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EPISODE LINKS:
Jamie's Twitter: https://twitter.com/JamieMetzl
Jamie's Website: https://jamiemetzl.com/
Jamie's lab leak blog post: https://jamiemetzl.com/origins-of-sars-cov-2/
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:27 - Lab leak
1:00:01 - Gain-of-function research
1:09:32 - Anthony Fauci 
1:19:14 - Francis Collins
1:23:56 - Joe Rogan, Brett Weinstein, and Sam Harris
1:53:53 - Xi Jinping
2:08:24 - Patient Zero
2:21:38 - WHO
2:45:28 - Government transparency
3:07:28 - Likelihood of a cover-up
3:09:16 - Future of reproduction
3:44:55 - Jon Stewart
3:50:14 - Joe Rogan and Sanjay Gupta
4:15:19 - Ultramarathons
4:25:21 - Chocolate
4:33:34 - One Shared World
4:48:37 - Hope for the future

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The following is a conversation with Jamie Metzl, author specializing in topics of genetic engineering, biotechnology, and geopolitics.

In the past 2 years, he has been outspoken about the need to investigate and keep an open mind about the origins of COVID-19.

In particular, he has been keeping an extensive up-to-date collection of circumstantial evidence in support of what is colloquially known as lab leak hypothesis that COVID-19 leaked in 2019 from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In part, I wanted to explore the idea in response to the thoughtful criticism to parts of the Francis Collins episode.

I will have more and more difficult conversations like this with people from all walks of life and with all kinds of ideas.

I promise to do my best to keep an open mind and yet to ask hard questions while together searching for the beautiful and the inspiring in the mind of the other person.

It's a hard line to walk gracefully, especially for someone like me who's a bit of an awkward introvert with barely the grasp of the English language, or any language, except maybe Python and C++.

But I hope you stick around, be patient and empathetic, and maybe learn something new together with me.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, here's my conversation with Jamie Metzl.

What is the probability in your mind that COVID-19 leaked from a lab?

In your write-up, I believe you said 85%.

We can't really be exact with these kinds of things, but it gives us a sense where your mind is, where your intuition is.

So as it stands today, What would you say is that probability?

I would stand by what I've been saying since really the middle of last year.

It's more likely and not, in my opinion, that the pandemic stems from an accidental lab incident in Wuhan.

I mean, that's kind of arbitrary, but when I stack up all of the available evidence, and all of it on both sides is circumstantial, it weighs very significantly toward a lab incident origin.

So, before we dive into the specifics at a high level, what types of evidence, what intuition, what ideas are leading you to have that kind of estimate?

Is it possible to kind of condense, when you look at the wall of evidence before you, where's your source, the strongest source of your intuition?

Yeah, and I would have to say it's just logic and deductive reasoning.

So before I make the case for why I think it's most likely a lab incident origin, let's just say why it could be, and still could be, what we, natural origin.

All of this is natural origin in the sense that it's a bat virus backbone, horseshoe bat virus backbone.

Okay, I'm gonna keep pausing you to define stuff.

So maybe it's useful to say, what do we mean by lab leak?

Viruses have been around for 3.5 billion years And they've been around for such a long time because they are adaptive, and they're growing, and they're always changing, and they're morphing.

And that's why viruses are, I mean, they've been very successful, and we are our victims.

We have viral DNA has morphed into our genomes.

But now, certainly in the case of COVID-19, we are victims of the success of viruses.

And so when we talk about a backbone, so the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it has a history.

And these viruses don't come out of whole cloth.

And so we know that at some period, maybe 20 years ago or whatever, the virus that is SARS-CoV-2 existed in horseshoe bats.

And there are some people who say There's no evidence of this, but it's a plausible theory based on how things have happened in the past.

Maybe that virus jumped from the horseshoe bat through some intermediate species.

So it's like, let's say there's a bat and then it infects some other animal.

Let's say it's a pig or a raccoon dog or a civet cat, they're all pangolin, they're all sorts of animals that have been considered.

And then that virus adapts into that new host and it changes and grows.

And then according to the quote unquote natural origins hypothesis, it jumps from that animal into humans.

And so what you could imagine, and some of the people who are making the case, all of the people actually who are making the case for a natural origin of the virus, what they're saying is it went from bat to some intermediate species, and then from that intermediate species, most likely, there's some people who say it went directly bat to human, but through some intermediate species, and then humans interacted with that species, and then it jumped from that whatever it is to humans.

And that's a very plausible theory, it's just that there's no evidence for

And the nature of the interaction is, do most people kind of suggest that the, like wet markets, So the interaction of the humans with the animal is in the form of it's either a live animal that's being sold to be eaten or a recently live animal but newly dead animal being sold

That's certainly 1 very possible possibility, a possible possibility, I don't know if that's a word.

But the people who believe in the wet market origin, that's what they're saying.

They were cutting it up, let's say, in a market.

And maybe some of the blood got into somebody's, maybe had a cut on their hand or maybe it was aerosolized and so somebody breathed it.

And then that virus found this new host and that was the human host.

But you could also have that happen in, let's say, a farm.

So it's happened in the past that let's say that there are farms and because of human encroachment into wild spaces, we're pushing our farms and our animal farms further and further into what used to be just natural habitats.

And so it's happened in the past, for example, that there were bats roosting over pig pens and the bat droppings went into the pig pens.

The viruses in those droppings infected the pigs and then the pigs infected the humans.

It's just that there's basically no evidence for it.

If it was the case that SARS-CoV-2 comes from this type of interaction, as in most of the at least recent past outbreaks, we'd see evidence of that.

They're constantly undergoing Darwinian evolution and they're changing.

And it's not that they're just ready for prime time, ready to infect humans on day 1.

Normally you can trace the viral evolution prior to the time when it infects humans.

But for SARS-CoV-2, it just showed up on the scene ready to infect humans.

And there's no history that anybody has found so far of that kind of a viral evolution.

With the first SARS, you could track it by the genome sequencing that it was experimenting.

And SARS-CoV-2 was very, very stable, and meaning it had already adapted to humans by the time it interacted with us.

Fully adapted, so with SARS, there's a rapid evolution when it like first kind of hooks onto a human.

Yeah, because it's trying, like A virus, its goal is to survive and replicate.

And so there are some people who say, well, 1 hypothesis is you have a totally isolated group of humans, maybe in southern China, which is more than 1,000 miles away from Wuhan.

And maybe they're doing their animal farming right next to these areas where there are these horseshoe bats.

And maybe in this totally isolated place that no one's ever heard of, they're not connected to any other place, 1 person gets infected.

And it doesn't spread to anybody else because they're so isolated.

I can't even imagine that this is the case.

Then somebody gets in a car and drives all night more than 1,000 miles through crappy roads to get to Wuhan.

No 1 else in that person's village infects anyone.

And then that person goes straight to the Huanan seafood market according to this, in my mind, not very credible theory, and then unloads his stuff and everybody gets infected and they're only delivering those animals to the Wuhan market which doesn't even sell very many of these kinds of animals that are likely intermediate species and not to anywhere else.

So that's, I mean, it's a little bit of a straw man, but on top of that, the Chinese have sequenced more than 80,000 animal samples, and there's no evidence of this type of viral evolution that we would otherwise expect.

Let's try to, at this moment, steel man the argument for the natural origin of the virus.

So just to clarify, so Wuhan is actually, despite what it might sound like to people, is a pretty big city.

So not only is there the Wuhan Institute of Virology, there's other centers that do work on viruses.

But there's also a giant number of markets.

And everything we're talking about here is pretty close together.

So when I kind of look at the geography of this, I think when you zoom out, it's all Wuhan.

But when you zoom in, there's just a lot of interesting dynamics that could be happening and what the cases are popping up and what's being reported, all that kind of stuff.

So I think the people that argue for the natural origin, and there's a few recent papers that come out arguing this.

It's kind of fascinating to watch this whole thing.

But I think what they're arguing is that there's this Hunan market, that's 1 of the major markets, the wet markets in Wuhan, that there's a bunch of cases that were reported from there.

So if I look at, for example, the Michael Warby perspective that he wrote in Science, he argues, he wrote this a few days ago, the predominance of early COVID cases linked to Huna market, and this can't be dismissed as ascertainment bias, which I think is what people argue, that you're just kind of focusing on this region because a lot of cases came, but there could be a huge number of other cases.

So people who argue against this say that this is a later stage already.

So he says no, he says this is the epicenter.

And this is a clear evidence that, circumstantial evidence, but evidence nevertheless that this is where the jump happened to humans, the big explosion.

Maybe not case 0, I don't know if he argues that, but the early cases.

Can you steel man it before we talk about the outside?

And my goal here isn't to attack people on the other side.

And my feeling is if there is evidence that's presented that should change my view, I hope that I'll be open-minded enough to change my view.

And certainly Michael Warby is a thoughtful person, a respected scientist, and I think this work is contributive work, but I just don't think that it's as significant as has been reported in the press.

And so what his argument is is that there is an early cluster in December of 2019 around the Huanan seafood market.

And even though he himself argues that the original breakthrough case, the original case, the index case where the first person infected happened earlier, happened in October or November, so not in December.

His argument is, well, what are the odds that you would have this number, this cluster of cases in the Huanan seafood market?

And if the origin had happened someplace else, wouldn't you expect other clusters?

And it's not an entirely implausible argument.

But there are reasons why I think that this is not nearly as determinative as has been reported, and I certainly had a lot of...

I and others had tweeted a lot about this.

And that is, first, the people who were infected in this cluster, it's not the earliest known virus.

So this is, it's not the original SARS-CoV-2 there.

So it had to have happened someplace else.

2, the people who were infected in the market weren't infected in the part of the market where they had these kinds of animals that are considered to be candidates as an intermediary species.

And third, there was a bias in the early assessment in China of what they were looking for.

They were asked, did you have exposure to the market?

Because I think in the early days when people were figuring things out, that was 1 of the questions that was asked.

And fourth, and probably most significantly, we have so little information about those early cases in China.

I know we'll talk about this later, because the Chinese government is preventing access to all of that information, which they have, which could easily help us get to the bottom, at least know a ton more about how this pandemic started.

And so this is, it's like grasping at straws in the dark with gloves on.

But to steel man the argument, we have this evidence from this market, And yes, the Chinese government has turned off the lights essentially, so we have very little data to work with, but this is the data we have.

So who's to say that this data doesn't represent a much bigger data set that a lot of people got infected at this market, even at the parts, or especially at the parts where the meat, the infected meat was being sold.

So that could be true, and it probably is true.

Is this the place where this began, or was this just a place where it was amplified?

And I certainly think that it's extremely likely that the Huanan seafood market was a point of amplification.

And it's just answering a different question.

Basically what you're saying is it's very difficult to use the market as evidence for anything because it's probably not even the starting point.

So it's just a good place for it to continue spreading.

What Michael Warby's argument is, and Michael is that, well, what are the odds of that?

That we're seeing this amplification in the market.

And if we, let me put it this way, If we had all of the information, if the Chinese government hadn't blocked access to all of this, because there's blood bank information, there's all sorts of information, and based on a full and complete understanding, we came to believe that all of the early cases were at this market.

I think that would be a stronger argument than what this is so far.

But everything leads to the fact that why is it that the Chinese government, which was, frankly, after a slow start, the gold standard of doing viral tracking for SARS-1.

Why have they apparently done so little and shared so little?

I think it asks, it begs a lot of questions.

Okay, so let's then talk about the Chinese government.

And not just the Chinese government, let's talk about government.

No, so there's the Wuhan local government, there's the Chinese government led by Xi Jinping, and there's governments in general.

So my father was involved with Chernobyl.

I'm trying to put myself into the mind of local officials, of people who are like, oh shit, there's a potential catastrophic event happening here.

And it's my ass because there's incompetence all over the place.

Human nature is such that there's incompetence all over the place and you're always trying to cover it up.

And So given that context, I want to lay out all the possible incompetence, all the possible malevolence, all the possible geopolitical tensions here.

All right, where in your sense did the cover-up start?

So there's this suspicious fact, it seems like, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had a public database of thousands of sampled bat coronavirus sequences, and that went offline in September of 2019.

let me talk about that specific, and then I'll also follow your path of zooming out and it's a really important.

So, but there's a bigger story, but let me talk about that.

So the Wuhan Institute of Virology, And we can go into the whole history of the Wuhan Institute of Virology either now or later because I think it's very relevant to the story.

But let's focus for now on this database.

They had a database of 22,000 viral samples and sequence information about viruses that they had collected, some of which, the collection of some of which, was supported through funding from the NIH, not a huge NIH, through the EcoHealth Alliance.

It's a relatively small amount, $600,000, but not nothing.

The goal of this database was so that we could understand viral evolution, so that exactly for this kind of moment where we had an unknown virus, we could say, well, is this like anything that we've seen before?

And that would help us both understand what we're facing and be better able to respond.

So this was a password-protected public access database.

In 2019, in September 2019, it became inaccessible.

And then a few months later, the entire database disappeared.

What the Chinese have said is that because there were all kinds of computer attacks on this database.

But why would that happen in September 2019 before the pandemic, at least as far as we know?

