Yuri Deigin and Bret Weinstein argue that the accumulating molecular and ecological anomalies surrounding SARS-CoV-2—including its location in Wuhan far from natural horseshoe bat reservoirs, human ACE2 pre-adaptation, and an anomalous furin cleavage site—render institutional dismissals of a laboratory origin untenable. (0:00)
The viral backbone closest to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, was renamed from BtCoV/4991 without clear notation, masking its origin from a 2012 Mojiang copper mine outbreak where three workers died of severe SARS-like pneumonia. (15:40)
The receptor-binding motif of SARS-CoV-2 diverges from RaTG13 to match a pangolin coronavirus with near amino-acid identity, yet it binds to human ACE2 receptors with higher affinity than it does to pangolin receptors. (37:16)
SARS-CoV-2 features a novel 12-nucleotide insertion encoding a polybasic furin cleavage site (PRRA) with rare CGG arginine codons and an engineering-friendly FauI restriction marker, an architecture not observed in any other known lineage B beta-coronavirus. (65:00)
The speakers call for an international moratorium on gain-of-function virology research, an independent audit of the Wuhan Institute of Virology's historical freezer samples, and whistleblower protections to establish the true origins of the pandemic. (80:00)
Detailed notes
## Background
This video was published on YouTube by evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein on June 8, 2020. According to the page description, the episode features a discussion between Weinstein and Moscow-based biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin regarding the evidence for the SARS-CoV-2 lab-leak hypothesis, centering on Deigin's comprehensive Medium essay on gain-of-function research.
## TL;DR
Weinstein and Deigin evaluate the scientific and circumstantial evidence surrounding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, contrasting the natural zoonotic spillover theory with potential laboratory-acquired origins at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They analyze key genomic anomalies, including the novel polybasic furin cleavage site with rare CGG codons, a FauI restriction cut site, and the chimeric discrepancy between the bat-like RaTG13 backbone and the pangolin-like receptor-binding motif. The discussion details the history of sample 4991 linked to the 2012 Mojiang miner pneumonias, the deletion of sequence databases, and gain-of-function collaborations involving EcoHealth Alliance and Ralph Baric. Finally, they address institutional suppression, potential digital interference, and the biosecurity imperative for whistleblower protections and international moratoria on high-risk pathogen research.
## Atmosphere & style
The conversation carries an intense, analytical, and sober atmosphere, resembling an intellectual forensic debrief rather than standard podcast banter. Both speakers balance a careful, methodologically rigorous demeanor with growing exasperation at the scientific establishment's reflex to dismiss laboratory leak hypotheses as conspiracy theories. An undercurrent of unease and paranoia persists throughout—amplified by discussions of deleted databases, coordinated smear campaigns, and unexplained computer glitches—culminating in an eerie, abrupt technical disconnection right at the broadcast's final moments.
## Bulletin
- [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=0s) Yuri Deigin and Bret Weinstein argue that the accumulating molecular and ecological anomalies surrounding SARS-CoV-2—including its location in Wuhan far from natural horseshoe bat reservoirs, human ACE2 pre-adaptation, and an anomalous furin cleavage site—render institutional dismissals of a laboratory origin untenable.
- [15:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=940s) The viral backbone closest to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, was renamed from BtCoV/4991 without clear notation, masking its origin from a 2012 Mojiang copper mine outbreak where three workers died of severe SARS-like pneumonia.
- [37:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2236s) The receptor-binding motif of SARS-CoV-2 diverges from RaTG13 to match a pangolin coronavirus with near amino-acid identity, yet it binds to human ACE2 receptors with higher affinity than it does to pangolin receptors.
- [01:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3900s) SARS-CoV-2 features a novel 12-nucleotide insertion encoding a polybasic furin cleavage site (PRRA) with rare CGG arginine codons and an engineering-friendly FauI restriction marker, an architecture not observed in any other known lineage B beta-coronavirus.
- [01:20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4800s) The speakers call for an international moratorium on gain-of-function virology research, an independent audit of the Wuhan Institute of Virology's historical freezer samples, and whistleblower protections to establish the true origins of the pandemic.
## Key takeaways
- [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=0s) Mainstream scientific claims asserting a near-zero probability of a laboratory leak rely on institutional assurances rather than sound forensic evaluation of genetic and ecological data.
- [05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=300s) The geography and timing of the initial outbreak in Wuhan contradict expected natural spillover patterns, as relevant horseshoe bat species hibernate in winter and inhabit regions 1,500 to 2,000 kilometers away.
- [15:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=940s) The Wuhan Institute of Virology initially published RaTG13 without disclosing that it was the identical strain previously cataloged as BtCoV/4991, recovered from the 2012 Mojiang miner pneumonia outbreak.
- [19:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1168s) Survivors of the 2012 Mojiang mine outbreak tested positive for cross-reactive SARS IgG antibodies, suggesting human pre-adaptation could have occurred years earlier or inside laboratory cultures.
- [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1800s) Critical public sequence databases and research metadata maintained at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were altered and taken offline in late 2019 without accessible backups.
- [37:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2236s) While RaTG13 is the closest overall genetic relative to SARS-CoV-2, the spike protein's receptor-binding motif matches a Guangdong pangolin coronavirus, binding more tightly to human ACE2 than pangolin ACE2.
- [40:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2402s) The ~12% nucleotide sequence divergence between the human and pangolin receptor-binding motifs consists largely of synonymous mutations, leaving unanswered questions regarding the evolutionary time or passaging steps required to generate this drift.
- [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2700s) Modern viral reverse genetics enables research teams to assemble live, infectious coronaviruses entirely from digital sequences in weeks for tens of thousands of dollars, removing the necessity of working with physical field isolates.
- [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3000s) Natural recombination between bats and pangolins is ecologically improbable given the solitary nature of pangolins, whereas laboratory settings routinely co-house disparate wild species or pass viruses through humanized cell lines.
- [55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3300s) The novel polybasic furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 spike junction dramatically broadens human organ tropism and is absent from all other surveyed lineage B beta-coronaviruses.
- [01:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3600s) Passaging SARS-CoV-2 in Vero monkey cells frequently leads to deletions of the furin cleavage site, indicating wild betacoronaviruses face strong selective pressure against retaining the site outside specific host environments.
- [01:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3900s) The 12-nucleotide furin insert utilizes rare CGG arginine codons and creates a recognized FauI restriction endonuclease cut site commonly used in synthetic biology to track inserts via gel electrophoresis.
- [01:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4200s) Captive laboratory passaging can exert unrecognized evolutionary pressures, analogous to the unintended hyper-elongation of telomeres observed in commercially bred laboratory mice.
- [01:15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4500s) Gain-of-function virology was funded and supported internationally by agencies including the US NIH and EcoHealth Alliance, making biosecurity failures an international concern rather than an isolated local issue.
- [01:20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4800s) A global moratorium on gain-of-function research is necessary because the promised predictive and therapeutic benefits have failed to materialize while generating extreme biosecurity and proliferation hazards.
- [01:50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6600s) EcoHealth Alliance's practice of collecting dangerous wild pathogens and concentrating them in high-density urban research laboratories dramatically amplifies spillover risks compared to leaving viruses in wild reservoirs.
- [01:40:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6008s) Independent forensic verification of the pandemic's origin requires international auditing of Wuhan Institute of Virology freezers, re-sequencing of RaTG13, and legal immunity or bounties for whistleblowers.
## Detailed walkthrough
### [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=0s) Introduction to Yuri Deigin and the Origin Debate
Bret Weinstein introduces his guest, Yuri Deigin, joining the Dark Horse podcast from Moscow. Deigin is a biotech entrepreneur and longevity researcher whose in-depth Medium article investigating the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic gained rapid prominence, earning mentions in mainstream publications. Weinstein praises Deigin’s synthesis of the scientific literature as the “gold standard” of analysis on the subject, noting that although the work is technically demanding and required multiple reads to digest, it successfully highlights patterns in gain-of-function virology research that cannot be dismissed. Weinstein observes that the public has struggled to accept the official narrative claiming the virus derived strictly from nature (such as a wet market) without any involvement from Wuhan’s two prominent bat coronavirus research laboratories.
Deigin responds with modesty regarding his credentials, stressing that he is not a professional virologist. He explains that his biology background allows him to blast sequences, track genetic patterns, and evaluate similarities and differences across viral strains. His article, he clarifies, was not intended to be a formal scientific paper, but rather an exploratory survey tracing his own intellectual journey. Initially, Deigin was entirely skeptical of a laboratory origin and trusted the institutional consensus. Over time, however, he became frustrated by how readily established scientists discarded the lab-leak possibility as mere conspiracy theory. Expressing his view on the certainty projected by mainstream figures, Deigin says:
> “And I think those those virologists who claim that there's zero chance or virtually no chance of this being a lab escape are, to put it mildly, incorrect.”
- Yuri Deigin: Tech entrepreneur and longevity researcher based in Moscow; author of a widely read Medium paper dissecting SARS-CoV-2 genetics and virology literature.
- Bret Weinstein: Evolutionary biologist and host of the Dark Horse podcast.
- Public context: Early June 2020, marked by heavy institutional resistance against entertaining any lab-leak origin hypothesis.
---
[05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=300s) The Geographic and Ecological Coincidences of Wuhan
Weinstein argues that while no one can definitively prove a laboratory leak occurred, anyone claiming certainty that it did not happen is misrepresenting the facts. He warns that virology's current incentive structure has led the field to embrace an untenable narrative, dangerously compromising the exact experts society depends upon during a pandemic. When asked to outline the most compelling facts that initially shifted his perspective, Deigin points directly to geography: the outbreak began in Wuhan, home to China's premier bat coronavirus laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). This anomaly was so glaring that even Shi Zhengli—the foremost coronavirus researcher at the WIV—openly worried and checked whether the virus might have leaked from her own facility.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Geographic and Seasonal Anomalies of the Wuhan Outbreak
accDescr: Diagram showing natural reservoir conditions versus the outbreak location in Wuhan.
subgraph Natural["Natural Reservoir: Yunnan (~1,500–2,000 km South)"]
A["Horseshoe Bats (Reservoirs)"]
B["Subtropical / Tropical Climate"]
C["Active Bats in Autumn / Spring"]
end
subgraph Outbreak["Outbreak Epicenter: Wuhan, Hubei"]
D["Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)"]
E["Bats Hibernating in Winter"]
F["Bat Meat Not Part of Local Cuisine"]
G["Huanan Seafood Market"]
end
A -.->|"No Direct Migration Path"| G
D ---|"Located in Outbreak City"| G
```
Deigin explains that the natural host reservoirs—horseshoe bats carrying closely related coronaviruses—do not live anywhere near Wuhan; their habitat is roughly 1,500 to 2,000 kilometers away in the subtropical province of Yunnan. Furthermore, unlike southern regions such as Guangdong where bat consumption has culinary precedent, bats are not a traditional dietary item in Wuhan or the wider Hubei province. Weinstein adds a seasonal factor: the initial outbreak surfaced during winter, when local bat populations would have been hibernating. With even official Chinese authorities stepping back from the Huanan Seafood Market as the primary place of cross-species spillover, Deigin notes that natural origin advocates lack a coherent explanation for how the pathogen traveled across the country:
> “And Wuhan is just a very, very odd place for this to have occurred.”
Weinstein reflects on how both he and Deigin arrived at their skepticism from opposite starting points. While Deigin originally dove into the genetic data to defend the natural spillover consensus, Weinstein first encountered the news after emerging from complete isolation at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
- Natural bat coronavirus reservoirs are concentrated thousands of kilometers to the south, notably in Yunnan province.
- Bats are not an established food source in Hubei cuisine.
- The outbreak took place during the winter months, when native bat species are dormant in hibernation.
- Official authorities subsequently walked back early claims that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the original source of animal-to-human spillover.
[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=600s) The Andes Epiphany and the Wuhan Coincidence
Bret Weinstein recounts being in the Andes in February 2020, cut off from news for a few days, when he first went online and read reports about the novel coronavirus outbreak. As an evolutionary biologist trained in bat biology, his initial reaction to the story was that it seemed entirely straightforward: an outbreak linked to a wet market where people eat bats, caused by a bat-borne coronavirus naturally jumping to humans from horseshoe bats. He even posted a tweet stating that the evidence pointed to an emergence through contact with horseshoe bats and noted the inherent danger of wet markets. Almost immediately afterward, however, he learned of the existence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology—a facility dedicated specifically to studying bat coronaviruses—and instantly retracted his tweet. As Bret explains, “There's obviously something about this story I don't understand because that's a huge coincidence.”
While Bret initially wondered whether research laboratories working on bat coronaviruses might simply be ubiquitous across the globe—in which case an emergence near one would be a statistical inevitability—he quickly discovered that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was actually one of the two most prominent institutions in the world dedicated to that exact research. Yuri Deigin highlights that defenders of the natural origin story initially argued that Wuhan had the lab precisely because that was where the bats lived. In reality, the relevant horseshoe bat species do not live anywhere near Wuhan; their natural habitats and caves are located thousands of kilometers away in southern China. Yuri notes that learning this geographical discrepancy was enough to make anyone scratch their head and question the mainstream virology narrative, noting that examining the research conducted in Wuhan made the lab-leak hypothesis look far more probable than commonly admitted.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Geographic Disconnect in Coronavirus Emergence
accDescr: Diagram illustrating the geographic distance between horseshoe bat caves in Yunnan and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
subgraph NaturalHabitat["Natural Reservoir (Yunnan Province)"]
Bats["Horseshoe bats (R. affinis / R. sinicus)<br/>Caves & abandoned mines"]
end
subgraph LabHub["Outbreak Epicenter (Hubei Province)"]
WIV["Wuhan Institute of Virology<br/>Leading bat coronavirus lab"]
Outbreak["Initial SARS-CoV-2 outbreak<br/>Wuhan wet market"]
end
Bats -->|"Thousands of kilometers away<br/>Samples transported to lab"| WIV
WIV -.->|"Hypothesized lab leak"| Outbreak
```
---
[13:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=808s) Dogma, Pushback, and the Moscow Scientific Community
Bret emphasizes how unsettling it is that anyone with the scientific literacy to scrutinize the facts, provided they lack an institutional conflict of interest or a partisan agenda, quickly finds themselves down a rabbit hole where every official dismissal of the lab leak appears paper-thin. Whenever independent thinkers bring up these points, they run into fierce, dogmatic resistance that is grounded not in logic or empirical data, but in institutional defensiveness. Bret observes that “if you have the background that allows you to just even begin to look into the facts here, and you don't have a dog in the fight, you're not a virologist, right, or you're not signed up with a political team that's selling a particular story, you instantly end up in this rabbit hole where all of the things that you're told about why you shouldn't pay any attention to that hypothesis – turn out to be paper thin and then all of the things that might point in the direction of the lab turn out to be harder to dismiss than you would like them to be.”
Yuri, who had been stranded in Moscow since early 2020 due to pandemic border closures and canceled flights, shares his surprise at facing the most intense hostility from the Russian scientific establishment. Even though Russian researchers nominally had no direct stake in the Wuhan research or Western grant funding, they viewed entertaining the possibility that scientists could lie or conceal an accident as outright blasphemy, fiercely accusing Yuri of peddling baseless conspiracy theories. Yet when pressed for a rigorous, data-driven refutation of a lab origin, critics possessed nothing conclusive. Instead, their entire rebuttal rested on trusting the Wuhan Institute of Virology's word that the 4% genomic divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known relative, RaTG13, represented an insurmountable evolutionary gap that proved the virus could not have originated in a lab.
- The Russian scientific community attacked the hypothesis as "blasphemy" rather than engaging the technical arguments.
- S科学 establishment defenses relied entirely on accepting the Wuhan Institute's assurances and publications at face value.
- The 4% sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 was treated as definitive proof of natural evolution, assuming no unpublished closer strains existed.
---
[15:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=940s) Deconstructing RaTG13 and the Mojiang Mine Connection
Yuri and Bret unpack the history of RaTG13, the bat coronavirus sequence published by Shi Zhengli’s team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in early 2020. Yuri explains that the name "RaTG13" designates the specific viral strain rather than an individual bat: "Ra" stands for *Rhinolophus affinis* (an intermediate horseshoe bat species), "TG" refers to Tongguan town in Mojiang County, and "13" denotes the collection year, 2013. While Shi Zhengli had historically focused her career on *Rhinolophus sinicus* (the Chinese rufous horseshoe bat that harbored the original 2002–2003 SARS-CoV), it was *Rhinolophus affinis* that carried this closely related strain. Yuri points out that the Wuhan lab revealed this sequence in a piecemeal, "limited hangout" fashion, failing to mention in their initial 2020 paper that this exact strain had previously gone under a completely different name (BtCoV/4991) and was recovered from an abandoned copper mine where six workers had contracted severe SARS-like pneumonia.
Bret steps back to contextualize the institutional setting: for over a decade, the Wuhan Institute of Virology—funded by international grants and working in collaboration with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance—justified its active hunting of bat viruses on the premise that discovering novel coronaviruses in the wild was essential for preventing future pandemics. When the Wuhan Institute first reported on this virus years prior, they published only a tiny fragment of its RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) gene used for phylogenetics. Only in 2020, after the pandemic broke out, did they claim to have sequenced the full RaTG13 genome, presenting its discovery as an obscure archival afterthought. Yuri underscores how suspicious it was to re-label the sample without acknowledging its lethal human history: “And why didn't she mention in the 2020 paper, why didn't she mention that she collected it in 2013 from a mine in which six people got SARS-like pneumonia.”
---
[19:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1168s) The 2012 Miner Pneumonias and Human Pre-Adaptation
Yuri details the 2012 outbreak in the Mojiang mine in Yunnan, where six miners clearing bat guano fell critically ill with severe respiratory failure. Two miners died rapidly, a third died later, and four were hospitalized for prolonged periods. Medical authorities and China's leading respiratory specialists consulted on the cases, directing that blood and sputum samples from the four surviving miners be sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to test for antibodies against emerging pathogens. Those tests came back positive for SARS IgG antibodies. Because the original SARS outbreak in mainland China had infected only roughly 5,000 people, the odds of random rural miners carrying genuine SARS-CoV antibodies were negligible. Instead, the test was picking up antibodies that cross-reacted with another closely related, SARS-like coronavirus circulating in that mine.
```mermaid
flowchart LR
accTitle: 2012 Mojiang Outbreak Investigation
accDescr: Flowchart tracing the investigation of the 2012 Mojiang miner pneumonia outbreak to antibody testing at WIV.
Miners["6 Miners clear guano<br/>(Tongguan, Mojiang, 2012)"] --> Illness["Severe SARS-like pneumonia<br/>(3 deaths, 3 recoveries)"]
Illness --> Samples["Blood & sputum sent to<br/>Wuhan Inst. of Virology"]
Samples --> Serology["Tested for viral antibodies<br/>SARS IgG positive (cross-reactive)"]
Serology --> Expeditions["Shi Zhengli field trips (2012–2013)<br/>Collection of BtCoV/4991 (RaTG13)"]
```
Crucially, this background was never disclosed in international scientific journals; it was uncovered only in 2020 by independent researchers and Twitter sleuths reading unindexed Chinese master's and doctoral theses written by the attending physicians. Yuri and Bret dismiss the official claim by Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak that this sample was deemed uninteresting and left forgotten in a freezer until 2020 as utterly implausible: finding a bat cave harboring a virus that actually caused human fatalities and generated cross-reactive antibodies was precisely what the lab had spent years hunting for. Bret stresses that the key anomaly of SARS-CoV-2 is that unlike natural spillover events—where a virus typically fumbles around clumsily in humans before adapting—the Wuhan pathogen appeared immediately pre-adapted for efficient human-to-human transmission: “The virus that emerges in Wuhan is ready to go. Right? It is... It is adapted to human beings. There is no evidence of a phase in which it is fumbling about trying to discover the means to infect human cells well enough to become spreadable. No evidence of that. It hits the ground and boom.”
- In 2012, six miners contracted pneumonia in a Mojiang mine; three died.
- Wuhan Institute tested survivor sera, detecting IgG antibodies that cross-reacted with SARS-CoV.
- These critical findings were omitted from Western publications and found only in un-translated Chinese academic theses.
- Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak maintained they left the sample unsequenced in a freezer for seven years, claiming it was considered unimportant.
- Natural spillovers rarely spark pandemics because novel animal viruses lack high affinity for human tissue; SARS-CoV-2 was fully optimized for human transmission from its very first detected cases.
[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1500s) The Renaming of Sample 4991 to RaTG13
Bret Weinstein begins by noting two crucial baseline observations: first, poorly adapted viruses do occasionally spill over into humans without causing historically catastrophic pandemics; second, a major research laboratory was behaving extraordinarily oddly regarding the very pathogen they claimed to be hunting. He asks Yuri Deigin to unpack the strange circumstances surrounding RaTG13, the bat coronavirus sequence unveiled after the COVID-19 pandemic began. Deigin explains that on January 29, 2020, Shi Zhengli published a paper introducing RaTG13 as the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2, claiming it had been collected in Yunnan in 2013 and stored without much notice. However, Shi only mentioned it in a brief, passing sentence—omitting any mention of the Mojiang copper mine where six miners contracted severe pneumonia while clearing bat guano.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Origin and Renaming of Sample 4991
accDescr: Diagram tracing the 2012 mine outbreak through the renaming of sample 4991 to RaTG13 in 2020.
subgraph S1["2012–2013: Discovery"]
A["Mojiang Mine (Yunnan, 2012)<br/>Miners sickened by pneumonia"] --> B["Sample collected (2013)<br/>Labeled 'BtCoV/4991'"]
end
subgraph S2["2016–2020: Publication & Rebranding"]
B --> C["2016 Publication<br/>Partial RdRp sequence published"]
C --> D["Jan 29, 2020 Paper<br/>Published as 'RaTG13'"]
end
subgraph S3["Discrepancy"]
D -.->|"No citation or cross-reference"| C
D --> E["Added '[4991]' to internal<br/>database entry without explanation"]
end
```
Deigin points out that this newly revealed strain was actually identical to an entry the Wuhan Institute of Virology had originally discovered and cataloged as "BtCoV/4991" (or sample 4991). The researchers gave it an entirely new designation without referencing their original 2016 paper where the partial sequence was first reported. Deigin documented this puzzle on Twitter, comparing the published sequences to see if they were the exact same strain. While online speculation ranged from researchers modifying an existing partial sequence to match SARS-CoV-2 to other lab manipulations, Deigin underscores that silently swapping designations without standard scholarly attribution is completely irregular:
> “Scientifically speaking, this is unacceptable. You would not rename a strain and not at least leave some pointer that explains why you renamed it and allows somebody to trace it.”
Eventually, an internal Chinese virus database added the label "4991" in brackets next to the RaTG13 entry, tacitly confirming they were the same entity, yet the lab offered no official public explanation. As Deigin observes, the 2013 fragment had already been submitted to GenBank years prior, making it impossible to conceal forever.
- Shi Zhengli published the RaTG13 sequence on January 29, 2020, declaring it the closest match to SARS-CoV-2 at roughly 96% identity.
- The original short sequence was collected in Yunnan in 2013 and published under the designation 4991 (BtCoV/4991) in a 2016 Wuhan Institute of Virology paper.
- The 2020 paper omitted both the historical name 4991 and citations to the authors' own 2016 paper describing the sample's collection.
- The original short fragment of sample 4991 remains permanently accessible on GenBank, where it was uploaded in 2013.
---
[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1800s) Vanishing Databases and Friendly Rivalries
Weinstein remarks that breaking the lineage of a viral sample by changing its name functions disturbingly like keeping "two sets of books" to obscure paper trails. He emphasizes that if deliberate, this practice is deeply unethical when investigating the roots of a deadly global crisis. Shifting to broader record-keeping, Deigin describes the mysterious disappearance of an online database curated by Shi Zhengli. Originally a publicly accessible repository of roughly 60 megabytes containing viral sequences, fragments, and field notes, it suddenly went offline. Deigin notes that on December 30, 2019, the database description was quietly edited under Shi's login to scrub references to arthropod vectors, host-switching interactions, and cross-species transmission, replacing those descriptions with generic references to bat and rodent coronaviruses.
| Event / Issue | Description Reported by Deigin |
|:--- |:--- |
| **December 30, 2019 Edits** | Terms like "arthropod vectors" and "host switching interactions" were stripped from the database metadata and replaced with "bat and rodent coronaviruses." |
| **Audit Trail** | Edits were caught via built-in system change-tracking logs attached to Shi Zhengli's user ID. |
| **Missing Download Link** | The 60 MB sequence file was removed; clicking the download link yields only an empty archive. |
| **Host Response** | System administrators told inquiring researchers they had not kept any backup copy of the data. |
When outside researchers pressed the database hosting provider to restore the offline repository, the host claimed no backup had ever been kept—an excuse Deigin dismisses as "laughable." Weinstein and Deigin agree that because the file was only 60 megabytes, rival virology teams almost certainly downloaded local copies during ongoing surveillance work. In particular, Deigin points to the lab of Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a prominent collaborator and rival of Shi Zhengli:
> “Ralph Baric is the PI in the other major coronavirus laboratory. He's in the US. He has collaborated with the Zhengli lab in China at times. They are also competitors. This is the way science works. So they're friendly competitors who are constantly, as you point out in your Medium article, one-upping each other with respect to their ability to manipulate viruses and things like this.”
Both Deigin and Weinstein issue an open appeal to any research groups holding an archived copy of the missing 60 MB Wuhan database to make it public, noting that its contents are critically valuable for evaluating lab-origin hypotheses and tracing the evolutionary path of SARS-CoV-2.
[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2100s) Ralph Baric’s Stance and the Accumulating Coincidences
Bret Weinstein notes that the Ralph Baric lab has been remarkably quiet regarding the abnormalities and coincidences surrounding SARS-CoV-2, effectively going along with the institutional consensus that treats a laboratory leak as too preposterous to warrant consideration. Yuri Deigin points out that Baric did briefly state in an earlier interview that a lab leak is theoretically possible and cannot be completely ruled out. Deigin recalls hearing Baric discuss on virology podcasts—such as *This Week in Virology* (TWiV)—that as of yet, there is still zero evidence pointing to a natural origin, and researchers have failed to identify an intermediate host. While Bret welcomes that Baric at least conceded it as an open possibility, he laments the lack of public clarity:
> “I mean, I hope he actually goes on the record and says what he really thinks, because I don't think anybody has been quoting him verbatim about his stance on this being either a lab leak or impossibility of a lab leak.”
Bret then steps back to summarize the massive cluster of coincidental circumstances:
- The outbreak emerged in Wuhan, the home of China’s preeminent coronavirus research institute.
- It began at the end of the year in winter, a season when local bats were hibernating.
- The Chinese government itself eventually conceded that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was not the actual ground-zero origin of the virus.
- SARS-CoV-2 is not an ordinary bat virus, as its receptor-binding machinery is not optimized for bats.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Coincidences Challenging a Natural Spillover
accDescr: Diagram mapping out the suspicious factors pointing away from a straightforward natural zoonotic jump in Wuhan during late 2019.
subgraph Circumstantial ["Epidemiological & Geographical Anomalies"]
A["Wuhan Outbreak Location"] --> C["Proximity to Wuhan Institute of Virology"]
B["Winter Emergence (Late 2019)"] --> D["Local Bats in Hibernation"]
E["Huanan Wet Market"] --> F["Market Origin Disproven by Authorities"]
end
subgraph Biological ["Molecular & Binding Anomalies"]
G["Spike Protein / RBD"] --> H["Not Optimized for Bat ACE2"]
H --> I["High Affinity for Human ACE2"]
J["Missing Intermediate Host"] --> I
end
```
---
[37:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2236s) The Pangolin Connection: RBD vs. RBM
The discussion shifts to the spike protein and the receptor-binding domain (RBD), specifically the receptor-binding motif (RBM)—the specific contact interface that latches onto the host’s ACE2 receptor to facilitate viral cellular entry. When Yuri mentions that the RBM came from a pangolin virus, Bret halts him to clarify a crucial scientific distinction: we do not know that the sequence physically *came* from a pangolin, only that the closest known sequence discovered so far was isolated from a pangolin.
