parliamentary colleagues here in the United Kingdom that it was not a lab leak. And we knew that because that possibility had been looked into by a number of American scientists who'd come to the firm conclusion that it could not possibly be a laboratory concept construct. They used the word ruled out. And I thought, well, that's good enough for me. These guys now look, look like they know what they're doing. And then In May of 2020, two things happened. One was a paper came to my attention which said this virus did not evolve very fast in the first few months and yet is very infectious. That implies that it's had prior exposure to human beings. It's not just suddenly appeared in the last few months, it's somewhere it's been in contact with human cells and that could have been in a lab. And that paper was written by three people, one of whom was Alina Chan, who ended up being my co author on this subject.

[Matt Ridley]

And the other thing that happened was that George Gao, the head of the

[Jonathan Sumption]

China cdc, who I've since met and interviewed, he said in May of 2020,

[Matt Ridley]

it didn't start in the market. We've looked in the market, we can't find an infected animal. And the pattern of infection of people,

[Jonathan Sumption]

people in the market doesn't point at an animal.

[Matt Ridley]

Animal vendors were not infected, etc, etc, now that's extraordinary. In the case of SARS, when the

[Jonathan Sumption]

outbreak happened in 2002, 3, it very quickly became apparent that There were infected animals and infected animal vendors.

[Matt Ridley]

Now there are 40,000 food markets of

[Jonathan Sumption]

that kind in China.

[Matt Ridley]

Plus, it happened next to one that happened also to be the site of the only SARS like beta coronavirus research

[Jonathan Sumption]

program in the world.

[Matt Ridley]

And it happened the year after they planned a very specific experiment in that lab on a virus that was 96% the same that was sitting in their own freezer in that lab, having been brought from a thousand miles away.

[Jonathan Sumption]

So your walk like a duck, quack like a duck thing is one way of putting it. The other cliche I reach for is

[Matt Ridley]

of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she

[Jonathan Sumption]

walks in a mine. The line from Casablanca, if you remember,

[Matt Ridley]

it is genuinely far less surprising that

[Jonathan Sumption]

Rick should run into can't remember what Ingrid Bergman's character was called in Casablanca than it was that this virus should turn up in this one place, at this one time when this kind of

[Matt Ridley]

research was going on and leave no trace in animals or people.

[Guest/Commentator]

Absolutely.

[Jana Keller]

Well, so another thing I know that we both, because from reading your work, I know we both kind of zeroed in on was this Proximal Origins paper in Nature Medicine because so for me, some of the viewers will know I have a background in evolutionary biology. I can kind of, you know, I have a better understanding than the average person of these things. This, of course, wasn't a paper, it was kind of a letter. But when I read this, right, basically it argued that there's no chance, there's zero chance that this could be from a lab. And I thought that was astonish, an astonishing claim because the. That it just simply was false. It was obviously false, Right. And it was the weirdest moment for me because this was a journal I would have given my left foot to be published in Nature at one point in my life, right? And it was. They were obvious, they were publishing something which was obviously false to me. And I checked with some friends from the past and my friends actually agreed with me. And one of them had even written to Nature Medicine saying, how could you publish this? This is obviously not true.

[Guest/Commentator]

Right.

[Jana Keller]

But this document was used extensively in this way to sort of justify.

[Guest/Commentator]

Yes, absolutely. It has to be from. It has to be a natural origin.

[Jana Keller]

And it changed. It changed my life.

[Matt Ridley]

Me too. Me too.

[Jonathan Sumption]

That was the paper I was referring to when I said that I started reassuring colleagues that this couldn't have come out. I was lied to, I was deceived. It is disgraceful what happened with that paper, because we now know what happened with that paper.

[Matt Ridley]

Well, first of all, in its own

[Jonathan Sumption]

terms, the paper is extremely unpersuasive. It has two main arguments for saying

[Matt Ridley]

that it can rule out an origin.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Those are the words used in a press release by Christian Andersen, the senior author.

[Matt Ridley]

Right. The first argument is it's not a perfect fit to our receptor.

[Jonathan Sumption]

If we had designed it, we'd have made it perfect.

[Jana Keller]

What?

[Matt Ridley]

It's a pretty good fit. Where do you get the idea that

[Jonathan Sumption]

we would always get it right first time or whatever? You know, that was a completely bizarre argument.

[Matt Ridley]

And the other argument was, yes, it's

[Jonathan Sumption]

got a furin cleavage site, which makes it way more infectious than any other sarbikovirus. And no other sarbikovirus has ever been found with one.

