SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: What Really Happened in Wuhan

[Music] nobody thought a thing like this was possible a pandemic that affected every single person on the planet why didn't anyone stop this for weeks and weeks the chinese government kept the silence this is the result of taking a natural virus and mucking around with it hey presto the perfect human pathogen that actually would make a good fire weapon it escaped from the lab they had an accident the first cluster worked into one institute of horology they silenced journalists and disappeared some of them it won't stop there what led you to believe this came from a wuhan lab it was obvious there were body bags covered 19. like you it wasn't until early 2020 that i started paying attention to this then came the investigation then came the revelations and then the writing tonight join me as i tell you what i've discovered about where the virus came from and when it first appeared mr president welcome thank you so much for your time thank you very much you've seen all of the intelligence when do you think the virus first started well some of the intelligence is classified and i can't talk about it but common sense tells you it most likely and when i say most likely like 95 came from the wuhan lab i don't know if they had bad thoughts or whether it was gross incompetence but one way or the other it came out of wuhan and it came from the wuhan lab ladies and gentlemen please rise for his excellency xi jinping general secretary of the cpc central they're the olympic games for military athletes held every four years wuhan was the host city in 2019 and i didn't even know about the military games until someone from the army uh called me in in december of 2020 and asked me if i could explain what happened at the wuhan military games and whether these people had fallen sick with an early strain uh emerging strain of covid as the site of a potential virus super spreader it doesn't get much bigger than this and in the weeks and months that followed reports emerged of athletes becoming sick it is suspicious i mean we we do see some indications in our own data you know that nih has that there was covid circulating the united states certainly in the earliest month you know as early as early december possibly earlier than that i mean some of these work these people who came back from those games were sick with something more than 9 000 athletes were there two weeks later they returned home to more than 100 countries oh i know that people got sick i believe their french athlete got sick i believe they're germans some americans got sick too but getting sick in one in that particular time frame of the kind of symptoms that are very similar to what would later known to be coronal virus symptoms that obviously deserve investigation no one was ever tested but there was one man who knew something was wrong china's most famous defector to the united states the father of his country's democracy movement i thought that the chinese government would take this opportunity to spread the virus during the military games as many foreigners would show up there [Music] diamond let's start with the night waging shang came over for dinner at your house on november 22. what was different about that night there was an urgency about um way's manner i mean way normally is a very relaxed person but that night was a little bit different because he talked in as you know almost a different tone diamond liu and wei jin shang are close friends she's a high-profile human rights advocate he was once a communist party insider [Music] he'd come to diamond looking for help who could he tell in america there was a virus on the loose in wuhan [Music] did he think this was a coronavirus yes he did say it was corona virus how did he know about it well into among the chinese diaspora there have been talks about it and way being who who he is uh tend to be the recipients of many information people seek him out weijing sheng spent 18 years in chinese prisons for standing up to beijing in 97 he made global headlines when he defected to the united states wei still has impeccable contacts high up in the party and they were telling him a virus was spreading in wuhan in october when did you first hear that there was a virus in wuhan was it during the time of the military games yes i learned there was an unusual exercise by the chinese government during the military games and so i told diamond about the possibility of the chinese government using some strange weapons including biological weapons because i knew they were doing experiments of that sort there was nothing in the news at the time i mean it was no one had mentioned a thing no no one had mentioned the day [Music] diamond wasn't the first person way told there was a coronavirus in wuhan he now tells me he passed on the same information to us intelligence and one politician as early as october 2019. it turns out waze warning wasn't the only piece of intelligence that agencies had at that time that warned of an outbreak in wuhan we knew this but we didn't know it my shock was that we had actually could have had foreknowledge david asher is a veteran weapons investigator he led a u.s government task force into the origins of covert 19 and in late 2020 he unearthed intelligence that wuhan institute of virology scientists fell sick with covert-like symptoms but what alarmed him was just how long washington had sat on this classified intel i was very surprised at the level of detail that they were able to produce around information that they had probably collected well over a year before that so in november of 2020 we learned things that they had collected in november 2019. wuhan is located in the central chinese province of hubei it's home to 11 million people also in this sprawling metropolis is one of the world's leading biological research facilities the wuhan institute of virology it was built by the french and included a cooperation agreement which meant that french scientists would be included in the research groups in wuhan and that they would work together on this biological research by the end of 2014 they had