Yuri agrees, explaining that this pangolin-like RBM throws a significant wrench into phylogenetic trees. Across the vast majority of its genome, the bat coronavirus RaTG13 remains the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2. However, inside the spike protein, the RBM aligns almost identically with a sequence identified in Malayan pangolins rather than RaTG13. Intriguingly, this pangolin-derived motif binds to human ACE2 with higher affinity than it does to the pangolin’s own ACE2 receptor, indicating an anomalous level of pre-adaptation to human hosts. According to official reports, this strain was allegedly sequenced from smuggled pangolins intercepted by Chinese customs in Guangdong in 2019 after the animals fell sick and died of respiratory illness.
> “And moreover, the more interesting part is that it actually binds to a human receptor better than it does to a pangolin receptor. So it seems a bit more optimized or adapted to humans than to pangolins, although the strain is supposedly extracted from pangolins that were smuggled or captured by Chinese customs from smugglers in Guangdong in 2019.”
---
[40:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2402s) Synonymous Mutations, Nucleotide Drift, and Passaging
Bret and Yuri delve into the precise biochemistry and length of the motif to determine just how similar these sequences actually are. The entire receptor-binding domain spans roughly a couple hundred amino acids and remains broadly conserved across SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, and the Guangdong pangolin strain. However, the critical functional core—the receptor-binding motif (RBM)—is only about 78 to 79 amino acids long:
- At the amino acid (protein) level, the SARS-CoV-2 RBM is nearly identical to the pangolin strain, differing by only a single amino acid.
- At the nucleotide (RNA) level, there is an approximate 12% sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and the pangolin sequence.
Bret explains the evolutionary significance of this discrepancy for non-specialists: because the genetic code uses triplet codons to specify only 20 possible amino acids, redundant codons allow for "synonymous mutations"—changes in nucleotide letters that do not alter the resulting translated amino acid. Because the functional binding shape remains preserved despite silent genetic drift, some researchers argue that artificial cell passaging or genetic engineering would struggle to produce that many silent nucleotide substitutions naturally without a prolonged period of evolutionary time. Bret counters that the unresolved question is precisely how much time, or how many serial passages through cultured cells or animal models, would be required to generate that degree of divergence.
> “Although the amino acids are the same, the nucleotides have like a 12% difference. So you're talking about what we call synonymous mutations, right?”
---
[42:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2567s) The Mystery of RaTG13 and Sample 4991
Bret brings the focus back to RaTG13, the closest reference bat coronavirus published by Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in early 2020. Research communities quickly realized that RaTG13 was identical to a virus fragment the lab had previously cataloged in 2016 as BtCoV/4991 (derived from a 2013 bat fecal collection in a Yunnan mineshaft). Bret asks Yuri whether any physical sample of RaTG13 actually exists in the real world.
Yuri explains that the Wuhan lab claimed they merely resequenced the old 2013 fecal swab and possessed no live viral stock. This claim has generated substantial skepticism among independent researchers, with some questioning whether the physical sample exists at all or if the sequence was assembled or altered in silico:
> “Some people are skeptical at all that RaTG13 even exists, that the sample exists, that they actually resequenced. People are skeptical about that and think that maybe they came up with the sequence in other ways, other creative ways.”
Bret stresses that because public genomic databases operate largely on the honor system, there is no technical barrier preventing an institution from modifying an existing sequence (like BtCoV/4991) on a computer and uploading it under a new name without providing physical biological reference material:
- It is entirely possible that a real physical specimen existed, was fully exhausted during testing, or was discarded.
- It is equally possible that RaTG13 exists purely as a modified digital text file uploaded to databases to establish a misleading phylogenetic anchor.
- Without access to raw physical samples or unedited laboratory notebooks, both possibilities remain firmly on the table.
[45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2700s) Reverse Genetics and Resurrecting Viruses from Code
Yuri Deigin and Bret Weinstein discuss the integrity of scientific records and the technical capacity to resurrect viruses from sequence data alone. Deigin points out that in normal scientific practice, researchers take one another at their word because there is usually no incentive to fabricate results; however, in a forensic investigation involving a lab leak, that assumption breaks down. If a lab possessed an original viral sequence, they could synthesize that virus, passage it repeatedly through cell cultures to accumulate mutations, re-sequence the mutated strain, and deceptively claim the altered sequence was the genuine sample gathered years earlier in the field.
Weinstein asks whether modern technology allows scientists to recreate a live pathogen entirely from digital code, even if every physical specimen in nature and the laboratory had been destroyed. Deigin affirms that this is standard practice in viral reverse genetics. Researchers divide an RNA virus’s genome into a series of DNA fragments (typically around seven), order them from commercial DNA synthesis providers, and insert them into host cell cultures that transcribe the DNA back into infectious viral RNA. Deigin notes that within just a month of the pandemic’s start, two separate teams—one in Switzerland and another at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston—independently assembled live SARS-CoV-2 strictly from the Chinese sequence downloaded off the internet.
```mermaid
flowchart LR
accTitle: Viral Reverse Genetics Assembly
accDescr: Process of synthesizing an infectious coronavirus from a digital sequence file.
A["Download Digital Sequence"] --> B["Synthesize ~7 DNA Fragments"]
B --> C["Transfect into Cell Culture"]
C --> D["Cell Transcribes DNA to RNA"]
D --> E["Infectious Live Virus"]
```
- When Bret Weinstein asks if modern capabilities allow researchers to install a synthetic genome into a viral coat and recreate an extinct virus, Yuri Deigin replies: “Yeah, absolutely. If you have the code, the sequence, you can just print the DNA, the DNA version of the RNA virus. That’s what is normally done in viral reverse genetics.”
- The Swiss team downloaded the published sequence, ordered DNA fragments synthesized in the United States, waited roughly three weeks for delivery, and assembled the live virus in Switzerland within a single week.
- Weinstein observes the staggering implications of modern biotechnology: “It’s a terrifying level of power.”
- Deigin agrees that genetic engineering has grown exponentially: “The things you can do today with genetics or life systems, yes, you have unlimited power to to do bad things.”
---
[50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3000s) The Low Cost of Synthesis and the Pangolin Recombination Puzzle
The discussion shifts to how accessible and cheap viral engineering has become. Deigin estimates that synthesizing a ~30,000-base coronavirus genome from scratch costs only a few hundred thousand dollars in total laboratory infrastructure, and the raw custom DNA printing itself costs around $30,000 in the West—or up to tenfold less when outsourced to contract research organizations (CROs) in China or India.
Deigin pivots to the genomic architecture of SARS-CoV-2. The backbone of the virus is closest to the bat coronavirus RaTG13, but its receptor-binding motif (RBM)—the precise region responsible for binding the host receptor—shares near-identity with a pangolin coronavirus. For a natural recombinant virus to arise, two distinct viral strains must infect the very same individual animal, enter the very same host cell, and replicate simultaneously. While bats live in massive, high-density roosting colonies where viral transmission thrives, pangolins are solitary mammals with small populations, making double-infection events vanishingly improbable. Weinstein points out that despite the pangolin being put forward as the putative intermediate host, there appears to be little genuine institutional appetite to hunt down the true wild lineage. Deigin emphasizes that instead of ignoring the lead, investigators should examine the historical freezer samples stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, especially the lung and serum samples taken from the Yunnan miners who fell sick with severe SARS-like pneumonia in 2012.
- Custom gene and peptide printing is now an inexpensive global commodity handled routinely by third-party contract research organizations (CROs).
- Natural recombination requires co-infection: two different viral lineages must physically penetrate the same single cell at the same time to swap genetic segments.
- Bats roost by the thousands in caves, facilitating frequent viral exchange, whereas solitary pangolins provide virtually no ecological opportunity for mixed-strain "parties."
- Yuri Deigin highlights the most critical target for an honest investigation: “I think we should really go back to the fridge in the Wuhan Institute and check the miners’ samples.”
---
[55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3300s) Laboratory Chimeras, Cell Passaging, and the Novel Furin Cleavage Site
Weinstein breaks down the phylogenetic anomaly of SARS-CoV-2: when mapped onto an evolutionary tree, almost the entire genome roots cleanly beside the bat virus from the horseshoe bat (*Rhinolophus*), but the critical spike-contact region abruptly clusters with the pangolin strain. He argues that rather than relying on a bizarre, once-in-a-million ecological coincidence in an endangered pangolin, it is far more parsimonious that a laboratory swapped the receptor-binding domains to engineer a chimera. Researchers worried about cross-species spillover routinely swap motifs to test human transmissibility. Once a chimeric virus is constructed, scientists often passage it serially through human cell lines—such as HeLa cells, the immortal cell line derived from Henrietta Lacks—driving rapid evolutionary adaptation that optimizes the virus for human infectivity in ways human engineers could never design manually from first principles.
Deigin then introduces what he views as an even more striking anomaly: the novel furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein. Such a cleavage site does not exist in any other known lineage B beta-coronavirus within its phylogenetic neighborhood. Deigin explains the molecular mechanism: for a coronavirus to enter a host cell after attaching to the ACE2 receptor, its spike protein must undergo a two-step proteolytic priming. Cleavage cuts the spike into two subunits, exposing a hydrophobic fusion peptide that embeds into the host cell membrane and initiates membrane fusion. SARS-CoV-2 features a polybasic insert of four amino acids that creates an optimal recognition motif for the ubiquitous human protease furin, drastically broadening the virus's tissue tropism across human organs.
- A standard phylogenetic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 yields contradictory trees depending on which section of the genome is analyzed: the backbone clusters with bat virus RaTG13, while the receptor-binding motif aligns with pangolins.
- Serial passaging in culture allows a composite virus to adapt rapidly to human receptors, evolving enhanced transmission characteristics under selective pressure.
- Yuri Deigin highlights the novelty of this feature among related coronaviruses: “Right, and we didn't even get to the furin site, which is another big surprise in a beta-coronavirus, which isn't seen anywhere else with anything close to less than 60% similarity.”
- Furin proteases reside within host cells, on cell membranes, and inside the extracellular matrix, acting like specialized molecular scissors that cleave specific four-amino-acid sequences and vastly expand systemic viral spread.
[01:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3600s) Furin Cleavage Sites and Evolutionary Disadvantages in Betacoronaviruses
Bret Weinstein and Yuri Deigin explore the functional significance of the furin cleavage site and its conspicuous absence across the broader phylogenetic tree of lineage B betacoronaviruses. Deigin explains that human cells already express the furin protease; when a virus displays a specific peptide sequence recognizing this enzyme, host proteases cleave the viral spike protein efficiently at the S1/S2 boundary. This cleavage facilitates cell membrane fusion and vastly broadens viral tropism, making the pathogen far less dependent on an exact receptor match in different tissues and across different animal host species. While similar cleavage motifs or less efficient protease cut sites appear in alphacoronaviruses and other coronavirus families, they are conspicuously absent from the entire surveyed subgenus of bat SARS-related betacoronaviruses.
When Weinstein presses Deigin to quantify how improbable it is to find a functional furin cleavage site in a horseshoe bat-derived betacoronavirus, Deigin notes that surveillance across the lineage makes its emergence statistically astonishing. Moreover, Deigin points out an empirical anomaly from cell-culture experiments: when SARS-CoV-2 is cultured in green monkey kidney cells (Vero cells), the furin site frequently mutates away or suffers deletions. Weinstein observes that this instability suggests an evolutionary trade-off cost. In wild horseshoe bats or under natural betacoronavirus selection pressures, retaining an active furin site appears to be functionally detrimental, meaning natural selective pressures would actively weed it out rather than preserve it.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Furin Cleavage Mechanism and Evolutionary Pressure
accDescr: Diagram contrasting natural betacoronavirus cleavage against SARS-CoV-2 furin-mediated entry and cell-culture decay.
subgraph Natural["Wild Betacoronaviruses"]
A["Horseshoe Bat Lineage"] --> B["Non-Furin Cleavage Sites"]
B --> C["Inefficient Human Host Protease Cleavage"]
C --> D["Narrow Host/Cell Tropism"]
end
subgraph Engineered["SARS-CoV-2 Phenotype"]
E["12-Nucleotide Insert"] --> F["Furin Cleavage Site (4 Amino Acids)"]
F --> G["Human Furin Pre-Activation"]
G --> H["Broad Cross-Species Infectivity & Fusion"]
end
subgraph Selection["Cell Culture Instability"]
F -.->|"In Vitro Passaging (e.g., Vero cells)"| I["Deletions / Mutates Away"]
I --> J["Underlying Trade-Off Cost Revealed"]
end
```
- Cleaving proteases: Host furin cuts specific recognition sequences, dramatically facilitating fusion even when spike binding affinity to target species receptors is imperfect.
- Lineage rarity: Betacoronaviruses (specifically the SARS-related lineage B found in horseshoe bats) lack this furin cleavage site naturally, whereas alphacoronaviruses sometimes carry them.
- Instability in Vero cells: In laboratory culture passaging, the furin site tends to experience spontaneous deletions, indicating counter-selection in specific cell lines.
- As Yuri Deigin notes when assessing its baseline phylogenetic probability: “Well, just by, you know, the phylogeny or surveillance of this beta coronavirus lineage, having none of them having the furin site, and this one, SARS-2, having one, it's just statistically very unlikely to expect it to see there.”
---
[01:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3900s) The 12-Nucleotide Insert, Rare Arginine Codons, and the FauI Restriction Marker
Weinstein outlines three competing hypotheses to explain how an unprecedented furin cleavage site appeared in SARS-CoV-2: an extraordinarily rare natural evolutionary recombination event; deliberate engineering by a laboratory seeking to probe gain-of-function phenotypes; or an in vitro passaging experiment where unnatural laboratory conditions favored the acquisition of the motif. Because the furin motif consists of just four amino acids, Weinstein asks if both synthetic insertion and passaging could generate it, which Deigin confirms. Deigin highlights that the structural nature of this genomic feature deepens the mystery: in nature, cleavage motifs generally evolve through point mutations within an existing sequence of static length. In SARS-CoV-2, however, the site appears as a de novo insertion of twelve nucleotides into an otherwise aligned genomic backbone.
Deigin reveals an additional, subtle architectural curiosity buried within the nucleotide code of the 12-nucleotide insert. The four amino acids introduced are coded by specific codons, including two consecutive arginines encoded by CGG codons—codons that are otherwise exceptionally rare in betacoronavirus genomes. Strikingly, this specific nucleotide arrangement generates a functional FauI restriction endonuclease site. Deigin explains that in synthetic biology, restriction enzyme recognition sequences are intentionally incorporated into genetic inserts to allow rapid, cost-effective screening via restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP). By running an RFLP digest, researchers can immediately verify whether an engineered colony retains the furin site or whether it has mutated away, all without the expense and delay of full-genome sequencing. Weinstein concludes that while each clue individually could conceivably be dismissed as natural coincidence, their conjunction appears remarkably engineered.
- Sequence size: The functional furin cleavage site spans four amino acids (proline-arginine-arginine-alanine, or PRRA), corresponding to an exact 12-nucleotide insert.
- Point mutations versus insertions: Natural viruses that acquire altered cleavage dynamics typically do so via point mutations that preserve sequence length; SARS-CoV-2 exhibits a sudden 12-nucleotide addition.
- Rare arginine codons: The tandem arginines within the cleavage site are encoded by rare CGG codons.
- FauI restriction enzyme site: The insert forms a recognized cut site for the FauI restriction enzyme, allowing quick RFLP gel electrophoresis checks to monitor whether passaged viral stocks retain the insert.
- As Yuri Deigin summarizes the cumulative weight of these molecular features: “Again, they're not proof of anything, but they're just add to the bag of questions that kind of weighing heavily on the tip of the scale.”
---
[01:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4200s) Unintended Lab Evolution, Passaging Artifacts, and the Mouse Telomere Parallel
Deigin broadens the definition of the lab-leak hypothesis, stressing that a laboratory origin does not strictly require human genetic engineering with recombinant tools. Everything that occurs in nature can occur inside a research institution, particularly when diverse wild reservoirs are collected and concentrated in the same physical space. Institutions such as the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention held live wild bats caught during viral surveillance, while wildlife rescue centers in Guangdong housed confiscated smuggled Malayan pangolins. Deigin notes that co-housing or cross-culturing specimens from disparate geographical origins—such as bats from Yunnan and pangolins from Malaysia—creates opportunities for natural selection and viral recombination that are orders of magnitude higher inside a research setting than across fragmented wild ecosystems.
Weinstein strongly validates this concept of accidental lab-driven selection by drawing a parallel to his own academic research on mouse telomeres. For years, scientists assumed laboratory mice naturally had extraordinarily long telomeres; Weinstein discovered that the high-turnover breeding protocols of commercial facilities inadvertently exerted intense selective pressure favoring animals with hyper-elongated telomeres to resist senescence, an evolutionary shift breeding colonies produced without scientists realizing it. Applying this evolutionary principle to virology, Weinstein warns that serial passaging inside specialized human cell lines or cancer cultures inevitably selects for idiosyncratic adaptations. For instance, passaging within temperature-controlled, indoor facilities might select for viruses that transmit robustly indoors while sacrificing environmental durability against outdoor solar radiation, leaving artificial evolutionary imprints on the emergent pathogen.
- Natural selection inside research institutions: Captive holding pens or accidental cross-contamination allow viral recombination between species that would never encounter each other in nature.
- Geographic discordance: Yunnan horseshoe bats and Malaysian pangolins were handled and sampled by research networks, collapsing thousands of miles of ecological separation.
- Weinstein’s mouse telomere discovery: Commercial laboratory breeding selected for massively lengthened telomeres in lab mice without the intent or awareness of the researchers, demonstrating that unrecognized selective pressures routinely warp captive organisms.
- Indoor versus outdoor adaptation: Serial laboratory passaging could explain SARS-CoV-2's pronounced capacity for indoor superspreading alongside its relative vulnerability to outdoor environmental factors.
- As Yuri Deigin emphasizes regarding the virological establishment's insistence on natural selection: “Connectional selection can be at work in a lab without even the scientists knowing it. They can just have some infected bats and infected pangolins. And it's actually a much higher odds of happening in a lab than in some remote location in Yunnan or Malaysia, where the pangolins normally live.”
[01:15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4500s) The Urgency of Truth and Global Scientific Responsibility
Bret Weinstein emphasizes that determining the true origins of SARS-CoV-2 is not about assigning blame, but about understanding the biological reality of what humans are fighting. If the virus is not well-adapted to outdoor transmission right now, people need to be disciplined so selective pressure does not push it to adapt to outdoor spread. Settling whether it is wild-derived or laboratory-derived requires either locating an intermediate wild host or getting complete transparency from the Wuhan laboratories. Yuri Deigin points out that getting transparency will be nearly impossible unless there is massive international pressure or an internal whistleblower, noting that the authorities hold all the cards. Weinstein highlights Deigin's growing impact on the global discussion, pointing out that respected figures like Matt Ridley in *The Washington Post* and authors in the *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists* have cited Deigin's deep-dive analysis.
Weinstein praises Deigin for his objective, evidence-driven approach, contrasting it with conspiratorial actors who merely seek to confirm prior biases. Both speakers openly state that they would prefer to be proven wrong, as a natural zoonotic origin would be far less concerning than a laboratory breach. However, Weinstein insists that if a lab escape is indeed the most probable explanation, the mainstream virology establishment must abandon deceptive narratives and tell the public the truth. Crucially, Weinstein explains that even if the virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory through chimeric engineering and cell passaging, it cannot simply be dismissed as an exclusively Chinese failure. The international scientific establishment, including funding agencies like the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), actively collaborated in and funded these lines of research.
> “And the most important thing is that in an effort not to take responsibility that we don't bury the evidence of what the virus is, because that evidence is essential for us figuring out how to deal with it, which is obviously to any reasonable person the most important question on the table.” — Bret Weinstein
- Solving the virus's origin requires discovering an intermediate animal host in nature or obtaining full laboratory transparency in Wuhan.
- Matt Ridley referenced Deigin’s work in *The Washington Post*, and the *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists* similarly cited his findings.
- Global granting bodies, including the NIH, funded related coronavirus research, making the practice an international scientific responsibility rather than an isolated national issue.
---
[01:20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4800s) The Unjustified Risks of Gain-of-Function Research and Asymmetric Threats
Deigin turns to what he considers the second most pressing issue: re-evaluating the utility of gain-of-function research and implementing another global moratorium. Proponents originally justified dangerous gain-of-function experiments—dating back to the H5N1 avian influenza modifications—by promising they would predict pandemics, identify viruses poised for emergence, and generate life-saving vaccines and treatments. Deigin argues that these promises have yielded virtually nothing of tangible medical value while generating catastrophic global biological risks. Weinstein concurs, structuring the broader crisis into three distinct pillars: first, dealing immediately with the circulating SARS-CoV-2 virus based on its true origins; second, halting dangerous gain-of-function research globally; and third, addressing the terrifying proliferation of this dual-use technology.
Weinstein warns that even if reputable academic institutions enforce a strict research moratorium, the recipes and methods are already public. Amoral organizations or rogue states aiming to alter the geopolitical hierarchy could quietly repurpose these published protocols to engineer biological agents for power or financial gain. Deigin agrees, observing that the current pandemic has served as a wake-up call for potential bad actors who may not have previously appreciated how easily a pathogen can bring modern civilization to a standstill. A malicious entity would not even need an advanced laboratory; they could steal or collect a virus sample and intentionally disperse it in crowded civilian hubs like subways or churches to decimate an adversary’s economy.
> “Humanity was promised originally that those studies would help prevent pandemics that would provide vaccines and treatments to people... Those promises have come up empty and we're nowhere, I don't think, closer to any treatment or vaccine from those studies that we were before they were conducted.” — Yuri Deigin
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Three Core Problems of SARS-CoV-2 and Lab Research
accDescr: Diagram illustrating the three distinct challenges outlined by Bret Weinstein and Yuri Deigin regarding pandemic origin, future oversight, and asymmetric risks.
subgraph Problem2["2. Research Oversight"]
D["Gain-of-Function Studies"] --> E["Enact global moratorium"]
E --> F["Weigh zero proven medical benefit vs. catastrophic risk"]
end
subgraph Problem3["3. Proliferation & Asymmetric Threats"]
G["Publicly Available Protocols"] --> H["Rogue states & bad actors"]
H --> I["Asymmetric economic disruption or bioterrorism"]
end
```
---
[01:25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=5100s) Mundane Motives, False Flags, and Scientific Self-Correction
Exploring the theoretical weaponization of viruses, Weinstein remarks that while SARS-CoV-2 is an ineffective tactical bioweapon due to high rates of asymptomatic spread, military lethality is not the only potential motive for malevolent actors. He notes that financial incentives alone provide a mundane motive: anyone who knows an engineered pathogen is about to hit the human population could short specific industries—such as tourism, cruises, hotels, and airlines—turning modest investments into fortunes while the rest of the world remains blind to the coming disruption. He explicitly clarifies that there is zero evidence SARS-CoV-2 was released intentionally, reiterating that an accidental leak of well-intentioned research remains the most plausible lab-based scenario.
Weinstein raises another theoretical scenario: if an outside actor had engineered a virus, releasing it in Wuhan would provide the perfect cover, since the presence of two coronavirus research laboratories would naturally draw suspicion. Deigin pushes back on this framing, arguing that pulling off such an operation would require extraordinarily deep insider knowledge. The engineered virus is genetically matched to RaTG13 (and sample 4991), a sequence kept specifically by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Unless an outside actor had total access to the Institute's private databases to frame them precisely, an intentional false-flag setup remains a remote possibility. Both agree that discussing such scenarios openly is necessary to strip away the stigma of conspiracy talk, while re-affirming that the best outcome would be discovering a natural, ecological origin that exonerates the scientists entirely.
> “I think actually we're modeling something that I want to see people be better about, which is conspiracies exist in the world... and we have to learn how to talk about the possibility without being labeled crazy for engaging in even considering it.” — Bret Weinstein
- Financial gain through advance market shorting represents a plausible, mundane motive for intentional biological disruption, independent of traditional military doctrine.
- Wuhan houses two major institutes studying bat coronaviruses, making it an obvious target for deflecting blame if a hypothetical bad actor wanted to stage an incident.
- Framing Wuhan would require intimate, insider-level access to obscure laboratory strains like RaTG13 and its precursor sequence, 4991.
- Both speakers maintain that an accidental leak from benevolent gain-of-function research remains far more probable than any intentional release scenario.
[01:30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=5400s) Surveillance Failures and Systemic Industrial Disasters
Reflecting on the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus, Yuri Deigin emphasizes the urgent necessity of establishing global biosecurity infrastructure comparable to international nuclear monitoring bodies. With synthetic biology tools and viral engineering capabilities becoming available at ever lower price points, Deigin argues that humanity needs a unified international surveillance agency capable of identifying, isolating, and rapidly sequencing novel pathogens the moment unusual infection clusters emerge in any locality. Even setting aside hypotheses of lab leaks or intentional manipulation, Deigin expresses deep disappointment in how authorities handled the initial outbreak in Wuhan, pointing out that failing to institute immediate lockdowns and allowing millions to mingle and travel internationally for Chinese New Year celebrations doomed the world to a global catastrophe that is only beginning to devastate continents like Africa and South America.
Bret Weinstein shares this dread, characterizing the pandemic as an alarming wake-up call and a preview of systemic fragility across modern high-risk industries. Weinstein observes a recurring civilizational failure where the public only learns about the perilous activities of specialized industries after a catastrophe has already taken place, pointing to a historical chain of institutional blind spots: the 2008 financial collapse, the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the massive Aliso Canyon methane leak. Rather than repeatedly conducting post-mortems once "the cat's out of the bag," Weinstein calls for proactive transparency and rigorous oversight of extraordinarily hazardous technological endeavors before disastrous breaches occur.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Systemic High-Risk Industry Disasters
accDescr: Timeline of major industrial and technological failures leading to COVID-19.
subgraph Precedents["Historical Precedents of Unregulated Risk"]
A["2008 Financial Crisis"] --> B["2010 Deepwater Horizon Spill"]
B --> C["2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster"]
C --> D["2015-2016 Aliso Canyon Gas Leak"]
end
subgraph Pandemic["Current Biological Crisis"]
D --> E["SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic"]
E --> F["Need for Global Bio-Surveillance Agency"]
end
```
- **Surveillance proposal**: Establishment of an international monitoring body modeled on nuclear non-proliferation agencies to track bioterrorism and perform rapid pathogen sequencing on localized viral clusters.
- **Wuhan containment failure**: The delay in enacting travel bans prior to the Lunar New Year travel rush allowed SARS-CoV-2 to seed global chains of transmission.
- **Historical disaster parallels**: Weinstein compares the virological failure to catastrophic industrial oversights in high finance (2008), deep-sea oil drilling (Deepwater Horizon), nuclear power (Fukushima), and fossil fuel storage (Aliso Canyon).
