things that i learned about myself and about writing from writing it and first thing i think is to think about. the first thing that i think you can learn is how you live a life that makes a difference while remaining true to your principles and still, you know, be happy and not drive crazy. this is an example how somebody as a ten year old kid can start off with a passion for liberty and by 12 years old, arguing for barry goldwater in front of his junior high school class and make a difference not running for office. an idea i had when i young, but i quickly have added. but by being in and but in some respects by being a practicing lawyer or being a criminal prosecutor is how you can leverage life. and one of the takeaways from this that i would everybody, whether they buy the book or not, and that is i think would live a happier life if you lived your life as though you were going to write a memoir about it. because when i sat down to write

it, i'm going to tell the whole truth about myself, including the bad stuff, including the stuff that i ate, the mistakes i made. and there's a lot of things about the mistakes made so you won't have to make the same mistakes i did if you're young, especially, and if you live your life as though you're going to write a memoir, i think you'll live a better life. you think about? would i be proud of what i'm about to do? i can put it in the book. or would i be ashamed what i'm about to do and i would never want to put it in the book. and there is one last message saying that i think get out of this. and that is about the importance of mentors and cultivating that it became immediately i was telling my life story that i am the man i am, that i am because others, starting with my father moving to my grade school music and my high school debate coach and philosophy professors in college, they had to influence on me. it was my mentors who helped shape me. and this book is a thank you to that. and so the other little piece of advice give people is thank your mentors while you still can

because some point you won't be able to thank them anymore. and i happily was to thank most of them while they were still alive. i didn't get every one of them, and that's another i think you can take away from this book a can be well-lived and make a difference and still be a pretty. joyous one. randy barnett, the for liberty, is his latest. we appreciate you joining us on tv. thanks for having me. it's always ayou know, i'm book.

we want to introduce you to matt ridley. he is a coauthor of this book viral the search for the origin of covid-19. mr. ridley, what do you do for a living, first of all? i'm pretty well retired these days from. most things, but i write books. i was a journalist. i was also a politician.

i in the lords in the uk. but these days i see myself as a writer who does a bit of gardening as well. do you have a scientist background? i do. i a pristine biology and did some research. but then spent a lot of time being a science. so i was science editor of the economist and a science columnist on the wall street journal and the telegraph and the times. who is your coauthor? elina chang elina jan is a fascinating woman. she's a young, brilliant researcher at the broad institute of harvard and mit, canadian by birth, but chinese by ancestry speaks chinese, for example. and she was doing really interesting work on the source of this pandemic, the origin of covid and so i reached out to her a number of articles i was writing and ended up proposing to her that we join forces to write a book because we were both then convinced that it was

wrong to rule out a lab leak as as the source, but nor could we rule it in for it. and we began to collaborate on this, but we never met. by the way, we wrote a book meeting. welcome to the 21st century. we met because, of course, with the pandemic and lockdowns, we couldn't we met the day book was published in the us in 2021, but obviously pinged lots ideas back and forth across the atlantic and you know hammered out drafts and it was it was a wonderful experience. i've never co-written a book with anyone before. she's a very good writer. she need me for the verbal skills and she's very good scientist. but it was i think we were both very good for each other and challenging each other. and so i really enjoyed the experience actually. it's 2024. does it matter where it came from?

it matters. 28 billion people are dead, trillions of bound dollars have been wasted. and if. we don't find out how it happened. there are three reasons why that matters. one, because we owe it to the people who died. you know, you say to the families, a victims of a plane crash, it doesn't matter. do you do? because we need to learn lessons, we need to make sure it doesn't happen. again, if it was a lab leak, we need to tighten up lab safety. if it was a wildlife market, we need to up wildlife market safety. we're doing of those things. that's extraordinary you know, the focus has gone off lab safety actually globally in the wake. and the third reason and i think perhaps the most is that rogue states and bad actors in the terrorism sphere are taking notice of this thinking. we need to have some biologist, we need to release viruses,

