Jeffrey Sachs: Lessons from the COVID Commission, Lab Leak Questions, and Nord Stream — #21

Show Notes

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, bestselling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development. Professor Sachs serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and is a University Professor, Columbia's highest academic rank.

Steve and Jeffrey discuss:

0:00 Jeffrey Sachs’ experience on the Lancet Commission for COVID-19

13:41 Potential for bioweapons research

19:06 Why a lab leak is plausible

32:38 Possible defenses for COVID coverup

43:56 Government secrecy and other areas of concern

48:08 Reflections on Nord Stream sabotage

Resources:

The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19

pandemic, Sachs et al., Sept. 14 2022: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)01585-9/fulltext

Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US

Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic,

Current Affairs, Aug 3 2022: https://www.jeffsachs.org/interviewsandmedia/64rtmykxdl56ehbjwy37m5hfahwnm5

Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.

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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU.

Please send any questions or suggestions to [e-mail] or Steve on Twitter @hsu_steve.

Creators & Guests

Host

Stephen Hsu

Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University.

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Steve Hsu
Yep. Jeff, let's just jump right into it. You chaired a Lancet Commission to explore, among other things, the origins of COVID. Could you please just share with the audience what you learned through that experience?

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Well, I learned it's a complicated story. And I learned that we haven't been hearing exactly the full story all along the way. As you know, this Lancet Commission was set up in mid 2020, a few months after the outbreak began to look at what was happening to try to make recommendations along the way of this global emergency. And then to take a step back what we thought would be, at the end or towards the end of the pandemic, and make an assessment of what happened and what lessons can we learn. We've just issued the final report of the Lancet Commission at the time of the UN General Assembly in September. One of the topics as you mentioned, was where did this virus, the SARS-CoV-2 virus come from? And I can tell you from the beginning I was reading the newspapers and I had enough experience with zoonotic diseases, I worked on AIDS, public policy. Of course, I'm an economist, not a medical doctor, a research scientist in virology. But I had worked on zoonotic breakthroughs and Pandemic response in the past, and had chaired a commission for the World Health Organization more than 40 years ago on investing in health for economic development. So I thought, this is like SARS, actually in 2003, for which there was a spillover we think, from a market to probably a Palm Civet is the animal that is designated as the most likely culprit of the first SARS infection. And I read the newspapers and I thought, well, this is probably yet another of these zoonotic diseases, like Ebola or like HIV, in fact, or like SARS. Then came the attacks starting in Washington. Well, this is something that China concocted, and I thought, Oh my God, here we go. Now we're going to turn this into geopolitics. So I, more or less, felt even more convinced that this was a natural spillover. And when I was asked to head the Lancet Commission, I reached out to a person that I knew had been working on zoonotic spillovers for a decade, Peter gastric, so I stepped right into what would be an absolutely wild ride. Peter Dascha heads something called EcoHealth Alliance. And it is an organization based on the threats of zoonotic spillovers, that is emerging diseases coming out of nature. And they were monitoring and collecting viruses and looking for outbreaks in rural areas in China and Southeast Asia. So I thought, oh, go to the source, go to the person who's most monitoring this and ask that person to head the Task Force on origins. Now, the Lancet Commission has 10 task forces. So this was only one of the topics but one that was very interesting and quite important. And Dashrath went ahead. After I asked him to head that task force. And I recruited a group of scientists, pretty much like minded scientists, I could see people who were working one way or another on natural spillovers. So I went on for a few months, and we were attending to other issues. Should you wear face masks? What about LockDown? So is the vaccine coming or not? How would it be used? There were so many issues and debates, and the Origins was, in a way, seemingly an intellectual exercise, but not the most immediate, practical concern. or, and by the summer and fall of 2021 a major article had come out in Nature Medicine in March 2020, called the proximal origins of SARS Cove to which I had read carefully, I thought, which described why this was a natural spillover. And there was a section in the middle that said, not from a lab just doesn't have the right markings. And nothing in the lab was much like this. And you could really rule that out. So, by the late fall 2020, I was knowingly telling other people, yeah, this is natural. Don't listen to this stuff, you know, lots of conspiracies, crazy, crazy ideas around, but I'm pretty much on the inside. And I can tell you that, that this is natural. I think things will start to turn in early 2021. First of all, there were a few dogged reporters, very few and not one in a mainstream outlet. Nobody in the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal or Financial Times, or any of the major English language newspapers were saying anything other than, well, it's natural, and China's probably hiding what happened in the marketplace. And but clearly, it came out of nature. But there were a few reporters, even filing lawsuits. Tell us something about what's going on. And, of course, I started to hear the controversies around EcoHealth Alliance, because people were saying, hey, maybe EcoHealth Alliance, the group that I had basically brought into the Lancet Commission, but because it was there, maybe they know more than they're telling us. And so I started asking questions and started reading the controversies late, I can't take any credit for early insight on this. But I started asking, and, of course, what happened was more and more disparities with the natural story started to come out. First, no animal was found anywhere in China. 10s of 1000s tested, and no evidence whatsoever, of unnatural spillover. And more and more stories started to come out that well, some fairly dangerous research, or suspicious research or research we don't really understand was underway at the Wuhan Institute of virology. And lo and behold, connected with EcoHealth Alliance. So, of course, I was open minded about this, to be sure and started asking questions of Daszak and was not getting honest answers from Daszak. He was evasive, denying that research that others were vociferously claiming to be done, was actually done. And he said things that immediately, I knew were not true to the media, I said we don't do any research like that we don't have any experiments of that kind. All we do is work with the local communities, statements that are absolutely untrue, and deeply misleading. Well, that's extraordinarily uncomfortable if you're chairing a commission. And at that point, I started calling around to many more of my friends and colleagues, and they pointed me to others and I got a thorough briefing really, for the first time, about a year, not in less than a year, but probably by early spring 2021. And the experiments that were being done were explained to me, and this was really striking for me, you know, again, I'm an economist. I'm not the lab bench scientist, but I can read the articles and I was given a reading list and I went through them and I went back to Daszak and said, Peter, this is really concerning. I'd like to see your grant proposal that is the basis of this work. And he said, No, no, I can't get that to you. And I said, What do you mean, this is an NIH grant, and I need to see it. I need to understand this right now. No, no, no, I can't give this to my lawyers and I can't Whoa, Peter. We're a transparent commission. You're heading a task force on origins. If you can't get this, you can't share this commission. That's for sure.

