[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] It’s been over six years since the COVID-19 pandemic began, yet much of the scientific establishment still seems unwilling to acknowledge or openly debate where this virus came from.

In this episode, Matt Ridley, co-author of “Viral,” breaks down the significance of newly declassified documents released by Homeland Security Secretary Tulsi Gabbard and the evidence of a coordinated cover-up of COVID-19’s origins.

Ridley delves into a key paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published by Nature Medicine, exposing how the authors themselves believed that a lab leak was a likely possibility while publicly pushing the opposite narrative.

Troubling questions arise: Why hasn’t the international community held China accountable for what happened at the Wuhan lab? Why is America so attentive to cybersecurity, but completely blind to biosecurity? And why are there such close ties between Western scientific research and Chinese dual-purpose facilities like the lab in Wuhan?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Matt Ridley, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Matt Ridley:

Thank you, Jan, for having me on.

Mr. Jekielek:

Tulsi Gabbard, in her last days as Director of National Intelligence [DNI], released a series of documents related to a cover-up around the Wuhan lab, around gain-of-function research. I know you’ve been following this closely. Explain to me the significance of these documents.

Mr. Ridley:

They add confirmation to what we already knew; that there was strong intelligence pointing the intelligence agencies towards a lab leak as the cause of the pandemic almost from the very start. And then they also add what we suspected, which is that there was then a strong pushback from somebody within the administration, the U.S. administration, to make sure those conclusions didn’t get out to us, the public, and indeed were sort of reversed on political rather than scientific grounds.

Now, I haven’t mentioned any names in there, but the briefing, the thing that has stood out for me, is that the briefing of the CIA that caused it to change its mind was effectively done by Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases [NIAID], who was very conflicted because he had been defending gain-of-function research. He had made sure that it got allowed again after a moratorium in America, and he had made sure that funds went to supporting that work in China, not just in the United States. So this really does show that when he told Senator Rand Paul in testimony on oath that they were not funding gain-of-function research in China, that just simply is not true.

Mr. Jekielek:

I find this whole situation almost bizarre, right? Because very early in the pandemic, April of 2020, we created a documentary looking, I believe it was called, Tracing the Origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus. It was still okay to call it the Wuhan Coronavirus at the time, which would have been a normal name for it, right? And essentially the argument in the documentary was, it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, probably a duck, right? It wasn’t conclusive, but there was already enough evidence to point to a much more likely lab scenario than the other wet market scenario that was brandished about. And here we are, we’re still kind of arguing the same issue. There are still people that think it was a wet market at this point.

Mr. Ridley:

Yes, you were onto it before I was. In February and March of 2020, and even through April, I was still telling parliamentary colleagues here in the United Kingdom that it was not a lab leak, and we knew that because it had that possibility had been looked into by a number of American scientists who'd come to the firm conclusion that it could not possibly be a laboratory construct. They used the word ruled out, and I thought, well, that’s good enough for me. These guys look like they know what they’re doing. Then, in May of 2020, two things happened.

One was a paper that came to my attention, which said this virus did not evolve very fast in the first few months, and yet it is very infectious. That implies that it’s had prior exposure to human beings. It’s not just suddenly appeared in the last few months. Somewhere, it’s been in contact with human cells, and that could have been in a lab. That paper was written by three people, one of whom was Alina Chan, who ended up being my co-author on this subject.

The other thing that happened was that George Gao, the head of the China CDC, whom I’ve since met and interviewed, said in May of 2020, it didn’t start in the market. We’ve looked in the market, and we can’t find an infected animal. The pattern of infection of people in the market doesn’t point at an animal. Animal vendors were not infected, etc. Now, that’s extraordinary.

In the case of SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome], when the outbreak happened in 2003, it very quickly became apparent that there were infected animals and infected animal vendors. Now, there are 40,000-plus food markets of that kind in China. It happened next to one that also happened to be the site of the only SARS-like betacoronavirus research program in the world. And it happened the year after they planned a very specific experiment in that lab on a virus that was 96 percent the same, that was sitting in their own freezer in that lab, having been brought from a thousand miles away. So, your walk like a duck, quack like a duck thing is one way of putting it.

The other cliché I reach for is, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine. The line from Casablanca, if you remember. It is genuinely far less surprising that Rick should run into. I can’t remember what Ingrid Bergman’s character was called in Casablanca. It was that this virus should turn up in this one place at this one time when this kind of research was going on and leave no trace in animals or people.