because that way we can do heck of a lot more damage that we can do with explosives. and probably that world health organization won't even investigate this properly because that's what happened. so i really worry we're sending a dangerous message. they're just just this week, a fourth congressional committee given aspects of my mit testified that he had ordered the ingredients for making the 1918 influenza virus under a pseudonym and had them delivered no bother at. if he can do it, so can kim jong un. so can al qaeda. do you see what i mean was it did you conclude that the covid 19 virus was a bio weapon, biological weapon? no, we don't conclude that it's a biological weapon. i don't think it is. in our book, we are agnostic. as to how it began, we think it's more likely have been a laboratory leak than a a market

event since the book came out. the evidence that has got much, much stronger actually. and we know i think it's almost certain that it a laboratory accident. the question is what were they doing, those dangerous experiments for? they were very dangerous experiments. they were done the wrong biosafety level and had very little upside. actually. you know, the theory was the reason why they were doing it. and i do believe them on this was to predict and prevent the next pandemic. well, that went well, didn't it? you do believe that that was there? i do believe that was what were trying to do. but in in the process, they got a bit away with some of the technologies that they were excited about doing and the idea of compared doing an even more spectacular of science than the competitors, i think became part of it. and so they produced it looks like and again we can't be sure because of course the chinese will not collaborate and be transparent on this, but it

looks like they together a virus from ingredients a bat virus souped it up a little bit with a single differing cleavage site, which was a unique ingredient. this virus not found in any of its relatives and, then probably had a simple accident. now there was military in that lab and they do have a bioweapons program in china, but i think it's mostly defensive as it is in the west. in other words, the reason studying these things is so that we're ready if our enemies release one. now you can see if both sides are doing that, it becomes a reason for doing things which isn't to be offensive, but can even more dangerous in viral. it really me of david quammen search for the hiv virus and he came to the conclusion that it was a monkey in cameroon in the deep jungle of cameroon in the 1920s that started hiv is it is

that a fair comparison. yes? no, there's no doubt that hiv from chimpanzees, not monkeys from apes, but how it into the human race? we don't there was a theory that it might have happened through a contamination polio vaccine trial which did involve chimpanzees being sacrificed for their organs in the late 1950s in congo. now i investigated that and i thought it's probably wrong but i do think it's you know it's not completely ruled out but either way both these viruses are from wildlife. so hiv is basically a chimpanzee virus that was more dangerous in us. sars-cov-2 is basically a bat virus that's more dangerous in us. but it has been souped up probably in a lab since the wet markets. why has this not happened? more frequent? lee given the ubiquity of some

of these markets? well, actually, that's a really good question. people are trading online mammals in markets all over south east asia all the time. curiously, wuhan is not a strong center for this kind of thing. it's further north. most of those markets, it's in southern china where you find most of these markets and of course, vietnam and laos and countries either. so that's where you'd expect a market outbreak to happen. and people have pointed to the dangers these markets. and we did have one very good example of a virus coming out of one of these markets and infecting people. that was source, the first source in 2002. and by the way that virus then leaked from a lab at least four times in once it was eradicated in the wild. so, you know, so that tells you both sides of that story. so buying and eating live mammals is a risk. but on the whole this happened with sars-cov-1. it also happened with murres, the middle eastern virus and with things like nipah and

hendra, which are other examples of spillover viruses from wildlife. on the whole, they start not very infectious, right? they're not very good at infecting people. it takes them a few months, adjust their genes to work out how to transmit from person to person. and to start with, you can only catch them from the other animal and then you can catch some of other people, but not very efficiently. and so on. this thing was different it was highly infectious between people. the get go a moment it appeared in the human species and it was highly transmissible and the weird about this is they looked really the chinese for an infected animal in the market and they haven't found one to this day. the pangolins were infected in that market they found a similar virus in pangolins that were confiscated but were other pangolins on sale in wuhan no raccoon dogs? nothing. so a.

998 to 99% genetically similar virus is. what you would expect to find in the market that's they found in sales. and so they found in murres and nipah and these other outbreaks, they never found one. and that's where the chinese themselves conclude. it quite quickly in the spring of 2020 that this thing had not started the market, that the animal brought the virus to the market. it was a human being. that's the lab that's their conclusion. that's most scientific scientists conclusion. matt ridley what's the difference between? a spillover and a lab leak? well, a spillover is when something natural happens, you eat an animal and get infected that way, or you get bitten by an animal or something like that. a lab leak is when scientists take a virus into the laboratory, do experiments on it. and then one of the scientists gets infected. the lab matt ridley variants. how has the covid 19 virus has mutated over the time we've known about?

and it, by the way, did it exist prior to us knowing about it. well as, far as we can tell it did not exist the form it is what do know is there are some 96% similar viruses in bats. okay, so the bulk of virus is out there in wild bats. but the weird thing about this virus, it's not very good at infecting bats. so something has happened to it between bats and us to change its genes by about two or 3%. and that's enough and that's enough to make it highly adapted to us. and to not to bats. now, we don't know where that happened. as i say, we think it looks increase like it happened in the laboratory because they were doing exactly the right kind of experiments at exactly the right time. when exactly right kind of virus. the closest the nine closest relative to cells to in the world before the pandemic broke

out. we're in the freezer of the wuhan institute of virology. now, that's probably telling you something. now, what about the variants? how is it? sorry. yes. so obviously viruses evolve the time and we've been able to in real time during this pandemic evolution happening. they a lot these particularly these coronaviruses, they have rna genes instead of dna ones. that's more unstable. the single stranded. so they don't they can't correct themselves. so there's a lot of mistakes made in the and those mistakes often make the virus less effective but sometimes make it more effective and then those get selected. so variation plus selection mutation and plus selection is evolution. and we saw very clearly rather beautiful graphs, graphs of of one variant being replaced by, another alpha the delta than gamma. then the omicron one and so on. and if you remember was was a

particularly nasty one, but in each case the variant was more infectious than the last. so the virus is getting it was already good at transmitting between people, but it was getting better and better as time went off, omicron was extremely infectious variant. it was also an extremely mild. now that's good news because it didn't kill as many people, but also bad news in the sense that you could hardly tell if you got it. and so there were a lot of asymptomatic people out there spreading. and that's why measures to prevent the spread of the virus just to be abandoned. omicron can now, i would expect a respiratory virus like this, not any kind of virus, respiratory virus to become more more mild over time. and the reason for that, because they want us fine. they want me going out to a party. they don't want me saying, no, i'm not going to go to the party. i'm not feeling well, because if i go to the party, i might give

it to 20 or 30 people. do you see? i mean, so the virus spreads better if people aren't feeling too ill. and therefore the mild variants tend to do better than the harsh variants. now, that's not true of insect borne or sexually transmitted viruses. they actually prefer you in a darkened room feeling ill or or, you know, something like that. they don't care whether they kill. care is the wrong. of course, viruses are not conscious. you know, i'm not that argument. but there is a perfectly good theory due to purely what? that a respiratory virus will tend towards low virulence will become a just another common cold with 200 different kinds of virus that cause the common cold. most of them rhinoviruses, some of them are coronaviruses some of the adenoviruses none them kill people. that's no accident. did you get the shots. i had three shots. yeah, i do. in a booster. but beyond that i'd had two bursts of covid itself by then. natural immunity is very good.

i don't see any fighting going on getting. continuous boosters at the moment. it might better in the future, but yeah. think they they did not prevent that's disappointing but they did moderate the severity of the disease they did also have side effects and pretending they didn't was a mistake. i think giving them to giving the shots to kids a mistake because i think kids were not really at risk from this. it was not at all severe except you. i'm in my sixties i was glad to take the shot in. it saved my life. matt ridley when we started our conversation about viral, you said trillions of dollars wasted. what did you mean by that specifically? well, i mean, if you shut the world economy for a year and, a half or for several periods during that time, you are going to set back human prosperity by trillions of dollars. that's what i mean by that,

that, you know, the whole pandemic cost us a lot of money. you know, we spend a lot money on plexiglass and and masks and redundancy for airline employees who are laid off. you know, all these things add up to a huge cost on the on the economy, even when you don't take into account the human cost, the dead, the people who it made ill and so on. has the international public health system writ large lost interest in discovering how this virus came about and how to prevent the next one? have we moved? my concern that yes, there is not nearly enough investigation going on. i know of no major research that is applied for grants to investigate the origin of this disease. that's extraordinary. i was told a senior scientist in the uk that he thought it was important. we never find. and i said but you wouldn't say

that about a plane crash. why would you say that about this? oh, because i didn't want to offend china. well, that's very odd. and i think the world health organization has been talking about treaties, about how to manage it. they have got an a committee set up to, investigate the origin of viruses like this. as far as i can see, it hardly ever meets. it's shown remarkably little curiosity in getting to the bottom of this. some brilliant amateur and scientific investigators and a few journalists are digging and are turning up really important evidence about how it started. and if we don't learn the lessons, it could happen again. and next time it could kill not a million americans, but 10 million americans. matt ridley how would you imagine a leak happening? what's going on to let this free? well, let's take it really example of where the lab leak did happen. there was a woman working in a

lab in beijing on size. the first samples. this was in 2004. and she doing perfectly reasonable experiments and she was taking all the safety precautions. she was wearing all the right gear, some how she got infected. and we don't know how we think it was to do with one of the device is which was not cleaned properly or something like that. and so she somehow picked up this virus. she felt sick. she went home. she felt even so she got on a train to go and stay her mother in a different province. she infected her mother. she infected the nurses who infected. suddenly they realized what was going on. by that time, the mother had died and some of the nurses were critically and they contact traced who had been in contact with thousands of people by then. now, thank goodness they were able to isolate everybody who

got sick and everyone else recovered. but it it a near run thing that could have been another outbreak. now, if that had happened with sars-cov-2 this virus and she had caught a train anhui province and back to beijing. she'd have given it to one hundreds of people. it's a far infectious virus and there would have been no way we could have stopped it. so that's the kind of thing that happened in the another case in taiwan, there was a a researcher working at biosafety four, the top safety level, and he dropped a test tube inside a cabinet. it the virus all over inside of the cabinet. he cleaned it up. he was in a bit of a hurry because he was going to a conference. he cleaned it up with with the wrong kind of bleach, which didn't really kill it. it most of it, but not all of it. he then got sick. he went to a conference. he came and he realized what he'd done. yeah, this is bizarre.

not sars-cov-2. he isolated himself at home and his dad found out and made force, forced him to go to hospital. but he was so ashamed what he'd done that. so these are the kinds of stories that lie behind a lovely, horrible human stories. now that biosafety level four, where you're wearing an inflated with, you know, positive pressure suit and you're working with these huge gloves and and you're working inside a cabinet that has negative. so it's sucking the air out, you know, all precautions. the experiment they were doing on bat viruses in the wuhan institute of virology were biosafety level two. now, you might wear gloves, you might wear a mask, but you don't have to. that's so it's a pretty picture. is the wuhan lab cooperating with the world health organization or whoever to

change their practices to discover the origin as far, as we can tell, the zero cooperation. the world health organization sends a team to, wuhan. they went to the wuhan is to virology. they toured the biosafety four lab. well, that's of no relevance. that wasn't where these experiments were done. they didn't ask for the database that virus has the sorry that the lab has of all the viruses that it has collected and worked on. that's a database of 22,000 entries. they took it offline. one of the members of the w.h.o. team was called peter daszak, and he was asked by a reporter, did you ask for that that? and he says, no, there's no point in asking for it because we know what's in it. so the report said, well, can you tell us what's in it? and he said, no, no, i can't share it with what's. so we still don't know to this day. now, if that database have a relevant virus in it, it would exonerate them in a flash. they will not share it with us. and shi, the head of the lab,

