As well as our ranking member on the oversight committee mr comer are going to give opening statements then we have two witness panels that are going to be presenting evidence and then we’re going to have some q a sessions we’ll do at least one round two rounds if necessary
And with that i will uh i’ll give my opening statement four million people around the globe have died from covet 19 600 000 of those deaths are here in america with every one of those deaths they’re still families and loved ones who are also mourning the entire world has been turned upside down
Our children have lost a year of their livelihoods millions of those children lost an irreplaceable year of in classroom learning governments have borrowed trillions of dollars responding to this pandemic so we have a simple basic question how did covet 19 start what was the origin of covet 19
We’ve asked that question for more than a year and requested that the house majority hold hearings to investigate the origins of covet 19. perplexingly speaker pelosi has refused to allow a single hearing calling it a diversion as the american people will hear today from our expert witnesses this is far from a diversion
The evidence continues mounting that this was a man-made disaster that started in the wuhan lab if that is the case then it might be considered dramatically worse than chernobyl today’s witnesses will lay out two specific facts one the chinese government engaged in a series of lies followed by a massive
Cover-up from the very start of covet and number two the weight of evidence strongly points to the virus having emerged from the wuhan lab let me start with the lie and you will hear more from ranking members mccall and nunes about this on january 2nd 2020 dr fauci and cdc
Director dr redfield picked up from the chinese communist party the first official lie the ccp claimed in each of at that point 27 reported cases that the illness had jumped from an animal to a human both doctors fouchy and redfield knew that was likely not true we now know with overwhelming certainty
That was in fact a lie a year and a half later there is not a single case of the virus having jumped from an animal to a human yet the ccp claimed to know of 27 separate individual cases the chinese communist party was also covering up knowledge of human to human transmission
On january 7th the cdc situational report included quote media has begun to report high demand of n95 respirators in china well you don’t need n95 respirators to protect against individual animal to human transmission china knew the virus was spreading from humans to other humans on january 4th of 2020 dr redfield
Offered to send the cdc epidemic into intelligence service to wuhan had china been opened and transparent with the world the pandemic could have been stopped right then and there instead weeks later china put people from wuhan on international flights spreading the disease globally throughout january of 2020 there were twenty thousand people from
China who were entering the united states daily exponentially worse than chernobyl on january sixth doctor redfield spoke with china’s equivalent of their cdc and reported to the u s national security adviser that his quote call was both troubling and bizarre china was stonewalling he went on to say
Gao was not forthcoming at all this was dr redfield back in january of twenty twenty redfield was concerned by gal’s tone which was different from his previous experiences with him gao sounded like a hostage on january 10th the united states beginning work on a vaccine let me pause there for a moment because
It shows a dramatic dichotomy between our two nations in the critical first days china was engaging in a massive cover-up while allowing the virus to spread across the globe and at the same time the united states was beginning work on a life-saving vaccine story matters and is a display
To the world of the two countries characters the morals and the values by january thirteenth doctor fauci concluded quote holy bleep they haven’t been telling us the truth that was dr fauci’s quote in january of twenty twenty why was china lying could it be the motive was to cover up a
Virus that had leaked from a lab conducting gain of function research on corona viruses meaning that manipulation in the lab had likely made the virus dramatically more dangerous to the world than a naturally occurring coronavirus that might be a motive for a massive government cover-up our witnesses will discuss this further
But here’s what we know today one no intermediate host the animal that the bat would be expected to infect that would then transmit the virus to humans has been found after testing by the way hundreds of different species and thousands of specific animals still haven’t found that animal
Two there is no evidence it was ever in the human community before the pandemic began and yet as dr quay will be discussing it had perfected human to human spread from the very beginning that is the hallmark of a lab-created virus and number three we know that the wuhan
Lab was conducting potentially dangerous research on bat coronaviruses and their ability to cause pandemics including included game gain of function research as admiral jarrar states quote it’s just too much of a coincidence that a worldwide pandemic caused by a novel bat coronavirus that cannot be found in nature
Started just a few miles away from a secretive laboratory doing potentially dangerous research on bat coronaviruses we also know the first cases of covet in china occurred sometime between mid-october to mid november of 2019. this is when we now know that according to the wall street journal three wuhan
Lab workers sought hospital care for an unknown respiratory illness covert didn’t start in late december in the wet markets it started months earlier and lab workers in the institute working on coronavirus were infected and china began lying immediately and began buying up n95 respirators immediately and they closed domestic travel but continued
Sending twenty thousand people a day to america and now six hundred thousand americans are dead and four million people worldwide this is exponentially worse than chernobyl and yet to this day speaker pelosi has yet to have a single hearing on the origin of covet 19 the very nature the very name of our
Committee is the select subcommittee on the coronavirus and yet not a single hearing on the origin of the coronavirus well that changes today the american people will learn a lot today about what we know the willingness the witnesses are respected serious experts who have put time and research into learning more
About the origins of covet 19 but we should be having a bipartisan investigation that would include subpoena power to bring others in nih and dr fauci should also testify about the history of nih’s involvement in gain of function speaker pelosi should immediately take up the bill that passed unanimously out of the senate
That would declassify all intelligence related to the origins of covet think about this there is a bill that passed the senate unanimously all republicans all democrats to declassify some of the things we’re trying to find out speaker pelosi has yet to bring that up we’re calling on her to bring that up it
Would pass this house overwhelmingly and get us more of those answers so ultimately today’s hearing we’re going to be asking these questions and we expect to get some answers and we hope to continue pressing to get even more answers with that i’d like to yield to the ranking member of the oversight
Committee mr comer thank you ranking member scalise for your diligence on behalf of the american people to get to the origins of covet 19. it’s essential to understand the origins of this virus in order to prevent it from happening again without a full and comprehensive investigation we cannot adequately
Prepare for the next outbreak the chinese communist party spent the majority of the last year and a half misleading the world spreading propaganda and enabling this virus to run unchecked for far too long the chinese communist party intentionally concealed the severity of coven 19 to stockpile medical supplies
To the detriment of the global supply chain the chinese communist party led an effort to control and conceal the information regarding their true infection and death rates but they did not act alone the world health organization helped the chinese communist party by supporting and spreading their lies and propaganda
The world health organization denied that human human spread of covet 19 could occur based solely on chinese communist party propaganda in early january 2020 when it became clear that human to human transmission was in fact occurring the world health organization delayed labeling the pandemic a public health emergency of international concern
Because the communist china the chinese communist party threatened to stop all international covet 19 efforts if it made that determination the world health organization failed to issue common sense restrictions on travel to and from china despite evidence the virus was transmitting when people traveled the who in an attempt to cover their
Tracks and perpetuate the chinese communist party’s propaganda issued a one-sided report on the origins of the virus in april 2021 this report had no chance of being accurate because the chinese communist party was given full veto power over inclusion of american scientists and they vetoed the inclusion of three american scientists
Put forward by hhs the chinese communist party designed the mission’s itinerary and refused to access the chinese scientists raw data the two most important sources of information on the origins of the virus at the behest of the chinese communist party the world health organization altered their mission to include
Far-fetched origin claims like shipped frozen food and the chinese communist party was given full power to edit and alter the final report how could we expect anything close to a full investigation and accurate port when the government seemingly responsible for the outbreak controls the entire investigation in short china lied
The world health organization complied and people died those responsible for the deaths of six hundred thousand americans must be held accountable and congress must seek answers for grieving families who lost loved ones during the pandemic a further concern has recently come to light that the chinese communist party
Demanded that the nih delete the early sequences of cobit 19 cases from their database in order to best understand the origins of this pandemic it’s important to look at how the virus initially emerged in the human population this information is mostly is most accurately found in the first infected patients
Without this data it becomes increasingly hard to uncover the truth this is yet another link in the long chain of chinese communist party cover-up actions and raises important questions about whether there were additional sequences that the chinese communist party failed to share with the world or deleted after covid 19 began to spread
Despite repeated attempts by the chinese communist party to cover up the origins of this virus a significant amount of data has been collected and analyzed in the last year and a half evidence we will uncover during this forum evidence that this virus came from a lab-modified version of a bat
Coronavirus is continuing to grow as we will hear from our witnesses today every scientific test that distinguishes between the theories of the virus jumping from an animal to a human and the virus originating from a lab leak gives results that highly favor the lab origin theory
We have yet to see any hard data that supports this virus came directly from animal to human i look forward to hearing more from our distinguished colleagues about their efforts to uncover the truth and look forward to hearing from our panel of experts their work is fundamental to preventing the
Next pandemic and we thank everyone for it i yield back thank you remember comer now to our fellow colleagues on the select subcommittee for opening statements mr jordan you want to yield to all right we’ll go we’ll go to our panel then after the first panel will come
Back to uh our members of the select subcommittee uh i know that the panelists that we’re gonna hear from next are colleagues who have been working on the front lines of various portions of this this pandemic but also looking into different avenues that we can at least get some information on regarding the
Origins so with that we’ll start with ranking member of the energy and commerce committee ms mcmorris rogers there is a significant amount of information relevant to the word is is is is received american funds usaid foreign all right is on youtube thank you mr morris rogers now the
Ranking member for the permanent select committee on intelligence mr nunes i thank you mr scalise and make sure your microphone is on it shows it’s on now there we go all right i want to thank whip scalise and mr comer i’m happy to be here today to discuss the work of intelligence
Committee republicans to uncover the truth behind the origins of covet 19. for nearly a decade house intelligence committee republicans have been investigating china’s malign activities across the globe from concerns over huawei to china’s belton road initiative to its theft of our intellectual property and increasingly aggressive activities in the south china sea
We have actively worked to determine the nature and scope of nefarious chinese activities we have faced the china threat head-on because we believe what is at stake here is nothing less than our future as a free society i also want to recognize the efforts of our colleagues in this room
Commend all of you for your strong leadership on this front both in the select committee and via the house republicans china task force that was stood up last congress and the road map for covet 19 accountability released last week the chinese government the chinese communist party and the people’s
Liberation army represent an existential threat to freedom across the globe strong dynamic and fearless leadership is what is needed to combat a threat of this magnitude unfortunately the democrats possess none of these qualities particularly when it comes to china president biden has failed to do anything meaningful to hold china accountable
Congressional democrats seemingly have no interest in protecting our nation and people from this threat and the media continues to serve as a propaganda mouthpiece for china the biden white house and democratic leadership along with help from big tech consequently last month committee republicans on the house intelligence committee
Released an interim report on covet 19 and the wuhan institute of ra biology laboratory that report describes our efforts to understand how the covet 19 virus originated in brief here’s what we found first there are simply no substance substantive substantive evidence supporting the theory that sars coveted two was
A virus transferred from an animal to human and recent scientific scholarship suggests that such a zoonotic transfer is unlikely chinese researchers have failed to find the original that population or species from which the virus may have jumped despite an intensive search and testing more than eight eighty thousand animals
Second there were multiple warnings about safety at the wuhan lab beginning as far back as 2017 health and science experts from u s embassy in beijing warned the labs work to make bat coronaviruses infectious for humans coupled with the grave safety control concerns could result in the accidental unleashing of a sars-like pandemic
Third our report outlines how china engaged in highly sensitive gain of function research at the wuhan lab as we all know by now gain of function research can produce dangerous viral strains that could intentionally or unintentionally cause a pandemic that niaid under the leadership of dr fauci funneled u.s taxpayer dollars to
The wuhan lab for gain of function research fourth the people’s liberation army reportedly conducts secret scientific research in the wuhan lab and the head of the lab is a major general in the people’s liberation army who is recognized as china’s top bio warfare expert given the chinese military’s presence at
The lab it is difficult to understand why the u s government permitted and funded collaborative research there and finally china has prevented a full some incredible investigation into the origins of covet 19 why would they do such a thing if the virus originated from an animal china’s interference of course is what
Allegedly led the biden administration to insist that china cooperate or face isolation in the international community this is of course a weak and ineffective position to take like most authoritarian nations china does not respect weakness stronger steps are needed to ensure we can get to the bottom of this matter and
Have confidence in the result let’s not forget the bind administration only called on china to cooperate a week after house intelligence committee released our report and after the republicans efforts to investigate the origins of covet 19 had begun to resonate with the american people as with many other things the democrats
Are not interested in finding the truth that’s why they’re not here today and they are only interested in cynically getting ahead of the story line remember my comment about the media acting like a propagandist mouthpiece for the democratic party a year ago the media labeled president trump and republicans as racist
Xenophobes for suggesting the virus was not zoonotic but was the result of a lab leak that the possibility that this virus originated lab was dismissed as a conspiracy theory by the press in fact facebook and other big tech banned and removed posts that claimed the virus may have come from a lab why
Well because they feared that information would support statements made by president trump and republicans at the time the fact that the democrats and their allies in the media and big tech were more interested in hurling insults at their political opponents rather than fostering an open discourse
About the origins of the virus that has killed over 3 million people worldwide in contrast i appreciate the work of not only this committee but you can trust that the house intelligence committee republicans will continue our investigation into china’s malign activities and with that i yield back
Thank you again mr nunes for that work and that presentation now not only the ranking member on the committee on foreign affairs but also the head of the house’s china task force chairman mike mccall thank you whip scalise ranking member comer as many of you know i began investigating the
Origins of kevin 19 in april last year both as a top republican on the foreign affairs committee and as the chair of the china task force and encompassing 11 committees of jurisdiction we invite the democrats to join us speaker pelosi said it was a diversion i released my initial report last
September in that report we touched on the possibility that it could have come from the lab after continuing to research this topic i now feel comfortable concluding that is more likely than not that it came from the lab in fact i would say there’s credible evidence as a former federal prosecutor
Unfortunately we may never know for certain because the chinese communist party went to great lengths to cover up this outbreak they detained the doctors in order to silence them they disappeared journalists they destroyed lab samples they hid the fact that there was clear evidence of human to human transmission
And they refused to allow a real investigation into the origins and at the same time the who under director general tederose failed to warn the world of the impending pandemic instead he parroted the ccp’s talking points and was really acting as a puppet of general secretary she
