YouSaid · the spoken record

Jamie Metzl

lines on the record: 283
first: 2021-12-08
most recent: 2021-12-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Videos and posting them. She was imprisoned for picking quarrels, which is kind of a catch-all. And now she's engaged in hunger strike. And she's near death. And so there's no question that there has been a cover-up. And there's no question in my mind that that cover-up is responsible for a significant percentage of”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% In my mind, there is a legitimate debate about the origins of the pandemic. There are people who I respect, who I don't necessarily agree with, people like Stuart Neal, who is a virologist in the UK, who's been very open-minded, engaged in productive debate about the origin. And you know where I stand. is and can be no debate about whether or not there has been a cover-up. There has been a cover-up. There is, in my mind, no credible argument that there hasn't been a cover-up. And, I mean, we can just see it in the regulations, in the lack of access. There's an incredible woman named Zhang Zhan, who is a Chinese, we have to call her a citizen journalist because everything is controlled by the state, but in the early days of the pandemic, she went to Wuhan, started taking”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's also Congress, and Congress, you talk about Rand Paul, and as a former executive branch worker when I was on the National Security Council and I guess technically when I was at the State Department, all of this stuff, all of this process, it just seems like a pain in the ass. It's like these effers, they're just attacking us. We tried to do this thing. We had all the best intentions and now they're holding hearings and they're trying to box us in and whatever. But that's our process. And there's like a form of accountability as chaotic, as crazy as it is. And so it makes it really difficult. I mean, we have other problems of just chaos in everybody doing their own thing, but it makes it difficult to have a kind of systematic cover-up. And again, all of that is predicated on my hypothesis, not fully proven, although I think likely that this is a lab incident in Oregon.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have pretty decent comment. And the reason I say I mention that I think of myself, I'm sure I'm not anymore as I get older. But as a progressive person, I'm a Democrat and I worked in democratic administrations, worked for President Clinton on the National Security Council. But kind of best friend in the United States Senate who I talk to all the time is a senator from Kansas named Roger Marshall. And Roger, I mean, if you just lined up our positions on all sorts of things, we're radically different. But we have a great relationship. We talk all the time and we share a commitment to saying, well, let's ask the tough questions about how this started. And again, if we had like what is the United States government? Yeah, it's the executive branch.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every government has the same instincts, and that's why we have, and it's imperfect here, but kind of these ideas of separation of powers, of inalienable rights, so that we can have, it's almost like a vast market where we can have bal”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I am offended. But their argument is, look, we don't fully trust the government. If the government, just like we fought against the British, if the government's wrong, we want to at least have some authority. So that's our system is to have that kind of voice. And that is the public voice actually balances because every government, as you correctly said,”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The government probably is going to have a lot of instincts to do the wrong thing. That was the experience in England before. And so that's why we have free speech to hold the government accountable. I mean, I'm kind of broadly a gun control person, but the people who say, well, we need to have broad gun rights.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true. It's true. It's true. And so let's just say that the Texas horseshoe bats only exist in Texas. But in Montana, we have a thing. It's called the Montana Institute of Virology. And at the Montana Institute of Virology, they have the world's largest collection of Texas horseshoe bats, including horseshoe bats that are associated with a previous global pandemic called the Texas Horseshoe Bat pandemic. And let's just say that people in Montana, in the same town where this Montana Institute of Virology is, start getting a version of this Texas horseshoe bat syndrome that is genetically relatively similar to the outbreak in Texas. There are no horseshoe bats there. And the government says it's your same point, Alina's point about the unicorns, like nothing to see here. Just move along.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me put it this way. So we're in Texas now doing this interview. Imagine there's a kind of horseshoe bat that we'll call the Texas horseshoe bat.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Giving up sovereignty was the absolute opposite. And so that's why China is, and again, I mentioned this Rush Doshi book. It's not that China is trying to strengthen this rules-based international order, which is based on the principle that, well, there are certain things that we share. And how do we build a governance system to protect those things? What it seems to be doing is trying to advance its own sovereignty. And so I think I agree with you, but I don't think that just we can just go forward without some accountability for the...”