It went down to September 2019, just so we get the year straight, January 2020 is when the virus really started getting the press, so we're talking about December 2019, a lot of early infections happened.

September 2019 is when this database goes down.

Just to clarify, because you said it quickly, the Chinese government said that their database was getting hacked.

Shu Jiang Li, the director of this part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology said that.

Well, she's an interesting character, we'll talk about her.

So, the excuse is that it's getting cyber attacked a lot, so we're gonna take it down without any further explanation, which seems very suspicious.

And then this virus starts to emerge in October, November, December.

There's a lot of argument about that, but after.

Sorry to interrupt, but some people are saying that the first outbreak could have happened as early as September.

I think it's more likely it's October, November, but for the people who are saying that the first outbreak, the first incident of a known outbreak, at least to somebody, happened in September, they make the argument, well what if that also happened in mid September of 2019?

I'm not prepared to go there, but there are some people who make that argument.

But I think, again, if I were to put myself in the mind of officials, whether it's officials within the Wuhan Institute of Virology or Wuhan local officials, I think if I notice some major problem, like somebody got sick, some sign of, oh shit, we screwed up.

That's when you kind of do the slow, there's like a Homer Simpson meme where you slowly start backing out and I would probably start hiding stuff.

Yeah, and then coming up with really shady excuses.

It's like you're in a relationship and your girlfriend wants to see your phone And you're like, I'm sorry, I'm just getting attacked by the Russians now.

So would it be OK if I give you my kind of macro view of the whole information space and why I believe this has been so contentious.

So here's if I had to give my best guess, and I underline the word guess, of what happened.

And your background, your family background with Chernobyl, I think, is highly relevant here.

So after the first SARS, there was a recognition that we needed to distribute knowledge about virology and epidemiology around the world, that people in China and Africa and Southeast Asia, they were the frontline workers.

And they needed to be doing a lot of the viral monitoring and assessment so that we could have an early alarm system.

And that was why there was a lot of investment in all of those places in building capacity, in training people, and helping to build institutional capacity.

And the Chinese government, they recognized that they needed to ramp things up.

And then the World Health Organization and the World Health Assembly, they had their international health regulations that were designed to create a stronger infrastructure.

And I know we'll talk later about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

So there was all of this distributed capacity.

And so in the early days, there is a breakout in Wuhan.

We don't know, is it September, October, November?

Maybe December is when the local authorities start to recognize that something's happening.

But at some point in late 2019, local officials in Wuhan understand that something is up.

And exactly like in Chernobyl, these guys exist within a hierarchical system.

And They are going to be rewarded if good things happen, and they're going to be in big trouble if bad things happen under their watch.

So their initial instinct is to squash it.

My guess is they think, well, if we squash this information, we can most likely beat back this outbreak, because lots of outbreaks happen all the time, including of SARS-1, where there was multiple lab incidents out of a lab in Beijing.

And so they start their cover-up on day 1.

They send nasty letters to different doctors and others who are starting to speak up.

But then it becomes clear that there's a bigger issue.

And then the national government of China, again, This is just a hypothesis.

They say, all right, this is getting much bigger.

They go in, and they realize that we have a big problem on our hands.

They relatively quickly know that it's spreading human to human.

And so the right thing for them to do then is what the South African government is doing now is to say, we have this outbreak.

We don't know everything, but we know it's serious.

But that's not the instinct of people in most governments and certainly not in authoritarian governments like China.

And so the national government, they have a choice at that point.

They can do option 1, which is what we would here call the right thing, which is total transparency.

They criticize the local officials for having this cover up.

And they say, now we're going to be totally transparent.

But what does that do in a system like the former Soviet Union, like China now?

If local officials say, wait a second, I thought my job was to cover everything up, to support this alternative reality that authoritarian systems need in order to survive, well now I'm going to be held accountable for if I'm not totally transparent.

So the national government, they have that choice And their only choice, according to the logic of their system, is to be all in on a cover-up.

And that's why they block the World Health Organization from sending its team to Wuhan for over 3 weeks.

They overtly lie to the World Health Organization about human-to-human transmission, and then they begin their cover-up.

So they begin very, very quickly destroying samples, hiding records.

They start imprisoning people for asking basic questions.

Soon after, they establish a gag order preventing Chinese scientists from writing or saying anything about pandemic origins without prior government approval.

And what that does means that there isn't a lot of data.

There's not nearly enough data coming out of China.

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Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory | Lex Fridman Podcast #247