As i have often said this was the worst cover-up in human history now more than one year later at least four many million people have lost their lives including more than six hundred thousand americans unfortunately the biden administration is refusing to take investigating the origins of this virus seriously
They are pushing for yet another who investigation even after the last one was so tainted by the ccp that even tedros has said more investigations needed to be done but that’s why we’re here today because the president and congressional democrats were are forcing us to do this work alone
As we continue this investigation i believe it’s time to completely dismiss the wet market as a source of the outbreak we have a con have confirmed case 10 days before the wet market cluster that had no connection to the market itself in fact i would say this is a diversion by the ccp
And all roads point to the lab and even as the ccp now has admitted after the fact that they don’t believe the virus originated at the wet market but as a former federal prosecutor i can tell you the preponderance of the evidence that it came from the lab is very convincing
State department cables from 2018 detail significant concerns about the safety protocols not being followed at the new campus of the wuhan institute of virology we know that this was not the first instance of safety protocols being ignored at the chinese labs in 2004 sars leaked from a similar lab in beijing
We now know that at the same time of the state department cables and for several years before scientists at the web were conducting gain of function research at both the new and old facilities this is genetic modification of the virus to make it more viral to make it more
Transmittable to make it more infectious in humans some of this research was conducted not only bsl4 but bsl 2 labs even though that kind of research should be conducted at bsl4 bsl-2 are far less secure by the way there’s one very close to the wet market
In addition in a city five times larger than the city of houston the first signs of the new illness were all clustered around the old with facility the level two facility then on september 12 2019 the webs suddenly took their virus database offline you have to ask the question why
Why did they take this offline removing the database would prevent hospitals in the city from comparing samples from sick patients to the labs library of viruses if the ccp was attempting to cover up a leak of coronaviruses being studied at the web this would remove the ability to link coven 19
Back to the web according to a harvard study in the following weeks five of the six hospitals surrounding the old wave saw the highest daily average of cars in their parking lot in two and a half years this indicates people around the old wave facility were suddenly sicker than
Usual and they were visiting hospitals at a higher rate than usual if an outbreak had begun around september from a leak this is exactly what we would see and new testimony now received by my committee reveals the chinese military potentially took over this lab not in january 2020 is reported
But earlier in 2019 the chinese military were actually in the facility at the time of 2017. that signals to me as a prosecutor the ccp was worried about something at the lab before the world knew even knew what coven 19 was why else would they put the chinese military in charge in
October 2019 wuhan hosted the 2019 world military games these are similar to the olympics but with military personnel competing more than 9 300 athletes from over 100 countries came to the city and it should have been a massive public relations opportunity for the ccp yet no fans or observers were allowed to attend
There were reports of roads being blocked with athletes describing wuhan as a ghost town if a virus had leaked from the lab in early september and there was an uptick in hospital visits around the old wave the ccp would likely be worried this would potentially leave them lead them back
And lock down the city and ban fans from the game which is exactly what happened most telling of all dozens of these athletes have recently come forward saying they got sick while at the games with what would now be classified as covet-like symptoms the village where the athletes lived was
Less than eight miles from the old wave and connected to downtown wuhan by a new subway stop i now believe this was actually one of the earliest covenant team super spreader events at least four of these athletes were from countries who have now confirmed the virus was circulating within their borders in november
And december of 2019 that would be italy brazil france and sweden this would be the exact time frame that indicated entered their borders in late october likely from the military gained athletes i’ve also discovered some very important new facts they not only point to the wuhan institute being the likeliest point of
Origin but they also establish a high likelihood that the virus was man-made as well i believe we’ve found the answer to the question quote how did this virus from a cave 1000 miles away get to the middle of a city of 11 million it wasn’t natural it was the lab
Next month the house foreign affairs committee will release the republicans will release an updated origins report that will detail all of our new findings so with that whip scalise and ranking member comer thank you so much for having me thank you i appreciate that testimony as well as the work that the
Committee uh that the china task force is doing to get these facts out here someone else who has been working on this for over a year now our colleague congressman gallagher uh thank you whip scalise ranking member comer uh for this opportunity i can’t think of a more important question
Facing the world today than how this pandemic started which makes makes it all the more tragic that we don’t have the uh willing participation of our democratic colleagues i don’t see this as a republican question or a democrat question this is a forensic question of how this actually
Started that being said i strongly support the establishment of an independent bipartisan expert commission i’ve had some experience in the cyber domain leading such a commission and i’ve seen the power of a hybrid commission of both legislators and outside experts to break through the noise and deliver serious bipartisan recommendations but
Even in the absence of such a congressionally mandated commission i think there are a number of steps we can immediately take to better understand the origin of the virus so that we can prevent a similar crisis from happening again i don’t want to rehash a lot of the very compelling points my colleague
Made so i’ll try and add a little bit to the discussion four things stand out in my mind the first and most obvious is is what whip scalise reference which is that we should declassify all intelligence products reporting and assessments related to covet 19’s origins and in particular those underpinning the ic assessments
Related to president biden’s may 26 2021 directive on his covet investigation the january 2021 state department disclosures made by the outgoing trump administration and the material used to inform the april 30th 2020 dni statement on covet origins that statement is openly available it’s worth revisiting or our entire intelligence community
Concurs with what they call the strong scientific consensus that this was not man-made or genetically modified how how did that happen i would i think we all have an interest in knowing number two issue a subpoena to the eco-health alliance for any and all data and files they have relating to their
Collaboration with the wuhan institute of virology number three auditing the records of all federal agencies for a thorough accounting of any funding that may have gone to the wuhan institute of virology either directly through third parties such as ngos over the past uh uh directly or indirectly through parties
Uh such as the equal health alliance over the past decade um ranking member mccall mentioned the wuhan military games for example i’ve written a letter to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs asking have we interviewed the 284 americans that went to those games were these americans
Tested for antibodies what did we learn from that from that process and if we haven’t started that process it can still begin it’s not too late to get more information related to this and then fourth and finally continuing the state department’s arms control investigation into potential biological weapons convention violations uh by the
Chinese communists hardly regardless of the outcome of these investigations and we should follow the data wherever they leave there are at least three broader lessons i believe we can already take away from this experience in the interest of brevity i won’t go into all in detail i’m happy to answer follow-on questions
But the first is the pervasive influence of what’s called united front work um perhaps the easiest way to understand the chinese communist party’s united front work is to think of it as as inception the ccp influences or co-ops foreign elites oftentimes without their direct knowledge to spread messages that
Align with the party’s interest and without speculating on their motivations it’s hard to escape noticing that many of the individuals who have been most critical of the lab leak hypothesis peter dazyk was mentioned uh by ranking member mcmorris rogers uh it should be noted that peter dasik is a zoologist
Not a virologist um anyone that signed that lancet letter at least uh uh five members of of who signed that lancet letter are now on the lancets investigation into the origin of the disease if you can believe it the chair also has profound conflicts of interest they have direct and long-standing
Relationships with chinese entities the second is the need to enhance american biological defenses the tragic deaths of over 600 000 americans and the losses throughout our economy have signaled to our adversaries that biological warfare could be a highly effective mechanism to attack our homeland and given the rapid
Advances in synthetic biology we need to act quickly so our adversaries cannot weaponize biology against us and third and finally i believe it is long past time for us to completely decouple our scientific collaboration with the people’s republic of china like many americans i was startled to discover that taxpayer
Resources made their way to the wuhan institute of virology which we know from the january 2021 state department fact sheet engaged in classified research on behalf of the chinese military while scientific collaboration is an important part of our technological leadership we have plenty of like-minded allies and partners that are not actively engaged
In genocide north threatening their neighbors with invasion that we can work with and unfortunately given the direction of the ccp policy scientific collaboration is likely only to enhance the party’s grip on power through new ways to surveil or control their population or in the worst case develop the ability to wipe out entire
Populations depending on their the whims of the party ranking member scalise you started off by commenting that this is worse than chernobyl i agree with that i’ve called this the ccp’s chernobyl if you’ve seen the hbo mini-series chernobyl uh there’s a moment at the end when the lead scientist valerie lagossov makes a
Comment and he says every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth and sooner or later the debt is paid well the debt incurred by the ccp’s lies has cost us over 600 000 american lives and counting and we owe it to these people and to their families to get to
The truth thank you i yield back well congressman gallagher i thank you for that work and for that presentation uh before i go to the members of the select subcommittee for their opening statements since it’s been referenced twice now i did want to ask unanimous consent to enter into the
Record senate bill 1348 this is the bill that would require the director of national intelligence to declassify information relating to the origin of covet 19 and for other purposes this bill passed the senate unanimously uh still sitting in the house uh without objection this will be
Entered into the record and now we’ll go to mr jordan for his opening statements uh thank you mr chairman um friday january 31st 2020 at 10 32 p.m dr fauci gets an email from christian anderson christian anderson’s a british researcher who’s received numerous grants from nih two really important
Sentences are in that email two sentences that get dr fauci’s attention the first is this 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
Again this is january 31st 2020 second sentence eddie bob mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory email arrives 1032 to dr fauci on january 31st 2020 two hours later two hours later at 12 29 in the morning dr fauci sends an email to his top deputy
Mr hugh aschenkloss guys worked for fauci for 15 years part of his inner circle sends it subject line says important in all capital letters he attaches a paper on gain of function research written by dr barrick and dr she dr she of course is the so-called bat lady batwoman the lady who does
Research in the wuhan china lab this email dr fauci says again to his top deputy it is essential that we speak this am keep your cell phone on read this paper you will have tasks to do today that must be done notice the intensity notice the focus i mean this is the
House is on fire email here now two hours after that at 2 48 in the morning dr fauci’s busy this morning 12 29 that email he sent to dr ashton kloss his top deputy two hours later at 2 48 in the morning he sends another email this one to robert cadlick assistant hhs
Secretary trump appointee not part of his inner circle and he attaches a different article to this email one that says the virus came from an animal that downplays any lab leak theory now again notice the tone of this one bob this just came out today gives a balanced view best tony
I mean totally different from the previous this is one like oh if you get a chance read this gives a balanced view so the tone is different but also that sentence gives a balanced view it’s not true either that’s just not accurate this article downplays as i said the lab leak theory emphasizes
Evolutionary cause to the virus what happens next what happens next later that same morning later that same morning at 11 47 a.m dr fauci’s deputy gets back to him i just want to read you this whole email the paper you sent me the one he sent him on that was written by the
Neurologist from wuhan china and dr barrick the paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause but have since been re reviewed and approved by nih not sure what that means since emily someone else who works for dr fauci is sure that no coronavirus work has gone
Through the p3 framework which of course is the oversight body that’s supposed to approve any grant dollars going for gain of function research no coronavirus work has gone through the p3 framework final sentence she will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work
Abroad she will try to determine if our fingerprints are on any of this all these emails happen in 13 hours so 13 hours after dr fauci gets the initial email from christian anderson saying looks like this virus is engineered not consistent with evolutionary theory dr fauci knows some important facts first
Dr fauci knows there’s a lethal virus on the loose that started in wuhan china second he knows the american taxpayers have funded gain of function research in wuhan china third he knows that the research grant didn’t go through the required oversight board fourth he knows the virus quote looks engineered and
Quote not consistent with evolutionary theory and finally fifth dr fauci knows he may have ties to this work in china his fingerprints in fact may be on this so what does dr fauci do next after he says oh whatever what does he do next he organizes a conference call for later
That same day i mean this is the busiest 24 hours i think i’ve ever he organizes a conference called 12 people on the call dr fauci and 11 virologists from around the world virologists who’ve gotten millions of american tax dollars over the past several years now look at this list
Here’s the list of people there’s only two americans on the list tony fauci and one another most of them from around the world as i said i think the first thing you notice is who’s not on the call who’s not on the list is dr cadlick on the list the guy he
Sent the email to at three in the morning is dr redfield the head of cdc dr jarrar who’s with us today assistant secretary at hhs at the time dr burks the lady who’s soon to be coveted response coordinator in fact there’s no one from the government on the call except tony fauci
Tony fauci and 11 other individuals who got a bunch of american tax dollars over the years what happened on the conference call the shorter answer is we don’t know we don’t know what they talked about i mean i think we got a good idea we don’t know for sure
But we do know what happened four days later four days later february 4th 2020 christian anderson the guy who started it all who said the virus looks engineered christian anderson said this four days later the crack quote the crackpot theories going around at the moment relate to this virus being somehow engineered
That is demonstrably false close quote what in four days this guy went from this looks engineered to now that’s demonstrably false four days he went from this isn’t consistent with evolutionary theory now we know it’s totally evolutionary but it gets even better it gets even better mr anderson and three of the
Other people on this call write an article a few weeks later that says covet is not a laboratory construct and while they’re writing that article there’s an email from march 6 where mr anderson offers to let dr fauci edit the article before it’s published and here’s the kicker here’s the kicker
When the article is published dr fauci cites it at a white house press conference when he is asked by a reporter about the origin of the virus cites the very article he put in motion on the conference call and he was allowed to edit at the white house where he’s supposed
To be giving the american people the truth he references an article that he manufactured now maybe i’m wrong about all this maybe it didn’t work out this way i think i’m right maybe it didn’t work out this way but it would have been nice mr chairman if dr
Fauci would come today and answer our questions he could have come here and defend himself but he didn’t have the courage to do it and you know elsewhere wouldn’t come remember that email about the p3 framework we invited dr hassell to come too he’s the individual who chairs that oversight
Board we invited him to come today too and he wouldn’t come they i i’m convinced these guys knew right from the get-go what the truth was and they misled the american people oh here’s the other thing you know that conference call that conference call we got the emails regarding the conference
Call from february 2nd all these guys all these guys were emailing back and forth they were on that conference call here’s what we got on the foyer request here’s all their emails every single thing is redacted every single thing is redacted about what took place in that conference call
Because i’m convinced it was at that conference call where they said we gotta cover our tracks and again maybe i’m wrong maybe i’m wrong but dr fauci could have been sitting right there and answering our questions and he wouldn’t come today i yield back thank you mr jordan and let the record