---
[01:33:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=5595s) Long-Term Pathological Unknowns and the Flu Fallacy
Addressing the biological trajectory of the virus, Weinstein warns that even if SARS-CoV-2 eventually attenuates to severity levels comparable to seasonal influenza, permanently saddling the human population with an additional endemic respiratory pathogen of that magnitude represents a massive historical setback. Deigin adds that because science has only known this virus for approximately six months, its potential for chronic, insidious pathology remains completely uncharted. He draws an unsettling comparison to feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV)—a feline coronavirus that establishes persistence by hiding inside host immune cells, eventually turning fatal in roughly ten percent of infected cats. Invoking Donald Rumsfeld's famous aphorism regarding "unknown unknowns," Deigin stresses that science cannot yet rule out long-term systemic damage, noting that autopsies from the 2003 SARS outbreak revealed viral invasion of testicular tissue and that early clinical reports from China similarly indicated potential male fertility impairments following SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Weinstein fully concurs with this warning, noting that he and his wife, Heather Heying, frequently reference Rumsfeld as "the Yogi Berra of geopolitical phenomena" because the phrase captures genuine epistemic blind spots. Weinstein highlights plausible worst-case mechanisms, including the pathogen sequestering itself in immunological or neurological tissues, or sustaining mutation rates that facilitate repeated reinfections throughout a patient's lifespan. Both speakers lament that political leadership—particularly in the United States—has downplayed the threat by equating it to a conventional influenza. Deigin and Weinstein candidly admit that they themselves initially misjudged the virus based on the precedent of SARS and MERS, expecting the outbreak to burn itself out locally. As Weinstein puts it: “And I keep trying to alert people that just the size of the unknowns here, the magnitude of them is so great that we are wise to be treating this very seriously.”
---
[01:36:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=5818s) The Backlash to Yuri Deigin’s Medium Investigation
Turning to the aftermath of Yuri Deigin’s comprehensive Medium essay detailing the genealogy of SARS-CoV-2 and gain-of-function research, Weinstein asks what the personal and professional fallout has looked like. Deigin admits the immediate reaction was harrowing, particularly within the Russian-speaking online sphere. Rather than engaging with the molecular data, structural papers, or published literature he cited, critics unleashed ferocious ad hominem attacks, questioning his basic intelligence, his scientific literacy, and his right to analyze academic publications. Deigin explains that he intentionally designed the essay as a factual synthesis for skeptical readers to evaluate on their own merits, inviting people to point out specific technical errors rather than simply dismissing him as a conspiracist.
Weinstein explains that this savage reaction is a standard playbook for enforcing scientific orthodoxy: “As somebody with considerable experience with things in this neighborhood, what they were trying to do was make you hurt to dissuade you from continuing and to make an example of you so that others would know not to make the error in their view that you made.” Weinstein emphasizes that Deigin’s true "infraction" was performing an honest, rigorous analysis in public and rendering dense virological literature accessible to non-specialists, which had directly enabled Weinstein and many others to trace the scientific paper trail behind coronavirus chimeric engineering.
- **Nature of the attacks**: Hostile critics resorted to personal insults questioning Deigin's qualifications rather than attempting to refute the genomic evidence or scientific papers he highlighted.
- **Weaponized social pressure**: Weinstein frames the aggressive pushback as an intentional effort to deter independent researchers from scrutinizing gain-of-function research.
- **Educational impact**: Deigin’s article served as a critical roadmap for scientists outside cellular virology, demystifying the history of lab-created chimeric coronaviruses and furin cleavage site insertions.
---
[01:40:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6008s) Silencing Hypotheses, Digital Anomalies, and the Need for an Audit
Deigin notes that once the initial wave of hostility abated, reception shifted decisively, bringing in an influx of supportive messages from both the public and working scientists. Many readers reported that the essay was an eye-opener regarding the sheer ubiquity and extreme hazards of gain-of-function virology research, while several scientists reached out privately to confirm that the lab-leak possibility cannot be ruled out and deserves equal consideration alongside zoonotic spillover. Weinstein rejects the weaponized label of "conspiracy theory," insisting that rigorous inquiry requires exploring legitimate "conspiracy hypotheses," especially when mainstream virologists exhibit an unnatural, coordinated uniformity to suppress inquiry into laboratory origins. As Weinstein argues: “Conspiracy hypothesis is really what we're talking about. Yes, it does appear at the very least that there is a conspiracy to prevent us from investigating what happened here.”
The conversation takes a chilling turn when Weinstein asks Deigin about recent technical difficulties with his computer. Deigin reveals that his system experienced sudden, severe disruptions and internet connectivity failures caused by suspected malware. Weinstein reveals that he, too, has experienced dramatic, unexplained computer anomalies recently, and notes that a third independent researcher probing the lab-leak origin has encountered identical technical troubles. While acknowledging that computer glitches occur routinely, Weinstein contends that a cluster of severe technological disruptions among individuals investigating powerful institutions crosses into suspicious territory.
Concluding the segment, Deigin reiterates that resolving the origin of the pandemic requires forensic transparency rather than dismissive pronouncements. True resolution demands full international access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, independent examination of clinical samples taken from the 2012 Mojiang miners, and direct, independent re-sequencing of the bat coronavirus RaTG13 to verify whether the published sequence matches the physical samples in the institute's possession.
- **Gain-of-function awareness**: Deigin’s essay successfully educated a wider audience on the scale of risky pathogen enhancement research occurring in academic laboratories worldwide.
- **Anomalous digital interference**: Multiple independent researchers actively investigating the lab-leak hypothesis, including Deigin and Weinstein, experienced sudden, disruptive computer failures and suspected malware attacks.
- **Core demands for an independent inquiry**:
1. Full physical and operational access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for international bodies such as the World Health Organization.
2. Independent access to the biological samples obtained from the sickened miners in Yunnan.
3. Independent verification and re-sequencing of the RaTG13 viral sample to validate the genetic data published by Wuhan researchers.
[01:45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6300s) Immunity and Crowdfunded Incentives for Whistleblowers
Bret Weinstein raises the question of whether society ought to offer legal immunity to scientists engaged in legitimate research—distinct from bioweapons programs—if SARS-CoV-2 ultimately turns out to be the result of a laboratory leak. Yuri Deigin fully supports the idea, explaining that the bench scientists conducting the research were not engaged in anything unlawful and should not bear personal liability. Instead, Yuri argues, legal and moral culpability rests squarely on those orchestrating an active cover-up. What is urgently needed, Yuri contends, is a robust framework of incentives to encourage insiders to come forward safely, including witness protection, legal indemnity, and substantial financial rewards.
Surprised that Western governments have not established formal reward structures despite demanding transparent inquiries, Yuri suggests establishing a crowdfunded tip hotline for coronavirus origins using cryptocurrency. Because traditional banking transactions can be tracked by authoritarian regimes, a decentralized, untraceable cryptocurrency bounty would enable scientists, laboratory staff, or their acquaintances within China to deliver actionable evidence without destroying their lives. Bret endorses the proposal as an ideal proof-of-concept for how cryptocurrency can serve the public good. Both agree that the global priority must be establishing the historical truth of the pandemic's emergence, regardless of whether that origin lies in nature or in a lab.
> “Let's just say humanity has an overarching need to know what took place in order to manage what we now are encountering.” — Bret Weinstein
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Proposed Whistleblower Incentive Architecture
accDescr: Diagram illustrating the flow of anonymous tips and cryptocurrency rewards to protect whistleblowers.
subgraph Source["Insiders & Witnesses"]
W["Lab Whistleblower / Insider"]
end
subgraph Protection["Secure Protocol"]
H["Anonymous Tip Hotline"]
C["Crowdfunded Crypto Bounty"]
end
W -->|"Actionable evidence"| H
C -->|"Untraceable reward"| W
H --> I
I --> Truth
```
[01:50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6600s) Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Fallacy of Spillover Hunting
Bret brings up Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, whose name repeatedly surfaces in mainstream media dismissals and mockery of the lab-leak hypothesis. Yuri explains that Daszak has built a career securing tens of millions of dollars in federal grant funding—from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Defense (DoD)—to venture into remote ecological niches, sample dangerous animal pathogens, and centralize them in high-density research facilities under the premise of predicting future zoonotic spillovers. Yuri characterizes this approach as deeply misguided, noting that centralizing rare viruses in laboratories dramatically escalates the probability of an outbreak compared to leaving them undisturbed in the wild.
The conversation turns to the statistical leaps Daszak has made to argue that natural zoonotic spillovers happen constantly. Yuri highlights a specific study where Daszak extrapolated from just 6 out of 218 surveyed farmers in Yunnan who tested positive for antibodies to bat coronaviruses—viruses that could not even infect human cells—to assert that millions of Southeast Asians are routinely exposed every year. Bret counters that true spillover events generally burn themselves out rapidly because novel wildlife pathogens are poorly adapted to human transmission. When weighing the speculative benefits of cataloging wild strains against the severe, tangible risk of a laboratory escape, Bret describes Daszak's aggressive public pushback as self-serving and labels him “patient zero for misinformation.”
> “If you pursue the information, his assurance of this is always wrong. So I have begun to regard him as patient zero for misinformation.” — Bret Weinstein
- **Funding scale:** EcoHealth Alliance secured tens of millions of dollars in grant financing from agencies such as the NIH and the Department of Defense.
- **Flawed extrapolation:** Daszak claimed millions of rural residents face annual coronavirus spillovers based on an antibody positive rate of less than 3% (6 of 218 individuals) tested in Yunnan, China.
- **Risk asymmetry:** Gathering wild viruses into an urban laboratory setting creates an immediate, catastrophic risk of accidental human transmission that does not exist while those pathogens remain isolated in wild animal reservoirs.
[01:55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6900s) Chimeric Engineering, Pan-Coronavirus Goals, and Final Thoughts
Yuri expands on the technical scope of the research conducted by EcoHealth Alliance in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The work went far beyond passively collecting wild specimens; it encompassed the engineering of synthetic chimeras to generate vast panels of novel coronaviruses. Yuri points out that just prior to the pandemic, in December 2019, Daszak spoke at a virology conference about how easily coronavirus spike proteins and receptor-binding motifs (RBMs) could be manipulated or swapped into different backbones to alter viral tropism. This chimeric research—mirrored in grant proposals and published literature by Ralph Baric—was justified by the overarching quest to develop broad-spectrum, "pan-coronavirus" vaccines and therapeutic countermeasures.
Bret and Yuri conclude the discussion by underscoring the absolute necessity of an independent, unimpeded global investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Bret commends Yuri for his thoroughness and personal bravery in publishing his extensive Medium analysis when the lab-leak possibility was widely stigmatized. Yuri observes that uncovering the truth will ultimately require sustained pressure from an informed public demanding answers from political leadership, alongside the courage of potential whistleblowers. Bret notes that he will link Yuri's Medium article so listeners can review the evolving genetic evidence for themselves.
> “And that was actually the kind of the overarching theme of virology research over the past few years to create a pan-coronavirus therapy, pan-coronavirus vaccine.” — Yuri Deigin
- **December 2019 remarks:** Yuri notes that shortly before the outbreak became public knowledge, Peter Daszak openly described how easily coronaviruses could be modified by swapping receptor-binding motifs (RBMs) to test vaccine efficacy across different strains.
- **Ralph Baric and chimeric panels:** Grant filings and publications involving Ralph Baric and the Wuhan Institute of Virology explicitly outlined the objective of synthesizing diverse viral variants to test pan-coronavirus therapies.
- **Public inquiry:** Both speakers stress that establishing whether the pandemic began through an environmental spillover or a lab accident is not an academic debate, but an urgent matter of global safety and public accountability.
[02:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=7200s) Technical Difficulties and Concluding Remarks
As the interview draws to a close, Bret Weinstein begins to reflect on how Yuri Deigin’s comprehensive Medium article has been received in the public domain for roughly a month. Weinstein starts to commend Deigin’s intellectual honesty and open approach, remarking, “Well, I consider it the hallmark of an honest actor is that, you know, of course you release something as...” Before Weinstein can complete his thought, the video connection abruptly freezes or drops out. Weinstein pauses, calling out repeatedly across the line to check if Deigin is still present on the call.
Faced with the sudden dropped feed right as they reach the final moments of a sensitive discussion on laboratory leaks and gain-of-function research, Weinstein jokes about the suspicious timing, quipping, “Oops, I think we got some hackers.” Relieved that the glitch occurred at the very end rather than interrupting the core biological and epidemiological breakdown, he notes that they managed to cover the entire argument. After making one last attempt to see if Deigin can hear him, Weinstein accepts that the connection has fully severed and concludes the stream alone, expressing his gratitude: “Anyway, thanks so much Yuri, and I’d love to have you back to give us an update when there’s something to talk about; be well.”
## Notable quotes
> [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1500s) You would not rename a strain and not at least leave some pointer that explains why you renamed it and allows somebody to trace it. — Yuri Deigin
## Mentioned
Bret Weinstein, Yuri Deigin, Shi Zhengli, Ralph Baric, Peter Daszak, Heather Heying, Donald Rumsfeld, Matt Ridley, Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth Alliance, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Texas Medical Branch, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense (DoD), World Health Organization, Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, GenBank, Medium, The Washington Post, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, This Week in Virology, Dark Horse podcast, SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, BtCoV/4991, Rhinolophus affinis, Rhinolophus sinicus, FauI
## Video description
Yuri Deigin and Bret Weinstein Discuss the evidence for the SARS-CoV-2 lab-leak hypothesis.
Find his Medium article here: https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, follow us on twitter (@BretWeinstein, @ydeigin), and consider supporting me on Patreon or Paypal.
Theme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for providing us the rights to use their excellent music.
Biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin and evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein argue that the hypothesis of a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2 cannot be dismissed, citing geographical anomalies, suspicious viral genomic features, and institutional conflicts of interest.
Geographical and Ecological Anomalies in Wuhan (5:00)
Deigin and Weinstein highlight the implausibility of a direct natural zoonotic jump occurring in Wuhan. The natural host reservoirs—horseshoe bats carrying closely related coronaviruses—inhabit subtropical caves in Yunnan, roughly 1,500 to 2,000 kilometers away from Wuhan. Furthermore, bats were hibernating during the winter onset of the outbreak in late 2019, and bat meat is not part of traditional Hubei cuisine. In contrast, Wuhan hosts the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), one of the world's premier research centers dedicated to studying bat coronaviruses.
The Mojiang Mine and RaTG13 Lineage (15:40)
