What Started Pushback Against Wuhan "Lab Leak" Theory?

the jurogan experience have any of the people that were initially skeptical or pushing back against the idea that it came from this level four lab are they coming around or are they still digging their heels in so some are are coming around and um so certainly there are people like like matt ridley who's a member of the house of lords in the in the uk a kind of very well-known science communicator he was firmly on the other side and now he started to be more open and actually has been quite uh quite vocal what was his motivation for being on the other side did he yeah i think that in the beg it's a really interesting story because in the earliest days of the pandemic there was a concerted effort by a relatively small number of high-profile scientists virologists who recognized that if the story was that this came from a series of what are called zoonotic jumps between animal hosts in the wild that was going to lead to kind of a positive outcome where we'd say hey let's be very mindful of our encroachment into wild spaces climate change all those things that we should be very mindful of but they were i think probably worried that if this story became dominant of an accidental lab leak i mean that would have huge implications for all of the research that people are doing and a lot of it is is very well intentioned so early last year there was a process where a series of scientists did two things one they came out with a letter in the in the british medical journal the lancet which we've subsequently learned was highly manipulated by a small number of people who may have had vested interests and there was a academic paper in a journal called nature communications and both made the case oh this isn't a lab leak and then there was a concerted effort to label anybody else as a conspiracy theorist and so i kind of spent last year in that uncomfortable space i mean i'm i i don't live my life as a conspiracy theorist i try to be data-driven in everything that i do but i really felt that this was a very real possibility and it deserved a full investigation and it was only in the beginning of this year uh 2021 that that started to turn i know i had i wrote some things uh someone named nicholson baker he had a great piece in new york magazine um the wall street journal did a great job um covering this and so this the space was starting to to open up then they had that really in my mind ill-fated press event in wuhan where it was this independent committee and the chinese government and they said don't investigate lab leak investigate the frozen food hypothesis and then in every newspaper around the world the headline was the world health organization says don't lab leak is not is not possible essentially and so i immediately sent messages to my my friends at the world health organization and saying look you're this is being misreported the world health organization hasn't said this and the the position of the who must be we have to investigate all hypotheses and i was very pleased that three days later so the press event was on a tuesday that friday tedros adenom who's the director general he then said in a press event that we believe that every hypothesis needs to be investigated which implicitly meant the lab leak hypothesis and then our letter uh came out which was just uh just last week i mean it feels it's been such a whirlwind since then and that's been picked up in newspapers all around the world so now i feel like there is an opening and i hope that we can continue and the goal in my mind isn't to prove like i don't i don't feel like i need to maybe if it's provable i'd love to prove it but it's not to prove that right this point that it is a lab leak or isn't but we at least need to have the most thorough unrestricted unpoliticized investigation into what happened with access to all the lab records all the samples there there's tons of scientists in china who were working on these issues very very few of them have been interviewed we don't have access to them and frankly i think a lot of them are afraid that if they speak up they'll be imprisoned or worse yeah that is the problem right the the people that were initially very vocal um and biased towards the idea that it wasn't a lab leak and you said they were highly motivated and they labeled other folks a conspiracy theorist what what was motivating them yeah so this it's a really tricky point and and so there's been a lot of controversy i got around a guy named peter dayzak and peter is an interesting figure because if you had asked me uh a year ago a year and a half ago who are the people who you respect most in the field of virology he would be really at the top of my list he was one of the heroes of understanding where the first sars came from he has an organization called eco health alliance that was really trying to get ahead of the curve on understanding these these pathogens but he also through eco health alliance was a funder of the wuhan institute of virology specifically the gain of function research that was being done there and i i truly believe it wasn't anything nefarious it was the idea was well if we want to understand dangerous pathogens we have to do it in the place where those dangerous pathogens are then under the obama administration there was a moratorium on this kind of of gain of function research um and then it was lifted in the trump administration so that's one one piece of it and so for peter i understand that his whole experience of his life has been well this is where these kinds of outbreaks come from um and but this could be just a very different story and for me personally that's i think one of the reasons why i was able to see this a little earlier perhaps than other people is that you know part of a big chunk of my life has been in the world of science but another big chunk of my life has been in the world of understanding china and so i think if you're just in the world of science you don't understand china you think well the chinese government says that this isn't from a lab leak it must not be from a lab leak but i know that in the chinese government they've totally suppressed the entire basically history of mao and all the millions of people who died under mao when they got their speed trains uh going the first train had this terrible crash and they just buried the whole train and and pretended like it it never happened until there was an outcry and they had to they had to to dig it up so i i feel like i understood a little bit more about the pathology of the of the chinese government so but coming back i think there were people in the kind of more traditional virology world who felt like we're going to open up a whole can of worms if we say well maybe it was a zoonotic jump and maybe it was it was elaborate so this one guy and his influence shaped the way the entire world was addressing this outbreak i wouldn't say it's one guy but it was i think a relatively small number of people because they certainly that the the lancet letter and it was all kinds of big luminaries who signed it that really shaped things um and so definitely if if the story in the beginning had been maybe this comes from a zoonotic jump maybe it comes from a lab leak we need to look at both options or i think that would have been a much healthier place because there would have been more pressure on china so it wasn't just one guy but peter certainly was was very influential and then in spite of this conflict of interest he's actually was selected as a member of this world health organization independent advisory committee so one of the the people who went on this mission to china was peter he also is the chairman of the lancet this same british journal that i mentioned they have a study study group he's the chairman of that and i'm not saying he's doing anything wrong i'm just saying if you have that kind of conflict of interest you shouldn't be in those kinds of roles it's just always so disturbing to someone like me who's a non-scientist who relies on scientists to be unbiased and to just look at the data when you find out that things are being influenced by very human factors like ego and financial gain and relationships with foreign powers and laboratories that they're involved with and that scares the out of me well you know this better than most anybody joe because you kind of are here every day looking into people's psyche and people are people even even scientists and everybody in the world has a story that explains what they're doing and and why and so i'm sure that you could maybe even should have peter on the show and he'll give you his his story but at least from the outside looking in the way i would see it is well he's he's invested his entire life into doing the right thing trying to protect us from this terrible threat of a pathogenic outbreak he correctly recognizes that encroachment into wild areas and climate change are big threats wherever wherever covid ii uh wherever covert 19 stars 2 comes from still those are are good things to do he has a long-standing relationship with the wuhan institute of virology and a friendship with the people who who who work there and so you you can see how we cut my guess and you know i can't speak for him he's become kind of a stakeholder in this story but we shouldn't this isn't just about peter i mean there are lots of very prominent scientists i would say there are more prominent scientists who believe that this comes from a series of zoonotic jumps through intermediate animal hosts in the wild then there are who believe that it's more likely to come from a lab leak but what i will say i get a lot i'm in touch with lots of people who are world famous scientists scientists who many many people will know who are privately telling me we think that there's a 90 chance that it comes from a lab but really don't want to speak up because we don't want to get pulled into the muck you were talking about trump before people remember the iraq war where there were all kinds of experts who were saying oh they definitely have nuclear weapons and then we invaded the country it's like oh oops they don't have it so people didn't want it to justify any kind of bad things and as scientists i mean the problem is the the scientists rely on data and there wasn't data because china was was covering it up and the the the journalists require scientists to make to legitimate claims about the origins and so there was this weird thing that's that's lasted for a year and our hope is and we're starting to see that our letter has opened up some space where we can have a real honest conversation about let's let's look deeply into all the possibilities and try to get to the right answer catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on spotify you 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Id: 2nhcSQmopO4

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021