Reflect that dr fauci was invited friday afternoon he declined with that we’ll go to dr miller meeks for opening thank you so much mr scalise representative scalise thank you to also representative comer and all of our panelists for coming it’s unfortunate that the entire committee could not join us for this
Important discussion because as we’ve already heard understanding the origins of covet 19 pandemic has both public health and national security implications we all know that wuhan china where the covid 19 virus originated is home to the wuhan institute of virology the wuhan institute of virology is china’s only cellular level for
Biosafety super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases this lab is only a few miles away from the wet market that is said to be the origin of covet 19. as many of my colleagues have already stated i went to the floor earlier this month to call for a full and thorough
Investigation into the origins of covet there needs to be a serious investigation into the origins of covet 19 and we must uncover what the chinese communist party knew and when and what the world health organization knew and when why do we think that this came from a
Laboratory or a lab league as versus to natural evolutionary one is the initial concern by scientists and the fact that their article was removed by the chinese communist party off of the internet two is the proximity of wiv to the wet market three no intermediate host and we
Know that we rapidly discovered the intermediate host for both sars and mers four the chinese communist party vigorously lobbied wh o to both deny human to human transmission and to avoid or delay announcing an international emergency or pandemic five the removal of scientific papers by chinese scientists from the internet early in
2020 and then as previously stated they took their database offline last fall we also know that the speed and rapidity and the number of variants and then the unique genetic code so we must hold the chinese communist party accountable for their misstep missteps of which this is only one while
They were stalling and not notifying the world health organization about the extent of the covet 19 outbreak the department of homeland security intelligence enterprise found that the ccp used this time to stockpile masks gowns and gloves this lost time put u.s frontline workers at risk and undoubtedly contributed to at least some
Of the 600 000 u.s deaths from covet 19. to prevent something like this from happening in the future we must seriously consider and examine how much scrutiny we place on laboratories working with highly infectious agents furthermore we need to make sure our media gatekeepers are more cautious and
Allow science to work before censoring information or suppressing information while no scientific changes have occurred the media has recently decided to allow the theory that thesaurus cov2 originated in a lab to actually be shared with the american people this is after a year of downplaying and scrutinizing that theory
And people rightly may ask why does it matter what the origins of covid are we’ve lived through the pandemic the vaccines are working and we’re getting back to normal but as a former director of the iowa department of public health and as a physician i know that this pandemic will
Not be the last we must get to the bottom of the origins to try to prevent our next public health emergency as a member of congress i believe it is our responsibility to ensure that other nations live up to their responsibilities and that international organizations in which we participate and fund are
Well regulated and beneficial for the american people international national health regulations state that each state party shall notify who within 24 hours of all events which may constitute a public health emergency of international concern according to the reports from hong kong the ccp identified cases of covet 19
Going all the way back to november 17 2019 over a month before the who was officially notified or publicly notified if the ccp had complied with these regulations it’s possible we could have worked with our international partners to more quickly contain the virus limit travel isolate people before they
Traveled and shut down travel more rapidly more urgency about the virus if it was a lab league versus of natural evolutionary causes less complacence complacency of individuals it’s incumbent upon the international community to have safety protocols for the laboratories the type of research that can be conducted is it ethical to
Bring a virus from the wild into a laboratory and is it ethical to have gain of function research that increases its transmission in humans also publications in trent uh prestigious journals which is what we as scientists and doctors like to do and for which we aspire but should they publish um uh
Scientific articles if the lab is not in compliance with safety standards or if there is not full disclosure and financial disclosure and conflicts of interest should we have viruses that are in the wild that we bring into laboratories and then manipulate them for gain of function research as representative scalise said this is
The chernobyl of virus research and it should underscore the need for increased scrutiny of gain of function research anywhere in the world because it is the humorous hubris and arrogance of human scientists that failed the basic function of security and safety if we are going to be serious about
Advancing scientifically in order to prepare for our next pandemic then we must let science work we must allow for debate and dissenting views to be heard or we may never get to the root cause of this problem and hold the chinese communist party accountable thank you
Thank you dr miller meeks and now dr mark green thank you ranking member scalise and ranking member comer it’s great to be back on an oversight committee with ranking member comer um thank you both for for setting this up for many months we have asked speaker pelosi to
Investigate the origins of this virus that has led to over 600 000 deaths in this country and disrupted our society for well over a year it’s a shame that our democrat colleagues continue to refuse to hold this very important hearing for most of the pandemic anyone who
Raised questions about the origin of the virus was dismissed as some crazy conspiracy theorists yet despite the efforts of some of the media and all of big tech the world health organization and the chinese communist party we continue to find increasing evidence suggesting that this pandemic can be traced back to the wuhan
Institute of virology in wuhan china our panel of distinguished experts can speak in further detail to the mounting scientific evidence pointing to the origins of the pandemic we now know that the lab in wuhan was conducting gain of function research specifically on back coronaviruses if this pandemic was indeed the result
Of a leak from the wuhan institute of virology it would be one of the greatest medical cover-ups in human history gain of function research should never be done at an unsafe lab covered up by a ruthless authoritarian government setting off a worldwide pandemic that has left more than 3.9 million people
Dead around the world from the very beginning beijing has actively sought to deceive the world on the origin and severity of covid19 as the virus was spreading in wuhan the ccp silenced whistleblowers such as dr lee wen liang and censored others who warned about the outbreak furthermore the chinese government
Consistently under reported cases and deaths which continues to this day what are the chances that the epicenter of the virus a nation of over a billion people has suffered around 5500 deaths in only 120 000 cases through the world health organization the chinese government spread propaganda denying evidence of human human
Transmission and claiming that the spread was under control meanwhile according to a dhs report while china was deceiving the world about the seriousness of the virus it was also working to buy up ppe around the world increasing its imports of surgical masks by 278 percent then of course we know they turned
Around and sold it back to italy who had donated it to china how many lives could have been saved had the world been made aware when beijing was made aware to this day the ccp continues to obstruct efforts to get to the truth about the origins of the pandemic
A spokesman for the chinese foreign ministry shamelessly accused the united states military of bringing the virus to china and the chinese government has threatened to sanction american lawmakers who criticized the regime’s handling of the pandemic when the world health organization finally sent a team to investigate the ccp completely controlled the investigation
From vetoing proposed team members and restricting access to exercising editorial control over the final report the only american the ccp allowed was peter dasik of echo health alliance the same group which channeled the nih funding for chronovirus research to the wuhan institute of virology there’s much that remains to be
Investigated about the origins of cobit 19. we have to understand the origins of this pandemic to prevent future pandemics today’s forum is the kind of honest and open examination of the evidence that the american people deserve evidence that was ignored and suppressed when it contradicted some of the media’s preferred narrative
Again we have to ask why is the democrat party not participating in this why are our colleagues on the other side of the aisle not participating in this why do they not want to get to the bottom of where this virus came from where is the penguin
Somebody tell me where’s the penguin we haven’t found him yet there’s a strong indication and we’re looking forward to questions today in our in our testimony today but the question remains where are the democrats on this i would submit to you it is one of the most consistent things on on the other
Side of the aisle is there relaxed uh lack of interest lack of concern about the threats from china they continue to forgive millions incarcerated in wuhan china are in uh you know xinjiang the uyghurs they don’t seem to care about intellectual property theft they don’t seem to care about their state-owned enterprises competing
Unfairly with subsidies from their taxpayers coffins coffers the democrats don’t want to hold china accountable that might be something else we look into but for today i look forward to the opportunity to ask questions to get to the bottom of the origin of the virus and mr chairman with that i yield
Appreciate that dr green and now to bring up our expert panelists and and again i thank each of you for coming you all in your own rights have done extensive research both in following the science and getting the facts which is what we intend to do today and this is
Probably the greatest gathering of scientists who have actually done real research into the origins of coven 19 that has ever been assembled here in washington’s capital so uh with that let’s start with you dr gerard no uh no stranger to these members we’ve seen you testify before many committees uh dr
Zarrar was the assistant secretary for health at the u s department of health and human services in the trump administration he also served as an admiral in the public health service commissioned corps and u.s representative to the executive board of the world health organization as a member of the white house
Coronavirus task force he was known as the testing czar and did a phenomenal job at coming together and bringing people together to address that lack of testing to ultimately get to a point where americans could be tested we owe a great deal of gratitude to you for your previous work dr jarrar
Thank you for the work you’ve been doing on this investigation and you may begin ranking members comer and scalise members of the house committee and select subcommittee thank you for allowing me to provide my perspectives on the origin of covet 19. perspective number one although we do not yet have indisputable evidence
Pinpointing the exact origin of the virus that causes covid19 i assess that the most likely origin was an accidental infection of laboratory personnel from the wuhan institute of virology with secondary transmission to the local population and subsequent spread to hundreds of millions of people around the world it is essential that congress provides
Leadership for a comprehensive transparent and unbiased investigation to determine one the most likely origin of the virus two whether the nih funded directly or indirectly or approved of explicitly or tacitly potentially dangerous research within the wuhan lab and three what the u.s can do to minimize the possibility
Of future pandemics and enable rapid global containment of any suspicious infectious outbreak perspective number two there is an increasing body of evidence pointing to a lab leak origin of the virus one the who investigation published march first failed to detect the presence of the virus after testing more than 80 000
Wildlife livestock and poultry samples from 31 provinces in china moreover the closest virus found in nature was quote several decades of evolution removed from the covid19 virus and we now know definitively that the wuhan wet market was not the origin of the virus but was a site of secondary spread point number two
We know that the wuhan lab was conducting potentially dangerous research on bat coronaviruses and their ability to cause pandemics including gain of function research this was proven in a 2015 nature medicine publication in which investigators from wuhan and collaborators across the globe reported the creation of a new hybrid bat
Coronavirus that could bind to and infect human airway cells number three since that 2015 publication there have been multiple nih grants to the eco health alliance all entitled understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence and from the limited publicly available information appear to be using the exact same laboratory methods that could create
Novel hybrid pandemic causing pathogens number four independent scientific studies have concluded that the first cases of covet in china occurred sometime between mid-october and mid-november of 2019. this is the exact time frame according to the u.s intelligence that some wuhan lab workers became ill with a respiratory infection and that according
To the wall street journal three wuhan lab workers sought hospital care for an unknown respiratory illness and finally the bottom line is i believe it is just too much of a coincidence that a worldwide pandemic caused by a novel bat coronavirus that cannot be found in nature started just a
Few miles away from a secretive laboratory doing potentially dangerous research on bat coronaviruses sometimes the most obvious explanation is indeed the correct one perspective number three the w.h.o cannot be relied upon to do an authoritative investigation because it is a multilateral organization with no authority to do anything in china that
Is not directly approved by the chinese communist party on behalf of the trump administration in september 2020 i delivered a comprehensive roadmap of reform to the executive board of the who that would strengthen the who’s global emergency preparedness and response capabilities this roadmap would better equip the who
For future pandemics but by the who’s very nature as a multilateral organization it can never be relied on to guarantee transparency from repressive regimes nor assure the health and safety of the american public finally with regard to the wh when this pandemic first emerged in china and began spreading around the world
The only eligible nation that did not have a member on the who executive board was the united states that is because after i was nominated for the executive board by president trump in november 2018 my nomination was repeatedly blocked by senator schumer and his democrat colleagues and i was not confirmed and
Thus the u.s did not have visibility at the executive board level until may of 2020. perspective number four the final one the investigation of the origins of coven 19 and the regulation of gain of function research cannot be left to scientists alone many of whom have serious conflicts of interest
These conflicts include hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual salary pharmaceutical company paid advisory board seats millions of dollars in grants rights to inventions that could result in tens of millions of dollars in royalties and perhaps most important their reputations among an often elitist scientific community that is overwhelmingly biased
Against anything related to the trump administration similarly americans should be careful of defenses of china by experts who are employed by or on the boards of companies with billions of dollars at stake in china and who fear reprisals from the chinese communist party in conclusion it is critical to our
Nation to the american people to the world and to future generations that we develop a bipartisan consensus on the truth of what happened and i respectfully encourage the entire congress to come together as truth seekers and truth tellers to accomplish this objective thank you for inviting me today and i
Look forward to your questions thank you for that statement mr dr gerard and we will continue to seek that bipartisan cooperation now our next witness dr david asher he is a senior fellow at the hudson institute most recently he led the us department of state’s arms control investigation into covet 19’s origins
And he also examined whether china’s conduct constituted a violation of the biological weapons convention with that dr asher thank you for joining us thank you rep republican whip scalise at ranking member comer to all the members of the select committee on examining the coronavirus for inviting me today i welcome this opportunity to
Speak before the support and gathering of concerned republican members i equally would welcome the opportunity in the near future to meet with the democratic majority side as well i’m a part of the hudson institute a research institute in washington’s nonpartisan i approached the investigation that i led department of state not in a
Particularly partisan way whatsoever i’ve done this for democrats and republicans maybe more republicans but it doesn’t really matter this isn’t that this is an issue that affects all of us as you’ve pointed out in 1960 hudson’s founder herman khan famously wrote the book thinking about the unthinkable it talked about thermonuclear war and
Ways of reducing the likelihood of such a war to meth into for methods of coping with the consequences should such a work or occur at hudson we’re still guided by dr khan’s principles but i will tell you my main concern for you today having worked in around wmd investigations into
Terrorists and proliferation networks and state adversaries including china for over now nearly 30 years of my life is that we’re entering an era of biological warfare and this is the beginning of a threat level that will affect us the rest of our lives and probably for generations to come
Uh whether the chinese did this uh deliberately or not um in terms of creating this pathogen i think that chances are that they were working on it and it was funded by the military uh very i’m very confident that but whether they released it or not deliberately or just had an accident uh
I think the answer is they probably had an accident but that doesn’t matter because they allowed it to be weaponized in the wake of its release they didn’t tell us at the state department uh i stand here for you with assistant secretary tom bonanno behind me who led
The armed patrol effort at state one of the things we did in the fall of last year was really systematically look at whether the biological weapons convention had been violated and what the evidence was to that effect and what we found truly disturbed us uh the the chinese were working on a military
Supported program which they did not declare under the biological weapons convention so they lied uh it involved coronaviruses which they said they weren’t working on the wuhan institute in their declarations to the biological weapons convention mysteriously at the same year in 2016-2017 period that they stopped declaring coronavirus research as it
Being occurred as occurring at the wuhan institute they kicked off the classified research with the pla the people’s liberation army there’s a lot of things that i could talk about if you want to answer if there’s any questions you’ve got but let me just talk about some things i
Recommend you consider doing immediately as members of congress uh and then i i i actually before that i’ll talk about some things i think the bite administration itself should do first we should stop funding the chinese communist research into biology it’s it’s this dangerous gain to function collaboration with china has to
End i i’m shocked we wouldn’t as a government including my own non-proliferation related colleagues at state uh say that this was basically aiding about eating an enemy adversary a national adversary secondly we got to enforce our treaty compliance that should be a focus across the board the biological weapons convention has been
Violated the state department should not have said that it’s case closed and we should not continue a biological weapons convention investigation into a violation there has been a violation legally the state department’s bound to continue this investigation under this administration sanctions china needs to be coerced they
Need to feel the pain it’s a year and a half after this thing broke out the clocks have melted time has not stood still like a salvador dali painting except in beijing where they’re sitting around saying wow look what we’ve been able to get away with and as their
Economy grows 18.2 percent the last quarter and exports are 49 we have tools at our disposal executive order 13382 on wmd proliferation particularly we also need to get prepared for the next pandemic there’s a lot that can be done with ford bio threat sensors next what should you do in my personal opinion
Expert commission 911 like commission i had friends dying on 9 11. i’m sure you did too but we’ve had a lot more friends who’ve died to covet 19 and the impact of this is is more resonant than anything we’ve ever seen secondly stop exporting our most precious biotech capabilities overseas especially to china
Third we need to amend the chem chemical and biological control and warfare elimination act to impose sanctions on entities individuals and parastatals that are involved in this type of malevolent work to threaten our country finally i’d unleash the civil litigation lawyers to uh ambulance chase on behalf of the victims of this
Tragedy ep pandemic which could have been averted had the chinese only told us that it was spreading human to human asymptomatically at the beginning of january thank you for your time all right thank you for your remarks dr asher next is dr stephen quay he’s a physician and a scientist with
Hundreds of published scientific articles uh dr quay’s been cited over 10 000 times holds 87 patents across 22 different fields of medicine and he’s invented seven different fda approved medicines further he conducted an early analysis of covert 19 which has been downloaded nearly 200 000 times
He’s an expert in the field and brings an upper echelon of analysis to the question we’re posing today about the origins now to you dr kwai uh thank you uh congressman scalise and comer members of the subcommittee of the coronavirus crisis ladies and gentlemen i approach i appreciate the nonpartisan
Approach the subcommittee is taking today clearly science in the last few years but especially on the topics related to the covet pandemic has been co-opted by geopolitics thus i am here not as a mouthpiece for any particular party but as an american scientist i dedicate my testimony today to the
More than 600 000 americans that this pandemic has killed so far with the hope by that by clarifying the origin of covid we can help to prevent future pandemics and the loss of innocent lives given this backdrop i will be keeping my remarks today to matters of science i’ll
State facts and evidence about the pandemic that i have collected i’ll explain why those facts lead to certain conclusions allow a particular inference or rule rule out a hypothesis about the origin today’s testimony is an effort to answer the question poised on december 30th 2019 by dr sanji xi the head of
Coronavirus research at the wuhan institute of virology she had just been told that a novel coronavirus had caused an outbreak of pneumonia at hospitals close to her laboratory in wuhan in what i believe was her last unscripted public utterance she has been quoted as saying could they have come from our lab
In the last 18 months we’ve learned an intense amount about the origin of the pandemic but one of my frustrations is that virologists and science writers around the world seem to want to ignore what has been learned and the inevitable consequence conclusion it reveals as inconvenient as it is i believe the
Evidence conclusively establishes that the covet pandemic was a not a natural process but instead came from a laboratory in wuhan china and it has the fingerprints of genetic manipulation through a process called gain of function research there are six undisputed facts that support this hypothesis
Now as a reminder the top left there a little science as a reminder all zoonoses are diseases that involve a virus infecting an animal the animal coming in contact with a human and then the human being infected the question of the origin of a zoonosis is the question of the location of the
Animal in natural zoonoses the animal is in nature a cave a farm or the market the infected human comes in contact with the animal and gets sick for lab acquired zoonoses the animal is in a laboratory or in cells from an animal in a petri dish and the human works in that lab
In deciding between a natural origin in the lab and the lab origin there are six facts no one disagrees with number one the chinese first told the world that the coveted pandemic began in the hunan seafood market because approximately one half of the earlier early cases had been associated with that location
This would this would have been reminiscent of the two previous corona virus epidemics as both sars1 and mers began in live animal markets however after 18 months of investigation we now know it did not begin in a market in wuhan for the following three reasons first
None of the 11 patients from the hunan market or any other market in wuhan were infected with the earliest virus meaning they came into the market already infected the four patients with the earliest genetic version of the virus all had one thing in common none had any exposure to the hunan market
Second we know in january 2020 from public scientific databases that the patient with the earliest first complete virus sequence was a 39 year old man treated at the general hospital of central theater command of the people’s liberation army of china located on wuho road in wu in the wuchang district of wu
Wuhan about three kilometers from the institute of virology after 18 months and almost 3 million viruses sequenced worldwide this virus still remains the earliest second none of the environmental specimens from the market had the earliest virus meaning they also came into the market this included 1055
Samples of frozen food in the market all of which tested negative recovery third 457 animals from hunan market were tested all were negative for covet 616 animals from suppliers to the market were tested all were negative 1864 wild animals from southern china of the type found in the market were tested
They were also all negative these data from the from the publicly available who report established that it did not begin in the hunan market or any other market in wuhan number two failing to find it in any market in wuhan the search was expanded to all of china but after
After testing 80 000 samples from 209 different species from other markets farms and nature the virus has not been found in a single specimen the probability of this for a community acquired infection is about one in a million this is what you’d expect for a lab acquired infection
Number three after testing 9 952 stored human blood specimens from hospitals in wuhan from before december 29th there was not a single case of coveted in any specimen it was expected that between 100 and 400 would be positive the probability of this for a community acquired infection is also about one in
A million but this is what you’d expect for a lab acquired infection there is no evidence of multiple animal to human transmissions with two prior coronavirus outbreaks sars one and mers fifty to ninety percent of early cases were from various animal to human infections for cyrus kovi ii
249 early cases of of covet 19 were examined genetically and they all were human to human transmission for a community acquired infection this is the probability of tossing a coin 249 times and getting heads every single time this is however what you’d expect for a lab acquired infection
Number five cysco e2 has a unique trigger on the surface called a furin cleavage site and a unique code in the genes for that site called a cggcgd dimer so these are two independent levels of uniqueness the fear inside is why the virus is so transmissible why it invades the heart
The brain and the blood vessels viruses like ebola hiv zika yellow fever all use fear insights and this is part of the reason for their deadliness but the entire group of coronaviruses in which czar’s cov2 belongs does not contain a single example of a furan site
Or a single example of the cggcg dimer code a comprehensive study by mit group shows that there has never been a furan sight or the cgg letter dimer in this group of coronaviruses for at least a thousand years since william won the battle of hastings in 1066 to become monarch of england
But since 1992 in gain of function experiments the wiv and other laboratories around the world have inserted fewer insights into viruses repeatedly it is the only sure method that always works and always makes them more infectious and the cgg cge code found in covid 19 is commonly used in laboratories around
The world including the wiv you can literally or order it from a supply company on the internet by the way some paralysis have said well but dr koi fear insights and codon dimers occur in one or more other of the four classes of coronaviruses and with a process called recombination a
Covid-like virus could pick one up this is wrong for three reasons based on well-known fundamental biology probably college level because coronaviruses do exchange genetic material so easily the very existence and stability of these five distinct groups is evidence from nature that there must be barriers for exchange of genetic material i’ve spoken
Previously about the 1 000 year stability of the group of covid that clovkovic belongs to if recombination was easy this group would have merged into the other four into a single group two things stop recombination from happening and this includes research by dr dassa can she by the way
First recombination happens when one poor bat is infected with two different viruses and during that co-infection the genetic material gets exchanged so here the group of viruses that have furan sites and cgg dimers don’t infect the same bat species as the covet-like viruses that don’t have furan sites
So the covet viruses can only exchange genetic pure material within their group the group that hasn’t had a fear inside or a cgg dimer for a thousand years now second even if you force two different viruses into a cell in the laboratory there are unique genetic sequences that
Are required for gene combination or recombination to to occur the hot spots where exchange can occur are different for each group and incompatible between the groups in a clever use of this concept dr ralph barrick a leading coronavirus scientist from north carolina once made a vaccine candidate that was resistant to
Recombination he didn’t want to recombine after he put it out in the world he did this by using synthetic biology to change the hot spot genes gene sequences number six finally cyrus cov2 was pre-adapted for for human human transmission from the very first patient specifically the part of the virus that
Interacts with human cells was 99.5 optimized when sars1 first jumped into humans it had only 17 percent of the changes needed to cause an epidemic as evidence of the relevance of this work the uk strain remember last fall in the fall of 2020 that emerged and was more effective
Was a change in one of those 17 few spots that hadn’t been optimized at the beginning and 501y some virologists may claim covet virus was not pre-adapted and point to evidence that has been mutating a lot since it first emerged mark making new variants like the delta
Strain currently in in the news but the details tell a different story covet does randomly make on average about one genetic mistake every two weeks so after a year of circulating the globe it will naturally have on average 26 changes somewhere in its genetic code compared to when it started but the vast
Majority of these mistakes are either neutral having no effect on the deadliness of the viral or actually detrimental making the virus weaker less than one percent of the changes actually improve the virus so how do i believe the covavirus was taught to infect humans in a laboratory a commonly commonly used gain of
Function method to optimize the covet virus would have been to serial passage in a laboratory on a humanized genetically modified mouse that can develop a human-like pneumonia you take 20 mice you infect them you wait a week and then you recover the virus from the sickest mouse
Then you take another 20 and you do it again and suddenly you’re starting to kill the mice and finally after several weeks through this directed evolution you’ll produce a a mouse that can kill every humanized virus and kill every humanized mouse however it’s actually a challenge to create that humanized mice for the
Serial passage in the first place here the wiv has acknowledged that for several years they’ve worked with humanized mice developed in dr ralph barrick’s laboratory in north carolina and funded at u.s taxpayers expense in closing let me say to the families of those who have died from from covid
Families of those who uh families of those who have died from covet i’m dedicated to applying my scientific and medical expertise to understanding how this pandemic happened and importantly helping put safeguards in place at our research institutions to be sure this never happens again thank you riveting testimony dr kwai appreciate
The work you’ve done and sharing that and now finally to bring us to dr richard muller dr mueller’s a professor emeritus of physics at the university of california berkeley he’s worked across his field of study leading the two efforts that have won nobel prizes and the national science foundation alan t waterman award
For outstanding research his scientific expertise has been vital to the work that we’re doing dr mueller appreciate you coming thank you very much mr comer mr scalizi i appreciate you doing this it’s extremely important having just listened to dr quay’s comments i think we need to recognize the power of science
And uh previous speakers have said that we may never know the origin what they i think that is incorrect i think when we bring the power of science to this we can reach conclusions that are that are that are very powerful dr quay has covered most of the science
That is most relevant i would like to emphasize five points each of which is capable of separating and distinguishing between a natural origin a zoononic origin and the uh lab uh lab origin so let me just draw your attention to these five the first one is the absence of a pre-pandemic infections
Uh he mentioned that and uh with with not over nine thousand samples taken in wuhan no uh pre-pandemic infections ex that’s unprecedented that didn’t happen when mirrors didn’t happen and sars doesn’t happen with other viruses unprecedented it’s very difficult to explain papers are being written trying to explain it but those
Papers aren’t evidence that what you do when you’re when you’re stuck and the evidence disagrees with you the absence of a host animal if you look at the famous lancelet article one of the reasons they say you can dismiss these conspiracy theories of lab origin is because they they explicitly
Say china has identified the host animal they’ve identified the the location and they even praise china for its openness this paper the lancet does not read well when we look at it 16 months later i recommend everybody re-read it and see whether there’s any value in that the unprecedented genetic purity
That dr quay talked about again mers sars previous viruses don’t have this but it is exactly what you would expect if you’ve gone through gain of function so each one of these things is is is compelling uh by itself if we had any one of the five things i’ve gone these
Are three of them we should conclude that that the evidence strongly uh favors the lab uh origin um the the spike mutation the fact that there’s no known way for that spike mutation to get there other than by gene insertion in a laboratory is a very powerful argument and um
And and again there are papers written that try to explain this away but those papers aren’t presenting evidence the evidence in favor of the natural zoonotic origin there isn’t any the only evidence that cited as well it looks like another zoonotic case where those cases are quite common but there’s no
Scientific evidence supporting those and and finally the fact that this virus was uh optimized of in to attack humans again something that has never happened in other in in in natural releases um but it does happen if you run it through the gain of function so there’s really no all of the scientific
Evidence uh argues in favor of the laboratory origin um the the the papers against the famous paper by christian andersen in nature medicine his argument against uh the uh the the the lab leak case was the fact his claim that the that the the the spike protein had not
Been optimized and it certainly would have been that is his once argument against it in that paper that is so widely quoted but recent evidence as dr quay talked about shows that it was 99.5 optimized i’m going to end with a little anecdote a story of uh that that is is horrifying
And more frightening than almost anything else in my life in the early days when i was trying to teach myself urology i called several of my friends who are expert in virology one of them i asked him if he could help me review some of this literature this anti the
The literature that suggested that there was a lab leak and he said no i’m sorry rich i i can’t do that well okay is there someone in your lab who could do it no nobody in my lab will do it well why not well let me be candid
If anybody in my laboratory is discovered to be working on a laboratory leak hypothesis china will label us enemies of china and the laboratory will be blacklisted and we will no longer be able to collaborate we collaborate all the time with china nobody will we’ll we’ll take that risk
This this this chilling this one was chilling conversations i’ve had in my life uh the idea that china has managed to to to to interfere to break um the united states freedom of expression freedom of investigation freedom of thought uh by by through this collaboration effort really scary so and