The discussion focuses heavily on RaTG13, the closest published relative to SARS-CoV-2. Deigin explains that RaTG13 is identical to a viral sample previously cataloged as BtCoV/4991, collected from an abandoned Mojiang copper mine where six miners contracted severe SARS-like pneumonia in 2012, resulting in three deaths. When the WIV published RaTG13 in early 2020, they rebranded the sample without citing their 2016 paper or mentioning the fatal human outbreak linked to its collection. Weinstein and Deigin criticize the claim that this sample had simply been forgotten in a freezer, noting that an online database maintained by the WIV was edited on December 30, 2019, and subsequently pulled offline without public backups.
Genomic Anomalies: The RBM and Furin Cleavage Site (37:16)
Deigin points to specific molecular features of SARS-CoV-2 that suggest artificial manipulation or lab-adapted passaging. While the virus's backbone closely matches bat coronavirus RaTG13, its receptor-binding motif (RBM) aligns almost perfectly at the amino acid level with a pangolin coronavirus and binds human ACE2 receptors with higher affinity than pangolin receptors. Given the solitary nature of pangolins, natural recombination requires a rare co-infection event, whereas chimeric domain-swapping is a routine laboratory technique.
The Unique Furin Cleavage Site Insert (65:00)
A critical molecular anomaly is the novel furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein, which is absent from all other known lineage B betacoronaviruses. The site features a 12-nucleotide de novo insert containing two consecutive, betacoronavirus-rare CGG codons encoding arginine. Deigin notes that this specific sequence introduces a functional FauI restriction endonuclease site, a feature commonly incorporated into synthetic biological constructs to allow rapid restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) screening. The instability of this site in cell cultures like Vero cells suggests it confers an evolutionary cost in natural bat hosts, making its spontaneous emergence in the wild questionable.
Gain-of-Function Research Risks and Institutional Resistance (80:00)
Weinstein and Deigin argue that the virology establishment has shown dogmatic resistance to scrutinizing lab-origin hypotheses due to deep institutional conflicts of interest. Major research initiatives, such as those directed by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance using U.S. National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense funding, have centralized dangerous wild pathogens and actively engineered chimeric viruses to explore pan-coronavirus therapies. Deigin warns that these gain-of-function projects generate severe catastrophic risks without having produced tangible treatments or vaccines, leading both speakers to advocate for global research moratoria, independent forensic audits, and anonymous whistleblower protections using cryptocurrency.
Deigin and Weinstein conclude that definitively resolving the origins of SARS-CoV-2 requires either identifying an intermediate animal host in nature or gaining complete forensic access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology's physical samples and laboratory records. They emphasize that establishing the truth is essential for addressing future biosecurity threats, though obtaining transparent records remains improbable without significant international pressure or internal whistleblowers.
## Background
本期视频由进化生物学家布雷特·韦恩斯坦（Bret Weinstein）于 2020 年 6 月 8 日在其 YouTube 频道的 Dark Horse 播客中发布。视频围绕科技创业者兼长寿研究学者尤里·代金（Yuri Deigin）此前发表的深度调查文章展开，双方聚焦并系统性探讨支持 SARS-CoV-2 实验室泄漏假说的科学与流行病学证据。
## TL;DR
对话深入拆解了主流自然起源叙事面临的重重矛盾，重点审视了疫情首发地武汉与病毒天然宿主偏远栖息地之间的地理与生态错位，以及病毒初现时即高度适应人类传播的异常演化特征。代金与韦恩斯坦详细剖析了武汉病毒研究所关键毒株 RaTG13 与 2012 年墨江矿工致命肺炎样本 BtCoV/4991 的命名隐瞒、数据库下线及元数据篡改疑点，并从分子生物学角度论证了刺突蛋白上弗林蛋白酶切割位点及内建限制性内切酶切点的异常工程特征。两人严厉批评了生态健康联盟负责人彼得·达扎克（Peter Daszak）等主流学者对功能获得性研究的辩护，指出此类研究不仅未能履行预防疫情的承诺，反而带来了灾难性的安全风险，并呼吁全球开展独立透明的溯源调查。
## Atmosphere & style
整场对话沉浸在一种严谨、理智却又隐隐透着惊悚感的探讨氛围中。韦恩斯坦以其进化生物学家的敏锐直觉与代金抽丝剥茧的文献考证相互呼应，双方带着科学家特有的审慎与自我怀疑，逐步拆解出令人不安的事实拼图。节目中充斥着对主流学术界利益绑架的失望与对前沿生物安全失控的深深忧虑，最后时刻网络连线的突然中断更给这场长达两小时的深度溯源增添了一抹戏剧性与冷峻的悬疑色彩。
## Bulletin
- [05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=300s) Yuri Deigin 与 Bret Weinstein 深度梳理了 SARS-CoV-2 实验室泄漏假说的科学证据，指出病毒爆发于坐落着顶尖冠状病毒实验室的武汉，而携带类似病毒的菊头蝠天然栖息于上千公里外的云南溶洞且冬季处于冬眠期，地理与生态反常极其显著。
- [15:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=915s) 武汉病毒所公布的 RaTG13 毒株被揭露在 2016 年论文中原名为 BtCoV/4991，采集自 2012 年导致 3 名矿工死亡的云南墨江矿洞致命肺炎事故，但 2020 年重新发表时其病史背景与原始编号均被刻意隐去。
- [01:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3900s) SARS-CoV-2 刺突蛋白中罕见的弗林蛋白酶切割位点由 12 个外源插入核苷酸构成，不仅采用了 β-冠状病毒中少见的 CGG-CGG 密码子，还内建了便于体外突变筛选的 FauI 限制性内切酶识别位点。
- [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2700s) 通过现代病毒反向遗传学技术，实验室无需实体活毒株，仅凭公开数字序列即可以极低成本（数千至数万美元）在数周内人工拼装复活具备完整感染力的高致病性活体冠状病毒。
## Key takeaways
- [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=0s) 主流学界断言实验室泄漏为“零概率”在逻辑上站不住脚，相关科学家群体面临严重的学术利益冲突与自保动机。
- [05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=300s) 武汉疫情的首发地点与时间存在巨大生态矛盾：本地无食用蝙蝠习俗，宿主菊头蝠分布于千里之外，且爆发正值蝙蝠冬眠期。
- [12:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=763s) 基于 RaTG13 与 SARS-CoV-2 存在 4% 序列差异以排除实验室泄漏的辩解，完全建立在单方面盲信涉事实验室未隐瞒其他毒株的前提下。
- [19:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1155s) 2012 年墨江矿工感染的严重类 SARS 肺炎产生了旧 SARS 交叉抗体，其样本当年送交武汉病毒所，是功能获得性研究的极佳素材却被长期淡化。
- [22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1350s) SARS-CoV-2 呈现“落地即巅峰”的反常表型，初次露面便已极度适应人类受体与人际传播，缺乏自然跨物种溢出常见的渐进式低效试错期。
- [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1500s) 石正丽团队 2020 年公布的 RaTG13 实为 2016 年的 BtCoV/4991，改名且未引用前序论文的行为被批如同金融欺诈中的“做两本账”。
- [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1800s) 2019 年 12 月 30 日，武汉实验室在线数据库紧急删除了蚊虫媒介和跨宿主交互等元数据，随后整个 60MB 核心数据库彻底下线并宣称无备份。
- [37:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2255s) 病毒的受体结合基序（RBM）与穿山甲冠状病毒高度相似，但其对人类 ACE2 的亲和力甚至超过了穿山甲自身，且群居蝙蝠与独居穿山甲在野外自然重组的概率极低。
- [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2700s) 病毒反向遗传学已高度商品化，仅凭计算机中的基因序列向外包公司订购 DNA 片段，即可在几周内以极低成本从零复活活体冠状病毒。
- [01:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3600s) 刺突蛋白中的弗林蛋白酶切割位点在已知同源 β-冠状病毒中前所未见，该结构大幅拓宽了病毒的跨物种感染力与组织嗜性。
- [01:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3900s) 弗林位点不仅表现为长达 12 个核苷酸的外来插入，且包含罕见的连续精氨酸密码子，并内嵌了一个 FauI 限制性内切酶位点，极似人为设计的质控标记。
- [01:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4200s) 实验室泄漏并不等同于人工拼接制造，将不同病毒或宿主聚集在实验室内传代所产生的高压人为自然选择，同样能催生出适应极端的特异病毒。
- [01:20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4800s) 功能获得性（GoF）研究承诺的预警与疫苗收益完全落空，其风险与收益极度不对等，全球亟需重新评估甚至暂停该类高危科研。
- [01:50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6600s) Peter Daszak 及其生态健康联盟推行的“预测溢出”模式将偏远病毒引入人口密集的城市实验室，其公开宣扬的嵌合体改造技术将下行风险推到了极点。
- [01:45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6300s) 为打破掩盖并获取关键证据，应考虑为从事合法研究的一线科研人员提供免责豁免，并建立基于加密货币的匿名举报悬赏机制保护潜在吹哨人。
## Detailed walkthrough
### [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=0s) 缘起：对 SARS-CoV-2 实验室泄漏假说的重新审视
Bret Weinstein 开启了本期 Dark Horse 播客，向观众介绍了身在莫斯科的连线嘉宾 Yuri Deigin。Deigin 是一名科技创业者和长寿领域的研究人员，此前因在 Medium 上发表了一篇深入剖析 SARS-CoV-2 病毒起源的长文而受到广泛关注。Weinstein 表示，他此前曾与妻子 Heather Heying 在节目中讨论过这篇文章，而近期该文更被多家主流媒体引述，成为论证“绝不能草率排除实验室泄漏假说”的有力依据。
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: 科学界对病毒起源探讨的转变流程
accDescr: 展示从最初盲信官方说法到通过文献证据重新审视实验室泄漏假说的演变过程。
A["官方定调：病毒源自自然（如华南海鲜市场）"] --> B["主流病毒学家定性：实验室泄漏属于阴谋论"]
B --> C["深入比对科学文献与基因序列（Deigin的研究）"]
C --> D["发现疑点：研究规范、功能获得性实验与地理异常"]
D --> E["科学立场转变：不能排除实验室泄漏假说"]
```
Weinstein 强调，许多大众难以接受官方给出的“病毒完全源自自然、源于海鲜市场，与武汉当地研究蝙蝠冠状病毒的两所实验室毫无干系”的叙事。他希望通过 Deigin 对冠状病毒生物技术研究的深刻理解，帮助听众拨开网络上各方人身攻击与口水战的迷雾，基于真实的信息与逻辑做出判断。Weinstein 盛赞 Deigin 对该领域文献脉络的梳理堪称“黄金标准”（gold standard），不仅揭示了病毒学研究背后的技术能力与潜在风险，而且极富勇气。
面对赞誉，Deigin 坦言自己绝非传统意义上的病毒学家，并发表了免责声明：他所掌握的生物学知识仅限于查看基因序列模式、运行 BLAST 比对并寻找差异与相似性；他在 Medium 上发表的并非严谨的科学同行评审论文，而更像是一篇综述，梳理了病毒学家多年来开展的研究，并记录了他个人的心路历程。Deigin 提到，他在刚接触这一话题时对实验室逃逸说持极度怀疑的态度，但随着深入阅读事实，他不仅动摇了最初的偏见，还对主流科学家轻易将其打成“阴谋论”感到十分不满。正如 Yuri Deigin 所言：“And I think those virologists who claim that there's zero chance or virtually no chance of this being a lab escape are, to put it mildly, incorrect.”（我认为那些声称这绝不可能或几乎不可能源自实验室逃逸的病毒学家，说得客气点，是完全错误的。）
- Yuri Deigin 是一位身居莫斯科的科技创业者兼长寿机制研究人员。
- 他的 Medium 文章聚焦于冠状病毒的功能获得性研究（Gain-of-Function）文献与基因组序列分析。
- Weinstein 评价该文章兼具复杂性与专业深度，普通读者甚至需要反复阅读才能完全理解。
---
### [05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=300s) 主流共识的利益困境与武汉当地的巨大巧合
Weinstein 进一步指出，虽然目前谁都无法斩钉截铁地咬定病毒“一定”泄漏自实验室，但任何百分之百断言“绝对不是实验室泄漏”的人，要么是对事实极度糊涂，要么就是在隐瞒真相。他分析道，主流病毒学界当前的激励机制存在根本问题，导致整个学术圈为了自保而步调一致地支持同一套叙事，甚至编造了一个童话来掩盖风险。在由蝙蝠冠状病毒引发的全球大流行肆虐之际，本应最先帮助大众弄清机制的核心专家群体，却因这一立场集体陷入了公信力危机。
随即，Weinstein 邀请 Deigin 列举最显著的反常证据。Deigin 直言，最不可思议、至今无法被自然演化论解释的“巨大巧合”，就是这场疫情偏偏在武汉爆发——这里紧邻中国顶尖的冠状病毒研究中心（武汉病毒研究所）。事实上，就连中国冠状病毒研究的代表人物石正丽（Shi Zhengli），在疫情爆发之初也曾高度怀疑病毒是否来自自己的实验室。
```mermaid
flowchart LR
accTitle: 武汉爆发冠状病毒的地理与生态矛盾
accDescr: 展现自然起源说在武汉爆发这一现象上所面临的生态与地理冲突。
subgraph 栖息地与自然环境
Y["云南/华南热带地区"] -->|"蝙蝠宿主自然分布（相隔约1000-2000公里）"| B["携带SARS相关冠状病毒的菊头蝠"]
end
subgraph 武汉当地现状
B -.->|"冬季冬眠 / 非自然迁徙路线"| W["武汉（华中温带气候）"]
W -->|"无食用蝙蝠习俗 / 官方否定海鲜市场源头"| P["疫情首发地点反常"]
end
```
Deigin 解释道，武汉乃至整个湖北省根本没有食用蝙蝠的饮食习惯（这与广东等华南地区完全不同）。在地理上，携带此类冠状病毒的蝙蝠自然栖息在相距近两千公里之遥的云南等热带溶洞中，以往的 SARS 或 HKU1 疫情也多见于气候温热的南部，武汉对于冠状病毒自然跨物种传播来说是一个极不寻常的地点。Weinstein 补充道，不仅地点反常，时间点同样诡异，因为疫情最初爆发的冬季，蝙蝠正处于冬眠期。
Deigin 指出，中国官方后来也排除了华南海鲜市场作为病毒源头地的假设，承认市场只是病毒发生放大传播的场所，这让所谓的“自然起源路径”彻底失去了合理证据支撑。相反，“实验室泄漏”却能完美解释这一系列巧合。Weinstein 亦深有共鸣地表示，他们两人在这个问题上走过了相似的思想轨迹：Deigin 最初是为了证明“阴谋论不成立”而去研读文献，最终被证据动摇；而 Weinstein 自己则是在与妻子 Heather 刚从厄瓜多尔亚马逊雨林（提普蒂尼生物多样性工作站，Tiputini Biodiversity Station）考察归来、与世隔绝数周后，才得知并开始审视这场席卷全球的历史危机。
- 武汉病毒研究所（WIV）是中国乃至全球顶尖的蝙蝠冠状病毒研究重镇，石正丽是该领域最具知名度的领军学者。
- 携带类似 SARS 病毒的菊头蝠主要栖息在相隔上千至两千公里外的云南省洞穴，并非湖北本地物种。
- 疫情爆发于冬季，处于蝙蝠的常规冬眠期，生态学上难以解释野外暴露与自然感染。
- 华南海鲜市场缺乏野生蝙蝠交易记录，且官方流调最终推翻了“市场即起源地”的最初定性。
### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=600s) 巧合的破灭：蝙蝠生物学家的本能觉醒与“千万里外”的栖息地
Bret Weinstein 回忆起 2020 年 2 月初的经历。当时他刚从安第斯山脉徒步数天归来，连上网后看到铺天盖地关于新型冠状病毒的新闻。作为一个有着蝙蝠生物学学术背景的人，他的第一直觉十分自然：海鲜湿货市场、有人吃野生动物、蝙蝠源冠状病毒——整个故事看起来顺理成章。他当时立刻在推特上发文，表示虽然还没深入查阅细节，但这看起来确实像一种原本存在于菊头蝠体内的病毒通过接触直接跨物种传播，并顺带提及了湿货市场的卫生隐患。然而没过多久，他就获悉疫情爆发的核心城市武汉恰恰坐落着全球研究蝙蝠冠状病毒最顶尖的机构（中科院武汉病毒研究所），他立即删除了那条推特。
这种地理上的巧合实在太刺眼。Bret Weinstein 最初还试图自我说服：也许研究此类病毒的实验室遍地开花，如果有上千家，那爆发在其中一家附近也就不足为奇了；但现实是，这所实验室是全世界研究此类冠状病毒最关键的两大核心之一。更关键的反驳在于生态地理分布。最初外界有声音辩解称“实验室自然是建在蝙蝠分布的地方”，但只要稍微核实生物学分布就会发现，携带此类病毒的蝙蝠根本不生活在武汉周边，它们的天然栖息地在数千公里之外的中国南方喀斯特溶洞。Yuri Deigin 赞同这种荒谬感，指出正是这些层出不穷的矛盾疑点，让任何认真审视该实验室研究课题与全球功能获得性研究（Gain-of-Function）的人，迅速滑向“实验室泄漏假说”的兔子洞，并发现这一解释的概率远比人们最初想象的要高得多。
Bret Weinstein 总结了这种深入事实后的惊悚体验：“我认为最令人不安的事情在于，只要你具备哪怕一点点背景知识去核查事实，只要你在这场争论中没有任何既得利益——你不是病毒学家，也没有绑定在兜售特定叙事的政治阵营中——你就会瞬间掉进这个兔子洞，发现所有告诫你‘不要关注实验室假说’的理由都薄如蝉翼，而所有指向实验室的线索却顽固得让人难以抹去。”
- 爆发地并非菊头蝠的自然栖息地，目标蝙蝠种群主要分布在相距千公里以上的云南等地。
- 武汉并非寻常城市，这里坐落着全球唯二专门大规模采集、筛选并改造高危蝙蝠冠状病毒的高等级生物安全实验室之一。
- 面对公众与同行的反驳，主流叙事所依赖的解释在生态学和地理常识面前漏洞百出。
---
### [12:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=763s) 莫斯科的僵局与科学界的“亵渎”指控
谈到提出该假说所遭遇的社会与学术阻力时，Yuri Deigin 分享了自己在莫斯科的遭遇。由于国际航班停飞和边境关闭，他整个疫情初期都被困在当地。令他大感意外的是，反对“实验室泄漏可能论”最激烈、言辞最严厉的声音，竟然来自俄罗斯本土的科学界群体。这些学者理论上与武汉的科研机构毫无利益捆绑，也不存在基金关联，但对他们而言，仅仅提出“科学家可能会隐瞒或撒谎”这一假设，本身就是一种不可饶恕的学术“亵渎”。
Yuri Deigin 指出，这些批评者极其尖锐地指责他是在散布毫无根据的阴谋论。然而，一旦要求他们拿出严谨的逻辑或确凿的科学证据来证明“绝不可能是实验室泄漏”时，他们便哑口无言。他们唯一的救命稻草，就是武汉病毒所公布的 RaTG13 病毒与 SARS-CoV-2 之间存在 4% 的全基因组序列差异。批评者将这 4% 的差异奉为不可逾越的鸿沟，认为自然演化需要数十年，因此绝对无法在实验室中凭空制造，从而完全排除了实验室来源。
但这种逻辑存在一个致命漏洞：它完全建立在单方面信任武汉病毒所的前提之上。外界必须无条件相信武汉病毒所交出的 RaTG13 就是他们手中“拥有的唯一且亲缘关系最近”的毒株。Bret Weinstein 尖锐地指出，将证据建立在一个自身面临巨大责任问责风险的实验室的单方陈述上，这在逻辑上是站不住脚的。更何况，这株序列的公布方式极其可疑——它不是一次性公开透明地展示，而是以典型的情报学“有限暴露”（limited hangout）手段，零敲碎打、半遮半掩地被抛出，且留下了大量未解之谜：例如为何改名，以及为何在 2020 年初那篇重磅论文中绝口不提它采集自六名矿工罹患严重类 SARS 肺炎的废弃矿洞。
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: RaTG13 叙事漏洞与争议流向
accDescr: 展示主流科学界基于 RaTG13 差异排除实验室泄漏的逻辑漏洞，以及反方揭露的疑点链路。
subgraph Defense ["主流辩护逻辑（单方信任）"]
A["武汉病毒所公布 RaTG13"] --> B["与 SARS-CoV-2 存在 4% 序列差异"]
B --> C["推论：自然演化需数十年，排除实验室泄漏"]
end
subgraph Suspicion ["质疑与事实漏洞"]
D["关键疑点：命名被篡改（原 BtCoV/4991）"]
E["隐瞒核心背景：2012 墨江矿工致命肺炎事故"]
F["信息披露方式：有限暴露（Limited Hangout）"]
G["利益冲突：涉事实验室拥有最大免责动机"]
end
C -.->|"建立在盲信未验证数据之上"| G
D & E & F --> G
```
---
### [15:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=937s) 揭开 RaTG13 的伪装：菊头蝠与中和抗体之谜
为了让非专业听众理清来龙去脉，Bret Weinstein 与 Yuri Deigin 详细拆解了所谓 RaTG13 毒株的命名与演变史。RaTG13 并非单只蝙蝠的名字，而是病毒株的编号。“Ra”代表其宿主中菊头蝠（*Rhinolophus affinis*），“TG”代表通关镇（Tongguan），“13”则代表 2013 年采样。Bret 指出，菊头蝠科是一个庞大的种群，在 2002-2003 年的第一代 SARS 溯源中，石正丽团队起初重点关注的是中华菊头蝠（*Rhinolophus sinicus*），而中菊头蝠此前常被视为次要宿主。
十多年来，武汉病毒所与彼得·达扎克（Peter Daszak）领导的生态健康联盟（EcoHealth Alliance）紧密合作，获得了大量国际资助，核心立项理由就是“未雨绸缪”——他们声称，由于第一代 SARS 来自自然界的蝙蝠溢出，因此必须提前采集并研究高危蝙蝠病毒，评估其跨物种溢出潜力，以预防下一次大流行。但当 2020 年初石正丽团队发表论文公布 RaTG13 时，人们惊讶地发现它在 2013 年被采集时根本不叫这个名字。该机构声称当年仅对该毒株的 RdRp（RNA 依赖的 RNA 聚合酶）基因做了一小段常规的系统发育测序，随后便束之高阁。
Yuri Deigin 揭示了这种说辞的破绽：在科学论文里，重命名一个已被部分测序的样本而不做历史沿革说明是非常反常的。更重要的是，这株后来被证明与导致全球停摆的病毒亲缘关系最近（96.1% 相似度）的毒株，背后牵扯着一起长达八年、被官方讳莫如深的致命呼吸道感染事件。
- **宿主分类**：中华菊头蝠（*R. sinicus*）为 2003 年 SARS 核心宿主，中菊头蝠（*R. affinis*）为 RaTG13 宿主。
- **资助脉络**：生态健康联盟与武汉病毒所长期合作，以“防范下一次大流行”为名持续十余年采集冠状病毒。
- **命名猫腻**：该毒株在早期论文中名为 BtCoV/4991，2020 年突然改名为 RaTG13，抹去了原本可被数据库直接关联的历史追踪线索。
---
### [19:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1155s) 墨江矿洞事件与被掩盖的抗体真相
事情的核心直接指向 2012 年云南墨江通关镇的一处铜矿洞。当时有六名矿工在洞内清理蝙蝠粪便，随后全部暴发严重的类 SARS 间质性肺炎。最终有三名矿工不幸死亡，另外三名幸存。事故发生后，中国呼吸疾病领域的顶尖学术权威钟南山院士（Dr. Zhong Nanshan）介入会诊，并建议将患者的血液与痰液样本送往中科院武汉病毒研究所进行病毒与抗体排查。
检测结果极具震撼力：在存活矿工的血液中，研究人员检测出了针对第一代 SARS 病毒的 IgG 抗体阳性。Yuri Deigin 与 Bret Weinstein 深入剖析了这一结果的严重性：第一代 SARS 在中国大陆仅感染了约 5000 人，墨江偏远山区的几名普通矿工体内天然携带旧 SARS 抗体的概率微乎其微。唯一的科学合理解释是，矿工感染了一种新型的、与 SARS 高度同源的冠状病毒，正是其产生的抗体与旧 SARS 检测试剂盒发生了强烈的“交叉免疫反应”（Cross-reaction）。
这本应是病毒学家梦寐以求的“圣杯”——它完美符合功能获得性研究立项申请的所有核心要素：一个能直接从蝙蝠粪便感染人类并致死、且与 SARS 具备同源抗原性的未知新型病毒群落。然而，石正丽和达扎克在 2020 年向全世界讲述的故事，却是“我们在 2013 年采集了它，但觉得它没有研究价值，就扔进零下 80 度冰箱冷冻，直到 2020 年新冠暴发后凭着巧合才重新拿出来全基因组测序”。这种言论在真正的科研逻辑面前彻底坍塌。更讽刺的是，关于矿工存在 SARS 交叉抗体、血液样本被送至武汉病毒所等一系列核心实证，全是由民间的开源情报调查者（OSINT）通过推特接力，在从未翻译成英文的中国高校硕士和博士毕业学位论文中挖掘出来的。
Yuri Deigin 直斥这种辩解完全经不起推敲：“当你看到这番解释时，石正丽和彼得·达扎克的说法——声称他们在 2013 年发现这种蝙蝠毒株时觉得毫无趣味，以至于直接扔进冷冻柜再也没碰过，直到 2020 年全凭纯粹的运气测序了 SARS-2 才发现与当年测的一小段序列相似——这个故事就变得难以置信了。”
---
### [22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1350s) “落地即巅峰”：高度适应人类的特异爆发
Bret Weinstein 进一步指出了另一个足以打破自然溢出共识的关键演化生物学证据：SARS-CoV-2 在武汉首次露面时，其传播能力与细胞结合能力就已经呈现出“完全适应人类”（ready to go）的惊人状态。
在典型的自然跨物种溢出大流行中，病原体从野生动物跳到新宿主身上，通常会经历一段漫长、笨拙且充满缺陷的适应期。病毒会在小范围人群中反复进行低效传播，在试错中积累突变，摸索出能够高效利用人类受体（如 ACE2）并在人际间快速扩散的突变组合；在此阶段，绝大多数溢出事件由于传播效率低下会自行熄灭。2012 年墨江矿洞的悲剧正展示了这种自然的早期溢出模式：几名直接暴露于高浓度蝙蝠粪便的人员患病、死亡或康复，但病毒并没有在当地社区引发持续性的大规模扩散，因为这种原始野生毒株尚未掌握在普通人群中高效传播的钥匙。
然而，2019 年底在武汉现身的 SARS-CoV-2 却毫无“摸索”的痕迹。它一出现在海鲜市场及周边社区，就展现出顶级的人际传播能力，如同事先已经在某种与人类生理结构高度相似的模型（例如人源化小鼠模型或人类细胞系）中经历过充分的适应性传代训练一样。这种“落地即巅峰”的演化异常，与所谓从云南偏远洞穴无声无息一路传到武汉大都市的野生假设形成了不可调和的剧烈冲突。
Bret Weinstein 总结道：“在这个病毒于武汉露面的那一刻，它就已经整装待发了，对吧？它早已高度适应了人类；没有任何证据表明它曾经历过在人际间跌跌撞撞、摸索寻找如何有效感染人类细胞以实现传播的过渡阶段——完全没有这种痕迹。它一落地就轰然引爆。”
- **自然跨物种跳跃特征**：低效适应、局限传播、高失败率，如 2012 年墨江矿工虽发病但未在外界引起二次传染潮。
- **SARS-CoV-2 异常演化表型**：极度缺乏早期在人群中试错的适应性突变阶段，初次被公共卫生系统捕捉到时即已具备极高的人际传播效率。
### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1500s) RaTG13 与 BtCoV/4991：重命名与蹊跷的学术断层
布雷特·韦恩斯坦（Bret Weinstein）指出，那些适应性并不特别完善的病毒有时确实会发生跨物种跳跃，但通常不会演变成历史级别的全球大流行；真正令人警觉的，是涉事实验室在面对自己声称一直在搜寻和研究的病原体时表现出的种种反常举动。他邀请尤里·代金（Yuri Deigin）深入剖析这一现象。2020 年 1 月 29 日，武汉病毒研究所的石正丽团队发表论文，首次公开了名为 RaTG13 的冠状病毒基因全序列，并宣布这是已知与正在人类中传播的 SARS-CoV-2 最接近的毒株（全基因组相似度约 96.2%）。石正丽称该样本是 2013 年在云南采集到的，当时团队并未对其给予过多关注。然而，代金指出这篇论文的处理方式极其反常：文中仅仅轻描淡写地提了一句，完全没有提及当年采集该样本的墨江铜矿，也没有提及曾造成数名矿工感染严重肺炎甚至死亡的背景。更关键的是，该毒株早在 2016 年发表的论文中就被石正丽团队披露过，当时的样本代号是 BtCoV/4991。
在新论文中，石正丽团队不仅将其更名为 RaTG13，而且彻底隐去了原编号 4991，甚至连自己 2016 年发表 4991 短序列的那篇原始论文都未予引用。韦恩斯坦直言不讳地批评道：“在科学规范上，这是不可接受的。你不可能重命名一个毒株，却连一点解释改名原因、方便他人溯源的线索都不留。”代金曾在 Twitter 上细致比对了两者的 RdRp 序列，公开质问这两个序列是否实质为同一个毒株。面对外界排山倒海的质疑，武汉病毒所随后仅在内部的大型病毒数据库中，悄悄在 RaTG13 的描述后用括号补上了“4991”，以此默认二者同源，但官方从未对此作出任何正式通告或解释。代金认为，4991 的基因片段早在 2016 年就已提交至 GenBank，根本无法抹除，这种刻意隐瞒以往研究痕迹的做法令人匪夷所思。韦恩斯坦尖锐地指出，这种行为给人的感觉就像是金融欺诈中的“做两本账”——如果你不想让别人顺藤摸瓜找到真相，就改掉名字，斩断它与既往关键证据的全部联系。
- **关键毒株更名**：2016 年论文中的蝙蝠冠状病毒样本 BtCoV/4991（采集于 2013 年云南墨江通关镇矿洞）在 2020 年被重新包装为 RaTG13，且未引用 2016 年的前序论文。
- **背景信息隐匿**：发表 RaTG13 时，论文省略了导致矿工严重呼吸窘迫与死亡的关键病史，仅将其描述为一份普通的蝙蝠粪便拭子。
- **被动承认同源**：在社交媒体与开源情报分析者指出序列一致性后，科研人员才在数据库条目中括号附注 4991，至今缺乏正式的勘误或声明。
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: RaTG13 与 BtCoV 4991 命名演变与信息断层
accDescr: 展示 2013 年采集样本如何从 BtCoV 4991 演变为 RaTG13 并产生信息隐匿的流程图
subgraph S1["2013-2016年：原始发现"]
A["2013年 云南墨江矿洞采集样本"] --> B["2016年 发表论文披露部分序列<br/>命名为 BtCoV/4991"]
B --> C["上传 RdRp 短片段至 GenBank"]
end
subgraph S2["2020年：疫情暴发与重命名"]
D["2020年1月 发表论文公布全序列<br/>更名为 RaTG13"]
D --> E["未引用2016年论文<br/>未提及矿洞及矿工肺炎"]
end
subgraph S3["外界质疑与补丁"]
F["开源调查发现二者序列完全匹配"] --> G["数据库后台悄然在括号内添加 4991<br/>缺乏正式官方说明"]
end
C -.->|"斩断直接索引关联"| D
E --> F
```
### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1800s) 删改痕迹与下线的 60MB 核心数据库
韦恩斯坦与代金进一步探讨了武汉实验室在数据库管理上的反常举动。代金透露，石正丽此前维护过一个对同行公开的个人在线病原体数据库，里面专门存放着她收集的大量野生动物病毒样本和有趣的基因片段，而不是第一时间全部同步上传至国际公共数据库 GenBank。引人注目的是，在 2019 年 12 月 30 日（武汉疫情正式引起外界警觉的同一天），该数据库的元数据被进行了紧急编辑：原本包含“节肢动物媒介”（如蚊子）以及“跨物种宿主转换相互作用”（host switching interactions）等描述字段被悉数删除，被统一替换成了看似更为平常的“蝙蝠和啮齿动物冠状病毒”。代金指出，修改操作是在石正丽的账号权限下完成的，操作者或许根本没有意识到系统自带版本修改追踪功能（Change tracking），任何用户都可以调出历史版本进行字句比对。
比文本修改更严重的是，这个原本包含宝贵原始数据、大小约 60MB 的数据库压缩包随后被彻底关闭并从网络上下线。当研究人员尝试点击原有的公开下载链接时，只能下载到一个空压缩文件。有人曾专门联系该数据库的服务器托管商询问是否有系统备份可以恢复，对方却给出了一个极为滑稽的答复：“抱歉，我们没有留存备份。”代金与韦恩斯坦一致认为，在现代数据中心里声称“没有备份”纯属无稽之谈。由于该数据库只有 60MB，在它被撤下之前，全球同行实验室——尤其是北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校的拉尔夫·巴里克（Ralph Baric）实验室——很可能早已在日常研究中下载过它。巴里克作为美国冠状病毒功能获得性（Gain-of-Function）研究的领军人物，与石正丽既是亲密的研究合作者，又是在该领域不断比拼病毒操纵技术的一流竞争对手，双方必然会严密追踪对方的最新测序动态。韦恩斯坦在节目中大声疾呼，希望拥有该备份的学者能够将其公之于众，因为在这一场全球浩劫面前，还原这些被抹去的数据对于溯源科学假设具有不可估量的核心价值。
> “在某种意义上，样本 4991 与 RaTG13 之间这种诡异的关系，以及它们明明基于相同的信息、属于同一毒株却没有被指明为同一毒株的事实，让人很难不产生一种印象：这完全是在像做两本账一样运作。” —— 布雷特·韦恩斯坦（Bret Weinstein）
- **元数据修改时间点**：2019 年 12 月 30 日，数据库内的“节肢动物/蚊虫媒介”及“宿主跨越”等关键描述被清除，变更为单一的蝙蝠与啮齿类。
- **数据彻底下线**：包含关键病毒测序目录的 60MB 数据库被撤下，托管方以“无备份”为由拒绝恢复访问。
- **呼吁数据共享**：同行学者（如巴里克实验室）通常会保存竞争对手的数据库镜像用于科研追踪，节目公开呼吁持有备份的实验室向全球学术界共享数据。
### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2100s) 拉尔夫·巴里克实验室的沉默与疫情爆发的重重疑点
布雷特·韦恩斯坦（Bret Weinstein）指出，拉尔夫·巴里克（Ralph Baric）的实验室在这场争论中一直保持出奇的沉默。外界主流舆论几乎达成了一种共识，即“实验室泄漏是极其荒谬、不值一驳的”，而巴里克团队似乎在某种程度上默认了这种共识。尤里·戴金（Yuri Deigin）对此进行了一定程度的修正，提到巴里克此前在接受播客（如《This Week in Virology》）采访时曾简短表示：实验室泄漏在理论上是可能的，因此巴里克本人从未在公开场合断言完全排除这种可能；同时，巴里克也承认目前缺乏任何自然起源的直接证据，尤其是没有找到确凿的中间宿主。尽管如此，巴里克从未深入细节，戴金表示：“I mean, I hope he actually goes on the record and says what he really thinks, because I don't think anybody has been quoting him verbatim about his stance on this being either a lab leak or impossibility of a lab leak.”
