adaptive. we don't know where that happened in that place a new looks increasingly like it was the exactly the right expert at exactly the right time. the nine closest relatives to sars to in the world before the pandemic rogue out were in the institute of virology. that probably tells you something. obviously viruses evolve over time and we have been able to watch in real time during the pandemic evolution happening. they mutate a lot specifically the coronaviruses. they have rna genesth and dna tt are more stable. they can't correct themselves so there were lot of mistakes made in those mistakes often make the

virus less effective than sometimes might -- making more effective. variations of selection and mutations of selection. we saw clearly grabs a one berian being replaced by another. if you remember delta was a one but the bearing was more infectious than the last of the virus is getting better and better. omicron was an extremely infectious variant. also an extremely mild variants. that's good news because it didn't kill as many people. you can hardly tell if you've got it. that's why measures to prevent the spread of the virus still have 50 looked at.

i would expect a respiratory virus, like this not just in the virus but a respiratory virus to become more mild over time. the reason for that is because they won't be going out to party and they would won't say i'm not going to go out. if i go party i might give it to 20 or 30 people. the virus spreads better if people aren't feeling well and that very and is different than the harsh o variant. that's not true of sexually-transmitted viruses. they don't care whether they kill you. viruses are not conscious and i was making that up. there is a theory that the virus will tend towards just another common cold with two

different -- to other kinds of viruses.us the rhinovirus in the coronavirus and none of them kill people. >> did you get the shot? >> i had three shots. i had two and a booster. beyond that i had to cope it a natural immunity is very good. it might be better in the future. it did not prevent transmission. they did moderate the severity of the disease. and you also have side affects. the it was a mistake giving the shotsak to kids. they were not really at risk from this virus. i'm in my 60s and i was glad to take the shot to save my

life. >> matt ridley when we started a conversation about "viral" he said chileans of dollars are. what did he mean by that? >> if you shut down the world economy for your to have for several periods duringou that te you were going to set back prosperity by trillions of dollars. that's what i mean by that. it costs a lot of money. we spend a lot of money and put the glass and masks and redundancy and airline employees were laid off and all these things add up to a huge cost on the economy even when you don't takeun into account the human cost, the dead, the people who were made ill. >> has the international public health system writ large lost interest insc discovering how ts virus came about and how to

prevent the next one and have we moved on? >> my concern is yes there's not nearly enough investigation going on. i know of no major research university that is applied for grants to investigate the origins of this disease and that's extraordinary. i was told by a senior scientist in the uk that we may never find out. and i said why would you say that about this? i don't want to offend scientist but i think the world healthth organization talking about how to manage if they have got a committee set up to investigate the origin of the virus. remarkably little peer out at glee. scientific investigators are setting up important evidence

that how it started. it could happen again. >> matt ridley how would you imagine a lab leak happening in what is going on to let this free? >> let's take an example. there was a woman working in a lab in beijing on sars, the first sars in 2004 and she was doing a perfectly reasonable experiment in taking all the safety precautions and wearing all the right gear. we don't know how to hit me up in a device which was not cleaned properly or something like that. she somehow pickeded up this vis and she felt sick and went home and she felt even sicker.

she stayed with her mother in a different province and she infected the mother andd the nurses and suddenly they realize it was going on that by that time the mother had died and some of the nurses were critically ill. they traced everyone who had been in contact with her and thousands of people by then. thank goodness they were able to isolate everyone who got sick and everyone else recovered. that could have been another outbreak. if that would have happened with sars to it she caught a train back to beijing again she would have given it to hundreds of people. there would have been no way to stop it. that's the kind of thing it's happening in another case in taiwan there was ain researcher working at the top safety level

and he dropped a test tube inside of the cabinet and spilled the virus all over the cabinet. he cleaned it up. he was in a bit of a hurry because he had to attend the conference and he cleaned it up with the wrong kind of bleach which didn't kill it. he then got sick and went to conference and came back and he realized what he had done. it was the sars do not sars two. his dad found out and he was so ashamed of what he had done. these are the kinds of stories that behind a lab leak. that was level for were you aware an inflated pressure suit working with gloves and working inside of the cabinet pulling the air out. the experiments they were doing

