but now, what about. delighted to finally welcome back, david quammen to share with david quammen 16 previous books include tangled tree the song of the dodo, the reluctance. mr. darwin and spillover, which was a finalist. the national book critics circle award and a recipient of the premio la tarrio mark in rome. he's written for the new yorker magazine, the atlantic national, and outside among others, and is a three time winner of the national magazine kwame and shares a home here in bozeman with his wife. betsy gave cronin. and you should check out her book author americans i am and they also have two wonderful russian wolfhounds who weren't able make an appearance this evening. so without further ado david

welcome. thank you thank you thank very much jessica. hello friends and neighbors. hello. friends and neighbors and it's really good to be back at the at country bookshelf. thank you, jessica. thank you. country bookshelf bookshelf. of those are disposable. it's to be back. what did i do with my glasses? i'll never mind them.

i'm going to talk you a bit about what's in this book and why it's in there. the content, the virus, the characters. but first, i want to a little bit about how it was written tell you a little bit of the story. january 2020, we remember can we remember january 20 training just starting to get some news about this peculiar pneumonia syndrome in wuhan, china may be caused by virus, may be transmissible among humans. i first paid attention to it on january 13th because i belong to a an infectious disease listserv alert network called promed and have belonged to it for ten or

15 years. and so i was working on spillover and this is a network there are about 80,000 people that subscribe and it sends you an email every time a child coughs in saigon. not quite that, but every time a gets sick of a suspicious disease inside on. every time a water buffalo in malaysia has lumpy skin disease. so every time. five birds fall dead on the coast, australia, every time an outbreak of unusual occurs somewhere you get emails, you get about ten, 15 of these things a day. so you delete them. you delete them because not interested in lumpy skin disease and not interested in this or that you don't believe the delete the ones that you're interested in. so i went back after and looked at my un deleted emails from pro med from.

2020 and i found one on january 13th about this unusual syndrome in wuhan and for the first time it mentioned the word virus and i delete it because. that was an alarm bell for me and for a lot of other people that this virus could be very, very serious could be the next pandemic so i was scheduled to go to australia to do on the book that i was working on at the time for simon and schuster. my dear, a book about as an evolutionary phenomenon. and i was going to spend time with tasmanian devil biologists because the tasmanian devil has fallen prey to. a cataclysmically weird, unfortunate, genuinely contagious cancer that has been wiping out the population across

the island of tasmania, the southern island of australia. so i was going to so february 7th or so i flew to tasmania before i went i got an email from an editor in the op ed section, the new york times, a woman in hong kong. she was based in hong kong. i'd never dealt with her before. i did things op eds for the new york times and she emailed me and hey, quammen isn't about time you did another op-ed for us about you feel like, for instance maybe this weird in wuhan, china? and i said yes, i do. i want to do an op ed on that because this could be next big one. so i wrote an op ed for the times and it ran on january 28th, 2020, saying i can't remember what the title was as it ran saying this thing in wuhan. the scientists know tell us

could be very, very serious. it could be a pandemic virus. and then i flew to tasmania and went out in the bush with devil biologists. i was staying at a hotel in hobart and when i wasn't out with the devil biologists, i saw that my email was just lighting up with requests from media, various parts of the world saying. hey, op ed guy, hey spillover guy, would you talk to us about this new virus australian broadcast company radio china television, television. you know npr. i think. i can't remember outfits in various different places. so i spent half my time in australia, in tasmania being, you know, a talking head, being media guy flapping his jaw about this new virus and other half with the devil. biologists and then.

march 2nd i got on a plane to come back to bozeman. i had masks with me because before i left february 6th, it occurred to me that you might not be able to get on a plane by march 2nd without a mask, but i didn't need them. nobody was wearing them except a very few people around the los angeles airport wearing. so i got home on march 2nd and then by that time things were starting to break and everybody was recognizing this thing is big and all over the world by that time are getting and quite a number are dying. everybody sees that even the show by that point might have acknowledged that it was a pandemic. i can't remember exactly when they said that. but it was clear this was a big this is a pandemic. parenthetically march 2nd, 2020. i got to bozeman and i stayed home. then for a year for, two years i got through 20, 20 on one tank