Let me just just say that some people say we will never know not until china confesses or unless there’s a whistleblower well we have a whistleblower it was the virus itself it came here it came out of china it came to us and it carried with us genetic information with and there there
Are in my mind five compelling sets of scientific uh evidence that allow us to reach this very strong conclusion that yes it was a laboratory leak thank you very much well thank you dr mohler and again riveting testimony from all of you clearly as we listen to the science the
Data that you’ve presented it raises even more questions we’re going to go into the first round of questions and there is a vote going on the house floor so you’ll see members getting up going and coming back but we’re going to continue this because i think it’s real
Important that we get as many questions answered as possible again there are people who were invited who didn’t come today and kind of underscores the point that if there were subpoena powers then we could have compelled more scientists to come why they didn’t want to come as a mystery all we’re
Trying to do is get facts if they’re if they have nothing to hide but they should be here because this is a question everybody wants to know the answer to people all across the country are not satisfied that okay we have a vaccine but now as we’re starting to get
Our economy opened again shouldn’t we find out how this happened shouldn’t we get to the bottom of this to prevent it from happening again at the minimum but but if it was a lab leak that raises serious questions and so all of you have talked about not only the
Hypothesis of a lab leak but in fact the near certainty that this was a lab leak and so let’s get into some of those facts and the biggest facts that i’ve seen are number one with over 80 000 animals tested maybe the largest testing that’s been done for a a virus like this
Not a single animal has been found you’ve talked about what gain of res gain of function research can can can do to ultimately expedite and make this a virus that’s much more uh much more invasive to to cause damage to people to be spread at a level where it looks like
It has been around a lot longer maybe over a decade and so i guess if i could start with you dr gerard when you look at all of this evidence do we know if there are any scientists in america who were in communication with any of the scientists at the wuhan lab
Who may be able to shed a little more light of what happened and how could this kind of leak occur so uh thank you for the question i i’m not i personally was not in communication with anyone there i think it’s very likely that dr fauci was because they were nyad recipients
Directly or indirectly but that’s the reason why you need to ask him that question i do not know that i think it’s probably likely that bob redfield who had extensive ties and i know was on the phone 24 7 uh for weeks trying to get information from china and the who might
Have had those but but i don’t know that for certain and i i certainly didn’t have communication with them and how how could a leak like this occur we’ve seen with sars there there been other uh problems with labs and maybe the safety of this this wuhan lab
Pointed out that lab leaks are not uncommon uh the last i believe six deaths from sars were all from lab leaks there was a lab leak of smallpox it’s widely assessed that the 1978 pandemic of influenza was probably due to a lab leak so lab leaks occur even under the best of circumstances
Because these viruses are adapted to be highly infectious so that only a few viral particles could cause an infection and particularly with this virus with so much asymptomatic spread a person could have spread it to dozens or hundreds or thousands of people before any symptom actually arose and we
Do have troubling reports that were from the state department and other agencies of potential work being done at a much lower level of biosafety than should have been done at this level so lab leaks are not uncommon at all these are incredibly dangerous microbes that are highly infectious and evolved
To be that way so the fact that there would be a lab lead particularly where there has been issues of biosafety does not surprise me and would not surprise any honest scientist in this country dr asher you had given a few specific recommendations one of those was stop funding the ccp
Research into biological uh weapons biolog biologics in general because of this unfortunately this obfuscation i mean we’ve seen the communist chinese party covering up information maybe destroying evidence corrupting the world health organization how long has this been a concern and clearly this is something we need to address
Sooner rather than later but if you can talk more about that i’ve been worried about this i was a senior advisor free station pacific affairs under the bush administration state and then went on to run our programs against north korea and the aq con network really financially and several
Other things and you know but on china it’s been as an asia hand for since 34 years of my life i’ve been shocked at the sort of lack of cognizance in our scientific community and i am deeply involved with our scientific community as a venture capitalist separate from the hudson
Institute mostly in biotech we’re just not really thinking about the dual use nature synthetic biology it’s it’s it you know which is which is ironic since in 2018 the national academy of sciences put out a very strong study uh warning about biotech dual use capabilities fueling biological warfare related uh capabilities in
Adversarial uh nations and including in our own nation they could get out of one of our labs so you know we’re at a stage here which the scientists can talk about better than me where you can do things with us with biology that can create a essentially a weapon
Uh as a gain of function experiment and if it gets out of a lab and you don’t stop it like happen in china it becomes a weapon you know so they they this is this this is to me a huge issue for you sir and your and all of the members of congress
And i’ll ask this to each of you as my final question because there has been a lot of debate about gain of function research and clearly it has been conducted over time just how directly or indirectly taxpayer funding was involved in the wuhan labs gain of function re research is
Something that we should be investigating more but in general weighing the pros and cons uh especially in relation to these kind of viruses do you do any one of you want to discuss or talk about what we should be looking at in terms of policy regarding gain of function research dr quad start
With you yeah i mean i think i think because i’d like to get something done you know the the the the good is better than the impossible that you can’t get done uh i would strongly recommend that gain a function research be placed under the infrastructure of the institutional
Review board so that any federal funding of gain of function research has to the pros and cons of that research has to be presented to an independent a party of lay people from the community where the laboratory is and they get to decide if this sounds too dangerous i think i
Think one of the things we saw here was that the gain of function research the one interviology was set up to be reviewed inside the nih and it was never sent to them to look at so we’ve proven that the current structure fails but as a as someone who’s invented seven drugs
And worked with irbs 30 30 different clinical trials um they’re very good at balancing you know risk to the humans and and safety i can’t do one study in clinical trials without an irb and we have 200 million people infected here with no no oversight and dr gerard i certainly support local review
But the national level federal review has to be overhauled number one how do we know that any gain of function research or something that could be interpreted actually gets into the p3 nih process and we saw from the emails that there were no coronavirus uh work that actually got into the process so
There’s an intake issue number two there’s a transparency issue who is reviewing it what are their conflicts of interest what are the criteria that they have um that allow or disallow and again i i do agree that this can’t just be scientists who work in infectious diseases they are not experts in
National security they’re not experts in ethical considerations it has to be transparent it has to be multi-disciplinary and somebody needs to be accountable that means either the head of that institute or the head of the nih needs to decide on the dotted line and it must be transparent to congress i would say
That in addition to the local review which would be a second level dr mueller yeah i’m not that concerned about gain and function research in the united states i think that some legislation could take care of that the issue is what do we do about china what
Do we do about terrorist groups i what we need here is a strengthening of the biological warfare convention something that demands that we have access to these laboratories and see what’s going on we could cut out all gain and function research in the united states it would do no good if the wuhan
Institute of virology just closes its doors doesn’t let anybody see what it’s doing and continues on so we need to have sanctions that will demand that china and other countries be open and accessible and their data be be transparent very important recommendations thank you now mr comer thank you ranking member scalise dr
Asher a story came out last week that the nih confirmed the chinese scientists asked them to eliminate gene sequences of early coping 19 cases just three months after sending them dr asher isn’t it true that the best chance to understand a virus is to analyze the gene sequence as close to
Patient zero as possible well rather than i answer that i’d like to defer if it’s okay uh representative comber to dr quay as a scientist that i could ask answer some other aspect yeah the elimination of that particular database was uh irresponsible or yeah and they gave no basis for doing so
Um it’s it’s very disappointing what we found from that database was that actually the pla patient that i identified is not the genetically earliest but it’s they were about six weeks earlier and before the hunan market but there could be so much additional information if additional files were were found
So initially it was claimed without any evidence that there was no possible way the virus came from the lab we’ve been through that many times thus far in fact anyone who asserted this so-called lab leak theory was was labeled a conspiracy theorist or even by nancy pelosi a racist
So dr quay both your testimony and dr muller’s testimony outlined several key pieces of evidence which favored the idea this virus came from a lab rather than zoonotic origins dr quay can you give us more information about the behavior and sequencing of prior coronavirus epidemics like sars and and mers
Well i can and just a personal comment on the racist my wife is chinese so um and my children then are half chinese um so with with respect to the sars one and mers and sarge kovi ii i think one of the things you need to
You always want to be able to quantify gain of function i think the best way to quantify it is sars one is natural and about 5 000 people were infected mers was natural and about 7 000 people were affected sars2 is not natural and i wear what 200 million and counting and
Probably asymptomatic over a billion that’s kind of the relative power that you should think about with what we’re doing with this um and so sequence data is is is absolutely critical um i’m i mean there’s additional there’s additional fingerprints in inside cyrus cov2 for example there’s four signals that i’m looking at which
One of them is an area where it looks like it it’s designed to kill cells more easily one area is looks like it’s designed to plug up the a hole in the in in the nucleus to uh to prevent interferon from coming out why is that important because
Then you’re asymptomatic you don’t sweat and get fever from the virus you get it from the interferon one site looks like the spike protein was actually humanized so that the immune system wouldn’t recognize it to make it even harder to make a vaccine against it and of course we have the
Fear inside which makes it highly effective so um we we are missing much much uh uh sequencing data uh that the chinese could have been been doing i’m sorry one one last comment is that these there are certain machines that provide a great deal of sequencing data that’s very valuable and
Then there’s machines that give you just the sequence and nothing else and china instructed all of their laboratories around april to only use the machines that give you just a sequence and know what’s called metadata and that’s really frustrating because the metadata um as i’ll be showing next
Week from the oneness of virology contains nipa virus and japanese encephalitis virus and many other things well just a couple of more things dr clay i want to make sure i’m correct on we do not have any evidence that coven 19 infected any humans and mutated prior to developing the ability to transmit
From human or human right that is correct what does the fact that the virus was optimized for human to human transmission tell us about the origins of the virus well again a natural zoonosis has two processes it jumps into humans but it can’t it can’t do very well it makes one
Person sick or maybe they don’t even know they’re sick they they have antibodies against it but then it’s building up its repertoire it’s it’s learning how to how to infect humans and then finally it takes and this takes a year to 18 months so here it was human to human from the get-go
Um it’s just yeah and that that simply indicates gain of function that’s what it implies the fact that it was human from the get-go implies gain of function there’s no way that we know that that could happen in that which would mean it could only be in the lab not from
Yes dr anderson predicted that there would be a lot of pre-epidemic uh blood samples because it was so it was so adapted to humans so when you got zero out of ten thousand and just to summarize with respect to the animals which is the what china initially said the virus came from
Uh dr muller how many animals were examined there were eighty thousand eighty thousand animals were examined but there was a set of animals that was never examined was the humanized mice in the wuhan institute of herald ah very good very good point of those 80 000
How many were found to be carrying the disease zero zero zero this is unprecedented because for sars in which a much weaker smaller effort was made they found the animal within three months for mirrors in which it was very well hidden in camels and also a very low effort made they
Found it in nine months this was a tremendous effort to examine 80 000 animals from farm animals to wild animals to everything you can imagine uh accepting as i point out uh the the the animals in the in the lab and uh and having zero uh if if if this if
I can’t imagine that the signers of the uh of of of the lancet article uh would have written the same letter if they had known this that’s amazing thank you i yield back thank you now let’s go to mr jordan uh thank you mr chairman uh dr gerard i
Want to dissect this one email that came from dr ashton kloss as we’re back to dr fauci dr ashton kloss again just just to refresh his is dr fauci’s top deputy so this is the email on saturday february 1st at 11 47 in the morning it’s in response to the one that
Dr fauci said in the middle of the night saying hey we got important things i got to talk to you keep your phone on you’re going to have to do etc so he gets back to him uh the email says the paper you sent me says the experiments were performed
Again the paper is about gain of function research and at the wuhan lab uh before the gain of function pause but have since been reviewed and approved by nih not sure what that means since emily assured that no coronavirus work has gone through the p3 framework she will
Determine if we have any synthetizes work abroad uh dr gerard are you part of the when you were in the government were you part of the p3 framework uh i was not how it does the p3 framework it’s my understanding it’s an oversight board that is there to
To decide if you are in fact going to fund any gain of function research is that right um that’s what the intent is but how it works how how research gets in taken into that it’s unbelievable to me that coronavirus work would not get even into the process if
You look at the abstract from the latest grant yeah that was done to eco health it talks about using protein sequence data infectious clone technology in vitro and in vivo um infection experiments this is all gain of function how this could not get into the p3 process is unbelievable and once it does
How does it work so how do you judge let’s just back up for a second i said in this i should have done this earlier uh there was a pause in any gain of function research my understanding was the positives in 2014 and so for a few
Years correct we didn’t fund any of it right i don’t know why we i mean i think there’s a fundamental question if we should be funding it at all but we were funding it pause 2014 was restarted a few years later and but under the uh the premise that if we’re going to
Restart it we’re going to set up this p3 framework this oversight body this oversight function that people will have to look at this closely or a second look or whatever some oversight look before it gets uh funded who determines now in the pr pe three framework during this time so uh
When it was restarted who determines what goes in front of the p3 framework or the p3 board who makes that determination um i am sorry i don’t know that and i don’t think anybody knows that about uh out of the hundreds or thousands of grants who
Picks which ones go and not and if there were truly no coronavirus work that got there you have an intake problem that means dozens hundreds of well someone’s got to be responsible who who who heads who heads nih well you know ultimately the buck stops with dr collins who’s the nih director
And doctor he makes decisions with dr fauci on nyad they are the directors ultimately they are the responsible individuals so in the end the people responsible for this who are supposed to decide if if a grant proposal is going to go in front of the p3 framework board
Process or not is ultimately dr collins and dr fauci is that right they run the institutes they run the nih the buck stops there yeah that’s correct okay i think dr clay you were getting ready to say something uh well yes the the more the more terms start from 2014 it
It was taken away in may 2017 and as far as i know there’s never been a grant that’s gone before this this structure the b3 despite the fact it was set up so it was set up to look for gain of function research and my understanding is that
There’s been no grant that’s been sent my understanding is the guy who heads the the the chair of this of this board this p3 uh framework board is dr hassell and he’s even he’s even said in a public forum he volunteered this information that he’s the chair and he said it’s
Been very limited the work that they’ve done very few proposals come in front of them but but i think maybe the big takeaway for us today is the people responsible for making these decisions dr collins dr fauci we invited him they wouldn’t come and then the guy who chairs the board dr
Hassell we invited him and he wouldn’t come i think there’s i think there’s there’s uh something there um do you do you think well let me let me do this question first dr muller you you raised something um well let me go back dr jarrar why don’t you think they’re
Here why wouldn’t they come dr fauci and dr collins and mr hassell um you know i don’t know i know tony and i i know francis uh pretty well um i i can’t imagine a reason because this is a worldwide pandemic in which millions of people have died
Um it may have been a result of a lab leak there will be other and we think highly likely it is there will be other pandemics in the future and if there’s something we need not just congress and i know you need it but the american
People in the world needs it is truth and transparency in openness and trust and when public officials who are supposed to have our trust don’t show up to members of congress i think that’s a problem he showed up everywhere for a year and a half i mean you couldn’t go you couldn’t go
A day you couldn’t go a day and not see dr fauci somewhere he was everywhere i mean he was like he’s like man of the millennial or whatever time declared him i mean he was everywhere and now now when we have emails that he’s sending out at 12 and two in the morning
And we have this gain of function that didn’t go through the process it’s supposed to go through and we have all this this evidence suddenly you can’t find him well you know all those redacted emails they’re redacted to you and to me but they’re not redacted to the people who
Are on it so he could read it unredacted and refresh his memory and inform congress and look when i was in the trump administration i got pinged by many antagonistic members on the house or the senate side uh 100 of time i answered questions i came to
Everything because i felt it was my duty as a public servant i appreciate that try to be open to everyone and you know that yeah this is not the first time you’ve testified by many times we appreciate my former colleagues uh to be open and transparent and provide that
Type of honesty transparency and trust to the american people if okay i want to go one if if the chairman will indulge i want to do one more to mr gerard then i do want to come to you dr dr mueller uh so dr uh gerard uh admiral in your um
In your testimony written testimony in perspective four you said this investigation of the origins of coven 19 and the regulation of gain of function research cannot be left to scientists alone many of whom have serious conflicts of interest i think that is obvious i mean i that
That’s in the four emails i showed that took place in a 13-hour time span i think that is clear just from those four emails the the the conflicts of interest but i wanted to give you a little chance to expound on that and expand on that um if you could
So i just thought it needed to be said um i have the highest respect for scientists and physicians and for people who have developed so many things that are saving lives and curing disease but scientists are like everybody else they’re people they have conflicts of interest and we should be very open
About that that uh we sort of have a little quote that we can’t hide behind our white coats of self-righteousness that we have hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries and millions of dollars at stake and this needs to be this in reputations i think is very very important among an anti-generally
Anti-republican scientific community let me know these need to be explicitly talked if i could just do one follow-up to that where does it concern you that that that conference call i referenced in my opening statement that that conference call that between there was only one person from our government on
There and all these others were scientists who were getting our tax american taxpayers uh money does that concern you that call the way that that took place um it it’s not sort of a smoking gun concern to me but would be a concern to me is that wasn’t specifically related
To dr cadillac or the secretary of hhs or anybody on the table to you immediately or or to me um you know that really should have been done this was very important and it you know we say that it doesn’t matter whether it was in the lab or not but
That’s not necessarily true if we would have known it were a lab-derived uh bug for which they probably had years of work it might have appreciably helped our counter-measures uh uh how we go about uh understanding whether it could be asymptomatic or not so this was
Critical um and i think that email all that blacked out spots needs to be maybe we don’t need to know it but congress needs to know it and understand sure do sure do okay finally if i could thank you mr chairman for your indulgence uh dr mohler and you’re in the close of
Your opening uh statement you said that people were afraid you talked to people in the research community in your community who were afraid to be doing any research that might expose that the truth that this came from a lab because they were concerned about getting black bald from china is that
Right you said something to that effect that’s pretty close i i’m not sure that they were convinced that they didn’t want to be involved in that kind of investigation whether how that investigation would turn out they weren’t sure but yes uh there were other reasons too when i
When people learned i was going to come here i live in berkeley i get lots of advice i get advice not only from my friends and colleagues in berkeley but i get advice from all around the country yeah not one person of all my friends and advisors
Thought i should come to this committee so the reason was because it was republicans my response to every one of them is i am not going to go and you know scientists yes they are often biased you need to distinguish between scientists opinions and science and science is nonpartisan science is unbiased
Uh i came here and i told all them i was going to come here and i will talk to anybody yeah and i want to present science because i think in this case the science by itself carries the argument i i don’t want you to ask me for my opinions on things i
If i if i stick to the science then i can defend myself against the the my friends the chairman just refreshed my memory uh he said the words you used were enemies of china i think you used when anyone who would be doing research that would go against the evolutionary theory
Of this was was gonna be somehow attacked but it wasn’t just china this is my point it was everyone dr fauci was against doing that the media was against big if you did that big tech win against everyone went against the people who were actually as it turns out
You know focusing on the truth that is a that is a scary thing for our country and it goes right to your point that’s about opinions and politics not about science and that is what has happened what did happen for the last year and a
Half and my point that i made my opening statement was and dr fauci i believe based on what i showed you all i believe knew that from the get-go and was misleading the american people and again maybe i’m wrong but he could have came here and answered my questions another
Quick anecdote in september when i called a virologist at a national laboratory and said uh i knew i i was soliciting some help this was before i met dr quay i was soliciting some help on this issue uh he said uh no i’m i’m not going to
Touch that i’m not going to recommend anybody touch that because it would help the re-election of donald trump yep so it was all political it was a political issue for some of them yeah well thank you dr mueller again thank you for and all of you for coming to testify we
Appreciate you being here and i think you’re seeing that we’re here to get facts and y’all are giving us a lot of really important facts dr green you are next up for questions thank you um dr asher you talk about the real possibility of this being a really a biological
Or at least related to the chinese biological program i’d like to place into our record the chinese mission to the 2011 biological weapons invention it’s a pretty incredible document mr chairman if i can okay without objection add that into the record um if you guys need to see it we can do
Copies to you but you don’t have to look very far to see what the chinese tensions are first the document states and i quote synthetic biotechnology poses a huge threat to mankind as it could be used toxicity and infectiousness than those than those currently known second second the document states the
Sequencing of pathogen dna can also be used to synthesize new pathogens causing traditional means of dealing with infectious disease to fail and rendering the prevention and control of such disease even harder third the document states quote study of systems biology in the body can also create the potential
For biological weapons based on genetic differences between races end quote that’s from the chinese document um fourth the document states drugs can be administered through aerosol aerosolized inhalation which can benefit in re-cueing recipient non-compliance effectively spreading pathogens and disease-causing genes end quote fifth the document states quote foreign
Genes or viruses can be introduced into the target population asymptomatically enabling a biological weapon attack to be mounted covertly almost every troubling aspect of kobit 19 is discussed in this very document dr asher do you believe that china has a biological weapons program and if so what is the percentage of the chance
That this was designed this virus was designed as a biological weapon well china does have a biological weapons program it does involve synthetic biology and gain of function technologies which is why it was particularly distressing to learn that we were providing material aid through financial assistance scientific knowledge transfer as well as
Just complicity to the chinese communist effort that was centered around the people’s celebration of army and this this is not really a secret the chinese have been talking about this for years let me also re just mention real quick in passing the people who built the bsl4 lab the most dangerous lab in
Asia one of the most dangerous labs in the world for enabling this research were the french the french were kicked out they had been starting to feel the pressure from the chinese in 2015 just as they started to build this lab the french government in 2017 was fully evicted humiliated actually their prime
Minister had gone there for a ribbon cutting ceremony i don’t think xi jinping was there but his vice premier was and then like weeks later they were sent away now they came out and warned people i was astonished because i was in the biotech sector at the time i heard all
About this i mean we were like well we better not be working with china anymore because the chinese are embarked on something that looks like wmd why didn’t everyone at the state department know this and what it really came down to is our non-proliferation bureaucracy which is separate from the arms control bureaucracy
For whatever reason just didn’t see the the importance of synthetic biology and advanced gain of function applications in biology as a warfare threat well now we know it’s a warfare threat was this a weapon probably not it was a weapons related vector being developed okay a weapon
Doesn’t is the reason i don’t think it was a weapon deliberately deployed at least was i just found the chinese were confused when this originally happened and they were asking us what’s going on wuhan and then i thought to myself if they really understood this why wouldn’t they have done what
Professor muller would say and has said they would have released it at fort dietrich in maryland just outside the gates and then they could have blamed the united states i think this was a laboratory disaster a biological meltdown but then they covered it up and when they covered it up and didn’t tell
Admiral garrar and others essentially it proliferated it as a type of weapon lies the vector any virus that gets out can effectively become a weapon which leads me to a final thing you know the chinese again had told us in 2011 that this was going to happen they told
Us they were going to pursue in effect these types of capabilities because they said that’s the future of warfare well today we at state and other a you know government agencies including commerce know this but we have no export controls on gain-to-function technologies from the united states even
Into communist china now i’m not for over-regulation of my own business area biotechnology which you know but it can save the world but it also could end the world so i encourage you to think why don’t we have just basic level export controls like we do in so many other technologies for biotechnology
Especially since we are at the epicenter of the biotech revolution in the world today and the chinese are desperate to get a hold of our technology thank you i think that’s an excellent point uh do you think this was an intelligence failure or do you think this was you
Know decision makers had the information and ignored it well it was intelligence failure because if we didn’t use the intelligence sir between our ears i understand the french government had been kicked out our ally i mean the french worked very closely with the national institutes of health i don’t understand
How the national health didn’t know that the french had been evicted from this the number one chinese cooperative program in the world that was apparent but then there are things i will mention in passing some of the information in the declassified fact sheet that secretary pompeo presented on january 15th right here
Was dated november december of 2019. it was all declassified including the dates of information we won’t say what was classified and what wasn’t unclassified there was a mix but most of it was scary sensitive information but how did it take a year to get to our desk at the state department maybe it
Got to your desk the same time with you got to us for your intelligence briefers i was sort of shocked it sort of reminded me have been a senior official at state before and after 9 11 i said you know we learned in ex post facto 2020 hindsight that we knew
Somehow in our sum system that this might happen well part of it is just policy makers themselves we didn’t emphasize the threat of biotechnology so like i don’t blame our intelligence community i don’t want to hold them to the fire unduly we didn’t tell them this could happen
And we should put this at like toward the top of the wmd priorities not toward the bottom because dr mohler one of the great experts on nuclear war in the world will tell you that it’s probably a lot more probable that we’ll have a bio war it’s a lot
Cheaper and dr quay has even done some estimates on what a bile war would cost versus a nuclear war it’s pretty cheap pretty effective and i’m more worried now not just about china but about every terrorist crackpot that i’ve dealt with in the world over the last 30 years coming out of the
Shadows and trying to get a hold of u.s technology to program these things on bioreactors on desktop so if i if i may to just i spent much of my career in biological warfare defense both at darpa and at ditra at the threat reduction advisory committee and i want
To just emphasize that i agree with everything dr asher said export controls but i do want to raise another dirty little secret that really needs to be looked at by congress and that those export controls should also include americans dna sequences um this is a really vital piece uh in general even
The nih often exports gene sequencing for many of our people to china china absolutely keeps databases or what in our genes what are our susceptibilities is there a possibility of ethnic weapons however china does not allow any sequences of chinese out of their country there’s a reason for that
So again i don’t want to steal your thunder dr asher but it’s not just technology but it’s information and genetic information is really credible and the last thing dr green just sorry to interrupt but the one area you didn’t mention which is the scariest not that you didn’t read it
I mean it’s just it’s so terrifying i can’t even process it the in the chinese declaration of 2011 they talked about to the biological weapons convention to talk about systems biology further revealing population specific genetic markers they can yield an improvement in levels of human health but also can create the
Potential for biological weapons based on genetic differences between races once hostile elements grasp a different difference between different ethnic groups harbor intrinsically different genetic susceptibilities particular pathogens they can put that knowledge into practice and create genetic weapons targeted at a racial group with a particular susceptibility i am certainly not a racist but
And i’ve spent my life in asia but to hear the chinese communists talk about ethno-targeting to the biological weapons convention is pretty scary thank you um shifting gears a little bit uh dr garrar uh could you mentioned in some of your testimony earlier and we’ve all talked about this conflicts of interest thing
Could you elaborate on the types of conflicts of interest and perhaps give us some specific examples of conflicts of interest that perhaps were violated and i don’t i don’t want to use the word cover-up by our media but but the lancet article and and so i’m
I’m let me first say i’m not accusing anyone of anything um but i want to be really explicit as a physician as a scientist or a person who had nih grants who’s a professor in medical school you know i did that i did this routine um uh people are salaried hundreds of
Thousands of dollars a year and that is a potential conflict of interest they want their jobs they want their money millions of dollars in grants you know the currency of the realm are nih grants um you know when somebody’s introduced they had 30 years of continuous nih funding this is not only
Financially lucrative but it’s also a prestige factor people who have inventions could make tens of millions of dollars based on those inventions when they sell those to industry but again i do believe and i saw it on a daily basis and some of these esteemed colleagues have said um you know there was
You know president trump was a controversial figure okay we were controversial in the trump administration but there was such bias against the president that even thinking that you were helping the president you were uh you know excommunicated from the scientific community and i think that’s a really important factor
And if you i want to i want to just dig in on that a little bit so i’m a physician and we did in residency you know this thing called journal club that was designed to teach us how to see bias in medical studies we would look at well were the
Researchers funded by the drug they’re investigating so uh breaking it down to the simplest level was there selection bias in the population examined in the study all these different types of bias in science right what i just heard from you is that there is a new bias in our scientific
Community and it is trump and if you are going to research anything that could you know prove the president’s statements true then then that absolutely is rejected out of hand and therefore a form of bias is that what i’m hearing um you are hearing that and i’m going to
Tell you and i’m i am not going to go into specifics but physicians who were on the task force or who were around the task force were under tremendous pressure from their scientific colleagues to not even show up with the president on stage advise in the oval office tremendous pressure and
They felt it this was real and again i i you know i’m not going to read into her but i’ll just say dr burke said she knew her career was over the moment she came to the task force because she would be uh prejudicially excommunicated from the scientific
Community she may have supported some thesis that but scientifically was true and we all know to be true but trump supported what’s not even the thesis is just being on the same place with the president uh i think you can’t even be in the same room huh
Right and and and huh that’s that’s true and people died because of the false information that has been put out right i mean we we know for a fact i mean columbia university not a bastion of conservativism columbia university said 60 of the people who died could have been saved had china
Just said human to human transmission three weeks sooner and this group of people the media and the dorseys and the uh zuckerbergs of the world who refused called it a conspiracy theory oh it’s a conspiracy theories people died that blood is on the hands of the social
Media giants and the media and the people who refused and just completely supported whatever china and the world health organization said you have scientists competent scientists saying differently and being ostracized shame on you um mr german i’m probably way over my time i yield thank you uh very good question uh represent
Meliata you you know as a member of the foreign affairs committee as well i was just really curious about talking about the responsibility of all global leaders to determine the origins and work together in cooperation to prevent a a future pandemic i would love to ask
David asher some of his thoughts on uh you know working at the uh the for the secretary of state what were some of some of the things that you had been working on with our partners on the global level and where can we build upon that to ensure that well
Number one is accountability but i do feel that there’s been a little bit of hesitancy from our uh global partners and in holding china account accountable and really demanding answers to the origins so love to hear from your perspective of the work that you did in that regard
From bali talks thanks very much for that important question um the the lack of cooperation among even our eye partners in the intelligence world was a bit surprising but you know the information can be had i mean talk to the french they know a tremendous amount they train the people
In wuhan actually so even though they got kicked out they’re still in touch they have one of the best intelligence services on the face of the earth the dgse the egse has come out publicly and which is unusual for them they’re very secretive makes the cia spokesperson look lookatious
But they’ve come out and said that you know they were very concerned starting 2015 that this was going to have a wmd relationship and that france was indirectly inherently not intentionally at all but because of the scientific cooperation that was sincere i have no doubt that the pastor
Institute in france sincerely wanted to help combat re-emergence of sars uh and the french scientific establishment just like ours was you know wanted to be helpful and i know that the french foreign ministry like the department of state bureaucracy was facilitating this cooperation but we should have been second guessing
Ourselves we should have had some sort of a more advanced function in policy related to proliferation i found an awful lot of the non-proliferation bureaucracy the sort of permanent bureaucracy cleared on things that in hindsight were proliferating giving dual use technology to the wuhan institute knowing that for years there had been
Suspicions of its involvement with the chinese people’s liberation army which now the washington post just put out last week is in their actual instruction manual for employees i believe that it talks about secret programs and the need to manage the loyalty of the party above anything else and sort of like it’s on
Their website okay so sort of the risk management thing here but the cooperation now does need we need a coalition of the willing among our allies i happen to have the the my you know one experience uh the democrats i came back as a nonpartisan person as a
Professional to help put together the coalition against the islamic state which you know at first was highly politically charged no one wanted to do it we weren’t going to go out and blast them i said we have to attack their economic underbelly uh general alan general mcfarland and i helped put the
Plan together and guess what we took them out that brought together all sorts of states that people never thought would cooperate it brought together our partners from nato it brought together the first arab coalition there are people that will work with us the singaporeans they’ve got major interests in wuhan uh the uh
The french the you know our own scientists have so many of the clues so i’m confident that we can get to the bottom of this issue i i concur with my colleagues that the idea that we’ll never know is silly we’re going to know we could learn an awful lot we
Don’t even have awards at the state department we don’t have a rewards for justice program like i’d give 10 15 million dollars like we did with al qaeda after 9 11 to anyone from the wuhan institute that wants to defect who actually has senior level knowledge i put there i
Mean i’ve done some things in the intelligence committee with the factions we know how to handle it we’ll get to the bottom of this the problem is when we do including with our partners we’re going to be scared out of our minds about what it entails that’s what i fear
The fear itself could be the problem is is that why you believe that the president and nancy pelosi dr fauci that they just refused to truly investigate this to allow the select subcommittee to hold hearings i mean what’s going on with i mean not to put you in a well i’m gonna give
The president a bit of ice to sometimes sit on the amtrak with a guy he was always finding me but you know what i mean you know the world changes when you get into that world he’s in but he hasn’t he’s done the right thing and enabling the intelligence community to
Try to actually work with the national laboratories to get to the bottom of this um we are in fact actually seeing some of the democrats uh but not with you in the room um you know some of them are asking questions and asking for our
Expertise so as much as you know this is a politically charged environment you know uh on the senate side at least i’m going over to we’re going all going over to do a briefing on foreign relations uh the at least seen mentioned in the staff level uh bipartisan so you know i have
Hope as a personal you know as a independent american citizen however the reality is we’re going to have to be very organized that’s why the idea that uh representative gallagher and put forward about this commission a 9 11 like commission this is you know 9 11 was terrible it’s the 20th
Anniversary we can’t forget i spent so many years in the war on terror fighting it um and we’re still fighting it despite what people say but the this war we need to do something to stop the war of the future in synthetic biology and gain a functioning technology because
It’s going to kill it could kill every one of us there’s much worse types of diseases that could be manufactured something called a prion that the doctor can tell you about l causes alzheimer’s and lead body dementia there’s no way to stop it so some terrorists we’ve seen al qaeda
Research this so we you know there’s so many things that could get worse and that have been public i think we just got to get organized and you can help and i hope that there’ll be a new comedy in the wake of this you know between both parties and you
Can get to work with the uh one more question i know uh dr koi you want to weigh in yeah i’ve just i have i haven’t talked about the thing that keeps me up at night the most so we’ve talked a lot about china and what its capabilities are and what bsly4 labs
Are and blsi3 and that sort of thing they’re very expensive and they’re complicated and there’s a lot of equipment and fancy things but there was a paper in february of 2020 30 scientists from switzerland uh they’re probably all under 30 in their tennis shoes and using kitchen equipment not blsa 2 3
Or 4 kitchen equipment they were able to order the pieces of cyrus kovi 2 from a from a supply company 8 different pieces and in baker’s yeast you know the stuff you use in your kitchen to make french dough bread on on saturdays they were able to
Uh recover they were able to put these eight pieces together inside the the sourdough yeast and get it to express cyrus kovi2 so that scares you a little bit and then you look at how many times that has been downloaded and that paper has been downloaded 118 000 times
And i would like someone to look to see if anyone any terrorists watch lists are on that download list appreciate you sharing that uh that’s certainly scary um one last question just because i want to focus more on the also the the the world health organization if if you know
I am concerned about you know re-entry into the world health organization without using leverage to be able to try to get some their cooperation in a more formal investigation uh i feel that some of the most outrageous actions taken by the who and the ccp are that the ccp was given
Full veto power over inclusion of american scientists the ccp vetoed the three americans put forward by hhs um the the only american accepted was the ceo of eco health which was interesting since they’ve historically funded the wuhan institute the ccp designed the mission’s itinerary and refused access to chinese scientists and raw data
And at the behest of the ccp the who altered their mission to include far-fetched origin claims like shipped frozen food the ccp was given full power to edit and alter the final report what should we be doing as a as a nation with regards to holding who accountable
Uh being that we are the largest funder of who and we deserve to be you know what treated with respect not not played for fools uh and and what what should we be doing with our partners that are you made very important comments and and i’m
Not really sure how much of this came out and i do want to get it on the record um our ambassador bremberg had a personal conversation in meeting with director general tedros as well as mike ryan and they suggested they didn’t suggest they told ambassador bremberg that we should submit
Uh names for the who investigation committee that got relayed back to me through our office of global affairs we picked three scientists they were not political they were career one from the fda one from the cdc one from the nih impeccable credentials we didn’t do a political biopsy on them had no idea
What they were from uh recommended them to the who um through all the official channels and crickets not one word back about the recommendations and they picked dr dasic um and i wanted to get that particularly on the record because we went out of our way to pick people who could not be
Argued to be political or have a bone to pick in any way just to try to get the truth point number two um the president whether we would have withdrawn from the wh or not eventually i don’t know but you don’t give up all your chips while you’re getting trying
To get the wh o to change and again i would refer you and happy to put the record the road map for change that came from uh delivered by me to the who executive board delivered by ambassador bremberg to tedros that was brought together by hhs the nsc
Department of state now it will never be a perfect organization because it’s beholden to its members and it has to have a member agreement to go do things but there are things to strengthen it it’s outlined by the trump administration it was almost exactly uh mimicked by france and germany they
Didn’t sign on to our paper because they didn’t want to sign on to the us at the time but it only had almost the exact same language this is a good place to start sounds like uh dr dasic is somebody who should come before our select subcommittee in the near future
And we hope that the majority will bring them in thank you all right thank you ms nelly now let’s go to dr miller meeks well thank you very much and uh first of all let me again thank ranking member uh scalise and comers for putting this select subcommittee together
Your testimony is critically important and it is a shame that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are not here this is not a partisan issue this is this is not an american issue this is a world issue it is of critical importance and your courage to be able to testify
Today and bring forward the information you’re bringing forward um i am extremely grateful for that and as both a physician and a director of public health i can tell you dr garr that the things that you’re talking about as conflicts of interest even as educated as we are
We’re still susceptible to peer pressure we’re susceptible to the desire to be published to be lauded by our peers to present at conference conferences and all of these things are a type of a pressure and conflict of interest as you said even at universities where i’ve
Been on faculty we were at the point where we could no longer accept a pin from a drug company because it would be a conflict of interest in prescribing a medication and i can say i’ve never prescribed a medication because i got a pin so what you’re talking about is extraordinarily
Sobering and it’s not just that 600 thousand americans have died of covet 19. we forget or we haven’t mentioned the millions worldwide i asked dr wilinski of the cdc in april when she testified before our committee how many excess deaths were there in 2020 500 000 excess deaths
Those are from cardiovascular events dr quay cancer that was not detected people who did not go into the emergency room cancer that was not treated diabetes that wasn’t treated drug overdoses and suicide there was article last year that sam in san francisco alone last year there were more deaths from drug
Overdose far exceeding the deaths from covid the number of deaths from youth suicide which is a tragedy in this nation because of our response to covid19 and the pandemic we will never recover even the world health organization has talked about childhood poverty which is much greater than 15
Percent higher and it will be decades until we recover the grounds that have been lost so when we’re talking about holding the chinese communist party accountable or the pressure there is among scientists to be able to convey information simply because they didn’t like who may have espoused that information
Those are issues that we have to address and we have to address as a nation so thank you for that and i know that you all actually had information you wanted to convey and were not so i may just leave my time for information but i did want to ask
Just two brief questions one dr gerard if we had known about the magnitude of the virus sooner do you think our response would have been different yes i do um uh you know the cdc has had its ups and downs during the response but the one thing that the cdc does better than
Anyone in the world is get on the ground investigate transmission and let us know about the virus and if we could have known about asymptomatic transmission you know two months beforehand it could have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives so um you know i i do
Believe and i i wake up at three o’clock in the morning still thinking about these questions that um you know when you get when you get to the ultimate source of death as the cnn would say in the autopsy it was a lack of chinese transparency early on if we
Could have had that sure people would have died we would have still had it throughout but i i think we could have had interventions much more timely because we would have known so much about the virus that’s my opinion that’s not science per se and i will defer to
That but that is my opinion that we would have done something differently and the cdc were the exact people we needed on the ground in china to make it happen well i i would say the same thing about treatment modalities that we were not able to discuss as physicians
Because we were censored or suppressed um so and this is for any one of you um are you aware and how many variants are there of sars or mers dr craig are you speaking of stars one and mers well the variances the variants are defined as numbers of infections so i mean it’s
Basically so with sars one it’s it’s very limited there’s there’s only like so yeah i think and then mergers too thank you so the fact that we have so many variants already of sarsko v2 and so rapidly does that shift us away from a natural naturally caused evolutionary disease
Does it shift it more towards uh work in a laboratory or manipulation it could be either a man-made virus or a naturally occurring virus that was manipulated yeah i don’t believe that event does because what you what you have is you have you know under 10 000 human infections
With sars one and with mers and so that’ll generate just by naturally a certain number of variants and then you’ve got 200 million over here um i i want to just comment on something that that he said that i think really needs to be amplified though is
Uh it was important to know a human human spread early and that would have been especially useful but i have to tell you that the the the concept of asymptomatic spread which was very unknown and which i believe may be part of or seven modifications that occurred
In the virus to make it more uh asymptomatic um is the real to me is that that is the the the cornerstone of having saved so many lives if we’d known about that could there have been genetic manipulation to make it more uh transmissible or um neurology has published
In between 2015 and 2018 i don’t remember the exact year but they published papers on playing around with orf7 making it making it changing to see how the interfering response was and i think they had like three or four different high interferon low interferon no interferon uh and this was done in
Another backbone but but they they did that work they did suppression of the antigens on the spike protein they did orf8 to show who they could kill and who they couldn’t um in other viruses and so all these pieces are in uh sargasso v2 as well and and given the information
That you all have revealed today about um uh you know basic levels uh exporting our biotechnology are you concerned about the president being willing to give up the intellectual property protections for the vaccines okay conflict of interest 87 patents seven drugs i’ve invented so i like
Patents um but then on just if i can beyond that um yeah i think so i mean i think i think because we’re willing to throw around so much money here there’s probably another way to do it without breaking something that’s was in the constitution we started with and has worked pretty well
I actually teach a course where patents are the foundation of america’s success because one one family like mine in the 1800s got to make fruit crates for two generations and then they gave it away and so the everything you see around here was patented at one point in time
And it’s a it’s an incredible engine of of commerce dr miller did you want to add something to that then i would say obviously it’s important to protect it so that you all can continue to develop patents um i just want to say that number one i think
Patents are critical for innovation but number two is completely naive of this administration to say we’re just going to give a patent away for a sophisticated manufacturing of vaccines that takes years and billions of dollars of expertise we’re going to give it away so somebody else can manufacture it it’s
Just naive it does not make biological sense it’s a fantasy world what needs to happen if you want to do that is exactly what we did on the administration have an option to buy two billion vaccines have them manufactured by the companies that have patented them and then give
Them to the world you don’t give this technology to other countries number one it violates our patent and innovation but number two they can’t do it because it you know you’re going to have contaminated vaccines bad vaccines and then you run the entire vaccine in addition to which the these both russia
And china have been known to spread disinformation about our vaccines which have been very effective so thank you that and i yield back my time thank you for yielding back and the other point on vaccines is if it were to be given away these countries don’t have the infrastructure today to start
Manufacturing it so you’ve given away what what’s been years of research and billions of dollars of private investment you will stifle future investment because if if the next company that maybe is on the verge of curing alzheimer’s or curing a new cancer if they see that if it’s successful
Their billions of dollars can evaporate because the president can just give it away to countries like china it would have a stifling effect on that innovation which still can’t even be used today because as you said doctors you can contract today with those companies and they have the
Infrastructure to to make those vials those countries china does not have the infrastructure today and do we even trust that they have the quality standards but let me ask uh do do gentlemen have the time to go for some additional questions all right now that we’ve had our first
Round of questions again thank you all for coming i’ll start in going back to what chairman mccall talked about with the work that he’s done on the china task force one of the things they looked into is that as we find out further back that this started there were reports that
Three the people who worked in the wuhan lab came out with covid19 symptoms at the time they didn’t know what it was but they had flu-like symptoms that today would fit with covet 19. first of all have any of you gotten any information on on testing that may have
Been done on those three workers at the wuhan lab to determine we can go back and do blood samples and see if they have the antibodies to determine if it was coveted 19 back probably in september of 2019 as opposed to even december or early 2020 do any of y’all
Know uh what happened to those lab workers who reports say had the first potential cases dr craig well there’s there were a couple major areas of information records that the who team wanted to look at they actually wanted to do a few things in a possible way and
And those are patient records and so no patient records of early cases of covid were given or allowed to be looked at by the uh the evolution committee they said you know it’s privacy they’re you know patience and and we we respect our privacy laws and things so so there
Isn’t information there i have i have published a paper that examined a very complicated process of of the 590 employees of the w uh is women answer virology which basically concludes that there is no statistical way that they didn’t have positive cases there you know china says they didn’t the who
Says they didn’t and with a four percent uh prevalence in wuhan in general they should have had them in the in the one institut just by getting it you know from the 711 down the street so saying they didn’t have any is a false statement so having led the
Declassification of that information uh with the support of course is dni radcliffe and secretary pompeo not myself but i you know put the fact sheet together with uh colleagues in the ic and uh and elsewhere and um you know very high confidence we put it into the classified information that there were
Illnesses inside the wuhan institute of virology a cluster before anywhere else we knew of in the world what time frame did you you know i’m going to say what i know from another government that had people in there okay because that way i’m not giving any u.s you know
Information out this is not if information was received by the state department i’ve heard it after i left the state department but i’m pretty convinced they know what’s going on because they were working with the wuhan institute it was mid-november early to november they were workers falling sick either with influenza uh
Or something that more or less resembled covid uh you know what the exact biology of this was what we we don’t know we may never know um but i do believe having led this effort to to sort of get to the bottom of this can of worms with the in the
Intelligence community there’s a lot of data that’s in our possession there’s a lot of data and admiral guerra can talk about at nih and its databases that’s what this these scientists out at the hutch institute at university of washington recently discovered that even on you know they were
Even in march of last year there were chinese calling up or sending emails to nih saying please take down the blast sequences we’ve run in your on your data system for genetic analysis because we just want them taken down well of course those were probative elements in showing that the chinese were sicker
Earlier than they ever admitted and you know may have even had evidence in some of those sequences that this was spreading in a way that would have been important to get that information first let me ask all of you yes yes or no question uh senate bill 18
13 48 which i referenced earlier this is the bill that requires the director of national intelligence to declassify information relating to the origin of covet again this bill passed the united states senate unanimously still has not come up in the house do you think it’d be helpful for the world to know
If we were able to declassify that information would you support getting this information i mean i know a lot of the information that is classified and i’d say your ears will bleed you know when you when you know you’re when you when you think of it so you would support the
Classifying this and it’s pretty pretty amazing things but there is also a lot of information that was never classified you know at the top sequence and i know i want to run through get the rest uh dr mueller would be helpful to get that information declassified you’re asking me
I believe it would be very important doctor not not that we’re determining whether this was a lab leak because i think the scientific evidence for that is compelling but for understanding more of the details of what the program was going on yes very important dr kwai
Yeah i believe it would be very valuable for that and i just adding other things we’re talking about being in the fall november 12 2019 three scientists move on into virology you know what they do they file a patent in china for a tourniquet to prevent uh bleeding if you
Get bit by an animal uh for you know so you don’t get infected by the virus in the animal november 12 2019. dr dr i think as much as possible i certainly wouldn’t want to jeopardize our sources and and methods in china because we’re going to need those but as
Much as possible that we can that would shed light without jeopardizing our sources and methods absolutely 100 percent thank you and that that’s what this legislation would do hopefully it gets brought up i’ll go back then to the other comment that chairman mccall made and you know we had heard about these
These military uh games back in october of 2019 the military world games about 10 000 athletes from over a hundred different countries participated this was in october 18th to 27th of 2019 in yes of all places wuhan china many of those athletes reported flu-like symptoms
At the time covet 19 was not known for for testing purposes to determine if that was it looks like that may have been the case uh have we been able to get information about uh was that maybe the first super spreader event and the other thing was
Getting back to that earlier question if we would have known in those early months that this was a lab made genetically engineered virus not a bat to animal to human virus uh if we would have known that at the beginning when china knew it could that
Have saved lives not here in america and throughout the world second question uh first whether it was laboratory derived or natural if we would had open access the moment it started spreading we could have saved lives secondly if we knew it was lab derived that would be an extra uh bonus for us
To save more lives and to expedite a vaccine as well expedite a vaccine you know all of the above the third part about the the games i have no information about it but i tell you every cdc detective and everybody at the nih started be looking at that could
That could really reveal information about the origins i don’t think we have anything in those athletes maybe the state department does but i i don’t yeah dr coy well since they were olympic style games they should have blood samples for drug drug testing and so i pointed i asked the david last
Fall if we should we should try to see the because the sample should be in in the in the refrigerator we know who would have that i mean it was again it was put on in china perhaps i’m not sure of that but but one thing i would like
To add if i had a test tube of this virus in 72 hours in a laboratory i could tell you how much more virulent it is in sars1 or myrrh so um that would have been very helpful in the fall dr muller no further dr asher any other points on
That we were told by the army that they had you know reason to be suspect suspicious but i never actually got any further information other than they were we’ve been having a hard time getting dod to give us some of that information now again it’d be helpful to have that kind
Of habit these athletes are highly tested i mean anybody who’s traveling abroad we all get you know i mean this i i just would be shocked if we don’t have that data i talked to the veterans administration of course to the army military army medical system and other services well we’ll keep
Pressing for that thank you next we’ll go back to mr comer thank you dr gawa the who is supposed to be an apolitical part of the united nations at the center of a response to a global pandemic yet throughout this pandemic the who has shied away from placing any blame whatsoever on china
Can you explain how this false claim hindered the u.s and the rest of the world from ramping up the proper response to this pandemic in a timely manner um complicated question you know saying the un or the who is non-political is just you know it’s fantasy it’s it’s all
Political right um there are people who are in the who nation states who are actively promoting their own agendas both at the who and by subsidizing other smaller countries so that they vote together on a block this goes everywhere from u.s ethical values that we’re trying to promote throughout the world including democracy
Um it also goes to agricultural products where people are trying to use health and certain practices as an excuse to boycott u.s and to bring down our agricultural industry so these places are by nature political they can be a lot more than that but they are political and don’t be fooled that they
Aren’t secondly i’m not sure how much the who statements influenced us but it certainly influenced the u.s media and social media and it’s very interesting to me how that’s sort of selectively taken so if the who says it couldn’t have been a chinese lab leak then everybody agrees
With that and that’s the truth but if the who says children under five should not wear masks and children under 11 only wear masks in certain circumstances that’s not picked up by the media so uh that kind of bothers me and i wanted to point out that dichotomy uh it’s very
Selective so i think the who’s stances did influence the u.s media and thus the propaganda machine that’s associated and that it couldn’t be spread from human to human and that it couldn’t be spread from human to human an unusual circ really an unusual statement very early um
Uh to be so definitive about that and that was really just taking uh the chinese word because there was no there was no information uh that that didn’t suggest that and we have all the information that we know that the contrary was true one last example of the w.h.o
In april 2021 it the who released an entirely one-sided report which uh tried to examine the or the origins of the virus outside scientists were given little access and the ccp was given full power to edit and alter the final report dr grewa did
The u.s submit any names to be a part of the investigation team yes of the recent one and i’m glad you bring this up um because i want to emphasize that we submitted and that went through my office three non-political career scientists with impeccable credentials who could not be tied to
Anything that would be offensive to the chinese aside from they were going to seek the truth and find it those were we don’t know what happened to them but all we know is they never showed up and only dr dasek was allowed to be on that on that
Committee we heard that we couldn’t believe it because it it’s just i don’t know if it’s unprecedented but it’s pretty unprecedented that you ask the director general asks for us to submit names we submit names go out of our way to make sure they’re completely apolitical top-notch and they’re
Summarily rejected so did communist china veto those names we infer that but we don’t know that all we know is they had veto power and these three names didn’t show up but but there were no americans on this team uh well peter dassack was the was the one american that’s correct and mr
Dazak did he have a relationship with the wuhan lab of course and that and that that’s well known and that is a conflict of interest right it’s it’s a very uh an ex it’s an extreme conflict of interest um again i don’t know him personally i don’t want to you know imply
But but uh a priori there’s a major conflict of interest there since he was his organization was the vehicle uh to provide much funding to the wuhan lab and of course would have every reason the world uh to make it not so that work that he funded actually caused a
Worldwide pandemic again i don’t speak for him i don’t know but that’s an appearance of a conflict of interest which is why we had independent scientists who were not involved fda cdc nih we gave them the pick pick your agency you want and they were impeccable and they were rejected
Based just on these answers today concerning the who and their behavior towards the united states and their favoritism towards china it’s very disappointing that president biden rejoined the who as one of his first acts as president very disappointing without the main holding them accountable without asking any questions without
Demanding any transparency very very disappointing uh mr remember i yield back thank you now let’s go back to mr jordan for a second round of questions uh thank you mr chairman let me just uh for the record um if we can just run down the the line here um
Each of you believe that the virus 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 you know it’s very unlikely this was
Found in nature um but there is a scenario that 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 and again 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 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 a 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 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 mr mueller yeah i would say that that the evidence that this was created by manipulation by gene splicing as well as gain of function
Uh is compelling and beyond reasonable doubt um the scientific evidence is very strong remarkably strongly stronger than anything you think it’s engineered then engineered okay yeah basically i 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 uh 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 gerard that that would have helped us save lives is that true
Um i i do believe that um two answers whether it was engineered or not if we would have known earlier 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 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 early we to save lives yes 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 earlier that this 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 makers 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 send 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 employed 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 wnb program so just to make now that it meant the president united states or anyone who 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 granted 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 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
Uh 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 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
Is very powerful right it decides who we are it tells about our vulnerabilities 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 a 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 gotta 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 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 just 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 well that brings us to the conclusion of this
Hearing let me again thank our four witnesses you are all experts in your field you’ve all brought some incredibly riveting testimony some concerning testimony just in the sense that uh more of these questions need to be asked and frankly uh we we should be getting answers from others who were also
Invited but didn’t come forward because there are a lot more questions to be answered about the origins of covet 19 i think it’s been very clear from all of your respected testimony that the origins of coven 19 came from the lab whether it was engineered just completely
From the mice uh was there a source a host like a bat but the bottom line is we need to be asking more of these questions especially to people who do have these answers and there are some people who have these answers who chose not to come i would urge
Our counterparts in the majority party to hold a bipartisan hearing where subpoena powers would be involved where we can compel all witnesses who know information that has not been put on the table to come forward we’re here to find facts we found out a lot of facts today
I think facts that are very helpful facts that show that if china was just fourth right early off in this process going back to september october of 2019 when they knew what was going on in that lab but lied to the rest of the world lives could have been saved hundreds of
Thousands if not millions globally could have been saved so let’s make sure we get those answers so it never happens again but also there needs to be accountability as well those are things that congress should be debating so far this majority majority’s chosen not to let’s also continue to call for a
Expedited hearing on senate bill 13 48 which would declassify much of that information that the director of intelligence of national intelligence has on the origins of covet 19 again it passed the senate unanimously this is not partisan legislation let’s get all of these facts out there and those
Others who have information and have not yet come forward now is the time to come forward the american people deserve to know uh wherever the facts lead and if the facts don’t lead in a place that you’re comfortable with the facts are going to come out anyway it’s better for
Everybody who has information to bring it forward so that we can at least ask these questions get the information and learn from what happened it’s been very very helpful uh that we got this information out i think you’ve all done an incredible service and having this uh having this broadcast
I think will open up and shine a light even brighter on something that we still need to dig and get more answers for so with that thank my colleagues for participating thank our witnesses again