red viral safety level 2. you might wear a mask that you don't haveve too. so it's not a pretty picture. >> did the wuhan lab corps operate with the world -- cooperate with the world health or whoever to discover the origin of? the world health organization went to the wuhan level 4 lab. that's where the experiments were done and they didn't ask for the database that the virus -- that the lab had a ball the viruses it had collected. the database at 22,000 entries. one of the members was asked to

to ask for it? we didn't ask for because it because they know it's in it in thete report said the new share with senate? no, no i can't share with tenet. if that database doesn't have a virus and it -- they would not share it with us and the head of the lab was asked why don't you share that database and she said because people are trying to hack it to well that makes no sense. if you shared it you wouldn't have the worry about it being i hacked. so no there has been almost no corp. in the international investigation. >> to put a period on a conversation you have written a book called "viral" the search for the origin of covid-19 and

how do you conclude and how much faith you have in your conclusion? >> let me say when they finish the book -- and since we finished the book more evidence has emerged to. we think it's extremely likely. we can't be 100% sure because we weren't there in a row when someone got sick. part of our book was to tell the story of how we found out not just what we found out that how we found out. there were some ingenious individuals and someone in india who figured out how to get passwords for web sites and downloaded speeches that turned out to be incredibly important. another who was good at auditing

companies they decided to audit the wuhan lab and to see what samples they have collected in when they collected them. a lot of this has come from talented amateurs and i'd like to pay tribute to them. >> here's the book "viral" the search for the origin of covid-19 we have been talking to the co-op are matt ridley. >> thank you very much. >> thomas woods the author of this book "diary of a pychosis" how public health disgraced itself during covid mania. thomas woods why do you call the covid crisis a psychosis? >> i think we all remember desperately for information march of 2020 and i was no different. one of the things i found early

on was from time to time a flickering of good news would come through and it was almost as if people didn't want it. it would put on social media and it was like i was a criminal of some sort. no, no sourcing ever. i've done a study and i think the numbers people are saying about percentage of deaths in this and that isis off. normally under normal conditions we'd say well he sent data and he's an m.d. and a ph.d. so we should listen to each other. instead we somehow know he must be wrong and this led to show we say not productive discourse or in some cases no discourse. >> was of a pandemic? >> it looks to me in numerous countries theres were more depth

than you would have expected. i know there's some who say it's all made up but the death numbers say that something happened. >> 28 million people dead by covid. do you agree with that? >> that i don't know because even now there still arguments about how to recode the cover death. within thevi scandinavian countries norway disagrees with sweden as to what constitutes covid so that's beyond my pay grade. >> so what are youou trying to o in this book? >> i'm trying to show the degree of certainty that the public health establishment had at the time about the effects of this medication measures was unjustified. i think people thought and in fact i don'tnt have had to think that know anthony fauci said he will see a distinct and clear unmistakable difference between

the results of the guidelines and restrictions and those who do not. but now we have the data and if you talk to the most stringent states versus the least stringent the lines are identical. i can look at california lou state nevada purple state arizona red state and they all track each other. the problem with the whole situation if your state had numbers that were falling that means you are doing good things but at the numbers go up then you are being bad. the problem with that is that requires me to believe for example california nevada arizona were all complying at the same time and not complying at the same time and then complying again and not. complying again and that's not a useful explanation for the data that we are seeing. if i said to you and i can do

this because they have the chart in the book you're four counties in tennessee and one of them restricted restaurant occupancy to 25% and closed. you can't figure it out or this place had a severe mask mandate but in germany and bavaria berlin they mandated and 95. my point is not i have all the answers. my point is that have some humility or maybe we just don't understand with goingnd on. and we got a glimpse of that, a littlele clemson 2021 wind and a slab it was on "msnbc" and he was the white housea codifies in i said adjusted for age california seems the same and that doesn't seem possible.

what 61 nation in the exit asked him that question which you would think everyone at the asking and his answer was extremely underwhelming. their a lot of things about this virus that continue to surprise us. that's not good enough. if you are guesstimating people's businesses life savings and postponing their surgeries and you have more mental health problems and knock all-ism that's not good enough. >> was a spread of covid inevitable and would any mitigation efforts work in your opinion? >> the best thing that could haveve been done in some people tried to do was to look at the people who are most likely to be vulnerable and have a special provision for them which in this case was very easy to determine because it was a thousandfold mortality difference between young and old. we don't always have that luxury but but this time we did. i remember asking the doctor

from stanford i just don't understandnd it. even i could explain what was going on and in florida where i live i was going to comedy shows in 2020 ander in concert and everything was pretty close to normal. i said does it seem like that should workk in does that work and he said it works because in most places that are making the most provisions for older people that's where they get good results. we can't do everything. you take the limited resources you have any focus on the people who are most likely to be in danger. >> and he wrote support for the book. tell us who he is. >> he is a ph.d. but also an m.d. and teaches at stanford where it's been for quite a wild. he's a professor of medicine but also has a background in economics so he can talk about health policy and theth medical

side which is a balancing act not everybody can do well. until this came along he was a very mild-mannered academic very well respected and wrote a great many academics. papers. >> have you for talking on? >> he had zero interest in the public wto eye. butik he felt like he got pressd into it because in something like this happen and some of his work had to do with age and code comes along how can he not write about that? criticism is one thing but there were posters around campus wearing him calling him a even though he didn't lie about anything. he had been a scholar at stanford for years and felt completely alienated by the experience that he had. he went from being a celebrated scholar to

somebody on the fringes in his argument was everything i'm saying about thee counterproductive nature of lock-downs in the collateral damage caused by the lockdown comes only from the standard pandemic preparedness playbook that we had for a very long time. i didn't invent it and he didn't than it. i'm telling you the playbook whereas went by. >> and referred to the tyrannical public health response. >> guess that's provocative language so if you don't like provocative language this is not the book for you but it was also the arbitrary. i'mm in florida and in alachua county and this is not a small trivial thing but it's illustrative of whatat happened. i don't live there but they came up with a rule that said retail establishments can have one person for 1000 square feet and when i asked how did you come up with that figure the answer was

we thought it would be simple math for everyone. the impression is being given that we have been locked away in lab coats with test tubes. a lot of it was arbitrary and it should have been obvious. we gott the data and we had the data early so we could see people moving around the people who aren't in it doesn't seem to matter. the things, the virus was doing what it wants and lasted in our efforts. if i look at japank ut and south korea i have a graph and are of the final quarter of 2020 and japan. japan had different policies. trajectories are identical. again unless i'm supposed to believee they'll comply and the otheren thing is that goes to te psychosis language because around april of 2020 it was clearcl that japan was not undertaking as severe a response

as other nul countries. i wrote them down the headlines were inpang effect japan and was coming to it. it wasn't like let's that all works out but that was not the tone of these articles. that is not humane. the fact is they had a lackluster law. they have a high elderly population and yet somehow their results are drastically better than ours and on par with south korea even though they are completely different policies. why doesn't thist a just as leae make us say that's curious andni wonder why that is? maybe we shouldn't have this absolute certainty that we know was happening and what tog do. and japan they were saying the experts are stomped and we don't understand it. that's all he wanted was some humility instead of your brother

is a bad person because he went to this motorcycle festival or something. itpl had no discernible effect n anything but meanwhile people are dying without loved ones in eye of ann acquaintance who had cancer and they said hang on it's not urgent and we will come back to it. to the hospital in the uk and they said sorry at stage iv. while you can't do that. there were so many numbers that are baked into the. cancer deaths that will occur because the screening didn't happen to "the new york times" said 2 million extra people will die from hiv malaria and tuberculosis because of lockdown related reasons. we have a million deaths related to all the unemployment because that is lifelong effects as well. the developing world people in

myanmar reporting people were reduced to eating and snakes. there were parts of the world where there was no education, not just on line. none for two years. none. those numbers better jump off the graph and i'd i should feel that tell which one of these places did this in which didn't and my last story one of my favorite in the world is katharine hewitt went before the ohio legislature and she said i've got a graph but i haven't labeled the timeline. it's just a graph of covid deaths and given these policies were supposed to be so effective that i could tell me where on this graph data go into effect in where the mask mandate went to affect and when was it within aware thanksgiving on this graph puts we should be big -- see a big spike after that. the graph is entirely random.