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the question is would China stop in that process? And then third, it's a little bit of a historical background, but Defending national sovereignty is one of the core principles certainly of the Chinese state and the historical issue is for those of us who come from the West, one of the lessons of the post-war planners was that absolute national sovereignty was actually a major feeder into the First and Second World Wars, that we had all these conflicting states. And therefore, the logic of the post-war system is we need to in some ways pool sovereignty. That's like the EU and have transnational organizations like the UN organizations and the Britain Woods organizations. For most Asian states, and also even for some African, the people who are kind of on the colonized side of history, sovereignty was the thing that was denied them. That was the thing that they want that the European powers denied. And so the idea of”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're scaling up everything. And so with the plan on leading. And that's why, again, I was saying before, I think there's a lot of similarity between this story, at least as I see it, at least the most probable case, and these other areas where China gets knowledge and then tries to leapfrog. It's the same with AI and autonomous killer robots. It's the same with human genome editing, with animal experimentations, with so many basically all areas of advanced science.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the challenge with that is one, it's hard to imagine a fully accountable future system to prevent these kinds of terrible pandemics that's built upon obfuscation and cover-up regarding the origins of this worst pandemic in a century. So it's just like that foundation isn't strong enough. Second, China across the fields of science is looking to leapfrog the rest of the world. So China has current plans to build BSL4 labs in every of its province. Yeah, they're scaling.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The joke about that is there's a big problem because a lot of people have to leave the Jewish socialist conspiracy to make it for the Jewish capitalist conspiracy meeting.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's not the like just a lab leak. Like if China on day one had said we have this outbreak, we don't know where it came from. We want to have a full investigation. We call on international, responsible international partners to join us in that process and we're going to do everything in our power to share the relevant information because however this started, we're all victims. That's a totally different story than punishing Australia, preventing the WHO, blocking any investigation, condemning People who are trying to look. And so overall,”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A stronger WHO, a new pandemic treaty that addresses the major challenges that we face and allows the World Health Organization to pierce the veil of absolute sovereignty because we know that when these pandemics happen, they affect everybody. We are also putting, and you can pick your number, but let's start with 5 trillion US dollars, some massive amount, into a fund that we will be distributing to the victims of COVID-19 and their”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was why we wanted to look into things when the process of investigating became so political, it gave us pause and we were worried that our enemies were trying to use this investigation in order to undermine us. Having said that, now that we've dug deeper, we have recognized because we have access to additional information that we didn't have then, that this pandemic started from an accidental lab incident. And we feel really terribly about that. And we know that we were very aggressive in covering up information in the beginning. But the reason we were doing that is because we thoroughly, we fully believed that it came from a natural origin. Now that we see otherwise, we feel terribly. Therefore, we're doing a few different things. One is we are committing ourselves to establish”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a whistleblower, maybe they knew of some evidence that we didn't know about or something. What would I do starting right now? What I would do is I would hold a press conference and we would say we had this terrible accident. The reason why we were doing this research in Wuhan and elsewhere is that we had SARS-1 and we felt a responsibility to do everything possible to prevent that kind of terrible thing happening again for our country and for the world. That was why we collaborated with France, with the United States, in building up those capacities. We know that nothing is perfect, but we're a sovereign country and we have our own system. And so we had to adapt our systems so that they made sense internally. When this outbreak began, we didn't know how it started.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Union carbide. Union carbide. There was this American company operating in India. They had this leak. All these people were killed. The company admitted responsibility. I was working in the White House when the United States government, in my view, which I know to be the case, but other people in China think differently, bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. And so the United States government allowed a full investigation. Then we paid reparations to the family, the families. And so to your question, if I were, let's just say I were the Chinese government, not, I mean, in kind of an idealized version of the Chinese government. And let's just say that they had come to the conclusion that it was a lab incident. And let's just say they knew that even if they continued to cover it up, eventually this information would come out.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starting from now, it would have major geopolitical implications. And go back to Chernobyl, like there was a reason why the Soviet Union went to such length to cover things up. And when it came out, I mean, there are different theories, but certainly Chernobyl played some role in the end of communist power in the Soviet Union. The Chinese are very, very aware of that.