of gas. i didn't leave gallatin county except for two times. i was a poll watcher. townsend and i went to a memorial service in deep creek in the paradise valley. otherwise, i was here in the house with betsy isolating with our dogs. cat snake and being, you know, affected by the pandemic. but about that time i heard from my simon schuster saying, david, that book about cancer is an evolutionary phenomenon which you just kind of push that to the back of your desk and. give us a book about the pandemic. and i thought, oh. they're going to be a lot of books about the every publisher is going to want a book about the pandemic. but simon and schuster wanted theirs to be for me, one of my

operating principles has always been write books about things other people are not writing books about this did not meet situation but i realized that it was not an opportunity it was sort of a duty or obliga option. so i thought about it very for four or 5 seconds. and then i said, yeah, i'll do that. and they said, fine, here's a nice new contract, sign it. and do us a book on the pandemic. so i signed me 20, 20 and and they said in the contract, we want the book by. december 31st, 2021, tight deadline usually. it takes me five or six years to do a book. so they wanted book in what was going to be just a little bit more a year and a half. and they had good reasons because knew there going to be lots of other books. they knew this an urgent situation. they wanted to get the book done. they wanted to get the book out. so here's a big contract but you

got to write this thing now fast. but december 31st, 2021. so i had no idea how i was going to write this book. not only did i to come up with an original sort of book on a subject that lots other people were going to be writing books about, but i had to do it without following my other cardinal principle when writing books, which is go there. if you're going to write a book that's about partly about gorillas dying of ebola virus in the congo forest, go there. if it's about, you know, bats and viruses in caves in china, go there, climb through the caves, which is i did that sort of thing for spillover ten years ago. i couldn't do that this time. i thought at one point, how soon can i on a plane for wuhan ha ha. not soon at all. i still don't think i get into wuhan right now, so i couldn't

travel and i had to write a unique book. and i had a i had a stern deadline of december 31st, 20, 21. so i did what anyone would do if faced a stern deadline to get a book written. i scheduled for double knee replacement surgery. and i the summer of 2020 doing that. and i wrote a couple of feature on the edge of the pen for the new yorker, and i wrote a couple op bids for the for the new york times. but mostly i sat with ice on my knee trying to figure out how in the hell am i going to write this book? how am i going to research it, first of all? and then how am i going to write it in time and around christmas? just after christmas, i think of

2020, i an idea of how i could do it, which consisted in essentially two parts. first of all, i would write a book about the virus, not about the medical crisis, not about the political crisis, not about the public health crisis, but about the virus. this virus the virus that causes covid 19 a virus officially as sars-cov two. my main character would be the virus i would write about the origins and of this virus and its ferocious journey through the human population as. it achieved great evolutionary success and was the first part of it. the second part i decided was i would that by writing also about the scientists who study this virus the world the smartest evolutionary virology

epidemiologists, veterinary virologist and others that i could find around the world, studying this virus. and they would be and i even put a label on one of my filing cabinets they would be my greek they would be the voices that would help me tell the story i would gather their voices and i would tell the story of the virus with voices. and i thought i'll i'll email them and ask them to do extended interviews with me by zoom or i'll get 60 or 70 of the world's top virologists to talk to me about this virus, their work on it, their views on it, but also their lives as people during, the pandemic, their lives, lab leaders and teachers and parents and children, elderly parents

and what were their like during the pandemic as? well, as how did they see this virus and what have they learned about so. i think i sent my first email request out on december eighth of 2020, and i started doing these zoom interviews extended zoom interviews. i asked them for an hour and a half each, which is a big ask of busy people. i you to give me an hour and a half. i want you to talk. i want to ask you about your life as a person during the pandemic as well as your work, your views of this virus and all the technical. and i will do the homework and read all your journal papers before i talk to you. and i will make sure that i double check everything with you so that things are accurate at the end. and they started saying yes, a few of them said no. a couple of them ignored me. but most of them said yes. so i started doing the interviews in.

