COVID-19: evidence for a synthetic origin (January 21, 2024)

Biosafety Now X Space #20 (January 21, 2024)

On January 21, 2024, Biosafety Now hosted an X Space titled “COVID-19: evidence for a synthetic origin,” where scientists Alina Chan, Alex Washburne, Valentin Bruttel, and Tony VanDongen joined Biosafety Now Leadership Team members Justin Kinney, and Bryce Nickels for an open discussion focused on evaluating the scientific evidence for a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2.

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ABOUT ALINA CHAN
Alina Chan, is a scientific advisor and viral vector engineer at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. She is a recent Broad Ignite fellow and Human Frontier Science Program fellow with a background in medical genetics, synthetic biology, and genetic engineering. During the pandemic, Dr. Chan investigated problems relevant to finding the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and co-authored Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 with Matt Ridley. In 2022, she joined the Pathogens Project Taskforce organized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to generate new thinking on responsible high-risk pathogen research.

ABOUT ALEX WASHBURNE
Alex Washburne is a scientist who studied pathogen spillover before COVID and conducted outbreak forecasting during the pandemic. Alongside Valentin Bruttel and Tony VanDongen, he co-authored the paper that will be a major focus of our discussion today, titled: “Endonuclease Fingerprint Indicates a Synthetic Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” This paper describes signs of bioengineering in the genome of SARS-CoV-2.

ABOUT VALENTIN BRUTTEL
Valentin Bruttel studied Biomedicine and Molecular Medicine at the University of Würzburg and completed his Ph.D. on tumor immune escape mechanisms in 2010. Since then, he has focused on developing targeted therapeutics for autoimmune diseases. He is currently working at the University Hospital of Würzburg, Germany, and is the founder and CSO of Toleris Biotherapeutics. In his free time, he co-authored the paper arguing for signs of bioengineering in the genome of SARS-CoV-2. He has never received any grants or benefits related to virology and declares no conflicts of interest. All views expressed are his own and do not represent those of any institutions or the company he works for.

ABOUT TONY VANDONGEN
Tony VanDongen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology at Duke University. He has a broad background in pharmacology, electrophysiology, biophysics, molecular and cellular neurobiology, computational neuroscience, structural biology, and drug development.

ABOUT BIOSAFETY NOW
Biosafety Now is a US-based non-profit organization working for a future where scientific research on pathogens supports human life without also threatening it and public trust in science is restored.
Learn more at https://biosafetynow.org/

Music – “Gathering Crowds” (https://www.apmmusic.com/)

Welcome to uh biosafety now’s 20th Twitter space I just received word that Alina Chan is going to be joining us a little bit late that’s why I was uh delayed in starting this but she will be on in a little bit um I want to begin with a disclaimer

That the views of individuals expressed on this and all our other spaces do not necessarily reflect the views of biosafety now my name is Bryce Nichols I’m a professor of genetics at Ruckers University lab director at the Waxman Institute of microbiology and one of the co-founders and leadership team members

Of BIOS safety now biosafety now is a nonprofit organization launched this past February our organization is led by an International Coalition of experts in biomedicine mathematics Public Health public policy law social science and public advocacy each of whom is dedicated to working for a future where scientific research on pathogens

Supports human life without threatening it and public trust in science is restored to learn more about our mission you can visit our website at biosafety now.org with me today is another co-founder of biosafety now Justin Kenny he’s a professor of quantitative biology at Colt Spring Harbor laboratory and

Justin and I are very excited to welcome are four special guests to the panel today one of whom will be joining us oh there she is I will add Elena um so um the the four people that we are going to be talking to today are all scientists that have been major

Contributors to the search for the truth about the origins of covid Alina Chan Alex wasburn Tony van dongin I think actually Tony how do you pronounce your last name do I realize I don’t oh and in Dutch it would be van dongan but in the United States Van van

Okay I apolog van dongan okay and Valentine brutel so first Elina Chan is the Scientific Advisor and and viral Vector engineer at the broad Institute of MIT in Harvard she’s a recent broad ignite fellow and human Frontier Science Program fellow she has a background in medical genetics synthetic biology and

Genetic engineering during the pandemic Dr Chan investigated problems relevant to the origin of SARS Cove 2 and co-authored viral the search for the origin of covid-19 with Matt Ridley in 2022 she joined the pathogens project task force organized by the bulletin of the atomic scientists to generate new thinking on responsible high-risk

Pathogens research and so Elina thanks for joining us today um again I think this is your third or fourth time actually and I know that you will not be able to actually be a speaker for a moment but um we’ll get to you in a second uh Alex wasburn welcome to a

Space for the first time we’re really happy that we finally were able to do this and have you on Alex is a scientist who studied pathogen spillover before covid and conducted outbreak forecasting during the pandemic alongside Valentine uh brutel and Tony van Donan he co-authored the paper that will be a

Major focus of our discussion today titled endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS Cove 2 this paper describes signs of bi Engineering in the Genome of the virus that caused covid-19 so Alex thanks for joining us today can you just unmute yourself and say hello real

Quick Bryce thanks for having me here it’s great to be here and cool to see all the familiar faces in the crowd yeah it’s wonderful and I as I said I’m very excited to have a what will be kind of a non-o chamber type discussion where

We’re kind of going to sort of break down some of the science related to to your study um Valentine brutel um is a our on our panel as well he’s been on our space before but only as a you know he came on and asked some questions so

Valentine it’s great that we were finally able to have you on to discuss this paper that we’ve been wanting to do for some time Valentine studied biomedicine and molecular medicine at the University of of w oh boy Valentine help me out here what is it w wburg how do you yeah

Good that just I got no catastrophe I think you’re okay yeah I’m not good with words as you see he completed his PhD on tumor immune Escape mechanisms in 2010 since then he’s focused on developing targeted Therapeutics for autoimmune diseases he is currently working at the University Hospital of the same thing

That I botched before in Germany and is the founder of CSO of to to Tois Biotherapeutics sorry founder and CEO I’m going a little too fast in his free time he he co-authored the paper that we’re going to be talking about today um and I want to just point out he has

Never received any grants or benefits related to virology declares no conflicts of interest and All Views expressed are his own and do not represent those of any institution or the company he works for so Valentine thanks so much for joining us today um really appreciate it that that the three of you are

On yeah thanks a lot for the introduction prize and the invitation and really excited to have the old band together kind of and to talk to Alina that’s yeah big role model of mine for standing outstanding for her honesty and integrity in this whole discussion and yeah really looking forward to this

Absolutely and last we have Tony van Donan who I think I’m still botching his name of course and Tony is an associate professor in the department of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke University he has a broad background in Pharmacology electrophysiology biophysics molecular and cellular neurobiology computational Neuroscience structural biology and Drug development

And he did Tony can I make the joke that you made please or do you not want me to do it the only joke this is the only joke and Tony said to make sure that I add that he also is very very highly skilled in what is it kindergarten

Molecular biology is that the is that the correct term thank yeah right moology courses all the courses letter and I promise I’m going to this is going to be serious discussion so that’s the only joke I’m doing today but thank you so much Tony for joining us um

And you know it’s great having all three of you on is is really wonderful and we’ve been trying to do this for some time so uh before I turn it over to Justin i’ just like to say we hope to have an enlightening and open discussion focused on evaluating the scientific

Evidence for a synthetic origin of SARS Cove 2 as presented in your guys paper um So Justin’s going to begin today by briefly summarizing some of the key background information to provide a framework for the discussion that will follow so Justin thank you very much uh and you can take it

Over thanks Bryce um can you can you hear me Bryce yes I can hear very clear okay good um so uh so the background is um in 2018 researchers at the Wuhan Institute of orology University of North Carolina um uh and Eco Health Alliance submitted a grant proposal called

Diffuse to DARPA now the scram proposal um was rejected um but it was uh leaked in 2021 and appeared to describe experiments that really could have essentially describe a blueprint for how genetic Engineers could have created SARS 2 um I have believed for some time that the diffused proposal the

The research described in it is so specific that it essentially constitutes a Smoking Gun demonstrating Beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS kobe2 originate from genetic engineering experiments um and the latest okay so uh fast forward to um uh uh last December um Emily cop at the um us right to know

Obtained drafts of the diffused proposal that had not previously been made public she obtained these through foyer requests um and some key and uh the revelations of these drafts just uh further confirm the opin my opinion that diffuse is a uh Smoking Gun in a

Blueprint for SARS K2 but I want to get into to some of the specific things that we learned from these drafts that we didn’t really know before so um some key things that we learned from these drafts are that first the diffused drafts revealed that some of the high-risk genetic engineering experiments that

Were planned uh that were said in the diffuse proposal to be uh planned to be performed at the University of North Carolina um the drafts revealed that some of those experiments were in fact going uh plan to be carried out in Wuhan uh secretly um without disclosure to

DARPA um uh and these include the high-risk genetic engineering experiments that if performed at biosa safety level two which is again uh what they planned um uh could well have led to the accidental release of SARS K2 another thing we learned from the diffused drafts is that um the baric lab

At UNC had by 2018 already constructed chimeric Spike proteins using previously unpublished viruses um and there is good reason to believe from these drafts that the receptor binding domain of these chimeric Spike proteins actually came from viruses from the moang mine in China where SARS K2 progenitor viruses

Also came from um the third the diffuse um drafts state that researchers plan to insert a variet so the the original diffuse uh Grant the the final diffuse Grant St that researchers plan to insert a variety of cleavage sites into novel SARS like Corona viruses but wasn’t very

Clear on what those cleavage sites would be the diffused drafts confirm that um confirmed specific plans to insert among various things a yearing cleavage site at a location in the virus genome called the S1 S2 boundary now among other things this Revelation contradicts um not just statements by many virologists

But the sworn testimony of Christian Anderson before the house select subcommittee on the Corona virus pandemic and uh fourth the diffused drafts revealed that a specific genetic engineering revealed a specific genetic engineering plan that involves stitching um the novel viruses together using specifically six segments um prepared using the DNA

Cutting enzyme or restriction enzyme called bsnb 1 so our guests today um Alex Tony and um Valentine uh posted a pre-print in 2020 noting that the SARS K2 genome looks in fact like it was stitched together from six segments prepared using two DNA prepared using exactly prepared using