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've changed the rules for that, but he's got a lot of enemies. I mean, there are a lot of people who are waiting in line to step up. So is there a chance that Xi Jinping could be deposed if it was proven that this comes from a lab? Isn't I? I think there's a real possibility. Would people in the United States Congress, for example, demand reparations from China? So we've had $4.5 trillion of stimulus, all of the economic losses. We owe a lot of money to China from our debt. I'm quite certain that members of Congress would say, you know, we're just going to wipe that out. It would destroy the global financial system, but I think that it would be extremely likely. Would other countries like India that have lost millions of people and had terrible economic damages? Would they demand reparations? So I think from a Chinese perspective,”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partnerships to understand what went wrong. They should have shared their raw data. They should have allowed their scientists to speak and write publicly because nobody knows more about this stuff, certainly in the early days than their scientists do. So it's relatively easy to say what they should do. It's a hard question to say, well, what would happen? Let's just say tomorrow we prove for certain that this pandemic stems from both from an accidental lab incident and then from what I've consistently called a criminal cover up because the cover up has done in many ways as much or more damage than the incident. Well, what happens? You could easily imagine Xi Jinping has had two terms as the leader of China.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe I'll break that down into a few sub questions. The first is what should, in an ideal world, what should the Chinese government do? And that's pretty straightforward. They should be totally transparent. The South African government now, there's an outbreak of this Omicron variant, and the South African government has done what we would want a government to do. Say, hey, there's an outbreak. We don't have all of the information. We need help. We want to alert the world and in some ways they're being punished for it through these travel bans, but it's a separate topic, but I actually think short-term travel bans actually are not a terrible idea. They should have on day one, if they should have allowed WHO experts in, they should have shared information. They should have allowed a full and comprehensive investigation with international”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was very little that the WHO could do because of the limitations of its mandate. And we can't just say we're going to have a WHO that only compromises Chinese sovereignty. If we want to have a powerful WHO, we should say you have emergency teams when the director general says an emergency team needs to go somewhere if they aren't allowed to go there that day. You could say there's an immediate referral to the Security Council. There needs to be something. But we have all these demands rightfully. So of the WHO, which doesn't have the authorities, the WHO itself only controls 20% of its own budget. So the governments are saying we're going to give you money to do this or that. So we need a stronger WHO to protect us, but we also have to build that.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leadership and empowerment. As I mentioned, the World Health Assembly is meeting now. And I think that it shouldn't be that we require superhumans. And there's some people who are big critics of WHO, the leader of the WHO in SARS-1 was definitely more aggressive. She had a different set of powers at that time. But it can't be entirely I mean, we definitely need strong-willed, aggressive, independent people in these kinds of roles. But we also need a more empowered WHO, like when the Chinese government in the earliest days of the pandemic said we're just not going to allow you to send a team to collect your own information and we're not going to allow you to have any kind of independent surveillance.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Edges, but there's only so far that they can go. And that's why we definitely need to have full accountability for the WHO. We need to expand the mandate to WHO, but we need to recognize that states have a big role and China is an incredibly influential state that's doing everything possible to prevent the kind of full investigation into pandemic origins that so desperately require.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of whom is an expert in the audit auditing of lab incidents. And then one of the, so they added those two. And then when they just released the list of people who are part of Sago, this one woman, a highly respected Dutch virologist named Marion Kupmans, who had been part of that deeply flawed and compromised international study group who had called, who has consistently called a lab incident origin, quote unquote, a debunked conspiracy theory as of now, her name is not on the list. We haven't seen any announcements. So I summary, and I'm sorry to go on for so long and to be so animated about this, I genuinely feel that the WHO is trying to do the right thing, but they exist within a political context. And they're kind of, it's like they're pushing at the end.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An open call for nominations to be part of Sago. And so a lot of people put in their nominations. They selected 26 people. But our group, we had a meeting and we were unhappy with that list of 26. It still felt skewed toward the natural origin hypothesis. So again, I drafted and we worked on together an open letter which we submitted to the WHO saying we think this list, it's a step in the right direction, but it's not good enough. And we call on these three people to be removed. And we have these three people who we think should be added. Incredibly, and I was in private touch with the WHO, after announcing the 26 people, the WHO said we're reopening the process. So send in more. And so then they added two more people.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Nick Baker and others. And those collectively shifted the conversation and then really impressively the WHO and with Tedros' leadership did something that was really incredible. And that is earlier this year, they, meaning the leadership of the WHO, not the World Health Assembly, but the leadership of the WHO announced the establishment of what's called SAGO, the scientific advisory group on the origins of novel pathogens. And basically what they did was overrule their own governing board and say, we're going to create our own entity. And so it basically dissolved that international, deeply flawed international joint study group. And a lot of those people, they have become very critical, like the Chinese of Tedros. So then they had...”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A full, we need to have a full investigation with access to raw data, and we need a full audit of the Wuhan Labs. And that part was really, really great. But then this saga continues because I was part of a group, as I mentioned before, this Paris group. It was about two dozen or so experts, and we'd been meeting since 2020, having regular meetings, and we just present papers, present data, debate to try to really get to the bottom of things. And it was all private. So I went to this group and I said, look, this playing field is now skewed.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Access to come to this conclusion. If the WHO doesn't distance itself from this, the WHO itself is going to be in danger because it's going to be basically institutional capture by the Chinese. This was repeating the Chinese government's propaganda points. And Tedro sent me a really, again, why I have so much respect for Tedro. Sent me a private note saying don't worry, we are determined to do the right thing. And so I got that private message. And again, I really like Tedros, but I thought, oh, well, what are you going to do? Three days later, Tedros makes a public statement. And he says, I've heard this thing. I don't think that this is a final answer. We need to have a full investigation into this process. He then released two more statements saying we need to have”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Though he himself thought that at least some manifestation of a lab incident origin was likely and that there should be an investigation, particularly he said, well, that's kind of weird that the Wuhan CDC moved just across from the Juan seafood market just before the beginning of the pandemic. But he said as a horse trading deal with the Chinese authorities, it shouldn't be that he agreed to say it was extremely unlikely and shouldn't be investigated. So I was actually in Colorado staying with my parents and I stayed up late watching this press event. And I was appalled because I knew after two weeks there was no way they could possibly come to that conclusion. So I immediately sent a private message to Tedros, the WHO Director General, essentially saying there's no way they had enough”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way they came up with that determination was by a show of hands vote of the international experts and the Chinese experts. And the Chinese experts had to do their vote in front of the Chinese government officials who were constantly there. So even if whatever they thought, there was no possibility that someone raises their hand as, oh, yeah, I think it's a lab origin. So that was outrageous thing, number one. Outrageous thing number two, which, I mean, which, and I'll come back to my response in February, outrageous thing number two is months later, Peter Benbarek does an interview on Danish television, and he says, actually, I was lying about extremely unlikely because the Chinese side, they didn't want any mention of a lab incident origin anywhere, including in the report that later came out. And so the deal we made, even”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And during that press event, a guy named Peter Ben Mbaric, and it's a little confusing, he was basically the head of this delegation, and he works for the WHO, even though this was an independent committee. It was organized by the WHO. So Peter Ben Mbarik gets up there and says, we think it's most likely it comes from nature. Then he says, we think it's possible it comes through frozen food, which is absolutely outrageous. I mean, it's basically preposterous. Alina Chan calls this popsical origins, but it's really, really unlikely. But then most significantly, he says that we've all agreed that a lab incident origin is quote-unquote extremely unlikely and shouldn't be investigated. We later learned that the reason”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, they made recommendations. Many of their recommendations were accepted. But when they went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and some of them did, they weren't able to do any kind of audit when they asked for access to raw data. They weren't provided that. It was a chaperoned study tour. It was not even remotely close to an investigation. And the thing they were looking at wasn't the origins of the pandemic. It was the single hypothesis of a quote unquote natural origins. Then, I mean, it was really so shocking for me. On February 9 of this year, in Wuhan, the Chinese government sets up a joint press event where it's the Chinese side and the international side.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pictures. They're traveling around Wuhan in little buses. One of the first visits they have is to this museum exhibition on basically a propaganda exhibition on the success Xi Jinping and the success in fighting COVID. And they said, well, we had to show respect to our Chinese host. But I think what the Chinese hosts were saying is let's just, we're just going to rub your noses in this. You're going to go where we tell you. You're going to hear what we want you to hear. So they have that little short time. They spend a few hours. So they weren't in control.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Peter Dasik. Peter Dasick, who had this funding relationship for many years with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose entire basically professional reputation was based on his collaboration with Shu Jeng Li, who had written the February 2020 Lancet letter saying it comes from natural origin and anybody who's suggesting otherwise is a conspiracy theorist and who at least according to me had been at very, very least the opposite of transparent and at most engaged in a massive disinformation campaign. He is the one American who's on this. So they go there, they have one month in Wuhan. Two weeks of it are spent in quarantine, just in their hotel rooms. Suddenly they have two weeks, but really it's just 10 working days. One of the earliest, and so then we've all seen.