effectively excluded all the french that were in the institute and you know the suspicion on the part of the french was that you know the the they were pushed out because of the chinese military interest in the work so what could this indicate about the type of research they were intending to undertake at the wuhan institute of virology well i mean the suggestion would be as relevance to biological warfare in terms of coronavirus research what was going on in the wuhan institute of virology well so what we we do know i mean is is that they were one of the world's leading repository of coronaviruses that research was headed up by xia zhang li they call her the batwoman she's china's top virologist and her specialty bat viruses so it does look like covert 19 you know at some point did originate as a as a bad virus that i think most people would accept uh that as a premise the question then is more about how did those changes occur that make it unique uh and that make it so well adapted to humans [Music] in 2012 shazangli hit pay dirt at a disused mine in south western china six workers fell ill after clearing away bat manure [Music] three died from a coronavirus but beijing covered it up and told no one to a virologist obsessed with stars like viruses that mine was a gold mine pardoned upon four new viruses to study and they've returned to it at least five times the mojiyang mine that's what she shelling has been doing for two decades she's been going around various bat caves mostly in yunnan china and collecting bad viruses hundreds of samples were brought back to the wuhan institute of virology there scientists were slicing manipulating and combining genetic sequences from different viruses together the story of of the minds intriguing one because most of us only first learnt about it uh you know in in early 2020 uh when the wuhin institute of virology said we've gone to all the viruses coronaviruses we've got stored in the lab um to look to see um did we actually have covet 19 in our repository and then they said we didn't find uh you know covet 19. but hey presto we found you know the very closest genetic relative to this uh which is rat g13 here it is ratg13 is the name of one coronavirus they extracted from the bats in those caves it is 96.2 percent identical to the virus that causes covet 19. then the natural question is did they find covert 19 on one of those trips and if so why haven't they told us about it um or did they manipulate uh you know rat g13 or one of the other coronaviruses that they found in this cave and that created covet 19. and of course that always raises the question well how far did they push the boundaries you know what what research were they doing [Applause] by early 2020 this administration has developed a very healthy and justifiable suspicion of a lot of things china saying is doing and china promised to do miles u was secretary of state mike pompeo's principal china advisor as 2020 rolled in miles started paying close attention to wuhan for weeks and weeks the chinese government kept silence on the outbreak i'm not saying anything as if nothing is happening so citizen journalists are beginning to send out their videos and reports and hospital situation reports on a daily basis one of those citizen journalists is chen kushi he's also a lawyer chen had heard china was covering up the unfolding tragedy in wuhan so he went there and started posting videos [Music] and then he disappeared mr president what evidence were you presented with that convinced you that it did in all likelihood come from a lab well i started hearing stories that you have also that there were lots of body bags outside of the lab and people were saying there are a lot of people lying down on the streets of wuhan and there were body bags body bags outside of the wuhan institute of virology i heard that a long time ago and if they did in fact have body bags that was one little indication wasn't it was that was that something that came from the agencies the intelligence agencies is that what they were telling you i don't know where it came from ask china but you're gonna have to figure that out and you probably won't be able to do it knowing you president trump told me that there were bodybacks outside the wuhan institute of virology is this correct i don't want to talk about particular things presidents get the chance to talk about things that some of the rest of us can't but there was an enormous albeit indirect evidence that the wound institute of virology was the center point for this remember too there were 14 american diplomats on the ground in wuhan at this time who were watching and observing what was taking place inside of wuhan i i hope one day that we'll be able to get that information out more broadly but as i come back to it the cumulative evidence that one can see points singularly to the wun institute of virology if there was really no blame here if this was really just some naturally occurring virus because someone ate a bat from a wet market china wouldn't have done the things that they did the chinese communist party would not have shut down wuhan they would not have silenced doctors and scientists and journalists and disappeared some of them ratcliffe was the united states director of national intelligence the overlord of 18 different agencies when did the intelligence community first become aware that there was a virus spreading in wuhan you know in late uh 2019 we have intelligence from both you know human intelligence sources and signals intelligence sources and other intelligence sources that were telling us that that there was some sort of a problem in wuhan key to that assessment was intelligence that three people working in the wuhan institute of virology had become sick in october 2019. this was well before the first official case was eventually announced in late december what mike pompeo and i put out is you know people became sick at the lab in october and with symptoms that became entirely consistent with what most people have experienced around the world from covid19 do you believe that to be the first cluster of the pandemic based on everything i've seen this is the first cluster against all enemies foreign and domestic former cia director mike pompeo was secretary of state during the pandemic his knowledge of covert 19 was second to none in the trump administration i have seen no evidence that there's a cluster that began any place but this i am all ears to see if any evidence that presents something some back set to the contrary [Music] david asher also agrees that this could have been the first cluster of the pandemic my shock was that we had actually could have had foreknowledge we could have known in november of 2019 that there was a disaster on occurring inside wuhan inside their most important biological facilities you know where something absolutely tragic dramatic and dramatic was occurring and we could have reacted to it i said we could have you know our the whole world could have been different it would have been like stopping 911 before it happened which raises the question if u.s intelligence knew there was a virus in wuhan in late 2019 why didn't they do anything about it was this an intelligence failure we collect everything and know nothing in our governments these days it's the big data problem we're all drowning in it we had the means to know something but we didn't either analyze it or disseminate it or even know that it was collected i always worry about that as the former director of the cia i was always worried that we were collecting information but we weren't able to process it sufficiently timely and get that information to the right places is this a pandemic that potentially could have been prevented had the intelligence agencies paid closer attention to the information that was coming in uh we'll have to go look back at what was actually in the possession what was the complexity of the information what was the certainty of that information should there be a review sure i think we always could go back and should go back and look at how we collected and what we knew and why it was we weren't able that didn't send the signal up the line in a way that was would have led to a better outcome did they survive those three workers who got sick what i can say is that from the intelligence perspective is we know that some of the people that were most involved either infected or reporting on or whistleblowing on or trying to get answers and and journalists report on um have been difficult to track down later at least from my time there um and so you know i think that's consistent with what the chinese communist party does why you know the status of those individuals and why they've disappeared i really can't comment on that one of those people who was reported to have disappeared was juan yang lin is she one of the ones that we believe fell sick with covert 19 i don't know her status um but uh you know the information that you're talking about that's out in the public domain is consistent with what i've seen and what i'm familiar with juan yang lin was a researcher at the institute in early 2020 she disappeared from its website her social media presence also vanished despite beijing's denials many believe huang was infected with covert 19. she's never been seen since you know in the west you might say oh this person just just want to protect her privacy in china privacy in the institution of of the state doesn't exist so it would have been it would have been such a big triumphant media scoop for the chinese government to showcase her to give like 10 seconds of her appearance somewhere making speech show up in the news media and that would have basically no score a major victory for the chinese propaganda machine she never did she is literally disappeared from public view making people disappear is actually a major feature of the regime i mean it's actually truly a people's republic of disappearances dissidents uh uh journalists and anybody the government doesn't like they disappear they disappear into oblivion forever this is basically a regime that is not only capable of doing these things and then doing this with great pride and it's not only people that go missing on the 12th of september 2019 the virus database at the wuhan institute of virology was taken offline 22 000 coronavirus samples gone [Music] and that very same day the institute beefed up its security and issued a tender to replace its air conditioning system this in september is when the evidence suggests a leak first occurred what does that indicate to you about the origins of the virus and whether an outbreak might have occurred or become known to the wuhan institute of virology at that early date so i've seen data points that place it in the summer time of 2019 late summer july august of 2019. these are all parts of the pieces right this is all the cumulative weight of the evidence that suggests that it did come to this lab and a month later the institute went into a communications blackout there was no cell phone or signals activity on the compound for about two weeks how significant would a blackout period at the wuhan institute of virology as has been reported how significant would that be again it would be another circumstance that would be difficult to explain other than there was a problem that the chinese communist party was aware of and was trying to deal with before uh you know it became an outbreak that was public and then ultimately a pandemic that affected every single person on the planet [Music] [Music] everyone around the world assumed it had come from an animal but we didn't know what animal in the early days of the pandemic australian scientist nikolai petrovsky made an extraordinary discovery i guess the first surprising result that we found that really stumped us for a while was there was no animal and that opened obviously pandora's box because then we had to start saying well if it didn't come from an animal where did it come from and of course that that led into to i guess exploration of other possibilities and and one of those of course was that could this have potentially have come you know from a laboratory [Music] foreign [Music] this video was part of the official launch of the wuhan institute of virology's latest lab bsl4 it clearly shows there were bats