Mr. Jekielek:

Absolutely. Well, another thing I know that we both, because from reading your work, I know we both kind of zeroed in on, was this proximal origins paper in Nature Medicine journal. Because some of the viewers will know, I have a background in evolutionary biology. I can kind of, you know, I have a better understanding than the average person of these things. This, of course, wasn’t a paper; it was kind of a letter. When I read this, it basically argued that there’s no chance, there’s zero chance that this could be from a lab. And I thought that was an astonishing claim because it just simply was false. It was, it was obviously false, right?

And it was the weirdest moment for me because this was a journal I would have given my left foot to be published in, you know, Nature Medicine journal, at one point in my life, right? And they were obviously publishing something which was obviously false to me. And I checked with some friends from the past, and they, and my friends actually agreed with me there. And one of them had even written to Nature Medicine journal saying, how could you publish this? This is obviously not true, right? But this document was used extensively in this way to sort of justify, yes, absolutely, it has to be a natural origin. And it changed my life.

Mr. Ridley:

Me too. That was the paper I was referring to when I said that I started reassuring colleagues that this couldn’t have come out. I was lied to. I was deceived. It is disgraceful what happened with that paper because we now know what happened with that paper. Well, first of all, in its own terms, the paper is extremely unpersuasive.It has two main arguments for saying that it can rule out an origin. Those are the words used in a press release by Kristian Andersen, the senior author.

The first argument is, it’s not a perfect fit to our receptor. If we had designed it, we'd have made it perfect. What? It’s a pretty good fit. Where do you get the idea that we would always get it right the first time or whatever? You know, that was a completely bizarre argument.

And the other argument was, yes, it’s got a furin cleavage site, which makes it way more infectious than any other Sarbecovirus, and no other Sarbecovirus has ever been found with one. But don’t worry, we'll find one with one in it naturally. Well, six years on, we still haven’t found one. So that was a non-argument at the time and is an even weaker argument now. So on its own terms, the paper was extremely unpersuasive.

We know it was unpersuasive because the senior author of that paper, in his private messages, said before, during, and after publishing the paper, I still think a lab leak is fricking likely. Those were the words he used. What? I’m sorry, but when I was in science, like you, I’m an evolutionary biologist by background, you do not publish papers that say the opposite of what you think.

So he claims he’s changed his mind. He didn’t change his mind. He changed his line. Now, why did he change his line? Well, we know a little bit about that, too, because he had an exchange with one of his co-authors. This is a man named Kristian Andersen, and the co-author was Andrew Rambaut.

They had an exchange in which Rambaut said, I hate it when it gets political, but sometimes you have to make compromises politically. I can’t remember the exact wording, but it was like that. And Andersen replied, yes, I completely agree. It’s a pity you have to get political, but we have to. For political reasons, they published a paper that says the very opposite of what they thought in private.

The other thing that’s wrong with that paper is that it was basically commissioned by Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust and Anthony Fauci of NIAID, who were consulted throughout, who helped change the wording and are not mentioned in the paper. And we have now got emails saying, please don’t mention us in the paper.

Again, that is a scientific disgrace. Yet, as you say, hundreds of us have written to the editor of Nature Medicine saying, this paper must be retracted. It’s wrong. It doesn’t say what they thought. It has left out some authors. It disguises its origins. And it has misled the world, right?

Mr. Jekielek:

And it’s false. I mean, it’s false on its face, yes.

Mr. Ridley:

We have not had the courtesy of a reply from the editor of Nature Medicine. This is extraordinary.

Mr. Jekielek:

Do you think these new disclosures from the Director of National Intelligence in the U.S. might change that?

Mr. Ridley:

I'd like to think that this would help. In a sense, we already had strong enough evidence that there was a tremendously energetic cover-up of the lab leak possibility in the early months of 2020 in America, right? The American side of things, we kind of knew already. It’s nice to have confirmation and some more details. What we need now, because you said that much of the world now realizes it’s a lab leak.

Pretty well everybody I know of any intelligence and who’s looked into it at all concludes it’s a lab leak now. Except Science journal, Nature journal, and the Royal Society in London won’t even debate it, along with the National Academies in America. The scientific establishment won’t budge, and that’s a problem. So what we need now is more intelligence about China.

We can find out more about what went on in America, and that’s helpful, but we need to know: A) what experiments they did on what days; B) why they took their database offline; C) why three of them went to the hospital; D) why the man who developed the first vaccine threw himself off the roof; and E) why they were suddenly in a panic about lab safety in the fall of 2019, etc., etc. We need to know: did they fund the proposal for putting a furin cleavage site into a Sarbecovirus for the first time the year before the pandemic? Did they fund that? And if so, how?

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s the DEFUSE proposal you’re talking about.

Mr. Ridley:

That’s called the DEFUSE proposal, yes, which is as close as you can get to a precise recipe for making SARS-CoV-2. They talk about a virus that’s 20 percent different from SARS, that’s this one. They talk about looking for furin cleavage sites and if they can’t find one, putting one in. And then in this virus there appears a furin cleavage site which has the same sequence as furin cleavage sites that they’ve put into genes elsewhere in the laboratory world.

So it’s quite extraordinary that China has been allowed to get away with revealing almost nothing about what went on in that laboratory. And instead of saying that’s a disgrace, we can’t cooperate with you scientifically until you clear this up, the world has said, oh fine, let’s go on having scientific collaborations with you as much as you want. That doesn’t seem right to me.

Mr. Jekielek:

The part that I also find confusing is certainly the U.S. intelligence community, which, you know, clearly is involved in this—that’s one of the things that is revealed, I think, in these DNI recently declassified documents—just that there is this kind of constant collaboration movement. The intelligence community clearly knew that this lab was a Chinese military lab. Now, why am I saying that?

Because in China there’s a military-civil fusion doctrine. If something has military potential, heads will roll if that military potential isn’t explored in a technology. And here we’re talking about gain-of-function research and viruses. This is bioweapons research on the other side of the coin, so to speak. So absolutely it’s a military lab. Absolutely the intelligence community had to know that. I’m looking at these emails, chummy conversations between the head of the Chinese CDC and the Americans. I find that bizarre because we’re dealing with the Chinese Communist Party here, right?

Mr. Ridley:

To be fair, it’s best described as a dual-purpose lab. There was a military side to it and there was a civilian side. Quite where the boundary was between them, we don’t know.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s just that the military side is of importance here.

Mr. Ridley:

Of enormous importance.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right, right.

Mr. Ridley:

And I don’t myself think we have evidence that they were trying to make a weapon out of SARS-CoV-2. I think it’s more likely that they thought of themselves in military terms as doing something defensive. How do we get ready to react if someone uses SARS-CoV-2 as a weapon against us? But that’s nearly always the excuse for bioweapons research, by the way, in the West and the East. And of course, it’s a sort of self-fulfilling motion.

The basic facts are that Ralph Baric in North Carolina invented a technique for manipulating coronaviruses, and it was a brilliant technique, and it meant that you could swap spike genes between coronaviruses. The Chinese said, could we copy that technology? And basically, Americans said yes, as long as you let us have access to some of your viruses. Some kind of deal like that was done, and they then got quite good at that technique, and they produced in that lab—this is not speculation, this is fact—they produced viruses that killed mice three times as efficiently and that increased the viral load in humanized mice 10,000 times.

Now, if one of those viruses, which by the way is being tested on humanized mice with human ACE2 receptors, if one of those viruses got out, of course it would cause a pandemic. Now, the experiments we’ve seen did not happen to a virus close enough to SARS-CoV-2 to do that, but we know that in the last year they switched to looking at ones that were closer. They were doing this at biosafety level two. I mean, that’s gloves and a mask. You don’t even have to wear a mask in a biosafety level 2 lab. You’re not suited up. There’s no negative pressure and all that kind of thing.

And the reason, you know, the EcoHealth Alliance, their American collaborator who was funneling U.S. taxpayers’ money to the lab, said, yes we like doing this work in Wuhan because it’s more cost-effective because they work at a lower biosafety level. Get your head around that. It’s a gigantic scandal, and most of the world wants to say, yes, probably a lab leak, but move on. I’m sorry, we can’t move on. 20 million people are dead.

Technology has just demonstrated to every terrorist on the planet that this is a really good way of bringing the world economy to its knees. And all you need to do is set up a biological laboratory and start working on viruses and hire a few experts. And do you know what? There’s no treaty. There’s no international monitoring. Nobody is saying who’s ordering the reagents, who’s working on particular kinds of viruses. You know, this is not an academic exercise where we want to know why people died. This is something where we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

By the way, I spoke to a very senior scientist in the UK at one point who had been predicting that we'd have a nasty biological accident at some point around now. And I said, well done, you got that right. And he said, no. It’s very important we never find out. It’s very important we never find out.

Mr. Jekielek:

Explain that to me.

Mr. Ridley:

I said, why? And he said, because it would disrupt relations with China. He said, you’re probably right. It probably did come out of a lab, but it’s better we don’t find out. I said, would you say that about a plane crash? When a plane crashes, we now have a system in the world where the details of why that crash happened are shared. If British Airways crashes, it doesn’t say, no, United Airlines can’t be privy to the information we found out. We have a global agreement that says that for every plane crash, the lessons from it are shared with everybody. Why don’t we have that in this case?

Mr. Jekielek:

Why don’t you tell me why you think this senior scientist has this view, this astonishing view?

Mr. Ridley:

There is a huge dependence of Western science on China now, collaboration with China, and Chinese funding. Many of the science journals get most of their revenue from Chinese researchers, not most, but a very, very large chunk of their revenue from Chinese scientists. China actually has an arrangement where it pays upfront for publication fees in journals. It rewards scientists financially for publishing in high-impact journals, and so many of them slice and dice their results to get as many publications out as possible.

So Chinese scientists, in that sense, are very productive, and that makes them very lucrative for Western scientific publishing. That’s an issue that needs looking into. But there is also a general admiration of the Chinese regime in academia. We’ve seen this explicitly in all sorts of ways, but academics are very Left-wing in this country and most of the Western world. Academics are, in my experience, and have been for quite a long time, people who admire top-down, directive politics.

They don’t think in terms of bottom-up democracy. They think it’s messy. They think, look, come on, whoever’s in charge should say this needs to be done. You know, tell people to brush their teeth twice a day. Tell people not to eat, and to drink milk. The desire to tell the world how to behave is quite strong in academia. So when the pandemic came along, you had people from the academic world, the editor of The Lancet is one of them, he published an editorial praising Xi Jinping thought at one point, who said, look at China, they’re cracking down on this virus, they’re telling people not to leave their homes, that’s what we need.

That whole sort of authoritarianism was very appealing to a certain kind of academic public health official, government bureaucrat in the West. So there is a China worship problem here that doesn’t see the harsh side of that kind of regime and doesn’t think in terms of liberty and personal liberty. And they didn’t want blame for this virus to go to this regime they rather admire.

Mr. Jekielek:

Except today, when we look back five years now, we see the abject failure of these policies, whether in China or here. So do you think there will be a shift in this admiration, given, you know, we’ve had the experiment now? How does this top-down rule work in a pandemic scenario? It turns out it fails in every respect.

Mr. Ridley:

No, there’s absolutely no doubt that lockdowns were a catastrophe. They didn’t work, and they caused all sorts of other huge problems. Nobody can look at the evidence now—the evidence from Sweden, the evidence from different American states, etc.—and not come to that conclusion. This virus was too infectious and too infectious in asymptomatic people for lockdowns to work. Full stop. That’s what we need to look at.

They might have worked in the early months in Wuhan when it wasn’t quite so infectious and when you had a ridiculously authoritarian regime. But no, next time we have a highly infectious viral pandemic, we must not reach for locking down the population. And that, by the way, was the conclusion of the public health establishment before the pandemic, months before the pandemic came out.

They had a big publication on this saying, whatever we do, we must resist the temptation from politicians to lock down the entire population. It won’t work. If the virus is sufficiently infective, it won’t work. It’s fine with one that’s not very infectious, you know, and you can lock down a limited number of people.

Mr. Jekielek:

Except there’s this small issue of civil liberties and free societies we may want to consider, right?

Mr. Ridley:

Good Lord, where did you get that idea? But I personally think, as an evolutionary biologist, that there is a point that gets missed here, and that is that viruses jump out of animals and into people quite often. We’ve had AIDS in our lifetime, we’ve had Ebola happening just quite recently, and others. So the theory that you can catch a new virus from an animal is not wrong. Of course, you can.

But they very, very rarely prove to be highly infectious from the start. They have to stutter their way through human-to-human chains of infection for quite a long time before they get really good at spreading. and then they can take off. They also tend to be pretty lethal. So Ebola kills 30 percent. Hantavirus kills 30 percent of the people it infects. So you’re much more likely to see what you’re seeing with Ebola: horrible outbreaks, but you can bring them under control. Or Hantavirus on that cruise ship, a few people die, and a few more people have to be in quarantine for a while, and then it’s over.

What we saw this time was completely different: a virus that was not very lethal. I mean, the all-age mortality from this virus was something like less than half a percent. That’s sort of equivalent to flu, roughly. So it was not very lethal, but very infectious. That, to me, tells you this wasn’t a normal zoonosis. That, to me, tells you that it must have had training on human cells and human molecules in the months, if not years, leading up to the pandemic.

Mr. Jekielek:

And just to kind of frame that out a little bit, because it already appeared to be so familiar with human cells. It had that ability to enter human cells very smoothly, if you will.

Mr. Ridley:

Yes, it had the ability to use the ACE2 receptor to get into a human cell. And by the way, it was much better at that. It’s not very good at getting into bats at all, even though it’s originally a bat virus. What does that tell you? It tells you it hasn’t been in bats for a while. It’s been in another species. It’s better at infecting humans than almost any other species. Monkeys, it’s pretty good at too. Cats, it’s quite good at. But it was humans. This had turned into a human virus somewhere in the months before.

Now, given that we know this lab was taking SARS-like betacoronaviruses, this very type of virus, and infecting them into human cells and humanized mice for several years before the pandemic. It’s crazy to think that this wasn’t how this happened, and therefore we really need to rethink our approach to pandemics. The idea that surveillance of outbreaks so that we know when they’re happening and can react quickly is great.

But going and finding bat viruses in a cave in Yunnan or Laos and bringing them a thousand miles north to a big city with 11 million people in it, to the middle of a big city, putting them in a lab, sequencing them, doing manipulation experiments on them, giving them an extra feature that makes them much more infectious in human cells, and doing all that at a low biosafety level, even if that hadn’t led to a pandemic, now we know they were doing that, we should be absolutely horrified.

It does nothing to ready us for a pandemic. The purpose of that experiment, as far as we can make out, those series of experiments, was so that they could say one day, look, aren’t we clever? We’ve made a vaccine that works against any kind of coronavirus. Well, they were nowhere near that. And they were looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.

Mr. Jekielek:

I know that the Chinese Communist Party has a policy—I’ve read the document—of, you know, basically doing bioweapons work. They’re interested in this topic. They’re actively sort of working on these types of things. Instead of again, sort of, we know that, I think, our academic community should know it. Certainly, our intelligence community is very aware of that. So there’s that whole realm, whether it’s offensive or defensive, as you pointed out earlier.

I think it’s unlikely, given the military involvement, that we could ever get any information from China, given how I know how they operate. Because, as you said earlier, you would like to get an accounting, which of course makes a ton of sense. What about these collaborations that were American institutions, National Institutes of Health [NIH], in the U.S.? What about these collaborations?

Mr. Ridley:

The American government has barred the EcoHealth Alliance from federal grants now. That’s quite right. That was an organization that was extraordinarily misleading to us. For a start, it failed to tell us about the DEFUSE proposal. I mean, they were the lead authors of this proposal in 2018 to put a furin cleavage site into a Sarbecovirus for the first time, and they sat on that. And throughout the first two years of the pandemic, they didn’t mention it until someone in the Pentagon decided it might be a good idea to hand it to a journalist. That’s a disgrace. How could you conceivably know of that document and not think it relevant to tell the world?

So there are good reasons why we never want to see the EcoHealth Alliance or its leader, Peter Daszak, getting federal or any other kind of American support ever again. And the NIH says it needs to defund and cease dangerous gain-of-function research. And when you say, we should stop dangerous gain-of-function research, all sorts of people put up their hands and say, that means we can’t improve wheat crops because that’s gain-of-function.

No, we’re talking 99.9 percent of biotech genetic engineering work is safe and sensible, and it’s not dangerous gain-of-function. Some of it’s gain-of-function. You’re putting the function of insect resistance into a wheat plant or something; that’s gain-of-function, fine.

But dangerous gain-of-function, where you know you’re increasing the infectivity of a virus that can infect humans and you know you’re doing that in a lab. You shouldn’t be doing that at all. It has no place. And scientists signed up to an agreement back in the 1970s that they would never do things like that. Where’s the self-reflection in the scientific community?

Because at the moment, the Trump administration says it’s not going to fund that kind of thing. But it hasn’t come out with a very clear policy. And in two years’ time, you could have a new administration that says, because we don’t like everything Trump did, we’re going to reinstitute collaboration with China on dangerous gain-of-function experiments. There’s nothing you or I could do to prevent that from happening.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, what I’m trying to do, you know, for example, I’ve written this book on the organ industry in China and so forth. The take-home message from this book is these people do things like this. It’s a government operation, right? So you shouldn’t, don’t think of it as a normal collaborator, right?

Mr. Ridley:

Can I give an example of that? This is probably in your book, but you know about Reedley, California, the lab there, do you?

Mr. Jekielek:

Oh, no, tell me more.

Mr. Ridley:

A couple of years ago, in this small town outside Fresno in Central Valley, California, an alert city official saw a hose pipe that had been put into a warehouse that was supposedly not in use. So he knocked on the door and went in, and he found a huge laboratory with Chinese nationals working in it in white coats. He contacted the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and said, I think you need to come and look at this. And they said, no, we’re too busy. The local police went in and they found bags labeled with AIDS, Ebola, all sorts of other hepatitis, all sorts of other infectious agents, and a whole mass of scientific equipment going on.

But two years later, a house that he owned in Las Vegas was looked into just this year and it turned out the garage was full of more scientific equipment and samples. He was trying to sell Covid testing kits as well. Now, clearly this was breaking all sorts of laws and extremely unsafe, but he was well funded, this man, by Chinese investors. It’s not that easy to see him as a lone wolf who happened to be just a little bit off the reservation. It’s easier to think that there was some quite significant official support helping him do this.

Now, that’s just one incident where an alert city official stumbled on something. We’ve had Chinese nationals arrested at airports for stealing biological material from labs in Detroit. We had another case in Winnipeg that was similar, etc. There’s very little doubt that with at least a blind eye from the Chinese authorities. There is a lot of espionage going on with respect to biological materials, and we’re very aware of this when it comes to cybersecurity, but in biosecurity, we’re asleep at the switch on this.

Mr. Jekielek:

And I mean, espionage and possible active experimentation in America, right? Yeah. I mean, that’s the sense that I’ve gotten from those two locations, from those two sites that you just mentioned.

Mr. Ridley:

Yes. You know, I genuinely live in fear. People tell me I should be worried about AI as an existential risk or whatever. I don’t understand why people are not more alarmed about biosecurity now. And I speak, I mean, I’m a passionate defender of biotechnology. I think it’s a wonderful technology. I think we should be using it in agriculture and medicine a lot. It can help us enormously with human flourishing.

And I think in Europe we were crazy to reject genetically modified crops. We would have been environmentally as well as economically better off if we‘d done so. So I’m not coming at this as someone who’s campaigned against biotechnology. Quite the reverse. I think that science says if we find out about a lab leak, it’ll be bad for the reputation of science.

Well, it wouldn’t have been if science had done its own research and said, look, these these were bad apples. But now, I’m sorry, those apples have infected the whole barrel. Where’s the funding for an investigation of the origin of COVID? Where are the grants to academics saying, please, could you find out everything you possibly can? And please, can you collaborate with the Chinese about this? You know, it just doesn’t exist.

The scientific community wants to tiptoe away from this hoping that nobody will ever know and that they can say it wasn’t proven, we don’t know. And they think that’s better for the reputation of science. I think that’s disastrous for the reputation of science. I love science. I think it’s humanity’s greatest achievement, bar none. And I think it’s really dropped the ball on this one.

Mr. Jekielek:

I share your concern about biosecurity, again, given what I know the Chinese Communist Party is involved in. And we got a hint of some of that through COVID. But at the same time, we also saw how biosecurity was used as a way to lock down society, introducing all sorts of policy that was erroneous would be the nicest way of putting it, in a way, in some cases arbitrary and so forth.

On the one hand, obviously, this biosecurity is a huge issue. People can concoct all sorts of crazy things in a little lab, especially with tacit agreement of the Chinese regime and so forth. On the other hand, the same idea is used as an excuse to implement policy, which has been highly inappropriate. And I’m not convinced we’ve learned that lesson at this point.