early january 2021. i made a whole list of the people my wish list of these around the world, these brilliant men and women and i ended with 95, not 60 or 70. so in first six months of 2021, i did these interviews. i interviewed these 95 scientists around, the world from eminent people, george gallo, director general of the china cdc, carlos morel of, highly respected disease ecologist based in rio de janeiro. tony fauci, barney graham at the vaccine research, the fellow who led the what became the moderne vaccine effort, eddie holmes brilliant, brilliant molecular evolutionary virologist in sydney, australia, who i knew my work on spillover ten years ago and some some completely unknown, but brilliant

scientists, graduate students in edinburgh and glasgow who were working on this virus while they set their phd work aside because their professor asked them to do. that couple of young women, edinburgh, verity hill and anya o'toole, who were doing brilliant, helping create a system of, tracing the variants by way of abundant, abundant genome that the united kingdom was doing, leading the whole world in sequencing genomes of samples of the virus as they came from different people so that they developed a picture of what was happening they invented the study of various eyes because they saw the alpha variant coming up out of southeast england into london in the early days of when was that it's hard to keep track of in these timelines probably early

2021 verity hill and tanya o'toole i talked to them because i emailed their their professor a very eminent virologist named andrew rambo and to his credit he said now don't interview me. i don't want to talk to you. talk to my grad students, talk to verity talked to anya, so i to them did these long with them got a lot of benefit from then i went back to him and said i talked to your grad students that was great idea. can i talk to you to please. so he did he he gave me his time. so so that's what i did. and after six months of that, i had these interviews. god bless gloria thede of prey, my transcriber for 30 years was transcribing these things, you know, 30 pages from this person, 35 pages from that person. these are piling up and. but i knew i had to start soon. so in the middle of june, i had these interviews and i started writing and i wrote hard and i

hit send on. 18th and simon and schuster, editor and the publisher there, jonathan, sort of said, what if you're two weeks early? what kind of a what kind of an author are you? but they loved the book and then it went into production. and i did a lot of fact checking late 20, 21 and early this and now the book is out and sylvia so a little bit of now i'll talk about a little bit about what's actually in the book. so the virus is the central character. as i said, and i already a few things about this virus and about viruses in general from previous work and from what scientists revealing. first of all, i knew that everything comes from somewhere

and scary new viruses in humans come from wild that's where they come from. viruses are not are not cellular creatures. they're genetic parasites. they have to live in cellular creatures. they have no metabolism. they just have some machinery. so viruses can only replicate themselves by infecting the cells of, cellular creatures, animals, plants, bacteria, other microbes and hijacking their machinery, making copies of themselves, and then coming busting out. so new virus in humans. question it's a mystery story. everybody likes mystery stories, right? it's a mystery story. first question is new virus in came from an animal what animal which? animal where and how how did this get started started? and we don't we didn't know at that point. we didn't know. second thing was we knew by that

time this virus was a coronavirus. so i'll talk a little bit about how that news came out. but coronavirus coronavirus is a family of viruses. they belong to a certain large group of viruses called the rna viruses, meaning that their genome is not dna. the old faithful double helix molecule that we learned about in high school that has stability and proofreading ability. it replicates itself, it corrects the mistakes it tends to be stable dna viruses tend not to evolve that quickly because they have a stable genome are any viruses generally with a single strand of this other information molecule. so the genetic molecule rna it it replicates itself it makes a lot of mistakes and in most those mistakes don't get repaired. coronaviruses have a little bit of a repair mechanism, but still more mutation, more changes, more random mistake when they

copy their genomes, therefore more raw material for darwinian evolution because darwinian evolution on the raw material of variation within populations competition, natural selection, adaptation, evolution, boom, boom, boom that's darwin 101. so rna viruses are good at that because they make a lot of mistakes when they copy their genomes. so this an rna virus, it's going to have to evolve evolve. it evolves in two ways not to get to deep into the weeds, it evolves by making mistakes one letter at a time in its thousand letter genome it's called mutation. making one letter mistake. and it also by recombination which is swapping of segments with, other viruses. so if two viruses are infecting the same bat at the same time

and they're in the same of a bat at the same and start replicating their genomes at the same time. there's a possibility that they can get tangled, that the replicating mechanism can sort of be bumped off of one template under the other template might go for, you know, a thousand letters or more copying genome into the the genome that it's producing and then be bounced back. so splicing so it's not unusual at all for a coronavirus genome to be a pastiche of 95% from this virus and, 5% from that virus. that's what we knew. the experts knew about coronaviruses, but few other things we knew there was news very early that there was a virus fairly similar to this that had been discovered.

