Future of Gain of Function Research

Take your flexibility beyond the mat PayPal Pay nothing at checkout. Then enjoy a flexible monthly payment plan that works for you. withith no sign up or late fees. Find yours then, and an easy way to pay. With PayPal. downownload the PayPal app to get started. sububject to approval. pay mononthly consonsumer loans made by Webank. available through PayPaling N ML nine one zero four fivety seven. Learn more at payPal d. com slash pay monthly. Your summer weekends fill up fast, but Crocx has your back. Road trips, beach days, last minute getaways, whatever's on the agenda, swing by your local store and find your new goat too Try it, style it, make it yours. becausecause the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off Walock out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest crox store today More than five years after the pandemic began, questions about the origins of COVID nineteen remain hotly debated. In our episode today, we speak to a physician, scientist, and author of the new book, The Code as Witness. He argues that the strongest evidence for the lab leak theory comes from the genetic code of the virus itself And a scandal like that should have huge implications for the scientific community I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive editor John Bickley, and this is a weekend episode of Morning Wire Spring is here and your yard probably needs some love after winter. Our sponsor fast growring Trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery, with thousands of trees and plants and over two million happy customers. Think of it as your local nursery available anywhere, with a bigger selection than you'll find anywhere else. From fruit and privacy trees to flowering varieties, shrubs, and houseplants, every plant is grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy simply click, order and grow to create your dream yard with options that fit your climate, space, and lifestyle. I ordered two bambino fiddleaf figs, so they're small, but they are so adorable and they arrived in beautiful condition Healthy, happy, and my living room is forever changed. Their alive and thrive guarantee ensures your plants arrive happy and healthy. Backed by ongoing support from trained plant experts to help you plan, choose, and care for your new greenery. Right now, they have great deals on spring planting essentials up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get twenty percent off their first purchase when using the code Wire at cheheckout That's an additional twenty percent off better plants and better growing at fastgrrowtrees. com using the code wire at checkout Fast growrowing trees. com code Wire. Now is the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use wire to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time, terms and conditions may apply And joining us now to discuss the clues pointing to a lab origin found in the virus itself is doctor Stephen CQui. doctor CQui, thanks for coming on. Well It's a pleasure to be here, Georgia So Dr. Qui, it's been five years since the pandemic began and most people have moved on, but you've actually written an entire book that questions COVID origins and talks about why that still matters. Why did you choose that as the topic of your book Well, I mean, I was looking at what was going on in in twenty twenty and seeing two things happening at the same time. One was representation of where the virus came from that didn't make sense scientifically And then in a parallel fashion The science establishment was really censoring people who had opinions, there wasn't the opportunity to debate, which is the foundation of science. So both of those drove me to write the book And the third thing is that There There may be another pandemic. It could be worse than the one percent Sirus COVID two. We need to be better prepared and we're not Now, you've argued that the virus itself contains some clues that point to a lab origin. What is the strongest piece of evidence that you've seen that makes you feel like this virus came from a lab leak Well, it's looking at the virus and comparing it to thousands and thousands of viruses we have from nature So it has a particular site called the Furin site, which makes it highly transmissible not found in nature in this class of viruses It has some unusual adaptations to the human tissue that are not seen in viruses in nature because in nature, viruses are living in animals, you know, bats and other kinds of intermediate hosts This virus was highly adapted for humans from the beginning It's also the first respiratory virus that that was ever transmitted asymptomatically. And I show that for five years, the one In Viology was studying how to make a virus that could transmit without giving symptoms. those are the three primary foundations inside the genome Let's say that it came from a laboratory and was manipulated in that laboratory When you say that it could be transmitted without symptoms, you mean in that prootrome phase before the symptoms arrive? So a new virus coming from nature is going to cause symptoms in ninety eightcent, ninety nine percent of patients. The symptoms are fever, you know, sweating, red cheeks and the like because it runs into what's called the innate immune system because it's not used to, you know, to being in humans This virus was forty percent to fifty percent asymptomatic in its patients. We missed that for a few months because we never expected it to be asymptomatic. And that was one of the two or three things that contributed most to making it a pandemic, a worldwide condition where you it has infected probably every person on the planet And you say there was evidence that they were working on making something exactly like that in the lab Yes, there's a particular gene called an accessory gene. It has the fancy name of orphate. I'm being facetious there, but orphate is responsible for suppressing the immune system so that the body doesn't react to it On the front end of an infection, it makes it asymptomatic. and on the back end, it makes it hard to make antibodies against the virus We've seen this virus, you know affect people over and over again. and part of that is this protein called or fade? that's actually suppressing the immune system at the end of an infection. Now the title of your book that you often use and it's a phrase in your book is the code as Witness. Can you just unpack that phrase a little bit and what aspects of the virus are you referring to there? And it might be the aspects that you just discussed Yeah, I mean, the title is to indicate that there's been a lot of what I'll call he said, she said evidence around, you where the virus came from. We have We have vilogists talking about that it came from a market publicly and then through FIA and other means gotten access to their private statements where they say GeSS could really have been engineered in a laboratory I don't use that evidence. I use the evidence inside the virus itself because that's, you know, apolitical. And really is the best place to find the evidence. This virus has features that have never been seen in thousands and thousands of viruses from nature. And those features are specifically the kind that have been used over the last twenty years to make viruses more inective in the laboratory. So it's circumstantial evidence, but much Fingerprints are circumstantial evidence This points to a lab origin and a manipulation of the virus in the lab Now how large are these gene sequences that you're referring to? Could some people say, oh, they just arose spontaneously or just mathematically, does that not make sense based on how large they are Well, there are different sizes. So the fur and cleavage site, the thing that makes it so transmissible. is twelve specific new letters in the virus that have never been seen in a thousand years in viruses from this class The adaptation to humans is up to one hundred different sites on the spike protein that are ideal for the human receptor, but not for the bat receptor, not for other host receptors If it came from bats, would you see some evidence in its genome of where it historically would have Favored latching onto bats Well, yeah, so what you're describing are two exact incidents. So this is a coronavirus. And in twenty fourteen, we had a coronavirus epidemic. In two thousand three, we had a coronavavirus epidemic. Both of those came directly from animals to humans. in one case, something called a civet cat. in markets in China and the other from camels to humans in the Middle East. And those virus had the hallmarks of having been in respectively, civic cats and camels And so that kind of evidence is what you should see in a natural spillover, which are completely absent in SRScoovI II Well, that brings me to the next question because Some people who disagree with you say the evidence does favor that natural spillover. Can you just explain a little bit what that term spillover means and then your response to that critique? Yeahes, so let's back up a little and do a a little biology training here. A zooonosis has the word zoo in it. it involves three entities, a human, an animal, and a virus, or perhaps a bacteria. If you hear about a new spillover in China, for example, or in Asia It is eight to one likely that it's a natural event coming from nature versus a laboratory event because that's the incidents that happen in Asia. And that's why I build the case that it's beyond a reasonable doubt that this came from a laboratory. Every year, there are, on average, eight natural spillovers from nature to humans that end up in the hospital or in a clinic that we can detect And in that same time fr every year, there's one approximately one lab incident where someone in a laboratory gets infected, they go out into the world, they begin to infect other people. So it's eight to one in favor of nature. and that's your starting point. and that's the starting point in the book with the evidence it actually flips so that it's greater than ninety five percent likely it came from a laboratory. The flip side is to be sure everyone understands that, that there are thousands of laboratory accidents around the world um, you know, in the last decade, for example, where people people actually died from laboratory experiments they were conducting. So Having an accident in a laboratory is actually not that rare given the large number of laboratories doing this kind of work and the pervasiveness of the microbes themselves. What's the fastest growing business risk right now? It's not inflation, it's not regulation, it's AI risk. Every new AI tool, every new software integration, each one creates another opportunity for something to go wrong Most security