[Matt Ridley]

But don't worry, we'll find one with one in it, naturally. Well, six years on, we still haven't found one. So that was a non argument at

[Jonathan Sumption]

the time and is an even weaker argument now.

[Matt Ridley]

So on its own terms, the paper was extremely unpersuasive.

[Jonathan Sumption]

And we know it was unpersuasive because the senior author of that paper in

[Matt Ridley]

his private messages said, before, during and

[Jonathan Sumption]

after publishing the paper in his private messages, I still think a lab leak is frigging likely. That was the words he used.

[Matt Ridley]

What? I'm sorry, but when I was in

[Jonathan Sumption]

science, like you, I'm an evolutionary biologist

[Matt Ridley]

by background, you do not publish papers that say the opposite of what you think. So he claims he's changed his mind. He didn't change his mind, he changed his line. Now why did he change his line?

[Jonathan Sumption]

Well, we know a little bit about that too, because he had an exchange with one of his co authors. This is a man named Christian Andersen and the co author was Andrew Rambo.

[Matt Ridley]

They had an exchange in which Rambo said, I hate it when it gets

[Jonathan Sumption]

political, but sometimes you have to make compromises politically. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was like that. And Anderson replied, yep, I completely agree. It's a pity you have to get political, but we have to for political reasons.

[Matt Ridley]

They published a paper that says the

[Jonathan Sumption]

very opposite of what they thought in private.

[Matt Ridley]

The other thing that's wrong with that paper is that they got in.

[Jonathan Sumption]

It was basically commissioned by Jeremy Farrow of the Wellcome Trust and Anthony Foucher

[Matt Ridley]

of niad, who were consulted throughout, who helped change the wording and are not mentioned in the paper.

[Jonathan Sumption]

And we have now got emails saying,

[Matt Ridley]

please don't mention us in the paper again. That is a scientific disgrace. Yet, as you say, hundreds of us have written to the editor of Nature Medicine saying this paper must be retracted. It's wrong. It doesn't say what they thought. It's left out some authors, it's disguised its origins and it's misled the world. Right.

[Jana Keller]

And it's false. I mean it's falsehood. Yes.

[Matt Ridley]

We have not had the courtesy of a reply

[Jonathan Sumption]

from the editor of Nature Medicine.

[Matt Ridley]

This is extraordinary.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Jana Keller]

Do you think these new disclosures from the Director of National Intelligence in the US might change that?

[Matt Ridley]

Well, I'd like to think that this would help, but I don't think anything. In a sense we already had strong

[Jonathan Sumption]

enough evidence that there was a tremendously energetic cover up of the lab leak possibility in the early months of, of 2020 in America. Right. The American side of stuff we kind of knew already. It's nice to have confirmation and some more details.

[Matt Ridley]

What we need now because you said

[Jonathan Sumption]

that much of the world now realizes it's lab leak pretty well. Everybody I know of any intelligence who's looked into it at all concludes it's a lab leak now except Science magazine, Nature magazine, the Royal Society in London, who Won't even debate it. The National Academies in America.

[Matt Ridley]

So the scientific establishment won't budge, and that's a problem.

[Jonathan Sumption]

So what we need now is more intelligence about China. We can find out more about what went on in America and that's helpful,

[Matt Ridley]

but we need to know a what

[Jonathan Sumption]

experiments they did on what days, why they took their database offline, why three of them went to hospital, why the man who developed the first vaccine threw himself off the roof, and why they were suddenly in a panic about lab safety in the fall of 2019, et cetera, et cetera. We need to know, did they fund the proposal for putting a furian cleavage site into a sarbikovirus for the first time the year before the pandemic?

[Matt Ridley]

Did they fund that?

[Jonathan Sumption]

And if so, how?

[Jana Keller]

That's the diffuse proposal.

[Jonathan Sumption]

You're talking about the diffuse proposal, which is as close as you can get to a precise recipe for making SARS. COV2. They talk about a virus that's 20% different from SARS. That's this one. They talk about looking for furine cleavage sites and if they can't find one, putting one in. And then in this virus there appears a furine cleavage site which has the same sequence as furine cleavage sites that they've put into genes elsewhere in the, in the laboratory world.

[Matt Ridley]

So it's quite extraordinary that China has

[Jonathan Sumption]

been allowed to get away with revealing almost nothing about what went on in that laboratory. And instead of saying, that's a disgrace, we can't cooperate with you scientifically until you clear this up, the world has said, oh, fine, let's go on. Having scientific collaborations with you as much

[Matt Ridley]

as you want doesn't seem right to me.