a scientist named zhengli shi, a woman in wuhan at the wuhan institute of virology, 96.2% identical to this virus as it in wuhan. and in january of 2020, 96.2% similar. so people said, i even overstated this when i was in australia flapping my jaw that oh, this is very, very similar. this proves that it came from a bat. well, not quite 96% similarity for coronaviruses implies 40 or 50 years of diverged. it's divergent evolution. so that's a pretty significant. so two different viruses that started off from the same ancestor may have continued their lineage in two different bat populations once isolated from each other for 40 or 50 years. and the result just by random

mutation, if not adaptation to different circumstance, would be that they might be 4% different. so so we knew that there was this one virus, but this not this the virus. i'll give it a name. rat g 13. that was the close match. rat g 13 actually there's supposed to i'm supposed to call it ratg13, but i like calling it rat g 13, so rat g was the closest but not that close still suggested that this virus came from bats in particular from horseshoe bats particular kind of small insects versus bat. and there were two curious features in this genome which the people who look at genomes the molecular evolutionary virologists can look at and say that's odd haven't seen that in this particular kind coronavirus before this narrow of coronaviruses the like

coronaviruses start stars like better never mind that but then there is there's there's a sub genus subgenus of of the family coronavirus that this virus belongs to. and nobody had ever seen these two features in a coronavirus of subgenus before. none of this going to be on the quiz at the end of the at the end of the lecture, there was a receptor binding domain, which is a patch you know the coronaviruses got the spikes that stick like clothes sticking out of a big tam right and those spikes are how the coronaviruses latches on to cells to infect them to latch hold get in them replicate itself and and continue to do its damage. so the spike protein very very important in terms of being able to affect, in fact a particular of creature spike protein has to capable of grabbing on to proteins that stick out of our cells or the cells some other

host so this particular spike protein had these two features in it right in that grabber one is the receptor binding domain and that is a really sticky sort of velcro patch in molecular terms that would help this virus to latch on to the protein, certain kind of proteins out of a cell and is called the and cleavage site f. so its rbd and fc s furin cleavage site and means there's a particular spot on that ring on that spike where if this molecule that's in our bodies touches it, then the spike changes shape like a transformer truck turning a giant robot suddenly and bonds so the membrane around cell shoots its

genome, the cell boom, it's a done deal the cell is infected. those two things are very important. okay, now forget about them, the people. oh, so so there was much, much, much known about this virus, but things were still mysterious. those two features were mysterious. where did they come from? how did get into this virus and and other things? we're unknown. there was a lot to learn. where did this virus exactly come? big question with important implications and where is it going? what's going to do? how bad is it going to be? how is it going to change? how is it going to evolve? so, by the way, i set watch for 40 minutes and after i've chattered for 40 minutes. i'm just going to stop so we can have a conversation wherever. i am. so this the watch will. don't don't worry. i feel like if it's if it seems like i've got you know i've got so much hot air that i'm going to talk all evening i'm going to

stop it at 40 minutes. so those questions remain to be known about virus. but then there's the people these people that i had contacted these, amazing, wonderful people. marjorie pollack, deputy editor, promed, that email alert service that i belong to, i decided i would call, interview, talk with her and she told me about what it looked like from where she sat december 31st, 2019. she is at dinner with her husband on their at their at their house in long island getting away from from new york city for the christmas holiday and she goes back after dinner to her computer and to check on things because it's her job to edit and curate these different messages. lumpy skin disease in malaysia and water buffalo as a child has got whooping cough in in ho chi minh city to curate these things

and. she goes back to her desk and somebody is telling her, hey, there's a strange thing going on in wuhan china. there are people with a respiratory and they've been showing up at hospitals and there's more than a few of them. and knows what it is. oh, okay. so starts talking by email to her sources around the world. can i get a second source on this? can i get some information? she works on that for a couple hours and she posts one of the very earliest messages late on december 30/30 about atypical in wuhan, china and then gets up the next day. it's new year's eve day relaxes little bit goes to dinner again that night with her husband to a particular cafe they like in this little town in new york on long island and gets a phone in the middle of dinner at right is her food is about come and it's peter daszak of the eco health alliance you may recognize his

name. he's been much attacked he's been much in in this story because ecohealth alliance is an organization that studies the of wild viruses from animals all over the world and he has collaborated a great deal with shi of the wuhan institute of virology. so he has become a target but he was in the midst of this he had close relations with chinese scientists in, particular with zhengli shi at the wuhan institute. marjorie pollack gets a call from peter daszak. what do you know about this virus? if it's a virus in in wuhan, well, not much yet. there seems to be a cluster of people might human to human transmission. there's no sequence yet. we don't know what it might be. there is a rumor that it might be stars like it might be a coronavirus, similar to the first stars. the stars of 2003 that had a 10% case fatality rate killed one in ten people that it infected came

out of southern china, spread to toronto, spread to beijing, spread to bangkok, spread to other places, terrifying disease that was stopped after only 8000 cases and 800 deaths. and be stopped because it didn't have transmission from asymptomatic cases, but it scared people who paid attention, including marjorie pollack and others. so peter daszak is telling could be the stars like virus. they're very concern and very concerned about that. she's she talks to peter daszak out there for 45 minutes or so. she told me it's like 23 degrees. i'm wearing a sweater. my dinner is getting cold inside. but i talked to peter and i go back then and we go home and instead of watching the ball come down in times square, like she usually with her husband, she goes back to her computer and starts scraping the web for more news and she starts finding news reports in chinese and putting them through. google translate and getting

translations. finds one in a business publication called sinha finance. um, and there is a statement the wuhan public health commission that says whether not it is a sars virus has not yet been clarified, but need not panic. is always reassuring. you hear government officials saying need not panic. okay, so, joe, boy, how many of the how many of these can i go through? eddie holmes, this brilliant evolutionary virologist in sydney, is collaborating with. a scientist in shanghai named yanjun zhang. dr. zhang and dr. zhang has a lab and. he's getting samples from wuhan, shipped to him and his lab is sequencing virus and and communicating with with eddie holmes sydney by wechat on his

phone this this this phone app that the chinese trust very much and he's telling eddie eddie this is a coronavirus it looks a bit like stars but it's not stars it's something else. and we have the genome we now have the full genome. we've sequenced the genome from samples in says we've got to release this. zhang you've got to release this. well i get in a lot trouble. the government has told us now, everybody stop working this, stop communicating about, do not publish anything. just shut up about this virus. chinese officialdom zhang is saying, i don't know, i don't, i don't know if i can do to do it. eddie and eddie are saying we've got to get this out. zhang we've got, get this, i've got to get the genome out. so it gets to be january 11th, the morning of january 11th and in sydney and in shanghai. and eddie has been pressuring zhang and and zhang has been called up to beijing, to report

to his bosses. he works for the government and on the plane for beijing, he's sitting down, buckling himself in. they're telling him to get off his phone. they're going close the door and his phone rings again. and it's eddie holmes in sydney saying zhang have to release this virus, the world needs this. the of this, we have to release the sequence. and zhang says, oh give a minute to think, eddie. so he thinks for a minute and then he and then they're hang up your phone, turn off phone. we're closing the door and, jiang says to eddie. okay, all right. all right, let's release the sequence quickly. he communicates with not with a post-doc in his says, send the file to in sydney. the post-docs sends the file to eddie holmes in sydney, australia. eddie has already arranged with a website in run by that professor i talked to who told

me interview my my grad students andrew eddie calls and through rambo on the phone so i got the sequence okay, let's write an introduction. we're going to put it up on this website. the world is going to have it. eddie says, i have it in my for a total of 52 minutes between when he it from zhang and when it went up on website. he's got it for 52 minutes, eddie tells me. i even check what it is. it could be bloody glow dna. he can look at the genome and see more than almost anybody in the world. but he doesn't. he doesn't take the time he says, we got to get this up. we got to publish this genome for the world. so it goes up. and now it's about am in edinburgh and about 8 p.m., 9 p.m. in bethesda, maryland, washington dc and barney graham of the vaccine research is waiting at home to get this genome and.

he has told his boss, who's a guy named tony fauci, just get me the sequence. we're all set to go, meaning we're all set to design a vaccine. if we can just get this sequence, we're ready to go and. tony fauci tells when i ask him what's most important decision you made in 2020, 20. tony fauci me to immediately say we've got to a vaccine and give my team all the support they needed to do it. so he has told barney graham as soon as we get the go, go, go, go on developing the vaccine, i will get you the money. i will get you the support. i will find a manufacturing partner. just go. and 8:09 p.m. that friday night january 10th in washington in bethesda he gets it because holmes has put it up on website in edinburgh, barney graham it starts looking at it looks at the spike protein, looks at the

sequence immediately, calls his lab people and says, okay, we're starting, here's the sequence, get busy. what job then was to do was design essentially a synthetic version of that spike protein and it's dangerous form before it latches on to the to the cell design a synthetic version of that that can be produced back engineering with the molecule mrsa messenger rna to become the moderna messenger more than a vaccine. and i think it was something like 60 days or less than 60 days from that night when. barney graham got the sequence and barney graham, by the way, had to make some. he looked at that sequence friday night and the next morning and had to make decisions about how to interpret the spike protein and engineer a spike protein effigy for this

vaccine that would stimulate the immune systems to attack this actual virus when it gets in the body. had to make that decision and graham told me that's what i kind of sweated over most is making the choice of the sequence because that final choice was my choice. barney graham, the choice he gives it to his people. they design this effigy. they call it an antigen. it's sent immediately to the company. moderna that they've partnered with to manufacture it. moderna starts manufacture the manufacturing process and, whatever it was, 58 days later, the first shot for the first clinical trial went in to a human arm. immeasurably faster than any has ever been developed before. and so we started to get it after clinical trials. when did we get it? october and november of that

year we started to be able to get the shot. so that's the way the way this book moves with with the story. the story has a lot of momentum and i try and i try and convey that momentum, that urgency, the fact that this was a breathless race to deal with this virus and that it was science, action and science is a process that's performed by people, human people. it's not a body of facts. it's not a body, established truths. it's an incremental process of gradually moving toward a clearer, more accurate reliable understanding of the physical biologic nature of the world world on. you o'toole that phd student in edinburgh in with a print dress and a nose ring talking to me

from an attic in edinburgh. when i zoomed, no, excuse me, i think it was an attic back in dublin because she had gone back to spend time with parents. she created a software tool called pangolin, named an acronym, but named after that beautiful little animal that that sort of armored anteater kind thing that has an important in this whole story that i haven't even been able to touch on here. but but pangolins carry coronaviruses and they're probably or least possibly has been some recombination between bat coronaviruses, pangolin coronaviruses, other mammal coronaviruses in order to create this virus, the sars-cov-2 virus she designed this software tool they call it a pipeline for taking in genomes, a number of genomes from samples from different people and putting them this software program and, and using it to create trees of

life of this virus. so that they could see. okay. here's one branch came out of south east england and look at its expand. it's going into london now. it's diversified saying it's throwing off more it's exploring evolutionary possibilities. it's thriving, it's spreading, it's succeeding. she divine just design the software tool that has been used now all over world to do that. how did she do that. i asked her, how did you do that? and she said, well, i stayed up late, late one night and i. i did some research on the internet and i thought about it and i noodled around and next morning there was her software. why did she call it pangolin? it's an acronym, phylogenetic assignment of named global lineages pangolin on youtube. just a sample. my wrist alarm went off. i'm going to stop there's a lot more to tell you, but it's in

the book. and i want to i want to take some questions i want to have a conversation with you and and and so we'll end it there. yeah. lauren. haven't read it yet, but i was curious if you could speak to your process of structure coming from 95 interviews, it sounds like it probably follows the chronology. yeah, that's a really quick turnaround. it interviews it is largely chronicles logical but not completely. it was quick turnaround. i, i used my usual very careful means of structuring, which was to make no outline whatsoever to start to have a rough sense. what i wanted to get in, what i do when i structure a book, a complicated long book like the song of the dodo or spillover or whatever. i don't like outlines because outlines create orderly books and i hate books with orderly structures. they're and they're predictable. i want an organic structure. i want a straight oh thank you,

brother. i want a structure that has surprise has unexpectedness in it that feels inevitable. my structuring of books i'm sure is forever affected. the fact that i spent 11 years obsessed with the novels of william faulkner and i learned a ton about about writing long complicated books, about science from, studying william faulkner. so i did. i just started writing. i knew that wanted to tell the story from the beginning. i wanted it to move like a freight train. i wanted use all these people's voices. so at each point i would say, okay, whose voice? whose voice could advance the subject right there. february 1st, 2020. oh, well, tony fauci's and christian anderson's voice from the scripps institute and eddie holmes voice and then etc., etc. and i would just i would just bring them in. scott the chinese virologist, you mentioned that they released