Steve Hsu
Just to verify, Jeffrey. That was a funded grant?

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Yeah, that one was a funded grant. So I wanted to know the details of it.

Steve Hsu
Which is potentially available through FOIA or other methods, in well, in the future.

Jeffrey D. Sachs
It soon came out by FOIA. So I got to read it. But not from Daszak. And so I started to see the resistance inside. I told him he could not chair this task force. He could stay on the commission, but he could not be in charge of this. Then, soon afterwards, that very Grant was foiled, and was released by the Freedom of Information Act. Whoa, that was quite concerning, because this documented exactly the dangerous research, especially in this case, creating dynamic viruses by taking virus backbones and replacing spike proteins on that backbone to test for pathogenicity and transmissibility infectivity of the kind of neurons. So the kind of gain of function research that was increasingly being debated on the fringes, but not in the mainstream. And we're NIH was saying, we, we don't we don't support gain of function research. And there was the content of the confrontation between Rand Paul and Fauci and pouchy absolutely denied all of this. But then the pipeline started to open up a little bit. And I saw that what Daszak had represented to me was absolutely not true. So I told him, You can't be on this commission. You can't be on the task force, at which point, the task force erupted against me to x, You're siding with the dark side, anti science, so and, and so forth. And I said, Look, I want it from all of you. clarification about potential conflicts of interest. Are you associated with the Wuhan Institute of virology? Are you associated with the EcoHealth Alliance? Do you have other affiliations that could be potential conflicts of interest because I'm chairing a transparent, open, unbiased assessment, and I need to know now from you, silence, silence from the group. I gave them a week, please submit things if you have any doubts, please talk to me about the doubts because I need to know about them. And we can talk to them through silence. Two weeks, three weeks, no response at all. Except that one of the scientists on this task force absolutely lambasted me for recklessness, anti science, and really, in extraordinarily crude terms, I must say, a pretty this is just words in a world of much more violence, so no one can take it, but still really excoriating terms about gross irresponsibility and gross anti scientific and unprofessional behavior, because of this and so forth. Then, the next FOIA came out the next week and showed that that guy was a co investigator with Daszak undergrad, I could not believe it, because I had asked for any kind of conflict of interest, the guy that is excoriating me, is up to his neck in exactly this research program, and never admitted it. Okay, tonight.