随后，韦恩斯坦梳理了疫情爆发初期一系列令人怀疑的巧合与矛盾：
- 病毒在拥有顶级冠状病毒研究实验室的武汉爆发本身就高度可疑。
- 疫情出现在冬末，而当地蝙蝠在此季节处于冬眠状态。
- 中国官方当时已承认华南海鲜市场并非病毒真正的源头或始发地。
- 该病毒并不像是一种典型的蝙蝠病毒，其受体结合域（RBD）似乎并没有针对蝙蝠的 ACE2 受体进行优化。
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Epidemiological and Genetic Anomalies
accDescr: Key coincidences and questions regarding the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
subgraph Circumstantial ["流行病学疑点"]
A["武汉爆发地点"]
B["冬季蝙蝠处于冬眠期"]
C["华南海鲜市场被官方排除为源头"]
end
subgraph Biological ["分子生物学矛盾"]
D["缺乏蝙蝠适配性"]
E["受体结合基序与穿山甲高度相似"]
F["对人类 ACE2 结合力反而强于穿山甲"]
end
Circumstantial --> Biological
```
---
### [37:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2255s) 穿山甲受体结合基序（RBM）之谜与人源适配性
戴金和韦恩斯坦就病毒的受体结合基序（RBM）展开了深入探讨。虽然在全基因组的大部分区域上，云南蝙蝠病毒 RaTG13 是与 SARS-CoV-2 亲缘关系最近的已知病毒，但在刺突蛋白用于入侵宿主细胞最关键的受体结合基序（RBM）片段上，RaTG13 却截然不同。相反，这一关键区域与 2019 年在广东查获并死于肺炎的走私穿山甲体内提取的冠状病毒高度吻合。
韦恩斯坦提醒大家保持审慎，不要武断地说该片段“必定来自穿山甲”，只能说已知数据中亲缘关系最接近的是穿山甲序列。戴金则强调了一个反常的生物学现象：这个源自穿山甲毒株的 RBM 序列，其结合人类 ACE2 受体的亲和力竟然比结合穿山甲自身的受体还要强。这种基序仿佛天生就对人类细胞进行了更高程度的适配，这打破了常规的系统发育树推演。
---
### [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2400s) 同义突变、传代差异与 RaTG13 真实性的疑问
深入到分子结构层面，戴金解释了受体结合域（RBD，约两百个氨基酸）与其中的受体结合基序（RBM，约 78 至 79 个氨基酸）的差异。在整个 RBM 中，SARS-CoV-2 与穿山甲毒株仅有 1 个氨基酸的差异，氨基酸相似度高达 99%。然而在核苷酸（RNA）层面，两者的差异却达到了大约 12%。韦恩斯坦随即指出，这是由遗传密码简并性导致的“同义突变”（Synonymous mutations）——密码子的第三位碱基改变但编码相同的氨基酸。反对实验室假说的人士往往据此主张，要累积 12% 的核苷酸突变，在实验室无论是细胞传代还是动物传代都需要经历极长的时间，因而更可能属于自然进化。
讨论随即转向了武汉病毒研究所石正丽团队在 2020 年初公布的关键比对毒株 RaTG13。该毒株被证实与他们 2013 年在墨江矿洞采集并简短报道过的“BtCoV/4991”序列完全对应。然而，实验室是否真正拥有 RaTG13 的活病毒实体样本成为了巨大疑团。石正丽团队声称他们只是重新对 2013 年保存的蝙蝠粪便拭子进行了测序，并不拥有活病毒。
韦恩斯坦指出，在科研数据库体系中，很多操作实际上是建立在“君子协定（honor system）”之上的：“People enter sequences. And, you know, it's up to them to provide a reference sample or something. And other than that, we are just simply taking them at their word.” 他分析了目前无法证伪的几种可能：
- RaTG13 在物理世界中根本不存在，它可能只是为了特定目的在计算机数据库中对 4991 进行修饰后上传的一串虚拟代码。
- 该物理样本曾经存在，但实验室已将其销毁或用尽，仅留存了电子文本序列。
- 它是真实测序得出的完整自然样本。
在没有独立的物理样本比对和透明调查之前，这些推论仍然属于完全开放的可能性。
### [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=2700s) 病毒反向遗传学：仅凭序列从零“复活”活病毒
Bret Weinstein 和 Yuri Deigin 探讨了实验室若拿到病毒基因序列后所具备的操作空间。Yuri 指出，即便研究人员最初测序了某种天然病毒，他们也能根据该序列在实验室中重新合成原始病毒，随后投入细胞培养物中进行多代传代实验；在突变积累后，甚至能声称新测序出的突变株就是最初采集的样本。科学界通常建立在彼此信任的前提上，假定无人有动机撒谎，但在事关重大疫情溯源的调查中，这种假设可能并不成立。
Bret 提出一个核心疑问：如果实验室乃至自然界中连一份物理病毒样本都没有，仅凭公开的序列数据，现代技术是否足以凭空复活病毒？Yuri 明确证实了这一点。在病毒反向遗传学（Viral Reverse Genetics）中，科学家通常只需将 RNA 病毒拆分为几个 DNA 片段（如 7 个片段）进行化学合成，然后转染进能够将 DNA 转录为 RNA 的细胞系中，即可直接从“计算机里的代码”复现出具备感染力的活病毒。
```mermaid
flowchart LR
accTitle: 病毒反向遗传学操作流程
accDescr: 展示从数字序列、化学合成到活病毒复现的完整反向遗传学步骤
subgraph Phase1["数字与合成"]
A["计算机序列代码<br/>(RNA数据)"] --> B["化学订购合成<br/>(划分为多个DNA片段)"]
end
subgraph Phase2["重组与复活"]
B --> C["转染至宿主细胞<br/>(DNA转录为RNA)"]
C --> D["组装生成<br/>高致病性活病毒"]
end
```
Yuri 举例说明这种技术早已是常规操作：新冠疫情爆发初期，瑞士一家实验室仅耗时约一个月便完成了复原——他们直接下载中国公布的 SARS-CoV-2 序列，向美国的生物合成公司（如类似 Genzyme 这样的服务商）订购打印好的 DNA 片段，等待三周邮寄送达后，仅用一周时间就在瑞士本土组装出了活病毒；得克萨斯大学加尔维斯顿（Galveston）国家实验室也完成了几乎完全相同的操作。面对这种强大的技术，Bret 感叹道：“这是一种令人不寒而栗的技术力量（It's a terrifying level of power）。”
- 现代基因合成使得制造病原体的门槛极低，甚至不需要任何活体物理毒株存样。
- 只要掌握基因序列，从订购商业化合成片段到拼装出活体冠状病毒，整个流程可在数周内完成。
### [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3000s) 极低的金钱门槛与穿山甲作为中间宿主的生态悖论
Bret 进一步探讨若有恶意行为者企图利用公开序列复刻活体病毒，其成本究竟需要多少。Yuri 估计，从零开始搭建这样一套流程，总成本大约仅在“几十万美元”上下。若仅计算打印病毒基因组本身的费用：
- 一个约 30,000 个碱基对的冠状病毒基因组，在美国专业公司合成大约需要 30,000 美元。
- 如果将订购需求外包给中国或印度的合同研究组织（CRO），价格往往便宜近 10 倍，低至几千美元。
生物制造如今已演变为一种高度商品化、高度外包化的产业，全球任何团队都可以极其廉价地获取定制的多肽、蛋白质或 DNA/RNA 片段。
随后，对话聚焦到 SARS-CoV-2 基因组中最显著的拼合特征。Yuri 指出，SARS-CoV-2 的全基因组绝大部分与来自云南蝙蝠的冠状病毒 RaTG13 极其相近，但唯独关键的受体结合基序（RBM，Receptor Binding Motif）却与穿山甲冠状病毒最为接近。如果坚持“自然起源说”，就必须解释这两种病毒是如何在自然环境中发生重组的。病毒重组的基本生物学前提，是两种截然不同的毒株必须在同一时间感染同一个宿主个体的同一个细胞并在其中共同复制。
针对这一生态学设定，两人展开了深入的合理性质疑。蝙蝠具有群居、密集群飞的生物习性，个体基数庞大；而穿山甲在自然界中数量稀少且过着孤僻的非群居生活，这使它们同时接触蝙蝠并被双重感染的概率极低。正如 Yuri 调侃所言：“目前完全无法解释这怎么可能发生，因为已知穿山甲和蝙蝠并不同栖在相似的区域，或者聚在一起开派对。”
Bret 强调，面对这种高度可疑的中间宿主假说，科学界理应竭尽全力在野外寻找真正的自然中间宿主，以此彻底推翻实验室泄漏假说；但现实中人们却看不到中国在此方向上有强力的调查动作。Yuri 补充指出，比起在自然界大海捞针，人们更应该去调查武汉病毒研究所的冰箱，重新核查 2012 年感染不明严重肺炎的 4 名云南墨江矿工的血清和组织样本，从中分离并测序其体内的类 SARS 病毒全基因组，因为那才是破解整个新冠大流行源头的关键生物学线索。
### [55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3300s) 嵌合嵌合嵌合体、细胞传代与神秘的弗林蛋白酶切割位点
Bret 详细梳理了分子系统发育树（Phylogeny）呈现出的异常矛盾。常规生物进化树具有明确的分枝结构，但 SARS-CoV-2 却表现出“基因拼凑”的特征：绝大部分骨架锚定在菊头蝠（Rhinolophus horseshoe bat）病毒上，而决定跨物种感染能力的关键受体结合区域却骤然落入穿山甲病毒分支。
面对这种反常，Bret 提出了两种可能性的概率博弈：“究竟哪种可能性更大？是某种极度罕见的生态偶然事件发生在了某个地方的一只穿山甲身上；还是某个实验室为了研究蝙蝠病毒跨物种感染人类的机制，特意将两种病毒拼合在一起，以此替病毒解决了它在自然界中极难自行克服的跨物种障碍？”
在实验室功能获得性研究中，科研人员会合成嵌合病毒，并在培养皿中通过宿主细胞（如著名的 HeLa 人源宫颈癌细胞系）对病毒进行连续传代。这种实验室环境下的人为定向进化，能在极短时间内赋予病毒野外演化所不具备的高感染力和极广的临床组织嗜性。
更致命的线索在于刺突蛋白（Spike protein）中的弗林蛋白酶切割位点（Furin Cleavage Site）。Yuri 强调，在与 SARS-CoV-2 序列相似度高于 60% 的所有已知谱系 β 冠状病毒亚属中，此前从未发现过类似的弗林位点。Yuri 随后向 Bret 和听众详细解释了这一微观侵染机制：
1. **附着阶段**：病毒通过刺突蛋白寻找并附着在人类细胞表面的 ACE2 受体上。
2. **两步切割过程**：刺突蛋白必须在此处被精准“切成两半”。
3. **融合肽激活**：切割位点暴露后，潜伏在其位置的融合肽（Fusion peptide）被激活，继而抓取人类细胞膜引发膜融合（Membrane fusion），将病毒基因物质注入细胞内部。
普通冠状病毒的切割机制相对低效，而 SARS-CoV-2 却独创性地插入了一个能够被人类弗林蛋白酶家族（位于宿主细胞膜表面、细胞质内部及细胞外基质中）特异识别的 4 氨基酸序列。这种高效切割位点的存在，不仅极大拓宽了病毒的组织嗜性（Viral Tropism），还赋予了它极其凶猛的跨组织侵染与人体传播能力。Bret 将这种特定的人类内源蛋白酶形象地比喻为一种高度精准的工具：“它就像一把外科手术刀，专门寻找特定的目标进行切割。”
- 在 β 冠状病毒谱系中凭空出现的弗林位点，是极不寻常的分子生物学特征。
- 这一插入结构赋予了病毒极高效的膜融合效率和宿主细胞入侵能力，成为支持实验室工程改造或人为传代假说的关键证据之一。
### [01:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3600s) 弗林蛋白酶切割位点及其跨物种感染能力
Bret Weinstein 与 Yuri Deigin 深入探讨了新冠病毒（SARS-CoV-2）基因组中关键的弗林蛋白酶切割位点（Furin Cleavage Site）。Bret 指出，病毒只要携带这段能被宿主现有蛋白酶识别并切开的特定序列，其感染人类细胞甚至在不同物种间跃迁的能力就会发生质的飞跃。Yuri 确认并解释道：“研究表明，添加弗林位点极大地增强了病毒感染不同类型细胞以及不同动物细胞的能力（It's been shown that the addition of furin site greatly enhances the ability of a virus to infect different types of cells and cells from different animals）。”拥有该切割位点后，病毒不再过度依赖其刺突蛋白受体结合域（RBD）与人类受体的精密匹配，即便与其他物种细胞的结合力不够强，膜融合过程依然能够顺利发生。
关于该位点在自然界中的分布，Yuri 指出在经典的 β-冠状病毒（Beta-coronaviruses）谱系中，该特定位置从未出现过弗林切割位点；虽然存在切割位点，但通常由效率较低的其他蛋白酶切割。弗林位点通常出现在 α-冠状病毒或其他冠状病毒家族中。以往针对流感病毒等病原体的细胞培养实验已经证实，引入弗林位点会显著提高病毒的传播能力并扩大宿主范围。在进化层面，从系统发育学和对野生菊头蝠（Horseshoe Bat）携带的 β-冠状病毒监测来看，野生株全部缺失该位点，唯独 SARS-CoV-2 突兀地拥有它，这在统计学上极其罕见。更关键的是，如果在细胞培养（例如绿猴肾细胞 Vero 细胞系）中进行传代，该位点往往会发生突变而退化消失。Bret 总结道，这说明携带弗林位点存在进化上的权衡代价（Trade-off cost），在自然或半自然环境下，维持该位点的选择压可能敌不过其他优先级的生存需求，导致其容易退化。
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: 弗林位点功能与来源假设
accDescr: 展示弗林位点如何增强感染力以及三种可能的起源途径。
subgraph Impact["生物学功能"]
A["引入弗林蛋白酶切割位点"] --> B["降低对ACE2精密结合的依赖"]
B --> C["刺突蛋白高效裂解与膜融合"]
C --> D["跨物种感染力与细胞嗜性大幅扩展"]
end
subgraph Origins["潜在来源假设"]
E["假设 1: 罕见的自然突变/重组"]
F["假设 2: 实验室人工插入/嵌合改造"]
G["假设 3: 实验室内细胞传代适应性突变"]
end
```
---
### [01:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3900s) 12 个核苷酸插入与内建限制性内切酶位点
面对野生谱系中从未见过此类位点的事实，Bret 列举了三种可能性：一是极其罕见的自然进化或杂交重组事件；二是实验室为了探究新型病毒功能而主动设计添加；三是病毒在实验室特殊传代环境中自发演变而成，因为实验室条件消除了自然界的生存代价。Yuri 确认该位点仅对应 4 个氨基酸，序列极短，从理论上通过嵌合体构建或传代均可实现。然而，该位点在核酸层面的构造呈现出高度可疑的特征。
Yuri 指出，通常病毒获得新位点是通过点突变累积、在不改变序列长度的前提下完成的；但在 SARS-CoV-2 中，该位点却表现为一段长达 12 个核苷酸的外来插入（Insert），像是凭空降临。更巧合的是，这段编码 4 个氨基酸的核苷酸序列中，前两个精氨酸（Arginine）采用了极其罕见的密码子（CGG-CGG），这种组合恰好在插入片段内部构造出了一个 FauI（转录文本误作 FAO1）限制性核酸内切酶切点。Yuri 强调：“它实际上拥有一个特殊的消化酶切点，可以极大地辅助在细胞培养中筛选突变（It actually has a special digestion enzyme site that could greatly help with screening for mutations in cell culture）。”科研人员无需对整个病毒株进行耗时耗力的全基因组测序，只需利用限制性片段长度多态性（RFLP）技术，即可快速筛查病毒传代时弗林位点是否突变丢失，或者筛选出依然保留该位点的病毒株。Bret 评论称，自然界发生这种精准巧合的概率极低，这与分子生物学实验中为了追踪修饰而人为设计的分子标记（Indicator）高度吻合，所有这些疑点叠加在一起显得格外扎眼。
- **序列长度**：由 12 个核苷酸组成的外源插入片段，直接编码 4 个氨基酸（PRRA 基序）。
- **罕见密码子**：前两个精氨酸的编码方式在 β-冠状病毒基因组中极不寻常，正好拼出内切酶识别位点。
- **质控用途**：内建的 FauI 酶切位点使得研究人员能通过低成本的限制性酶切快速筛查病毒群落。
---
### [01:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4200s) 实验室自然选择机制与端粒研究的类比
针对 Kristian Andersen 等病毒学家的观点（即认为病毒特征更可能源于自然选择而非人工拼接），Yuri 提出了一个根本性的修正逻辑：“实验室泄漏并不一定意味着人工制造（The lab leak doesn't necessarily mean handmade）。”自然界中发生的每一种演化机制，同样可以在实验室内发生，甚至发生得更为密集。例如武汉疾控中心（Wuhan CDC）曾饲养活蝙蝠以采集病毒，而广东野生动物救护中心则收容过海关查扣的走私穿山甲。如果实验室将蝙蝠、穿山甲病毒或宿主聚集在同一物理空间，乃至在同一套细胞培养体系中共存，发生跨宿主重组与自然选择的概率，远高于让这些病毒在相距遥远的云南蝙蝠洞与马来西亚穿山甲栖息地之间自然相遇。
Bret 对此深表赞同，并以自身过往著名的演化生物学发现作为印证。他回忆道，实验室小鼠之所以普遍拥有异常修长的端粒，并非小鼠这一物种在野外的天性，而是小鼠繁育场在无意识中施加的选择压力所致；繁育人员在完全不知情的情况下改变了小鼠的生理特性。如果新冠病毒曾在实验室特殊的细胞系（例如人类癌细胞）中连续传代，它必然会针对这些细胞的特异性缺陷进化出极端的适应性，这种演化完全可能脱离实验人员的预期。Bret 进一步展开推论：
> “可能实验环境筛选出了某种特性，使其在室内极易传播，但代价是削弱了它在室外的传播能力（It's possible that something was selected for that made it particularly transmissible indoors and did so at cost, at expense to it, in terms of how transmissible it is outdoors）。”
Bret 警示，如果新冠病毒在室内环境（如实验室或人工饲养箱）中被长期人工选择，导致其对室内传播高度优化却不耐受室外环境，那么一旦它进入人类社会，随着时间的推移，它很可能会在野外和日常自然环境中逐步演化出更强的室外传播能力，带来更为深远的公共卫生风险。
### [01:15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4500s) 追查病毒起源的关键意义与国际科学界的共同责任
Bret Weinstein 强调，搞清楚新冠病毒（SARS-CoV-2）究竟是来自自然界还是实验室，绝不是为了推卸或追究责任，也不是一句简单的“反正大流行已经发生了，应对就行了”所能敷衍的。如果该病毒目前在户外不易传播，人类必须极为谨慎地行动，绝不能让它在户外环境中进化出更高效的传播能力；若对户外传播掉以轻心，病毒就会朝那个方向演化。解决起源争议的方式，要么是在野外找到某种中间宿主种群，证明它是完全来自野外的病毒；要么就是彻底厘清武汉实验室究竟发生了什么，但这必须依赖实验室的高度透明度。
Yuri Deigin 对此表示赞同，但他直言：“除非有巨大的国际压力或者出现某种吹哨人，否则他们掌握着所有的底牌，我不知道我们能否得到真相。”
Bret 对吹哨人的出现表示期待，并高度肯定了 Yuri 在推动该话题上的巨大贡献。他指出，Matt Ridley 本周在《华盛顿邮报》（The Washington Post）发表了文章，认同了 Yuri 所提出的论点；《原子科学家公报》（Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists）同日刊登的调查文章也引用了 Yuri 的工作。Bret 赞扬 Yuri 在分析中展现出的严谨与自我怀疑精神，而不是像某些阴谋论者那样只挑选能验证自己信念的证据。
两位对话者都坦言，自己内心深处其实极其渴望被事实打脸。正如 Yuri 所说：“我不想自己是对的。”
Bret 也回应道：“我也不想自己是对的，但如果我们是对的，这是最可能的解释——我代表我自己说，我认为这是目前最可能的解释——那么病毒学界必须停止向我们讲述虚构的故事，向公众坦白他们所知道和理解的一切。”
Bret 进一步指出，即使最坏的情况成立——该病毒是在实验室中通过嵌合体病毒制造出来，并在人源化细胞中传代，从而解释了它在人类中极强的适应性——这也不意味着它纯粹是“中国的问题”。全球科学界都深度参与了这类功能获得性研究，资助机构甚至包括美国国立卫生研究院（NIH）。这是一场全球共同承担责任的危机，绝不能为了逃避责任而掩盖关于病毒本质的关键证据。
- **国际反响**：Yuri Deigin 关于实验室改造与功能获得研究的深度文章，已被科普作家 Matt Ridley（发表于《华盛顿邮报》）及《原子科学家公报》等主流科学与媒体平台引述。
- **合作背景**：武汉实验室并非孤立存在，它长期参与国际合作，且相关冠状病毒研究曾获得美国国立卫生研究院（NIH）等西方科研机构的资助。
---
### [01:20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4800s) 功能获得性研究的虚幻承诺与三大核心危机
Yuri 提出，紧随病毒应对之后的第二大核心问题，是关于功能获得性（Gain-of-Function, GoF）研究的本质：人类是否应当重新评估这项研究的实际效益，甚至在全球范围内再次推行暂停令（Moratorium），至少暂停数年以理清人类究竟从中得到了什么。过去科学家推销 GoF 研究时，承诺能帮助预防大流行、提供疫苗和针对“蓄势待发（poised for emergence）”病毒的现成疗法。然而 Yuri 指出，这些承诺最终全部落空了：无论是在冠状病毒上，还是在最早的 H5N1 禽流感功能获得实验中，没有任何确凿证据表明这类研究带来了高价值的疫苗或疗法，其风险巨大而收益完全不对等。
Bret 赞同并梳理出了摆在全人类面前的“三大核心议题”：
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: 三大核心议题逻辑关系图
accDescr: 展示从当前病毒应对到长远生物安全防范的三个层层递进的核心问题。
subgraph S1["现实应对"]
A["议题一：应对 SARS-CoV-2<br>（探明其是否适应于实验室环境）"]
end
subgraph S2["科研监管"]
B["议题二：评估功能获得研究<br>（反思潜在外泄风险与不对等收益）"]
end
subgraph S3["生存安全"]
C["议题三：防范生物扩散与滥用<br>（应对技术外溢、恶性势力与低门槛生物袭击）"]
end
A --> B
B --> C
```
针对第三个议题，Bret 发出严重警告：哪怕全球正规科学界达成了暂停共识，也无法阻止试图改变全球权力格局的国家或冷酷无情的恶意组织接盘该技术。现存的科研论文和公开技术已经将制造此类病毒的门槛大幅降低。一个完全缺乏道德底线的实体，为了追求权力或财富，随时可能利用这些公开技术。
Yuri 补充道，生物恐怖主义的风险正变得愈发紧迫。很多潜在的恶意行为者原本可能没有意识到这种手段的破坏力，但这次疫情犹如一记警钟。现在甚至不需要完整的实验室设备，只要从自然界、实验室中偷取甚至直接从现存感染者身上采集病毒样本，并在教堂、地铁等人群密集的脆弱场所蓄意释放，就能轻易重创敌对国家的经济。
---
### [01:25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=5100s) 动机分析、设局假说与理性探讨阴谋的边界
谈及病毒是否可能被故意制造并释放，Bret 展开了一次思想实验。他分析指出，如果纯粹从传统军事武器的角度来看，SARS-CoV-2 并不是一个高效的选择，因为有大量无症状感染者存在，致死和失能效率无法达到硬性杀伤武器的标准。然而，动机并不一定局限于军事用途，完全可能是出于平庸而赤裸的经济利益。
Bret 指出，一旦有人制造并释放此类病毒，即可预见到航空、酒店、邮轮等行业将遭受毁灭性打击。在金融市场中，提前预知这一黑天鹅事件的人，利用信息不对称即可通过做空等手段将极少量的资金瞬间撬动成天文数字般的巨额财富。虽然目前没有任何证据支持“蓄意释放”这一假设，两人均认为最可能的情况依旧是出于善意研究却意外发生了未曾预料的泄漏，但此类经济动机在理论上是完全成立的。
Bret 还提出了另一种极端假设：如果真有幕后黑手蓄意制造并释放病毒，武汉正是掩盖行踪的“理想地点”，因为武汉有两家顶尖的蝙蝠冠状病毒实验室，一旦在此爆发，外界自然会归咎于实验室事故。Yuri 随后用病毒序列的硬核事实提出了反驳：
“但那可能需要一场巨大的内部做局（inside job），他们必须知道武汉手头拥有 RaTG13 毒株，才能真正栽赃武汉病毒研究所，因为 SARS-CoV-2 与武汉研究所拥有的毒株实在是太接近了。”
两人详细分析了病毒与 RaTG13 以及此前云南矿洞样本（BtCoV/4991）的高度同源性。Yuri 认为，要在武汉精准释放一个与武汉病毒研究所内部未公开或刚公开特征高度一致的蝙蝠病毒，必须对研究所当时的真实科研动态具有极其深入的内幕情报，因此这种外部栽赃的概率“极其极其微小”，且目前没有任何证据支撑。
Bret 总结指出，探讨这种可能性展示了一种健康的理性态度：现实世界中确实存在阴谋，公众和学术界必须学会在不被扣上“疯子”帽子的情况下理性探讨极具争议的可能性。两人都重申，他们最期望看到的最好结局是：大流行纯粹来自大自然罕见、复杂的生态事件并最终被证实，从而让实验室洗清嫌疑；但无论如何，人类都必须吸取这次惨痛的教训，严格反思功能获得研究，并严肃面对前沿生物技术可能赋予恶意势力的可怕破坏力。
### [01:30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=5400s) 全球病毒监测的需求与制度性灾难的教训
Yuri Deigin 指出，随着生物技术成本不断下降，任何有心之人都能轻易获取强大的工具。因此，国际社会迫切需要建立某种类似于国际原子能机构（IAEA）的全球统一机构，专门负责监测潜在的生物恐怖主义与新型病毒疫情。一旦某个地区出现聚集性异常感染，该机构应迅速进驻并完成病原体测序，绝不能让病毒像这次一样失控蔓延。Yuri 强调，撇开任何实验室泄漏的假设不谈，仅就武汉地方及中国官方早期的应对而言就令人极为失望——由于没有尽早实施封城，反而放任民众庆祝春节、聚集并离境，导致疫情向全球扩散。面对非洲和南美洲不断攀升的确诊数字，这场大流行的最终破坏力才刚刚显露。
Bret Weinstein 对此深表赞同，并将 COVID-19 视为人类文明的一场“终极试炼”。回顾过去的几十年——2008 年金融危机、2011 年福岛核事故、深水地平线（Deepwater Horizon）钻井平台爆炸以及艾利索峡谷（Aliso Canyon）天然气泄漏，人类总是陷入同一种被动模式：只有在重大灾难发生后，公众才惊觉某些行业一直在暗中进行着极度危险的操作。Bret 感叹道：“我总是觉得，自己总是在事故发生之后才了解到本该提前知晓的信息，而我真正希望的是有人能把这个过程快进，让我能提前获知我们正在从事的所有不可思议的危险进程。”即使 COVID-19 最终降级为类似流感的常规季节性危害，由于人类每年都要承受流感的沉重打击，再加上第二种长期共存的致命呼吸道疾病，也将是一场巨大的历史倒退。
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: 现代高危行业事故的被动应对模式
accDescr: 展示人类在福岛、深水地平线以及功能获得性研究中先酿成灾难后被动知情的发展循环
subgraph PreCrisis["灾难发生前：黑箱操作"]
A["高风险技术与行业探索<br>功能获得性研究 / 深海钻探"] --> B["缺乏独立监管与透明度"]
end
subgraph Catastrophe["灾难引爆"]
B --> C["系统性崩溃与外溢<br>COVID-19 / 深水地平线事故"]
end
subgraph PostCrisis["事后被动追责"]
C --> D["公众与科学界事后才获悉风险细节"]
D --> E["呼吁建立全球统一监测机制<br>类似国际原子能机构的病毒防线"]
end
```
### [01:33:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=5590s) 未知后果：慢性感染与组织隐藏的隐忧
两位学者进一步探讨了冠状病毒长期健康风险的未知数。Yuri Deigin 引用前美国国防部长唐纳德·拉姆斯菲尔德（Donald Rumsfeld）著名的“未知的未知”（unknown unknowns）名言，警告称该病毒出现仅半年，科学界对其远期后遗症仍一无所知。例如猫传染性腹膜炎（FIP）也是一种冠状病毒感染，该病毒学会了隐藏在宿主的免疫细胞内形成慢性感染，最终导致约 10% 的染病猫死亡。SARS-CoV-2 是否也会潜伏于人体组织中，目前根本无法排除。
Bret 赞赏了 Yuri 引用拉姆斯菲尔德的比喻，戏称其为“地缘政治现象界的约吉·贝拉（Yogi Berra）”。Bret 强调，病毒完全有可能潜藏在神经系统或免疫组织中，或者以极高的变异频率实现终身反复感染。Yuri 补充指出，过去的 SARS 尸检中就曾发现男性生殖腺体（睾丸）受到感染，而中国也已经出现 COVID-19 康复患者面临生育功能受损的临床报告。Bret 批评了美国政界淡化疫情严重性的言论，认为对该病毒未知维度的低估是极其危险的；而回想疫情初期，两人都曾基于 SARS 和 MERS 很快自行消亡的历史经验，误以为这不过是另一场转瞬即逝的呼吸道疫情，事实证明这种轻敌错得彻底。
- **潜在的组织靶点**：神经组织、免疫系统、男性生殖器官（睾丸与生育能力受损）。
- **动物冠状病毒前例**：猫传染性腹膜炎病毒（FIPV）演化出躲避免疫系统并潜伏于免疫细胞的能力。
- **早期认知偏差**：因 SARS（2003）和 MERS 传播范围有限并最终熄灭，导致包括作者与公众在初期均误认为本轮疫情会迅速退去。
### [01:36:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=5797s) 发表调查长文后的网络围攻与舆论反转
谈到在 Medium 上发表关于功能获得性研究与实验室起源的长文后的个人经历，Yuri Deigin 直言过程相当难受。尽管收获了许多正面反馈，但最初在俄罗斯网络社群中遭到的攻击极其恶毒。抨击者完全不讨论文章列出的论文与事实，而是进行毫无底线的人身攻击，质疑他的智商、学历以及阅读科研文献的资格，直接扣上“白痴”或“阴谋论疯子”的帽子。Yuri 强调自己原本只是希望大家保持怀疑态度去审视数据，文章绝大部分内容都是对已知文献的客观梳理。
Bret 结合自身经历剖析了这种攻击的本质：“他们真正想做的是让你感到痛苦，劝阻你继续深入，并把你树立为一个典型，好让其他人明白不要犯下他们眼中你所犯的错误。”Bret 指出，Yuri 所谓的“错误”恰恰是做了一次诚实的科学分析并将真相公之于众，这正是当前学术界最稀缺的勇气。事实上，正是 Yuri 的文章帮助像 Bret 这样非细胞生物学背景的学者理清了脉络，系统性地追踪到了冠状病毒功能获得性研究的文献链条。随着最初的舆论风暴平息，越来越多的同行与读者意识到功能获得性研究的普遍性与惊人危险，许多科学家也私下联系 Yuri，表态支持“实验室泄漏绝不能被排除，应当与其他自然起源假说平起平坐地加以调查”。
### [01:40:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6040s) 学术压制、“阴谋假设”与离奇的技术干扰
Bret 进一步指出，主流语境将一切合理怀疑斥为“阴谋论”，实际上是一种带有政治目的的污名化标签；严格来说，大家讨论的是一种合乎逻辑的“阴谋假设”（conspiracy hypothesis）。在当前环境下，大量病毒学家反常地抱团捍卫一个漏洞百出的自然叙事，这种不自然的协同本身就带有某种串通与学术掩盖的意味。Bret 随即询问 Yuri 最近的电脑设备状况，Yuri 透露自己的电脑不久前确实遭遇了极为诡异的故障，系统出现反常行为且无法连接网络，疑似感染了恶意软件。
Bret 透露自己近期也遭遇了非同寻常的严重电脑故障，且至少还知道另一位勇敢调查实验室泄漏假说的研究者也遇到了类似的技术问题。Bret 直言：“在某个节点上，当你的设备问题足够严重、足够神秘，并且与那些同样在用电脑探讨强权势力不希望被讨论的话题的人呈现出某种规律时，你就必须提出这个问题：这些电脑故障究竟是正常的，还是这种反常的错误频率在向你传递某种信号，表明你给这个世界带来了多大的震动？”Yuri 对此表示，或许其他调查实验室泄漏的研究员也可以梳理各自遇到的不可思议的技术干扰，形成一份清单。最后，Yuri 呼吁国际社会必须向有关方面施压，争取进入武汉实验室进行独立核查，并调取当年墨江铜矿患病矿工的原始样本以及 RaTG13 的原始样本进行独立测序，以验证武汉病毒研究所对外公开的数据是否属实。
- **语言标签的重塑**：从污名化的“阴谋论（conspiracy theory）”回归中立严谨的“阴谋假设（conspiracy hypothesis）”。
- **多名调查者的反常遭遇**：包括 Yuri、Bret 在内的多位追踪实验室起源假说的研究者，在相近时间段内均遇到了无法解释的严重电脑故障与黑客攻击迹象。
- **核心未决诉求**：获得对相关实验室的独立实地核查权限；调取墨江矿工的临床与病毒样本；由第三方独立机构对 RaTG13 等关键毒株进行重新测序比对。
### [01:45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6300s) 科学家免责豁免与加密货币吹哨人悬赏机制
Bret Weinstein 与 Yuri Deigin 探讨了如何打破当下围绕新冠病毒溯源的沉默与阻力。Bret 提出一个设想：为了全人类的利益，如果最终证实病毒确实源自实验室泄漏，社会是否应该向那些从事合法科学研究（而非生物武器开发）的涉事科学家提供免责豁免，使他们免于承担法律责任？Yuri 对此表示完全赞同。他在自己的长文中也阐明过，哪怕真的发生了泄漏，只要研究本身合法合规，一线科研人员就不应成为替罪羊；真正该承担后果的是那些在事故发生后蓄意掩盖真相的人。Yuri Deigin 在谈到掩盖行为时明确指出：“The thing is, like, if it escaped and there's been a cover up, the people who are doing the cover up, they're the ones who do face, who should face some ramifications.”