has been asked, why don't you share that database? she says, because people are trying to hack it. well, that makes no sense. if if you shared it, you didn't worry about it being hacked. you know, it's it's now in the open. so there's no thing as hacking. so i'm afraid no has been almost no cooperation with international investigators on this. all right. to put a period on our conversation, you and lena chan have written a book called viral the search the origin of covid 19. how do you conclude and how much faith do you have in your conclusion? well, as i say, when we finished the book, we thought it was more likely than not that it came out of a laboratory. since we've finished the book, more evidence has emerged and us conclusion has got stronger. both in chan and i think, it's now extremely likely that it did from both tracks. we can't be 100% sure because we weren't there in the room when

someone got sick, as it were. but a lot of the key information and part of the point of our book was to tell the story of how we found out, not just what we found out, but how we found out. and a lot that came from some really ingenious individuals. the guy called seeker in india who simply online discovered how to get password for key chinese databases. websites and downloaded three cc's that turned to be incredibly important. that's the kind of thing that's been done. there's another who's a spaniard who who was very good at auditing companies. so he decided to audit the wuhan of virology to find out where they'd been collecting bats, on which days, which samples they collected, and and he was able to put together what he called his big sudoku and work it all out. these are, you know, a lot of this 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. we've been talking with the coauthor. matt ridley. thank youwell, on your screen is woods. he's the author of this book diary of a psychosis how public disgraced itself during mania thomas woods why do you call the covid crisis a psychosis? i think we all remember desperately clamoring for information in march 20, 20, and i was no different, but what i one of the things i found early on was when from time to time, a little flickering of good news would come through. it was almost as if people didn't want. i would spread that on social media and it was like i was a criminal of. some sort. no, no, no. it's the thing ever. it was very strange was jay bought charity at stanford was trying to say i've done a seroprevalence study i think the

numbers are saying about the percentage of deaths this and that is is off and normally in an under normal conditions we would say well he's got a and someone else does and he's got data and he's m.d. and he's an md and, you know, and and ph.d. so we should listen to each other but instead it was we somehow a priori that he must be wrong and this led to, shall we say, not very productive or in some cases, discourse. was it a pandemic. it looks to me as if in numerous there were more deaths than would have expected in the absence of this. so i know there are some people out there who say, no, it's all it's all phony and it's all made up. but the death numbers do say that something happened. 28 million people reported dead by covid. do you agree with that figure? that i don't know. because even now there are still

arguments about how do we code a covid death, like even within the scandinavian countries, norway disagrees with sweden as to what constitutes a covid. so so that is beyond my my pay grade. so what are you trying to do in this book? i am trying to show that the degree of certainty that the public health establishment had at the time about the effects of its mitigation measures was unjust. i find that i think people thought, in fact, i don't have to think it. i know that anthony, fauci said. you will see a distinct, a clear difference between the results of states that follow the guidelines and the restrictions and those that do not. but now we have the data and if you plot the 25 most stringent states versus 25 least stringent, the lines are identical. and this just goes on and on. i can look at california blue state, nevada purple state, arizona, red, and they all track each other.

and the problem was that the whole situation was lines like if your state has numbers that are falling, that means you're doing good things. but if the numbers go up, well then you're being bad. and the problem with that is that that requires me to believe that, for example, california, nevada, arizona were all at the same time and then not complying at the same and then complying again and then not complying. get it at the same time. that's not a that's not a useful explanation for the data that we're seeing. and so in case after case, like if i said to you, here are four and i can do this because i have the charts in the book. here are four counties in tennessee and one of them restricted, you know, restaurant occupant see to 25% and closed the bars. here are their charts, which is that which one is that? you cannot figure it out or this place had a really, really severe mask mandate like in in