we cannot lose one our days, exposing the hidden human and environmental cost way with the company. give free what it is you never know about it said boss fashions or knowledge. we understand the differences and similarities of cultures across the world. so no matter how you take it will bring you the news and current affairs that matter to you. i know i'm marianne was a london our main story. this our a pledge by g 7 leaders to donate a 1000000000 doses of the current of ours vaccine to poor countries has been dismissed is inadequate by activists. british prime minister bars johnson says the group of 7 plan will inoculate the world nearly a 1000000000 people by the end of next year. but campaign is saying, the move is far too slow and it shows that west and lead is not up to the job of

tackling the worst public health crisis in a century. there is jona hall is in cornwall where the leaders have gathered and sent us this report. the white sands of compass bay it delicate power setting for a meeting of the group of 7 described as the world's most advanced democracy. they're also leading the vaccine race to exit the pandemic. and while socially distance still there face to face, at least, and promising a combined effort to help the world emerge from crisis. i actually think this is a meeting that genuinely needs to happen, because we need to make sure that we learn the lessons from the pandemic. we may need to make sure that we don't repeat some of the areas that we doubtless made in the course of the last 18 months or so. and we need to make sure that we now have all our economies to recover the headline pledge on this opening day. the

g 7 is the donation of a 1000000000 vaccine doses to lower and middle income countries over the next 12 months with the us offering half of that amount. campaigners say it's nowhere near enough and know when near fast enough. i think a 1000000000 dose is. it's a good thing, i mean, you can't say it's a bad thing, but we need 11000000000 dollars and we need to move away from the idea of charity crumbs from the rich countries and let developing countries like south africa or india produce their own vaccines. and the only way to do that is to share the vaccine recipe and break through the monopolies of these big pharma corporations and bar, as jones really doesn't want to do that. so he wants his all to talk about donations and the logic of the richest nations, when in fact, they're being hugely selfish and putting profit over people. but now the age of consumerism, fossil fuel addiction, things will use protest as a being kept well away from the some of the venue. but for once the issues they

raise are actually being discussed. there's pressure to wave peyton. so the poorer countries can develop vaccines for themselves. the u. s. and france are in favor with others yet to follow the climate and inequality or among the worlds crises that will talk the agenda on sunday. they call it the g 7, but really there is no doubt who the 2 leading figures are here, or is johnson the u. k. prime minister and host key to show his country off as a global power play, a post breaks it. and joe biden goes to the us president on his 1st foreign visit. both men came to be seen at the helm of efforts to rid the world of climate change and depend demik only the most prestigious visitors to the u. k. a graced with the presence of the queen. what emerges from this leaders gathering a post trump consensus alliance, his reinvigorated meaningful promises of action, will determine whether this wealthy club of nations can make a real difference. joan, a whole al jazeera cornwall deforestation,

and brazil's amazon rainforest has risen for a 3rd consecutive month with, with president marble scenario. yet to follow through on a pledge to boost funding for environmental enforcement more than 2. and our 1000 square kilometers of land was destroyed in the 1st 5 months of the year. that's a 25 percent rise compared to a year earlier. much of the land is used for capital ranches, farms and logging a 15 year old palestinian boy has died after being shot by israeli forces during a protest in the occupied west bank. the teenager was one of several palestinians wounded in beta south of nablus, while demonstrating against the expansion of the jewish settlement. and molly's transitional government has named a new cabinet with kind of sad, jo kamara pointed as defense minister. the military sees power last month and the army officials have now been appointed to several key cabinet positions and we'll have more on that later. the bottom line is the program coming up next. discussing the u. s. investigate investigation into the origins of the crone of ours pandemic

. the. ready hi, i'm steve clements and i have a question. are american officials and scientists starting to believe that the corona virus pandemic came from a lab accident? it will. hon. let's get to the bottom line. ah, does it even matter how the pandemic began? isn't it more important to figure out how to end the disease that has wiped out more than 3700000 people worldwide, and it's still spreading. for china, the case is closed cove in 1900, jump from animals to humans in late 2019 period. and i might add that some folks in china pushed a conspiracy theory that the u. s. military hatched it and release it in china.

last years, investigations focused on a wet market and woo hon. it's old sea food and exotic animals for human consumption. the world health organization and many scientists agreed with this theory. even though there are still a lot of lingering questions. when former president donald trump talked about the possibility of an accident at the one institute of her ology, it was generally dismissed as a conspiracy theory changed with racism. but now president joe biden is asking his intelligence agencies to look into that very possibility. and china says, washington is now just playing politics. so how do we responsibly investigate the origins of cove? it without political blinders? today we're speaking with dr. g. g gronvold, in immunology at the johns hopkins center for health security, and the author of synthetic biology, safety, security, and promise. she's a member of the threat reduction advisory committee, which advises the defense department on how to reduce the risk of nuclear, biological, chemical and conventional threats. and jeannie metal who writes about the future of technology, health care and geo politics. and he's the author of a great book,

hacking darwin, genetic engineering, and the future of humanity. he's a member of the world health organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing. it's great to have you both with us today. let me, let me just start with you. if you are sitting in china and during the tenure, a president, trump, a lot of these theories you know about the virus coming from the wu, han lab being, you know, geo engineered and even released by the chinese military to, to, to their own people. i think a lot of that was discounted largely by the media now. president biden is in and some of the theories are coming back. i guess, you know, asia really well. my questions from china's perspective is wouldn't you expect a little whiplash in their response? it depends on where in china, i certainly believe that there are many senior people in china who recognize what happened here, and that is whatever the origins of the pandemic. and there is a legitimate debate and

a legitimate conversation right now about whether emerge naturally 0 or not, john, from animals to humans or through some kind of lab incident. it's a very real question. it's an honest question. you mentioned in your intro, steve, that the world health organization has cited with the natural origin hypothesis, which is 100 percent as much as i love you. it's 100 percent untrue. dr. tedra has said that all that the w h o supports the investigation of all high policies, including the possibility of a lab incident origin. so if i were in china, i would be a little worried right now, because i would know that the chinese government has carried out a massive cover up from day one. immediately they started destroying samples, disappearing critical records, imprisoning citizen journalists, asking the most basic questions when they establish a universal gag order, preventing chinese scientists from saying, or writing anything publicly about pandemic origins without prior government

approval. and so i don't think it's whiplash. i just think that you're right that the world, many of us in the united states and i'm a progressive democrat, got in the habit of just assuming it everything that president trump said was just some kind of fabrication or lie or whatever. but even a broken clock is right twice a day, and that's why i've been saying we need to evaluate the message, not the messenger. and i think right now there are 2 very valid origin hypotheses, and that's why i've always called for a full investigation. so we can get to the bottom of what went wrong and then address our greatest vulnerability. it's a fascinating challenge and is a mystery sort of like a, who'd done it and, and you know, one would think of that line. well, if china is incident or innocent of this, why do they behave so guiltily? but let me start, you're gone for a moment. can you share with us where he, some of your skepticism comes of at least that path of looking at this pan makes

you no escape if you will, into mankind? sure. happy to. so a lot of the theories about where cove it came from come from either that it was originally in animals and made the jump somehow to humans, or that it was actually created in the laboratory. and i think that the evidence for that ladder that it was created in a laboratory is very weak and, and so there's a lot of problems with that. with that idea. one of the issues is that people, i think, put a lot of, i mean, i think science, it's amazing, but it's often a lot more incremental and tedious than i think a lot of people think and, and so i, a lot of the discussions over what is possible in the laboratory to,

to create, put a lot of faith in science that you know, should not be put into it quite yet. that you know, that scientists could basically mad me wave a magic wand and create a virus of this type. right now there is a serious investigation that we need to have for the origin of this virus, but, but we need to do a lot more science to and a lot more exploration to figure out where this virus could have been derived. well, let me ask jamie, and both of you together. i mean, one of the critiques you offer in your, in this paper was that when it comes to genetic editing and genetic design, a topic that jamie metal knows a lot about. that we're not yet at the point in our collective knowledge in science and how to micro engineer those changes in genes in a way that would produce very fine results as of yet we're going in that direction . your argument is that we're not there yet. jamie, why are we there yet?

