Started in the lab in wuhan china yes sir yes yes yes okay and each of you believe that uh by definition if it starts in the lab it’s it’s it’s man-made it’s engineered not not correct okay um it it you know it’s very unlikely this was
Found in nature um but there is a scenario that it could have been collected in nature and then brought to a population center of 11 million which is kind of crazy and then accidentally leaked it could also have been when you say man-made it could have been naturally evolved
Which is what was suggested earlier so it wasn’t like humans putting pieces together but allow the virus to do the virus which do you think is more likely the the humans engineering it or what you just described i think more likely is this was uh and again we’re this is
Speculation but i think more likely it was evolved by passage either in human cells or by quote humanized mice to have a very very virulent pathogen um at least the majority of which okay you know but it’s still the same thing okay whether i use the genetic tool or
Whether i evolved it in nature or maybe did a little bit of both as might have been suggested it’s still a lab either one of those routes is still considered gain of function research yes well well yes if you’re passaging it to gain function yes because it’s or you’re
Really hearing it to gain a function okay it’s gaining a function i want to make sure we’re all we’re all on the same page uh and do um do we get to answers yeah yeah i saw head shakes from everyone so i’m thinking that on the first part yeah
Um i’d like to distinguish between gain of function which is where a virus is brought in and you could do three kinds of manipulations to it and something else i call gain of opportunity where you do what what what the doctor said and go out into into caves and things
And you bring them back to a population center and they’ve been used to being in a bat fighting with all kinds of viruses and now you you make a million times as many copies in one dish and and the person doing that is it gets a chance to
Get infected so gain of opportunity is a natural virus that is in wuhan that escapes and then gaining function is is a virus but we haven’t found this being a natural virus no of course not so it’s a gain of function without it mr mueller yeah i would say that
That the evidence that this was created by uh manipulation by gene splicing as well as gain of function is compelling and beyond reasonable doubt um the scientific evidence is very strong remarkably strongly stronger than anything i think it’s engineered and engineered okay yeah basically i have been involved in many
Scientific discoveries and i have never seen such compelling evidence even for those scientific discoveries that’s where i was at in physics all right dr asher just the key thing is to ask your as you move toward declassification of information um that’s that needs to be seen protecting
The sources and methods just ask how much intelligence there is on it coming out of nature right you’ll be interested in that answer yeah i think we know that almost rhetorical right um uh if we had known it was um from the lab and as dr mueller points out engineered
I think you said earlier dr jarrar that that would have helped us save lives is that true i i do believe that two answers whether it was engineered or not if we would have known early and there wasn’t a cover-up we could have saved lives number two if we knew
Where’s lab derived and they were transparent again i’m just hearing about the orf7 interferon uh right here uh but that is such a key issue yeah which tells you if you you know you get fever and get sick because of your interferon response and it was deliberately
Engineered to block that not only does that become more infectious but it means you’re going to be asymptomatic yeah that could have been a major major uh you know important finding for us to know early if that were true dr cued do you believe if we’d have
Known earlier we’d have to save lives yes if again as i said earlier if i had this if i had the virus in 72 hours i could have predicted all of the transmission and asymptomatic from the from the virus itself dr dr mueller if we had known early that
That was from a lab and an engineered virus do you think that that would help to save lives i have no scientific expertise on this i have my own personal opinion but i defer to dr quay on such such issues okay dr asher the key question i think is did we
Actually know and not process the data and that’s you know something we can fix it’s not that it that we can’t expect the intel ferry to exist on the policy maker’s desk and say oh what do you want to know today but certainly at state department we would have liked to have
Known that the chinese were working on the types of research we later learned they were and that maybe was in the possession of our government while this was happening well so we might have known but didn’t actually know you understand it’s a weird thing like with the prior 911 information well
Well i’m going to take it a little broader but you’re sort of getting the point getting to the point i wanted to make is dr fauci was on notice on february 1st actually take it back he was on notice on january 31st we got the email where one of the
Scientists who gets american tax dollars sent him the email and says the unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features look engineered
So the top guy on this in our government the spokesman for the past year and a half knew clear back on january 31st 2020 and he also knew this sentence uh we all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory so we were on notice
Back on january 31st but i think the guy who had this and was on notice downplayed it and actually manufactured an article to keep the american people from knowing this but we were on notice in february of 2017 with the french government that had the most sophisticated technology
Deployed in the world but they they gave to the wuhan institute were kicked out and told the world that they thought this might be the beginning of a wmd program so just to make now that it meant the president united states or anyone really knew about it but you know
Those of us following technology knew about it but that’s that’s different that is a little different but no it’s a lot different because this is the guy in our government very grant too i mean it’s his counterpart in france this was they were supposed to have 50 of their researchers from his
French counterpart on station and they were evicted dr ash let me ask you a question earlier uh today you you talked about this came from the lab and the question is is it a just a leak from the lab or is it a bio weapon and i want you to to
Talk to us about that because i think the assumption for most of us has been it’s a leak from the lab but you’re the one who raised the bio weapon you you brought up that term and you’ve been at the state department i think you were at the state department
For over 25 years in and out in and out educated at oxford and cornell you know a little something about all this stuff tell me your your your answer to was it just a lab leak or was it a biopsy they were working on a program related to synthetic biology and
Gain of function using the serial passage evolutionary or convolutionary technology approaches quite publicly actually that they had said in their 2011 declaration of the biological weapons convention and other places including speeches by their generals was related to their future of warfare of hybrid warfare so of course
They were working on dual use research of concerns called dirk and the dirk in this case again if it gets out of a lab and it’s not contained promptly could result in a weapons-like release okay whether they deliberately did it is i have very little sense they did
But were they deliberately working on developing the capability to use advanced path and genetic capabilities of war in a way that no one’s seen ever employed yeah they were of course they are that’s what the chinese have been talking about publicly so i mean there shouldn’t be any surprise here i don’t
Know why no one paid attention to it finally if i could mr chairman last question is uh i think earlier when i was not uh had to go vote um dr gerard you mentioned something about human dna and and american going to china so i i didn’t
Catch that could you could you fill me in so um dr asher talked about export controls for biotechnology and i and i know he knows this as well or better than i do but it’s not just technology but it’s information and our genetic information is actually critical and i
Do assess that the chinese have set up circumstances that they’re doing a lot of our gene sequencing of americans that are through normal labs or even through studies at the nih and they’re doing that for a reason and that genetic sequences are are powerful they know our
Vulnerabilities it is the first step in devising a potentially ethnic weapon um as was discussed by dr asher and similarly i don’t know if it’s still the case but i believe it is you’re not going to see any genetic sequences of chinese exported out of the country that was a law
There’s a reason for that and when we talk about export of technology export of our genetic information may be the most important key that we need to stop well i want to make sure i understand this so so american genetic information is going to china the same china that dr asher talked
About is doing bio weapon research with this stuff and you’re saying that combination is a particular concern oh it is a it is a huge it is an absolutely huge concern from where i sit and again um i’ve been out of the formal bio weapons defense uh
You know uh part of the government for for a period of time but uh genetic information uh is very powerful right it decides who we are it tells us about our vulnerabilities uh not only disease states but potential for genetic weapons and what i mean by that is there are
Variations in receptors and other things that vary by populations and those can potentially be exploited so that a new pathogen would differentially target a race uh a european ancestry versus someone else and we are essentially just giving all that information to china in the context of what i do believe is an unprecedented
And what’s your question now for giving that to china i mean i think that’s a fundamental question we got to ask on all this why are we giving all this information because most people in the community are either naive to the threat they deny the threat they’re oblivious
To the threat or just don’t want to think about it um and that’s my assessment of many of the people involved in research it’s not that they’re evil it’s not they’re giving it to them but they don’t just understand what is happening in china and other places and we’re providing
This in a naive fashion um acro across the board and and i just wanted to point out that genetic information and again i’m i’m gonna i hope dr dasher would agree with this but genetic information is one of those things that you know we should be uh keeping as a vital national security
Secret uh and not providing it to adversary nations who wish to develop weapons uh even openly in the literature if i could make a comment on this i’m at the mercy of the chair right now but i’ll leave it up because uh i know i know exactly what he’s saying
But i think i want to say it in another way so if you go on the internet and want to do you know you can do dna tests for almost anything on the internet as a consumer and you don’t even need you know a doctor to sign and you you do a
Scrape you do a spit the specimen will very often go to a laboratory here but then but then it gets shipped to bgi uh which is which which uh dr ash will say bought more illumina sequencing machines than any company any place in the world and so they will get they will
Do the sequence there and they’ll send it back to the company but but guess what they’ll keep a copy and that’s what he’s talking about so every time in america not not always but many times you will do what you think is it you know and you’ll go to a u.s
Address and then it gets shipped to bgi