[Jana Keller]

The part that I also find confusing is certainly the US Intelligence community, which clearly is involved in this. That's one of the things that is

[Guest/Commentator]

revealed, I think, in these DNI recently

[Jana Keller]

declassified documents, just that there is this kind of constant collaboration movement. The intelligence community clearly knew that this lab was a Chinese military lab. This is. Now why am I saying that? Because in China, there's a military civil fusion doctrine. If something has a military potential, heads will roll if that military potential isn't explored in a technology. And here we're talking about gain of function, research and viruses. Like this is, you know, this is, this is bioweapons research on the other side of the coin, so to speak. So absolutely, it's a military lab.

[Guest/Commentator]

Absolutely.

[Jana Keller]

The intelligence community had to know that. I'm looking at these emails, chummy conversations between the head of the Chinese CDC Right.

[Guest/Commentator]

And

[Jana Keller]

the Americans, I find that bizarre because it's. We're dealing with the Chinese Communist Party here. Right, Yep.

[Matt Ridley]

To be fair, it's, I think it's

[Jonathan Sumption]

best described as a dual purpose lab. There was obviously there was a military side to it and there was a civilian side.

[Guest/Commentator]

Yes, quite.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Where the boundary was between them, we don't know.

[Jana Keller]

It is that the military side is

[Guest/Commentator]

of importance, of enormous importance.

[Jana Keller]

Right, right.

[Matt Ridley]

And I don't myself think we have

[Jonathan Sumption]

evidence that they were trying to make a weapon out of Sarbikov viruses. I think it's more likely that they thought of themselves in military terms as doing something defensive. How do we get ready to react if someone uses a sarbikovirus as a weapon against us? But that's nearly always the excuse for bioweapons research, by the way, in the west and the East. And of course it's a sort of self fulfilling motion. The basic facts are that Ralph Barrick in North Carolina invented a technique for manipulating coronaviruses. And it was a brilliant technique and it meant that you could swap spike genes between coronaviruses. And the Chinese said, could we copy that technology? And basically Americans said yes, as long as you let us have access to something, viruses, some kind of deal like that was done. And they then got quite good at

[Matt Ridley]

that technique and they produced in that lab. This is not speculation, this is fact. They produced viruses that killed mice three times as efficiently and that increased the viral load in humanized mice 10,000 times. Now if one of those viruses, which by the way is being tested on a humanized mice with human ACE2 receptors, if one of those viruses got out, of course it would cause a pandemic. Now the experiments we've seen did not

[Jonathan Sumption]

happen to a virus close enough to SARS COV2 to do that. But we know that in the last year they switched to looking at ones that were closer.

[Matt Ridley]

They were doing this at Biosafety Level 2. I mean, that's a gloves and a mask. You don't even have to wear a

[Jonathan Sumption]

mask in a biosafety level 2 lab. You're not suited up.

[Matt Ridley]

There's no negative pressure and all that kind of thing. So. And the reason, you know, the EcoHealth

[Jonathan Sumption]

alliance, their American collaborator who was funneling US taxpayers money to the lab, said, yeah, yeah, we like doing this work

[Matt Ridley]

in Wuhan because it's more cost effective

[Jonathan Sumption]

because they work at a lower biosafety level.

[Matt Ridley]

Get that, get your head around that. You know, it's a gigantic scandal and

[Jonathan Sumption]

most of the world Wants to say, well, yeah, probably a lab leak, but move on.

[Matt Ridley]

I'm sorry, we can't move on. 20 million people are dead. Technology has just demonstrated to every bio, every terrorist on the planet that this is a really good way of bringing

[Jonathan Sumption]

the world economy to its knees.

[Matt Ridley]

And all you need do is set

[Jonathan Sumption]

up a biological laboratory and start working on viruses and hire a few experts.

[Matt Ridley]

And do you know what?

[Jonathan Sumption]

There's no treaty, there's no international monitoring. Nobody is saying who's ordering the reagents, who's working on particular kinds of viruses.

[Matt Ridley]

You know, this is not an academic

[Jonathan Sumption]

exercise where we want to know why people died. This is something where we need to make sure it doesn't happen again. And by the way, I spoke to a very senior scientist in the UK at one point who had been predicting that we'd have a nasty biological accident at some point around now. And I said, well done. You got that right. And he said, no, no, no, no, I, I, it's very important we never find out. It's very important we never find out.