all i'm saying is we need to figure out why it's random. this doesn't do anything but decimate extremely of populations around the world. >> what is your background in writing about the covid virus? >> i'm writing this in the capacity of the u.s.e historia. in the book it's overwhelmingly an american point of view which means bye the way i lost a translation deal. the were going to translate my book and they looked at it and they said this is all u.s., forget it so i had to give them their money back if that's okay. i'm a u.s. historian. i'm not making medical claims in the book and not saying this treatment works better than that one. that's not my placey to say but it is my place to say they said x would happen. x didn't and they said if i compared this and this it will be a big difference but i don't. i'm a smart guy who can read charts and i've a ph.d. in from columbia. in order and doing.

>> why do you think it took on a moralizing tone and do you see anything in history that's comparable? >> i thinkd, in part and i hateo be uncharitable i really do even though i can be a -- provocative writer it seemed seemed like they were let people felt like here's my chance to be involved in something that matters and though it had to do was stay in my house. i'll stay in my house and render moral judgment on everybody else. look at me i'm sitting at my house and saving the gillian -- of the gillian lives. that's very tempting. it's like a death of a salesman everyone wants a legacy and everybody wants to feel like they contribute something and this was handed to them on a silver platter. if i had more leisure i could come up with a historical map. >> we were told throughout the

pandemic to follow the assignment and do you think we did? i think we follow people who are held up to us as official experts but i don't think that's helpful especially at the time. i don't care what your political stances are what you thought about the covid policy if we were in an unprecedented situation and i understand somebody who has no business saying anything we have seriously accomplished people and many thousandsds of people signed that declaration do you think it would be a good idea to let them talk it out and let them freely talk it out. the thing about ventilators early on in new york it was one lone doctor who ran an extremely amateurs youtube video who said i think these ventilators are counterproductive. if we also banish him because o he's not part of the consensus on ventilators a lot of that would happen.

because of the video people take a second look b at it. some people will be wrong but that's how science proceeds by making mistakes it's clumsy and it's that eventually we reach a consensus on something think the consensus was prematurely declared.t >> this is a chart from your book "diary of a pychosis." can you walk us through what we are looking at? >> this is the chart of the statistics known as excess debt so that is to say we look at the trajectory of where were we where were we expect the that the numbers to be based on pastr experience in various countries. the issue is we are curious to know, this is mostly europe but you can see where several countries outside of europe in which country did the best in terms of excess deaths and the reason this is helpful is this includes not just covid deaths

but they are people who died because of the mitigation measures or that was unavoidable that would happen but there's also the problem of how do you decide something like a -- how do you decide if it's a cold adapter not in norway and sweden feet away from each other at different ways of deciding. something should be classified a cold adapteret now. this gets rid of the complication so you can eliminate the confusion. but we see sweden has the lowest excess death percentage. if we had said in march of 2020 if sweden doesn't do this stuff where do you think it will be on this chart a lot of people would say obviously would be the worst one in a national catastrophe in effect for three years the main epidemiologist in sweden was condemned and vilified by health experts all over the world and

yet unlike anthony fauci who was welcomed and celebrated at every turn the sky was and called the killer for years and he said i'm going to be vindicated but it will take three years. could you imagine having that yo' know what to go three years not being vindicated in having the worst things on earth said about you but he had the guts to do that and he was vindicated. that should make us say if something like this happens again we have more data now and it's not as cartoonish as we thought. no one who favored the alleged mitigation measures would have predicted hsu sweden which had h a favorable outcome. >> what can we learn on the countries at the bottom? >> in some cases it's hard to understand. for examplee brazil improved. peru had a