Steve Hsu
Can I ask you about that research program? So it's NIAID. They do bioweapons research, and some of their funding comes from defense or sort of spooky sources and they're one of the biggest in terms of funding for the NIH. Am I correct in thinking that?

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Yeah, they don't call it bio warfare. And I cannot authoritatively tell you what they do. They call it bio defense. But the fact of the matter is that they manage the US bio defense program to a very significant extent. And they don't want us looking, that's for sure. They don't want us to know, they don't want us to know the details, and they don't tell us the details.

Steve Hsu
And so by treaty, we are not allowed to do offensive research on bio weapons, but we're allowed to do defensive research. But the line is very blurry. Because if you're developing a vaccine against potential weapons your enemies might use, you still need to have access to dangerous viruses that the enemy might use. And so that line is, I think, very unclear between offensive and defensive uses of bio weapons.

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Well, I think it's unclear for a much simpler reason as well, which is that it is completely unsupervised. From the public point of view, we don't have a clue as to what's going on. And they don't want us to know. And they're not telling. And they're not telling Congress, and they're not telling the public. And by the way, one of the interesting Freedom of Information Act responses by NIH by doing an AI AI D was a lawsuit for them to report on their research on SARS, like viruses coronaviruses. And they were released and you cannot even believe it, but you can find it online. I think it was the intercept that had this one. They released a 290 page report that has the cover page of the NIH Research Program, essentially on beta coronaviruses. And then every one of the 290 pages is 100% redacted. In other words, they gave as a response to the lawsuit 290 blank pages. And we're supposed to trust them. Which, of course, as my story progresses, I don't trust them to turn around because they haven't told the truth from the very start. So just to not go into every twist and turn of this saga. Suffice it to say that the group that had assembled was completely up to their necks, in EcoHealth Alliance, Wuhan everything. So I disbanded that entirely. But we came to understand pretty quickly that there were two huge kinds of problems that were at stake. One was the research that was underway was dangerous. Certainly, and it was us who funded us back then us technology, I would say to a great extent, and especially technology led out of the University of North Carolina, where this cutting edge viral manipulation is done. And that's one part. And somebody leaked. The proposal that was made to DARPA, the Defense Department research agency for an extraordinarily dangerous set of experiments. A really remarkable document called the diffuse proposal, which is a three way partnership of University of North Carolina Wuhan Institute of virology and EcoHealth Alliance. And the proposal on page 10, which says this is 2017. It says there are more than 180 previously unreported strains of cervical viruses that are SARS like viruses. On page 11. It says we will test these viruses and when they don't have a particular part of the genome, called a proteolytic cleavage site, we will insert a proteolytic cleavage site into the virus. What they're saying there is we will deliberately make these previously unreported viruses much more dangerous because the research program at UNC and in association with others had established clearly that adding in this piece of the genome called a proteolytic cleavage site and specifically a Furin cleavage site. Because Furin is the enzyme that cleaves this spike protein by inserting it, you create a dangerous pathogen. That's the bottom line and about the research program.

Steve Hsu
Can I interrupt for one second? So this was five years ago that this proposal was written and five years in the field of gene editing is a really long time. So when you talk to actual experts, how many of them would say not only with a, you know, could SARS COVID have come from the lab. But even putting that aside, if we wanted to, could we actually, with today's technology actually make something dangerous is COVID?