[Jana Keller]

Explain that to me.

[Matt Ridley]

I said, why?

[Jonathan Sumption]

And he said, because it would disrupt relations with China. He said, you're probably right, it probably did come out of a lab, but it's better we don't find out.

[Matt Ridley]

I said, would you say that about a plane crash? You know, when a plane crashes, we now have a system in the world where the details of why that crash happened are shared. You can't, you know, if British Airways crashes, it doesn't say no.

[Jonathan Sumption]

United Airlines can't be privy to the information. We found out. We have a global agreement that says that every plane crash, the lessons from it are shared with everybody.

[Matt Ridley]

Why don't we have that in this case?

[Jana Keller]

Why don't you tell me why you think this senior scientist has this view, this astonishing view.

[Matt Ridley]

There is a huge dependence of Western

[Jonathan Sumption]

science on China now, collaboration with China, Chinese funding. Many of the science journals get most of their revenue from Chinese research, and not most, but a very, very large chunk of their revenue from Chinese scientists. China actually has an arrangement where it pays up front for publication fees in journals. It rewards scientists for publishing in high impact journals financially. And so many of them slice and dice their results to get as many publications out as possible. So Chinese scientists in that sense are very productive and that makes them very lucrative for Western scientific publishing. That's an issue that needs looking into.

[Matt Ridley]

But there is also a general admiration

[Jonathan Sumption]

of the Chinese regime.

[Matt Ridley]

In academia.

[Jonathan Sumption]

We've seen this explicitly in all sorts of ways, but academics are very Left wing in this, this country and most of the Western world.

[Matt Ridley]

Academics are, in my experience and have been for quite a long time, people who admire top down directive politics. They don't think in terms of bottom

[Jonathan Sumption]

up democracy, they think it's messy. They think, look, come on, whoever's in charge should say this needs to be done. You know, tell people to brush their teeth twice a day, tell people not to eat, drink milk or, you know,

[Matt Ridley]

the desire to tell the world how

[Jonathan Sumption]

to behave is quite strong in academia.

[Matt Ridley]

So when the pandemic came along, you had people from the academic world.

[Jonathan Sumption]

The editor of the Lancet is one of them. He published editorial praising Xi Jinping, thought

[Matt Ridley]

at one point, who said, now look at China, they're cracking down on this virus.

[Jonathan Sumption]

They're telling people not to leave their homes.

[Matt Ridley]

That's what we need. You know, the whole sort of authoritarianism was very appealing to a certain kind

[Jonathan Sumption]

of academic, public health official, government bureaucrat in the West.

[Matt Ridley]

So there is a China worship problem here that doesn't see the harsh side

[Jonathan Sumption]

of that kind of regime and doesn't think in terms of liberty and personal liberty.

[Matt Ridley]

And they didn't want blame for this

[Jonathan Sumption]

virus to go to this regime they rather admire.

[Jana Keller]

Except today, you know, when we look back five years now, right, we see the abject failure of these policies, whether

[Guest/Commentator]

in China or here.

[Jana Keller]

So do you think there will be a shift in this admiration given, you know, we've had the experiment now, what does this top down rule, how does this top down rule work in a pandemic scenario? It turns out it fails in every respect.

[Jonathan Sumption]

No, there's absolutely no doubt that lockdowns were a catastrophe. They didn't work and they caused all sorts of other huge problems. Nobody can look at the evidence now, the evidence from Sweden, the evidence from different American states, etcetera, and not come to that conclusion. This virus was too infectious and too infectious in asymptomatic people for lockdowns to work full stop. That's what we need to learn. They might have worked in the early months in Wuhan when it wasn't quite so infectious and when you had a ridiculously authoritarian regime. But no, next time we have a highly infectious viral pandemic, we must not reach for locking down the population.

[Matt Ridley]

And that, by the way, was the conclusion of the public health establishment before the pandemic, months before the pandemic came out, they had a big publication on this saying, whatever we do, we must resist the temptation from politicians to lock

[Jonathan Sumption]

down the entire population. It won't work if the virus is sufficiently infective, it won't work.

[Matt Ridley]

It's fine with one that's not very

[Jonathan Sumption]

infectious, you know, and you can lock down a limited number of people.

[Jana Keller]

Except there's this small issue of civil liberties and free societies we may want to consider.

[Guest/Commentator]

Right.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Good Lord, where did you get that idea?