and we just don't collective we know it know. so i completely agree with what d g 's just for the people who think that a bunch of scientists in china sat down and they brought out all of their, their best crisper tools. and they just built using the tools of synthetic biology, some kind of, of this actual virus and then unleashed it on the world. that's a very futuristic idea. maybe in 20 years, 50 years. that will be possible. certainly not possible now. but that's why i think a lot of people have gotten confused with this conflation of the idea of a genetically bio genetically engineered bioweapon with the idea. well, maybe could have been a very small genome added just of what was called the for and cleavage site. and there's a big debate about that happening right now, but you don't even need to go to, to the point of assuming that there with any genome editing to make the lab

incident hypothesis possible. it could be something as simple as people from the one is due to a variety or the cdc going down to one of these bad infested caves and you, non, and in southern china and being infected and to the human being the vectors. i could have easily been the one is due to her ology, which has the world's largest collection of bat corona viruses. and they were doing things like called serial passage, which are just exposures of viruses to other viruses, to other cell cultures, to 8th, to knock in humanized might, it could easily have been that in all there were a lot of different permutations. and one of them was one that was more able to, to jump to, to human than somebody in the lab was infected and just accidentally walked it out . there was some problem of waste disposal. and so i think we don't have to go all

the way to a genetically bio engineered virus to raise the very legitimate sion of an accidental lab incident. well, i think this raises gigi, some of the, the dimensions of lab protocols, lab safety, we do apparently understand and i don't have the report. but there are the accusations in some of the intelligence reports done by the u. s. government. the 3 individuals became sick in november of 2019 and that there was another case prior to that that doctor anthony found she has asked to look into which is a number of people who became sick after investigating a cave some time ago. and so what of jamie's speculation that there could be something along these lines that may still be tagged to the lab, but may be less diabolical. i think that the only way that a laboratory accident argent makes sense with knowing the science that we have is if it was just like jamie described, where

a virus was taken from the natural world and was examined in the laboratory and came out somehow. i still think that, you know, the natural introduction is probably more likely but, but you know that that's what an investigation is for. however, i don't think that that we are going to be able to satisfy everybody's curiosity to, to be able to get to that level of certainty. we can, we have to take the word of what has been put forward. right now. we have heard, it's been in the news for months that the people who worked in the lab had serology tested and were not had not been exposed to cov, it prior to the demick. so we either take that or retest, or i don't know how one would get to greater certainty than that declaration. i

think there are more things, though that can be done scientifically that we're not doing to be able to better underscore like, you know, to figure out where this came from. and that is to do more sampling of the environment and to, to be able to trace back some of the where the animals came from. those leads are going to go cold if they're not cold already. and so i think it would be nice to see more of an effort that we all work together to be able to find the origin and the natural world and then see where that takes us. well, let me ask steve. okay, yeah, let me, let me just jump in there. i'm all for additional testing and i'm for sure we should do all kinds of testing and sampling in the natural world. because as i've said, that's one very legitimate hypothesis. one of the reasons why i'm so sir and about, and i think we need to do much more to examine the lab incident. hypothesis is that everything the g g said is contingent upon our essentially trusting the word of

should jang lee and a small number of people at the woo hon institute of veronica g. in an ideal world on day one of the pandemic. she had dr. show and others would have said, you know, please, international community. however, however, organized, come in and review our records. look at the lab notes. look at the databases of what viruses we did or didn't have in our repository. if at that time, let's say on day one, we knew that the one institute of veronica had sars coby too, or a possible precursor virus to it, in their repository, that would be game over. we would know that the origin is 11th, and if on the other hand we had full access, we knew everything that was happening there. she has said that there was no chinese military engagement at w i. v. although every us intelligence agency has asserted that there was a, there are major question about sure. jang lee legitimacy and her,