两人认为，眼下最紧迫的缺失是缺乏一套能让知情者安全站出来的机制。各国政府虽然嘴上高调宣称要求全面调查，却从未出台过针对吹哨人的法律免责、证人保护或重大经济激励措施。Yuri 半开玩笑地提出了一个构想：由民间社区发起众筹，建立一个基于加密货币的新冠溯源匿名举报热线。由于加密货币具备完全匿名且无法追踪的特性，它能绕开跨境资金监管与身份暴露的巨大风险，为中国境内面临巨大生存威胁的科学家、实验室工作人员或其亲友提供数额足够改变人生的奖励，激励他们提供关键线索。Bret 盛赞这是一个展示加密货币造福人类的绝佳应用场景，并强调人类社会必须穷尽一切手段揭开真相：“Let's just say humanity has an overarching need to know what took place in order to manage what we now are encountering.”
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: 吹哨人匿名举报与激励机制
accDescr: 展示民间众筹加密货币向知情者提供安全激励以获取关键实验室线索的流程
subgraph FundSource["资金与平台筹备"]
A["社区与公众众筹"] --> B["建立加密货币奖励奖池"]
B --> C["设立全匿名线索热线平台"]
end
subgraph Whistleblower["知情人端（规避地缘与法律风险）"]
D["一线科研人员 / 实验室员工 / 亲友"] -->|"安全提交核心证据与线索"| C
C -->|"通过匿名加密货币网络"| E["发放实质性经济奖励与安全保护"]
end
subgraph Investigation["调查与公众利益"]
C --> F["独立调查团队获取关键切入点"]
F --> G["明确病毒起源：自然溢出 vs. 实验室泄漏"]
end
```
- Yuri 认为即使不是民间众筹，美国情报机构等官方部门也早该建立类似的匿名加密悬赏通道，否则身处高压环境下的知情者冒着生计与生命危险揭发真相的几率微乎其微。
- 潜在的吹哨人不仅限于核心科学家，还包括他们的同事、亲属与朋友，他们往往掌握着实验室当时究竟在做什么、调查应该向谁问询的关键内情。
---
### [01:50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6600s) Peter Daszak 与功能获得性研究的逻辑悖论
谈话转向了在公众舆论中极力将“实验室泄漏论”斥为阴谋论的关键人物——生态健康联盟（EcoHealth Alliance）总裁兼创始人 Peter Daszak。Bret 直言，凡是在媒体上看到有文章声称“彻底终结了实验室泄漏假说”或对该假说冷嘲热讽的地方，Peter Daszak 的名字就无处不在。Yuri 介绍道，Daszak 多年来活跃在公众视野中，从美国国立卫生研究院（NIH）以及美国国防部（DoD）获取了数以千万美元计的巨额科研经费。其主要业务模式是奔赴全球偏远荒野，搜集形形色色的危险冠状病毒等病原体，将它们集中运回武汉等大城市的实验室进行测序与分析，声称借此能“预测”自然界向人类溢出的潜在风险。
Yuri 尖锐地批评这种所谓“预测溢出”的研究纯属徒劳且极度荒谬。自然界中潜伏着天文数字般的病毒突变，大自然中发生的事通常只留在自然深处；而科学家跑到偏远洞穴主动搜集蝙蝠体内的烈性毒株，并把它们汇聚到数百万人口的大都会实验室，这本身就在成倍放大灾难发生的概率。此外，Daszak 在公开言论中屡屡使用误导性统计进行夸大宣传：他声称亚洲每年有数百万农民暴露于人畜共患病突变之中，然而这一耸人听闻的结论，仅仅是从云南 218 名农民中有 6 人（不到 3%）体内检测出某种连人类细胞都无法感染的冠状病毒抗体粗暴外推出来的。
Bret 从演化生物学逻辑指出，即便自然界真有偶发的跨物种跳跃，绝大多数毒株因为根本没有适应人体而会迅速自然熄灭；而实验室功能获得性研究则是将极高概率的人为泄漏风险引入毫无防备的现实世界。在 Bret 看来，Daszak 每一次出面做出的断言都经不起客观事实的推敲，其言论完全是为了混淆视听。Bret Weinstein 严词批评道：“So I have begun to regard him as patient zero for misinformation.”
| 维度 | Peter Daszak 主导的研究逻辑 | 演化生物学与安全逻辑（Bret / Yuri 视角） |
|:--- |:--- |:--- |
| **核心假设** | 人类能够在实验室中从海量自然突变中提前“预测”下一个大流行病株 | 自然突变浩瀚如海，实验室人工模拟预测犹如大海捞针，本质是徒劳的 |
| **野外采样** | 深入偏远洞穴搜集并富集各种烈性蝙蝠冠状病毒株 | “自然发生的留在自然界”，搜集并运回高密度人口城市实验室极大推高了溢出风险 |
| **溢出频率论据** | 拿云南 218 人中 6 人的弱抗体（~3%）推演全东南亚每年数百万人暴露 | 多数自然跨物种溢出因未适应人类而快速自行熄灭，极度夸大自然感染频率以争取经费 |
| **研究代价** | 声称为了提前研发疫苗与药物提供“远见” | 下行风险极大（人为引发全球大流行），上行收益渺茫（大流行来临时疫苗并未就位） |
---
### [01:55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6900s) 人造嵌合体、全冠状病毒疫苗与对真相的呼唤
Yuri 进一步披露，Daszak 与武汉病毒研究所的合作远不止于简单的野外采样，他们还执行着一套成体系的“合成嵌合体”（synthetic chimeras）制造计划。其公开的科研目的是通过实验室人工改造，扩充可能在野外出现的突变病毒库。在 2019 年 12 月（即疫情暴发初期）的一次病毒学学术会议访谈中，Daszak 甚至公开夸耀实验室对冠状病毒的操作有多么得心应手：科研人员可以像拼积木一样轻松拆卸和替换受体结合基序（RBM），随意改变病毒对不同物种宿主的嗜性，以便测试更广谱的疫苗。这一阶段病毒学界狂热追求的方向正是开发“泛冠状病毒疗法”（pan-coronavirus therapy）与“泛冠状病毒疫苗”。包括 Ralph Baric 的学术论文以及 EcoHealth 拨付给武汉病毒研究所的课题申请书中，都白纸黑字地写着这一任务——制造大量新型人造工程毒株作为测试平台。讽刺的是，这些耗资巨大的研究不仅没能在这场大流行前夕提供任何可用的疗法，反而让实验室深陷泄漏源头的重大嫌疑之中。
面对 Daszak 在舆论场上的竭力否认与攻击异见，Yuri 认为 Daszak 实际上是在绝望地为自己的学术生命与个人前途抗争，因为一旦实锤病毒源于其实验室合作项目，后果对他而言是毁灭性的。但 Bret 直言 Yuri 这种看法未免“过于仁慈”：全球已有数十万人丧生，人类追求真相的最高利益绝不能向任何个人的名誉和事业妥协。Bret Weinstein 斩钉截铁地表示：“Humanity's overarching interest in knowing what took place overrides his interest in maintaining his reputation.”
在节目尾声，Bret 表达了对 Yuri 撰写长篇深度分析调查的由衷敬佩，称赞其打破学术界禁蝉的非凡勇气。两人呼吁全球公众持续向政界施压，要求开展彻底、独立、不受利益绑架的病毒溯源调查。Bret 承诺将把 Yuri 在 Medium 上持续补充修订的关于冠状病毒谱系与功能获得性研究的重磅长文链接附在节目说明中，共同期待真相浮出水面的那一天。
- Daszak 在 2019 年底的采访中透露他们手中掌握并正在测试研究的上百种不同冠状病毒突变株。
- Ralph Baric 与武汉病毒研究所共享了逆向遗传学操作技术，使替换冠状病毒刺突蛋白与 RBM 成为标准化操作流程。
- Bret 强调，公众哪怕在网络上遭受攻击也应勇敢发声，唯有强大的民意呼声才能倒逼政客推动真正独立公正的溯源调查。
### [02:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=7200s) 突遭断线与节目的戏剧性收尾
在播客对话即将收官之际，布雷特·韦恩斯坦（Bret Weinstein）正准备总结尤里·戴金（Yuri Deigin）在公开提出和论证病毒实验室泄漏假说时所展现的治学态度。韦恩斯坦强调，一个诚实的探索者最显著的特征就是能够坦诚地公开发表观点并接受检验：“好吧，我认为一个诚实行动者的标志就是，你知道，你当然会把某些成果以某种方式公之于众……”然而话音未落，两人的连线画面突然中断卡死。
面对猝不及防的画面冻结，韦恩斯坦接连呼叫了几声以确认对方是否仍在线上：“喂？喂？你还在吗？喂？”在意识到连线彻底切断后，韦恩斯坦半开玩笑地幽默调侃道：“哎呀，我想我们是遇到黑客了。”不过他也欣慰地表示，整场深度讨论的核心论点与证据链条在此之前已经完整呈现，关键内容都已经录制完毕。在反复尝试确认对方是否还能听到声音无果后，韦恩斯坦正式向观众和断线的尤里致谢并道别：“无论如何，非常感谢你，尤里，等到有新进展可以探讨的时候，我非常希望能再次邀请你回来给我们做更新，保重。”
- **连线意外中断**：在韦恩斯坦总结尤里探讨学术问题的诚实态度时，网络连线突然断开，韦恩斯坦调侃称“我想我们是遇到黑客了（I think we got some hackers）”。
- **圆满收官与后续邀约**：尽管收尾有些猝不及防，但长达两小时的深入探讨已涵盖所有核心证据；韦恩斯坦向尤里表达感谢，并约定在未来出现新的调查进展时再次邀请他做客节目。
## Notable quotes
> [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=0s) And I think those virologists who claim that there's zero chance or virtually no chance of this being a lab escape are, to put it mildly, incorrect. — Yuri Deigin
> [01:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=3600s) It's been shown that the addition of furin site greatly enhances the ability of a virus to infect different types of cells and cells from different animals — Yuri Deigin
> [01:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=4200s) The lab leak doesn't necessarily mean handmade — Yuri Deigin
> [01:45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=6300s) Let's just say humanity has an overarching need to know what took place in order to manage what we now are encountering. — Bret Weinstein
> [01:30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=5400s) 我总是觉得，自己总是在事故发生之后才了解到本该提前知晓的信息，而我真正希望的是有人能把这个过程快进，让我能提前获知我们正在从事的所有不可思议的危险进程。 — Bret Weinstein
> [22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1350s) 在这个病毒于武汉露面的那一刻，它就已经整装待发了，对吧？它早已高度适应了人类；没有任何证据表明它曾经历过在人际间跌跌撞撞、摸索寻找如何有效感染人类细胞以实现传播的过渡阶段——完全没有这种痕迹。它一落地就轰然引爆。 — Bret Weinstein
> [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug&t=1500s) 在科学规范上，这是不可接受的。你不可能重命名一个毒株，却连一点解释改名原因、方便他人溯源的线索都不留。 — Bret Weinstein
## Mentioned
Bret Weinstein, Yuri Deigin, Heather Heying, Shi Zhengli, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Kristian Andersen, Zhong Nanshan, Matt Ridley, Donald Rumsfeld, Yogi Berra, Martin Molin, Wintergatan, SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, BtCoV/4991, Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth Alliance, National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston National Laboratory, Wuhan CDC, Guangdong Wildlife Rescue Center, International Atomic Energy Agency, Tiputini Biodiversity Station, The Washington Post, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, This Week in Virology, GenBank, Dark Horse Podcast
## Video description
Yuri Deigin and Bret Weinstein Discuss the evidence for the SARS-CoV-2 lab-leak hypothesis.
Find his Medium article here: https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, follow us on twitter (@BretWeinstein, @ydeigin), and consider supporting me on Patreon or Paypal.
Theme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for providing us the rights to use their excellent music.
[Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug)
Source quotes
[0:00] Yuri Deigin: And I think those virologists who claim that there's zero chance or virtually no chance of this being a lab escape are, to put it mildly, incorrect.
[60:00] Yuri Deigin: It's been shown that the addition of furin site greatly enhances the ability of a virus to infect different types of cells and cells from different animals
[70:00] Yuri Deigin: The lab leak doesn't necessarily mean handmade
[105:00] Bret Weinstein: Let's just say humanity has an overarching need to know what took place in order to manage what we now are encountering.
[90:00] Bret Weinstein: 我总是觉得，自己总是在事故发生之后才了解到本该提前知晓的信息，而我真正希望的是有人能把这个过程快进，让我能提前获知我们正在从事的所有不可思议的危险进程。
[22:30] Bret Weinstein: 在这个病毒于武汉露面的那一刻，它就已经整装待发了，对吧？它早已高度适应了人类；没有任何证据表明它曾经历过在人际间跌跌撞撞、摸索寻找如何有效感染人类细胞以实现传播的过渡阶段——完全没有这种痕迹。它一落地就轰然引爆。
[25:00] Bret Weinstein: 在科学规范上，这是不可接受的。你不可能重命名一个毒株，却连一点解释改名原因、方便他人溯源的线索都不留。
Source quotes
[25:00] Yuri Deigin: You would not rename a strain and not at least leave some pointer that explains why you renamed it and allows somebody to trace it.
Original transcript
[0:00] Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast. I have with me Yuri Dagan, who is in Moscow. He is a tech entrepreneur and longevity researcher who has recently come to my attention as someone who has done extensive work looking into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. and I was very impressed when I read his paper on Medium. I talked about it previously on the podcast with Heather and so many of you have seen his work. What you may or may not know is that, especially this week, that work has shown up in a number of mainstream publications as a strong bit of research pointing in the direction of at least not shutting down the laboratory origin hypothesis for the virus. So, Yuri, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So you and I have talked a number of times about what this virus looks like to us and why it is that we having trouble swallowing the official story that this virus clearly came from nature perhaps through a wet market, but that it has nothing to do with the two labs that study bat-borne coronaviruses in Wuhan, China. So what I want to do is bring the fans of this podcast along a bit so that they can get the view from somebody who really does understand the biotech aspect of coronavirus research. And they can make a judgment for themselves based on real information rather than just dueling personalities making claims. so i hope i can fill those shoes but thanks for the credit of you know knowledge well i know you are giving me uh i you know i think you don't fully believe that you are at an epicenter of history but obviously the pandemic is a major historical event in some ways it is a singular historical event and your work on you know your work which is you know not in the laboratory with coronaviruses but your work revealing the patterns in that that body of literature and what they suggest about what is possible and what we have to consider with respect to this pandemic that work is the gold standard. You've really done a better job than anybody else surveying that literature and pointing out what it implies. I mean, it really, there's one problem with it. It's that the work is so complex that I had to read your paper twice in order to understand fully what you were saying. And I think for lay people, it's out of reach until we unpack it for them a bit. But it really is very high quality work and you're courageous to have put it out. Well, thank you. I just, you know, disclaimer that I'm not a virologist by any stretch of imagination and I mean my knowledge of biology is I think you know just at a level where I can just see genetic patterns and blast sequences and see differences or similarities and that that medium post post or medium article is nowhere like it's not a scientific paper and it's not meant to be it meant to be just an overview of the things that virologists have been doing and the kind of research they been doing And just my kind of ramblings about the things that I would have thought could have pointed at a lab origin or natural origin. And I was kind of sharing my journey, which took me from initially being extremely skeptical about the possibility of lab escape to being much less skeptical and actually quite upset that so many established scientists just dismiss this as a conspiracy theory, which kind of leads people like me initially who trust scientists, trust their opinion to just by association to do the same. But actually, when you look at the facts, I don't think we can be that, you know, sure that this is not a lab leak. And I think those those virologists who claim that there's zero chance or virtually no chance of this being a lab escape are, to put it mildly, incorrect. Well, you're obviously bending over backwards not to say what I think is clear to both of us, which is we can't say that this is a lab escape.
[5:00] bleak but we can say anybody who tells you for sure that it isn't is either very confused about the facts or not telling you what they know and that that you know you're not a virologist but in a sense that may be why you're able to play the role that you're playing something about the incentives that surround mainstream virology at the moment has caused the entire field to line up behind a story that is incorrect, that lab leak is not worth considering as a hypothesis. And, um, As I've pointed out on the podcast before, that puts us in a very dangerous situation because at the moment when we have a global pandemic unfolding with a bat-derived coronavirus, the very people who need to be at the forefront of helping us understand what that means, what that implies about the pandemic, mechanisms at work in this virus, those people have all compromised themselves by telling us a fairy tale. So what I'd like to do is unpack a little bit. what the evidence does look like and what it doesn't yet tell us. So can you outline what the evidence does look like? The facts are that are most striking to you with respect to unpacking the or with respect to sorting out what the most likely explanation is. Sure. Well, I mean, the biggest... Thank you. coincidence, the most striking thing is this happening in Wuhan, which is next door to the lab that is the number one lab in China on coronaviruses. And this in itself is a huge coincidence that hasn't been explained at all at this point, and which has puzzled many scientists, including Shi Zhengli, the chief scientist in coronavirology. She's not the head of the Wuhan He's probably the number one leading scientist or the most recognized name. in coronavirology in China. And she herself was the number one person suspecting a lab leak out of her lab because Wuhan is a very odd place for a coronavirus leak to occur from a bad coronavirus because on Well, first of all, they don't really eat bats in Wuhan or Hubei, as opposed to like in the south of China, where actually like Guangdong, where it is part of the cuisine. And I didn't know all this. Like to me, like when people were initially saying that this is odd, I thought, well, come on, it's a wet market. Yeah, it's like, maybe a small chance of happening, but I'm sure they had bats there. But when I actually looked at the evidence, before I became skeptical of the impossibility of the lab leak, I thought that, you know, it's not a big coincidence. But after looking at it, I realized that it is a huge coincidence. Because those bats that carry those coronaviruses, they don't live in nowhere near Wuhan. They live, you know, 2000,000. kilometers away in Yunnan and any other outbreaks of coronaviruses like SARS or HKU1 that happened, that happened in, I guess, the tropical climates. And Wuhan is just a very, very odd place for this to have occurred. It's an odd place. It's also an odd time since those bats would have been hibernating. Yes, absolutely. So there are two conspicuous facts that suggest something about the Wuhan origin is odd. Thank you. Right. And we don't have any explanation, like natural origin explanation of how the virus could have gotten there. Like they scared the wet market. And now even the official Chinese sources dismiss this hypothesis that no, actually wet market is not the place of origin of the virus. epidemic. And so it's just a huge question mark, which isn't in any way explained at this point. and lab leak explains perfectly you know yeah so i think uh it would be worth pointing out that you and i had a parallel journey in this regard you were initially researching to basically to buttress your argument that the lab leak hypothesis was an empty one. And as you delved, you discovered that it wasn't an empty hypothesis at all. For my part, I was in the Amazon with Heather, completely out of contact with the world, and we emerged from a very remote location, the Tipitini Biological Station, into the Amazon.
[10:00] into we came out and went into the Andes for a couple days and we started to look at what was on the Internet that we had missed and there was a a story about this coronavirus circulating and, you know, this was very early. This was in, uh, in February. And, um, looked at it and I'm a bat biologist and I saw a Okay, there's a wet market. People are eating bats. This is a bat-borne coronavirus. The story looked very straightforward to me. And so I tweeted about it and I said, you know, I haven't done a thorough look, but what I understand from the evidence here, this does look like a virus that would have been in horseshoe bats and that it would have emerged through contact. And I said something about wet markets being dangerous, I think. that studies bat coronaviruses, and I immediately retracted my tweet. And I said... There's obviously something about this story I don't understand because that's a huge coincidence. And, you know, I initially thought maybe... the facts wouldn't turn out to be what I thought they were. They would turn out, You know, as you wondered, maybe these... Labs that study these viruses are really very common, and so it showing up in Wuhan isn't that special because if there are a thousand such labs or whatever, then okay, it emerged near one of them. But no, this is one of the two most important labs in the world that studies these viruses. So anyway, that moment of waking up to these coincidences are too big to ignore then leads you into the biology. Yeah. And kind of one of the contrary points that was being made initially was that, well, of course, they had the lab where the bats are. So... But then you actually examine it and realize, no, those bats don't live anywhere near the lab. They live thousands of kilometers away. And that alone was enough to make you, you know, scratch your head and think maybe, you know, this is... all to the story that people like virologists make it out to be. So yeah, a lot of questions that kind of led me down the rabbit hole and, After looking at the kind of research that has been going on in that lab, and around the world, the lab leak hypothesis has become much more probable than initially thought. Yeah, I think the frightening thing to me, maybe the most frightening thing here, is that if you have the background that allows you to just even begin to look into the facts here, and you don't have a dog in the fight, you're not a virologist, right, or you're not signed up with a political team that's selling a particular story, you instantly end up in this rabbit hole where all of the things that you're told about why you shouldn't pay any attention to that hypothesis – turn out to be paper thin and then all of the things that might point in the direction of the lab turn out to be harder to dismiss than you would like them to be. And so at the point you start... talking to people about this. you discover that the resistance to this idea is not based in facts or logic. It is based in something else, but it is very strong. So have you encountered this problem? I don't know if I said at the top, you're in Moscow. You've been in Moscow for the whole duration of the pandemic? Yeah, I kind of go. I was stuck in Moscow once the flights got canceled and the borders closed. Yeah, absolutely. I encountered it and actually I was a bit surprised that the strongest opposition to the idea that lab leak is possible, I got from the Russian scientific community. And people who also Supposedly, you know, they don't have any dogs in this fight either, but to them the very kind of thought of even considering that the scientists could be lying. To them, that was blasphemy and they were very harsh in the criticism that I'm just kind of peddling baseless conspiracy theories. But what? When actually pressed for kind of a logical explanation why they think it's okay to dismiss a lab hypothesis. Why do they believe so strongly that it cannot possibly be a lab leak? They don't really have any evidence or at least nothing conclusive. Eventually, it all ended up being dependent on the 4% difference between the sequence of genomic sequence of SARS-2 and the nearest common ancestor, the RATG sequence, RATG13 that the Wuhan lab
[15:00] I'm released. And it all kind of takes wanted the word that this is the only sequence and the closest sequence they ever had and completely just trusts them and thinks that, you know, that's those people think the Russian kind of critics think that that's the strongest evidence that this could not have happened. inside a lab. Right, a sequence that... that came from a lab that obviously has a tremendous amount at stake in the question of whether they are responsible. Absolutely. And it's a very suspicious way in which it was revealed. And just those little half-truths about the sequence that were revealed in a piecemeal fashion, like limited hangout fashion, that to this day haven't really been explained. Nobody has been so many questions about it, first and foremost being, Why did she rename it, right? And why didn't she mention in the 2020 paper, why didn't she mention that she collected it in 2013 from a mine in which six people got SARS-like pneumonia. Okay, so my listeners are not going to have any idea what you're talking about yet. So let's put this story together so that they can follow it. So RATG13 is the name of the individual from which the sample was collected? An individual bat? No, it's actually the name of the strain. RA is Renault Office Affinis. Yeah, that's right. I hope they're not putturing. Yeah, Rhynolophus finnis, which is a horseshoe bat. Right. It's one of the horseshoe bats are like a big family. Yeah, it's a family. Finnis is, yeah, because they have Synecas as well. Synecas bats, Rhynolophus synecas were the ones who had the first SARS and that was the kind of the bat family that Shi Zhengli initially specialized in. And the Finnis is kind of the one that, like, the one she initially dismissed, or at least she claims, but this is the one that harbored this strain. the sequence. Okay, so you've got a lab that specializes on Bat coronaviruses. They are studying these viruses. Their grants and their papers point to the danger of a virus emerging from nature. They point to bats as a likely place for a coronavirus to come from on the basis that SARS-CoV-2. The first SARS, SARS, cove, the initial one, appears to have emerged from a bat. And so their point at a scientific level was we need to study these viruses and how they might emerge so we can prevent a pandemic. Is that approximately right? Yeah, and they had grants for this for probably over a decade. They worked together with EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak. We'll come back to him. Right. But let's get back to the story of the strain, the RITG strain. Uh, It wasn't originally named RATG 13, and in 2020, it was only revealed that what they Wuhan Institute claimed that they fully sequenced it, and they said that when they collected it in 2013, they only sequenced a very short fragment of its RDRP gene. the polymerase gene that copies a virus, which was their standard practice to determine pretty much the phylogeny of the virus. I'm sorry to interrupt you. I want to go back to the sequence of events so that people can follow. Right. This Wuhan Institute of Virology lab that studies emergent coronaviruses because of the danger of a pandemic is looking in Yunnan province in a cave in a mine that has horseshoe bats. And they're looking there. Am I correct that there has been a minor outbreak? There's a minor outbreak of pneumonias. Right. Well, they had six minors having a minor outbreak. This is the puns. No, I like it. And so they were invited. The Wuhan Institute was invited to investigate. The outbreak actually happened in 2012. And so they were invited in 2012, Xi Jinping and Wuhan Institute and some other virologists from other institutes from across China.