[Matt Ridley]

But I personally think as an evolutionary

[Jonathan Sumption]

biologist, that there is a point that

[Matt Ridley]

gets missed here, and that is that viruses jump out of animals and into people quite often.

[Jonathan Sumption]

We've had AIDS in our lifetime. We've had Ebola happening just quite recently and others.

[Matt Ridley]

So the theory that you can catch

[Jonathan Sumption]

a new virus from an animal is not wrong. Of course you can.

[Matt Ridley]

But they very, very rarely prove to

[Jonathan Sumption]

be highly infectious from the start.

[Matt Ridley]

They have to stutter their way through

[Jonathan Sumption]

human to human chains of infection for

[Matt Ridley]

quite a long time before they get

[Jonathan Sumption]

really good at spreading and then they can take off.

[Matt Ridley]

They also tend to be pretty lethal.

[Jonathan Sumption]

So Ebola kills, you know, 30%. Hantavirus kills 30% of the people it infects.

[Matt Ridley]

So you're much more likely to see

[Jonathan Sumption]

what you're seeing with Ebola. Horrible outbreaks. But you can bring them under control

[Matt Ridley]

or Hanta, you know, on the.

[Jonathan Sumption]

On that cruise ship, you know, a few people die and a few more people have to be in quarantine for a while, and then it's over.

[Matt Ridley]

What we saw this time was completely different. A virus that was not very lethal. I mean, that all age mortality from

[Jonathan Sumption]

this virus was something like less than half a percent. That's sort of equivalent to flu, roughly. So it was not very lethal, but very infectious.

[Matt Ridley]

That, to me, tells you this wasn't a normal zoonosis. That, to me, tells you that it must have had training on human cell cells and human molecules in the months,

[Jonathan Sumption]

if not years leading up to the pandemic.

[Jana Keller]

And just. Just to kind of frame that out a little bit, because it was.

[Guest/Commentator]

It already appeared to be so familiar

[Jana Keller]

with human cells, it had that ability

[Guest/Commentator]

to enter human cells very smoothly, if you will.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Yes, it had the ability to use the ACE2 receptor to get into a human cell. And by the way, it was much better at that. It's not very good at getting into bats at all, though. It's originally a bat virus.

[Matt Ridley]

What does that tell you? It tells you it hasn't been in

[Jonathan Sumption]

bats for a while. It's been in another species. It's better in infecting humans than almost any other species. Monkeys, it's pretty good at, too. Cats, it's quite good at. But. But it was humans you know, this was.

[Matt Ridley]

This had turned into a human virus some somewhere in the months before. Now, given that we know this Lab was taking SARs, like beta coronaviruses, this very type of virus, and infecting them into human cells and humanized mice for

[Jonathan Sumption]

several years before the pandemic,

[Matt Ridley]

it's crazy to think that this wasn't how this happened. And therefore, we really need to rethink

[Jonathan Sumption]

our approach to pandemics.

[Matt Ridley]

The idea that surveillance of outbreaks so

[Jonathan Sumption]

that we know when they're happening and can react quickly is great.

[Matt Ridley]

But going and finding bat viruses in a cave in Yunnan or Laos and bringing them a thousand miles north to a big city with 11 million people in it, to the middle of a big city, putting them in a lab, sequencing them, doing manipulation experiments on them, giving them an extra feature that makes them much more infectious in human cells, and doing all that at a low biosafety level, even if that hadn't led to a pandemic, now we know they were doing that, we should be absolutely horrified. It does nothing to ready us for a pandemic.

[Jonathan Sumption]

The purpose of that experiment, as far as we can make out those series

[Matt Ridley]

of experiments was so that they could

[Jonathan Sumption]

say one day, look, aren't we clever? We've made a vaccine that works against any kind of coronavirus. Well, they were nowhere near that. And, you know, they were looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.

[Jana Keller]

I know that there's. The Chinese Communist Party has an.

[Guest/Commentator]

A policy. I've read the document of, you know, basically doing bioweapons work. They're interested in this topic. They're actively sort of working on these types of things and sort of, again, sort of. We. We know that. I think our academics community should know it. Certainly our intelligence community is very aware of that. So there's that whole realm, whether it's offensive or defense, as you pointed out earlier. I think it's unlikely, given the military involvement, that we could ever get any information from China, given how I know how they operate. Because, as you said earlier, that you would like to get an accounting, right? Which, of course, makes a ton of sense. What about these collaborations that were, you know, American institutions, you know, National Institutes of Health, NIH in the US what about these collaborations?