her credibility and accountability. these serology tests, the g, g mentioned, were taken way after the potential exposures. so the chinese cover up and the destruction of evidence there. and that in my view, that's the problem. these are unanswerable questions. they just can't be answered without a full process, right? we're looking into them. and when the international study team was in china, people think it was an investigation. they were on the ground for 4 weeks, 2 weeks in quarantine, and then 2 weeks for a highly curated, manipulated study to or include a visit to the cobra propaganda museum. and then at the end of their, of their 2 weeks, they did a vote on which hypotheses were more or less likely. and they did it by a show of hands where the chinese scientists had to raise their hands in front of

the chinese party commissars. and we all knew that people would ask basic questions had been put in prison. so do you think one of those scientists could have raised their hand? it's a yeah, i think a lab in the origin is possible. we should look into that meeting that all of this exists within a content g g. looks like you want to respond. yeah, i think i just want to caution your viewers about a concept that we called mirror imaging. so this is something that we thought about a lot when it was the u. s. as the had an adversarial relationship with the soviet union. and that whole idea was looking at the soviets and saying, why are they doing this? well, they must be doing this way for this reason. and, and the whole idea is could be false if you are making your enemy or your adversary a little bit more like you. so, i want to caution you. your viewers is to say that sometimes china is going to behave in a particular way that may not have anything to do with whether or not they are covering up this particular incident. and it's important when you're looking at the

discussion of where this fires came from, that we will push the science and push what we know and not what we think we know about or, or what we presume to be why china is acting the way that they are, well, i mean, i've said that like a bat could have come out of the cave wearing i name tag speaking english, and fact somebody and postal insta and people would, you know, china may act exactly the same way. and even if the origin was clear, isabel, let me, let me just say a few moment just a little bit on what g g said. i don't think that's just china being china shouldn't be any way that we should think about this about this issue because there is we have this terrible in my view, very likely avoidable pandemic. there's this terrible cover up we can't get into, that's just china being china and saying, oh, transparency and accountability. that's just our thing. we should just let them do

their thing if they want to, you put a 1000000 weavers in concentration camps. that's just china being china. i think it's i totally reject that. i think your 2nd point is a very important point. we are entering the era the age of synthetic biology. he wrote a great book about that. and then the core message of this era is that our species has the increasing ability to read, write and hack the code of life. and over time, we're going to have a much greater ability to just to, to manipulate all of life, including, including viruses and including, you know, maybe it's 10 years, maybe it's 20 years, however many years. and so we need to be thinking about this, and that's why we need to be learning the tough lessons. that's why we need to be doing everything we can to understand how this pandemic started and how we can be much better prepared for the next ones. all i mean is that one should not assume that the origin of the virus tends anything to do with,

with the way that china is acting. and we need to make sure that we separate out the science from other consideration. but what i but it is true, but while g and biology in general is, is it's, this is the science of the century and, and a lot of nations are looking towards biology as a way to lift their economies and to provide not only medicines, but materials and manufacturing and everything else into for the next several decades. so countries reporting a lot of money into the bio sciences and. and so we have to think of different ways that we can keep bio safety funded, that we can encourage good norms and, and be able to have the kind of safety systems in place so that people are appropriately flagged. and you may not be able to stop it, but at least halt some of the incidents like that,

christopher baby experiment. so this is, it's not as a nebulous kind of governance for sure because, you know, you can't tell other nations what precisely they are doing. but we do have treaties, we do have norms, we do have engagements, we have publications, there are lots of different layers and ways that we can try and, and promote our vision of how science should be operating. thank you. please. just a minute. that's why i think there's, there's a through line between the crisper babies and it's an open question whether they even got greater resistance, future resistance to, to h i v, which is doubtful. but there's a through line chain, the, the who john way, crisper baby issue, right. and this, and a lot of other things that are, that are happening and there are 2 light. one is that science and our biggest

challenges are global. busy but we're not organized to address global challenges and there are mismatches is increasingly dangerous. the 2nd challenge, if i may have non state actors, right? so not the actor doing. this is the difference between what government and military's are organizing to do and what individuals who are entrepreneurial and think they're going to tackle something with new technologies or doing. yeah, and connect back. so, i mean, if you, if you all the states that have navies looked, probably looked at what happened with the u. s. s. roosevelt. and said, you know, that, that is terrible. we've got to do something about our defense right now to say that are to be able to take a symbol of american power and reduce it to a hospital ship. mean that's, that's, and that's something that we need to be worried about. it. let me, let me ask jamie, let me ask you a question. you have written a lot about your concerns about a guy named peter, daz in the ico health alliance, and anthony voucher dark. tiffany pouches said, hey, you know, the u. s. government has helped fund some of his work,