programs weren't built for the speed at which AI is changing business That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is a number one agentic trust platform used by more than sixteen thousand companies to help stay audit ready and manage security and compliance more efficiently. But what makes Vanta especially useful is that it doesn't just help during audits. It helps companies monitor the risks that show up between audits too. The Vanta agent works in the background like a twenty for seven GRC engineer identifying issues, drafting fixes, and reducing vendor assessment time by up to fifty percent. Whether you're a fast growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta is here to help you automate your security and compliance and earn improve trust. Get started today at Vanta. com slash morningwire That's Va NTa d. com slash morningwire. Now, looking back, when it comes to the largest failures with COVID that led to all those deaths, would you point the finger at science and sloppy lab work? Do you think it was a political issue or do you think it was institutional? L the guard dog institutions failed at their in their position? Yeah, so I mean I mean, let's unpack that. That's a complicated question. The two features of the virus that were unexpected for the frontline doctors, and had they known they would have acted differently and had they acted differently, we would not have probably had a pandemic. is the rapid human to human spread and the fact that about half the infections are asymptomatic I spoke before about eight natural zoonosis per year in Asia, for example When they happen, one person gets sick and maybe gets very sick and maybe even dies. But because the pathogen in the virus is not adapted to humans, it doesn't go beyond there. It very seldom infects another person at all And so the frontline doctors, when this came out, were expecting a virus that yes was going to be you know dangerous for the people who had it, but wasn't that transmissible. And having the fact that it clearly shows that ninety nine percent of recognition site for the human Ace two pre adapted made it a highly human to human pathogen from the beginning. And then the other thing is again, only one percent of viruses from nature are asymptomatic And so none of our people expected that there was asymptomatic transmission which would have changed how we treated you know, airport surveillance or shutting down travel and those kind of things. Yeah. Now is gain of function research still happening? And if so, how should it be governed and how should it be managed Yeah, I mean, I think it still is occurring. It's defined as changing the properties of a pathogen, a human pathogen, making it more infective, so it takes a smaller amount, making it more pathogenic or likely to kill you and the like. And it is going on now. And as part of the provisionsion that I suggest in the book is putting all of that under an independent national surveillance group, a research study group that would look at this research and weigh whher whether it's expected to cause benefit or it's just too risky to do. Right now, the people who are funding the research and doing the research part of the people who decide whether the grants are appropriate or not. and there's too much self interest in that current cycle Now, it's possible that a lot of the information was either hidden or destroyed. but if you or we were somehow able to gain access to one hundred percent of the lab data, all of the correspondence, emails, internal records, et cetera, what do you think we would learn that still hasn't been exposed today. Well I mean, I think the chain of custody on a natural virus that gets manipulated in a lab in two or three ways, including fe and Cleavage site, including adaption to the AC two, I think that if you had the laboratory noebookch, you would see the steady progress, probably takes six to twelve months to do those activities. So you'd see the steps along the way that led to all of that work And that would probably blow the lid off of where this specific virus came from Well, I think, you know I've done an analysis because to remind you know your viewers, the techniques for manipulating coronaviruses were developed the University of North Carolina by a scientist called Ralph Barrick. And you know, it really is very inventive and creative fundamental research that he did in terms of making consensus viruses. so growing viruses that couldn't grow before, being able to do reverse genetics in the laboratory so you can manipulate them and make large quantities of them and doing seamless transmissions so you can You can prevent the detection of the work itself. He called it the no seeM technology where you can' actually detect viruses being done. So all of the work was done in North America. But when you publish it, it becomes available to everyone in the world. My analysis was that given the location of the initial cases and the early spread and the proximity of the cases in China in Muhan itself, That is the seventy thirty or eighty twenty likely location of the laboratory that did the work, Wuan Institute iology in Wuan China. All right, well, Dr. KQui, thank you so much for coming on and explaining all of this to us Thank you, Georgia That was physician, scientist and author, Dr. Stehen CQuay, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire