← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
The Genetic Proof COVID Was Lab-Made | Dr. Steven Quay
00:59:56
Victor Davis Hanson interviews Dr. Steven Quay, one of America’s top scientists and inventors, on his explosive new book “The Code as Witness: How the Covid Genome Reveals its Lab Origins and How to Prevent Future Outbreaks.”
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- [00:00]
A
You were one of the earliest to suggest that this was a man made virus inside this compound.
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B
By March 14, 2020 we had 100,000 patient study out of China that showed nobody under 40 was dying who didn't have a comorbidity. And yet we did severe lockdowns and school closures.
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A
Why did they do it? Do you think it was a bioweapon?
- [00:20]
B
The entrance requirements for the club is you have to believe that you can make viruses from nature more dangerous by changing their properties. And then you will swoop in and make therapeutics and vaccines against these things. With the hypothesis that nature will eventually get to these highly deadly viruses. And that you're doing this in the service of mankind.
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A
That doesn't happen too often, does it?
- [00:43]
B
That hypothesis is wrong.
- [00:56]
A
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for Victor Davis Hansen. In His Own Words. This is one of our exclusive interviews that I do sometimes without Jack or Sammy. And we're going to have a returning guest, I think you from the response we got on prior occasions, you'll be excited. And he has a new book out from Encounter Books, the Code as Witness. The subtitle is how the COVID Genome Real Reveals Its Lab Origins and How to Prevent Future Breaks. And we have with us Dr. Stephen Carl Quay. And as you remember last time, he's got a very distinguished record. He has a PhD, MD, he's been affiliated with MIT, University of Michigan, Stanford University as a faculty member. And he's got enormous amounts of patents, hundreds of patents. He's run two or three biologists, companies. And he has testified, you may remember his testimony to Congress was kind of earth shattering because he just workmanlike, systematically went through and showed you that the so called Pangolin bat thesis was just impossible given the biological trail that the virus left. So it's good to see you again, Stephen.
- [02:22]
B
It's good to be here.
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A
Before we start on your book, the background is almost every six months we get a viral panic. It was the hantovirus, the rat virus. Then we were told it was going to spread. Maybe that was because Gene Hackman and his wife or his wife had it. And then it was Ebola two weeks ago. And what was your take on these esoteric viruses that pop out of nowhere for a while? We all know they're around all the time, but. But why do people think they're going to break out? And why don't they break out into the general population?
- [03:01]
B
I mean, I think there's a predicate question to that whole, to the whole thesis you've brought up is why does the media spend so much time on these kinds of events where certainly for the person or the family of someone who's infected, these are super serious, but their chances of spreading are infinitesimally small. And we see so much media attention to them, which is then immediately followed by requests for additional money by the WHO or as a pretext to criticize, you know, President Trump's administration or what's going on at the cdc. So I think we need to step back and see, hey, there's a pattern here. These things do come from nature. From time to time. They're really bad again for the people that have them with being 25 to 70% lethal for those people. But they are not designed, because they're designed by nature. They don't have the capability of causing a pandemic like a designed virus does.
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A
In other words, they're not as nearly as infectious as man made Covid.
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B
Victor we have the tools now to exceed nature's capabilities in terms of infectious disease importance and outbreaks and that sort of thing. And I think it's an important point that everyone just suddenly realizes. I mean, the two previous coronavirus outbreaks were bad. They were 9% lethal or 30% lethal, but they stopped at 10,000 people. They burned out in about six months. And only a virus that transmits asymptomatically, that is tuned for humans from the get go, can do what SARS cov2 Covid did.
- [04:46]
A
The more you talk to people, because Covid has not been in the news, is it, I haven't followed the mutations, is it acting in the way that other viruses do, that the further they devolve in these mutations, the less infectious? Or is it going to pop up at its original lethality? Or are we, the hosts, more capable of handling our bodies after repeated infections and things?
- [05:12]
B
Well, there is a large amount of what's called herd immunity at this point in time. Yes. It's now become what's called endemic, which is like the rhino virus or the influenza that comes every season. And these viruses have to settle on the top of a needle, sort of being effective enough to be transmitted from person to person, but not so infective that they kill the first host, because a dead host for them is a dead end for them as well.
- [05:41]
A
Yeah, I had it four times and two of the times I had it for four months and then six months and I think I had a mastocytosis immune problem. But it was the most bizarre thing in the world. The symptoms, it just was like a never Ending flu. And then I discovered there was a whole group of people worldwide that just. They get better and then they relapse and then they get. And the next thing I knew I had problems breathing and I went for a regular checkup and they gave me and they found this big ground glass mass in my lung and they thought the first thing they said was have you had a prior infection because this pneumonia or valley fever? And I said oh, I only had long Covid. And they got kind of quiet about that. They didn't want to talk about it. I don't know if that was controversial or not. But before we go to the book, one last question. Is the status of the vaccine and the boosters settled now that in a cost of benefit analysis, at least for people under 18, it was a bad mistake to mandate that. Is that a settled science or what's the status of the boosters now? You don't hear of anybody getting them anymore very much.