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Well, first of all what we have in SARS cov. Two is a SARS like virus with a pure and cleavage site, and maybe with some other tinkering, but the core of the biological innovation, whether from nature or from a laboratory, is to add the urine cleavage site, and that is for amino acids that make all the difference in the infectivity. SARS just is not very infectious. That's why it died out. After killing several 100 people, but it died out it didn't kill 18 million people, because it's not so infectious. Add in our sequence into this genome, and wow, you've got to doozy. And so the real question and I'm coming to the second part, the real question is, where'd that your Cleveland side come from? Okay. Well, the diffuse Grant said, maybe they put it there, because, especially in retrospect, looking at the sequence of research articles and interviews that Ralph barrack, among others, Dave, he's the head of the lab at UNC, they were on the trail of curing cleavage sites, that's for sure. This was a major focus, because they knew that the secret sauce can make a SARS like virus really dangerous. So they were on that trail, and they wanted to do these experiments. Okay. That's one thing that we learned in the fall of 2021. We the public. The second thing that we learned is that there was no credible suspicion. And I would say at this point, a manipulative series of meetings in late January to early February 2020, that has been brilliantly documented by the reporter, Emily Cop at the US right to know organization. And through all the lawsuits that we have right to know when others have undertaken, she has pieced together a timeline that really makes your hair stand on end. And the timeline is basically that in late January 2020, a lot of scientists were saying, Whoa, look at that Furin cleavage site, how back dead there. That's really unusual. Bats, by the way, would not light bats here and cleavage sites. So it didn't, it didn't evolve within the bat reservoir. Because our AR is not good for bats, which hold this and technically not in the lungs. And because of that, the Puritan cleavage site is not something that would naturally evolve within the bat population. So a number of scientists are saying, wait a minute, where did that thing come from? This is again within a few weeks of the genome being known. And it was posted to ostensibly January 11 2020 for the world to see. And then the scientists looked at it and said, quite immediately, they focus right in on this. S one S two junction of the spike protein saw the Furin cleavage site said something really odd is going on. So Fauci and Collins, Collins being the head of NIH, called a conference call for February 120 20.

Steve Hsu
This is the call of Jeremy Farrar at the Wellcome Trust.

Jeffrey D. Sachs
So Jeremy for our Wellcome Trust, organizes the call, and then summarizes it in an email. And thanks to not only transparency and honesty, but thanks to a Freedom of Information Act, we know what was on the call, and what was on the call was what most of the scientists said is pretty suspicious. Some said I can't figure out how nature could ever have done this. Others said 8020 lab 7030 lab 5050 lab, but basically, oh, this really could have come out of a laboratory.

Steve Hsu
So just ready to roll, just to reiterate early 2020 initial reactions having known that, now that we knew what the genome was for COVID initial reactions were plausible to have been of lab origin, maybe some people even at 20, lab origin. How do you think those numbers have changed in the subsequent two years? So if you talk to those same scientists, and they give you their aunt, suppose hypothetically, they gave you their honest opinion, would those numbers have changed in either direction very much?

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Well, I think the stunning thing that we know is that within three days, they went from 7030 lab, or 8020, lab to 100 to zero natural, because what we see is a narrative concocted

Steve Hsu
can talk right, right, I accept your claim that there has been an active cover up or deception. The secondary issue is, though, what is the sort of best scientific opinion today about?

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Okay, so the best scientific opinion depends because those who are in on this narrative are dug in deeply. And when other scientists say, you know, boy, this, this looks like a lab creation, or it easily could have been a lab creation, or that isn't exactly what the diffuse Grant said, it wouldn't be. They get excoriated by this quite narrow group. It's not a large group. It is a group for around an hour and Fauci. It's actually not the profession by any means. It's a quite small group of the same people from the start. At the very start, they said lab, three days later, they said nature, you can even track comments that, gee, this would be bad if the rumors started that this was from a lab and so forth. So they concocted a narrative without a scientific basis. What's fascinating for me, and I mentioned it obliquely, earlier, was I then went back to read proximal origins as all of this was spilling out. And I just could not believe what I had missed the first time. And I think what everybody missed was almost a joke. In the section where it says This couldn't have come from a lab. The argument is, this couldn't have come from a lab, because it's unlike any previously reported. Virus. That's the heart of it. Well, first of all, it could have been an unrecorded virus. We know from diffuse that there were more than 180 unreported viruses, but they say, No, it wasn't like a previously reported virus. And then what made my jaw drop is the footnote to that statement is to a 2014. Paper. That's almost a joke. I recommend everybody look at footnote 22 proximal origins, because it's unbelievable. They're looking at an outbreak in 2020. And they're denying that it could have come from a lab citing a 2014. Paper. And what is absolutely, profoundly inappropriate about that paper is that they don't say, we don't know what the lab was doing. We need to know what the lab was doing. We can't make definitive statements about what the lab was doing, because we're not privy to them being in March 2020, and not having access to the lab notebooks. They don't say any of that. They don't even hint at the idea that more information could be found out by understanding the experiments that were being done. They just pull the curtain down and say no, it is not from a lab. And that's the phoniness of what happens. That is a concocted narrative. That's for sure. They made it up. Now they justify it. God knows they could even be right, by the way. But yes, they were not making these assertions on the basis of scientific evidence, or rigorous thinking or even thinking plainly about the kind of evidence one should have to make these announcements. Now what happened afterwards was they said this in 2020. They tamp down all of the counter arguments who were then labeled as fringe scientists, and they thought that they would get this down once and for all, then the diffuse. Grant was leaked or the grant proposal was leaked. What's interesting is not one of those scientists involved in proximate origin said, Oh, I didn't know about that. Oh, that's interesting. Well, that, that changes something about what we said, Not one of them. In my view, they're not being honest. It's not that they're so sure, because they don't have an animal in the marketplace. By the way, even if there were an animal, they have no single, even remote, story other than hand waving about where the fear and cleavage site came in. That's not a simple story. One side says, Hey, we're gonna put it in. That's our research program. The other side says, I don't know, I don't want to talk about it. And yet, we're supposed to believe that I don't know, I don't want to talk about it as the definitive storage, and just ignore what you're seeing on the other side, which says, hey, we are doing research to put that into SARS viruses.