the sequence. did she have any backlash from chinese government for doing that? the one who released the sequences is he that's yang's and jiang zhengli. she is the woman at the wuhan institute. so professor zhang released the sequence. he got in trouble. his lab was closed for rectification soon afterwards. and according to eddie holmes, he has been in trouble. and eddie, even eddie doesn't exactly know much trouble he's in, but he's a government employee and he may have tanked his career by doing that. so when people say, well, the chinese are close, chinese have been opaque. the chinese haven't been transparent, they haven't shared any information. that's half true. it's very true. chinese officialdom. it's not true of. chinese scientists, at least the best, most courageous of them. anybody else, they've animal an

animal that's going to get it. next, what animals have a huge population now? yeah, that's reserved reserve growling whatever this virus. if i were some other animal would be scared. you know the list of animals that have gotten it something like 40% of the white tailed deer in iowa are now positive for covid. likewise in illinois, michigan, pensilva yeah, nobody knows how they got it, but they got it and. apparently they can spread it from dear to deer. mink. the mink of there used to be a mink industry in the netherlands and in denmark, a big one. and they were farming america in mink because those are the ones with the best pelts. there were millions of mink in in denmark and the netherlands and they testing positive and it spread among the mink colonies

because. mink workers were coming in positive and were infecting the mink, and then it was spreading among the mink. and some of those mink each year get away and go feral on the landscape of denmark. so they were potentially infected you know they're they're both predators and prey so they're infecting other animals. there's some concern about deer mice, mink in have become infected with it. and we about some of the other things i mean dogs pet dogs and pet cats have become infected tigers. the bronx zoo gorillas at the san diego zoo and safari park snow leopards at, the louisville zoo, all the world, they're other animals. so people i didn't even get into the origins controversy. i could do another hour on that. but i won't. but when people who favor lab leak hypothesis argue. oh, well, here's one of our

arguments. it's really susp that this virus was so well adapted to humans. the very get go is not suspicious because. this virus was not a special be well adapted to humans. it was quite well adapted humans and also adapted to other mammals, dogs, cats tigers, gorillas mink, etc., etc., etc. . it's a very broadly adapted, enterprising mammal, infecting virus, tony fauci said to me, i asked him about it at one point in relatively conversation, but a very interesting conversation with him and and he's sort of channeled the virus and he talked to me for a couple of minutes and saying, imagine i'm the virus. you know, i want to infect as many people. i want do his brooklyn accent. like i'm not i can't compete with kate mckinnon and brad

pitt. but he he channels the virus for a ways imagine you know i'm anthropological analogizing here but you know you know how this works you you've written about viruses before i want to i just want to infect lot of people. i don't care once. i've infected people and moved on to the next person. i don't care if that person dies or not. it doesn't matter. that doesn't affect. my evolutionary success what my evolution every success is measured in and how more transmissions i achieve, how broadly. i spread the three darwinian impaired tips have have a lot of offspring spread yourself in geographical space and continue yourself in time. he was essentially me that and then at the very end he says so this is a very insidious virus and and it is this man here and then we come back over to you just thanks to parts is there enough information you're talking about, you know, this originating in with that, too,

that food court market versus a lab in wuhan? is there enough information about that then? secondly, where do you see this going? yes. you mean that question going or the virus going to virus? oh, okay. yeah. well is there enough information about, its origins? no, there's not. we need we need more. we have a strong strong, strong basis to believe that it came from a wild animal being traded for food in that market. there is a very strong pattern among the earliest cases. most of them were either that market or centered around that in a nonrandom way, and there's a paper published in science in february of this year, led a scientist that i've known for a long time trust of ton named michael warby, who is his team, examined all those data and found this very strong signal that contrary to what he had

originally thought, there was strong evidence to believe that the virus started in that market. but we don't know which animal it came from. don't have the evidence we, don't have the progenitor of this virus from an animal. you know, we've got rat ratg13 team that's 96% similar, but don't have 99.6% similar. and we need that we need to keep sampling wild in china central and southern china keep sampling animals in the food chain and investigating all the other hypotheses, including the lab leak. yeah. don't don't brush off the table. there is a theoretical that it could be that, but there is no evidence for that because this virus as far as we know, never was in a lab to be leaked from it. you really can't say we have strong evidence of that until you place this virus in some lab and and has never there has never been a record of this particular virus and in a lab

