And I think a lot of scientists agree with me that the best available evidence suggests that the pandemic was the result of a lab accident that happened in Wuhan, China. “Where did Covid start?” “There is still no consensus on the origins of the virus.” “And I think that most Americans think that Covid-19 came from that lab in Wuhan. I certainly do.” What percentage odds of that being true, would you say? It’s pretty close to certain. I tend to be on the side of the scientists that think that it was a lab leak based on other things. There was a whole effort by the scientific community, by the N.I.H., the Chinese scientific groups and European groups essentially to prevent all pandemics. The research program was you go into the wild places, find viruses in those wild places —— Find the bats. Find the bats. Now there’s a trillion or more viruses out there, most of which do not infect have any chance of infecting humans. So you don’t know which of those viruses you’re pulling out of the wild places into the lab are likely to jump into humans. And so the argument was in this 2000 — let’s say 2003 to 2020-some era is that we have to manipulate those viruses, make them potentially more dangerous and more infectious to humans in order to triage, and identify the viruses and pathogens that are closer to making the leap into humans in some evolutionary sense, and then prepare countermeasures. This is what so-called gain of function research is trying to do? It’s trying to essentially hype up multiple viruses, and the ones that become the most deadly are the ones you try and treat? Yes, or in advance of it ever infecting a human being. The countermeasures that you develop for those pathogens in the lab that have never made the leap into humans will obviously never have been tested in humans — the vaccines you develop — because no human has ever been infected by that. So you’ll have a set of vaccines whose efficacy is hypothetical, right? Or it could be other countermeasures, but let’s say vaccines. So this but — so part of the scientific establishment was committed to this project —— Including the N.I.H. Including the N.I.H. And there was, at the very least, a good chance that that led to Covid-19 and the pandemic. Why, then, do you think that overcommitted the establishment to school closures, mask mandates, and everything else? What is the link there? OK, so what if you open Pandora’s box, what would you do? You’ve unleashed hell on the world and you’ve done it. You’re responsible for it. What would you do?
