מסמכים חדשים שפורסמו בארה"ב חושפים מאמץ הסתרה מתואם בנושא מקורו של נגיף הקורונה | ריאיון

It's been more than six years since the CCP virus or COVID-19 took the lives of over a million Americans. Yet much of the scientific community still seems unwilling to openly debate its origins. American Thought Leader's Jose Ania Kellogg tapped insight from Matt Ridley, co-author of Viral, on the issue. Ridley breaks down the significance of newly classified documents released by then Homeland Security Secretary Tulsi Gabbard, along with evidence of a coordinated effort to cover up COVID-19's origins. Let's dive in. Matt Ridley, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you, Jan, for having me on. In her last days as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard released a series of documents related to a cover-up around the Wuhan lab, around gain-of-function research. I know you've been following this closely. Explain to me the significance of these documents. They add confirmation to what we already knew, that there was strong intelligence pointing the intelligence agencies towards a lab leak as the cause of the pandemic almost from the very start. Then they also add what we suspected, which is that there was then a strong pushback from somebody within the administration, the US administration, to make sure those conclusions didn't get out to us, the public, and indeed were sort of reversed on political rather than scientific grounds. I haven't mentioned any names in there, but the thing that has stood out for me is that the briefing of the CIA that caused it to change its mind was effectively done by Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, who was very conflicted because he had been defending gain-of-function research. He had made sure that it got allowed again after a moratorium in America, and he had made sure that funds went to supporting that work in China, not just in the United States. This really does show that when he told Senator Rand Paul in testimony on oath that they were not funding gain-of-function research in China, that just simply is not true. I find this whole situation almost bizarre. Very early in the pandemic, in April of 2020, we created a documentary. I believe it was called Tracing the Origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus. It was still okay to call it the Wuhan Coronavirus at the time, which would have been a normal name for it. Essentially, the argument in the documentary was, it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, probably a duck. It wasn't conclusive, but there was already enough evidence to point to a much more likely lab scenario than the other kind of wet market scenario that was brandished about. Here we are, we're still kind of arguing the same issue. There are still people that think it was a wet market at this point. You were onto it before I was. In February and March of 2020, and even through April, I was still telling parliamentary colleagues here in the United Kingdom that it was not a lab leak. We knew that because that possibility had been looked into by a number of American scientists who'd come to the firm conclusion that it could not possibly be a laboratory construct. They used the word ruled out. I thought, well, that's good enough for me. These guys now look like they know what they're doing. Then in May of 2020, two things happened. One was a paper came to my attention which said this virus did not evolve very fast in the first few months, and yet is very infectious. That implies that it's had prior exposure to human beings. It's not just suddenly appeared in the last few months. It's somewhere it's been in contact with human cells, and that could have been in a lab. That paper was written by three people, one of whom was Alina Chan, who ended up being my co-author on this subject. The other thing that happened was that George Gao, the head of the China CDC, who I've since met and interviewed, he said in May of 2020, it didn't start in the market. We've looked in the market. We can't find an infected animal. The pattern of infection of people in the market doesn't point at an animal. Animal vendors were not infected, etc., etc. Now, that's extraordinary. In the case of SARS, when the outbreak happened in 2003, it very quickly became apparent that there were infected animals and infected animal vendors. Now, there are 40,000 food markets of that kind in China plus. It happened next to one that happened also to be the site of the only SARS-like beta coronavirus research program in the world, and it happened the year after. They planned a very specific experiment in that lab on a virus that was 96% the same that was sitting in their own freezer in that lab, having been brought from a thousand miles away. So, your walk like a duck, quack like a duck thing is one way of putting it. The other cliche I reach for is, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks in a mine, the line from Casablanca, if you remember. It is genuinely far less surprising that Rick should run into, I can't remember what Ingrid Bergman's character was called, in Casablanca than it was that this virus should turn up in this one place at this one time when this kind of research was going on, and leave no trace in animals or people.