[Matt Ridley]

Well, the American government has debarred the

[Jonathan Sumption]

EcoHealth alliance from federal grants. Now, that's quite right. That was an organization that was extraordinarily misleading to us that, for a start, failed to tell us about the defuse proposal. I mean, they were the lead authors of this proposal in 2018 to put a furine cleavage site into a sarbikovirus for the first time. And they sat on that. And throughout the first two years of

[Matt Ridley]

the pandemic they didn't mention it until

[Jonathan Sumption]

someone in the Pentagon decided it might be a good idea to hand it to a journalist.

[Matt Ridley]

You know, I mean, that's a disgrace. How could you conceivably know of that

[Jonathan Sumption]

document and not think it relevant to tell the world? So there are good reasons why we never want to see the Ickhealth alliance or its leader Peter Daszak getting federal or any other kind of American support ever again.

[Matt Ridley]

And the NIH says it needs to

[Jonathan Sumption]

defund and cease dangerous gain of function research.

[Matt Ridley]

And when, when you say, oh no, no, you know, yeah, we should stop

[Jonathan Sumption]

dangerous gain of function research, all sorts of people put up their hands and

[Matt Ridley]

say, oh, that means we can't improve

[Jonathan Sumption]

wheat crops because that's gain of function.

[Matt Ridley]

No, we're talking 99.9% of biotech genetic

[Jonathan Sumption]

engineering work is safe and sensible. And it's not dangerous gain of function. Some of its gain of function, you're putting the function of insect resistance into a wheat plant or something, that's gain of function. Fine.

[Matt Ridley]

But dangerous gain of function where you know you're increasing the infectivity of a virus that can infect humans and you know, you're doing that in a lab, you shouldn't be doing that at all. It has no place. And scientists signed up to an agreement back in the 1970s that they would

[Jonathan Sumption]

never do things like that. Where's the self reflection in the scientific community?

[Matt Ridley]

You know, where's the. Because at the moment the Trump administration

[Jonathan Sumption]

says it's not going to fund that

[Matt Ridley]

kind of thing, but it hasn't come

[Jonathan Sumption]

out with a very clear policy.

[Matt Ridley]

And in two years time you could

[Jonathan Sumption]

have a new administration that says because we don't like everything Trump did, we're

[Matt Ridley]

going to reinstitute collaboration with China on dangerous gain and function experiments. There's nothing you or I could do to prevent that happening.

[Jana Keller]

Well, what I'm trying to do, for example, I've written this book on the organ industry in China and so forth. The take home message from this book is these people do things like this. It's a government operation. Right? Yeah. So you shouldn't, don't think of it as a normal collaborator. Right.

[Matt Ridley]

Well, can I give an example of that?

[Jonathan Sumption]

This is probably in your book, but you know about Readley, California, the lab there, do you.

[Guest/Commentator]

Oh no.

[Jana Keller]

Tell me more.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Well, a couple of years ago in this small town outside Fresno in Central Valley of California. An alert city official saw a hose pipe that had been put into a warehouse that was supposedly not in use, this warehouse. So he knocked on the door and went in, and he found a huge laboratory with Chinese nationals working in it in white coats. He contacted the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and said, I think you need to come and look at this. And they said, no, no, we're too busy. The local police went in and they found bags labeled with aids, Ebola, all sorts of other hepatitis, all sorts of other infectious agents, and. And a whole mass of scientific equipment going on.

[Matt Ridley]

But two years later, a house that he owned in Las Vegas was looked into just this year, and turned out the garage was full of more scientific equipment and samples.

[Jonathan Sumption]

He was trying to sell COVID testing kits as well.

[Matt Ridley]

Now, clearly this was breaking all sorts

[Jonathan Sumption]

of laws and extremely unsafe.

[Matt Ridley]

But he was well funded, this man, by Chinese investors. It's not that easy to see him

[Jonathan Sumption]

as a lone wolf who happened to be just a little bit off the reservation.

[Matt Ridley]

It's easier to think that there was some quite significant official support was helping him do this. Now, that's just one incident where an alert city official stumbled on something. We've had Chinese nationals arrested at airports

[Jonathan Sumption]

for stealing biological material from labs in Detroit. We had another case in Winnipeg that was similar, etc.

[Matt Ridley]

There's very little doubt that with at least a blind eye from the Chinese authority authorities, there is a lot of

[Jonathan Sumption]

espionage going on with respect to biological materials. And we're very aware of this when it comes to cyber security.

[Matt Ridley]

But in biosecurity, we're asleep at the

[Jonathan Sumption]

switch on this and.

[Jana Keller]

And mean espionage and possible, like, active experimentation in America.

[Guest/Commentator]

Right.

[Matt Ridley]

Yeah.

[Jana Keller]

I mean, that's what. That's. Yeah, that's the sense that I've gotten

[Guest/Commentator]

from those two location. From those two sites.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Yeah.

[Jana Keller]

That you just mentioned.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Yeah. You know, I genuinely live in fear that people tell me I should be worried about AI as an existential risk or whatever. I don't understand why people are not more alarmed about biosecurity now.

[Matt Ridley]

And I speak. I mean, I'm a passionate defender of biotechnology.

[Jonathan Sumption]

I think it's a wonderful technology. I think we should be using it in agriculture and medicine a lot. It can help us enormously with human flourishing. And I think in Europe we were crazy to reject genetically modified crops. We would have been environmentally as well as economically better off if we'd done so. So, you know, I'm not coming at this as someone who's Campaigned against biotechnology.

[Matt Ridley]

Quite the reverse. I think that science, science says if

[Jonathan Sumption]

we find out about a lab leak, it'll be bad for the reputation of science.

[Matt Ridley]

Well, it wouldn't have been if science had done its own research and said,

[Jonathan Sumption]

look, these were bad apples.

[Matt Ridley]

But now, I'm sorry, those apples have infected the whole barrel. Where's the funding for an investigation of

[Jonathan Sumption]

the origin of COVID Where are the grants to academics saying, please, could you find out everything you possibly can and please, can you collaborate with Chinese about this?

[Matt Ridley]

It just doesn't exist. The scientific community want to tiptoe away

[Jonathan Sumption]

from this, hoping that nobody will ever know and that they can say it wasn't proven, we don't know, and they think that's better for the reputation of science.

[Matt Ridley]

I think that's disastrous for the reputation of science. I love science. I think it's humanity's greatest achievement, bar none.

[Jonathan Sumption]

And I think it's really dropped the ball on this one.

[Jana Keller]

I share your concern about biosecurity.

[Guest/Commentator]

Again, given what I know the Chinese Communist Party is involved in. Right. And we got a hint of some

[Jana Keller]

of that through, through Covid. But at the same time, we also

[Guest/Commentator]

saw how biosecurity was used as a way to, you know, lock, I don't know, lock down society, introduce. Introduce all sorts of policy that was, you know, erroneous would be the nicest way of putting it, in a way. Right. In some cases arbitrary. Right. And so forth. On the one hand, obviously, this biosecurity is a huge issue.

[Jana Keller]

People can concoct all sorts of crazy

[Guest/Commentator]

things in a little lab, especially with, you know, tacit agreement of the Chinese regime and so forth. On the other hand, the same idea is used as an excuse to implement policy, which is, you know, has been highly inappropriate. And I'm not, I'm not convinced we've learned that lesson at this point.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Now, you're right there that we crack down too hard on some things and we're not cracking down hard enough on others. I mean, I would like to see the world give quite a tough time to biology laboratories that work on viruses in terms of monitoring what they're up to. I do not want to see ordinary human beings told, there is now a general rule in place that the moment we snap our fingers, we're going to impose curfews and we're going to close schools and we're going to stop you leaving your home and all that kind of thing. So we were far too tough in the pandemic on ordinary people, and we

[Matt Ridley]

were not Nearly tough enough on labs.

[Jonathan Sumption]

That's the answer.

[Matt Ridley]

Now look, I'm a libertarian.

[Jonathan Sumption]

I think there are too many rules and regulations getting in the way of innovation in the world.

[Matt Ridley]

But when I listen to some of the virologists who are complaining about people like me, I'm not the same that libertarian. They say things like, it's a disgrace that the government tells us what we can and can't do in our laboratories. Well, that's about the one place where I quite would want a little bit of government

[Jonathan Sumption]

approval.

[Matt Ridley]

And we have ethics panels saying, you

[Jonathan Sumption]

can't do that experiment. It's not ethical.

[Matt Ridley]

We do not have safety panels in universities doing that. Literally, it's easier to get safety approval for an experiment on a virus than

[Jonathan Sumption]

it is to get ethical approval for an experiment on an animal.

[Matt Ridley]

Say that's the wrong way around.

[Jana Keller]

You know, another thing that just comes

[Guest/Commentator]

to mind quickly is that the, the way the whole Covid scenario played out, it feels to me like we haven't had an accounting of how poorly that went for us as a society. And this was implemented in, I don't know, over 100 countries, I think.

[Matt Ridley]

Well, let me give you an example of exactly that.

[Jonathan Sumption]

We have had a Covid inquiry in this country led by a judge and staffed by ignorant barrister lawyers. They have generally been very hard pushing and the judge who leads the inquiry has been concluding that the problem is we didn't lock down hard enough. And soon enough, right when the evidence totally points the other way. So this is just the bureaucracy looking after its own interests and defending its own decisions.

[Matt Ridley]

But when one politician, Michael Gove, was

[Jonathan Sumption]

being grilled by this committee, he said, by the way, we need to talk about the origin of the virus because it probably was a lab leak. That should have altered our conversation right at the start, because if it was a lab leak, it was more infectious. Lockdowns were never going to work.

[Matt Ridley]

He was shut down. He was said, that's outside the scope of this inquiry. So the lack of interest in the

[Jonathan Sumption]

biosafety error that led to the pandemic is a problem.

[Matt Ridley]

The excessive interest in defending the biosecurity

[Jonathan Sumption]

errors that to led led to the lockdowns is an equal problem.

[Matt Ridley]

I said that there's been no funding,

[Jonathan Sumption]

no proper research into the origin of the virus.

[Matt Ridley]

But what did happen, rather remarkably during

[Jonathan Sumption]

this period, and it is an extraordinary

[Matt Ridley]

story, and one that deserves to be much better known, is that some amateur sleuths put their heads together and did incredible things that illuminated vital information about

[Jonathan Sumption]

what was going on. In Wuhan that the. The official espionage people and the official academic researchers hadn't bothered to tell us. Okay.

[Jana Keller]

I mean, you're talking about drastic and

[Jonathan Sumption]

other groups drastic and particularly a wonderful Indian guy called the Seeker. Gene Ray is his real name. Francisco Diassis in Spain, Gilles de Minerv in New Zealand.

[Matt Ridley]

These are ordinary people working in their spare time on their own dime who did things like find crucial theses in China, work out exactly which bat cave the Chinese scientists have been visiting on which dates and collecting which viruses in them. It's an amazing story that of citizen science. And they were way better than the

[Jonathan Sumption]

CIA, MI6, the Royal Society, the national Academies of Science. They found out far more than these guys.

[Matt Ridley]

And that journalists do not recognize that enough.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Just hats off to the amateurs.

[Matt Ridley]

It's a reminder that society is not

[Jonathan Sumption]

run by brilliant experts who know how to tell us what to do.

[Matt Ridley]

The people who make society really work are ordinary people.

[Jana Keller]

Let's finish off on this. On this. This is something that I find incredibly disturbing.

[Guest/Commentator]

In a way.

[Jana Keller]

It's been good for us that we were asking normal questions that a great many media were deeply uninterested in, in numerous areas. Whether that was, you know, this Steele

[Guest/Commentator]

dossier back in the day, or whether

[Jana Keller]

it was Covid origins or later, you know, Covid response. What do you make of what happened

[Guest/Commentator]

to so many of our trusted media

[Jana Keller]

when they're sort of absent on these, you know, some of the most important issues of our day?

[Jonathan Sumption]

A lot of the media became willing purveyors of propaganda during the pandemic. That was a real shock to most of us. I'm a journalist by background, and I was brought up or educated to regard journalists as people who challenged authority rather than pervade its message. But I'm afraid in the pandemic pretty well, every mainstream media decided it was their job to tell us to do as the government told us to do. Sorry, that's not your job, you know, your job was to challenge stuff. So the media got very supine in this period.

[Jana Keller]

Well, a final thought as we finish.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Thank you for talking to me about the lab leak. I'm not going to give up on this subject, and I'm sure you're not either. It took us 12 years to work out that a lab leak was responsible for an anthrax epidemic in the Soviet Union. They denied it for 12 years. We then found it was true. We've got another six years to go before we get to that. That thing. I'm pretty sure that at some point we will get more information. It's a very, very important essay episode in human history, and I think we mustn't let it drop.

[Jana Keller]

Well, Matt Ridley, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.

[Jonathan Sumption]

Thank you so much.

[Jana Keller]

Thank you all for joining Matt Ridley and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan.