Jim Haslam: He said he put a smokestick up there to get the airflow from the HEPA filter down to the ground inside Colorado where he's at in Fort Collins and it came around the other side and it infected this negative control bat cage above.
This thing was so contagious there was no containing it. This thing would have leaked from a BSL-5. They threw the kitchen sink at this thing, not to infect us humans — it's an accident, It's an animal vaccine — to infect live bats. This thing, the R-naught was cranked up. You know, everything about this thing, you know, is designed to transmit through air, through aerosols.
And that was shown in what I consider to be the smoking gun email between these two who unknowingly gave it up.
Steve Hsu: Welcome to Manifold. The interview you're about to watch is with Jim Haslam. He's recently written a book on COVID origins, and he has dug extensively into the information that emerged since the pandemic started in 2019. Now, one of the things I didn't emphasize enough in our conversation because there's so much information to process and Jim raises so many both interesting and speculative points in the conversation is simply the following.
The evidence now is strong that prior to 2019, the United States had the capability to genetically engineer a virus very similar to COVID 19. So, whether or not the virus was engineered, the actual virus which killed millions of people, whether that really was bioengineered or leaked out of a lab, is somewhat secondary from the scientific point that we do now have the capability to construct such viruses de novo in the laboratory. I think the evidence is strong now that we can do that and that there are researchers working on this kind of thing funded by US taxpayer dollars.
At the time when the pandemic started, it wasn't clear at all, at least to me. And most of the people, all the people that I talked to, whether this really was scientifically possible, I think a few virologists experts at engineering coronaviruses knew the answer then, but we as a general population didn't have access to that information. Even other scientists didn't have access to that information that this was indeed technically possible. So aside from Haslam's theories about whether there was a lab leak, who bioengineered this virus, or whether it had a natural origin, aside from all of that, I just want to emphasize that in this conversation, you'll hear a lot of evidence that we do indeed today in 2024, 2025, have the capability to make such viruses which are very dangerous. And I think that's aside from your opinion about COVID origins.
Going forward thinking about policies to control the possible production of viruses that could lead to new pandemics. That is something that should be in the public discourse that this is a capability. This kind of genetic energy engineering is a capability that exists now and needs more scrutiny. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Jim, welcome to the podcast.
Jim Haslam: Thanks for having me, Steve.
Steve Hsu: So, I was explaining to Jim that I have not followed this subject closely.
I'm not taking a position in this podcast because I don't have the required expertise to take a position on what really happened. But I did interview Jeffrey Sachs two years ago in October 2022. And that was around the time he had finished chairing a Lancet special committee to investigate COVID on behalf of the Lancet, which is a leading British medical scientific journal.
And what he told me was that several of the people who were appointed to the committee with him to do this investigation. Included people who it later turned out had severe conflicts of interests and were not straight with him about those conflicts of interest before participating in the project, and he later removed them from the project.
I encourage everybody to go back and watch that interview.
One piece of news that we sort of broke in that discussion was about something called the DEFUSE grant proposal, which Jim and I are going to go into great detail about. That is a proposal to DARPA by individuals who might've been involved in the origin of COVID.
And that proposal made very, very specific plans to modify, to produce what's called gain of function in what were originally bat viruses, that could have led to COVID, the COVID pandemic. That's what we're going to discuss.
One of the things that Jeffrey and I discussed, being both very familiar with scientific funding and grant processes, is that at the time we did not, what we knew was that the defuse proposal was not funded by DARPA, but both Jeffrey and I knew that researchers often do the research, even if the proposal is not granted. Sometimes they use funds from other sources where they've already done the research before they write the proposal. These kinds of things happen. And that's what Jeffrey Sachs and I discussed two years ago. What really got me excited about Jim is he carefully followed the foyer revelations, the Senate, I mean, sorry, the congressional investigation into COVID origins. And he has put together a number of pieces, which are new to me, which are relevant to what happened to the activities, which were proposed in that DEFUSE grant proposal.
At the time Jeffrey and I spoke, we didn't know whether those activities were actually carried out. It appears indeed they may have been carried out, funded instead by NIH, by N-I-A-I-D, which is Fauci's institute within NIH. And I hope I've whetted your appetite for what Jim and I are about to discuss. Jim has spent a lot of time, he's a real expert at this.
I'm going to try to slow him down enough that people who are not experts in this subject can follow what his argument is for piecing together what happened. So Jim, apologies for that long introduction. I welcome you to the podcast.
Jim Haslam: Again, thanks for having me, Steve, and the opportunity to talk about the evidence. I'm going to pick off, I guess where Jeffrey Sachs stopped on your podcast. He made a kind of a controversial statement saying he heard it was funded. This DARPA DEFUSE Grant, this infamous, you know, bid in early 2018, which eerily resembles what emerged in late 2019 in Wuhan. So I guess I'll start off with the first part of the DARPA DEFUSE project. It's DARPA. It's this tiny, successful, nimble bureaucracy, if you want to call it that, within the Pentagon. It's not inside the actual Pentagon building, as best I can tell. It's outside of it. And it's also outside of it philosophically speaking.
they're, they're, they're, they're radical. That's, that's, that's what they are. They date back to World War II. And it was to take on the Russians and Soviets back then. And they have invented some stuff that you use in your phone, GPS, Siri, you know, drones, Agent Orange, machine guns, the whole nine yards.
A lot of these, you know, are dual use technologies. So they continued into obvious, you know, success through the internet era, and they started to evolve in the biological era. You know, there's a, there's a book out recently, and Sheep. Kind of documented this, but in the biological era, they, we can.
Steve Hsu: just interrupt. My audience is very familiar with DARPA. So I have a lot of them.
Jim Haslam: I'll just, I'll just go right to the chase
Steve Hsu: Yeah, a lot of physicists, engineers, tech people, they know what DARPA is so you don't need to introduce DARPA but one thing you could do is let's talk a little bit about that. Sorry to interrupt you. Let's talk a little bit about the cast of characters.
Okay.
So amazingly, and this is something you explained to me and I checked, I double checked since we last since we first spoke, I went and looked at the DEFUSE grant again. So, individuals who are named on that proposal include Ralph Baric, Danielle Anderson. Let's talk a little bit about who these people are.
So, who is Ralph Baric?
Jim Haslam: He is the coronavirus hunter on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill in North Carolina. He made his name, developing this reverse genetic system that could create a coronavirus, a novel coronavirus. He doesn't copy an existing coronavirus. He can create a novel coronavirus. He is one of the few people I believe, at least in the industry that can create something from nothing.
So he can basically create life and a novel genome never before seen. His reverse genetic system was patented all the way back in 2001 or 2002. It's proven. You know, he started off actually in Fort Detrick in 2003 before UNC had built him a BSL 3 on the campus of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which is like a 15 minute walk from where Michael Jordan played basketball.
So on that campus he has developed, you know, a hundred, now it's a 200 million lab, and he is, he is considered to be the expert on coronaviruses.
Steve Hsu: So, Baric, I'm just clarifying things that you said for the audience. So, Baric's lab can take a digital file, which is the sequence of a virus, maybe that was genotyped in Wuhan or in Berlin, he can accept that digital file and he has the ability to synthesize an actual living virus with that particular DNA or RNA sequence very uniquely in the world.
He can do that and he can make changes to the sequence that he receives to create a new form or a mutated different engineered version of that virus. When it comes to coronaviruses, he is acknowledged, I think, worldwide as the most advanced genetic engineer of coronaviruses. He has a huge laboratory complex at UNC. I was the vice president for research at Michigan State for eight years. We had to look into various BSL laboratory infrastructure, things like this during my term as VPR. Professors who can command very large grants from agencies like NIH or DARPA have a huge amount of weight on campus, because they're bringing millions of dollars, in his case, maybe 100 million or 200 million cumulatively, to the campus.
So they have a lot of weight. They're kind of the academic superstars on campus. Baric ran this coronavirus research at UNC, world famous, and probably the leading lab in terms of genetic engineering of such viruses in the world. Is that fair, Jim?
Jim Haslam: That's perfect.
Steve Hsu: Good. Okay. Continue with Baric and then we'll talk about Danielle Anderson, who was also on the grand proposal.
Jim Haslam: So to continue on his engineering capabilities, a lot of people get freaked out when they dive into it. He calls it the no see um technique. He literally can hide the scars within a genome. He does it the way he cuts it. It literally, you know, hides itself. And when he cuts it, he eliminates the scar from the actual genome itself.
And by doing this, a lot of people are thinking, bioweapon, why do you want to hide your engineering scars? You know, this is not, you know, a civilian application. It's only a military application. And the brain just starts to go off in crazy different directions. It is, you know, in virology, it is a beautiful thing to be able to hide your engineering scars.
you, you want to, you know, he's, he's an artist, you know that has perfected his craft over these decades. And because of this, a lot of people get freaked out, but that when you're creating a vaccine, it is a genuine moral benefit to have a genome that does not look like it's artificial to the mammalian immune system.
So he's trying to hide the engineering scars not from us lab leakers. He's trying to hide it from the mammal's immune system. If the mammal sees the genome as natural from nature it will accept it and if it accepts it infects it it'll create antibodies against it, whether it's a mouse or in this case a bat.
So this is what he's trying to do. He's trying to hide his engineering scars, not from us lab leakers, he's trying to hide it from nature and by hiding it from nature, the natural mammalian immune system will accept it and produce antibodies against it. So that's, that's a big, you know, one of the many myths that people go off on is they think he's an immoral character.
He's a boring father of four. He's about as, you know, clean cut as it gets. I mean, he's pretty, I don't, you know, he's, he's, he's, he's an up and up.
Steve Hsu: So to interrupt again, I want to say on this podcast, we're not going to insult anybody. We're not going to make any conclusions or speculate about the motivations of people. We're going to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. So this guy's a serious scientist. I'm sure he's advanced his field of science tremendously.
He wouldn't have $ 200 million of funding over his career, you know, without having done that. So enormous respect to this guy for what he has done. Now the DEFUSE grant proposal, what was that meant to accomplish? What were they trying to do? And it involved bats and it involved inoculating bats, Jim. So explain what they were proposing to do.
Jim Haslam: So this is another great myth that you brought up. Thanks, Steve. And it's that, you know, the defuse proposal has something to do with humans or, or you know, HIV, or I, you know, I can't even imagine all the other possibilities out there. No, it's about bats. If you go to the cover page of the defuse proposal, it's 75 pages deep, but just go to the cover page.
That's enough to get your brain around. That's, that's another file within the file. In the cover page, they say, we will inoculate bats. We will inoculate bats. We will inoculate bats. I believe three times, maybe a fourth time. They're talking about wildlife delivery of a vaccine to these bats, and they go into great detail about how they could do this in 75 pages.
So the overall arching theme of DARPA DEFUSE was to deliver a vaccine to bats in the wild, and that is the end goal. Why they have been brought in, this group has been brought into this world of biodefense. And, uh it's, it's an eco health bid with, with the subcontractor of Ralph Baric and a subcontractor of Duke University, including Danielle Anderson and another subcontractor called the USGS, the United States Geological Service.
They look after the caves in North America where bats are kept. So this is a bat program to deliver bat vaccines to bats in the wild.
Steve Hsu: So let me elaborate on that a little bit and just correct me if I get any of this stuff wrong. So I think Baric has said himself that, you know, primarily his funding did not come until that time came from DARPA, it was kind of a new thing for him to work with DARPA. He found that DARPA people are kind of odd people in my audience understand, like, the DARPA program managers are kind of cowboys deliberately.
They take risks on speculative technologies a little bit like venture capitalists in terms of scientific funding, they're willing to take risks and do slightly far out things motivated by core needs of the defense department. And in this case, this may sound crazy to people. I didn't realize this session, you know, when I, when I learned this, I found it.
I thought it would just seem crazy. But the goal was to suppress the development of diseases like viruses for which bats form a deep reservoir. So bats are something like a fifth or a quarter of all mammalian species. So if you made a list of all types of mammals, different species, the biggest, well, a very big variety of those, a quarter or a fifth of all species are bat species.