in the lab and that's a fact world health organization investigators said was a conspiracy it was passed on to me by a group of scientists and researchers who've been digging into the origins of covert 19. they call themselves drastic when it the outbreak happened a lot of people noticed that it's quite a coincidence that it happened in the same city where there's this premier lab studying chronoviruses and you know people were saying well that's suspicious and everybody who said there could be more to it they were called conspiracy theorists yuri dagan is a genetic engineer from moscow he watched covert 19 spreading around the world in april 2020 yuri wrote an essay arguing that the animal to human theory just didn't stack up can you detail some of the issues that you uncovered in that medium paper that were just so crucial basically it's that the institute of virology that is located at the same at the epicenter of the outbreak has been creating chimeric genetically modified coronaviruses for many many years and they've been putting these spike proteins from different viruses in their backbones and then studying like how well does that affect human cells just this alone forms a very plausible argument that this is actually the lab that holds so many different chronoviruses explains the lab leak the best yuri this was highly risky coronavirus research that was happening at the wuhan institute of virology and no one seemed to be paying any attention to it yes this kind of work of very dangerous potentially pandemic pathogens how you know being made more transmissible and potentially more lethal to humans nobody paid attention to it because nobody cared about this kind of work in virology until the outbreak happened [Music] to begin with i i certainly didn't approach the issue with any sort of suspicion or or or foregone conclusions however things began to change as the pandemic evolved sir richard dearlove also ran into resistance to the lab leak theory he's the former head of the british spy agency mi6 early in the pandemic two scientists asked for his help in publishing a paper that cast doubt on covert 19 coming from an infected animal we approached nature we approached science we approached the american journal of virology we approached various publications in the uk and it was clear to me um that there was a sort of united front not to put anything in the public domain um which questioned um the chinese narrative how disturbing is this censorship and do you think it amounted to chinese disinformation i'm pretty sure that the chinese after the outbreak in wuhan and they're very good at doing this sat down and you know developed their own information campaign so richard you were one of the first people internationally to come out and say this virus may be the result of a laboratory leak how were you treated after you made those remarks i had people saying to me richard my strong advice is you don't get involved in this issue you know it's it's conspiracy theory and i mean my reply to them was you know if that's what you really think you haven't really looked at the science you don't understand the arguments and i suggest you go back and delve into this a bit more deeply because you're going to find some pretty strange things when you do boy did i get put downs from you know some very uh important parts of government who basically were keen that i shut up was this by british government or british intelligence i'll leave it your imagination given my past links another paper that struggled to find a home was from professor petrovsky his research found the virus was better adapted to infect humans than any other animal including bats and we thought the the scientific journals particularly the leading ones would would actually jump on this paper because they'd like to have papers that are very topical that are going to get a lot of media attention and so we were quite stunned when we just got rejection after rejection after rejection without even the paper being looked at professor this is censorship of science absolutely and of course the more this happened the more indignant i and and and my colleagues you know uh who were authors of the paper became because you know again science is is not about politics it's not about you know only finding nice things it's it's about you know what is the truth what are the facts it's a sad story of unprincipled compromise in face of a authoritarian regime and also it is also a sastery of political wokeness because the reason many scientists sign on to that kind of rhetoric to accuse anybody who is seriously interested in the possibility not uncertainty but the possibility of a lob league as a simply racist it is my profound honor to address the united nations general assembly we must hold accountable the nation which unleash this plague unto the world china why were so many scientists against the lab leak theory well one of the reasons was united states president donald trump yes unfortunately you could say that the trump factor contaminated the argument quite seriously and i think there were a significant number of prominent scientists who did not want publicly to appear to be supporting trump we saw big media say you know what donald trump and his secretary of state are out talking about this thing these people are surely crazy they're they're political zealots they want a shiny object i heard all the different stories but of course as we unpack it as we accumulate data science evidence facts it's more clear than ever that the virus came from this laboratory in early 2020 the medical journal the lancet published a letter from a group of scientists saying the lab leak was a conspiracy the man behind the letter was peter dazzik he's the president of eco health alliance and he'd been working with the wuhan institute of virology for 15 years sending us grant money to wuhan for bat research he's the absolute expert on bat born coronaviruses in the united states uh in their in their epidemiology and that he assures us that the the chinese had provided him personally with uh proof to uh to make it clear that this had come out of nature but when we asked for this proof when we asked the government agencies that had funded the work of eco health and others they couldn't give us that proof because they didn't have that proof we looked at what certain scientists were saying matching it with intelligence and when it didn't match up we were questioning it but then we were as we looked more closely at the wuhan institute of virology you know what a lot of scientists like dr fauci and peter dozick were saying was there's no live bats there there's no gain of function research there there's no military there and we had intelligence that was telling us that all of those things were occurring there has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we're deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction it took more than 12 months from the start of the pandemic for the world health organization to finally send a team to wuhan to investigate the origins of the virus the u.s submitted the names of three officials but one they didn't suggest was picked peter dagic what we did see um on the animal side is um clear evidence that the chinese scientists showed us they found these this information out from the market that there was a pathway into that market of animals that we know are coronavirus reservoirs are able to carry corona viruses from places where the nearest related viruses are found [Music] if you're telling us it came out in nature you got to give us proof when we looked for proof for zoonosis through all of the cable traffic all of the intelligence everything we could find almost nothing it's crazy absolutely crazy uh the the dashik was the guy he was incredibly compromised in that sense he should have recused himself he said nope i can't be part of that i i was connected to this i had i was involved in the funding of things that were taking place at this laboratory it made no sense to put him on that group he should have seen that himself and certainly the leaders who were making the decisions about who to have be part of that commission should have seen that this conflict of interest would deny their report whatever it was they were going to put out the credibility that i know they hoped that they would have as to the possibility of covert 19 coming from a lab the who report found it extremely unlikely they spent just three hours at the institute and even tedros walked away from the findings it was a complete fiasco the report you know it's 413 pages long and and only three pages are debated to the possibility that we're dealing with a lab uh escapee well the w.h.o is controlled by china i dropped out of the the world health organization i thought it was ridiculous they were late they were wrong they advised against travel restrictions they they objected to your travel ban from china well they really did what china told them to do if you think about it they were like a mouthpiece for china how beholden was the who and dr tedros to china deeply behold dr tedros owed his leadership role at the wh two deals that were cut with the chinese communist party dr tedros couldn't have been that next leader without the support of the chinese communist party and then we saw the behavior on the ground where he talked about how wonderful the chinese communist party was behaving they were doing all that they could and we now know nothing could have been further from the truth again this was this is the tragedy the central tragedy of the end of 19 the beginning of 20 it became political not scientific it became driven by personal uh incentives and not the data set do you think there should be an investigation into dr teddross's ties to china you know sure but we already know an awful lot the truth of the matter is that when the wgo was tasked with accomplishing the singular mission with which it was intended to accomplish preventing global pandemic and the spread thereof they fell down and they fell down because they weren't willing to confront the perpetrator they weren't willing to demand from the chinese communist party that they'd be given access they they failed they failed because of the absence of backbone and resolve and the world is deeply worse off for this [Music] [Music] before the pandemic much of the world had never heard of the term gain gainer function put simply it's genetically manipulating a virus to give it new functions like the ability to infect humans that's what was happening inside the wuhan lab you know there is quite a logical explanation when you look at the virus and its its special characteristics that you know this is this this is the result of taking a natural virus and mucking around with it [Music] covert 19 is like a frankenstein virus and it looked to many scientists like it had been cobbled together because it has a bat virus backbone with a pangolin virus spike protein and a unique furan cleavage site in the same spot where chinese scientists were genetically tweaking viruses [Music] for those who keep bringing up you know the possibility of a bat in in the wild markets in in wuhan having been the source of covert 19 scientifically that has has really no merit because it can't infect that so so it couldn't have come straight across from a bat if it can't affect a bat if covert 19 was the result of gain of function or other risky experiments at the wuhan lab remember this that same lab was being partly funded by america dr fauci knowing that it is a crime to lie to congress do you wish to retract your statement of may 11 where you claimed that the nih never funded cain of function research in wujon senator paul i have never lied before the congress and i do not retract that statement take an animal virus and you increase this transability to humans right you're saying that's not gain a function yeah that is correct and and senator paul you do not know what you are talking about quite frankly and i want to say that officially dr anthony fauci is america's top medical advisor i found a scientific paper he wrote in 2012 where he argued the benefits of gainer function research were worth the risk of a pandemic in total american agencies funded 65 research projects at the wuhan institute of virology so you don't want to go to hoboken