Heather Heying & Bret Weinstein: The Lab Hypothesis | Real Time (HBO)

we've heard a lot recently about the fact that maybe the virus did start in the lab let's talk about that the fact that there is this lab i think it's the only one in the world quite like it in wuhan where it started it would almost be a conspiracy theory to think it didn't start in the lab right and and and that theory was demonized at first that oh it can't come on that's conspiracy thinking that it would start it in the lab but it it certainly is a 50 50. would you say that oh uh it's far more likely than that as a matter of fact right i said i think in june that the chances that it came from the lab look to me to be about 90 okay um so this was never a conspiracy theory in fact that term is simply used to make it go away it's a an obvious hypothesis that is in need of testing and we are only now a year in getting to the point where we can discuss it out loud without being stigmatized okay part of the problem of course is that we are so politicized we are so polarized and partisan now as a country that if the wrong guy proposed this to begin with and for half the country it was the wrong guy then the rest of the country says no way know how we're going to call that a conspiracy theory and uh and we're never going to revisit it and the fact is that's not how science works that is not science you need to you need to say i've got a pattern i'm going to make some observations and i'm going to consider every possible explanation on the table and did it leak from a lab that was clearly from the beginning a possibility okay so let me ask you this at first i was going to say oh when they make me get this i'm going to i want the mrna because it's new i feel like it's an improvement over the old ones then i heard you say no even though you're a little squirrely about it tonight i heard you said you want the one where they have a little piece of the virus in it the way they did it for many many years then i heard about the lab and i was like wait if they made that one in the lab do i really want a little piece of that virus in me is it possible there's something in a lab made virus that is different and would make a vaccine different than the ones we've had for decades which were made from viruses that occurred in nature well this is a this is a complex topic the adenovirus why you're here right the adenovirus is one that you have history with or at least viruses in that family you are very unlikely to have any evolution every evolutionary history with beta coronaviruses which are the ones that sardis kovi 2 comes from so just from the point of view of what unexpected might happen if we give you the adenovirus vaccine it's much less likely to be dramatic than lipid nanoparticles which is what the mrna vaccines are packaged in as far as the uh the little fragment of dna in question or the fragment of rna they produce the same proteins so the target is the same the uh the virus is wrapped the sars sarskov2 virus is wrapped in spiked proteins and the idea is to give those spike proteins to the immune system so that it recognizes them immediately if you ever get infected and from that point of view the the the vaccines that are currently available are equivalent they're all delivering so you're not worried if it was made in the lab that it would be different that a vaccine would be different made from that that was that came from a lab instead of nature itself which i mean the lab is taking nature itself of course yes that doesn't concern you all of our best tricks we are borrowing from nature right in case we are just simply taking that spike protein and figuring out how to get it into your cells so that your immune system gets a chance to see it so if but let's assume that the chinese were not trying to create a bio weapon it's possible that they were if they were they did a hell of a job because they shut down the world but let's assume they were just studying this for elemonary reasons we want it we want to have them but it got out maybe like on a worker's you know it's like when the busboy doesn't wash his hands before he goes to the bathroom and you know then you get food poisoning but for the whole world right right that's what happened okay so okay so that got out it raises the question should we ever be studying viruses and labs this way if we're just going to create the problem that we're trying to well that battle was taking place before the covet 19 epidemic there was uh there were two factions there was a faction that said we had no choice but to study these viruses and in fact to engage in what's called gain of function research where we turbocharge the viruses and make them much more dangerous than they are in the condition we find them and the argument was that we had to do that in order to know what they would be like in their dangerous form and could perhaps prepare by generating a vaccine and then there was another faction that said actually we're likely to create exactly the disaster we fear and what was missing from this discussion was a proper evolutionary analysis now the fact is there are lots of viruses that can escape from nature and infect people but in general they don't have a second trick that is to say they can infect you they can make you sick maybe they can kill you but they can't jump to the next person and so what's really conspicuous about this virus is that it had both tricks from the get-go it infects people and it differs from one person to the next with no explanation and now it seems to be having a third trick which is it's mutating which of course is not new viruses are always mutating that's why flu shots are very often so ineffective because you're getting the vaccine for that's why i never wanted a flu shot for the one that was around last year sometimes they're they're as little as 10 effective but okay so this one is definitely mutating we have a lot of them now the south african one the british one they're all over the world now uh i heard at the beginning of this that they usually get milder viruses as they mutate because they want to survive they don't want to kill anybody then they got no host you might expect that a virus that did emerge from a lab that was doing gain of function research would precisely not do the thing that wild-type viruses would do that it might exactly do what we seem to be seeing get more virulent get more pathogenic you think it's getting more virulent the mutations if you think about it the the expectation amongst those who have been seriously investigating the question of whether this is a gain of function uh lab escape virus is that the virus would have been passed through either animals in the lab or tissues in the lab in order to use evolution to re-rig it and that means that effectively tension was put on the virus pulling it in the direction of certain things some of those things were intentional like infectivity of human cells which may have given it extra capacities like this this fern cleavage site that no other virus like this has but sarsko v2 does so in any case in an attempt to give it these extra capacities lots of things will have been inflicted on the virus including things that we don't think about so many of the characteristics the fact that this virus attacks so many different tissues in the body does not seem natural the fact that it does not at least at the beginning did not seem to transmit outdoors nearly at all is very conspicuous i mean after all most animals live outdoors so a virus that seems to be adapted to indoor transmission is a bit conspicuous in this case but i think heather's point is all right you take the tension off of it you let it go into the human population it spreads out we've now got many millions of individuals with infections it's now going to move in the direction that makes the most sense for it rather than the most sense for the researchers so yes i think there's every possibility that what we are seeing is um a response to this virus now being free to explore evolutionary space and the common theme is we need an evolutionary perspective on the research that's being done it seems that there is there are certainly perverse incentives to once you start doing research to try to keep doing that research regardless of whether or not it's still good for humanity right and excuse me um whether or not this virus emerged from a lab or not actually has implications for how it is likely to behave now that it's out in the world and how therefore we should we should imagine how likely these things are going to be going forward so we should have been paying attention to the lab theory at the beginning but we didn't because it was politicized really is the moral there you

Channel: Real Time with Bill Maher

Views: 1,745,704

Rating: 4.7800384 out of 5

Keywords: Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, evolutionary biologists, The DarkHorse Podcast, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, Van Jones, CNN Political Commentator, REFORM Alliance, criminal justice system, James Pogue, journalist, Contributing Editor, Harper’s Magazine, gun culture, political right, COVID-19, Coronavirus, Wuhan, China

Id: ZMGWLLDSA3c

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/cannablubber]

Glad that the hypothesis is gaining some traction, it genuinely is an interesting question and unfortunately was relegated to conspiracy-status.

[u/palsh7]

Bill saying that he doesn't get flu shots is typical Bill, but I would have hoped Bret and Heather would have thrown a quick "get flu shots, Bill" in there.

[u/Chickenflocker]

This is the clip I was discussing in the other thread but wish it wouldn’t cut off the beginning

[u/stanleythemanley44]

Has Bret ever spoken to a virologist or someone about this? Even Nicholas Christakis would be worth having on the show. I think the lab hypothesis is feasible but it would be worth getting down in the weeds with someone that’s really knowledgeable.

For example, the outdoor spread problem he mentions. If the coronavirus came from bats, then it could easily spread in places bats like to hang out (cramped caves etc).

[u/QuantumVanilla]

When was this interview?