Okay, so you have these winged mammals, they're mammals like us. So there's a lot of commonality in the base genetic architecture, but they fly all over the place and they eat insects and they are fed on by insects like mosquitoes and they'll bite bigger mammals. So, you have a system that is a natural reservoir for dangerous diseases, which can be dangerous to humans.
And really, ultimately, what the Pentagon cares about, dangerous to their soldiers. So, in the wake of the original SARS epidemic, which was, I guess, early 2000s, the Pentagon actually investigated the idea that they would inoculate bats, this huge reservoir, they would spread within this reservoir, some viruses which would make the bats themselves more resistant to developing these kind of coronaviruses or other diseases.
Things which could ultimately prove dangerous to humans. So, believe it or not, we are genetically and, you know, our government has paid money to genetically engineer viruses, designing them to spread within the bat population, in this case in Southeast Asia, in order to make our military safer. And I'm not making this up.
This is in the language of the DEFUSE proposal. And in particular, the genetic engineering I'm talking about is a modification of something so that it can be transmitted within the bat population. So if you, if you give the virus to one bat, and then you let it loose, it will spread the virus to the rest of the bat population and inoculate them against, you know, further developments.
Is that fair, Jim? Am I characterizing
Jim Haslam: Oh, that's, that's, that's perfect. Steve, you're a lab leaker and you didn't know it, but yeah,
Steve Hsu: Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Jim Haslam: Welcome to the nerdy, you know, underworld crowd that, you know, but that's it. They, they, they want they want what do they call it? A scalable solution to this problem.
Steve Hsu: Right. I'm familiar with this because researchers at MSU work on malaria. And there are various ways to try to suppress malaria by doing things to the mosquito population, genetically engineering things, which will cause the mosquitoes not to spread malaria, etc, etc. So I'm familiar with this at a scientific level.
Without even going into the pandemic, if the pandemic had never happened, we could ask the question, wow, are our scientists really genetically engineering viruses so that they will spread among an animal population? The answer is yes, we are doing that. And these are artificially engineered viruses with a goal to do what we just described.
And yes, scientifically, apparently, it's not my field, but apparently this is something that your tax dollars are being spent on. So okay, let's come back to the DEFUSE proposal. There's a name there. You mentioned Duke , it's the Duke National University of Singapore joint campus, which is in Singapore.
And there is a woman who I guess was employed through that academic institution, and who did work at a BSL-4 facility in Wuhan. So, that woman is Danielle Anderson, so say a little bit about her.
Jim Haslam: She's my most interesting character in the book. She's a loner like me. She's, you know, a traveler like me. And she's a bit of an alpha. I learned as the foyer slowly emerged, she doesn't come across as that because you don't hear much from her. But her story is, uh that she moves in, doesn't move. She lives there temporarily in Wuhan off and on since about 2017. She is the only Westerner in that Eastern lab though, in 2019. And we only know that because in 2020, she was the Facebook fact checker for lab leak misinformation.
Steve Hsu: Of course she was. Of course she was, yes.
Jim Haslam: You know, she was running to the defense of her Asian colleagues that said, look, they didn't do this, you know, more or less, I'm paraphrasing, but you know, it's a clean lab.
We do good science and we, we are good people and we didn't do this. And she's, you know, defending her colleagues, you know, she's, she's, You know, to her credit, but who, who's we, there's, there's also this other misnomer that this BSL-4 in Wuhan has got like some sort of PLA, you know, connection. There is no one, everyone has looked at this thing.
God knows how many hours it took to find one PLA scientist in Wuhan before 2020. There's no military connection to this thing. It is built upon the idea of Western collaboration. This is an idea to eliminate the next SARS spillover event. It is a good idea.
Steve Hsu: So, everyone is probably familiar with these maps of Wuhan, which show the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So that was the center of most people's attention. And there's a woman there called the Bat Lady, Dr. Xi, who works there. But that is a BSL-2 facility. And that is not the facility that we're talking about.
So, if you look at the map, you know, maybe, I don't know, 10 kilometers away, something like that, 5, 10 kilometers away in another part of the city, is this BSL-4 facility. Now in BSL-4 you're wearing a spacesuit to go in there. Okay. And that's a very serious facility. There aren't that many BSL-4 facilities.
Okay. This woman, Danielle Anderson, worked there. Jim has tracked her using cell phone technology. We'll get to that in a second and can assert that she was there as late as mid October of 2019 just before the pandemic started. We'll get to that in a second. Okay. But before we get to that, I want to point out that in the DEFUSE proposal, which was not funded, but laid out this whole chain of activities, collect bat viruses, maybe sequence them, send the sequences to Baric, Baric makes various modifications so they become spreadable, transmissible, scalable viruses for the purposes of inoculation within the bat population.
And at the end of that chain is Daniel Anderson, who would be injecting that, the end product, which is a virus into live animal models in a BSL-4 facility, because it's kind of dangerous, to test whether it really works. And maybe you put those bats in a cage with some uninfected bats and see if the uninfected bats then get infected in 24 hours or 96 hours or whatever.
So, obviously, scientifically, if you, if your goal was to produce this spreadable transmissible virus within the bat population is what you'd have to do. You'd build your own new virus, but you'd have to test it, and Danielle Anderson was the person in the DEFUSE proposal who was going to be doing these activities, okay?
And maybe, maybe this is the point where we should say that DEFUSE was not funded, but along the way, maybe just in the last 12 months, is that right, Jim? I mean, you've figured out that actually chunks of that proposal were funded by NIAID, which is Fauci's institute at NIH. So maybe you can elaborate on that.
Jim Haslam: so it's a brilliant move by Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, this, this contractor in New York City, who doesn't have a lab, doesn't have a BSL 2, doesn't have, you know, a genome, but they do have, you know, connections and they have connections all over the world and those connections extend all the way to Wuhan.
And what, what Peter Daszak did after rejection, and he's rejected, you know, there, there are meeting minutes where he is, he is pissed off. He is, he is bitching at the staff in New York City, you're idiots. You uploaded it late. We look dumb. We just missed out on $14 million. So this is not the kind of guy that sits around and just says, well, I guess I'll just throw away 75 pages of $14 million and not you know submit it to the next, you know, a potential buyer.
So NIAID has a long, you know, relationship with Ralph Baric, has a long relationship with Peter Daszak, and has a long relationship with Duke University. And Duke University in Singapore. They, they, they do not have a long relationship with the United States Geological Service. But they do have a long relationship with Rocky Mountain Lab, because they own it. They operate it. So you can see what happens, essentially, in 2018. In late 2018. The project's moving forward, technically. I'll come back to the commercial part. I think it's easier for me to talk technically, and then we'll come back to the commercial part. But technically, this is the paper that Jeffrey Sachs picked up on.
And in late 2018, Ralph Baric has partnered up with the Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana, Hamilton, Montana, and they're going to infect live bats. This sounds right, you know, like what they were planning to do in DARPA DEFUSE, they're moving forward now in not Wuhan, in Montana. So, Ralph Baric has now partnered up with this aerosol specialist in a BSL-4 in Hamilton, Montana, named Vincent Munster.
And they take what's called the W one Genome, which was isolated by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Again, the Wuhan Institute of Virology can't engineer new genomes like Ralph Baric can, but they can isolate existing genomes, and one of those genomes was W one, and they just upload it to the cloud.
Baric downloads it. He can recreate it. He doesn't even need the actual physical sample via plasmids. So Baric takes Wiv one, he sends it to Hamilton. This is late 2018 after they've been rejected.
Steve Hsu: And just, just to clarify, this is documented. You're not speculating about this, right? So you have actual documentation. So, samples were sent from Baric's lab. These are genetically modified, well, genetically engineered viruses sent to this NIAID lab, which happens to be in Montana. In order for the virus to be, I guess, further modified or at least tested to see that it can be spread through the air.
Is that correct? Within these animal species. Go ahead.
Jim Haslam: At this stage, they're just wanting to infect the bats. So the first stage of any bat vaccine program is to infect the bats, you know, to get it to replicate inside that tiny little mammalian immune system. And they failed the, the, the title of it is you know, with one does not infect Egyptian fruit bats.
You know, they're, they're, they're announcing a failure. I guess that's not very common in published papers, which
Steve Hsu: Yeah, weirdly in biology they don't publish negative results. In physics we publish negative, negative results because they constrain the physical law. It's like this doesn't work, right? Because X. So, but in biology, they don't like to publish negative results.
Jim Haslam: That's what they did here. They publish a negative result. And they give you the next step in the paper. If you look very closely inside this 2018 paper co-authored by Ralph Baric and Vincent Munster I've asked both of them to explain this to me. I've asked them for an alibi and they have not. So I'll go ahead and go into the details.
In there, they say we need a furin cleavage site. They call it intracellular proteases. This is the term Ralph Baric uses when he's trying to get the bat virus into the bat cell. He wants it intracellular. He wants it inside of it. He wants to, you know, he wants the virus to replicate inside that bat cell because we've won without the furin cleavage site not infecting the Egyptian fruit bat.
They're proposing that we've won with the furin cleavage site and would have infected the furin cleavage site. We've won. It's just a genome again. That's, ironically, you know, named after the women's Institute of virology, but it is isolated and created in Chapel Hill. Now it's in Hamilton, Montana.
And now they're. They're you know, they're there. It's a wish list of future items that they basically have. And at the very bottom of this paper, they said, therefore, it would be interesting to test this on Chinese horseshoe bats. And there's only one place on the planet, you know, with Chinese horseshoe bats in a BSL-4, and it's Wuhan.
So that's the, the, the, the paper that has brought everyone's attention to, you know, Jeffrey Sachs even brought it up on Tucker Carlson and said, they want to do infected chip chip fruit bats and Tucker Carlson goes, really? So this is the first step of what's going to happen later.
Steve Hsu: So we've introduced a new concept for the listeners. You can tell I'm a professor, right?
So Furin cleavage site. It's a very short region of DNA, which is necessary so that the virus can enter an animal or human cell and reproduce itself. And it is claimed that the furin cleavage site in actual COVID, SARS 19, may have been engineered and placed there.
What's spooky for people studying the subject is to find a paper in, was it 2018, you said? 2018, in which these guys are saying, hey, we need a furin cleavage site if we want to be able to infect these fruit bats. Yes. Right. And when they say we need to, I think they're saying we need to genetically modify or engineer that site into this virus that we're preparing for bats.
Right. So that's the spooky thing that got everybody excited.
Steve Hsu: Now, at some point, I want to have a discussion about the nature of the furin cleavage site, which is in the actual SARS CoV 2 versus maybe other versions of it that have been found in other viruses or that someone might engineer. I don't know, Jim, do you want to have that conversation now?
Should we postpone it a little bit later in the discussion? It's up to you.
Jim Haslam: No, just be specific with the question though.
Steve Hsu: Okay, so if you go online and you start reading about the possibility that SARS CoV 2 is engineered, one of the responses that you'll read, and I believe Baric sort of says things this way at various times. There's a claim that in the actual furin cleavage site, the amino acids are PRRA and that is supposed to be evidence that it's not engineered because another variant, I think RRRA maybe is actually more effective or something.
and so therefore, oh, if you were engineering it, why would you do PRRA instead of RRRA? There's a, there's a lot of discussion like this online, which I wanted to address because it always comes up. I, in fact, before I got on this call with you, I was on a research call on a totally different matter with some of my postdocs in theoretical physics.
And I mentioned, I'm going to talk to this guy, Jim Haslam, and one of my postdocs was pretty familiar with all this stuff. He said, yeah, but it's PRRA, you know what? if you don't mind, we could go into that because I'm sure it will come up. People are interested in this. I don't really do it again. I'm not an expert in this subject.
I do not have a deep understanding of this. I'm just raising this point because it comes up in the discussion all the time. So maybe Jim, if you could address that.
Jim Haslam: Okay. So yeah, that's a typical you know, why would they do it this way if they were engineering and they are, let's be honest, it's Ralph Baric. He has pre confessed to appointing to, you know, insert urine cleavage sites into live coronaviruses. About 20 percent different than SARS 1 and SARS 2 is 20 percent different.
So he has pre confessed to creating this kind of genome. And why is he you know, using a P was the first question they all used. And I always counter that argument by saying where the restriction site is flanked by or the furin cleavage site is flanked by a furin cleavage site.
Uh, the furin cleavage site is taken by a restriction enzyme site, I should say. That basic is called BSA X one and without that restriction site flanking the furin cleavage site, you have to insert the proline in there. It is by, you know, nucleotide, you know, necessity, the biological gods forced Ralph Baric's hands.
If he's going to use the B. S. X. 1 restriction site to insert the proline to start off this furin cleavage site. It's just there's no way out of that. but then recently, what recently means 2 years ago with a preprint and about, you know, what are we in January 2025. As we record this, it was December of 2024. A German scientist went in there to search for the records and searched. You know, he's a biological, you know, mathematician and whizz. I don't know how he did this. He told me, but it still doesn't make sense. He searched the database for PRRA and he found it. He found a complete match for this Particular furin cleavage site found in SARS 2 referenced in 2017 at the University of Iowa.
It was a paper that they had, what's called a pat seven. I'm not going to get into the details of pretending to know all the details of it, but it's just a molecular address that has basically been proven in the literature in 2007. In the University of Iowa to survive a passage after 30 times over in a humanized mouse model, it's stable to use the term they use.
And this peaked Ralph Baric's interest in 2019. In 2019, he published a Tripson paper called RXXR. He's focused on it, it's a MERS paper. I'll get into why, but it's MERS. MERS is another coronavirus just like SARS found in the Middle East. And he's using this, this, this reference of the University of Iowa in 2017 for his 2019 paper.
So he is referencing the molecular clone, the precise molecular clone, to use the German scientist, you know published paper verbiage, the precise molecular clone in 2019. So, that part 7 is essentially a proline, proline followed by 7 amino acids, and it basically forms this molecular address that stabilizes the genome over several passages.
Steve Hsu: Okay, so I'm not expert enough to judge this, but I believe what you're saying is that the argument that PRRA when you find that in the furin cleavage amino acids, the argument you often encounter is that this means it was naturally evolved because an engineer would have done it differently.
You're saying that that's not a decisive argument, that, in fact, Baric wrote papers in 2019, in which he gave that as an example of something that was still perhaps viable again, I'm not an expert in this. I just, just want to state both sides of the argument. Did I do a fair job of that?
Jim Haslam: Yeah, you know, that's, that's exactly it. I mean, he is, he is referencing the molecular clone found in SARS 2. He is about Ralph Baric in 2019. He uploads this paper in October of 2019. So, you know, do your own, you know, timeline on that one when he's working on this thing. So he has a paper trail many times over pointing towards the furin cleavage site and the amino acid sequence and the nucleotide sequence.
Steve Hsu: Okay. But just to put a little hypertext marker on this, the assertion is that there is no simple argument. Based just on the molecular structure, molecular genetics of the actual SARS CoV 2, that could lead you to conclude that, hey, this would be a very crazy way to engineer something that there's no decisive, you would say there's no decisive argument that establishes that.
Jim Haslam: Correct.
Steve Hsu: Okay, because I think that in every discussion that comes up, right? So I just want to put a marker there. Hopefully more people, more experts, even than you and I, I mean, you, I'm not an expert at all. But hopefully people who really are experts on this subject will go in public and debate this point further and come to some consensus on it.
So, let's continue in the story.
So there are three NIH grants from NIAID which were funded. And what work did they fund?
Jim Haslam: So to the commercial side, Daszak, mad, lost. I'm going to win. You know, he's a winner. He's got a 20 million a year outfit. You know he's a name, you know, people pick on him. I did not think much of him. I thought he was a bit of a bozo. He's not. He's he's he's he's sharp. He's he's he's good. So what he did is in 2018, along with Ralph Baric working with the Rocky Mountain Lab in October 2018, they all got on a plane. They are Ralph Baric, Peter Dascak, LIFA Wong, Daniel Anderson, and Shi Zhengli. They all sit in front of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and they take a picture in October 2018. They're all there. This is the entire DARPA DEFUSE team in October of 2018 in Wuhan.
Okay. This project has moved forward to think otherwise there's, you know. There's a, there's, there's, there's, there's photographic evidence of this team together in Wuhan and what they are doing in 2018, October 2018, they are reviving the DARPA DEFUSE project. So Peter Daszak and his brilliance took the DARPA DEFUSE grant and DARPA, as all your listeners, I guess, know once two pieces to these biological grants, one's called TA1 and one's called TA2 --technical area one, technical area two. Technical area one, identify the problem. Technical area two, do something with it.
Technical area one was essentially to collect bat samples in bat caves and identify these nasty genomes that have spillover potential. Does that sound familiar to those in the lab leak debate? It does. It's called the NIAID. NIAID R01 grant is this infamous R01 grant. That people have been debating ad nauseam for the past five years.
And NIAID's defense was that this is not, you know, a precursor to the SARS 2 genome. Yes, we funded some gain of function research in Wuhan, but this grant that you're looking at, you, you, you lab leakers, is not even close to the SARS 2 genome. It just could not even have produced it. This is Tony Fauci's defense. It was molecularly impossible to have created the SARS 2 genome. So that was essentially Fauci's solid, solid defense against funding the creation of SARS 2. This R01 grant by itself is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman, in the BSL-2 working with humanized mice.
Another, you know, myth that I want to talk about real quick is humanized mice. SARS CoV 2 is a very contagious agent, one of the most, it is the most contagious agent in the history of mankind. It does not infect humanized mice. Never in the history of the world has one mouse infected another mouse. It has nothing to do with humanized mice. A mouse did not belch SARS CoV 2 up into the air and whip around the world in a matter of weeks and locked us down.
You know, it is, it is, it infects a lot of animals, but it does not infect mice. So I want to make that clear. I think a lot of your listeners may learn about lab leaks. I'm not going to speak much for them. Maybe they don't. But if you contend that SARS 2 has something to do with increasingly humanized mice, you have to admit it also infects raccoon dogs.
It's the same kind of test. You take SARS 2 and you shove 100, 000 infectious particles into the nose of a mouse, you're going to get an infection. They did the same with the raccoon dog. These are what's called laboratory infections. These are, you know, essentially not natural. They do not recreate, you know, the natural pathogenesis.
Steve Hsu: Can I, just so for the audience, there's a distinction to be made between I take the animal and I inject a huge dose of the virus into the animal and maybe the animal gets sick. But if I put the infected animal in a cage with other uninfected animals of the same species, there's a question of whether it can transmit to the other animals.
And mice, for example, don't sneeze. So they can't aerosolize stuff around. I don't know anything about raccoon dogs. But, I think, are you making that point, Jim, that it's never been shown that raccoon dogs or humanized mice can spread it? I mean, they could be infected if you, if you, you know, inject it, literally inject it directly into their circulatory system, but they, they cannot spread it.
Is that the point you're trying to make? Okay.
Jim Haslam: That's exactly it, and you get it. Not a lot of people do. So I'm basically eliminating Shi Zhengli's BSL-2 as a suspect. Both commercially and biologically.
Steve Hsu: Okay.
So, there's two points here. One is, I think everyone acknowledges that Shi Zhengli did not have the genetic engineering chops to make something like SARS CoV 2, possibly only Baric could do it. Okay, so I think that's pretty well acknowledged in what I've read.
I think you're
Jim Haslam: not. No, it's not. So this is the whole chapter in my book. You know, I have to plug it in. So, you know, here it is. It's chapter 14. Essentially, it's called. He said she said this gets into the weeds really quick, but I'm going to summarize it as best. Ralph Baric pre and post pandemic says the Wuhan Institute of Virology did not copy my technology. Because I never uploaded my technology to be copied. He's not giving away his hundred million dollar biotech for free to some, you know, Chinese lab on the other side of the world. This guy is competitive, you know, and he's got a competitive edge. He can recreate something from nothing. So his Ralph Baric uses cDNA.
This is, you know, the Ferrari. I call it a reverse genetic, you know, engineering of a 30, 000 nucleotide, a huge genome in the grand scheme of things. Shi Zhengli and the Wuhan Institute of Virology uses Bach, bacteria, and artificial chromosomes. I, you know, it's, it's basically a used you go. You know, don't get me wrong. Her chops are a lot better than mine than anyone else, probably in coronavirus too in a grand scheme of things. But what she can do is, is copy a genome and, and, and basically manipulate in a very limited way, meaning the spike protein. She can only swap the spike protein. Both she says this and Ralph Baric says this.
She cannot, she cannot engineer the entire 30, 000 nucleotide genome. She can only modify spikes, which is about 10 to 12 percent of the genome. So she cannot create a new backbone. She can copy an existing backbone. And then that backbone, she can modify.
Steve Hsu: Just to elaborate on that. Because I think I mentioned this earlier in the podcast. My understanding is so-so the height of capability, which a lot of my listeners will understand. This is if I can sequence, I have a virus in my lab, maybe my lab is in China or in Africa or something. I sequence the virus and suddenly it's a little file.
It's just some bits. And I email those bits to Baric. He has the capabilities to synthesize de novo, a living virus.
from that information that I sent and also made some non trivial modifications. And again, I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that is a unique capability that Baric's lab has. And, and, and Wuhan Institute of Virology did not have that capability.
Jim Haslam: Correct.
Steve Hsu: And so they were primarily, from the viewpoint of the DEFUSE grant, again, correct me if I'm wrong, they were mainly people who would just go out and prospect and get new samples of, by going into caves, et cetera, et cetera, infected. You know animals, whatever, sequence the virus, but then send those bits to Baric who could do something, you know, more advanced with that information.
And maybe that's not a collective perspective on this, but that's my understanding.
Jim Haslam: No, that's perfect. And, you know, just to finish off, she's in these engineering capabilities. It always has seven segments. Seven segments or the way you chop up the genome and deal with it on some sort of, you know, it's 30, 000 nuclei tied. You can't deal with all that at once. So you have to kind of modify smaller pieces.
So she's just a minimum of seven and star coat two has an infamous six. So this is the retail paper. The retail paper, you know, is basically a pretty good, you know, sharp group of guys who went in there and found that the SARS two genome has these five restriction sites, creating six segments. And these six segments are somewhat evenly spaced over the entire 30, 000 nucleotides. And because it's six segments that essentially eliminate, you know, the WIB because they've always used at least seven to create a genome. This one uses six and guess who uses six Ralph Baric. So it is, it is essentially, you know, what he uses.
Steve Hsu: Okay.
So now it's October 2018, about 1 year before the pandemic. There's a photo that you can point to. The people in the photo were all the ones who are on the DEFUSE grant. Longtime collaborators, some specialized more on dealing with bats, some specialized on whole scale genetic engineering of coronaviruses.
Right? So you've got that whole group of people there in 2018. And I think you're about to say they did get the money to do what?
Jim Haslam: Yeah, back to where I started. I get deviated sometimes. Sorry about that.
So Peter Daszak lost DARPA DEFUSE March, May of 2018. So we're now in October of 2018. The whole group, the band's gotten back together. The biological band has gotten together. We're in Wuhan. We're going to, you know, crack open some wine.
We're going to celebrate the recent middle of DARPA DEFUSE. So they, so. He took TA one, technical area one, and, and that's, he took that to the side and he took TA two and he took that to the side. I gotta get TA one funded first. So we did this in 2018 by resubmitting his grant renewal process. This R01 has a five year lifespan on it.
It started in 2014 for the Wuhan Institute of Virology 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. And so it's up for renewal in 2019. So in October of 2018, you can see him propose the renewal of this R01 grant for three and a half million dollars. This is the infamous grant that showed up, you know, that everyone's debated about.
And in 2019, they won it in the summer of 2019. So this is now Peter Daszak recycling the TA1, the technical area one into the R01. How do I know that? You can go into my book. It's kind of hard to describe, you know, verbally here, but I have columns basically at the end of each chapter, and you can see the exact same personnel in each column.
You know, here's the R01, here's the TA1. You can see the same scope of work in the R01 and the TA1. You can see the same, you know back collection, the same samples that they want to go after. So this is now the TA1 of DARPA DEFUSE has been funded by this R01 grant starting in 2019.
And there's one particular addition to the personnel in this R01 grant that got renewed in 2019, it's the addition of Ralph Baric. He was never on this sub grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He is a high dollar scientist. What is he doing on this sub grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology? I mean, he brings a lot of payroll to the, you know, the, the overhead. So this was such a big question. Ralph Baric, why were you added to this R01 grant, this renewal in 2019?
It came up during his testimony.
Steve Hsu: Just to clarify. So he was on the DEFUSE proposal. But he was not on the initial R01 until the renewal happened in 2018. He was added at that point to the renewal. Go on.
Jim Haslam: So the, the, the committee, the COVID committee led by the Republicans went in there and finally got the guy to talk. And you know, Dr. Baric, you know, after three years of silence after DEFUSE leaked, he decided to, you know, finally give us something. And he did not have a good answer when they brought it up.
They asked him point blank, why were you put on this grant? And he goes, I did an invoice. I didn't do anything, but he let it slip that because he's added to the grant, he essentially gets access to Shi Zhengli's freezer. That was the entire, you know, purpose of bringing him on to the R01 Grant. He now gets access to what she's collected for the past decade that has been, you know, properly accounted for, you know, and properly uploaded in the NCBI databases uh NIH databases. She has gone out there and done her duty. You know, she has been paid to collect these samples. She has been paid to isolate what she can. These are not dangerous, you know, endeavors, by the way, if, if, if someone gets infected, it's just the technician, you know, it's not, you know, everyone on the planet.
So she has done her duty and she is also, you can see from the records, she has uploaded or started to upload this, this, this bat genome called RaTG13 in 2018. This is when she uploads bits and pieces of it to the NCBI database. We could not see it until it leaked, you know, I leaked is the wrong word, until it, until it was published in 2022.
But she is uploading bits and pieces of this RaTG13 genome that everyone's debated. It's about a 96 similar genome to SARS-CoV-2 and, and is made singly a primary suspect in a Wuhan lab leak scenario.
Steve Hsu: Okay. So you've mentioned RaTG13. Again, her role in this is, or at least part of her role, or the role in this particular grant, is to go out and get samples, sequence the viruses that are found, upload them to a scientific database, right? So all scientists benefit from being able to search through this database and understand, you know, genetic architecture of viruses and how that architecture is related to what they actually do in terms of infection, et cetera.
So real science. There's a particular sequence, RaTG13, which she had uploaded and how did that come to people's attention?
Jim Haslam: Great question. My favorite question. It's not public record in 2018. It's not public record in 2019, nor is it public record at the beginning of the outbreak. So what happens between, you know, an outbreak in late 2019 and 2020 is she published it. She published it though after a lab leak. When she published this RaTG13 genome, she basically uploaded it to GIS aid.
That is a private competitor, I believe, NCBI or the NIH database because she can't upload it to the NIH database because she already uploaded it to the NIH database, but it's not published. It's under embargo until 2022. So she went around the embargo. The Batwoman goes around the embargo and uploads it to GIS aid, and she punches it into the system on January 24th of 2020.
And that is a very key date because I'm going to dive into it here. No one suspected SARS CoV 2 was engineered from January 10th to January 24th of 2020. I mean, no one. I've seen Kristian Anderson's statements on Virology. org. I've seen Bob Gary's statements on Virology. org. That's a public record.
They're talking about snakes on January 24th of 2020. And they're loving the evolution of this virus as it emerged in Wuhan because they can trace it in real time through databases like GISAID. Then she uploads, you know, RaTG13 to GISAID on January 24th. Kristian Anderson goes quiet. Kristian Anderson is this evolutionary virologist at the Scripps Institute in California who's got himself into deep water over this whole thing because he's looked at this thing and he does an alignment.
He takes Shi Zhengli's RaTG13 and he overlays it with SARS CoV 2. And I have to do this because it's my visual for everyone. But you see right here is what he's looking at on January 24th of 2020 is what Kristian Anderson is looking at. So he sees this PRRA during cleavage site flanking, you know, this, this perfect, you know match across the entire, I'd wrapped it around the other side of the book just for effects and purposes.
It's, it's backwards mirror image. It doesn't matter because that's a 100 percent match. For 500 amino acids, 250 in each direction of that furin cleavage site. As if at the hand of God, or Ralph Baric, it separated this genome and put a furin cleavage site right in the middle of the S1, S2. And essentially, you know it's just stuck out like a sore thumb.
Because before she uploaded RaTG13, there's not a great match. This novel genome that's emerged in SARS 2 is so novel, there's not even anything to compare it to. So when she uploads RaTG13, she sends out the signal and she says, not my lab. So in my, you know,
Steve Hsu: I just want to, yeah, I mean you're doing great. I just want to make sure the audience doesn't lose track of what's happening here. So let's first not deviate to Kristian Anderson for a second. Let's talk about the motivations of why Dr. Shi did this stuff and I think why her boss or collaborator is not her boss, but why the guy at Duke resigned on it.
Was it on the same day that he resigned? Okay, so very interesting, right? So at that point, people are pointing to Wuhan, right? So, in January, people are pointing at Wuhan. Everybody knows there's something going on, right? This is a genome that she had already uploaded to the NIH servers. But there was an embargo and an embargo typically would be like, oh, I'm going to publish papers on this.
So I, while I'm uploading it into the database, no one else is allowed to see it until like, typically it would be because we want to, we have our patent or we have our papers that are going to come out. And then after that, the genome is available to other labs. Okay. So I'm just recapitulating what you said.
If I see, if I get it wrong, just interrupt me. So there was an embargo, although she had uploaded it previously, but for some reason, January 24th, 2020, she decided to upload it to this other server and she made a public statement, right? Does she? About like, you know, this, I don't know exactly what she said.
You should, maybe you can fill that in, but
Jim Haslam: Not my lab.
Steve Hsu: Yeah, not my lab, right? So this thing is not itself dangerous to humans. Right? RaTG13. It's just a thing found in the wild. It's a bat virus, but then later on people find that aside from this furin cleavage region, there's a very, very close match between RaTG13 and the actual SARS CoV 2 virus.
Do I have all that right?
Jim Haslam: That's perfect.
Steve Hsu: And at the same time, the guy, the Duke professor, who is Danielle Anderson's boss, okay, a bat guy, a coronavirus guy, he resigns, right? They were the ones with access to that BSL-4, she was at a BSL-2 across town, but the fingers were all pointing to her. Okay? So
Jim Haslam: Ironically, the fingers pointed though, to Shi for the past five years, because she brought attention to her lab by publishing RaTG13. It made her the primary suspect. It backfired. In other words.
Steve Hsu: I think your interpretation and her own statements subsequently have been, look, I didn't have the ability to engineer this. Okay. We did find RaTG13, but RaTG13 is at best a precursor, or at least it's similar to the actual dangerous SARS CoV 2, but it's missing, it doesn't have that furin cleavage site.
Jim Haslam: Correct, correct. And the counter to your argument, you often hear from lab leakers. I'm a 2nd generation lab leaker. I love that term. I just piggybacked off the work of the 1st generation. I, you know, but their argument is that she took the Wuhan Institute of Virology and took their database online. And I counter that by saying, it's biologically impossible to publish something closer than RaTG13. When you look at a 500 amino acid match over, you know, this, this, this very important S1 S2 junction, and there's a furin cleavage site in the middle, I, I call it, you know, in the, in the, in the book, I call you naive. In the, in the Substack I have a more, you know, graphic word to use. You're not really thinking this through. I mean, by, by publishing this, this, this natural genome, she made the SARS 2 genome look unnatural.
Steve Hsu: Okay before we get into that, because now we get into what Kristian Anderson noticed right away when he, when he aligned these two genomes and looked and saw this furin cleavage site stand out. Online, I see people talking about B A N A L, BANAL-52. And they say, oh, BANAL-52 is actually more similar to SARS CoV 2 or something like this.
It's not actually RaTG13. So maybe you can just comment on that.
Jim Haslam: Oh, it's a, it's like everything in the lab leaks. It's another, you know, endless rabbit hole. But BANAL stands for bat ANAL. So that just cuts to the graphic side of this thing. And it emerged well after, the pandemic started in September of 2021, about the same time major Murphy leaked DARPA DEFUSE.
It was like a one, two punch. And this genome was published by the French who have a lab there in Laos. And it's called Laos BANAL-52 and I believe RaTG13 is like 96. 1 percent identical to SARS CoV 2. Laos BANAL is like 96. 8, you know, it's in the same region. but there's a quirk. There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a curveball in this thing.
You know, it was also collected by the U. S. military. At least the funds of the U. S. military were in that same bat cave at that same GPS. This Laos BANAL-52 sample was found in 2017 is this I've already forgotten about in MRCA. It's another acronym basically, but the military, you know, again, has a big footprint around, you know, the specific rim and they're looking, you know, for these pathogens and this, this, this pathogen was found in this back cave in 2017.
And we don't know where it went or where it is. It's also been embargoed somewhere.
Steve Hsu: Okay, quick question. So, that's it, I didn't know this. So the bat anal thing, be BANAL-52. Do you know which scientists actually found it and sequenced it? So you said it was collected in 2017. So that's even earlier, right? But do we know who these people are and they didn't publish it or what?
Jim Haslam: yeah, we know who he is and people have contacted him and he said it's embargoed. The samples from 2017 are embargoed by the funder and the funder is the DOD. It is the Pentagon. They did not allow this genome to be published by the French.
Steve Hsu: So, somebody, not DARPA, but DOD, paid some French guys, or were people working with the French guys, and that's how BANAL-52 was discovered. Is that?
Jim Haslam: The exact same GPS down to, you know, the, the, the fourth digit is you know, been collected in 2017 and embargoed in a freezer somewhere in Laos. And it's, it's, it's quite the story and another rabbit hole into itself, but yes, and that, that the same program manager on that job was even on the DARPA DEFUSE, you know, kind of, you know, bids and it's, it's a one, you know, they're all the same, you know, group.
Steve Hsu: Well, okay. Just to clarify. So the program, you do know that you do know how that collection was and sequencing was funded. It was through DARPA and the same program manager.
Jim Haslam: Well, it was a guy that was a part of the DARPA DEFUSE type of bids in 2018.
Steve Hsu: Someone, someone in DARPA who had the bio, the infectious disease portfolio. Okay.
Okay. Let's come back to Chris Kristian Anderson, Kristian Anderson, originally from Denmark, an evolutionary virologist. So interested in the evolution of viruses. Scripps Institute in San Diego, beautiful office overlooking the Pacific Ocean. January 24 or maybe a few days after, I don't know exactly when, but after Shi publishes or releases the RaTG13 sequence, he's looking at it and by that time they also have some early SARS CoV 2 sequences, right? And he aligns them. Okay. So when you align them, you can compare base pair by base pair the two sequences.
And what he found was something that stood out very strongly in that there was enormous similarity over most of the two genomes, but it looked like this furin cleavage site had just been inserted. Like there was a break and someone had inserted this furin cleavage region. Kristian Anderson, immediately alarm bells went off in his head.
We have his emails and Slack conversations with his colleagues who are also evolutionary virologists and then later people like Fauci and Jeremy Farrar were pulled in, but I want you to tell that story.
Jim Haslam: That's my favorite part of the story. It's chapter 15 of the book. It's on the Substack. You know, it's it's, it's, it's when it starts to rock and roll.
So yeah, again Kristian Anderson on public record in virology. The org where all these evolutionary virologists hang out is on record saying this is a beautiful genome from nature snakes.
He is full on on board with a natural spillover event and excited. Then Shi Zhengli uploads RaTG13 on January 24th and the, in the, in the, you can actually see one of the virologists upload the paper into the forum. And then all of a sudden underneath that forum, it goes quiet. There's no more Kristian Anderson. There's no more Bob Gary. There's no one else there. And now we know what happened. They went to, you know, burner phones. They went to Slack messages. They went to holy crap. This thing is engineered. And Kristian Anderson is ringing the, he's, he's paranoid. And he's also ringing the fire, the biological fire alarm.
He is by January 30th of 2020, he wants to call the FBI. He testified that he had FBI and CIA pamphlets ready to go. He has not talked to Fauci. He has not talked to anyone besides Bob Gary and Eddie Holmes in Australia. And I think when he talks to Eddie Holmes in Australia, and he shares his you know, concerns, because he's like, hey, Eddie, have you looked at this?
He goes, yeah, the SARS 2 genome, you know, there's nothing there, you know, as far as I can tell, it's natural. Then, you know, Kristian Anderson brings to attention the RaTG13 genome to expose the SARS 2 furin cleavage site. And, you know, I think, you know, Kristian Anderson said I wanted to pound some beers after that call with him.
Well, Eddie Holmes gets on the call and calls his handler, calls him, you know, it's, it's Jerry Farrar, the Wellcome Trust. So Jerry Farrar, the Wellcome Trust is now pulled into this thing. He says he heard some rumors from some, you know, US virologists. It's code for, you know, Kristian Anderson, because he's the only one on record, basically going out there to, to ring the, the, the biological fire alarm on SARS CoV 2 being engineered was before the February 1st teleconference.
This is all before the February 1st teleconference. It has nothing to do with the February 1st teleconference. So I, you know, looked at all these emails they have, and it's not easy to figure out what's going on, but Jeremy Farrar the Wellcome Trust, the Fauci of the UK, has received these concerns directly from Kristian Anderson, and he's actually genuinely concerned as best I can tell.
This isn't like some, you know, you know he's going to help cover this thing up. He is genuinely concerned like, wow, this evolutionary virologist, this world class evolutionary virologist with a corner office overlooking the Pacific Ocean, you know, bringing in his own, you know, grants, you know, is going to call the FBI.
Let's talk about this. It sounds like a logical thing to do. And he is organizing this February 1st call. with, with, with, with Ron Fouchier, with Marion Koopmans, with Kristian Drosten. These are all the Fauci's of, like, Denmark, not Denmark the Netherlands and Germany. These are the who's who 's organizing this and Fauci is not involved at first and he keeps sending Fauci emails and only Fauci in the US government, you know, hey, we're doing a teleconference.
One of your own virologists in California is ready to call the FBI. I, you know, and Farrar to his defense has documented this in his book spike, you know, am I supposed to call the FBI? Is the actual quote from Kristian Anderson into Farrar's book in chapter three. It's the, that's the name of the chapter.
Am I supposed to call the FBI? And he puts them there on January 30th. It's almost like he's, you know, covering his own hide and I don't really blame him. He doesn't get pulled out of this thing any further than he has. So he's begging Fauci to get on this phone call that's been organized on January 31st. And that night, January 31st, Fauci finally picks up the phone and calls Kristian Anderson.
And Kristian Anderson, we don't know what's said. But apparently Kristian Anderson has relayed to Fauci, I'm ready to call the FBI. This thing's engineered. And then, you know, they hang up the phone. And then the email comes from Kristian Anderson, almost as if he's trying to, like, cover his own hide on this thing.
He wants to document what he's told Fauci. We find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. We, as Kristian Anderson, Bob Gary Andrew Rambo, and I, Mike, I forget his last name. Um but these are four world class evolutionary biologists, you know, hanging out in your circles, not mine, going to Harvard, Yale and all that.
One of them, you know, Eddie Holmes, you know they're all world class virologists and they have basically told Tony Fauci on the night of January 31st, 2020, we find the genome inconsistent with expectations. We're engineers. And he says, you have to look very closely at the genome to see that it's engineered because it's very small pieces of it.
That looks potentially engineered and he's talking about the furin cleavage site essentially at that point. It's pretty obvious. He's admitted that. That's January 31st.
Steve Hsu: So, What we've just described is the first, alarm bells going off once they had the RaTG13 genome and they could compare it to the by then sequenced SARS COVID 2 genome.People who were completely outside the circle of coronavirus gene editors and bat scientists, people who are completely outside who were well respected evolutionary virologists got alarmed. started talking about it amongst themselves, pulled in Jeremy Farrar, who is the head of the Wellcome Trust, which is the largest funder, I believe, of biomedical research in the UK.
I actually know Jeremy. Coincidentally, I was visiting Jeremy in mid January 2020, so about two weeks maybe before this, these events that you're talking about happened. It turns out around Jeremy, and this is documented to some extent in his book spike, which I highly recommend his lieutenant deputy of at the Wellcome Trust, I think is a former and MI5 or MI6 director and one of the members of his board was also had a very senior position or maybe top position and MI5 or MI6. So he's surrounded by spooks, which I found very strange. In his book, he says once this, once this shit hit the fan, once this broke, the events you're talking about, he notes that he was advised immediately to get a burner phone and a separate email account. And I always found that very strange because most scientists don't get burner phones ever, okay? So, but, now maybe it's just because he was surrounded by spooks and there was, as the British might say, an abundance of caution, okay? But, he writes about this in his book because he also found it strange.
Okay. Now, having said all that, which makes this all sound very exciting and James Bond like, I just want the listeners to take a step back and, and we are talking about what people at a moment in time thought. It is possible that they were mistaken and later changed their minds. So we, I want to allow for that possibility that Kristian Anderson, others, were very alarmed, rightfully so, had this set of conversations. However, they later wrote a paper called proximal origins in which they advocate for a zoonotic or natural origin of the virus and against human engineering of the virus. We'll get to that discussion in a few moments. But, as of right now, it is February 1, there is a conference call involving scientists from all over the world, Kristian Anderson, the guy at Scripps, I think Fauci is on this call, Farrar is on this call, and Jim has learned, or I learned from Jim, that secretly, without anybody else's understanding, except maybe I think Fauci who invited him, Ralph Baric is on this call.
Am I right about this? February 1, 2020.
Jim Haslam: February one. So it was always a question. Why did these world class evolutionary virologists go from I'm calling the FBI to I'm going to write a paper saying this thing came from nature in a matter of days, weeks, months, and it never really made sense. Ever. And everyone thought they, you know, did this through, you know, the scientific collaboration and feedback and peer review system.
And they got talked out from, you know, talked down from their conspiracy. They called it, this thing was engineered. So it never really made sense to anyone, including myself, why on earth this group, you know, did a 180. And the assumption was that someone like, uh you know, Kristian Anderson was bribed, maybe, to change his answer. And that assumption was based on this proposal called creed. I don't get too far off track, but essentially, that's part of the, you know, the DARPA DEFUSE also funding. So that was always what Richard Ebright of Rutgers University called a creed pro quo. So that's the narrative.
He changed Kristian Anderson changed his mind on engineering because of a bribe and bribe is the word that Fauci used.
Steve Hsu: I just want to be very clear that we're not making any assertions. You're stating that some people have expressed this online, for example. I actually know Richard. We're not asserting that here. Okay. So let's leave that aside. But it is true that people who are very alarmed and caused this teleconference to happen on February 1 later are authors of a paper claiming it was not engineered. But let's go through it.
So, and what's interesting now, thanks to Jim, is that we have, you know, thanks to all the hearings and the FOIAs, we have access to the communications of these people in the days when this conference is happening and the transition afterwards in their opinion. So go ahead, Jim.
Jim Haslam: So Kristian Anderson's files that he used are presentation slides, PowerPoint presentation slides that he used during the February 1st teleconference or public record. And the big one and the main one is the genomic alignment of RaTG13 over SARS 2. And it's essentially what we've already talked about.
You know, I can now point to this furin cleavage site in the middle of this genome that's almost been inserted out of frame. You know, perfect, you know, S1, S2 junction. You know, this is not nature. This is, this is man. And that's, that's essentially what's going on on February 1st. And they hang up the call after about an hour.
And the public record only showed Fauci and Collins, and Collins had invited Tabak. And so there's three U. S. government officials, and that's it. Everyone else is, you know, not working for the U. S. government. You know, they're a spook like Farrar or so, you know, it's someone else, you know, and somewhere else.
So that's what happens on February 1st. It's a gray area. then comes a follow up meeting, you know, this is now organized. This thing's been escalated to Fauci's defense. He organized it. He says, I'm going to get a broader group of virologists together and we're going to do it under the NASA umbrella.
The National Academy of Science is basically on February 3rd. This is now a Monday, February 3rd of 2020 has gotten together to, you know, expand upon Kristian Anderson's concerns of engineering, and you can see Kristian Anderson go into this meeting kind of like cynical, you know, NAS is a political organization, they don't understand the genomic evidence, but I'm just logging off here, guys, and I'm going on
Steve Hsu: And when you say he was cynical going in, we know this because his community, his emails and Slack messages to his close collaborators express these sentiments before he went into the NAS meeting. Just to be clear,
Jim Haslam: His words, not mine. and he logs off, you know, the Slack messages, and he goes into the NAS meeting. And now this meeting formally includes Ralph Baric, and we do not know or we did not know what occurred during this meeting. We knew less about this February 3rd meeting. This is now the U. S. government. This is now the FBI. This is now the CIA. This now is the White House. This is the who's who, you know, basically, we now have gone from a bunch of foreigners and virologists debating it to U.S. government officials are now debating the genomic origins of SARS CoV 2. And during this meeting, Kristian Anderson represents the exact same, you know slides.
You can see him working on it. He's such a brilliant nerd. You know, he's working on this these
Steve Hsu: are all are
Jim Haslam: Okay, he's working on this, this, this proof that I'm going to prove this thing's engineer and I'm going to do my patriotic duty and I'm just basically going to be, everyone's going to love me and you know, he represents, he represents his slides to uh as far as I can tell them the same ones.
And again, it's the genomic evidence showing RaTG 13 adversaries to expose this furin cleavage site. Kristian Anderson's words were redacted once he came back into the Slack forum. His reaction to the February 3rd meeting organized by NAS. They were redacted by Kristian Anderson's own lawyers.
They did not want it to be public record. This was so well hidden. No one saw what happened during the February 3rd meeting, but
Steve Hsu: On what grounds can they redact? I mean, weren't these Slack messages extracted? I mean, under what?
Jim Haslam: There was a negotiation between the congressional committee.
Steve Hsu: Got it. All right.
Jim Haslam: Yeah. And you know, we'll give you the Slack messages, but we're not going to give you everything. And, you know, we're going to give you the least incriminating bits and pieces. So one of the congressional committee committee guys, I know which one, I don't want to say to him.
He marched down to the HHS office, which is in downtown DC. and he went into what's called an in camera view. I believe they call it where you go in and you can, you can't take a picture, but you can take notes about what the, what's actually behind the redactions. And he went in there and he, he, you know, pretty awesome truth seeker.
He broke down what happened after that February 3rd meeting. And he brought that into the Ralph Baric testimony. And he says, look, I've got something to read to you because under Kristian Anderson's testimony, they invited everyone, but you. To that February 1st teleconference and they wanted to make sure you weren't there because they knew that, you know, this is Kristian Anderson to the committee in 2023 during his deposition.
They wanted to make sure that they had, you know, an objective viewpoint because they knew Ralph Baric had been collaborating with the one Institute of biology. There's an infamous 2015 paper real quick. The only reason she's on the papers is because she's only shared the sample before publication, so Ralph Baric would add her as a coauthor. This is something that similar happened with RaTG 13. Obviously she's only shared the sample before publication and she'll be added to a, as a coauthor to a nature paper.
But anyways, they know that Ralph Baric collaborates. So they did not want him on the February 1st teleconference, but what Ralph Baric did was listen to Kristian Anderson's evidence secretly on the phone, not visually.
And attacked is the word Kristian Anderson used. Ralph Baric just attacked me. I wonder if he's implicated in this too. So, Ralph Baric attacks Kristian Anderson for suggesting his SARS, his SARS 2 genome, you know, this SARS 2 genome looks potentially engineered.
Steve Hsu: Okay. So just to recap, these were recovered by some congressional investigator who took hand notes, being able to read the unredacted slack messages. So, upon leaving this NASA meeting, Kristian Anderson says to his close colleagues, I was attacked by Baric in this meeting, potentially implicated in all this.
Okay, go on.
Jim Haslam: And so that's the 180. You know, it was always a question in my mind. Why on earth did Kristian Anderson, you know, a pretty cocky guy by anyone's account, a pretty confident guy is the word I should use. Why did he 180? And you know, I'm not going to get into the psychological aspects of this, but if you're the Corona King.
And you're, you know, attacking someone that's an Ebola specialist, who's going to win the argument, you know, and he did it. Ralph Baric did it in front of the CIA, in front of the FBI, in front of the white house, when everyone was watching, he attacked them as if to, you know, I'm the alpha of the room and this thing's not engineered.
And so, you know Kristian Anderson, you know, I don't blame him. You know, I would have, you know, folded. I mean, maybe your evidence isn't all there. He's getting gas lit by the king.
Steve Hsu: So just to, again, for the audience, Baric is the expert on genetically engineering coronavirus. As far as I know, Kristian Anderson is not a genetic engineer. Right? He's not a guy who goes in the lab and actually develops techniques for modifying genomes, etc. So if I went to that meeting, and I were from a more theoretical viewpoint, like an evolutionary virologist, and I study sequences, I align them and I look at how they change over time. And, you know, I do things like that. But somebody who's an engineer comes in and says, hey, yeah, this is natural because we would never do it this way. We would, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Just to give Kristian the benefit of the doubt, I could imagine him just saying, well, somebody with deeper knowledge about engineering is telling me it's natural. It's not engineered. This is not how we would do it. And maybe I just accept that. So we don't have to talk about bribes or, you know, it's possible. Okay. I just want to lay that out. It's possible. He's got the highest level of intellectual integrity and he was just convinced by a stronger area expert about this conclusion, right? I mean, why would you not believe that?
Jim Haslam: Oh, you know, I would fold in a heartbeat. You know, I mean, we all, there's an evolutionary gene in us to go along to get along.
Steve Hsu: Right. But okay, but look, let me go forward now.
So, first of all, are you sure he folded right away? Like, maybe for a week or some period of time, he's still thinking about it. Or how do you know he, that was the key thing that changed his mind about, you know,
Jim Haslam: Well, I'm not going to get into his mind. He has communicated with me, I'm not going to say that. I'm not, I don't want to talk about that offline, but I, I, well, I will say this. It's a public record question. Did you know Ralph Baric, Kristian Anderson? Did you know Ralph Baric was on the February 1st teleconference?
No, I did not. And we are shocked to learn that. So he had no idea Ralph Baric was listening in to his February.
Steve Hsu: Yeah, no, no, I, I, I don't question this idea that he was ambushed. And by the way, that's a pretty dirty trick on the part of Fauci or Collins or whoever invited Baric onto that call. It's a pretty dirty trick. Right? I have no doubt that he was ambushed at this later meeting.
Jim Haslam: is the word,
Steve Hsu: I'm more interested in these people who originally saw the smoking gun kind of thing and thought, oh, hey, this is engineered, but then became authors of this paper, which came out a few months later, I think. At what point did they change their mind? What in the record speaks to why they changed their mind? Because the paper itself, which I read at the time when it came out, is very unsatisfying. So I'm now interested in this time evolution between February 3 and when that paper came out and any insights you can offer about that.
Jim Haslam: So that's chapter 15 of the book. I have direct quotes from their emails in there. You can actually see them kind of convincing themselves, to be honest with you, maybe this thing is not intentionally engineered.
If you read closely, what they're going to argue is that this thing could have been passed on to an animal.
Maybe the, you know, the Wuhan Institute of Virology messed up and it got out, but it was unintentionally engineered to, you know, have a furin cleavage site. But they're very, if there's a point to the proximal origins paper, it is to make a point that it's not intentionally engineered. And my point is that it was intentionally engineered.
This is actually, you know, the intent of this genome was to, you didn't, to infect an animal.
Steve Hsu: Yeah, so okay. Okay, so the particular point about that particular group of authors of proximal origins, what went on in their heads, maybe it is a little secondary.
Let's get to your main thesis, which is that going all the way back to the original DEFUSE proposal, which DARPA asked for, we want to be able to create a virus which transmits within the bat population. It's not aimed at humans. It's aimed at transmitting within the bat population, but that will maybe reduce the dangerous reservoir of diseases which are lurking in the bat reservoir, which could eventually affect humans. But initially, we're just trying to affect what's going on in the bat world. Your contention is that this process was followed. And the most plausible thing is that ultimately they did engineer that furin cleavage site into something, which might have been similar to RaTG13. That was then further processed at the Rocky Mountain lab. You have records of things being sent. To the Rocky Mountain lab, which is an intramural internal lab of an I. A. I. D. And your further contention is that eventually that virus was sent.
to Kristian Anderson in the BSL-4 in Wuhan, and that is
Jim Haslam: Anderson. Yes.
Steve Hsu: Daniel Anderson, and that is really the origin of SARS CoV 2. So we're finally at your main, sorry it took so long, but I want the audience to come along. That is your, I think your main conclusion when you write mystery solved at the, on the title of your book.
That is what your contention is. So let's just talk through that.
Jim Haslam: So where do I start with her? I got to make it abundantly clear. She's what I call the first victim of many. I start the book off though with her and by naming her, you know, as patient zero it is to help the reader move along to the end of the book. You know, she is a character to deliver, you know a narrative that delivers an answer.
And the whole premise about her presence in Wuhan has never been answered. You know, and she was always kind of in, you know, the, the, the background. Who is she? What is she? She's a world class bat immunologist. I turned myself into an amateur bat immunologist to try and figure out who she was. She's not easy to understand.
She has been asked by her own colleagues to explain what she does and what she was doing inside that Wuhan lab. And you can listen to the presentation. It's on YouTube, and it's not even easy to follow because it's very complex. But when you're a bat immunologist, which is what she is, she is Lympho Wong Jr.
She is Lympho Wong. Lympho Wong is the batman, and she is, you know, the batlady, we'll call her, you know. She's more of a batwoman than she's Zing Li.
Steve Hsu: Lin Fo Wong was. In a sense, her superior was the Duke NUS, National University of Singapore, Duke campus in Singapore professor, and he's the one who resigned his position on January 24th when,
Jim Haslam: 10th, the born on date for the SARS 2 genome.
Steve Hsu: okay, sorry, sorry,
Jim Haslam: Yeah, he resigns on January 10th. He resigns as Duke's emerging infectious disease director to spend more time with the family. January 10th is the date.
Steve Hsu: You mentioned his name, so I just thought I'd explain to the audience who that is. Danielle, I guess, worked under him, and she was really the one in the lab. I mean, you've got photos of her with her BSL-4 spacesuit on in the lab, and you've traced her physically to that BSL-4 facility in the lead up to the actual pandemic.
So, go on with that, and also maybe tell us how you traced her.
Jim Haslam: So there's an NBC cell phone news report that was released in May of 2020 and it says there's an event inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology inside the BSL-4 in like the first full week of October of 2019. And inside the NBC News report is a link to the RAW report and inside the raw report is about 15 pages of the data. And, you know, everyone can look at it themselves. NBC News cell phone report and just click on the link inside the report and you look at the raw report. If you open up the raw report, you can come to your own conclusions about what's happening. So inside this raw report are 2 cell phones that they've traced.
There's a, there's a cell phone that bases in the, in, in Singapore and they literally declare is the emerging infectious disease director, but the names redacted and it's uh one of the two
Steve Hsu: Fa.
Jim Haslam: That's lympho lympho long, but the names redacted, you know, so, but by inference who they've told you, you know, it's him.
Then there's another report, there's another page that's dedicated to another cell phone and this one's the world traveler. This one is getting around. This one is all over the place. It starts off in Kenya in 2018 19, where there's a Duke Hospital and then there's a Danielle Anderson publication on murders and camels there.
Then her, her phone, this phone, not her phone, this phone that's also had its name redacted, goes over to Beijing in the early of 2019. Now she's working on a CRISPR paper inside of a Beijing lab. Inside of a BSL 3. She's the lead author on that publication paper in 2019. She is, you know, she is international, you know, she's a Western woman from Australia, but she is truly international.
And she's, as best I can tell, invited to China under the Chinese Academy of Science. She is, you know, working, you know, to prevent the next spillover event, essentially, you
Steve Hsu: Yeah, none of this for scientists. None of this is surprising. This is the life of a scientist. So I gave a talk at the Chinese Academy of Sciences like a month and a half ago. So none of this.
Jim Haslam: This is an international world. I thought oil and gas was international. This is on another level. I mean, she describes her passport as being like full filled up three times
Steve Hsu: Yeah, I've had to, I've had to use one up and get a new one actually. But, okay. But most importantly, cell phone logs place her both at the BSL-4 facility. And then there's a dormitory where she sleeps in Wuhan, right?
Jim Haslam: I don't have her cell phone at the dormitory per se. I have a word of the dormitory, but then she flies from Beijing. This phone flies from Beijing to Wuhan on June 28th, 2019.
That is the application date for the creed project. This is the creed program. That's been called the creed pro quo. The bribe to Kristian Anderson, Kristian Anderson in his defense was true. He said this thing was in the works for a long time and it was in the works. The, the, the bid. was due on June 28, 2019. This is the Creed project. Peter Daszak has taken TA2, technical area 2, and repackaged it into this Creed grant, essentially. And only now have we recently got the FOIA to see what's going on there.
But June 28, 2019. 2019, Daniel enters the BSL-4 after giving input into the CREED grant. She is actually a bit of an alpha. I did not know this until I read her input into this CREED grant. She is steering Peter Daszak and she is steering Ralph Baric away from a coronavirus centric bid into a more general bid.
This is her pushback and feedback from them losing DARPA DEFUSE. She's, she's mad. They lost DARPA DEFUSE. She wants, you know, to, you know, have a big grant to work on.
Steve Hsu: Again, I want to defend all these people because in their minds, in her mind, there probably was a good rationale to pursue all of the science. It's real science. How did these viruses work? How do they get into the human body? How do they divide? How do they get into your cells? How are they transmitted?
You know, this is all real science that we need to understand. And if the military says we want a scalable transmissible thing, which is going to improve the situation with the bat disease reservoir, and we're funding it, most scientists are not going to say no to that, right? They didn't know this could potentially lead to a pandemic, etc.
So, I don't want to, like, paint a negative picture of these people. They're, they're doing real science. They're traveling around the world doing it. but it may have led to something and that's your contention.
Jim Haslam: So she gives input to the CREED bid, which is Technical Area 2 of DARPA DEFUSE. It has basically the same scope of work. Danielle Anderson's going to head the animal challenge studies. Ralph Baric's going to do genomic engineering. and inside of this creed bid is a draft that they're going to submit and inside the draft of this creed bid in 2019 is Ralph Baric's furin cleavage site, a reference to the furin cleavage site. It's the exact same reference he used in DARPA DEFUSE. So Ralph Baric has taken his proposal from 2018 and refurbished it. And now he gets to try out his novel new genome with the furin cleavage site in this. CREED grant that's about to be funded by NIAID. So, this is not in the final grant, this is in the draft.