new jersey or to fairfax virginia to be studying the bat human interface that might lead to an outbreak so you go to china are you concerned at all about how it happened that the gain of function ban was was lifted during the trump administration how was it that anthony fauci was able to to do this without anyone knowing well i i don't know for sure who all was involved in that decision-making process i can i can say this much when we look back and figure out how that decision was made i hope that all of those parties were able to come to the table express their viewpoints their concerns so that we had not only a decision but an informed decision that was made i've seen very little evidence today that there was a broad-based information exchange before the decision was made by dr fauci to lift that ban on gain of function research [Music] mr president anthony fauci did he ever once mentioned to you that the wuhan institute of virology was genetically manipulating coronaviruses well no he didn't and you know anthony's been in government for many many years he's a bureaucratic kind of a guy a very great promoter i give him an a plus as a promoter and probably a c or a d as a doctor we now know from emails that have been released under the freedom of information act that he was getting his advice from the likes of peter dagek a wuhan collaborator at the same time he was telling you that this was a natural virus while at the same time behind the scenes in emails he was having discussions about whether this might have been genetically manipulated does that shock you well he was dealing with them certainly and my thing was a little bit different i just wanted to stop it uh whether it developed one way or the other i just wanted to stop it but it's important to know where it came from it's extremely important to know how it developed faucet was dealing with them and i guess they were even making payments for certain kinds of research and i ended that too i stopped that when we found out about that he was doing that during the obama years and when i found out about it i said can you imagine that the united states is making payments to a chinese lab so just that on his face didn't make sense but i stopped that the obama administration did hit pause on gainer function research though and that was lifted under your watch why did you allow the gainer function research to continue well i think probably people that worked for me looked at it and at one point they might have done that but ultimately what we did was we shut it off we shut the whole thing off and we stopped making payments that were approved much earlier than our administration do you regret now not paying closer attention i mean this gain of function research is extremely risky you know banned under the obama administration and then kick-started in 2017 under your watch yeah no i i think we've done an incredible job between the vaccine and between all of the operation warp speed i think we did a great job and people are now starting to see what a great job we did while writing my book i discovered a crucial piece of the covert 19 puzzle cyber security analysts at internet 2.0 recovered chinese government data that had been virtually wiped from the web it showed there was a buy up of pcr equipment used to test for coronaviruses in wuhan in 2019 the next month one of those machines went to the wuhan institute is this something you're aware of that they bought a pcr machine in november 2019 i wouldn't be able to comment on that how significant would this purchase be would be significant is it a smoking gun ultimately i don't think there's ever going to be one specific smoking gun um i think there's um more than just smoke here i think there's fire from a whole bunch of different sources um i think that would be another compelling piece of uh evidence if you need more i don't need more mr president i just want to ask you about this idea that the wuhan institute of virology has strong ties to the chinese military and was working on secret projects with the chinese military do you think sars cove ii was developed as a buyer weapon so i'd like to think it wasn't and i'll probably have to leave it at that because i want to give the benefit of a doubt and china was also affected by it so i really don't think it was but nobody can really know for sure and certainly now most of that evidence is gone and it's going to be very hard to find out that evidence was the viral database which was taken offline by the institute there's also early samples that were destroyed and the people who disappeared but what is very evident is the lab's close ties to the chinese military it's definitely possible that the chinese have been working on a bioweapon their labs affiliated with the pla have been working on chronoviruses as either by a weapon or as a defense against the potential by a weapon and they've you know published papers in china about both aspects saying that oh we can weaponize coronaviruses that actually would make a good good bioweapon and also the public published papers and said we have to be prepared for potential you know released bioweapon whether this precise you know virus is the result of a bioweapons program i highly doubt it but i could not rule it out nor is david asher ruling it out in fact the former covert 19 investigator believes something went badly wrong inside the wuhan institute of virology my concern was the chinese were doing research in as we learned later quite uncontrolled circumstances that was most definitely related to biological warfare ambitions in the future and that they had had an accident of a secretive program that they never wanted anyone to know about uh because it was a weapon and the weapon had gotten uh released errantly i mean it was like someone dropping a nuclear weapon out the back of a b-52 and bombing some city and saying whoops we didn't mean for that to occur do you think this was an accidental or deliberate release of covert 19 from china so i think it was probably an accident i don't think it was uh on purpose if it was that's essentially war i don't think it was on purpose i think it was incompetence scientists walked out and had lunch outside in a park or something with the girlfriend and he had it and she had it was that patient zero that scientist from the lab i don't know if it's patient zero or or patient something else but that's one theory do you know how he was infected i think that it was incompetence i think that is that it escaped from the lab through incompetence and they've also had some safety problems as you know at that lab has the united states spoken to defectors who worked in the lab who blew the whistle on what happened i really can't talk about that yeah i cannot talk about that i won't be uh really allowed to talk nor would i want to [Music] few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now once in a century virus that silently stalks the country almost four months after becoming president joe biden ordered a probe into the origins of coveting the results inconclusive the report found two causes plausible either it came from a lab or an infected animal [Music] is there still major intelligence that goes to proving the virus came out of the wuhan institute of virology that's still not in the public domain yes there's compelling intelligence that hasn't been declassified when you declassify intelligence you you you risked you know the potential human sources or signals intelligence where your where your eyes and ears into the to their actions are coming from and so we put out as much as we felt we could safely do um at the time but i think the time has come for the biden administration to declassify additional information that would again um more evidence if you need it that the chinese communist party officials acted badly bullied international officials covered up intelligence and reporting on this there is more intelligence out there and i'd like to see it declassified because it'll create additional pressure not just on chinese communist party officials but others that still continue to deny that china is a bad actor here we had an opportunity in january 2020 to eradicate this virus out of the whole human population and that's really sad because you know in 50 years time our children's children you know i might one day look back and say why didn't anyone stop this virus when you had the opportunity in that first few weeks from his lab in australia nikolai petrovsky is developing a vaccine that's in phase three clinical trials but he fears that clover 19 may become a way of life [Music] so viruses are opportunists they find themselves in this wonderful new host of which there's billions and it's learning as it goes it started as an exquisite human pathogen if we look now at strains like the delta strain you know it's it's it's going from bad to worse i mean and and this is what happens when you have something that is already the perfect human pathogen it won't stop there because you it's already you know has has its foot in the door and and it can only get better over time and that's what we're seeing and that's why you know it's been so scary is this what the future looks like if this virus is allowed to spread and disseminate it's going to learn more tricks it's going to become more infectious because that's the way viruses travel their opportunists and it's going to reach a point where we'll never actually free ourself because it's found with such a wonderful host species it doesn't ever want to leave [Music] how do you think this global pandemic this crisis of a potential laboratory leak could impact on chinese leadership well my view is that the implications of this for the prc leadership are severe there will be factions who are hugely dissatisfied with what has happened with the way the chinese reputation is damaged the way that you know china now becomes something akin to an international pariah so i i think the consequences of this will be severe politically in china over the next four or five years watch this space something will give something will happen and i wouldn't be at all surprised if it brings xi jinping down or at least there isn't a contest around his concept of leadership [Applause] [Music] and as for two of the most senior members of the trump administration they are in no doubt about what really happened in wuhan well listen the people that had the most access to the most intelligence are telling you that the most likely origin of of covid19 of the wuhan virus was what happened was a lab leak at the wuhan institute of virology this is really most likely what happened and it's more than just a possibility it's certainly a probability and it's probably a certainty the other thing that the cover-up tells you is the absolute absence of humanity of these leaders they are willing to allow people to die they don't care about human life they don't value them the way the people in the west in the united states and australia do they are prepared to let millions of people die if that's what it takes to protect their regime [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Sky News Australia

Views: 13,215,380

Keywords:

Id: oh2Sj_QpZOA

Length: 59min 45sec (3585 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Terminator857]

Thanks for sharing. Excellent video. What I got out of it:

1. Obama banned gain of function research.
2. Trump administration in 2017 re-enabled gain of function research.
3. U.S. funded gain of function research in Wuhan.
4. Wuhan lab leak likely was accidental. Has a history of accidental leaks.
5. China covered it all up.

[u/DreamSofie]

Can someone tell me, what is Sky News Australia and what is their reputation?

Thank you in advance.

[u/kale_boriak]

"Really happened" - as seen on youtube, no sources available, sorry!

[u/FctFndr]

I plan on finishing this video, it looks well produced. I think a thorough investigation is necessary to determine China's level of culpability. Financially they should be forced to pay affected countries.

Whether accidental leak or natural transmission, most importantly was how China handled ..or rather hid.. the outbreak. The severity of the outbreak and the illness were both kept from the world. China is 100% liable for how bad COVID has harmed the people and economy of the planet.