Steve Hsu
Let me let me just make sure I understand. So there was already a proposal in 2017 to insert the fear and cleavage site. Now that grant was not actually funded. But no one is saying now that the technologies or the methods that they were proposing to use wouldn't work. In reality, no one is saying that, are they?

Jeffrey D. Sachs
No, in fact, people are telling me that the research was actually done, in fact, actually done before the research proposal went in. So I'd heard from one of the reasons.

Steve Hsu
Which is common in NIH, which is common for NIH.

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Yes, because I expressed to somebody that the fact that the research proposal was turned down, and to my mind was meaningless in terms of investigation, because you constantly make a research proposal. And if it gets turned down, you continue anyway, or you. And the person said to me, Jeff, I was the reviewer. The research was done before the proposal went in. So it's even more than that we had the capabilities. I think, there, I've not heard from anybody, not a single scientist that claims that you couldn't make this thing. It's pretty straightforward, not for me. But for those who do this. And Barix, reverse genetic system technology is the platform that makes this stuff. And so nobody's saying it can't be done. What we do know is it was the intention to do it. What we do know is that there was a massive library of materials, that is genetic material to do this. What we do know from Beric, also, very interestingly, is the motivation to do it earliest one motivation, he explains in one interview, quite fascinating Wait, he says, Look, nature makes all sorts of new viruses and so forth. We need to be ready with vaccines. And we need the most powerful possible vaccines, because we don't know what's going to come after us. So we need to test our vaccines against the most powerful pathogens. And we can't just expect that we're going to collect the most powerful pathogens, we need to make the most powerful pathogens so that we can actually test the vaccines against them. And this is stated in a 2015 interview

Steve Hsu
by Jeffrey, that from the national security standpoint, that's not crazy, right. So if you think this is the way that our enemies are going to make a really dangerous weapon, well, we need to make it ourselves and test vaccines against it. So it's absolutely crazy from a net sec. perspective, right? It's dangerous, but you can understand why they would act that way.

Jeffrey D. Sachs
It is true, but it is crazy to do it in a BSL two facility, meaning to do these experiments on dangerous pathogens in a low biosafety level Lab, which, apparently

Steve Hsu
Did you really mean two or three? I thought

Jeffrey D. Sachs
I had to because I had been told that it was in Wuhan. This was done in BSL two conditions. I don't know whether this Yep. So

Steve Hsu
when I was told it should definitely be three or above.