Okay, it did not make the draft because now, I'm guessing DARPA allows 75 pages and NIAID only allows like 15 or 25. That's the beauty of DARPA DEFUSE. We got 75 pages of their mindset in early 2018, but it shrunk down to make it fit, and Danielle's making it even broader and less SARS centric as they go into their research of what's about to happen.
Steve Hsu: Okay, but I, I want to back up a little bit because now you're already in mid to fall 2019 when she flies, when she flies from Beijing to, uh,
Jim Haslam: June 28th or June the end of June 2019 and then she's in the BSL-4 until October of 2019.
Steve Hsu: But I think there's a part of the story that you want to tell, which is that Baric sent some sample viruses to the Rocky Mountain Lab, which is an intramural NIAID lab in Montana. And what was done there, and what was done there was then, you contend, sent to Danielle Anderson, and that's what she was working with in that BSL-4, you contend, right?
So, go ahead with that.
Jim Haslam: Yeah, that's a lot to digest, but there is a record, a FOIA of Ralph Baric working on an RRAR furin cleavage site and shipping, you know, MERS like samples to Rocky Mountain Lab in February of 2019. It's documented in the book. It's a public record. You can, anyone can ask me for the references on that one.
It is essentially, I'm now working with Rocky Mountain Lab when they are going to do the in vivo experimentation of my in vitro genome. I am now before the pandemic, Ralph had a great line. I never sent chimera to China, you know, and that was always his defense, you know, and it was a pretty solid one.
And that's before DARPA DEFUSE leaked. You know, that was like, Hey, I'd never sent chimera to China. And that's when my mind perked up. That's an interview he gave to MIT technical review in like June, not even that maybe May or June of 2021, a few months before DARPA DEFUSE leak, then he went quiet, but I never sent chimera to China.
That always piqued my interest. Who's the third party lab? And I found that 2018 paper where they're collaborating together. So Ralph Baric has a FOIA that says I'm going to, you know, the, the in vivo. Experimentation on this genome I've created is going to be done in Rocky Mountain Lab, and that's February 2019.
So in there, obviously, this, you know, this, this 2018 paper where they tried to infect the Egyptian fruit bat, you know, it's not carried into 2019. If you look deep into the Creed grant, Rocky Mountain Lab is a part of it. This guy, Vincent Munster is a part of it. So they have now gotten the DARPA DEFUSE team back together with the DARPA DEFUSE team that won the DARPA preamp team that was in Rocky Mountain Lab. They beat, you know, Peter Daszak and Ralph Baric in 2018 with better technology. They have what's called transmissible technology. Baric's technology was transferable in DARPA DEFUSE. So Vincent Munster and Rocky Mountain Lab have transmissible technology.
That's injecting the needle into one animal and it spreads to the next animal via aerosols. This is highly dangerous as far as I'm concerned because it's an infinite loop that you're putting in. potentially creating. But inside of a BSL-4, they thought they were safe and sound. So this, this, this, this bat vaccine has been developed inside Rocky Mountain Lab using what's called an Egyptian fruit bat.
Steve Hsu: So, your contention is that the further processing of what Baric produced was done at the Rocky Mountain Lab, for sure there was some relationship where testing it in vivo, in the actual animals was going to be done for some things that Baric produced in that lab. I think there's, there's records to that effect.
But, you can't directly establish that something was sent from that Rocky Mountain Lab to Wuhan BSL-4 where Danielle Anderson worked, right? So you assert that's true, but you don't have the strongest evidence for that, right?
Jim Haslam: Correct. What I have is the return label. So the whole book, the whole genesis of the project I took on was to answer a question. Why does this old world virus called SARS CoV 2 love new world lab animals? That's it. That's all I care about. You know, why does SARS 2 come from the old world, the Eastern Hemisphere?
I think we all agree that we love new world lab animals and new world lab animals. I mean, you know, western hemisphere, you know animals that you find in a BSL-4 lab. 1 of them's Egyptian fruit bats. It's called the lab rat. Basically BSL-4 is in western countries. It's easy to feed and breed.
It's easy to know. Keep up because it eats fruit, you know, you just throw some fruit into the cage and the, and the bat will eat itself. You know, the Chinese horseshoe bat is where the test needs to be done. This is actually a high maintenance bat. It's an insectivirus bat. It basically eats, you know, fleas, not fleas, you know, flies, and it's very high maintenance to keep up.
So if you're going to test a bat vaccine that you've developed in Egyptian fruit bats. You have to go to Wuhan to test it in this, the only place on the planet, you know, basically with live Chinese horseshoe bats, Daniel Anderson has admitted she had Chinese horseshoe bats inside the BSL-4 to Peter Daszak, who admitted she was working on a live bat colony.
She claims the bat colony didn't work. It didn't, you know, it failed. The word colony though, doesn't mean much when it comes to Chinese horseshoe bats, because what they proposed in DARPA DEFUSE was wild caught. Wild caught Chinese horseshoe bats would be kept inside this Wuhan BSL-4. Wild caught means I went out into the wild, I grabbed a bat, a Chinese horseshoe bat, I brought it into the lab, and I'm going to keep it alive long enough for experimentation.
It's not born into captivity. It's not bred, you know, ideally, as the way it's supposed to be done. So it's, it's, it's a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a bit of a, you know, it's, It was in the DARPA DEFUSE documents that, hey, we can get the WIV colleagues of ours to basically catch wild caught bats. So she has admitted, you know, to Peter Daszak, who admitted publicly, ironically, weirdly enough, that she was working on creating a live bat colony, and it failed.
So that is her admitting live bats are in this BSL-4. When, when, and when it hits the fan, she has a story that's different from what she was working on. She claimed she was working on Ebola. So I've gone into her CV, it's a hundred pages long, it's a hundred papers long, and I've looked for it, and I did not find one paper on Ebola.
I asked her colleague at Duke at the time, does she ever work on Ebola? He didn't, you know, he kind of said no in a professional way. And I showed him the quote in the Bloomberg article, you know, well she claimed she was working on Ebola, so that's not adding up. She never disclosed. That she was on the DARPA DEFUSE team.
So her story, basically post pandemic, is not adding up.
Steve Hsu: Okay. But you mentioned another line of evidence, which is the new world animals. So let me let me summarize what I think I understand about that, but please correct me so I think your claim is that the actual SARS CoV 2 virus is transmissible within certain other mammalian species and they include I think deer, deer mice, is it mink or ferrets? Things like this. I don't know if cats or hamsters are in there, but it's some very finite set of species. And there is some link between those specific, I think, five species and what they have at the Rocky Mountain Lab, right? This is an important part in your chain of logic. So could you go into that?
Jim Haslam: So that's it.
There's five animals on the planet, outside of us humans, that SARS CoV 2 efficiently transmits through. Onward transmission is the term I've come across. That means I can infect you, and you can infect Bob, and Bob can infect Kay, and Kay can infect Joe. It's onward transmission. Cats are a dead end.
US humans can infect the cats in captivity, you know, in the house, but they don't, they don't infect other cats. There's no genomic evidence in GISA of many cats being infected. There's no genomic evidence of raccoon dogs being, you know, infected multiple times over. There's no laboratory evidence of humanized mice being infected.
It was a big problem at the beginning of the pandemic, you know. What does SARS CoV 2 infect, and more importantly, transmit, because we need to create antibodies, vaccines, and stop the transmission. It's always been a problem to replicate the transmission of SARS CoV 2. And over time, this pandemic, you know, has created, you know, its own laboratory.
And we found out what we, you know, essentially is, you know people that publish on this, a list of five animals. And those animals you've talked about, Egyptian fruit bats, onward transmission deer mice, onward transmission deer, we all know about deer now, onward transmission, mink, what I thought were ferrets like you were actually mink, and they're not just, you know, any kind of mink, they're, they're, they're American mink, and they're, they're found, you know, everywhere except China, none of these animals are in the eastern hemisphere, you know, unnatural, or natural, I should say, then the fifth one is the hamster, this one blew my mind, I thought for sure you would find a Syrian hamster in the, in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, I thought for sure you would find a Syrian hamster in the, in the Wuhan There's none.
This is that little pet you had or your kids have as a, you know, when they're a kid and, you know, oh, yes, they live for a couple of years and you throw it away. It's just a, it's, it's called a Syrian golden hamster. And they're not found in China because they have their own called a Chinese hamster, which doesn't really, you know, it's not a transmission model for SARS 2.
When I found out the fifth transmission model wasn't even in China. I'm like, wow. I mean, this is incredible. So I propose this to be our biological proof of a Wuhan area lab leak in a Rocky Mountain Lab origin, because there's only one place on the planet before the pandemic, where all five of those models that I listed are found and that's inside Rocky Mountain Lab.
And pretty much, I'm not going to get into the list, but I do at the very end of the book, which ones were used for transmissible models on contagious vaccines, which is what they're developing at Rocky Mountain Lab. They've been, you know, talking and publishing about this and Rocky Mountain Lab since like, 2012 openly on transmissible vaccine research, for all kinds of animals. And all these animals are basically only found there, pre and post pandemic inside Rocky Mountain Lab.
Steve Hsu: So can, I want to drill into the science of this a little bit. So the thing was sent to them and they were working on enhancing, maybe, transmissibility of the virus. So does this mean they pushed it through those five model species? And, and your contention would be that the thing that had been pushed through those five species, was then the thing that got out in Wuhan.
Jim Haslam: Correct. Correct. And you know, it's not, you know, a lot of people come at me about, you know, was it the ancestral strain? Yes, it is. You know WA1 is the best known ancestral strain of SARS-COV 2. WA1 stands for Washington area 1. It's a beautiful story. It's chapter 27 of the book America's patient zero. Maybe I should've called him a patient one. I'm how that works. But there was a man in his mid thirties. Unnamed. The New York Times talked to him, but didn't name him, who traveled to Wuhan in the middle of November of 2019.
And he's obviously, I think, renewing a visa, and I'm guessing he works in the tech sector somewhere in Seattle. And he's there for about six to eight weeks, and he's traveling back to the United States on January 15th of 2020. He never visited the wet market. He did go to Wuhan, though, obviously, during the pandemic and unknowingly traveled back to the U. S. with the best known ancestral strain of SARS CoV 2, WA1, Washington Area 1, was the, was the isolate, isolated from his lungs and sent off to the CDC and sent around to all these different, you know, labs in the U. S., where we got to learn about what, you know, what animal models transmit SARS CoV 2 and which animals models do not?
WA1 predates Lineage A and B found in the wet market. I have eliminated the wet market from this equation, basically. You know, it's essentially, you know, out of the picture. It's only three nucleotides out of 30, 000. But that's not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it's still considered the ancestral strain of SARS CoV 2 called Washington Area 1, WA1.
And that ancestral strain transmits efficiently in those five animals we've talked about. So I consider that to be the biological proof of the Wuhan area lab leak in the U. S. area lab origin.
Steve Hsu: Okay. I think that was very clear. I think people listening understand what your contention is, and the logic that leads up to it.
We've been on for quite a while, so maybe we should start wrapping up. I just want to say again to people who are listening if you're interested in this, buy Jim's book, read it, think about it.
I hope this conversation will stimulate further scientific discussion. I'm not an expert, I'm not taking a position on this, but I think, you know, I'm happy to have the conversation. Jim seems to have a lot of interesting facts that I didn't have access to before I talked to him. Jim, if everything fell into place, if the HHS director coming in under Trump were your best friend, or maybe Trump or Elon was your best friend, what steps can be taken to really sort this thing out finally?
Jim Haslam: You can like subpoena people and keep doing for years and they're gonna keep doing these charades. It took us 5 years. Us is not me. You know, it's other people. I did not file for you. I didn't write a research paper. I just stand on the shoulders of others. It took us 5 years to get to see these emails inside Rocky Mountain Lab.