Two DNA cutting enzymes bsnb 1 and bsa1 so some have called the appearance of these six segments and bsnb one in these draft grants a Smoking Gun I myself and more skeptical but I am looking forward to um uh discussing this in our conversation today

Justin can I just ask real quick if you could give a little more detail about a restriction enzyme just discuss like this like what um I guess maybe it would be useful to talk about sequence recognition yeah so um yeah I’d be happy to do that so um a key part of genetic

Engineering involves cutting DNA uh molecules at specific sequences um and in particular to create a synthetic virus what researchers have to do is they have to um synthesize DNA in smaller chunks um and then cut the ends of these chunks to to U make the ends uh sticky if you will

And then they can stitch then that allows them to stitch the the different segments together to create a much longer virus um so uh the enzymes that are used to cut DNA are called restriction enzymes they recognize specific um sequences that are six um six letters long six nucleotides long uh

I mean among other things but the ones we’re talking about cut six nucleotides long um and there are hundreds of these enzymes that cut various different sequences in different ways um and it is kind of remarkable that in the um diffuse proposals they specifically propose ordering bsmb one one very

Specific enzyme and using that to do the molecular cloning to do the genetic engineering maybe one other thing Justin just to be to hammer this point with a six so there’s four can you just talk about the what that means in terms of how frequently you expect to encounter a

Site for a six something that cuts out of six specific base pairs yeah so something that cuts at six specific base pairs well you you Rec you expect to see these a few times by chance um the exact number of times you expect to see this by chance um depends on the underlying

Genome and I I I uh uh I forget the exact number just okay don’t do that so the the controversy is that um these um the the relatives of SARS K2 um the closest known natural relatives they also have um restriction sites for bsnb one and bsa1 in their

Genomes um but the specific pattern of these sites the the spacing between these sites seems to be unusually um uniform and that is something that would um facilitate the genetic engineering of SARS K2 but it is a fair objection you know it it is important to point out that these sites

Do occur in the relatives of genomes at the same locations um um in related genomes but in different combinations so okay yeah I know Alina I don’t know if Alina’s ready to join I guess the one other thing I would mention is that in terms of just the

Reason why you use these enzymes in cloning specifically cloning that involves um sorry what I mean is enzymes that recognize a six base pair specific sequence is that on average that sequence will be represented about one out of every 4,000 base pairs yeah given random stretch because the probability

There’s four bases four four different base pairs so each the the probability of encountering one of those four base pairs is going to be one out of four the and so extrapolating that out you get one out of about 4,000 chance that on on at a Rand if you’re looking at random

DNA you’re going to have that sight um and that’s important for molecular cloning because it means that you can use enzymes that are rarely present in a ra in a in a large chunk of DNA because you want to be able to direct the activity of these enzymes or molecular

Scissors to specific locations in DNA um and cut just there and not elsewhere so the rarer the sequence that the enzyme cuts at the more useful it is often for molecular cloning I’ll I’ll leave it at that and I guess if um yeah yeah

So so um you know with that um uh let’s see I’m not sure if Alina is ready to chat yet uh yes yeah so um Bryce and and Justin I think this is really good to have this this public conversation among scientists on on this uh story now which

Is kind of floating through the new cycle on how much is this a smoking gun for lamp original covid-19 so before I jump into the part that I think there’s some disagreement on I’m going to just emphasize the Baseline here which is that most of the people talking about

This right now I mean the speakers today in the space we agree that the diffuse proposal is as close as you can get to a recipe for covid-19 so some people say it’s a blueprint some people say it’s a plan you know whatever you say this is a

Lab that was operating at low biosafety they were collecting an enormously large collection of Novel SAR viruses from BS from the wildlife trade even from sick people in South China they were taking all these samples back up they were seral passaging these viruses they were passing them over humanized mice cells

With human receptors cells with civit receptors in every way these experiments these routine experiments would have brought these viruses closer and closer to being able to cause a human outbreak and then you’ve got this part in the diffuse proposal which to me is the strong strongest piece of evidence

Pointing to a l origin which is the the plan to start putting these furing cleavage sites these gain of function features into novel Sak viruses in the world and so I I agree that if you look at the whole body of publicly available evidence and and that’s not a lot but if

You look at it it all seems to point towards a more likely lab origin than one from the market for which there’s very little evidence no intermediate host pointed to date no uh evidence that such viruses were circulating in uhan or hoopi Province so uh what is the

Discussion today about uh it’s not about whether or not a lab leak is likely because we agree on that point but we we disagree on how much this is conclusive evidence how much of this is a Smoking Gun evidence and so I I disagree that there is conclusive or even Beyond

Reasonable Doubt uh that a very specific cloning strategy was used because right now this diffuse proposal and everything I’ve seen it seems consistent with various lab leak scenarios so the first which is the the most uh the well the the hypothesis that has the least human intervention is one where they found a

Natural sik virus with a very rare cleavage site and they grew this up in the lab they they made it you know adapted to its human cells and that leaked so that’s one hypothesis that’s still on the table I I don’t think we can rule this out at all um and I don’t

Think there’s evidence against it uh the the ones that are more favored by myself and others today is that the virus might have been genetically engineered so they they might have kept most of it natural but they they stuck in a furing cleavage site and that’s what caused this virus

To become capable of causing a human pandemic so where we disagree is that how how sure are we that this virus was cloned in such a specific way laid out in the preprint uh by by Alex Tony and Valentine so that that’s the point that we arguing

Today yeah I I completely agree um so uh uh it um let’s see Bryce uh how should we uh well no I would like so you wanna Valentine Alex or Tony who who wants to sort of go first year I guess I we should first you know I don’t know if I

I guess you said you fully agree with what alen is saying I mean I well actually I should say yeah I largely I I basically agree with Alena I think I am more of the belief that the diffused proposal as a whole is essentially Smoking Gun evidence that SAR K2 has but

But I am but I am still skeptical of this specific proposal by um Valentine Alex and Tony now I think I I I do like their paper um and the the pattern that they observe um of the spacing of the um uh restriction enzyme sites is genuinely

Anomalous um that that is true um and that has actually been inadvertently confirmed by others um but I think there’s also a lot of um possibility still for other explanations for that such as um the cloning strategy that was used being a partial match to what Valentine Alex and um Tony propose um

But I do think that their work is quite thoughtful and creative um and it’s certainly worth discussing uh because it does make you think either way yeah seriously like just to be very clear because this space has become incredibly toxic about you know if you’re not 100%

In log step the Valentine Tony and Alex they have done this is a really important paper and what we’re here to do is kind of tease it apart we’re not saying so so Alex go ahead and talk like just to be clear like this is what scientific discourse is supposed to look

Like where we kind of just respectfully talk about it and we can figure out what the truth is so please go ahead Al yeah thank you all it’s um it’s great to hear everyone’s voices and perspectives here I think I’m in agreement with Justin and Elina that there are still other possibilities for

Exactly what may have happened in the lab and I think there’s some context that we could provide that might kind of I guess inform this discussion a little bit further um so one thing that I was doing before covid um the diffuse Grant was submitted to this DARPA preempt call

And I was on another DARPA preempt Grant I helped write a section on how we do the data analysis and forecasting the likelihood of various what they called in DARPA jump capable quasi species um and things like that so from that context I can talk a little bit about

The logistics of how in a lab what involves is you go out you sample bats you do some sort of feal swab or you know you swab their mouths or whatever you get some tissue samples and then these RNA viruses can be very unstable and difficult to transport long

Distances and there’s a lot of understandable and good red tape um you can’t just say hey we’re looking for dangerous B viruses in you know Bangladesh and we’re just going to ship them to you know to Montana you have to go through a lot of procedures in order

To do that but one simple step that you can do is if you can find a sequencing facility nearby then you can sequence the sample and if you find the virus genome sequence then anyone in the world can print out that genome with like a 3D printer effectively I mean what is

Effectively a DNA 3D printer and that’s what our method examines is a particular method for constructing a virus in a lab that logistically was very easy for this kind of research and in addition to the so we looked at this pattern we looked at the prior work for how people did

Construct viruses in the lab before covid with this infectious clone technology and 80% of the studies and the viruses that we could find the corona viruses that were made by these methods left these stitching sites in the genome and had this pattern of unusual fragment sizes and spacing of these cutting sites

Additionally they also modified these sites exclusively with silent mutations so if you had had some prior virus like the rwiv one infectious clone and that had escaped without us actually seeing the backbone we’d be able to identify it with our forensic methods based on the unusual fragment pattern as well as the

Exclusivity of Silent mutations and the hotspots of Silent mutations Within These sites relative to the rest of the genome and so that’s really the full when people say the pattern we have this great visual of the fragment spacing but the pattern in our paper is really this holistic consistency of the viral

Restriction map with the reverse genetic system and that includes the fragment spacing the unique sticky ends the exclusive silent mutations and the hotpots of Silent mutations and we combine all of our kind of the anomalous features of all those anomalous features together it becomes a very weighty piece

Of evidence and it’s not conclusive I don’t think we ever really proved things in science but you know there I think the likelihood of that pattern OBS being observed in a wild virus is low and the logistics of how to make a virus in a lab make me lean a little bit more

Towards this being a likely route for creating virus in the lab Tony Valentine did you have anything you wanted to add to that yeah I something that hasn’t me been mentioned yet the so the those five restriction sites the first two year BSM B1 and then this the last two are bsa1

What’s what’s interesting about that design if it is a design is that the the if you could cut this genome just with bsa1 and you would take out a big part of the spike Gene including the FCS including the receptor binding domain and the hiv1 inserts quote unquote

Inserts so in a way that’s not so that’s not so so stupid to do it this this way if you if they had focused if they had made the entire thing with BSM B1 you couldn’t do that so now you Tony you may need to give more explanation there that

Might be a little too too yeah I don’t know if that’s a little too in the weeds for people to follow that I’m trying to figure out like we hit the sort of uh Goldilocks regime where we’re we’re able to sort of simplify it but yet still

Discuss it at a high level yeah yeah yeah so I don’t know if um so you’re saying that in a you’re saying that it’s not just those restriction site pattern but also these additional there’s like additional features of the fragments themselves that lend themselves you know lend more credibility or provide more

Yeah I don’t want to use words like credibility it’s hard to to to shift between like the sort of casual words and more precise language so right so so the the it seems that this was designed with having in mind that you want to make many versions of the spike protein

In particular the F in CIT site in the the uh receptor binding domain so what you want you want to be able to take out a small fragment of the 30,000 based genome modify it and put it back in and that’s exactly what these two BSA one

Sites allow you to do so it’s not a it’s not a bug it’s a feature yeah exactly yeah yeah so I I I want to say like I I actually think that’s pretty compelling these these two the two BS A1 restriction sites um they are really positioned to perfectly swap

Out the part of the spike protein that appears to be most anomalous and so in particular what it would do is allow the researchers to make like a um a baseline virus and then swap in a lot of different spike protein sequences to see which ones could cause

The virus to be um most dangerous to humans um and this one uh BSA these two BSA one sites the the the segment of the virus that they uh bookend um that’s exactly the segment of the virus that um Well it Well it contains the the segment

The virus with with the you know key features of interest in the diffuse Grant both the receptor binding domain um which allows the um virus to bind to human cells and the fur and cleavage site which kind of supercharges the the virus allows it to to um fuse the human cells and infect

Them better um so I think that is a feature of the Restriction map that I actually find very compelling but should say that bsa1 was not in the diffused proposal um so you know and even if it was um there are other ways that they could have constructed the virus so for

Instance when um Ralph Barrack’s lab first created SARS K well when Ralph barck lab uh reported the creation of a SARS K2 reverse genetic system they actually used bsa1 and bnv1 but they used it in a um than a in a different way than um uh you know than uh um uh brutal

Itol uh than bralol propose so um that’s and and the other thing is BSA 1 is just very commonly used for this kind of it it’s just you know happens to be a very commonly used enzyme for stitching together um many different genome segments so um like that’s really the extent of my

Skepticism um but I think the observation by brutel atol that the um that the bsa1 sites are actually very well positioned um not just to create the virus in the first place but to then screen lots of different spike proteins for their properties I think that’s a really important observation Valentine

Go ahead and I would say this is also I posted a link to the paper I believe you’re talking about figure 3A of the paper for those that are have that paper open because you can use go ahead and reference that because um you know that that’s important these details are

Easier to see I know it’s hard to see in a space Valentine please sorry it’s taking well for you to get to speak oh no problem at all um I agree with most of what the other said well I personally think it is like now proven Beyond reasonable doubt that this virus

Came came from Lab was modified in a lab so of course they didn’t make up the entire thing but they introduced all these very suspicious changes um but that believe is not only based on this paper we’re discussing now uh but before we go into details I’d really like to

Take a few seconds to thank um Emily cop and the US right to note team um Gary for like getting access to these new documents I think that it really is a major contribution to um really learning more about what the involved researchers were thinking uh what their mindset was

And uh what precise plans they had and we we just had this discussion yeah that um this genetic construct you can probably compare it to like a puzzle of six pieces like a linear puzzle and these two BSA one sides allow you to just take out that one puzzle piece and

Um this would be of course very handy if you not just want to make one Rus but if you want to test a whole bunch of different receptor binding domains to find out basically which one is the most dangerous in humans um or if you want to test several different fur and cleavage

Sites or have one version with and one without the F and cleavage s um and through these new documents we pretty much know that this is even in more detail than before that this is exactly what they wanted to do they wanted to take U receptor binding domains and if you take

A look at the virus and not just you know the average mutation rate overall but really look at the individual segments and you single out the receptor binding domain then this is highly Divergent it’s like 25% different from for example R 13 while the rest of the

Genome is just like one or 2% different um and then of course the other very very weird part is the F and cleavage s which is depending on how long you define it 60 80% different um from from Red sheet 13 so those two really stick

Out and I think it’s fair to say that this looks like not only an inserted um FCS the first virus ever but also like a RBD receptor binding domain Chima and the receptor binding domain allows the virus to bind to the human receptor and they really go into great

Detail here um to explain how they would prioritize receptor binding domains based on modeling um based on binding studies with just the synthetic spikes um in cell culture experiments and this would in my opinion neatly explain another very unusual feature of this outpak which is the enormously rapid

Spread of this virus if you compare this to um for example sasan or M it took like months till we had the first uh few hundred infect infected people and here it just went around the world with no with no breaks on basically which would be perfectly explained if you have the

Receptor binding domain that’s that’s so well fitted and then of course it’s a more lethal virus than other similar viruses are and that would be explained by the fur and cleavage side which allows this virus to infect brain cells for example but these other protases that are normally used by other related

S related viruses are not expressed um so yeah just wanted to point out these these two things um on a very basal level that um through these new documents we really have a much better insight into what kind of experiments they were planning and why would be so

Useful to have a basically virus construction toolbox in which you can just you know for a few hundred put in a new receptor binding domain or a new um fine cleavage side and how this basically proves one very common counterargument wrong which we have often heard which is that if you use

Type two enzymes like bsa1 bb1 you wouldn’t find them anymore in the final construct right um many people said you can use can you explain a type two can you explain that real quick that’s also a sort of very confusing thing about those enzymes if you could just go back

Because I don’t know if we didn’t go over that before about the difference between like yeah sure so um if you if you come back to the puzzle picture basically in the puzzle you have always let’s imagine you have to put together six pieces of a puzzle blindly and um they would each

Have the same um Junction yeah you would never be able to put them into the right sequence right but if they have a unique Junction that’s very easy yeah so in the genetics World basically you link together different DNA pieces with so-called sticky ends you have a double

Stranded DNA and if you just bluntly cut that off the relations or connections are random but if you leave a short overhang of one of the strands and you basically make a compatible overhang on the next puzzle piece that you want to connect on the next strand then those will kind of

Magnetically attach to each other and then you can use liase to like close the thing and this allows you to put up to 60 pieces of DNA in the right sequence if you use these very precise and very efficient and very clean enzymes like uh second generation or High Fidelity BS

Mb1 and um bsa1 yeah so the difference between these type 2 s enzymes and normal enzymes is that they do not cut in the middle of their recognition sequence usually if your pentomic recognition sequence let’s say TT AAA and the virus will cut in a way that you

Have like a ttaa overhang at the Restriction enzyme it give you a ttaa overhang yeah so whenever you use that enzyme you will get always the same overhang so this is not really useful to assembly to assemble virus for ma six fragments type 2 s enzymes have a nonpalindromic

Recognition sequence so they basically read six letters of DNA and then they cut always at the same distance on one side of that yeah and what they cut they don’t really care what they cut so they can produce very Divergent and very different sticky ends so you can use the

Same enzyme to basically chew up your entire uh six eight whatever up to 60 fragments and then because they all produce a different unique Junction you can put them back together so this is the huge advantage of using these enzymes can I try like a very B I’m

Trying to think of a good analogy to explain like this concept of cutting in the recognition site or cutting outside of it um I’m not sure maybe maybe we should just move on but if anyone has one that’s a little bit more simple because I’m trying to think of you you

Know if you actually maybe mine is a bad one but I I’ll just leave it for later just putting a pin in that we might want to come back to that well it’s a bit like you know maybe cutting off a a branch yeah and if you

Just you know whatever draw a Target on it and uh you shoot it off will always um split right in the middle and you will have half of the Target on each side of the branch and if you put it back together you’ll see the target but

If you put one of these type to S enzymes in then it will basic lead to a cutting off next to your target yeah so it depends on the orientation of your sequence if you leave it in so yeah I think um so I just want to say like um

Uh the um like the the cloning method that um uh um uh Valentine um and colleagues uh propose like it would totally work um there there’s every reason to believe it would work um I think the main objection to it is really just that a lot of times

When people use these enzymes they remove the cutting sites um now there is no reason you have to do that and there is some though I would say not complete precedence for this in um you know for for leaving the sites in in previous work from the Wuhan Institute of

Urology um I I think the main question that people have including the me is just that it just seems like a little unusual but like it’s not a very strong argument against it but it’s um it you know it it just I don’t know I so I

Think that is part of my um skepticism about about the cloning method but I think again it’s not really an either or you can use a combination of these things for the different segments um you know there one thing people should know is that there’s a lot

Of flexibility in in how you Stitch DNA together um so um yeah so I I just wanted to um uh throw that in there um uh Alex yeah I think if I were to kind of try to popular eyes what Valentine was talking about I think it’s just there

Are many different kinds of scissors on the market and some of them work some of them don’t and also some of them are more popular than others and one of the things we tried to emphasize in our paper was that bsnb 1 and bsa1 are two of the more popular enzymes on the

Market and so I think that point at a very minimum that point was um corroborated by the presence of BS smb1 in these diffused drafts now one point that alinaa made that I thought was really great was that there are other possible explanations for the bsmb one

In this draft and one explanation Alina pointed to the paper was that they could have just been using the six segment construction that they used in Prior work specifically Ralph baric in 2016 his group um experimented with the Wuhan Institute of biology infectious clone with one using a SARS coronavirus

Backbone that was Li in six segments and in that liation it actually in order to find it you have to go back to a 2007 paper but that was a complicated liation they did use bsnb one but they also inserted a bunch of mutations in order to move around other restriction enzymes

And use for example bgl2 mf1 and a variety of other of these good molecular scissors and so when Valentine and Tony and I did this work we’ve studied these past methods in great detail to try to understand what are the enzymes used and what were the methods and other infectious clones that

Were out there um and for the SARS one coronav virus infectious clone they would need more than just bsnb one to stitch that together and for the Wuhan Institute of biology infectious clone rwi one that was stitched together using a different set of scissors called bgl2 so it’s interesting that this draft

Has BSN B1 listed as a restriction enzyme and not bgl 2 which is also a requirement for both rwiv 1 and the SARS coronavirus infectious clone used in the 2016 paper so you know that’s neither here nor there too they could have another possibility is they could have

Just inserted VSS smb1 in this you know early discussion as a placeholder for a cost estimate of these restriction enzymes and that would underscore our point that these were popular enzymes these are the first enzymes someone would think about and someone would use um and another kind of interesting

Technical historical detail in our literature review was that these two enzymes that we find evidence for or we find our curious in the Genome of SARS 2 bsn1 and bsa1 had only been used together once in a Corona virus and that was on a paper by Ben who Peter dasak

And XI Jang Lee all of whom were um pis on defuse now in that paper these enzymes bsmb one and bsa1 were not used for the full liation of in the construction of the Clone but instead we’re used to swap Spike genes and that gets to Valentine’s point which is that

The methodology that Ben who and colleagues used in 2017 to swap Spike genes could be replicated with the SARS Cove 2 infectious clone system that we find specifically since the second half of the genome or the last um last couple of restriction sites are all bsa1 and

There’s not a bsnb one in the mix it’s possible to swap entire Spike genes using BS smb1 primers on both ends um and so this is kind of some methodological detail it’s kind of hard to quantify but is important for piecing together the forensic possibilities and

So I think that there are many scissors on the market these were the most popular ones and that was a main point in our paper to begin with they’d only been used once before together by Ben H who and colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of virology in 2017 and of all

The enzymes that we saw in the diffused draft we did see BSM 1 and not bg2 which was also a requirement for both the SARS and the wi one infectious clones Alina did you want to um comment on what you’ve heard and I I know you also had a additional point about like

The negative controls or something or clarification about that yeah so I’ll I’ll reinforce some of the points that have been made so far I think there’s no doubt that these virologists at at UNC and and uhan Institute virology they will fully capable of seamlessly recreating novel Corona virus sequences

From the wild and they shown this in their papers from like way back even like 2015 that kind of thing so they they don’t even need to remove natural cut sides restriction enzyme cut sides they don’t even need to do that you can see that in their papers from 2016 and

2017 when they reconstituted novel Sak viruses they did not have to obliterate any cut sides as far as I’m aware of um and they and and this question of you know can you can you reliably confidently tell whether a certain cloning strategy was used can you tell whether a certain signature of

Engineering was used is very challenging and I don’t think that we at that level yet I don’t think that science is at that level yet even even you know top scientists funded by iapa uh and in 2020 they were tasked with exactly this job they they were tasked with looking at

The S K2 pandemic virus sequence and and determining whether or not it had been genetically engineered and and they were wrong so this this very elite group of scientists even they would they were overly confident in ruling on a genetically engineered uh like origin of the of the virus so they they declared

On the website and I believe that this probably influenced a lot of the intelligence agencies as well when they made the assessments that they they they tend to lean against a man-made origin is because of these sort of proclamations that you can tell whether there’s a signature so uh if you look at

The literature of what happened after Zas k 2 appeared you can see that a lot groups including Ralph Barrack’s group could easily just clone in again like without leaving any Trace using bsa1 and bsmb one these are commonly Ed enzymes but he also did the same thing for the

Pengalin virus so this Pengalin virus that’s quite similar but not that closely related but it’s also a wild like SS like virus he also reconstituted it without leaving any traces without having to obliterate any sides also using bb1 so I mean I don’t think that there’s a pattern in any of these

Viruses that you can say aha this is a signature so I I do think that being so of closing all these doors prematurely saying that you’re you’re you know like 99% confident that this exact cloning strategy was used I I don’t think that there’s evidence to support that I mean

I do I do find it worrying that a lot of these viruses can be seamlessly reconstituted but that doesn’t only apply to sou K too even even applies to other s viruses and even before the pandemic this was happening so I I will say though if you look at everything

Probabilistic just trying to think about it from a probabilistic kind of level uh what what you have here is that you the pandemic itself could have been caused by any of hundreds of different virus species at any of tens of thousands of wetli markets across China and Southeast

Asia in any of thousands of cities in that region in and in any year but it was a s like virus with a unique furing clearage side that appeared in uhan less than two years after the scientist that proposed splicing exact that type of feature into novel like viruses from the

Wild so I I do think that there’s enough here that that really tells us we need to get more information we need to find out what happened after that diffuse draft was submitted to daa in in March 2018 because there there’s this huge gap of knowledge right now we don’t know

What the heck happened in uhan between mid 2018 to throughout to the end of 2019 and and I think that right now we don’t have Smoking Gun we don’t have a Reas like Beyond A Reasonable Doubt level of evidence but there might be that evidence and it’s it’s appalling

That it’s not only people in China that withholding this evidence but now even people in the states refused to release this evidence so mainly the US collaborators of the wh and and even for some reason uh last year there was a CO origin act that was signed in the law

Passed both the Senate and House unanimously signed in the law by President Biden and still the DN refused to release intelligence pointing that could link the wh to the original covid-19 so that that’s my stance on it is that I I think that we need to seek

More information and there might even be a Smoking Gun in there but right now we don’t have it Valentine did you want to come at first and then Alex yeah yeah um thanks a lot so these are very good arguments I’ve heard them

A lot um so and I I agree yeah these are typ enzymes you can use them for so-called no seam cloning or and general uh general terms on vectors you call this Golden Gate assembly um EnV virology it’s no seam cloning or seam dis liation all that kind of stuff um

The reason why they could not have done this for a diffus like project is that you don’t have the Restriction sides in your final product anymore and if you don’t have that if all your six puzzle pieces are basically sealed together without the ability to taking one out again you have to produce

The entire puzzle you have to produce the entire virus for every variant that you want to make yeah if you reorient these sites so that you can still find them in the viral genome you will also have them in basically the DNA template it’s called the bacterial artificial

Chromosome here um that produces the viral genome you can always go back and like Alex and Tony described you can just take out that one piece that codes for the F cage side and receptor binding domain yeah so instead of putting and I mean it’s if you look at the the newly

Released documents yeah they speak of 15 to 16 different viruses from which they wanted to take receptor binding domains yeah I don’t know how many F and cleavage sites they wanted to test but let’s say just two and then no F and cleavage side and then they wanted to

Produce three to five new backbones yeah so complete uh viruses in which they wanted to test at all these features this gives you 200 different viruses and it’s a huge huge difference if you have to reassemble 200 viruses basically 200 times of you just open each baral

Backbone up once when you have checked everything when there’s no mutations when all the puzzle pieces have connected in the right way and you just open it at one on one piece and you put in the new fur and cleavage site or the new receptor B new domain yeah so you

Can talk to many bio engineers in this paper was kind of uh addressed to bioengineers um for example Professor Kon they they confirmed that we also use this in the lab like almost every day we have a genetic construct we want to one part we have two flanking type aides and

We just cut out that part and put the new part in like a new tag for protein purification or something like that yeah so this is the first reason why they could not have used or why it would not have made any sense to use this seamless

Cloning here and then maybe the second Point why we are so sure that they use these enzymes is uh a bit hidden in our in our preprint but um you have to understand that these uh stitching sides these gluing sides always put into viruses with synonymous mutations so you

Never want to change the protein sequence of a virus in many cases this was would render the virus completely dysfunctional maybe it wouldn’t do that much but your reviewers would say well you have SS virus and you claim it’s the same as the original one but you have

Five new amino acids to in there and it it doesn’t do anything so how do you know it’s not these five amino acids that use so you always use so-called synonymous or silent mutations to put in your uh your gluing sides your stitching sides um and in nature the distribution of Silent or

Syor mutation is completely random yeah these restriction enzymes do not play any role in natural life cycle of a virus they’re not expressed in the human cells the virus infects or any animals it just come from bacteria which the virus cannot infect um so basically what

You can look when when you compare any historic um natural template and the synthetic version you find a few synonymous mutations and those are exactly in the uh restriction sites that they used to assemble the synthetic virus and this is this is what we did here yeah and Alex wrote this really

Beautiful statistical analysis on that um and basically you would have expected based on the number of synonymous of mutations that there would be like one or two in the bsa1 and bsb1 side sites and that we found 12 yeah and maybe I I’ll leave it to Alex to explain How likely or unlik

That is go ahead Al yeah valentine and andelina really great points all around here I think um some you know I’ll I’ll start off with like some higher context of the preco challenge of figuring out where a pathogen came from and what the evidence look like and and how we combined it and

Then kind of dive into Valentine’s point about the strength of the evidence from the silent mutations um so back in 2018 there was a outbreak of NEPA virus in Kerala India and at the time I was working with a group studying NEPA viruses and their relatives the hanipa

Viruses and trying to figure out where they came from um there’s many hundreds of species of bats and so many possible reservoirs and we weren’t sure what was happening in kerola India because typically NEPA virus would spill over far from there it would be in um in the

NEPA belt in Bangladesh people would drink date palm sat buckets and the bats would have peed in the date palm sat bucket and so that’s how people get sick in the NEPA Bel but what was happening in carola wasn’t clear so we had a similar task of the forensics and the

Attribution of a virus and figuring out which Reservoir it likely came from um there weren’t any labs in carola India to complicate that matter but what we did is we combined the evidence both from the host biogeography and the ecology and the host abundance and the receptor binding and the viral genome

And many features within the viral genome and all of that evidence slowly accumulates to a point towards the likely reservoirs and in our top 10 list of bats which you know there were 500 species of bats in total they ended up finding the progenitor to the NEPA virus

Or at least a very close relative 99.9% similar within one of our top 10 bat species and so the question of attributing where a virus came from isn’t isn’t new and there’s ways to combine all the evidence and we never really get this Smoking Gun or like a

Single thing that’s I mean while I’d love to have you know a email saying does this look like a good fear and cleavage site and that would absolutely be you know a Smoking Gun um we can still get Beyond Reasonable Doubt even when the gun is thrown in the river and

You know the digital signatures have been erased we can rule out a natural origin and I think that’s kind of where we are today you know even if it’s a straw that breaks the camel’s back scenario there’s still the entire bail of hay before that last straw um and so

Regarding the sort of pieces of straw that that we’ pitched into this we were following the diffuse proposal and that’s kind of what you can hear from from our careful consideration of the methodology and the prior work and we asked okay great so it has this weird pattern and that was visually apparent

We wanted to quantify the odds of that but that finding because we’ picked it up with our eyeballs was a little bit post talk and you can’t rest too heavily on that so we really needed to test the additional implications that we hadn’t looked at yet if this were a reverse

Genetic system then we would expect these sites to have been moved around by exclusively silent mutations which don’t affect the proteins that are being translated by these sequences um and we would also expect a hot spot of Silent mutations Within These sites if we had found again the rwiv one infectious

Clone causing a pandemic then we would look at the bgl2 sites we’d notice their unusual spacing and we have that visualized in our paper that’s also an anomalous coron virus restriction map and it has a higher concentration of Silent mutations within the bgl two sites which are anomalously space and

Then the rest of the genome so that was a really important stone that we turned over and this is a proper out of sample prediction um that there would be exclusively silent mutations and there would be more a higher concentration of Silent mutations Within These sites than

The rest of the genome and what we found was exactly that all the Sy all the mutations that had moved around these restriction sites whether from Bal 52 or another close relative published by the Wuhan Institute of iology RG G 13 all of the mutations moving these sites are

Silent and in ratg13 we found 8 to nine times as many silent mutations per nucleotide Within These modified restrictions or you know mutated restriction sites than in the rest of the genome so if this were really a pattern that we found by chance and these restriction sites were randomly

Spaced in the genome how did we get so lucky to find 8 to nine times as many silent mutations in these very small number of nucleotides that we looked in so that was a very significant finding our estimate of the P value from a fisher’s exact test looking at silent

Mutations per nucleotide within the sites versus the rest of the genome that was on the order of 10 the minus 8 and so that’s a pretty big straw on the camel’s back um you know one in 10 million-ish or 20 million-ish chance of that under some you know assumptions in

An all hypothesis and so that’s a very that’s kind of where we that’s really where I started thinking that there’s significant evidence that we should consider carefully and that’s very weighty and maybe there’s other explanations and we’re really encouraging those tests but when you look at that strength of evidence and

The consistency with the prior work um and the suitability of this system for the diffused proposal that makes me be a little stronger in my belief that this may have originated as an infectious clone but when we look at the totality of evidence from the geography and the host biogeography and the receptor

Binding and the early outbreak features such as is the d6g mutation that enhanced the fear and cleavage site the fear and cleavage site itself and the Restriction map when we combine all that evidence and more that’s where I get personally Beyond Reasonable Doubt confidence that this originated from a

Lab or did not originate from nature which leaves us with the only other possibility being a lab so I I wanted to um just kind of um I wanted to comment on what um uh Alex just said I think uh the overall analysis that they do is really

Smart um and I I basically agree with the conclusions um my my hesitancy I I think my hesitancy is um I guess a few things I just want to point out though I think there are reasonable uh critiques that can be made of the specific ways to compute the quantitative probabil ities

Um and uh so for instance you know it you know would it be better to do like uh a philogenetic simulation in order to compute these probabilities but I think the overall gist of what Alex and and um Valentine and Tony are saying is is right that these um the spacing of the

Sites the specific synonymous mutations you would need to get the sites these are really anomalous looking things um I think there are so I also think that there are various you know as as we’ve said like we seem to disagree um like alinaa disagrees about whether

This is a Smoking Gun I kind of do um she you know she she’s more skeptical I think there’s um valid uh you know I think these are valid differences of opinion um but what I also just want to emphasize though the big picture all of us agree that the existing scientific

Evidence strongly suggests a CO largely strongly suggests a um genetic engineering um origin for SARS kovy 2 um it might not prove to some some people Beyond A Reasonable Doubt but I think all of us agree that the preponderance of evidence um um the preponderance of scientific evidence especially um points

To a genetic engineering origin for SARS K2 and I want to emphasize that language because that is the standard of evidence that is used in us civil law so um I think to my mind uh if people are frustrated that the authorities like the FBI aren’t doing the investigations that

Should be done for instance into Eco Health Alliance and into Ralph Barrack’s lab there is another option which is to um Sue those labs for damages and I think the standard of evidence that would be needed to that would need to be met in order to have a successful civil lawsuit against Eco

Health Alliance um and Peter daak in against Ralph baric and perhaps the University of North Carolina I think that has been met and I think those lawsuits might also be a good way of getting through Discovery um new documents about specifically um what was going on and what you know the likely

Origin of this virus so I really think that those that standard has been met and that standard is very consequential for um possible uh routes um for um frankly Justice for people who have been harmed by covid-19 hey Alina can I ask you a quick question are you able to stay a little

Bit longer I know you said you might have to leave around two I didn’t know if you have to go or um I don’t know if you’re oh yeah I should be able to okay here’s I have a question for you and and Tony by the way feel free to

Jump in you can I know Alex and uh Valentine raised their hand it’s very polite I I love it um a question about this whole idea of can we determine whether there’s a synthetic origin of of a virus I one of the things I guess that

I maybe I’m wrong about this and and maybe this analogy people will not like but if we considered like that that the virus is a bomb right so the bomb goes off and now you are doing a forensic investigation to see who is the likely bomb maker

Right so it’s not like you know we’re really talking about specific Labs there’s a handful of labs maybe that could have designed the virus if you’re you know having suspects right um and and you see that with proximal Origins too right where they are hyp the hypothesis is really that if this was

Maybe La made in Ralph Barrack’s lab how would it be done is that a fair assess because aren’t we kind of just talking about trying to prove it was made in Ralph Barrack’s lab I mean is that because it’s a bomb that went off Ralph baric makes bombs apologies for that

Analogy if if we’re really talking about who in the world would have made this it would be through him or through somebody working with him or under his guidance right is that because we’re really sort of trying to do a synthetic origin coming from any lab in the world is a

Lot different from asking if it’s synthetic origin coming from one lab and I guess I don’t know if you know Alex and Valentine and Tony when you did your paper where you kind of directed on you know how it would be done from this specific lab as it was it so proximal

Origins you know they were trying to exclude it was made in Ralph Barrack’s lab that that to me seems pretty clear so I I’ll leave it at that Valentine go ahead sorry cool um yeah maybe so one one weird thing about bioengineering is that the better you design these plasmids

These constructs these viruses the easier it is to finally then produce them right the better uh your your your sticky ends are the better the fragments will glue together um the easier it will be to purify your uh DNA segments from so-called plasms DNA rings in which you

Produce them in bacteria um so this is I think this virus looks like a very Advanced design that is really optimized to on a highr level test lots of different receptor binding domains and fur cleavage sites um I think technically it it’s no no question that

Uh this the the Chinese team could have done that like you know put the segments together the design part is really where this is this is the question but this is very in my opinion very difficult to judge the bomb maker analogy who is the bombmaker uh or directing I I guess I

Don’t want to the designer yeah yeah the designer because ultimately we’re not talk you know Justin we we can ask did Justin Kenny make this and no you know like we could investigate that and we’d find that no but there’s only a few people in the world if it were of of of

A unnatural origin that we’d really have as suspects right and and we’re really just talking about all of the evidence coming out of the baric lab um suggesting that they were developing this technology that could have led to this I I guess can I go ahead can I take

That so I think the key elements I think there is a lot of evidence that this virus was designed in the diffuse proposal or at least designed by this collaboration of multiple scientists um that includes the optimized receptor binding domain and uh a furing cleavage site at the S1 S2

Boundary inserted into novel Corona virus backbones I think you know the documents make very clear that it would really only be this collaboration that that could that would design that the actual cloning sites though they look so if the I think the the strongest evidence against this being con literally constructed in the

Barck lab is in fact the um the proposal of Valentine um Alex and Tony um that they use these restriction sites and keep them in the virus um just because the baric lab had was proud of this seamless cloning strategy and even when they ended up um

Cloning SARS K2 um early in the pandemic uh they actually used seamless cloning even even with bsnb 1 and bsa1 um so to me it kind of looks like the contents of the virus were designed by this collaboration but the actual destruction of the virus um especially if it was

Done using uh the brutel atol strategy uh it just seems likely it was done by someone else only because of the pattern of restriction SI at least that’s my personal opinion yeah J I think that’s a really great point that baric did seem to prefer the seamless cloning method and

The virus also didn’t originate in North Carolina but the first outbreak was in Wuhan um and I think you’re right that someone could have a blueprint for how to build a bomb and if someone else found the blueprint they could build the bomb even though it wasn’t written by

Them and so I think that’s one possibility you know and there are still some unknowns even if we we are highly confident in the laboratory origin by virtue of ruling out a natural origin we may not know who held the pipet we may not know if they dropped a bile or got

Bit by a mouse but I still think we can look at all the pieces of evidence together and keep those on the table um and I think that that’s definitely where our restriction map analysis sits in is that the prior the last infectious clone that the Wuhan Institute of Urology

Published was rwiv one and in that they had used BG one as the enzyme to cut and paste and glue the glue the Clone together um and they would also use both bsa1 and bsnb one in order to swap the spike genes and so when we really

Localize in on okay who within this set of collaboration might have known what and when I think the only people who I would have a higher confidence and having communicated closely about this would be Ben who Peter daak and Xiang Lee whose 2017 paper didn’t involve

Ralph baric at all so I think you’re right that you know this does lean more towards the Wuhan Institute of biology related collaboration and it wouldn’t even be unheard of if for example after diffuse was rejected by DARPA um some others at the Wuhan Institute of iology

Went forward in a private or you know non-public setting the one piece of evidence that I think going to Alena’s point of we could learn more is that the diffused collaborators hadn’t published a document before diffuse but they were all on a call with niid in 2019 what

Were they talking about what was their research program then it would be really nice to know Al I see youve got your hand raised yeah go ahead Alina yeah so I wanted to comment on something first before getting into the scientific like argument about this so the first thing

Is that you know we we often watch these Hollywood movies where you see the FBI busting into people’s homes and like taking whatever they want but you can’t do that like in in real life they can’t really do that they there’s a process they can’t just bust into anyone’s home

Or lab and take all the lab records immediately so we actually actually need a investigated the process we need like a bipartisan committee with subpoena Powers but the New York Times reported a year that the White House was resisting initiating such a committee that could have investigated that could have gone

In to get these land records and then since last year we’ve had this all these select committees uh in Congress trying to investigate but until today they have not issued any subpoenas for the Eco Health Alliance or Barrack to get their lab records to get the exchanges so I

Mean this is extremely aggravating for me you know if if this issue could be resolved tomorrow I would love that and and so it it’s it’s shocking to me that the the main leader of the charge right now is us right to know so it’s the US

Right to know that’s been foing for all these documents that have given us some insight into what happened in in in between uhan and UNC in early 2018 so moving back to the science part of things I think that there there are four things that uh I want to say and

And this these are the reasons why I don’t think that there’s a Smoking Gun based on this cloning approach so the first thing is that there’s no need to obliterate these Cuts sites anymore um these scientists were really like developing ways to to leave these genomes as unperturbed as possible as as

Much as possible they wanted to replicate what was in nature so by by even like years before the pandemic they already had ways of doing these cloning without doing anything without changing any sites uh any changes they left were there to distinguish the natural virus

From the on Clon in the lab so uh the second point is that uh when you come up with cloning strategies for all these genomes you typically need to have it in front of you you you might know you know I’m going to do six or eight pieces like

Roughly but you you you typically don’t have like I’m going to force my way through every single novel genome using bsmb one and bsa1 that that’s not the way they do it and you can see this in how baric synthesizes all these novel uh genomes s like genomes is that he he

Just picks whatever strategy Works once you look at that genome um and this was this diffus draft was written in early 2018 this was before I’m assuming any S 2 like sequences any RG like sequences were shared between the wi and Barracks lab and this is why I want to see what

Happens after the diffused proposal in the two years following the diffused proposal that any other those sequences or any hint of those sequences get shared with with rth barck and from those emails we see that actually rth barck had been getting some sequences that until today are not disclosed so I

Think that he should be called to the stand to to to stand witness and to to tell us what he does know from the wh so the third point is if you look at these mentions of six pieces and bsmb one in the diffuse draft the six pieces are in

My opinion quite clearly taken from Ralph Barrack’s 2016 paper where he breaks with one aze one like sequence down into six pieces to make into a genome again in this paper he did not have to obliterate or insert any cut sides uh so some parts of the the fuse

Proposal are taken from Barrack’s writings or from his text from his manuscripts and and you can see that because it says that he’s going to order pieces from biobasic and you can see this in his papers post pandemic as well that he’s ordering pieces synthesized genetic pieces from biobasic so to me

That six pieces doesn’t mean that the wh had a six piece plan with bsnb one for all Sal like viruses it’s that it was taken from a 2016 text by Ral barck and the bsnb one had been used by wi before in the 2017 paper where they splice the

Spike Gene just the spike Gene from One S like virus into another so this this doesn’t speak to me even if it’s in their budget it’s not unexpected it doesn’t tell me that they were certainly using a six piece bsb1 approach so the fourth Point here is

That um if you look at uh and maybe I’m maybe I misinterpreted this but if if you look at the analysis by Alex Tony and Valentine they also find that RG3 and Bernal other 97% similar viruses to sou Co 2 also had a high number of

Silent m at these cut sites so to me that sounds like even even the natural viruses also have an elevated number of mutations like silent mutations at these cut side so that makes that makes s Co 2 seem more natural then right so am I

Wrong on that point so I’d like to hear your rebuttal to these four points Valentine you want to go okay maybe yeah you can try in anytime Alex so um yeah i’ agree if you would like to maybe very briefly going back back to seamless cloning you said

That um they had the technology and it was R Bar signature to remove these SES this can be probably compared to like constructing a car if you want to build one car and test one engine which is the equivalent to the receptor binding domain and FCS here you can just weld in

That engine right and then you give it a go and uh if it works well it’s fine but now if you imagine to have to test like 15 different backbones so 15 cars and uh 16 different um engines or receptor binding domains it makes a lot of sense

To just use screws and after you tested one engine in one car put the next engine in yeah this is basically the equivalent of leaving the Restriction sides in the genome you just exchange one segment you just need to liate two sticky ends and you have your next virus

That’s ready to go each variant would cost maybe a few hundred dollars it’s insanely cheap that’s what akes this technology so uh really risky to make a whole new backbone would be another 6,000 um so basically this is this is why I don’t think they used seamless

Cloning here um but let’s get to your next point so you said that this is based on a rough bar paper the six segments um I think uh that if you look at for example this is uh page 478 in these new documents they say that R Barrack has already generated SS like

Ciras with ra rbds from group of bad viruses called 293 we can speculate what that is which is 20% different than epidemic strains um so basically what they say here in this in this proposal is that they have already built some new backbones and I think they are really the these uh these

Two hints naming six segments and specifically mentioning BSN B1 kind of tells us that they already knew which which at least which family of backbones they were going to use and bar and she have worked before together they like put a f cite and then S one Spike at one

Point um so I think they could have exchanged ideas before yeah so a lot of this looks like Barrack design B based on viruses collected in China so basically neither team could do what they describe here without the other in my opinion yeah they need it you always

Have to adapt Your Design to the specific virus and the all the design and the cloning strategies here are attributed to Bar Barrack and he apparently has done some of these experiments already um so the last part with the elev ated um numbers or frequencies of Z mutations

I’m not really sure uh where this comes from or if I understood this correctly so what we did we compared basically the synonymous mutation rates of sasco V2 um to the basically the Restriction of gluing sites in other viruses such as FAL 52 or r13 and usually you don’t get such

Extreme P Val is like 110 million this is only there for R 13 it’s actually really surprising this very very detailed because I mean it looks like they removed one of the signs in the S two backbone with like four mutations which is kind of weird um but still

Looks like man-made maybe they panicked and they wanted to make it look specifically different at the sides that um that they used for the cloning so that there’s they look really really different I don’t know this kind of speculative but even with other with other enzymes you get U you get like low

P Valu 0.04 or something in that range um yeah so I think that’s those would be my counters I think they they collaborated for years um I think seamless wouldn’t have worked here for such a huge project but of course it’s the first time they plan such a huge

Project so there’s no there’s no equivalent en virology there’s tons of equivalents in um bioengineering um yeah and basically i’ really yeah so Alex do you want to chime in um I saw Alena also raised her hand and I’ll I’ll just quickly get straight to her to let her have the floor the

Only point is just reiterating Valentine’s point for clarity that we found the hotspots of Silent mutations relative to SARS 2o and we didn’t look at other Corona viruses to find if these sites in general across Corona viruses have a higher or lower rate of Silent mutations I think that would be a very

Very good follow-up analysis and you it could go either way we could find that oh there is an eight to nine times higher rate of Silent mutations Within These sites and all these other distant related Corona viruses that we can have very high confidence were wild Corona viruses and that would reduce the

Significance of our finding um so that that would be a great piece of follow-up work and we haven’t done that we’ve just kind of used the Baseline of ratg13 to SARS and B Now 52 to ours too Elina yeah so just to to sum up what um

Tony said and this I agree with him on this point so he’s saying that you to adapt your cloning strategy you must have access to the backbone that you’re going to do stuff in so this is early 2018 and and it sounds like this is where we disagree again is that I don’t

Think that at this point she’s lab has shared SARS K2 like genomes with baric yet even though there is this part of the proposal and of the minutes in the emails where where baric is said to be making chimeric salik viruses using some new sequences from chlam because nowhere

In this whole proposal did they mention like this novel Family of sik genomes that they’re going to use as backbones I’m not saying that that didn’t happen later in 2018 or 2019 but I think at this point they did not yet have that task to like backbone I would be shocked

If if baric had been sent ASAS to like Backbone in early 2018 like maybe I’m too naive but I like right now I just there’s nothing there’s no evidence here that suggests to me that Ral barck has been getting these s to like genomes from the wh since early 2018 and he’s

Been sitting on that all this time and maybe I’ve maybe I’ve totally proven wrong like maybe my trust in humanity is going to be obliterated based on based on the draft based on the emails that we’ve seen so far up till early 2018 I don’t see any

Signs yet that she has started sharing these novel s twole genomes with the Barrack lab or even the eoh alliance um so I I agree with you on that point so the last point about the silent mutation so this this is directly from your preprint you say that there are

Many of these silent mutations at these bsa1 BS mb1 sites for SARS 2 and also that there are significantly higher rates of Silent mutations Within These sites for both rg13 and beral 52 so Bal 52 is another natural salag virus found by a totally different group of scientists of French and Cambodian

Scientists uh in Cambodia so I there there’s nothing in me that thinks that these guys also made a synthetic genome and tricking the rest of the world so if if you find that even these natural s like viruses also have a very like low P value of having a lot of

These silent mutations then suggest that your low P value for SARS k 2 the pandemic virus is is not as meaningful um I I I wanted to ask uh so um okay Alex can you go but after you I do want to ask AO question absolutely yeah quick point of Lena is

That if you look at our wiv one um both from a backbone that was used in the lab as well as the close relatives you would find a higher concentration of Silent mutations within the bgl1 sites and that was the intention of our comparison of both ratg13 and bow 52 was that the

Anomaly here is not either of those genomes necessarily but rather it’s SARS 2 that this thing if it were constructed in a lab with our methods would have hot spots of Silent mutations relative to the close relatives that we have available so um thanks Alex Alina I I

Actually want to um bring the conversation over to some other um issues in the in the diffuse drafts one was this um kind of interesting statement about the baric lab having created and this kind of struck me when I when I saw the drafts the baric lab um

You know as preliminary data for the diffuse Grant had already constructed chimeric proteins from uh chimeric Spike proteins using parts from what they call the two uh was it the the 293 viruses um and you know the um my understanding is that that suggests that um the 293

Viruses there’s reason to believe that those are um rg13 like viruses um or at least viruses from the um moang mind that uh uh that um the wi had previously isolated um but I think Alina you know you know the source of all these viral genomes better than I do

So so what’s your what’s your take on this so yeah I think actually the diffus draft that came out there there two big like takeaways from that is that one uh this work that a lot of zunos proponents have been saying was were delegated to the UNCC to R barck lab actually in

Private pet dashek said that he was going to Red delegate them back to uhan Once daa gave them the money and he believed that the wh The uhan Institute of biology were totally capable of doing these experiments by themselves and in fact had been doing these experiments by

Themselves since like 2017 even did at BSL to a low bios safety level so um in terms of the novel the second part that’s novel about the diffused draft where where it says that rth barck is making these chimeric s like viruses from this 293 group of Sak viruses or all viruses

I I also don’t know know what the 293 group refers to but the clue there is that they say at least maybe the the spike RBD has to be 20% different from SAR one from the 2003 SARS one and I’m not aware of which published sequences

Match that description so to me it seems like there are some novel Spike sequences from s like viruses that have been shared by the wh to Ral Barracks lab in early 2018 before 2018 so I would like to know what those sequences are and I’m I’m

A guest that that you know baring on these sequences but why I don’t think that these are the sze two genomes is because at this point in early 2018 the W was still stitching together the Genome of RG3 and we know this from the data from the sequencing data that they

Posted and they didn’t realize that the dates were were in the metadata of those files and the dates say that even up to like October 2018 they were still sequencing rg1 so I think that the most important year that we need to see the records for uh obviously the year of the

Pandemic 2019 so a year is plenty of time for the W to have discovered a novel precursor to the pandemic marus and to have tested these in cells realized that it was it was optimal for putting in a furing cleavage site popped in a furing cleavage site in a couple of

Weeks and then escaped because of the low bio safety was totally plausible within a year so that’s what I would like to see evidence for it could be something in email maybe to between she and bar or to P the dash something like oh we’ve got this noral group of SAR

Viruses or like you know uh we found some feing cage sites we like to test like that would I think move me to to Beyond A Reasonable Doubt I think that I think that’s a very good point and um just to clarify for everyone so the protocol that they propose inuse for

Identifying new um new SARS like Corona viruses it involves using um it involves sequencing first specific regions of the viruses including uh what’s called the RNA toen RNA polymerase but also the spike protein so one possibility is that the whve might have shared the um Spike protein sequence with Ralph baric and

Enabled the creation of chimeric Spike protein from the 293 like viruses even before um they had assembled the full Genome of these viruses would would you say that that’s fair Lena I mean I I don’t know because I I don’t know what sequences was sent and I

Think like it’s easy to speculate but then you speculate too much and then you get proven wrong so for me I I obviously have more information seeking position is that unless I think I can quite confidently say that something H didn’t happen I wouldn’t try to speculate on it

And maybe maybe that is something that’s on brand for me is that people know that I’m very skeptical of things skeptical of like surprising coincidences or things like that until it I I feel like there there’s enough evidence to show that that is what most likely happened

Valentine yeah I’d just like to very briefly comment on um this last point is R barck would have already had similar enough sequences in in 2018 so actually Floren uncovers he’s like the anonymous scientist here at U um on X he suggested that this 293 number is the exact same

Number that is found in a um publication of shiing Le from 2016 in which they um published Corona viruses um that were selected at that abandoned M shaft in moang uh so it was like 284 240 284 um Alpha Corona viruses and nine beta Corona viruses and together this would

Be 293 and this is in my opinion speculation at the moment but if this is what they refer to as the group of 293 viruses would be the exact same number then they would have access to these viruses already uh in in 2016 at least they were collected

RI 13 was also collected in in 2013 yeah but then sequenced of course later than that but um the reverse genetic system we’re looking at here is not specifically or only usable for R30 right I think ex especially through these banal viruses we got a very good

Idea of you know what sasov 2 related viruses look like but at this point according to the fuse again I think they mentioned they had already 180 so way way way more sequenced and unpublished viruses in their databases in 2018 right so they may have had a way

Better picture of what sas2 related viruses look like than we have no even with including the banal banal viruses and this cloning strategy would have worked for a lot of these viruses if you look at our figure three you can you can see that for example um

The last segment yeah of hk3 could be just put into uh into sasov V2 without changing anything many people have said this indicates that these these restriction sites came from recombinations um which I think recombinations would never increase the mutation frequencies in these sites so

This is uh proven Wrong by uh this last figure which no biologist ever seems to notice in our preprint um but it’s a very general cloning system that would allow you to basically mix and match parts of different related viruses and this would really be ideal to produce these three

To five backbones they wanted to produce per year and if you then see then for example that your last puzzle piece whatever you off 7 to n doesn’t work you can just put in another pule piece there yeah um so it would give you a lot of flexibility um so it’s not specifically

Designed for RI 13 in my opinion Alex yeah I think these are all great discussion points and and things to consider and I I think alinaa is right in terms of you know just drawing a line where we don’t know and kind of asking questions and trying to procure

Documents that might help us know more about who knew what when and what sequences were shared amongst this group and I think one area where I could shine some light on this is that we’re working in this pathogen spillover field preo and again talking about Eco health and

Their reputation around the time of diffuse it was known so I was working in a group that was studying bat hanipa viruses and it was known that Eco Health Alliance had a massive data set of bat hanipa virus I believe it was f and g Gene so they had these databases from

Their extensive surveillance efforts in Southeast Asia um and those databases were not made public they were not shared and so you know you could imagine if there were this hanipa virus outbreak near a lab that was collaborating with eal Health Alliance we’d be facing the exact same questions now and we don’t

Have the transparency from Eco Health to just know all of the sequences that were in their possession and there’s an additional complexity which is that if they were sending these bat samples to the Wuhan Institute of iology for sequencing which is one of a set of possible scenarios where the Wuhan

Institute of Urology could have obtained the progenitor the Wuhan Institute of iology could have sequenced this and they could have not told eal Health Alliance as well so I think you know there’s stuff we don’t know and there’s stuff we may never know we can still have high confidence in a lab origin

With what we know for a fact now we know that SARS 2 has a fear and cleavage site that there was a proposal to insert the fear and cleavage site that proposal was not to take place in Buenos Idis or Atlanta or Amsterdam or Sydney but in

Not even in Beijing or Shanghai but in Wuhan and and additionally the Wuhan Institute of biology at the time of emergence had the closest known relative SARS 2 ratg13 and the odds of that are very low and additionally we’ve provided evidence to show that this virus in SARS

2 is unusual among wild Corona viruses in every way that it’s consistent with the reverse genetic systems with enzymes that only been used together once before on a Corona virus by not people in Bueno sides or Atlanta or Sydney but people at the Wuhan Institute of iology who are

Also collaborators on the defused grain and so there’s a lot we do know and even though there’s you know digital fingerprints that for all we know may have been deleted and burned and thrown to the bottom of the ocean um and there’s a lot we may never know I think

We can still have high confidence in the lab origin and at the same time use this high confidence to push for more documents and transparency knowing that there are these viruses and viral genomes and Spike proteins and genes that we haven’t yet seen but which could inform this

Matter so I I I I completely agree um I I just want to you know emphasize again um and and Alina has made this point it’s very frustrating that we’re still learning such critical information from Freedom of Information Act requests I think it is clear that there is more

There is very good reason to believe that there’s more information about the origins of the pandemic both at UNCC and at Ecco Health Alliance um and it’s just shocking that there’s no seeming federal investigation um at least that’s you know no aggressive federal investigation into the origin of this virus but

Instead we’re learning most of our information through you know the work the the the efforts of some you know a very small number of very you know hardworking reporters at small institutions and you know not even at Major media Outlets um so um you know one thing I I want to emphasize though

Is I think there you know the you know we differ in the strength of the criteria but I think it is clear that there’s a strong argument to be made that all the legal requirements for the amount of evidence that you need to carry out um you know searches to issue

Subpoenas and probably to even win civil lawsuits against individuals and institutions is there um and so um there are a number of different legal routes that can be taken um to try to get Justice for the the um victims of covid-19 hey Justin I was going to say

Um I I was going to suggest we just take one question and then do final word unless we want to go long I I didn’t want to Elina do you w to go to three or I I just we’re going longer than I thought but I I mean obviously there’s a

Lot of interest in this topic so I don’t want to cut it too short um do you um should we go till three so I’ll take one for Anand has been very patient I’m gonna take question from Anand uh and then final words from the panelist and

Then we’ll sort of leave it until next time Anand I’m going to go ahead thank you for your patience and you have a question or comment uh oh S I hope you’re on a phone because I maybe you’re on a computer if you’re on a computer it’s going to be a

Problem um okay well why he’s trying to connect you want to um maybe Tony did you want to say oh we got Matt Ridley I’ll add Matt Ridley go ahead Matt go ahead Matt oh me um hi I only came in a short while ago so I may have missed

This but uh regarding the 293 uh phrase why is it not possible for somebody who is in reasonably good terms with daak or barck um to ask them what this phrase means I think someone should I mean I think you know the answer Matt um listen I can post on Twitter I I’m

I’m sure he’ll respond in a very kind manner um it’s ridiculous I think just I mean all I can do is laugh about it it’s absurd it’s absurd um so yeah did you want to say anything else Matt um any comments generally about what your what is your current thought about where

Things stand after the recent Revelations well I think as usual I’m uh in in alignment with Alina I think she’s quite right to to uh offer the cautions she does um uh but I do feel that the recent Revelations have significantly strengthened the case um uh but I think

It’s terribly important that we don’t uh erect a hypothesis that then gets shot down and that damages the entire case yeah that’s a very good point um I think we were discussing before the space this sort of general idea that and actually at the beginning of the space

That we’re all in agreement that the evidence is extremely strong towards lab origin and I think maybe Alina is a little less than certain than the rest of us are but the preponderance of evidence it’s it’s really quite overwhelming and it’s not really about whether this particular paper stands up

It’s really just this is one of many pieces and it was you know the idea here is to sort of look carefully at what has been presented in this one paper in in way that we were trying to model how normal scientific discourse happens so that’s why I really oh here’s Elena

Back go ahead Elina or or Alex go ahead Alex I what yeah basically Echo Alena’s thumbs up and and Matt I completely agree that we don’t want to go all in on one hypothesis and um one thing that we did in our paper was really emphasize limitations and really try to request

Future work um but also by having these very peculiar terms that no one else has you know we don’t ever use BS smb1 in in common language unless we’re talking about molecular cloning techniques and so what we’ve provided is language that could be used to assist Searchers for

Digital fingerprints and could be used to contextualize anything we find and so I think that’s really what our paper has done is contextual this pattern and so it’s still out there and you know that’s what helped us kind of raise our eyebrows At The Mention of BS mb1 um but