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Yeah, you know, they when they're in the spacesuits that's for that for show, because most of the the ironic thing you know with it is as I understand it. And I may misunderstand some of these points, certainly. But as I understand it, since SARS was not so infectious, it was not classified in a pathogenic level that required a BSL four. And one thought is that one of the reasons why the US was partnering up with China. Partly it was to get access to the vaccine to the virus strains that were there, no doubt, partly, it may have been to observe what the Chinese were doing. And partly it may have been because they were doing it faster and quicker in a lower BSL facility. So if it had to be done in the US, there would have been a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of problems. But doing it at Wuhan wouldn't raise those problems. So I think where we are is rather straightforward. And that is the following. You have two hypotheses, they're both still viable, could have come out of nature, it could have come out of a lab, there is not an AI Oda of either, it shouldn't have put it this way. There's nothing which rules out the laboratory, and the accumulation of the evidence, and the accumulation of the bad behavior, I would say, points more and more towards the lab. Because now we understand the dangerous research program, we understand the experiments, we understand the library of unreported viruses, we understand the research setting in which this was done, and so on. So I think the evidence has gotten more and more towards the laboratory as being the very likely explanation. That market hype, the market hypothesis has many deep problems, actually many gaps and flaws

Steve Hsu
In it, let me just give you the strongest defense of [unclear] and [unclear], and these guys, maybe they were doing this research, and maybe they were even encouraged by national security interests of the United States to do this research. And maybe they didn't, you know, ultimately, maybe COVID was not a lab leak. But these guys are defending themselves, because they know that they could take a lot of the heat because of their previous activities. If that narrative is too cold. Is that? Is that a reasonable defense of these guys? Or is that too charitable?

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Well, it's possible. You know, what, what, what we know is that they're not telling us the truth about possibilities. That's for sure. We know they concocted a narrative. We don't know the full story. Why? There are many reasons why. One is they don't know what happened. Maybe research was being done. Maybe Wuhan went off on its own and did things that they just don't know. That's one possibility. The second possibility is they know that they were part of it, and they're covering it up. The third possibility is done. We're not sure. But we sure don't want people looking at our bio defense research, because we got a lot of it. It's secret, it's classified, and we don't want people poking their noses into it. So I think the fact is, we don't know. But frankly, it's not a defense. I think for scientists, the only defense is, here's our lab notebooks, here's what we were doing. The chips will fall where they might. And we need to know that's, by the way, the only justifiable position in this, which is that there is transparency. So we figure out what the heck is really going on, where this came from, what the risks are, what we need to do, to stop this pandemic and move forward to stop future pandemics. You know, there's a lot of dangerous research underway. I think this is irrefutably true, but it's unsupervised. So this is another reason to find this out. Because if it didn't happen, this time, it's going to happen the next time. And we really need to get this under control. I personally lost confidence in NIH in this. We never got an honest view. Not only that we got a deliberately concocted false narrative about this. And that's not satisfactory when you're dealing in high stakes risks, because where could the trust possibly be? I think there are a couple of other things to add speed that are important in this. We heard it, but I don't think we were hearing clearly enough. What Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, was saying to us, he was the head of one Half of the US response to the pandemic, he believed from the start, that this very likely came out of a laboratory. And Fauci shut him down. And Redfield knows a lot. So this is not some crazy outside view. This is the view of one of the most significant insiders, someone extraordinarily experienced, by the way, in the US bio defense sector, who is aware of who does what, when, and how, and who says, Wait a minute, you never looked at the possibility of the laboratory. And when I raised Fauci, his response was to keep me out of all meetings, rather than to take an honest view. So we have step by step, more and more reasons for thinking, it's not just us looking in saying, God, this is weird. It's people that were right at the top, in the midst of this being stopped from having an honest view. And what Redfield and others have also pointed out is that while we did not pick up the signals from Wuhan in the fall, because there are signals coming from everywhere in the world all the time about things, and most of them are really noise in the end. If you look back retrospectively, it's pretty clear, at least according to what I'm told that there were some strange things happening in Wuhan already in September and October. And that fits the normal phylogenetic clock for this outbreak. Because if you look at the variants, the mutations, the strains, and you try to figure out when the original spillover occurred, the dating is October, November, not December. The Market Hypothesis depends on this being December, it depends on the market being the place where the spillover took place, not just a place where the virus was spread. But the genetic evidence, but also, the human intelligence evidence, looked at retrospectively suggests that something was happening in Wuhan and outbreak already in September or October, and that this was potentially knowable, but in the noise of daily events, it, it probably wasn't really picked up until a retrospective look at the evidence. But I think the point is we have enough to say we need an independent investigation in the United States, not waiting on China. But what NIH was doing, what major US scientific labs were doing, what they know, what the experiments were, when they were done, show us the lab books. And we have enough reason to go to that now.