- [07:00]
B
Yeah, I mean I think they are probably available, but you're exactly right. I mean it was settled maybe a couple years ago that certainly under 18 and even under 40, if you don't have comorbidities, it's not a lethal virus. If you don't have comorbidities or you're
- [07:20]
A
quite old, is there a scientific consensus? I saw that Stanford six months ago issued a report coming out of Stanford Med Research Lab that it did have problems that the boosters and the original vaccines did impact negatively cardiovascular problems, that they said that. But is there any consensus looking back that that the damage from the virus was real and it was. We've underestimated or did we overestimate it and panic and the shots were helpful and more helpful than not?
- [07:58]
B
Well, I think there was a fundamental overestimate of the lethality because the first example was the two previous coronaviruses, MERS in the Middle east and SARS one were 9 and 30% respectively lethal. So I think a fair starting point would be geish who are going to have another super lethal event. Now by March 14th we had 100,000 patients study out of China that showed exactly what it ended up being. You know, our knowledge now six years later, which is nobody under 20 was dying, nobody under 40 was dying who didn't have a comorbidity. If you had two or three or four comorbidities, it might be 10 or 15% lethal. So we knew that in March and yet we went ahead and did severe lockdowns and school closures and the like. So.
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A
And that was when we that was in March of 2020.
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B
Yes, exactly. Yeah.
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A
And that's when we, and we were. Mass vaccinations started in late 2020 and early 2021.
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B
Yeah, mainly the first quarter of 2021.
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A
Yeah, yeah, I remember that. I remember that Trump had, when he was running for re election, he had said right before he had he was going to have 17 million people vaccinated. I think he did before the year was out. And then Joe Biden came in and said that no one had been vaccinated. There was a big fight about that. But looking back, it's funny about Operation Warp Speed. The Republicans were very proud of it and now there's a large number of dissidents who think that it's hard to know. Do you think that the vaccine saved lives in its first incarnation of people who were vulnerable?
- [09:46]
B
Yeah, I think it did. I think it did. And I think also, you know, we can't use, you know, hindsight is 2020 and it really is inappropriate to challenge that. It was the most remarkable drug development program I've ever seen in 40 years to go from a sequence of a virus to a vaccine that you can give in 10 or 11 months. So, yes, we've learned a lot about the vaccine since then and some of its inherent mechanisms may be problematic for future pan vaccines using that MRNA technology. But I think it's really cheap shots to be criticizing it. In retrospect, given where we were.
- [10:30]
A
What do you think the future of these. Mr. You hear people saying they're not vaccining, they're genetic engineering, or you can't limit the amount of spike protein or where it's going to go. What do you think the future of. Is that science going to be refined so it's going to be a more common type of vaccine, or is it just inherently dangerous? The idea that you won't see it very often anymore.
- [10:53]
B
Let me predict its future if I can. If I get it wrong, you get me back and chastise me. I believe that this technology will pivot to cancer vaccines because it's highly tunable. You can make it, it's a precision medicine tool. And so people with cancers, pancreatic cancer, where you have a nine or ten month life expectancy, I believe in some of these severe cancers you'll see these mRNA's doing really wonderful things. I do not think they have a place for mass vaccination. Childhood vaccinations, the inherent difficulties in the, you know, the technical difficulties they have about making inappropriate proteins going around the body to, you know, the wrong places, making their antigen for too long. I mean, a vaccine's supposed to give you an antigen for four or five or six days and then go away and let your immune system respond. So having a vaccine that's still producing antigens at nine or 10 months, the body will say, gosh, I guess that must be my protein, because I've been seeing this for nine months. And you actually see that there's something called igg, which is a tolerance antibody. It's the one that you try to get with people when people have allergies. You try to induce IgG4. We now know that these MRNA vaccines induce IgG4. And so in some ways they actually make it easier to get an infection after three or four or five vaccinations. That's pretty well documented.
- [12:20]
A
One of the strange things was that we even heard it from scientists at this age old, going back to the Greeks idea of natural immunity or herd immunity. And I know J. Bhattacharya at the nih, I was on the campus when he was essentially saying, wait, everybody, this is an ancient concept, herd immunity. And even though this is a strange new virus, it will share enough components with traditional viruses that at some point people will develop them. And he was severely. It was almost as if the official Fauci scientific community had decided that they were gonna question herd immunity. Or do you remember that period of that hysteria?
- [13:04]
B
I do, Victor. And again, there were five or six of these fundamental scientific, sort of almost truths, if you can call about that in biology. I mean, biology is not physics. Physics has real truths, but one of them is the fact that if you've had an infection, you don't need to be vaccinated against it, because your innate immunity reaction to a true virus, where you have all of the proteins, all of the things, is stronger than vaccination, which is just one of 10 proteins inside SARS CoV2. So I mean, with all due respect to, you know, Dr. Fauci, he is on TV, you know, over the last few decades saying, hey, if you've had the influenza, you don't need to get the influenza vaccine. It's for people who haven't had it this year. I mean, it's very standard science. And to be criticizing that, it's just wrong.
- [13:59]
A
Yeah, yeah, let's go to the book. Your first chapter is the pandemic is born. And you talk about the Batwoman and the alternate theories. Why were you so skeptical in the beginning about the wet market or pangolins or the bat cave and Batwoman and kind of the. I don't know at what point the People's Liberation army bureaucracy took over the lab or controlled it or they always. But what raised your antenna pretty early because you were one of the earliest to suggest that this was a man made virus inside this compound and not of a virus in nature that infected people or mutated.
- [14:43]
B
Yeah, well, no, Victor to be. And honesty is really important. So until May. In May of 2020, I wrote a book on how to avoid what to do if you don't vaccine and how to avoid getting Covid. Every time there was a spike in the new variant, the book sales went up. But in that book, in the front part of the book, I talk about how we need to respect the traditional wet markets in Asia because I was living in Taiwan at the time. These are century old markets of people. They're social events, they're baked into the culture. And so Fauci was saying we just need to burn them and shut them all down and that sort of thing. And I was being respectful to that. But by the last chapter in the book on how to prevent Covid saying we need to stop gain of function research, because between May and about July, I started looking at the virus itself. I stopped listening to the pundits and the people talking and just looked at the virus and it had so many features that were atypical for anything that had ever been seen in nature. It flipped me.
- [15:46]
A
Has the scientific community had a case where an animal was infected with the COVID virus and jumped into humans? Do we know of any?
- [16:00]
B
Yeah, so. Well, yes, the examples are that in mink farms in Belgium and in France and in Denmark you can see genetically. Again, just a quick tip for your readers here. So the virus makes a mistake every two weeks. It changes a letter every two weeks. It's called a molecular clock and it allows you to look into a population of viruses and put them in order from this one was earliest to this one, to this one, to this one. So you can actually see the transmission in the gene itself. So what you saw in these mink farms, you know, five, six thousand animals, you'd see transmission from humans into the minks. You would spend some time in the minks and then you'd see it jump back into the human. So that's the extent of animal to human. And then in America there were a few deer hunters who got it from deer because again, went into their population. Yes, it likes the American deer very much as a host.
- [17:01]
A
I didn't know that. We're talking to Dr. Stephen Quay on his new book about the COVID virus. But More Than the Code as Witness. And we'll be right back in a minute after we talk to some people who are helping us out, our sponsors.
- [17:17]
C
Hey, I'm Bradley Devlin and just like you, I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis Hansen. Whether it's his long form podcast, Victor Davis Hansen in his own Words or his short form content for the Daily Signal. Victor Davis Hansen in a few Words might always leave an episode. Learning something new.
- [17:33]
A
I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands War.
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C
And in the age of clickbait and rage bait, that's a really good feeling. Right. The media.
- [17:41]
B
Thank you. You can leave now.
- [17:43]
C
And if you agree, you might like my show, the Daily Signals long form interview podcast called the Signal. Sit down. Every week we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington D.C. as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policymaking process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever, especially with the Trump administration back in office, because in 2024, you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government and together we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, we're there too. And drop me a follow on X radleydevlin to stay updated with what's happening on the Signal. Sit down.
- [18:25]
A
And we're back with Dr. Stephen Kuei. What do you think was the motivation? You talk about it, but looking back, what was the motivation in the Wuhan lab? Why were they. There's all these theories. Were they. I mean, the French helped build the lab and we gave instrument. One thing that I noticed and learned from your previous work, some of it and then things that have come out afterwards, that it wasn't just that Peter Dasak gave 650,000 on a grant, but that they put their stamp, their imprimatur on that and that greenlighted people who were sharing instrumentation or knowledge that helped it in a way that was not necessarily transparent. But that being said, what do you think? Why did they do it? Do you think it was a bioweapon? Or do you think they were just serving Western interests that had found it too dangerous to do here and they were getting monies or help and then they were supposedly going to share the knowledge or what was the purpose of doing something? So in retrospect, stupid.
- [19:41]
B
Yeah. So you know I make a case at one point in some of the writing I did. I'm not sure this actually made it into the book, but there's a network of between 14 and 20 laboratories that do this kind of work. 99% of scientists don't do this kind of work. So it is a very specialized club, if you can call it that. And the entrance requirements for the club is you have to believe that you can. That you can go in the laboratory and you can make viruses from nature more dangerous by changing their properties. And then you will swoop in, godlike, and make therapeutics and vaccines against these things with the hypothesis that these will come from nature, that nature will eventually get to these highly deadly viruses, and that you're doing this in the service of mankind.
- [20:38]
A
That doesn't happen too often, does it?
- [20:40]
B
That hypothesis is wrong.
- [20:41]
A
It is. It is completely wrong.
- [20:45]
B
Yeah, it's completely wrong.
- [20:47]
A
Why do they continue it, you think?
- [20:49]
B
Well, they continue it to this day in some respects. I mean, there's a lot more attention on this gain of function, gain of opportunity research that is making it more difficult to do and more challenging to do. For example, the leading Engineer of Coronaviruses, Dr. Ralph Baric, has, I believe, retired from the University of North Carolina, and his, you know, his lab has sort of been shut down. I'm not sure if there's a behind the scenes story there. There may be. I don't have it. But in any case, you know, at the time, they continued to believe that they were doing this in the service of mankind. And I think they were wrong. I think they were always wrong. To be fair, you know, I went into the literature, I looked at 200 gain of function papers in this field and then tried to see, well, what did that contribute to in the way of human health, vaccines, therapeutics? I didn't see anything that was compelling today.
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A
If you Are there people today who submit grants to the NIH or the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease with a proposal to do gain of function research on viruses. Gain and function?
- [22:01]
B
Yeah, I believe there are. So we're in kind of a limbo situation in the government. So President Trump, in my opinion, correctly signed an executive order to ban and limit this kind of research. That dropped the process into the Office of Technology and Science Policy, which is a White House office that takes presidential directives and then does the nuts and bolts for every agency in the government, from the Department of War to the NIH to the CDC and the like. So their work has to be very comprehensive and has to Meet all the constituencies and they haven't finished their work. It is overdue. People are a little impatient with them. But it's a complex process to get something that's DOW and NIH at the same time. But until that's finalized, we won't have full government understanding of the process here. But it's my understanding that Director Bhattachary and the NIH are looking very carefully at these grants and perhaps not funding them is what I'm hearing from the scuttlebutt.
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A
In your second part, you talk about the code speaks, and it's almost as if they have fingerprints or they have a unique ability. And you. You can almost find out where they were made and when they were made. And that knowledge had predated the emergence of COVID had it not?
- [23:37]
B
Well, actually, with colleagues in New Zealand and Puerto Rico and Australia, we actually invented some forensic virology tools that now can be used to trace which lab they came from and to look inside laboratories and actually see the other work that doing there. So the work that we did together as a group over the last six years has actually enhanced and again, I'm repeating myself. Created tools that you can sort of do forensic virology work and that has, you know, we did it directly for the one Institute of Virology, for the University of North Carolina and for SARS COV2, and that now can be used on a more comprehensive level going forward.
- [24:24]
A
I see. What do you think? What is the status right now of the Wuhan Lab? It's still open. It's functioning. Under whose auspices and what kind of work? If anyone knows what kind of work? What do you think they're doing there?
- [24:40]
B
Yeah. So first. Well, yeah, let me just answer that question. So Dr. Shi Gen Li Xi, who was responsible for the lab at the WIV and for the research which we believe led to SARS CoV2, has left the WIV. She's now at another institute. It's unclear what kind of research she's doing. And she was attending international meetings two, three times a year for her entire career. And she's not left China now. She does international meetings only by zoom. I believe she may not be able to leave China at this point in time. So one of the challenges that I think we need to realize is that in 2020, she was beginning to talk about she and also a man at the Duke Singapore University called Wang. So she's the Bat Woman, he's the Bat Man. They had. And they had transitioned to a virus called the nipah virus, which does not occur in China. It's more equatorial, so it's in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, but it's 70% lethal. And they were going whole hog on doing research in that. Taking it apart in the laboratory, doing reverse genetics, which is extremely dangerous. That's not allowed in the United States, by the way. And also setting up joint venture laboratories in both Pakistan and Bangladesh with kind of a, if you looked at a map, it's a pincer almost military exercise with India in the middle. So it's unclear what those were, but it was a very, you know, 14 laboratories were set up, joint ventures between China and those countries. So that is an activity that I think is dangerous and should be watched very, very carefully.
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A
When you talk about preventing the next virus, are you. To sum up, you expect sooner or later there's going to be something like Covid. If they continue this type of research, are we as prepared as are we better prepared than we were, obviously, in 2019? Are the odds that something even more sophisticated and lethal will occur that we. That we can't catch up? We're not going to be able to do much about it?
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B
I think there's, you know, I have four or five, you know, key steps we could do that I talk about in the book that I think could help us a great deal. I mean, one of them is. One of them is simply frontier border surveillance with wastewater surveillance, airplanes that come into the United States, boats, people crossing borders and that sort of thing, where if you do wastewater surveillance and you actually bring some AI tools to that, you can very quickly see viruses that have come into the country. We know from SARS COV2 experience. Exactly. For example, that you can see two to six weeks ahead of time in wastewater what's going to show up in the emergency rooms. So we spend about 30 billion on homeland security and human crossing at borders. I think we should stand up a surveillance for pathogens crossing the border. And I did an op ed in Washington Post today where I talked about how these pathogens get a vapor visa, free transit while we're spending time with human assets. I think that we should stop both gain of function experiments and gain of opportunity, where we go into a cave that a human hasn't been in in decades, and we bring viruses back to a laboratory, we amplify them, we grow them in cells. They're in a city with 11 million people like Wuhan or 4 or 5 million people like New York. And then if a lab accident happens, bingo, you're in pandemic land. So some of these common sense things need to be done.
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A
I noticed there was discussions and I don't know if it was ever verified, but when Trump put his travel ban, he was not only criticized for doing that, but there had been information that at some critical point China had stopped domestic flights out of Wuhan, but they were still allowing direct flights into Rome, Paris, I think lax, SFO and New York. In other words, that was one of the facts. If it were true, that kind of fed the conspiracy idea, or was there any truth to that, or was it just laxity or were some of the conspiracies having a grain of truth that they thought, well, it's out now, so it might as well get out everywhere. What do you think? Explain that if it was true.
- [29:31]
B
Yeah. So the thing that got me started working with Secretary Pompeo and the Trump administration, Trump first administration, had to do with what I called the COVID conduit, which was line two of Wuhan, which went to the airport. And as you say, there were 14 international flights around the world into Europe, into the Middle east and into America that were going on on a daily basis. We know that 600,000 passengers left the Wuhan airport into those international destinations after the point in time when province transportation, you know, getting in and out of Hubei province, where Wuhan exists, had been stopped. So while China had stopped cross border province transportation transit, they had allowed 600,000 people to leave the country or to transport out of the country. And that definitely carried the infection. You can see it in Milan. You know, there were textile, there was, I remember that Milan design clothes and Wuhan manufacturing clothes. There was this Wuhan Milan conduit and the whole Italian. There was a lot of damage there because they also have multi generational families
- [30:58]
C
living in the house.
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A
I remember that older people in those villages got wiped out. And that was a legitimate conclusion to draw that they knew that and that they knew what they were doing. And the hypothesis or the hypothetical is legitimate too, that it's a good. There is a strain of thought that can't really be conditioned, contradicted. They thought we're going to take a lot of scrutiny here in China, but we're still going to let it go and it's going to spread. But if we're going to go down, everybody's going to go down. That was kind of the.
- [31:32]
B
Well, I, you know, I'm very, I'm
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A
just putting it in very brutal tune,
- [31:35]
B
very careful not to get into other people's minds. But I can say that they absolutely had a Different policy for their own people in Hubei, where they stopped transit, which is a good thing, and opened the gates at the Wuhan International Airport.
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A
Where do you think right now in the world we should be especially focused on where there's types of viral research that may have a propensity to lead to bioweaponry or just because of incompetence, laxity. Are there certain places in the world that are more apt to be the loci of a future of viral.
- [32:14]
B
Yeah, let me answer that in two ways. So I talked before about a network of scientists that do this kind of work. There's between 14 and 20 laboratories that, you know, exchange information, exchange samples, exchange people training back and forth, you know, and they're in the United States, they're in China, they're in Europe, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, maybe Iran. And so there's that. That aspect of it, which I think is one thing that you can look at. It's very visible. The other consequence, which I'm not very happy about, is that there's been a proliferation of what are called BSL 3 and 4 laboratories in many countries and actually in many places that are politically unstable because of what happened with COVID and all the interests here, virologists, scientists were able to get people to give them a lot of money to do this kind of research with the threats of, you know, well, I'll help you with the next pandemic as kind of their, you know, their grant justification. And so the more of these labs we have and the more people doing this, the more likely there is to be a lab accident. SARS 1, you know, the 9% lethal virus escaped a BLSA 4 lab in Taiwan, killed a few people. So there is no lab safety standard that can fully contain us. And it becomes sort of a statistical thing. The more events you happen, the more people doing it, the more labs doing it, the more likely there is to be an escape. Again, I haven't finalized this science. I have around the fact that I don't think a natural virus can do what SARS CoV2 did. My working hypothesis is that that's probably the case, but that that clearly means that if people are working on enhancing these, either their infectivity or their transmissibility, or maybe making them asymptomatic or maybe making them hard to make antibodies against, because that was engineered into SARS CoV2. This protein called orphate, is something that the WIV had been manipulating at great extent for five years. It's a thing that makes it asymptomatic at the beginning, which has never happened for a new respiratory virus. It makes it very hard to make antibodies against it's HIV like in that context, which means you could get this thing over and over again. And of course, you know, that's what we're seeing.
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A
What degree do you think the world's militaries, either Western and non Western, are engaged on it either for defensive purposes or for deterrence or for offensive purposes? Do we have any idea which militaries are more committed to this type of weaponry than others?
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B
Well, this is speculation. In 1975 we signed something called the Biological Weapons Convention, which doesn't have, unfortunately doesn't have inspection aspects. That's one of the things I've called for, is to have that updated into the modern. So just like in nuclear, you have inspections. Part of it. But I think probably look at it, I mean, part of what got China into this is a very interesting event that happened in the late 90s which the United Nation passed an almost unanimous proposal that the world destroy the last smallpox sea.
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A
I remember that, yeah.
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B
United States and Russia had them. China was watching at that point in time. This is the late 90s, right. So China, this is before WTO and everything. And the United States and Russia said, you know, I hear you, but I don't think we're going to do. Looks like China saw that and said, okay, if I'm going to be on the world stage, I need to get into this virus research because this is a pretty powerful thing when the entire world can tell via the UN can tell America and Russia to stand down on something to destroy a dangerous thing that's no longer circulating and they didn't do it
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A
after that. Have we had a case in the general public of smallpox that we know?
- [36:22]
B
No, the last person to have it was a secretary working two floors up in a laboratory in the uk. The scientists down there there had a ventilation problem so she got it through the vents. Basically she died and he was so the scientist was so distraught he committed suicide. So that was.
- [36:42]
A
I have a particular interest because where I'm speaking on my farm about 11 miles from here in Reedley, California, when I was a high school student, there was a well known Reedley packing family, Hamilton. They were a wonderful family. My grandfather sent his plums, peaches there. So one day when I was 15, of course you could work when you were 15 in those days. He walked over and met the patriarch HR Hamilton and he said, well we gotta, you know, we have our team for the summer it was very hard to get packing jobs. But he said that some people are gonna go on vacation. You can work here a week. And it's. If you go to Reedley, it's right on the railroad tracks, and it's the perpendicular to the main street, and it's got more traffic than the main street. So as we know, just a city inspector was driving by and saw this water leaking out. And there hadn't been cars there. And when they went in, there were all these different types of viruses and engineered. What do you think? And then this mysterious character who had. People had been following him. He'd. He'd gone to Readley thinking it was an obscure agricultural town, nobody would know it. But then something had prompted him to either leave or shut it down. What do you think? These. And I think another one appeared in Las Vegas. What do you think they are? What's going on?
- [38:12]
B
Yeah, so I only have public information, Victor, but to summarize what happened there, in both locations, you have a biological laboratory in kind of an obscure place with no real business function that you can imagine, and with collections of pathogens that are quite remarkable for their location and for. Again, you know, there's no business there. They don't have a website where they're selling things to scientists or that sort of things. And they. If I understand it, they do have a Chinese government or Chinese connection that's quite strong. It's quite strong. So I think when you put two and two together, you get four. Most of the time the same thing.
- [39:05]
A
Are they connected? Do you remember, I know you're a graduate of Michigan. Do you remember the Michigan graduate student that was involved in grain research? I think it was a type of rust that might wipe out. And he was. I think he was tried and convicted. What do you think the Chinese are doing with things like this, whether the food supply, or is it just an insurance policy, or do they actually want to go to the next step?
- [39:33]
B
Let's just talk about facts and then speculate beyond that. So the facts are exactly what you said, that the FBI at the Detroit airport identified someone coming in from China with biological samples that were undeclared. The samples were major pathogens for that, you know, that for the food supply in America. This person had a job at the University of Michigan in the laboratories there, was purportedly going to study it. But, you know, the consequences are very, very severe if that kind of thing gets out into our food supply. I mean, you're a better history person than I am, but someone said, you know, we're only 96 hours away from a revolution because if people run out of food, they stormed the bastion or whatever.
- [40:23]
A
No, I know it. And there's all of. As a classics historian, there were. We don't know about why there's. At all of the Greek temples, not all of them, but mostly at the Panhellenic sanctuaries. The priestess was always going into fits. And we don't know what made her lose consciousness or, or claim a higher consciousness. And people had talked about wheat rust, you know, that it would mold and then fungus or mold would be hallucinogenic. But that was very popular in classical literature. One last question and then we'll let you go. But I watch your testimony very carefully in your first book, and then references to it in this book book, you chart out very carefully each step necessary to create the SARS virus that caused Covid. And each time that you did that, the odds of finding that exact, the odds of not happening in lecture increased exponentially. Maybe you could remind us in looking back to create that, that sequence, what were the chances in nature doing that? Yeah, there were these choices. It was very fascinating. Like a detective, you were saying, at each crossroads, so to speak, they chose the pathway that was the most infectious.
- [42:01]
B
Yeah. So I think you can simplify it down to sort of three features inside the virus that really exist in nature. And then kind of the consequence then is it must have come from a laboratory. And one is the spike protein, the entrance key. That puts the key in the lock of your cell and goes inside and reproduces itself. It has to be split to be effective. I mean, this virus is very clever. It wants to be stable in nature and inert unless it gets near a cell. So it actually uses the protein on the surface of the cell to unlock the key. It's like two step verification. So it wants. The first step is in nature, a natural virus, the spike protein gets clipped on the surface of a cell and then it goes into the cell. With SARS CoV2, it was pre clipped. The first step of two step verification was done when it was made. That makes the virus sort of unstable. And it's also never seen in nature. So that's step one. Step two is that ACE2, this protein that we have on our lung cells, every mammal has this in slightly different forms. And so when you looked at 3,000 different variants of the Human Ace 2, so this brilliant scientist in University of Washington, Jesse Bloom, varied all of the possibilities on the Human Ace 2 and showed that in 99.5% of the cases, it was using the best amino acid that it possibly could. SARS1, when it came to humans, was only using about 15% of the best humans. And it spent time building up to an epidemic. It had to go from 15 to 100% in the process. That took about two years. Actually, SARS hit the ground running with a perfectly established ACE2 binding key. It was perfectly established for our key. And the other is to do the kinds of reverse genetics that Ralph Baric invented. You have to take away certain sites in the natural virus in order to then do your laboratory engineering. These are called restriction sites. There's normally about 12 of them in the viruses that come from nature. And there's no virus in nature that has less than 7, except SARS CoV2 has 5. And some of the closest viruses like RTA TG13, have 4 and 3. This reminded me of Jonesy in the Hunt for Red October, where the way he was able to find the Red October was not by the signal it gave. It was so quiet. It was actually quieter than the ocean background noise. Here SARS CoV2 is engineered because it has fewer sites. Its sites are quieter than the background sound. So those three factors and then ORF8, which is a remarkable protein, doesn't exist. The closest protein in nature is 10% analogous. So it's highly different than anything that's ever been done. And WIV had spent five years with all the Mets and bounds on what ORF8 could do. And that's the thing that made it asymptomatic at the beginning. You can't make antibodies at the end. That's not academic research, that's non academic research. Some people call that bioweapons research. I try to avoid that because that requires knowledge of what they're doing it for, but certainly not something you do in an academic setting.
- [45:40]
A
I have a final question. I just spent almost eight days in the thoracic surgery ward at Stanford Med. And when you're kind of tied down, you can't move, and you hear a lot of nurses come in and they're all in that ward ward. And there were a couple of COVID people somewhere. And they all talk about how they prevent getting Covid. And it was fascinating for me because they suggested things to me that when they went out by day three, I could use my phone and I would go onto GROK or something and see. One of them was a pectin from Harvard called Profti that you inhale and it coats your nose. Another one was something that a lot of people use for allergies. Azazeltine, antihistamine. Are there things people can do now like that to mitigate the chances of getting infected, or is it just wash your hands and be careful? Wear a mask on a plant. What's a parting shell that you would advise people?
- [46:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think the purpose of a mask is to prevent you from giving things to other people, not to prevent you getting things from other people. So a healthy person wearing a mask is probably not helping themselves very much. There are absolutely sprays you can do before you go out, if you're going out that will essentially coat the nasal cavity. One of the seven companies that I built was we were making nasal sprays, even for obesity. And so one of the the challenges is the nasal mucosa gets cleared every 30 minutes. So when you spray something on it, 30 minutes later, it's kind of gone unless you do something special. But these things can help around the edges. I think now most people have had Covid and they have enough antibody and T cells that they're not going to get much of an infection again. One of the things that's important to remember is the vaccine induces an IgM protein, which is good for in your body, but on your mucosal surfaces like the nose and throat, it's something called iga, which you definitely make when the virus comes through that area goes into the lungs. You don't necessarily make IgA when you have a vaccine. So it's the IgA that gets excreted into the mucosal fluid and that gets the virus before it even gets near your cells.
- [48:09]
A
Does the virus enter the body almost primarily through the nasal passages, or does your hands touch your mouth or your eyes? Or is it a NAS nasal entry?
- [48:22]
B
Barbara's it's about 70% nasal, 30% back of the throat. And you have to remember your tear. Where do your tears go? You know, they coat your eyes. Where do they go? They go into the back of your throat. So I was seeing about 15% of people who were tracing the infection to a con. So they were getting it through the eye. They would get a conjunctivitis, a SARS conjunctivitis. They would get really red eyes, and then they would get it in their lungs. So those people were getting it by touching, you know, touching their eyes. We touch our face about 90 times a day.
- [48:53]
A
And there were so many people that I knew that got it four or five times. And then there would be someone else who never got it. I mean, there were People that had. Were they blood types, particular blood types, or what was it that suggests that they weren't going to get it as frequently?
- [49:10]
B
Yeah, it's particular blood types and it's particular viruses that you've seen before. So about 50% of the colds that you had, you know, in school, kindergarten, about 15% of them, are coronaviruses, other coronaviruses. So if you happen to get one that was close enough to SARS CoV2, you'd have some memory T cells, memory B cells that can help you out in those settings.
- [49:34]
A
I guess what you're. I don't want to put words in your mouth, Stephen, but I guess what you're suggesting is that even with this radically mutating virus, the chances that it's going to mutate to a more virulent form and one that catches our immune system by surprise, as it did during its first manifestation, is getting rarer and rarer that that could happen. Is that a fair assumption, or is this we don't know in nature?
- [50:00]
B
No, no, Victor. I mean, I think there's always 15% of nature that we don't know. Physicists can have it down to a couple percent. We're stuck with 15%. But the 85% is that this virus in infecting half everybody on the planet, so billions and billions of people. It's played every game it has. It's used every color on its palette. It's done all the things it can possibly do, and it is what it is. It's probably no worse than the average cold. It's definitely not as bad as some of the influenzas that we get. We are stuck with it for the next millennium. I mean, so the interesting thing is you and I and most European ancestry for folks, have the immunological memory of the Black Plague. In our immune system. You can see the traces of having dealt with that, what now? The 14, 13, hundreds? So a long time ago. This will be around 1,000 years from now in our immune system.
- [50:59]
A
It's funny how you talk about it when it makes decisions and it's smart and as almost if it's a human entity, but it is a biological organism. But I don't know, does it think like a person? I mean it. Or is it just, you know, genetically instinctual or something?
- [51:17]
B
Yeah, it is just instinctual. You know, I don't. I don't. Yeah, it's very easy to give it agency, and I probably shouldn't do that. But it doesn't change the analysis. Yeah, I don't think.
- [51:34]
A
And Final. This is the final one because I don't want to keep you. What is the role. What is, is the role of artificial intelligence now, do you think, versus in 2020, did we have AI enough to be a help when we first discovered this virus? And if we didn't, had we had AI at the level we do now, would it have made a difference? And is it going to play a future role?
- [52:04]
B
Yeah, that's a really important point. You may have seen in the Wall Street Journal in the last week, most of the the CEOs of generative AI companies said, hey, we need to do something about the use of our tools in biotechnology because it has dangers. I'll give you a very specific example. So Secretary Pompeo asked me in the 2020 timeframe, could you make a virus or could this virus be ethnically targeted? Because there were some ideas around that it seemed to be affecting Caucasians more and that sort of thing. And so I said, well, look at the differences on the outside of cells that make us ethnic. African Americans and Caucasians and Asians are not sufficiently different to really make it a targeting tool. Fast forward to last year. I did a presentation to Senator Cotton's staff on some work that I had done with generative AI to say, I'm going to ignore what's on the outside of cell. I'm going to let it go into the cell, into all cells. And then I'm going to use the Ancestry.com genealogy SNPs to try to. Is it possible to differentiate people from Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales? I did that to be provocative because Robert Quay came to America in 1775 from Northern Ireland. So he's my direct paternal ancestor. And I was able to design a pathogen that was 70% lethal in Northern Irish and only 3% in Scottish, English and Welsh. Welsh using generative AI because it required a logic train where you had to have seven SNPs in a row that are at high prevalence in Northern Ireland. Not so much in Scotland, not so much in England, not so much in Wales. That is, unfortunately, the danger, the power for darkness of this particular technology. Generative AI plus biotechnology.
- [54:06]
A
That's very interesting because in our, our military, even though it's a closed group to the public, we had a high official who was fluent in Chinese and grew up in China. And in passing, when this matter came up, I think it was in 2021, he had a team that was monitoring Chinese media, but not necessarily in the major dailies in Shanghai, but in regional places. And that team had Discovered references in the media that they were developing ways to protect themselves by trying to target the virus to particular groups. Not that they had done that, but they were thinking along those lines. And that was pretty scary. And he mentioned that. And I don't know if that was. It was not classified what he said, but he said that there were people in the Pentagon, the State Department that were aware that that had been a topic in China. Trying to hone that.
- [55:16]
B
One of my proposals in the Washington Post from the book, is to stand up something. There's something called FinCEN, which is the financial surveillance organization. Know your customers. One of the requirements of banks and suspicious transaction where the banks send these random reports into the government that look suspicious. I said, let's do the same thing for synthetic laboratories. You have to know your scientist before you accept an order. And if you see a suspicious order and one of the positive sides of generative AI is it can find patterns in the folding of nucleic acids that might not be seen by direct sequence homology, but have three dimensional homology that could make it look suspicious. And so you would require these companies to make reports on suspicious sequences. And that combination I think has been useful in the financial world and I think it would be very useful in this new age of biotechnology.
- [56:14]
A
It would. Well, we've been speaking with Dr. Stephen Kuei about all the aspects, not just of the SARS virus that gave us Covid, but of viruses in general and what to be worried about in the future and how we can prevent that worry. And I know you've been very busy. So I think all of us thank you, Stephen, for taking so much time to be consulting with Congress, the current administration, about ways to protect us. Because I think people are really still on edge given what happened.
- [56:48]
B
I think it's somewhat reasonable. But thank you very much, Victor. It's been a pleasure. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
- [56:53]
A
Well, thank you everybody and we'll have you on next time because I know there's going to be something in the news. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hanson for Victor Hansen in his own words. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. And also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.