[20:00] We're invited to kind of look at the mine, look at the viruses that inhabit this mine. And they had, I think, three or four trips, and they collected, extracted this one in 2013, probably the last trip of that four in that time span. And by then, three of the miners have died, and they also analyzed four of the miners' samples, so the four surviving miners. Two miners died right away, four miners were in the hospital, and they had their blood samples, sputum samples and sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology on the advice of the head academic in China responsible for SARS, Dr. I hope I'm not butchering his name. So, on his advice, they checked the minor blood samples against various viral antibodies. And antibodies for SARS, the first SARS came up positive. They detected IgG SARS antibodies, which of course is hugely suspicious because the first SARS outbreak was pretty small in China. It was just about 5,000 people in mainland China. carrying antibodies from the first outbreak, are negligible. Most likely it's actually just SARS antibodies cross-react with a close relative, another SARS-like strain, which, you know, which that Shai Jianli was on the hunt for for many years. And now we know that this, of course, the SARS-2 is a SARS-like strain. Like it's close enough relative that there's a high chance of antibodies cross-reacting. the antibody test for the first SARS cross-reacting with any kind of SARS-like antibodies that could have been produced when people are infected by SARS-2 or RATG-13 or any other similar strain that could have been in that cave. And so, The fact that this was never mentioned, like all of this, knowledge now about the four miners having SARS antibodies, about Wuhan Institute testing the miners' blood samples, It's only been revealed in the past few weeks through Twitter activists digging into Chinese PhD and master's thesis in Chinese that were never translated into English. So, you know, when we kind of look at this, the story of Xi Jinping and Peter Daszak saying that when they discovered this bad strain in 2013, it was so uninteresting to them that they put it in the freezer and never touched it until in 2020. Just by sheer luck, they sequenced SARS-2 and saw a similarity to this little fragment they initially sequenced. That story kind of becomes hard to believe, you know. It does not add up. The fact is you have a lab that has dedicated itself to studying SARS-like coronaviruses. They have happened on a cave in which humans have been infected, the first step in the pandemic sequence. And you've got these cross-reactive antibodies. So this is what they're looking for. And their story that they at the time regarded it as unimportant just simply holds no water. I would point out that there's another important... piece of information here for people trying to understand why you and I and a few others have landed so far from the consensus perspective. One of the things that is maximally conspicuous to me is... The virus that emerges in Wuhan is ready to go. Right? It is... It is adapted to human beings. There is no evidence of a phase in which it is fumbling about trying to discover the means to infect human cells well enough to become spreadable. No evidence of that. It hits the ground and boom. Now, the story from 2012-2013 in this cave, this mine in Yunnan, is... indicative of something that must be true, which is actually little jumps into human beings are not that uncommon. In general, no pandemic arises because they don't experiment successfully. The viruses don't experiment successfully and discover the key to infecting large numbers of humans. So people may get sick, they may die, or they may get sick and they get better. There are pneumonias all the time. The fact of the virus in Wuhan being so well adapted,
[25:00] The fact that we have evidence that viruses that are not especially well adapted do jump sometimes and it doesn't turn into something that we notice at a historical level. These two things are really important. And then you have a laboratory behaving oddly with respect to the exact thing that they claimed to be looking for. We know they were looking for it. We know that they were working on these things. And so now I want you to unpack, if you will, the oddness. So this is, again, something that you called my attention to. I never would have gotten there on my own. RATG 13 is the strain that is revealed in 2020 after the pandemic begins or late 2019? Okay, so this is the strain. Well, January 29th, I think it was published by Xi Jingli. Okay, so Xu Zhengli publishes a sequence. She says it's the closest thing we've got to the circulating sequence. uh, The virus that's circulating in the human population. It comes from a sample we collected in 2013 in Yunnan. And we didn't think much of it at the time, but here it is. We've got it or we had it. Am I correct that they do not? Yeah, she just mentioned it in passing in like a very short sentence. She never mentioned the mine. She never mentioned pneumonia. And it's a different name from the one that they have given it in 2013. And also they don't cite their original publication in which they revealed this original short sequence of this strain. They Initially, they called it 4991, Betcov491991, which is just the number of the sample. And it's just odd that they decided to rename it. and never mentioned the original strain. Scientifically speaking, this is unacceptable. You would not rename a strain and not at least leave some pointer that explains why you renamed it and allows somebody to trace it. And I think people should actually look at your Twitter feed, because they can see you as you're trying to sort out. You've got these sequences that may in fact be the same strain, under two different names and you simply pose the question on Twitter, Are these two the same? And it turns out that we now know that they are based on what is the... Well, now they claim they are. I mean, there's some wild speculations that maybe... Maybe they... Just... They couldn't bring themselves to claim the same thing because they just took the 4991s, the little fragment, and they kind of worked around it and put something closer to SARS-2, but maybe the actual initial sequence is different or maybe it's... extracted out of the minor samples. There's so many possibilities and I agree there are just wild conjecture at this point. But it's just very odd. Why would scientists not even mention, not even cite themselves their previous work where they collected it, they should get some additional accolades for it, and they just can't bring themselves to mention this and remain quiet they haven't explained. All that happened is in their internal database, there's some big Chinese database on viruses. All they did is they added in the 4991 to the description of the RITG sequence just in brackets, which kind of indicates that now they have confirmed that it's indeed the same sequence that they collected in 2013. But there's been no official commentary and there's been no official explanation. And even I think in the follow up paper, they still don't cite the 2016 paper by the Wuhan Institute authors, which just Very odd behavior. It's as if they're... Go ahead. Yeah. No, I don't know. It's either they're really uncomfortable with what they're doing or... Because, I mean, it's obvious that, you know, once they reveal it, people are going to arrive at the conclusion that it's the same sequence. I mean, the original... fragment 4991 was submitted to Genebank in 2013, it's not like it could be you know, deleted from there. So, It's very odd that, you know, the way that they chose to, you know, disseminate this information to the public. So in some sense, the odd relationship between sample 4991 and RATG 13, the fact that they appear to be based on the same information, the same strain are not identified as the same strain it's hard to avoid the impression that this is
[30:00] functioning like two sets of books. Where if you don't want somebody to be able to follow a trail, you could rename something so that it doesn't connect to the other things that would constitute evidence of what it really was. So I'm not saying that that happened, but I am saying it is very interesting that this lab is behaving in a scientifically-examined way. unorthodox, unacceptable, and if it's intentional, unethical way with respect to samples that are now at the center of a historical pandemic. Whatever its source, we have a right to understand what it is that these samples are. and what the relationship to each other is. And then you mentioned databases. What has been your experience looking into these databases in order to figure out what connects to what? So there's another database, or there was another database by Xi Jinping herself, like her private, not private, personal database. It was public at the time and she essentially collected her own little viral samples or pasted some little parts of the genome that she thought were interesting into this database rather than submit them to Genebank or other databases. So that database has been missing. It seems to have been deleted. The download link is no longer available. And also the database was kind of in the midst of a bit of a, not a scandal, but it was very interesting to see that on December 30th. Xijin Li kind of scrubbed the database of some mentions of arthropod vectors or like mosquitoes or she changed those names to not just phrases she changed to bad coronaviruses so initially it was a database of potential wildlife coronaviruses, and zoonotic interactions, or actually host switching interactions, and all those mentions were deleted and replaced by just bad and rodent coronaviruses, which, you know, a lot of people noticed that. And maybe at the time, whoever, well, it was done under Xi Jinping's ID, I think, whoever was doing the changes probably didn't realize that there is a change tracking system in place where people can just go back to the previous version of the description and see the differences. And I mean, that's kind of a minor thing. The major thing is that now the 60 megabyte database that was previously available for download is no longer there. The download link, if you click on it, you just get an empty archive back. And people have tried contacting the hosting provider of the database to check, was there a backup file? Can we get it back online? And the response they got was laughable that, "Oh, sorry, we didn't keep the backup." They didn't keep the backup of these. How things can be. I'm sure there's virology labs that probably have the backup because it was just one downloadable file. It's not that big, just 60 megs. And if they have it, it'd be great if they could share it. Yeah, many people will have downloaded it, right? Many people will have downloaded it in the course of their work. I'm pretty sure that the Barrick lab would have it because they've been working on your competitor slash collaborator has, you know, to kind of maybe give you ideas on what they're working on, see their recent submissions. And I think that can give a good idea of the types of to the person skilled in art could give ideas of what research directions the competitor is following. So I'm sure they were keeping tabs on each other. So yeah, if anybody has the database and they can share it. Or at least check if there's any kind of odd sequences. Maybe just, you know, No, no. Please share the database with us if you have it. This is important. And it's, you know, It would be great to... um, check some hypotheses here, but really that database is disproportionately valuable in light of the pandemic and what information it might contain. So you mentioned the Barrick Lab. This is Ralph Barrick, In North Carolina. Is that right? Yes. So Ralph Baric is the the PI in the other major coronavirus laboratory. He's in the US. He has collaborated with the Zhang Li lab in China. at times. They are also competitors. This is the way science works. So they're friendly competitors who are constantly, as you point out in your Medium article, one-upping each other with respect to their ability to manipulate viruses and things like this.
[35:00] But anyway, this deserves to be on the table because the Barrick Lab has been quiet, am I right, about these abnormalities and coincidences. They have effectively signed on to the consensus that a laboratory leak is so preposterous as to not be worth our consideration. Well, I think there was just one brief mention by Ralph Baric that lab leak is theoretically possible. So he personally, I don't think he said he can rule it out. That was a while back, but he never dove into the details. And one thing he said that at this point, we still don't have any evidence of a natural origin. We don't have an intermediate host. And, uh, Since then, I haven't really heard anything from Ralph. I just heard, I guess, a couple of podcasts with him on virology. Yeah. the virology podcasts this week in virology, I think. Okay. Well, that's better. I'm glad to hear that he acknowledges that it's an open possibility at some level. I think so. I mean, uh, that's, I hope I'm remembering correctly that, I mean, I hope he actually goes on the record and says what he really thinks, because I don't think anybody has been quoting him verbatim about his stance on this. being either a lab leak or impossibility of a lab leak. Okay. So let's, we've jumped around a little bit. We've got a massive coincidence in terms of The emergence of the virus emerging in Wuhan is suspicious. It emerging at the end of the year in winter when the bats would have been hibernating is suspicious. Even the Chinese government now acknowledges that the wet market is not the origin point. We don't have a bat virus. It doesn't seem like the receptor binding domain is not optimized for bats. I'm not sure. Did they try infecting bats with this SARS-2. In any case, so the RBM came from a pangolin virus, and that's a whole... Now, wait a second. I want to correct you. The RBM did not come from a pangolin. the closest sequence we have is from a pangolin. Am I right about that? It's not that we know that the RBM came from a pangolin. Pangolin is offered as the likely intermediate because the sequence for it. So the the binding domain is this important sequence that creates the proteins that allow the SARS-CoV-2 viral particles to invade cells, right? So it binds the the ACE particle. So am I correct? We don't know that this is from a pangolin, but that's our best guess because of the sequence similarity. Well, the RBM is from a pangolin strain. The RBM is nowhere else to be found. That RBM is pretty unique and so it's kind of been throwing a wrench into this phylogenetic trees that, because in all the respects, in all the parts of the sequence, RATG 13 is the closest relative of SARS-2. But in that very narrow strain of the spike protein, the RBM, the receptor binding domain, that is actually kind of the key to entry of a particular animal, because, you know, the ACE2 receptor is different in different animals, that came from a pangolin. And moreover, the more interesting part is that it actually binds to a human receptor better than it does to a pangolin receptor. So it seems a bit more optimized or adapted to humans than to pangolins, although the strain is... supposedly extracted from pangolins that were smuggled or captured by Chinese customs from smugglers in Guangdong in 2019. And then they sent some samples to some labs Virology labs because those pangolins died of some pneumonia or something. So I still think we need to sort this out. I think we are having a communication problem for some reason. The sequence is not 100% identical to the pangolin sequence. binding domain sequence. It's 99%. I mean, it's got like, I want to say, How many? It only has one amino acid difference in the receptor binding motif There's the receptor binding domain and the receptor binding motif, the RPM, And that one has, you know, all but one amino acid, identical to The pangolin strain and be seven eight nine and how big is the how big is
[40:00] is the The motif. It's not that big. My memory, I mean, I think it's like 78 or 79 amino acids. So one of them is different. Yeah, it's pretty short. The domain is bigger. It's, I want to say, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred. And what is the percentage similarity of the whole domain? Thank you. Well, the RBD, the domain, is actually very similar between the three strains, between the SARS-2, the Pangolin, and the RATG-13. And it's pretty conserved with other strains. But it's actually the RBM. It's different between SARS-2 and RTG13, but it's nearly identical with just one amino acid difference between the Pangolin strain. and SARS-2. And the only thing is that it's identical on the amino acid level, but on the nucleotide level, there are some dissimilarities. And there's actually quite a lot of differences for some people to claim that, you know, it couldn't have been like a lab leak because it would have taken a lot like for natural passaging of the two strains to have such a high difference in nucleotides. Although the amino acids are the same, the nucleotides have like a 12% difference. So you're talking about what we call Synonymous mutations, right? Right. Yes. So for those of you who are maybe grappling to remember your high school or college biology, because you have a triplet codon and you only have 20 amino acids that are possible to be specified, there's a lot of redundancy in the code. this molecule has for the cell receptor to which it is binding that allows the virus to gain access. Is that a fair summary? Yeah, absolutely. So when we're talking about how similar or how different, we have to be careful about whether we're talking about the protein, in which case you have very tight similarity, or the underlying genes, in this case RNA, which would be... uh, more distinct. And so then there's a question about how much time would have to pass and how much, if you were involved in an experiment, how much passaging that is moving it from one cell to the next or one, you can also do this with living animals, from one animal to the next, would you have to do to get this level of sequence difference? So you want to unpack for us what you think. So you have RATG13, which is the strain that is revealed in 2020 by the Zhang Li lab. You have 4991, which is at some level the same strain we now know, although we don't really know... what RATG 13 is because, am I correct, there is no physical sample of RATG 13? Well, this is a good question too, because they claim they resequenced the old fecal swab that they took from the bats in 2013. Thank you. They claim they don't have the live virus, but they resequenced something, so that something must be the sample they collected in 2013. Some people are skeptical at all that RITG13 even exists, that the sample exists, that they actually resequenced. People are skeptical about that and think that maybe Day. came up with the sequence in other ways, other creative ways. So let's just be clear about this. We don't have any reason to believe one way or the other. What we do is a physical sample, but it is entirely possible to take a sequence, let's say 4991 sequence, and to... modify it without doing anything in a laboratory and enter a new sequence that has high analogy to 4991, into a database under a new name, So there's nothing that prevents this. This is on the honor system. People enter sequences. And, you know, it's up to them to provide a reference sample or something. And other than that, we are just simply taking them at their word. So we don't know whether... It's possible that RATG 13 didn't exist, that it's a modification of a sequence that was created for a purpose. It's possible that the sample did exist and they did do away with it. They disposed of it and have only the text left. But anyway, these are all open possibilities, and until we have,
[45:00] a frank discussion coming out of that lab about what they did and didn't do. We just are in no position to know. Yeah, and even if they had originally sequenced it, they can... then take that sequence recreate the original virus put it into some cell culture, do many experiments on it, and it will mutate. And then they can take the new mutated virus and re-sequence it and say, "Oh no, here it is, is what we collected back in 2013." And you'd see many differences from the original sequence. And as you said, it's just their word that in science, people take just people with their word and normally nobody really has any incentive to lie. which, you know, in the case of an investigation might not be entirely correct. So am I correct that from the sequence that they have given us, that they could actually, even if there is no... physical sample of this virus left in the lab or even in nature, let's say it had gone extinct, they could resurrect That virus from the sequence alone. Current technology would allow them to take the coat from a coronavirus and install a genome that they had effectively written from scratch. Is that correct? Yeah, absolutely. If you have the code, the sequence, you can just print the DNA, the DNA version of the RNA virus. That's what is normally done in viral reverse genetics. You print like seven fragments of the virus in the language of DNA. and then you put it into a different cell culture which turns DNA into RNA and voila, you got a live virus just from essentially from a computer. I mean, it's done routinely and it was just recently done with SARS-2 in two labs in one Swiss lab, did it like in a month. They put together SARS-CoV-2 from the sequence alone. Yeah, they just downloaded the Chinese sequence, ordered the DNA printed in Genzyme in the States, waited three weeks until they got mailed back, and then within a week they assembled the live virus from the fragments that they got printed in the States, in Switzerland. And the Galveston lab in Texas did pretty much the same thing. It's a terrifying level of power. Thank you. Well, yeah, that's, I mean, biology and genetic engineering has been growing by leaps and bounds. And the things you can do today with genetics or life systems, yes, you have unlimited power to to do bad things. We still don't know about the underlying mechanisms in many organisms, but we can muck around with them pretty good. Yeah, we can composite them. We can take pieces from here and pieces from there. And in fact, that's one of the things that is very clear in your review article that you wrote is that we now routinely composite viruses in order to find out how they will function once done. So the creation of chimeric viruses that, for example, have assets from one place and assets from another place, from two different ancestral strains, and then you can put them in an environment and see how they infect the cells from a creature or the creature itself, and then you can passage them one generation to the next, either of cells or individuals, You can basically guide them evolutionarily to become better and better at infecting whatever creature it is, and then you can discover how the sequence changed in order to make them better. So the fact that all of these things are now happening in labs routinely, presumably usually occasionally. with good intentions, with the intention of making us safer rather than jeopardizing us. It certainly could be weaponized and maybe is weaponized sometimes, but scientists are routinely doing these things in the interest of making humanity safer. But the technology involved in doing these experiments obviously carries a tremendous risk. You know, SARS-CoV-2 is bad. It's highly infectious and has a very long list of very dangerous symptoms, but it obviously has a relatively low death rate per infection. That could be worse, and the ability for anybody to download a sequence— And what would it cost to put together a... that was capable of taking, let's say, SARS-CoV-2 from the sequence
[50:00] alone and creating a live infectious virus. Well from scratch, I I guess it would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Okay, that's a very low number given given for for bad actor. Yeah, and You can print the sequence for like a 30,000... base sequence, but $30,000 if you order it from the States. If you do it in China, it's probably... 10 times less. You can order the sequence. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's so many CROs that, like companies that do custom DNA printing, protein printing if you need an actual peptide or protein. But yeah, any kind of biology work is now outsourced, uh, There's so many providers and a lot of them in China because it's cheap or India. It's a cheap commodity now, the Thank you. creation of DNA or RNA feed. But actually, one thing we just briefly touched upon about the synthetic chimeric viruses And this is true about SARS-CoV-2, SARS-2, in precisely the RBM, the receptor binding motif that is supposedly coming from the pangolin. Not supposedly, it's the closest to the pangolin strain and everything else is closest to RATG13. So if we're talking about a natural origin, we have to explain how the two viruses recombined. And of course it can happen in nature, but it would take a pangolin and a bat meeting at the same spot. Because the virus to recombine, it needs to be in the same cell, like two different strains to recombine. We need to enter the same cell and start replicating there for them to have a chance to recombine. And it's really unexplained at this point how this can happen because pangolins and bats are not known to inhabit similar areas or Have any kind of parties together. Yeah, it's not it's not impossible, but it's also right. It's got to be considered ecologically highly unlikely and You know the other thing is bats are Um... The way bats roost creates large populations and the fact that they're small animals means that effectively you can have a large number of bats. But pangolins aren't like this. And so the number of individuals is low, which means the number of opportunities for an animal to be infected by two different strains that then get to combine is pretty low. Pangolin is just a it's a suspicious proposal as the intermediate population. host. So, you know, not impossible, but at some level, we ought to be obsessed with finding whatever the wild intermediate host is, because it will tell us an awful lot, and it will allow us to put this lab origin hypothesis to rest, if indeed it should be put to rest. But one does not get the sense that this is a focus. And it really, it just, it, It needs to be. Yeah, for some reason we don't see a huge effort in China to find this intermediate animal or to survey other Yunnan strains or maybe go back to that cave. But I think we should really go back to the fridge in the Wuhan Institute and check the miners' samples. Those four miners that had SARS antibodies, we should really try to extract the genome of underlying SARS-like virus that they had. I think that would offer some clues as to what this pandemic is. Yep, I think that's a great point. Just to fill in what the problem is and why we're focused here. When you generate a phylogeny, that is a tree that tells you how closely related organisms are to each other. We've all seen these things, these bifurcating trees of animals or or whatever. You can do this with viruses too, of course. And the problem with SARS-CoV-2 is that it doesn't land in one place. If you sequence one part of its genome, or in fact, most of its genome, it lands in one place, closely affiliated with the rhinolophus horseshoe bat virus. And if you sequence this other very important part, it comes out much closer to this pangolin.
[55:00] version of the virus. So not impossible the two would have come together, but very unlikely ecologically. And so Really, the question is, which is more likely? that some very unusual ecological event took place in some individual pangolin somewhere, or that a laboratory in an attempt to create a virus that was highly infectious and therefore highly relevant to the study of human pandemics emerging from bats, would have composited two viruses, thereby solving a problem for the virus that the virus would have a very difficult time solving on its own. would typically be a very short-lived jump. And if you were in a laboratory and you were worried about things jumping into humans, you might make that jump for it. You would composite two viruses. You would make a virus that had capabilities that no wild virus does. in order to see what happens next. And if that thing escaped, it might be that we are living downstream of that terrible phenomenon. If it escaped from the lab, having been composited for the purpose of making it more infectious or interesting to them in some ways, then many of the phenomena that are so unusual that we are seeing, like the very large range of symptoms the passaging of these viruses in a laboratory, which would have evolutionarily imbued the virus with special capabilities, especially if it was passaged in human cells, which is something that's done. You may have heard of HeLa cells, HeLa cells being cells from a particular, Helen Lack was her name, a patient who died of cancer. And her cancer is now a cell line that continues in many laboratories and is used for experiments to see how things interface with humans. So, you know, arguably, This cell lineage could have been used to passage viruses that had been composited, and then it would, the viruses that were then the result of this experiment would have new capacities that a human being wouldn't know to generate, but that over evolutionary time in the laboratory, the virus would have picked up. Could that explain the incredible transmissibility of this virus? Possibly. Right, and we didn't even get to the Furen site, which is another big surprise in a beta coronavirus, which isn't seen anywhere else. with anything close to less than 60% similarity. Let's have you spell this out. What is a fern site? Okay, so that's a cleavage side. Okay, let's step back. The virus to infect a cell, it needs to attach to the ACE2 receptor. And then what needs to happen is it's... two-step process, the spike protein needs to be kind of cut in two And at the position it's cut, this is where the fusion peptide is located that then starts attaching to the cell membrane and kind of invaginates the virus into the membrane and starts the fusion process, the membrane fusion, to get inside the cell. And so for this fusion peptide to become activated, the spike needs to be cut at this cleavage side, And a very efficient new cleavage site is found in SARS-2, which can be cut by a furin family or furin family of proteases that can recognize a specific sequence of four amino acids. All right, hold on. I want to slow you down just so people get it. The cleaving peptide, the protein that does the cutting, is resident in the human cell. Am I correct? Right. Okay. Yes. Protease is in the human cell. And then there is a sequence... Oh, go ahead. Yeah, and now in the extracellular matrix as well, it's actually both inside cells and outside cells, and some proteases are actually found on the membrane. And the furin site is a very efficient site to be cleaved because it can be cleaved by various families of this proteases. And this increases the viral tropism much greater than without the site. that it finds and it cuts in a particular way it's like a a surgical instrument that looks only for one
[60:00] Sequence and slices whenever it finds it is that correct? Yeah. You know it's correct. I know it's correct. No, that's not true. I think we know similarly. So, okay. the virus, by providing the sequence at which this existing protease already cuts, takes a quantum leap in its ability to infect human cells. Is that correct? And in fact, its ability to move between species. Am I correct about that too? Right, yes. It's been shown that the addition of furin site greatly enhances the ability of a virus to infect different types of cells and cells from different animals. Because now the virus isn't so dependent on the exact match of its kind of spike binding domain and the receptor, human receptor, but the actual fusion can happen. to other cells where the attachment might not be as strong, like just from a species standpoint. Okay. And these furrin sites, again, a sequence at which these human-made proteases slice, That fur and sight, where do we find it in New York? natural coronaviruses. Yeah. Well, at that particular spot, we don't really see furin sites in beta coronaviruses. I mean, it's a cleavage site, but it's cleaved by different proteases, not as efficient, at least in humans, as furin is. We see them in alpha coronaviruses or other families of furin. coronaviruses, but we know that the introduction of this furin site, just from previous experiments in culture and other viruses as well, and in influenza, that it greatly increases the transmissibility and expands the repertoire of a virus in terms of types of cells and types of animals it can infect. Okay, so a furin site greatly enhances transmissibility, coronaviruses. So where do we see foreign sites and where don't we see them? We see them in alpha coronaviruses. What are alpha coronaviruses? What are alpha coronaviruses? It's just a different family of... I'm trying to get you to spell out how unlikely it is that... that you would find this fur and sight in a horseshoe bat-derived coronavirus from the wild, based on what we see in viruses of that type. that we've encountered. Well, just by, you know, the phylogeny or surveillance of this beta coronavirus lineage, having none of them having the fear inside. And this one, SARS-2, having one, it's just statistically very unlikely to expect it to see there. And moreover, I think when we put them in cell culture, I think it tends to actually mutate away. So, um... Very interesting. In cell culture, what kind of cells? I think they saw it in Vero cells, the green monkey kidney cell line. But I wasn't really prepared to go this deep into the actual experiments on the furin site. But it's just very unlikely to see it in this type of coronavirus. the fact that it seems that there's some kind of evolutionary, not evolutionary, some kind of selection pressure against it in the beta coronavirus lineage because of, you know, maybe in bats, in horseshoe bats, that beta coronaviruses normally are found. that furrin site is actually detrimental to the virus. So if I can just translate this, probably there's a trade-off cost to having a furrin site. And so what happens is if you allow the thing to evolve under natural circumstances or semi-natural circumstances, the furrin site comes apart because some other priority is higher. any of the natural lineages that, you know, come from bats, for example, and So the question is, did something really unusual happen here? that put that fern site either through an evolutionary mechanism or through a high
[65:00] hybridization event. Did a fern site get added to a virus that almost never has one when we find it? In fact, in the wild, never does have it. or Did a laboratory decide, well, one thing that we could study is what happens if there was a foreign site? That would create a virus that had capacities we haven't seen, and maybe we'd like to investigate those capacities. Or third possibility... You tell me if any of these are off the map of actual possibilities. Third possibility is a passaging experiment generates a fur and sight because the conditions that are provided to the virus make it advantageous and whatever the... trade-off is not prioritized by the laboratory environment. So fernside is short in sequence, am I correct? Yes, it's just four amino acids. Four amino acids. So that's a very short site. And so you could get there through chimerism and you could get there through passaging. Am I right about that? Yes, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. So, the... The question then is, is the highly unusual fact of a foreign site showing up in this virus that is creating the COVID-19 pandemic the result of some natural event that is very unusual? Or is it the result of laboratory manipulation, which would make good sense if you were of a mindset to study potentially emergent pandemic causing viruses? Thank you. Yeah, it's a big question and unexplained at this point. And I think there's also one interesting aspect of the site, the furin site, that I find interesting is that the way it's constructed in the nucleotide code, It actually has a special digestion enzyme site that could greatly help with screening for mutations in cell culture, to screen if the urine site is actually mutated away, or on the contrary to actually screen for colonies that still have it, the FAO1 restriction enzyme site. And the way it's implemented, the four amino acids that are coded for. The first two arginines are coded by pretty unusual codons that are in general found quite rarely in the sequence. But what they do allow for is for this new restriction enzyme to be present in the insert. And this is another thing that the furin learned in the SARS-2 sequence in the SARS-2 genome is that it's in there by an insertion, an insert of 12 nucleotides. Whereas usually, you know, it's not unusual for viruses to develop the spheron sites that didn't have them before, but usually it happens through mutations. Like the sequence length doesn't change. It's not like you see a... magical appearance of 12 new nucleotides at the very spot that now has a furian site, which is what happened in SARS-2. So these two interesting occurrences are Again, they're not proof of anything, but they're just add to the bag of questions that kind of weighing heavily on the tip of the scale. They're very conspicuous when taken together. Right, yes, absolutely. Yeah. So, all right, so you've got a fern site that shows up out of nowhere. in a play in a virus that would typically not have one. You have the fact that the sequence is added rather than the result of mutations of the sequence that was present. That's also conspicuous. So that could be evidence of a laboratory inserting the sequence rather than it resulting from a natural process. that if I understand you right, you're suggesting they could be used as a kind of indicator. Sometimes scientists will add something... to a modification so that they can detect whether the modification is present in a particular sample. And so in this case, if furrin is something that would tend to evolve away as a result of a tradeoff cost, you might want a little indicator to tell you whether it was still present. Is that what you're getting at?