And just to put a footnote on this, you know, there is a smoking gun email, you know, in the book that essentially proves the Egyptian fruit bat is a transmission model. I want to make this very clear because it exonerates Danielle Anderson of any, you know, responsibility for this thing real quick. Tony keeps the Egyptian fruit bat colony for Rocky Mountain Lab. He breeds them in captivity for Rocky Mountain Lab. DARPA pays him to breed them in captivity for Rocky Mountain Lab. DARPA pays Tony Schountz at Colorado State to send his bats to Hamilton, Montana once a year, $1,000 a year. So in a way, the DARPA, you know, preempt team, which beat Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak, you know, had a hand on this too.
So in that, you know, exchange, I want to get to this because this is the smoking gun email, the smokestick email. I put this in front of every bat virologist on the planet, you know, prove me wrong. I wish, and I would move on with my life gladly.
But inside this email, essentially, is Tony Schountz out of curiosity. He's a, he's like, he's kind of the Limpa Long of the, of Colorado. He's the Batman of the U. S. Out of his own genuine curiosity, good guy. These are all, you know, interesting people with their own curiosity. I'm going to stick every animal I got and I'm going to infect it. This is now February of 2020. And, and Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountain Lab says, don't do it. Don't do it. We've already, we, myself and Ralph Baric have already tested that, that, and it didn't work. And, and, and, Vincent Munster sends Tony Schountz an email, with the link to this 2018 paper that we started this conversation off with.
WIV-1 does not infect Egyptian fruit bats. And so he's trying to discourage Tony Schountz from actually running the test in February, 2020 out of, you know, out of just joyful curiosity, Tony Schountz fires off the email back to him and says we have some curious results, but we have 21 day positive test results of my Egyptian fruit bat colony without symptoms And you get this get this Vincent Munster.
Not only did my contact bats get infected. They're the ones that aren't you know they're the virgin bats put in after the bats have been infected a day after you infect three bats. Then you put in a contact bat in the same cage to see if you get transmission onto the next bat. That's very typical. But then he had a negative control sample housed in a cage above the infected bats. Above was the word he used in all capital letters. And he says, I can't believe it, but all my, you know, negative control bats are infected by this thing too. This is really weird, isn't it, Vincent Munster? And he said he put a smokestick up there to get the airflow from the HEPA filter. Down to the ground inside Colorado where he's at in Fort Collins and it came around the other side and it infected this, this, this, this negative control bat cage above.
This thing was so contagious there was no containing it. This thing would have leaked from a BSL 5. They threw the kitchen sink at this thing, not to infect us humans, it's an accident. It's an animal vaccine to infect live bats. This thing, the area was not cranked up. You know, everything about this thing, you know, is, is, is designed to transmit through air through aerosols.
And that was shown in what I consider to be the smoking gun email between these two who unknowingly gave it up.
Steve Hsu: Okay, just to elaborate on that a little bit, so the actual virus you're talking about here is WA1. Okay, so this is an experiment done with WA1, February 2020, at Colorado State, guy who's an expert with fruit bats, and it's found to be incredibly contagious among fruit bats. That email from Munster, where he cited the failed result from 2018 with a different virus. What's the thought process there? Here he's telling his friend don't try this in your bats, but is he saying it's not going to work because look at this paper, it didn't work in fruit-- the other thing didn't work in fruit bats. What's going on there?
Jim Haslam: He's gaslighting him kind of like Baric did Kristian Anderson. You know, he's that, that, that's kind of that parallel. I'm going to get, I'm going to get into, I mean, the email is in the book. It's public record now. It only emerged this past summer, meaning, you know, 2024, but it's incredible to have.
I will admit this inside the email. I, personally , knew what to look for. Now, I've been trudging through these FOIA documents, you know, looking for something because I woke up one day and I thought, I was like, you know what, the U.S. CDC is sitting on unpublished data and I'm going to accuse them of it. And I'm like, well, why don't I just email the guy and ask him, you know, hey, you keep an Egyptian fruit bat colony, Atlanta, Georgia, and me sitting in this chair in Houston, Texas, now, you're sitting on published data. Cause I know SARS CoV 2, WA1 infects Egyptian fruit bats. How do I know that? Because the Germans already showed that. So why don't you publish your results? He says, well, we don't want to repeat the results, the Germans already tested. But it is a non natural reservoir host.
The non-natural reservoir host was the thing that stuck in my mind. I don't name the guy in the book. I'm not going to name him. I don't really care, but he gave me what I needed. Self confidence to look through these FOIA documents to find out what I thought. And as I'm reading through it, I read the paragraph where Tony Schountz describes the test.
And I thought that's Egyptian fruit bats. To their defense, I look at the subject line of the email and it says Jamaican fruit bats. This is basically a new world lab animal, basically that's, that's used a lot. But back below it you can see what's happening. If you go all the way down to the February email, you can see that this isn't, they call it the bat Rosetta's, you know, that's essentially the Latin name for this Egyptian fruit bat.
So it was hard to tell exactly which bat they're talking about, but I asked Tony Schountz directly. Did you run this test on Egyptian fruit bats? I did it via Twitter. And then he deleted his Twitter account. So he's, he's gone, you know, I mean, he was accessible and now he's not accessible. I've asked these people to provide me a defense, a denial.
I asked Vincent Munster, did he run it? And if he did, why don't you publish the results? So I guess to answer your question that you started off with before I get off these tangents is what can we do? We can educate ourselves on this thing. We can have an adult conversation about this thing. These people did not set out to blow up the world.
They were trying to, you know, infect bats. They wound up infecting us. If we just admit this and we go with them, you know, we, who's we, you know, as truth seekers, and we say, you Rocky Mountain Lab are sitting on unpublished data, you have not published the Egyptian fruit bat transmission data. Please publish that.
Obviously the test has been run, but it hasn't been published. Since then, Vincent Munster has tested Jamaican fruit bats, all kinds of other little weird things. He's run all kinds of tests on various bats, but he will not do the Egyptian fruit bat test. So he's sitting on that unpublished data. He just needs to give this to us, you know, let us humans, you know, on this planet that endured this, see the results, see the results of the W1 transmission.
He has not done it on deer. Kansas did, but he has not. Kansas State University did, but he has not done so. He did not do it on deer mice. Again, Tony Schountz did it on deer mice, but not Vincent Munster. And Tony Schountz has gotten mad at him in some emails. Don't you have a deer mice colony? Why aren't you running this test?
Why do I have to do it? Why do I have to waste my funds? You know, it's kind of funny to see these two go at it with each other. He did do the mink, but he did not do the mink, meaning the neobison bison. But I don't think he didn't do WA1. He's a bit sneaky when he does things. He may not use the ancestral strain.
And then someone else in Rocky Mountain Lab did the Syrian hamster. So Rocky Mount Lab, if we were to get together and say, Look. Let's have an open letter, open scientific discussion. You have lab animals inside your lab, pre-pandemic, that have not been tested with WA1 isolate, the best known ancestral strain of SARS CoV 2.
Please publish the data so that we can see the results.
Steve Hsu: Are you sure this would really prove the result because it's already known that it transmits in those species right from other labs.
Jim Haslam: I just bring it up because, you know, it's a cover up, you know, and it, what you can understand it, being a physicist, I can understand because I've just thought about this way too much, but your average Joe on the street cannot comprehend the fact that, you know, something cooked up in Montana could have been used in Wuhan and leaked and came out and blew up the world and they covered it up.
But if you propose to, you know, the people that don't really think about this too often, that look, they're sitting on published data, they understand there is a cover up and there's something more to be said. And then maybe, you know, there's a political leverage to go in there and open up the lab books.
We were, you know, the whole time everyone's been wanting to see the lab books of the WIV. We saw them when she's in the lead published RaTG 13. She opened up the lab book. She opened up the database. We saw her records, you know, essentially. We saw Ralph Baric's records with a FOIA. I have a genome 20 percent different from SARS 2 or SARS 1.
And that turned out to be SARS 2. So that was their
Steve Hsu: FOIA.
A little in the weeds question because I am not sure I understand the actual biology of this. So, if I want to make it, suppose I had those five species: deer, deer mice, mink, hamsters, fruit bats in my lab in Montana and Baric has sent me this sample and I'm trying to make it transmissible in those five species.
What am I actually doing? Like am I modifying the virus further to make it transmissible in those model species or what do you actually do?
Jim Haslam: How does Munster aerosolize the agent? Is that what you're
Steve Hsu: Exactly. Yes. Yes. Sorry.
Jim Haslam: So it's not public record. He was not allowed to publish how he did it. And he is basically the protege of Ron Fouchier. So when you read about the engineer doomsday in 2012 from the New York Times, it was the Ron Fouchier experiment of ferrets in Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the lead author on some of those papers was Vincent Munster.
He is the protege of one Ron Fouchier, and Ron Fouchier was the face of that old disaster along with Tony Fauci who funded it, and there's a huge debate along with the, you know, give the Richard EBRs credit, the bio Hawks. Biodefense Hawks. I would just say that the biosecurity hawks, excuse me, did not allow Ron Fouchier and Tony Fauci to publish the results.
You know, they did not publish the entire way it was done, so it was always an unpublished state secret how to, how to aerosolize the agent. Best I can piece together, this is how it's done, without rambling too much. I've listened to Fouchier talk a lot. He calls it three phenotypes. You aim for the upper respiratory tract at a targeted temperature, massive amounts of virus in the upper respiratory tract at a targeted temperature is the key there. As best I can tell this, this, this, this bat, you know world, these bats actually ironically have about the same, you know, body temperature in the upper respiratory tract, a similar age to the receptor as us in the upper respiratory tract.
So they aim for these 3 phenotypes, a massive amount of virus in the upper respiratory tract. I got a targeted temperature. And you do it by taking the genome and you shove it down the nose of one. You force the sneeze, you get it into the air, and then you quickly bring in the contact animal to get the thing transmissible.
And as you daisy chain it about six or seven times over, by forcing the sneeze, you get this transmissible agent. And you also have, you can see Munster's, you start with a small animal like a, like a, like the Syrian golden hamster, which the kids play with, and you have these tubes that are about a meter apart, but then they're two meters apart, then the three meters apart.
So he's trained the agent how to transmit further in a small animal basically over
Steve Hsu: I get it now. So they're relying on the natural mutability, the natural variation of the virus, and then they're setting it up so that what they end up harvesting is the one that could actually traverse that.
Jim Haslam: He's trying to make the microns of the agent as small as possible. That's one of those unique features of starscope too. It's like. It's like three or four microns. I don't even know what it was, but it's so small. It can float upwards of.
Steve Hsu: I understand. So they're, they're, they're basically using the existing variation in the virus because it's very mutable. And then they're just basically selecting it for the ones that transmit through the air.
Jim Haslam: And there's, you know, a lot of these are, you know, Ralph Baric was very uncomfortable with transmission of coronavirus to his defense. That's why he always used that mouse model. You know, he said he would feel icky immoral was a term. I don't remember what he used. I use it in the book.
Steve Hsu: Yeah, you want. I understand you want non sneezing systems, because otherwise
Jim Haslam: right. You know,
Steve Hsu: Otherwise somebody can use the sneezing transmission as a way to select for variants of the virus that then are aerosolized. So I understand.
Okay, Jim. It's been great talking to you. I appreciate everything you've done.
I hope-- I feel like we've done a good job elaborating this, so the audience who's willing to sit through two hours of this will come away with a deeper understanding, like I did, of the origins of SARS CoV 2. I just want to end by saying that I'm not taking any position on this. These are all real scientists with probably honorable motivations for what they were doing at the time.
My base assumption is because there have been many zoonotic transmissions of any new virus or pandemic, my base assumption would be that zoonotic engineering is an extra step. So if you're a Bayesian, you might, you know, reduce the probability a priori that it could be engineered. And so one should, you know, have a high threshold for evidence that before one concludes that it was actually engineered.
But of course, I think it's important to try to understand these things because this kind of research is clearly very dangerous and deserves more attention. So let me end there. Thank you again, Jim, for coming on the podcast.
Jim Haslam: Thanks for having me, Steve.