Mr. Ridley:

You’re right that we crack down too hard on some things, and we’re not cracking down hard enough on others. I mean, I would like to see the world give quite a tough time to biology laboratories that work on viruses in terms of monitoring what they’re up to. I do not want to see ordinary human beings told there is now a general rule in place that the moment we snap our fingers, we’re going to impose curfews, and we’re going to close schools, and we’re going to stop you leaving your home and all that kind of thing. So we were far too tough in the pandemic on ordinary people, and we were not nearly tough enough on labs. That’s the answer.

Now, look, I’m a libertarian. I think there are too many rules and regulations getting in the way of innovation in the world. But when I listen to some of the virologists who are complaining about people like me, I’m not that libertarian. They say things like, it’s a disgrace that the government tells us what we can and can’t do in our laboratories.

Well, that’s about the one place where I quite would want a little bit of government approval. We have ethics panels saying you can’t do that experiment; it’s not ethical. We do not have safety panels in universities doing that. Literally, it’s easier to get safety approval for an experiment on a virus than it is to get ethical approval for an experiment on an animal. That’s the wrong way around.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, another thing that just comes to mind quickly is that the way the whole COVID scenario played out, it feels to me like we haven’t had an accounting of how poorly that went for us as a society. And this was implemented in over 100 countries, I think.

Mr. Ridley:

Let me give you an example of exactly that. We have had a COVID inquiry in this country led by a judge and staffed by ignorant barrister lawyers. They have generally been very hard-pushing, and the judge who leads the inquiry has been concluding that the problem is we didn’t lock down hard enough and soon enough, right? When the evidence totally points the other way. So this is just the bureaucracy looking after its own interests and defending its own decisions.

But when one politician, Michael Gove, was being grilled by this committee, he said, by the way, we need to talk about the origin of the virus because it probably was a lab leak. That should have altered our conversation right at the start because if it was a lab leak, it was more infectious. Lockdowns were never going to work. He was shut down. He said that’s outside the scope of this inquiry.

So the lack of interest in the biosafety error that led to the pandemic is a problem. Excessive interest in defending the biosecurity errors that led to the lockdowns is an equal problem. I said that there’s been no funding, no proper research into the origin of the virus. But what did happen rather remarkably during this period, and it is an extraordinary story and one that deserves to be much better known, is that some amateur sleuths put their heads together and did incredible things that illuminated vital information about what was going on in Wuhan that the official espionage people and the official academic researchers hadn’t bothered to tell us.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re talking about DRASTIC [Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19]  and other groups.

Mr. Ridley:

DRASTIC and particularly a wonderful Indian guy called The Seeker, along with Francisco de Assis in Spain, and Gilles Demaneuf in New Zealand. These are ordinary people working in their spare time on their own dime who did things like find crucial theses in China, work out exactly which bat cave the Chinese scientists had been visiting on which dates, and collecting which viruses in them.

It’s an amazing story of citizen science, and they were way better than the CIA, MI6, the Royal Society, and the National Academies of Sciences. They found out far more than these guys. Journalists do not recognize that enough. Just hats off to the amateurs. It’s a reminder that society is not run by brilliant experts who know how to tell us what to do. The people who make society really work are ordinary people.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s finish off on this. This is something that I find incredibly disturbing. In a way, it’s been good for us that we were asking normal questions that a great many media were deeply uninterested in. in numerous areas, whether that was, you know, this Steele dossier back in the day, or whether it was COVID origins or later, you know, COVID response. What do you make of what happened to so many of our trusted media when they’re sort of absent on these, you know, some of the most important issues of our day?

Mr. Ridley:

A lot of the media became willing purveyors of propaganda during the pandemic. That was a real shock to most of us. I’m a journalist by background, and I was brought up or educated to regard journalists as people who challenged authority rather than pervade its message. But I’m afraid in the pandemic, pretty well every mainstream media decided it was their job to tell us to do as the government told us to do. Sorry, that’s not your job. You know, your job was to challenge stuff. So the media got very supine in this period.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, a final thought as we finish.

Mr. Ridley:

Thank you for talking to me about the lab leak. I’m not going to give up on this subject, and I’m sure you’re not either. It took us 12 years to work out that a lab leak was responsible for an anthrax epidemic in the Soviet Union. They denied it for 12 years. We then found it was true. We’ve got another six years to go before we get to that point. I’m pretty sure that at some point we will get more information. It’s a very, very important episode in human history, and I think we mustn’t let it drop.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Matt Ridley, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Ridley:

Thank you so much.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.