being used for gain function research or anything else. so yeah we need lot more, a lot more research to try and settle this if we ever can. where is this virus going? it's, it's going round and round. that's where it's going. it's going round and round in us for the next. 40 years, forever, whatever. never going to be out of humans i would guess guess. and although we have vaccines against and the virus changing and a lot of people refuse to take the vaccines or so far have been unable to have the opportunity to get the vaccines vaccine is a big problem. 1%, 2% of the population of africa has had the chance or has gotten vaccinated far. so you know we've had a vaccine for measles for 60 some years, but measles isn't gone and measles still kills thousands of

kids a year in the democratic republic of the congo, measles kills them. this virus, i would guess, is going to be something like that. ralph, is there a mechanism in the virus that actually makes it more virulent or more easy to spread that takes away i mean, apparently now a lot of people are getting it and i'm conservative i know it's gotten well. yeah and clearly it makes them less deadly. so is there a function, the virus or some mechanism there that it evolves to actually quit killing the host. so much? this is an important question. thank you for asking it. the answer is no. as is tony fauci told me speaking for the virus. i don't care if i kill people or not. it doesn't matter because the darwinian fitness of whatever changes the virus undergoes

effect, whether it's able to make copies of itself and spread widely, and if it leaves. 1% of its victims dead or 10% of its victim dead as long as before any of them die, they've been able to spread the virus that will have no evolutionary effect. it's it's a it's a side effect. so some people say, well, viruses in humans, new viruses in humans always tend evolve eventually toward being endemic. well, that that's sort of a truism and endemic is very poorly defined. but people will think that means and we have coronaviruses that are common cold coronaviruses, people think this virus is inevitably going to involve evolved toward that. no there is no inevitable bility of that whatsoever. it could happen by chance or the virus could evolve to be more lethal to the people that it infects and its capacity to transmit is is largely separate

from that as far as we can tell. so as long as it keeps evolving to be more able to transmit to get around this vaccine to get around that to reinfect people who've already had a case as long it can do that evolution doesn't doesn't see how people are dying natural selection doesn't see whether it's killing 1% or 10% clear. so i think when we all back on this or it's tangled up with politics for yeah so how did you decide how to wrestle with that i decided very on that i wanted to write about the science of the virus and that there is a huge story of political incompetence and malfeasance and other people writing books about that and have already published some those books. there's a public crisis story.

other people are better equipped to write that story. i let them happily do that, and there's only a little bit in this book i do make couple of snotty comments about donald trump, but otherwise i mostly almost entirely stay away from that. yeah, thank you. so but that's the reason this virus has been so successful is that the first sounds as though and serves people with develop a symptom the first before it can be transmitted. all right and this is we don't have the symptoms and you're still is that why it's been so widely successful? yes, in a word, yes. yeah. that's a huge difference. and the scientists who studied sa's one and may have said this already, they they specifically said, thank goodness this virus was not transmittable from cases. if that been one of its attributes, we re would have

been in trouble. we dodged a bullet and this the bullet got us between the eyes. yeah you did a very good job. oh. sticks out of it. but i did pick on one another comment was made. not you. but in that you said just a politician that said we know where to stop and not thought that clear but yet the entire book tells you how this global network operates and it's like how what a terrible thing you say. yeah, yeah when isn't even remotely right. well i think maybe i also donald trump when he said nobody saw this coming. yeah. nobody saw this coming. yeah. yeah. and so yeah yeah. a lot of people, a lot of scientists saw this. but what was that tension?

because i found no, i would never intended really negative about the president of the united states but it just out of one of the things i asked fauci dr. fauci, i said that i asked him what's the most important thing decision you made in 2020? and the first thing you said was political or scientific? and i said, you you're tony fauci you get both. it's a political. when i stood up against the president, the united states, i take no pleasure in standing up alone against the president, the united states. that was the most difficult thing politically, scientifically, the most important thing was saying to bernie graham, you just be ready when i when we get to the genome, i'll have support that you need for for the vaccine effort. and then i asked him at the very

end of our conversation. after we had talked about the serious things. so who does the best? tony fauci imitation? brad pitt or kate mckinnon? and he goes. and he laughs and he says, you know, i was thrilled when brad pitt got the emmy for that. but that kate mckinnon, she is so talented. she is hilarious. maybe that's the point to stop. thank you very much. thank