[70:00] Yeah, absolutely. And it's not even the flanking, it's actually inside of the insert. And the way the insert is done, the codons, coating for it, the two arginines, enable this new restriction enzyme site to be there. And it could be used for, you know, RFLIP, the restriction length fragment polymorphism screening process to very quickly, very efficiently see if your colony of a virus has this furin site or it doesn't. So you can, if you want it to stay in the colony, you can screen the colonies that have it pretty efficiently without, you know, having to bother to resequence the whole thing. So when that's that's I mean it all of it could be a result of just occurring naturally but it's just as you said taking together all those coincidences just add up to the point where you start you know being somewhat suspicious about this being handmade rather than you know evolutionary selected for and another point I want to make is that The lab leak doesn't necessarily mean handmade. It could also mean like everything that happens in nature can happen in the lab. especially given that the lab is the place where all of these pangolins and bats all are brought together, or even maybe they're put in the same culture, maybe inadvertently. And so just like some virologists say that they think it's a process of natural selection that is at work here. Well, natural selection can work in a lab, you know, in holding pens for, I don't know, bats, which the Wuhan CDC had live bats to extract virus samples from. I don't know if they have pangolins, but they have pangolins, live pangolins in Guangdong and the Wildlife Refuge Center. where the Chinese customs sent the smuggled pangolins to. Just because, you know, some virologist thing that – all the hallmarks that we see in the virus, like what Anderson and others are claiming, they think they are much more likely to occur through natural selection Again, that doesn't preclude a lab leak. Connectional selection can be at work in a lab without even the scientists knowing it. They can just have some infected bats and infected pangolins. And it's actually a much higher odds of happening in a lab than in some remote location in Yunnan or Malaysia, where the pangolins normally live. anyone along the way. Yeah. Which is a big question. So it's funny you mentioned this issue of evolution taking place in the lab without scientists knowing about it because of course one of the ways that people know about me at this point has to do with my discovery or my prediction, hypothesis that made a prediction that the long telomeres that we see in... laboratory mice are actually not indicative of the nature of mice generally, but are indicative of a kind of evolutionary pressure that exists in the breeding colonies that nobody had recognized. And so we now know that this is right and that those telomeres were elongated by selection in the laboratory or in the breeding colony. And of course, that was not the intent of the people who were breeding these mice. In fact, they weren't even aware that they were exerting a strong selective pressure, but it was enough to radically elongate the telomere. So this kind of thing happens all the time. And in this case, It's particularly dangerous because if this virus was passaged in the lab... under conditions that were special. In other words, if it was passaged in human cancer cells, well, cancers have particular idiosyncrasies, and any particular cancer that you would choose would have idiosyncrasies. And those idiosyncrasies would have a lot to say potentially about the way the virus functions. Also, you point out the issue of evolving away. To the extent that this virus might have been passaged and favored to adapt to certain cells, that might be giving us advantages at the moment, like, for example, The difficult time the virus has transmitting itself outdoors. Well, the laboratory is an indoor environment. It's possible that something was selected for that made it particularly transmissible indoors and did so at cost, at expense to it, in terms of how transmissible it is outdoors. And what's going to happen then is over time, it's going to become more transmissible outdoors. I don't know if that story is right or not. I mean, we don't know if this came from the lab or it didn't. But if it did... And that has had effects on its nature as a virus. then
[75:00] Not knowing that is going to cause us to make the problem worse, because to the extent that right now we have a virus that we can... interact outside and not transmit it to each other, we would be very wise to act carefully so that it does not learn the trick of being transmitted outside. And if we're casual about outside, it will evolve in that direction. So one thing I really hope people get from our discussion is that this is not a question of blame. This is not a question of who cares? It's now a human pandemic and let's deal with it. This is a matter that has very important implications for the that we are facing, how long we will face it, how many people will die, if it is a wild, wild, derived virus We need to know that. And the way we're going to find that out is we're going to settle this by finding a population of some other creature, an intermediate host in the wild. But that's going to require transparency with respect to what went on in this lab in Wuhan. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I don't know if we're going to get it. I mean, they hold all the cards unless there's immense international pressure or there's some kind of whistleblower. Well, yes, a whistleblower would be great. I would love to see a whistleblower. Yuri, You have no idea, I think, how important an effect you are having on this story. Right. We saw me. Yeah, you. I hope not to not too important. I know that I want to get rid of me. Oh, yes, you're not important. Hello. Yes, Yuri is completely unimportant and he doesn't know what he's talking about. Just ignore him. But if we were to put that aside, Matt Ridley published in The Washington Post this week, an article pointing out what you have been saying. just me. It's just, I mean, a lot of people were saying, And many of them way longer, I mean, way prior to my article. And it's good that there are people who are not afraid to speak out. Let's hope there's more and more. evidence is compromised by people. who do have such a conspiratorial bent that they are basically verifying their own beliefs rather than doing an honest, careful job of sorting the evidence that goes in both directions. What I saw in your work and what I expect Matt Ridley saw in your work. And what others who I know have cited you, you know, I saw another one in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists today investigating this question. It also cites you. clear self skepticism, your desire to do this honestly, You and I share a desire to actually be wrong in this case. It would be much better if this did not come from the lab. I don't want to be right. I don't want to be right either, but if we are right that this is a... the most likely explanation I'll speak for myself I believe it to be the most likely explanation at this point I'm if we are on the right track there than it is urgent that the virology community stop telling us a fiction. and that they... come clean with what they know and they understand. And I think in order for that to happen, It is incumbent on us to be clear that let's say the worst is true. Let's say that this virus was created in the lab, that it was the result of a chimeric virus that was then passaged through human cells and that this explains something about the way it behaves now that it's escaped into the human population. That does not mean that this is Chinese in origin. The scientific community was engaged in these experiments. Yes, this most likely would have come from the lab in Wuhan, but that lab was involved in international discussions. The granting agencies include the NIH. So this is a global problem. We understand. We share responsibility for it. And the most important thing is that in an effort not to take responsibility that we don't bury the evidence of what the virus is, because that evidence is essential for us figuring out how to deal with it, which is obviously to any reasonable person the most important question on the table. Thank you. Absolutely. And the second most important question, I think, is the nature
[80:00] of gain-of-function studies and the you know, should they be, like, what's the benefit, and should they be maybe reconsidered and another global moratorium on them should be maybe in place, at least for a few years, until we sort out, you know, what are the benefits that humanity is gaining from these kind of studies? Yep. Humanity was promised originally that those studies would help prevent pandemics that would provide vaccines and treatments to people. Uh, viruses poised for emergence to take the headline of one of the studies. Those promises have... come up empty and We're nowhere, I don't think, closer to any treatment or vaccine from those studies that we were before they were conducted. Again, I might be a little biased here, but so far I just don't have any, I don't know of any conclusive evidence. evidence for vaccines or treatments that have come out of studies, not just on coronaviruses, even influenza, the first H5N1 gain-of-function experiment. I don't see it having... provided the world with anything of great value. Well, the risks of these studies Even if this one wasn't a lab leak, just in general, the risks of gain-of-function studies is huge with... I think, unjustified benefits. So this is the second topic. Yes, well, okay, I agree with this, and I think there's a third one, too. So the first one is, what do we do about the circulating SARS-CoV-2 virus? virus, which depends in part on figuring out what it is adapted for, which might be a laboratory environment. The second question is, what do we do about gain of function research going forward in light of the danger, even if this wasn't a lab leak, we now are suddenly aware of all of the things that are going on in a lab and that that it is plausible that this pandemic emerged from a lab tells us that this is a this is a major global concern and we need to figure out what to do. And then I would say the third thing on that list is Thank you. The fact... that this... "Work is now possible." even if we have a scientific moratorium, does not prevent somebody from taking over that research. Even if we stop doing it in the scientific community, what stops some country that is interested in changing its ranking in the world power structure or a malevolent organization that wished to use it to its own ends? it's not even difficult to figure out a perfectly amoral entity, somebody who just really didn't care about other people, could use this technology to greatly increase their own power and wealth, and it's not hard to figure out how they would do it. So we have a problem. We have now generated the technology to do things which having been generated and shared publicly, discussed in literature, are now available to people that do not share our values, and that is a big concern. Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean, bioterrorism was a very tough question. I think I've become much more urgent cause of concern after some bad actors that were probably not bright enough to see the potential of bioterrorism after this pandemic. They probably could have woken up to - Whoa, yeah. And you don't even need a lab now. All you can, all you need to do is collect some samples from, I don't know, or maybe steal samples from, labs or just samples of even this virus and release it strategically in places where people don't expect it, church or subway system or something. And yeah, you can just wreak havoc on economies of countries that you like to see go down. It's a big problem. You could do that. And I also, just as a mental exercise, I was early on in the discussion of could this have come from a lab? Could it be a bioweapon and all that? There was lots of discussion about whether or not this virus would make any sense as a weapon. And I agree that if your purpose was... military effectiveness.
[85:00] this virus is not a particularly good choice because so many people are asymptomatic. But that does not have to be what was on people's minds. And I really hesitate to put this idea into the world, but my feeling is it's so obvious that my being quiet about it doesn't help. So probably better that we are all sobered up and aware of this. if one decided to create such a virus and release it, one could pretty reliably guess that it was going to have a negative impact on, let's say, air travel, hotels, cruises, these kinds of things. And obviously the nature of markets are such that if you can predict when nobody else can that these particular industries are about to take a huge hit you can take small amounts of money and turn it into large amounts of money or take large amounts of money and turn it into gargantuan quantities of money for just simply being able to predict what others don see coming And that fact means that motive here could be utterly mundane Now again there is no evidence that this was intentionally released by anybody. And I think you and I are both believers that the most probable explanation is well-intentioned research that resulted in a leak nobody foresaw. But I have to say one other possibility, again, zero evidence for it, but it has to be on the list of things that could explain the phenomena that we see, is that if somebody did create the virus, Wuhan would be the kind of place you would want to release it in order to hide your tracks, right? Because if it's released in Wuhan, then the obvious, you know, the obvious interpretation is that the laboratories in Wuhan, and there are two of them that study bat, coronaviruses that one of them made an error. But yeah, it would probably have to be a huge inside job for them to know that Wuhan would have the RATG strain really, you know, setting up Wuhan Institute because, you know, the SARS is so close to the strain that the Wuhan Institute had Well so I agree with your logic assuming RATG 13 is what we think it is And would you say that the similarity to 4991 similarity to 4991 is sufficient, that somebody would have had to have, they would have had to have lots of information about what was going on. So it's unlikely that some malevolent force, it's not impossible that somebody would release a bat like coronavirus in wuhan in order to hide their tracks but the chances that they would get something so close to r atg 13 and 4991 is pretty low i mean it's not impossible but it would be someone with really deep knowledge of what Wuhan Institute was doing. So, I mean, probably if an actor of that caliber was contemplating something like this, they'd do a lot of the homework. Okay. It's a possibility. It's a very, very remote possibility. It's a remote possibility. There's no evidence for it. But I think actually we're modeling something that I want to see people be better about, which is conspiracies exist in the world Huge concern going forward Yes a huge concern going forward and we have to learn how to talk about the possibility without being labeled crazy for engaging in even considering it. And so, you know, what you've just seen is two people who know something about this story and the relevant scientific details, and, you know, I think we're both pretty skeptical that this has unfolded now, but we're worried that it could unfold in the future. Yes, I hope we're wrong. Yeah, I hope we're wrong too. And I hope that, yeah, best possible from my perspective, and I'm sure I speak for you here, is this comes from the wild through some unusual, hard to imagine series of ecological events that we are capable of discovering and figuring out. So the lab isn't at fault. They can be exonerated and we can sober up on the basis that we've been now through this exercise and learned the lessons that it has to teach us. And we can figure out what we should think about gain of function research. And we should think about what the heck we're going to do about the amazing power that malevolent forces now have.
[90:00] at their disposal. at ever lower price points. And there would almost have to be some kind of really broad surveillance of new viral outbreaks or just outbreaks throughout the world where there needs to be some kind of like one big agency like there's a nuclear agency, uh, monitoring the possible bioterrorism. And if there is a cluster of similar infections in one geography, just really trying to sequence quickly what is the agent behind this and hopefully not let it get out the way that this one got out. And I got to say, even without any conspiracy theories or lab leak, the way it was handled by... Wuhan government or Chinese government just not imposing a lockdown soon enough and letting people celebrate the Chinese New Year and intermingle and leave the country. I mean, that alone is... pretty disappointing and in the future we really need like really quickly isolate geographies where outbreaks happen so that we can avoid global pandemic. The scale is completely crazy. I'm afraid we're just beginning to see the numbers start growing even further in other continents, other countries like now Africa and South America reporting high to see this play out, to see this pandemic play out. Yeah, I share those fears with you. And I do feel like as bad as this is, this is the ultimate trial run. This is the thing that sobers you up. And, you know, I hope there's also a willingness to consider the general style of problem, because I know that over the last... Gosh, what would it be? 2008 financial crisis, 2011 Fukushima, Aliso Canyon, and I don't know, what was that, 20... 17, 18. Anyway, we keep having this situation where we discover what some industry is doing after it is too late when some of the Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico. So I constantly feel like I'm learning what I needed to know after the accident has already happened. And that what I really want is somebody to fast forward that process so I can know all of the processes that we're engaged in that are unbelievably dangerous. So that we can talk about them ahead of time rather than once the cat's out of the bag. Yeah. And this may be the worst of these in terms of the destruction economic and human that ultimately comes out of it. And frankly, even if this thing evolves into something with flu-like levels of hazard, that humanity is stuck with, even that would be a major setback. I mean, we have flu circulating every year. That's a big problem for humans. To have a second one of those, if that's what this turned into, would be a huge disaster going forward. So we are playing with fire. Yeah, we're not even sure about the long-term consequences of this. It's only been six months that we've kind of known this virus. We don't know if it can hide and become a chronic infection like the virus. feline peritonitis, which is also a coronavirus that you actually learn to hide in the immune cells. then it just becomes fatal in like 10% of the infected cats. I hope this is not going to be the case with this one. But it's not out of the realm of possibility that there could be long-term bad consequences. We're just not even aware of the unknown in the words of Donald Rumsfeld. You're quoting Donald Rumsfeld. I love that. Yeah, for what it's worth, Heather and I are constantly quoting that guy. like the Yogi Berra of geopolitical phenomena or something. But I agree with you. This thing could hide in neurological tissue. It could hide in immunological tissue. It could learn to change at a rate that would allow individuals to be reinfected multiple times over a lifetime. We just don't know what we're playing with here. Yeah. Right. Male reproductive system, they are...
[95:00] We had issues with the first SARS where, you know, autopsies saw like infected gonads and, you know, there were reports in China with male fertility issues of people after having had this SARS-2. So, yeah, it's just, I don't want to like scare people, but I'm pretty scared myself that like long term this can be a bad one. Yeah, I agree. chronic flu hiding site. Yeah. The worst possible scenario. I find myself in these conversations all the time, too. I where people are I mean, in my country, people have been convinced by our president, amongst others, to treat this as more trivial than it is. And I keep trying to alert people that just the size of the unknowns here, the magnitude of them is so great. that we are wise to be treating this very seriously. Yeah, at this point, if anybody is still unconvinced that this is much more serious than the flu, I think, living under a rock. But initially, we all kind of were just based on the previous track record of other viruses, other outbreaks, even coronaviruses. SARS and MERS were pretty bad, but comparatively, it was just a few thousand people. They burned out. Yeah, exactly. And that's what we thought. Many people thought, me included, in the beginning, that it's just another something seasonal from China that we get every year, and it just usually subsides pretty quickly. It's exactly what I thought, too. I remembered SARS, and I thought, okay, that's bad, but… Yeah, limited Thank you. Boy, were we wrong. That's right, right. So let me ask you two more questions. One, your experience since releasing your... Medium peace. Okay. Well, I it wasn't Very pleasant. I mean, there's a lot of positive feedback. But the share of the negative feedback I got, especially initially in Russia, it was... Very vicious. For some reason, people started Attacking me personally. Yeah. And questioning my... intelligence or whatever, the qualifications of being able to, I don't know, read scientific papers or whatever, that had really nothing to do with whatever facts I presented. I mean, I suggested initially for everybody just to read with a skeptical mind and analyze for themselves. I mean, I don't really put a lot of... my own views on an article, I just pretty much summarize the facts. Of course, I mean, I color it with my views, but, you know, you can do your own analysis. And if you think I made a mistake, just you can point out the mistakes rather than say I'm an idiot or I'm a conspiracy nut. Well, that's not really what they're saying. As somebody with considerable experience with things in this neighborhood, what they were trying to do was – make you hurt to dissuade you from continuing and to make an example of you so that others would know not to make the error in their view that you made. But the error that you made was doing an honest analysis and sharing what you discovered with the public. So my sense is we needed you to do that. And I know that as much as I was already quite suspicious, it happened. gave me a tremendous boost in terms of understanding exactly What the suspicions were rationally based on and how to follow the trail into a realm. You know, I'm not biotech. Cellular biology was never my primary interest. So just having somebody guide me into the literature that was relevant to this, since I didn't know anything about what was taking place with coronavirus coronavirus. research. That was all new to me. So, uh, What you did needed to be done, which is exactly why you were punished for it. That said... oh go ahead well yes and it I mean if whoever wanted to reach the goal of making me feel
[100:00] They did so, but... The initial fecal storm subsided, and after that, I got mostly positive feedback of people saying that, it did open their eyes to at least the scale of gain-of-function research that has been going on in the virology community and the danger that itself poses, even if the lab leak theory is to them still highly unlikely. The fact that there's so much dangerous research around and still goes on, to them that was a revelation. And in parallel, some scientists have reached out and said that They, you know, support the definitely support the idea that we cannot rule out the lab leak at this point and that should be considered uh like on on an equal basis with any other hypothesis as opposed to some people some are all just claiming this is sheer lunacy and conspiracy yeah well so i've uh been suggesting to my audience that conspiracy theory is a stigma designed for a purpose. Conspiracy hypothesis is really what we're talking about. Yes, it does appear at the very least that there is a... conspiracy to prevent us from investigating what happened here. In other words, the unnatural alignment of virologists with each other around a story that doesn't stand up that does appear to be a kind of collusion. Now, There's also other evidence. uh, How's your computer? It's okay now. It's okay now. What happened? Yeah. Well, I don't know. I I think I might have been hacked. I just started doing really weird things and not connecting to the internet. I just... - Yeah. You've had computer problems. Probably malware. Yeah, I don't know. I don't want to claim it's connected, but some other people have some other computer issues at the same time. Computers are complex. Things go wrong with them. You never know. I've had computer problems, too, of late. It's pretty dramatic in fact. Uh, Could be nothing. You know of anybody else who's been... courageously investigating this hypothesis, you might have had some trouble? I know at least one person, yes. All right. So take that for what it's worth. People have computers. I mean, look, there's nobody who's watching this podcast who doesn't have a computer. They screw up, right? Things happen. On the other hand, there does come a point at which your problems are severe enough, mysterious enough, and form a kind of pattern with other people who are also using their computers to discuss and investigate possibilities that obviously powerful forces don't want discussed. And you just simply have to ask the question, are my computer glitches normal, or is what seems like an anomalous rate of computer errors telling me something about the level of disturbance that I have caused in the universe? Yeah. Right, so if maybe other researchers who have been working on the lab leak hypothesis had some kind of computer problems or any other weird things happen, in their lives. Maybe they can share it and we can put together some kind of list of unexplained coincidences outside of the lab leak hypothesis. I think it's well worth considering. All right. Is there anything that you think we've missed that needs to be on the table for people to understand the landscape they've landed in? Well, I mean, I think we already said way too much for anybody to get their head across at this point. We discussed a lot of things, but I think we've touched upon all the main points of this huge coincidence with a lot of unanswered questions and... I just hope they're answered. I just hope somehow someone pressures the scientists, or not even just answered, but we need access to... the lab, we need to, you know, the WHO, whoever needs to, uh, Check. the environment or we'd like to see the samples collected from those miners and we would like to sequence and we'd like to independently sequence the RATG sample to just verify that everything that the Wuhan Institute was telling us is indeed
[105:00] the facts. What do you think about the idea that for the good of humanity we ought to be offering uh... immunity to scientists who were involved in legitimate scientific research, not weapons research, but legitimate scientific research into potentially human infecting viruses. If this turns out to be a leak. Would you be in favor of them assuming that they were being honorable, that they were be immunized from liability. Definitely, and even in my article I say, even if a a leak occurred, the scientists, they're not to blame because they haven't been engaged in anything illegal or out of, even, you know, well, weapons research is a bit of a gray area, but it's not illegal for countries to engage in it. The States and, you know, China and Russia have all been engaged in weapons research. The thing is, like, if it escaped and there's been a cover up, the people who are doing the cover up, they're the ones who do face, who should face some. ramifications. But what I think we really need to establish is some kind of incentive for whistleblowers to be able to blow the whistle safely with immunity and witness protection and big financial incentive to do so. Yep. And so far I haven't seen anything even remotely of the sort from governments and which is a little odd. considering initially I thought, the American government stance was that it's going to demand a full investigation, but it's not really providing financial incentive for whistleblowers to help out. And so one of the things I suggested maybe half-jokingly is that maybe the community can crowdfund something like this, or create a crowdfunding hotline, tip hotline for coronavirus origins research, where we can have some completely anonymous, system of rewarding whistleblowers or people offering actionable tips. With cryptocurrency, we just need some donors of crowdfunding to collect a bit of a purse to be able to offer these rewards for like meaningful amounts for people to be kind of risking their livelihood. I think this is a great idea. And the idea of doing it with the cryptocurrency is a wonderful idea, too. It would be a tremendous opportunity. proof of concept about how cryptocurrency could function to the benefit of humanity. Right. It could be completely anonymous. And that's one of the usually problems of financial incentives. Like if somebody really is in China and he wants to or she wants to alert the US get in trouble in China, but if you're doing it online through cryptocurrency, which is, you know, anonymous and untraceable, I think that even if it's not crowdfunding, I think, you know, the American intelligence agencies should set up some kind of... system like that. It's just Otherwise, the risks for people in China to blow the whistle. I think I'm just too great for them to do so. But if they can earn some money... in a very safe way. I think they'd be much more inclined to do so. And it's not necessarily just the scientists who were working on this, who might know something. It's probably like they had friends, family, who can offer substantive advice tips on what to look at and maybe who to question for investigation to move forward. But I don't know. It's just... Let's just say humanity has an overarching need to know. what took place in order to manage what we now are encountering. And that suggests we should pull out all the stops with respect to... liberating people to tell us what they know. And, you know, people who have the capacity to do something that would aid in that effort know who they are, and they may be more creative than you and I are in a position to be. Maybe they can figure out some way to make it happen, but let's figure out where this thing came from. And if it's nature, you and I will. Oh, this does point something out. If it is nature that this came from, you and I will be relieved to discover it. and we'll be
[110:00] Happy to do a follow-up podcast and talk about... whatever. what the meaning of what we've learned is. And if it came from the lab, let's figure that out. Last thing before you go. I want to talk about... I have increasingly noticed in looking at all of the sources that claim to put the idea of a lab leak to rest. I find the name Peter Daszak, is that right? I don't know. It doesn't ring a bell. This name shows up all over the place. He's everywhere that the idea is mocked. And he is the president of Eco Alliance, whatever Eco Alliance may be. He's the founder, yes. I have come... Go ahead. Behind it, yeah. Yeah, he's the main... guy who's been doing this for... many years and very publicly and very large amounts of money, dozens of millions of dollars in grant financing from various sources, from NIH to Department of Defense. just... funding research of essentially going out to remote places in nature and collecting all sorts of dangerous pathogens and bringing them to one spot to analyze and predict the potential danger of them spilling over to humans. which in itself is, I think, is a pretty futile exercise to be able to, claim that we can somehow predict what in nature can, out of the gazillion possibilities which mutation will actually jump out from nature to the human domain. Just because, you know, usually what happens in nature stays in nature. When we actually start going out and probing what, you know, bats carry in remote places and actually bring them all together in one spot, like in Wuhan or whatever, we're increasing the chances of it actually happening. Well, I think there's a very simple comparison to be made, right? In general, these things do not jump to humans. the ones that can jump to you. Right, no matter what Peter claims, and he's making some very odd claims of like, oh, in Asia it happens every day and there's millions of people exposed to zoonotic jumps, and he's making a huge, huge jump from, like, extrapolation from just six farmers in Yunnan that had antibodies, six out of like 218, six farmers having antibodies for related, uh, coronavirus that can't even infect human cells. So he takes us 3% and extrapolates it to all the farmers in Southeast Asia. He's saying all those millions of farmers every year that get exposed to bad coronaviruses which is i take i take exactly the opposite message which is the jumps when they happen burn themselves out quickly because the things that have jumped are not well adapted to humans in general which doesn't mean it couldn't happen but it does mean that we can compare what is the risk of a jump happening that we didn't know anything about ahead of time And that if we had known about the risk ahead of time, we could have prepared. Right. So that's the upside of this research. And then there's the downside, which is what are the chances that you are going to trigger a. the accidental release of something terrible by doing this research, which is clearly high. And so anyway, I have come to regard this individual. And every time I see his name show up, The information does not check out, and there's this very strong implication that those who even consider this hypothesis are telling us just how naive and under-informed they are, which does not match the information. If you pursue the information, his assurance of this is always wrong. So I have begun to regard him as patient zero for misinformation. Thank you. Well, yeah, I mean, he's really fighting for his life, so he really doesn't have any other way to defend himself. And if this does turn out to be a lab leak, I mean, the ramifications for him personally, I think just... too horrible for him to consider to even entertain the slightest idea of possible possibility of a lab escape i think you i think you're being i think you're being too generous the misinformation is too egregious and the fact is any decent human being would recognize
[115:00] is that Humanity's overarching interest in knowing what took place overrides his interest in... uh maintaining his reputation frankly i think the world would end up being decent to a scientist who had made an honest error that had some role to play in this thing emerging but uh i have very little sympathy for somebody who would hide the truth at expense to others i mean people are dying this is this is not a joke this is not a joke something where you get to defend your career at the expense of – tens of thousands of other human beings. Yeah, and one other point being that it's not that they just went out and collected so many viral strains, is that they actually had a whole program of synthetic, creating synthetic chimeras. to kind of expand the panel of possible, first of all, to predict possible mutations in the wild for some reason. Again, as I said, very naive to predict like out of gazillion natural possibilities, which of them can happen in nature to predict them in the lab, to create them in the lab and then say that we need to prepare for those. And yeah, in the latest interview, like just before the, we're actually in the middle of the pandemic in December, he gave an interview in at some virology conference where he was saying that they had like a hundred different strains that they were working on and how easy it is to manipulate viruses. coronaviruses where you can just snap out an RBM and put one back in and have different tropism between the virus so you can study a more efficient vaccine. And that was actually the kind of the overarching theme of virology research over the past few years to create a pan-coronavirus therapy, pan-coronavirus vaccine. Whereas, so they actually needed to provide as wide a panel of coronaviruses as possible. This is actually mentioned in an article by Rav Baric. It's mentioned in the grant for eco-health that Wuhan Institute was part of, that they have a mission to create many new viral strains against which they can test potential therapies or vaccines, which of course, you know, we haven't really gotten in time for this pandemic, but that's the difference. question yeah well I think that's a I think it's a proper a proper note to end on I hope that we will discover things in the coming weeks that will lead us to revise our... our best understanding of what likely has taken place here but I'm very grateful to you for doing the work you've done to unearth the of a lab leak hypothesis. I regard it not only as important work, but... and I regard you as courageous for having done it and it troubles me that people have tried to make you feel bad about doing it i hope that um ultimately the internet you get to hear a lot of unpleasant things on the internet there are some unpleasant things on the internet i wonder why they put them there Um, yeah. All right. Well, Yuri Dagan. having a thorough investigation. But if it's actually a lot of people being vocal and making their politicians heard and making them know that we want the truth, we can handle it, maybe we'll get to the point of having a really independent and true investigation into this. Or some whistleblowers. Yeah. Well, one way or the other, we need to get to the bottom of it. Yeah, I hope we do get there someday. Okay. I will put a link to your Medium article, which I think you have added to a couple times. You've made little edits that you have highlighted so people will know what was in the original and what you've added. Is that correct? Yeah, I had it initially just when I released it. There were a couple of points that came out. Yeah, I put like updated. I haven't really updated it since. That's probably the same.
[120:00] for almost a month now or a little more. Well, I consider it the hallmark of an honest actor is that, you know, of course you release something as... Hello? Hello? You still there? Hello? Oops, I think we got some hackers Oh no, alright, well, fortunately we got it all Are you able to hear me now? nope can't hear me we're done all right i guess we're done maybe now they're yeah all right um anyway uh thanks so much yuri and uh i'd love to have you back to give us an update when there's something to talk about be well you