Steve Hsu
Now, Jeff, you're a real world guy, you know more about how the real world operates than almost any academic. So what are the chances of a scenario where we do actually get this level of transparency in the United States?

Jeffrey D. Sachs
The US is really good at shutting down investigations. So that's been true my whole life. It took me a long time to understand they shut down any honest investigation of the Kennedy assassination, and almost anything afterwards, that has been really, I won't use the term I would normally use. It's not for polite company. But any of these events. The Iraq war on false pretenses and all the rest, we almost never investigate these things. And so this is pretty tough. This is calling for an investigation of ourselves. And we don't like to investigate ourselves and our government runs on secrecy. It has really run on secrecy since the end of World War Two since the US became the world's superpower. And there's so much that goes on. I know it only you know, I see a lot of the shadows, the doors closing and other things because I do see a lot, but I never see the inner sanctum I'm not in the inner inner sanctum and I don't pretend to be and I don't want to be for that matter, because I don't like what they're doing in there. But the point is that we typically don't get honesty at core. You issue like this one. And so I can't say that the chances are good. But I would say, practically speaking, the Republican side of the house, and the Senate has said something weird's going on. The Democrats have circled the wagons around Fauci strangely, because the origin of the SARS code tool is not a left-right issue, in my view. But in any event, it turned into a left-right issue like everything else in our country. And it is possible that if the Republicans win one or both houses of Congress, in the November elections that they will launch an independent investigation, I just don't know. But it's not the typical modus operandi of the US government.

Steve Hsu
I just want to share one, I wanted to give you as much time to talk as you need, I just want to share one story. So not so long before COVID began, I was in London, I had a meeting with Jeremy Farrar on a different matter. And I met his deputy, who is a former EMI, I don't know if it's five or six.

Jeffrey D. Sachs
The former head of MI5, MI5.

Steve Hsu
Yes. So my feeling on this is that if the government is nervous, because they have treaty obligations, about bio weapons, but they don't want to completely give it up, it's very natural for them to funnel it through the NIH or funnel it through the Wellcome Trust, for example, which is the largest funder of medical research in the UK, I believe, or at least one of them. It's not surprising that spooky people want this program to continue for maybe legitimate national defense reasons. But they want to put it at arm's length so that they can play Fauci or NIH or welcome if they have to, but they want to keep some tabs on it. And it's also a good way to keep tabs on what scientists in other countries like China are doing. If you're funding some of their work. If you have contacts with the leading researchers, maybe they're not doing anything related to defense, maybe they're just trying to, you know, understand how to build better vaccines. Nevertheless, you get a view into what is going on research wise, in that country, and the former students of those people that you're monitoring their product with may be working for the defense establishment in that other country. So I'm almost certain this whole network of stuff exists. And it's this kind of network that would close like this and prevent you from getting the full story of what actually happened with COVID. So any comments on that?

Jeffrey D. Sachs
One of the authors of the proximal origins, said to me, I asked how did you get into this? He said, Well, I'm Jeremy for our spooky friends. I called them and we're very concerned about, you know, where this virus came from. And then Jeremy called me. So that or he's, there was a chain of calls. But he said it himself Jeremy's spooked friends? Well, yes, what we're seeing is the behavior of a highly secretive part of our government. We're not seeing much of it. But we're seeing glimpses of it. So there's no doubt that this is part of, quote, bio defense, whatever that means. And we're not supposed to see that, according to the strictures. But unfortunately, an epidemic broke out that has claimed 18 million lives. So people are rather interested to vote where this came from. And I think what you're saying is absolutely correct. This is a network. And it's a network that is the opposite of transparent. And yet, science, when it gets involved in such networks, is really unpleasant, actually, you know, science is our vital, vital hold on reality. It's our vital way to address complex challenges. But of course, it's constantly suborned by, by the state, by power. And this was true of the nuclear age, of course, it started as a secret state project to make an atomic bomb. It meant that a lot of physics was really under the aegis of the security state. And now we see that biology is under the aegis of the security state, and a lot of high tech is under the aegis of the security state. And the security state doesn't tell us what's going on. They think for our own good. I'm not so sure. But the point is that we don't see even and, and one of the funny things about the security state is that even when things are in plain view, they're denied. hide. So gaslighting, so called is a core part of the behavior of, of the security state, you see something obvious. You say it and they say, No, that's not there. No, that's not true. That's not true. And that's normal behavior.

Steve Hsu
I saw you on Bloomberg the other day talking about Nord Stream. And who did Nord Stream which I think most people in the world think there's at least a strong possibility the US did it. And the idea that our media and government cannot even address that obvious possibility. It's just it's like living in Orwell's book,

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Nord Stream is hilarious, because in its way, hilarious, strange words. But Biden said we have our ways to take this out. He said if Russia invades that's the end of this pipeline. Oh, Mr. President, how could you say that you said we have our ways. Then you have the justice, an online app, the ability to track planes so we see a US Poseidon flying over the site before boom. And then when the bomb goes off, you have the four former foreign ministers of Poland. Radek Sikorski gives who might know, saying thank you USA and tweeting a picture of the massive leak, and then you'll look at the motive, which is that the US has wanted to shut this down the whole time. And naturally, what do we hear in our media? I don't know, a big mystery. Then because I travel around the world. People say to me, Jeff, I want one lead. Reporter who, I'm not going to say more just of course, Jeff, it's the US. And I said it. It'd be nice if your newspaper mentioned that once in a while. But that is exactly like this, you see it straight out. And you cannot get a straight answer. You get it? Well, you're not welcome on this show. I was supposed to be on for a bit longer. But that was the end of that interview. So this is how this world works.

Steve Hsu
Just to clarify a point because it was the first time I'd heard it from you when you were in Bloomberg that there are publicly available radar logs of a helicopter. I think of the type the US military uses, which left Gdansk near the pipeline. And that was soon before the, the the upload,

Jeffrey D. Sachs
It seems that it's not a helicopter, if I understand it correctly, better. It is some kind of military aircraft. And there's a Twitter account, at sander, underscore 2021. On an October one tweet where you can look, I can't evaluate more than that, but it shows a plane that is refueled in midair, that flies over, like flies over the site, does a little curlicue and then flies off. And this was tweeted already on October one and you can you know, it's on the website, and people can evaluate it. I can't fool you. I can't even use the word FOIA. I can't evaluate it. But boy, I want answers. I want answers to this just like I'd like answers to the COVID. Not just we don't discuss this. I'll give you another one just to riff on this for one more moment. We've had this extraordinarily dangerous showing of these upper OSHA nuclear power plants. Now the Russians control the plant. And the Ukrainians are trying to take it back. And the shoveling is of the plant. And our newspapers say, well, we don't know who's selling it, but it's very dangerous. And I say, Well, if the Russians are inside, and the Ukrainians are trying to take it over, maybe it's the Ukrainians shelling it, but our media does not allow any word against Ukrainian actions, not a word. So I've asked very senior people. They say, Yeah, Jeff, of course, it's Ukraine showing the power plant. But you can't find that in the public discourse, because we are told stories, and we're told whether they make any sense, even when they're absolutely captured on film doesn't matter. We're told stories, and that's how the US government operates.

Steve Hsu
You know, I think it's especially infuriating to scientists and academics who are used to carefully reading the evidence and demand some level of honesty and integrity and self consistency in the kinds of things that they read. And the current era is just, it's, it's, it's driving us nuts, I think.

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Yeah. And also, you know, our lives or you go into a seminar and your colleagues attack you to like nothing if you make one slip. Because you're supposed to be on your toes with the evidence and being able to make your case. And that's a healthy process, you know, that's that? That's a really healthy process. So we're confronting a sociology of knowledge in this case, that's completely different. The government's not interested in the truth, the government's interest in the message, the government's interest in the power, the government's interest in the outcome, the government made say, dirty, well, hey, we're protecting you, you idiot, whatever it is, but it's not interested in? Well, who took out the pipeline? Or who created or where did the virus come from? Or who's showing the power plant is not interested in those questions really?

Steve Hsu
Well, Jeff, I want to say I really admire your courage. And I imagine the last year of your life has been maybe qualitatively different from all the previous ones, because you've come out against the narrative on some key topics. Do you want to say anything about that? What has been a personal cost for you?

Jeffrey D. Sachs
Well, look, I think we're in a dangerous situation worldwide. So I think we need some truth. That's the basic, basic point.

Steve Hsu
Great, maybe we should just end there. Jeff. That was fantastic.