I also agree that there’s still many other possibilities for this laboratory origin and you know we still don’t know who held the pipet we don’t actually know was a fear and cleavage site first found and then after Corona virus or was it inserted or did it arrive with serial

Passage um and so there are a lot of unknowns but yeah there’s also ways to combine that evidence to do attribution and I think that’s where many of us are in agreement that I think we’re there for being able to have high confidence in a laboratory

Origin did um Justin should we just do sort of a wrap up um sure I I just want to say that I think this has been a great discussion of kindergarten molecular biology um can you make sure you clarify what that’s about by the way because I realize

Without some people may not know about that go ahead just real quickly can you do that well so uh correct me if I’m wrong I I I remember that being what was it uh Chris how Christian Anderson described uh the paper uh the Valentine and Alex and Tony’s papers kindergarten molecular

Biology and uh um I I I have to say I think um you know I I have some critique of some of the technical details of the paper but I think overall again it’s it’s a really important paper um and there’s a lot of leeway for errors in the mathematical assumptions that they

Make say to quantify P values because the resulting P value that they get is so incredibly low um so not all of their assumptions have to be correct for it to give strong evidence for a um laboratory origin um and I I really want to thank

Them uh for their work because I think it’s very good work and I think it’s far better than any of the work that Christian Anderson has published on this topic yeah I’d say by 1 billion percent frankly geez so um I don’t know so you

Want to start maybe Tony did you want to say some final words and then Al yeah there’s yeah there’s some um I want to go back to the the diffuse proposal sure the recent draft that was released two things one is there’s language in there about generating the backbone backbone from a consent

Sequence so if that’s if that’s true if that’s how the backbone was made then we will never find most common res answer to because it doesn’t exist it’s it’s a computer generator code um and actually it looks s c 2’s genome really looks like that I mean

Because we you know the closest we can get is 97 % I think so so that that that would make sense and that what that means is that the generation of the backbone could be done anywhere because you can simply order that sequence from some of the DNA

Uh uh companies that make DNA fragments for you the ship to you in a ready ready plasmid to ready to go plasmid and you just need to cut you already designed the type 2s uh enzyme cleide so we just need to cut those plasms and light gate may have

The virus right so that the amount of work is negligible and the cost is around maybe 5 to $6,000 to we have and the second thing about the diffuse proposal is that we do have the the budget for um uh the Wuhan Institute of aerology but the the the budgets for Ralph baric

And Eco Health Alliance and also the Singapore outfit uh are still blocked so we it’s it’s interesting why why what could be in there that is that we are not allowed to see so um yeah sorry El Elena raised her hand as soon as you so this is not your

Final word Elena did you want to address something that Tony said and then oh no no I I can wait I can wait sorry no Tony go ahead if you’re I I thought you might be finished I’m sorry yeah I think I think this these were the the final two points I wanted

To make yeah thank you Elena go ahead yeah so I mean I think that this sort of conversation that we’re having is extremely healthy in science and and this is really the biggest problem about the original covid-19 aside from the virus of course that’s causing pandemic is that establishment scientists have

Tried to intimidate other scientists from broing this topic they’ve tried to shut them out journals and when you when you put out preprints they come after you calling you a kindergartener like belittling you saying that you don’t know what you talk talking about and that that is a major problem like even

If even if this virus somehow at a very low chance did come from that market this doesn’t excuse any of that behavior of them shutting out other scientists and then trying to stuff a premature consensus down our throats so um I do think that it’s very good that that you

Know Valentine Tony Alex you’re looking at this and I hope that more eyes get on this like it’s shocking how few scientists there to to weigh on this topic publicly because they’re afraid of retaliation if afraid of of being belit in public you know it’s it’s it’s shameful honestly for for for scientists

Like me to look at this and and and see how many people are scanned of their width to say something publicly about this topic um so I I think that we should have more of these conversations I I don’t know that there’s very strong evidence for one particular cloning

Strategy but I do agree again that if you look at all of the evidence that’s available it does point at a lamb leak and I do think that that should be the default assumption that that should be how we op going forward thinking about how to prevent future pandemics is that you

Really have to start increasing oversight and accountability on this type of very specific type of biology research absolutely I I just want to I just want to Echo that the intimidation campaign by a small number of biologists is absolutely true and it’s shameful and Alina in particular deserves a lot of

Credit for um consistently speaking out on this topic even in the face of this um was very clearly a concerted intimidation campaign to shut down scientific debate by prominent scientists um Alex you want to say something yeah I just want to Echo that Alina you’re my hero um I was you know I

Was working on a DARPA preamp Grant and a call in a group of Dara Pan People studying bat virus bill over pre-co the pandemic happened and I just got totally sucked into medical demand forecasting um and that took up about 2 and a half years of my time but I remember seeing

Alina specifically speaking up about this courageously and with you know with the highest rigor and that kept my mind open and I kept hearing what you were saying even though I wasn’t engaged in that debate because of the outbreak forecasting war zone that I was in um I

Just want to say that Alena your courage to speak up and Matt you as well and and others who’ve spoken up um really inspired me to enter into this with an open mind and so I think that we can keep doing that by just being open-minded scientists like this and

Having room for disagreement that’s polite and inclusive of the many possibilities that are out there and so I just want to thank you again alinaa you’re my hero um so uh Valentine I I’m GNA first of all Alena know Elena knows where where she stands with me um I’ll just put it

At that uh Valentine go ahead okay thanks yeah I I this maybe didn’t come through today but I 100% agree that you know we should turn over every stone here yeah we should search these Labs we should look at every computer of uh the diffuse involved

Teams and in Singapore in the US and in China um and to me they hesitant they like that the fact that they didn’t on their own terms voluntarily released any of these documents yeah that we really need people like my heroes from us right

Know and um to to get a hand on this after four years is evidence in itself right if they wouldn’t have done anything wrong they could have just come off out there and say look we had these plans but here all our lab books we never did them they weren’t funded no

Worries search our computers look at our databases the World Health Organization didn’t have any access to uh to real access to the whff um the fact that the commission was led by Peter dashek is a shame in my opinion for all of science um and yeah maybe I want to can can

Briefly end that this was a excellent debate I really really enjoyed it not to be K that and not to be insulted um because it’s yeah it it can be quite harsh to have your name been pulled in the dirt all over the newspapers and very damaging for your own therapeutic

Projects and signs and so on um yeah in conclusion I’d like to add that I think there is further almost equally clear evidence that this came from a lab which we didn’t have the time to discuss today such as uh leaked plasmids with a 100% identical sequence of the S to spike

Except for the F CLE side the leaked ination samples in 2019 or basically the most ancestral virus haven’t been found with Vero DNA which is the cell line they always use to make these synthetic viruses uh there’s these other preprints that another preprint that is super relevant and hasn’t been allowed to be

You know to be really reviewed the same thing is happening to us um journals reject our preprint they keep it for half a year then they tell us oh we couldn’t find any reviewers I think this is almost kind of like censorship and I’d like to point out that the academic

World may not be able to within itself solve this issue right we’ve seen this with a lot of other similar scandals that there was no one at VW who was going out there and saying look hey we’re cheating with exhaust values there was one guy at the NSA coming out saying

Look we are breaking us laws every day and a lot of these things have been considered to be conspiracy theories before we had the evidence here they’re really trying to shut down the evidence and yeah I can only agree with with alinaa that we should really turn over

Every stone and if you want want to like look into further Evidence you can just put my name into YouTube or look at my attached tweet um and I’d be happy to get feedback to that I’m happy to be proven wrong but needs to be like solid scientific arguments thanks a lot for

Doing this um yeah Justin and price and you know congrats again for going going there and trying to change laws yeah this is something I tried or we tried here in Europe for a while and there’s just no no getting through and there’s no for lawsuits or anything alike in Europe

It’s really really desperate and you you may be frustrated with the process in the US going so slowly there’s basically no process at all there’s no real big um investigative newspaper or anything alike in in Europe in my opinion so um yeah you might have not an ideal system

But way better than what we have here and yeah thanks a lot for everything you do and for inviting us here well thanks Valentine and I want to Echo actually would make a lot of sense for us to have um future Twitter spaces to talk in particular about those um that

Uh um was it Antarctic sample um and just some of the other evidence um that’s out there for Co Origins that perhaps hasn’t gotten so much attention but is is very very well worth a look one point I’d like to add on top of that you know that the elephant in the

Room here is diffus and we’ve all been talking about it we take for granted that you know we can’t thank Peter dazak for for that document but rather that came from drastic and Charles rxy who I see here helped produce that document um so this has really been a you know a

Decentralized team effort and I just want to thank every single person here for for all they’re doing to to think openly about this and produce documents amen very good by the way yeah Alex very good point I I um I was I oh Alex did you want to mention I we have

Not mentioned this uh Stephen Quay did you want to give a shout out to him oh absolutely yeah so we um while we were writing up our manuscript we learned when it was nearing completion that Stephen Quay had also been working on similar work um so we think that yeah in

The spirit of sharing credit and really raising tides and lifting boats that we have a hat tip to Stephen Quay who had also stumbled upon this pattern and also done his part to Quant y the low odds of this bsa1 bsnb one map and so between Charles Rickie producing diffus and

Drastic and all their work to help contextualize this evidence to Stephen Quay and others who have also worked on these topics as well um this has been a real team effort and it’s cool to see everybody here thanks yeah thanks a lot Alex uh Matt did you want to say

Anything before we go or um I wasn’t requesting to no I agree with everything that’s been said recently thank you okay and thanks for uh supporting in us obviously um so this has been great Justin you want to uh say the final farewell um I just want to thank um all

The panelists who joined us and all the listeners I think this is an incredibly important topic I wish um we could have similarly rational discussions with um zoonosis proponents um I it would be nice to have that in the future if anyone is going to come on and uh talk

About um evidence that they think there is for zoonosis with uh without you know insulting everyone um I think that would be great um but I’ve really enjoyed this discussion and yeah thanks and thanks pry for uh running it thanks everybody um and take care we’ll be back um soon I think with

Perhaps another scientific discussion this has been great I appreciate it have a great uh rest of your day A [Applause] the