the defense support. and if you could do batt surveillance and be involved in that, that's a good thing. it would be irresponsible not to what are your concerns about peter dad's act. if you can give us a brief catch up on that. so peter days it is one of the world's premier will call him a virus hunter. people who believe that we need to have surveillance to understand these viruses that are out there. and we can't just bury our head in the sand and he was actually one of the heroes of the effort to track down the origins of the 1st sars outbreak. the reason why i have become moved from being a big fan of his, in the past to a big critic of his now are essentially to thing. i 1st, he was the organizer of a letter in the british journal, the lancet in february of last year, which claimed without sufficient supporting evidence that this outbreak will almost certainly are very likely stems from natural origin and called anybody who

was even raising the possibility of a lab incident origin, a conspiracy theorist i've called that scientific propaganda. i've called it thuggery. i even called for the editor in chief of the lancet to be fired because i think it was not appropriate to use that kind of language. when there was, we needed to have an open, honest conversation. second, peter, who already we know through email access through right to know with highly manipulated in that process and trying to create the impression of unanimity and didn't disclose any conflict of interest. then he was a member of both the w h o organized but not lead study team and the lancet commissioner. i think it has a massive conflict of interest as someone who has funded the work at the one institute of garage that's now being brought into question of thank you. will g g i love your comments on that. whether it's about peter to day sake, but also on the broader side of the scientific commons globally,

and how you know that. i mean, these don't follow national lines and my impression, how can we make sure that that remains healthy, enroll bussed in serving the public interest. i'm going to give you the last word. so i think that there's a lot that we need to learn from this. and one of the things i've been struck by to talk to small group of people have been making this their career to be able to investigate new viruses. we should be doing a lot more of this and making sure and seeing what we can do to stop pandemic, not just, not just make vaccines really quickly once they, once they come upon us. so i think that means opening this up to being a greater a bigger field, having more engagement between scientists working on. we have seen pretty clearly that infectious diseases don't know, borders and putting our head in the sand is not going to change that. you know,

we don't do what we can to stop spill overs. well, i'd like to thank johns hopkins university immunology dr. gigi gronvold and writer and technology future ologist jamie met. so thank you both for being with us today . i really wish we could have these kinds of conversations. whenever we have a car, it's very, very good to talk to you both. thank you. they see. so what's the bottom line in relations between super powers? there is no such thing as an innocent question. it would be absolutely fabulous to think that the world is open to unshackled, scientific inquiry, just for the sake of science and human curiosity. but here in the real world, everything consequential get shackled by politics. sometimes there are good folks trying to help the whole world come out on top of this process, but that's not always how it works. if the u. s. government is challenging china's version of the truth, it will be seen as an act of aggression. and for some reason or other, china has done a lot to blur the origins of coven and muscle. those who knew something about the early days of the killer virus. so politics aside,

identifying the source of the pandemic is vital fighting the next. whether we'd like to or not, the consequences for mankind are staggering. and that's the bottom line. ah, it's one of the biggest clubs in south america. but its greatest rival is just a few blocks away. a mutual dislike between fans formed from a class device sustained over generations. most local junior support is a born in cities club colors. in an epic feud of rich versus poor. the fans who make football. when i was just the children born into it because he had traps, discover the beauty of music in the ugliest places. when

a chance to play for the world, 10 mariana t into a dream. ah landfill, harmonic witness documentary on. oh hello, i'm marianne demising, london with a quick look at the main stories. now. a pledge by g 7 lead us to donate a 1000000000 doses of the current of ours vaccine to poor countries has been dismissed as inadequate by activists. they say it doesn't go far enough. british prime minister or johnson says the group of 7 plan will inoculate wells nearly a 1000000000 people by the end of next year. but campaign is the same and move it

slow. and it shows western leaders are not up to the job of tackling the was public health crisis. and.