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you do this? So then they were there for a month. Yeah. Of the makeup of the team, guess who was, so the United States government proposed three experts for this team. People who had a lot of background. This was the Trump administration, people who had a lot of background, including in investigating lab incidents. None of those people were accepted. The one American who was accepted.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's okay, really important point. And I'm sorry, I wasn't clear on that. They were rather the mandate of what they were doing was not to investigate the origins of the pandemic. It was to have a joint study into the zoonotic origins of the virus, which means which was interpreted to mean A single hypothesis, not so that they weren't empowered to examine the lab incident origin. They were there to look at the natural origin hypothesis.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the joint study it had the Chinese side and the international side. So these international experts, then part of their examination was going for one month to Wuhan.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then it took six months to negotiate the terms of reference. And again, while China was doing all this cover up, they delayed and delayed and delayed. And by the terms of reference that were negotiated, China had veto power over who got to be a member of the international group. And that group was not entitled to access to raw data. The Chinese side would give them conclusions based on their own analysis of the raw data, which was totally outrageous. So then, and I was a big, I and others, now friend of mine, although we've never met in person, Gilles Demanouf in New Zealand, he did a great job of chronicling just the letter by letter of the terms of reference. So then it took, now it's January of this year, January 2021, this deeply flawed, deeply compromised. International group is sent to Wuhan.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Australians brought that idea of a full investigation to the World Health Assembly in May of 2020. As I mentioned before, the WHA is the governing authority of states above the World Health Organization. And so, but instead of passing a resolution calling for a full investigation, what ended up, ironically and tragically passing with Chinese support was a mandate to have essentially a Chinese-controlled joint study where half of the team, a little more than half of the team was Chinese experts, government affiliated Chinese experts, and half were independent international experts, but organized by the WHO.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China, particularly what it did in those early days, but it really is outrageous. So that was. So then there was the question of, well, how do we examine what actually happened? And the prime minister of Australia, then and now, Scott Morrison, was incredibly courageous. And he said, we need a full investigation. And because of that, the Chinese government attacked him personally and imposed trade sanctions on Australia to try to not just to punish Australia, but to deliver a message to every other country if you ask questions, we're going to punish you ruthlessly. And that certainly was the message that was delivered.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When they shared it against their will, it was incredible. Moderna. 48 hours later after getting the information, getting the sequence genome, they had the formulation for what's now the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. But that's two critical weeks in those early days, they blocked the World Health Organization from sending its experts to Wuhan for more than three weeks. I said they lied about human-to-human transmission during that time, they were aggressively enacting their cover-up, destroying records, hiding samples, imprisoning people who were asking tough questions. They soon after established their gag order. They fought internally in the World Health Organization to prevent the declaration of a global emergency. So China definitely, I mean, I couldn't be stronger in my critique of”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the most important, where there were a few things, one, China didn't report the outbreak. Two, they had the sequenced genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and they didn't share it for two critical weeks. And when they did share it, it was inadvertent. I mean, there was a very, very courageous scientist who essentially leaked it and was later punished for leaking it, even though the Chinese government is now saying we were so great by releasing.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I would have made a different decision, which is why I never would have been selected as the director general. There's a selection criteria that everybody kind of needs to support you.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not going to be happy. And the job of the WHO isn't to condemn states, it's to do the best possible job of addressing problems. And I think that the culture was, well, let's do the most that we can. If we totally alienate China on day one, we're in even worse shape than if we call them out for”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having said that, the Chinese government knowingly lied to Tedros. And Tedros, in repeating the position of the Chinese government, which incidentally I'll say Donald Trump also did the exact same thing. I mean, Donald Trump had a private conversation with Xi Jinping and then repeated what she had told him. Both of them were wrong. Dr. Tedros, I think when Chinese government was lying, knowingly lying, saying there's no human-to-human transmission, Dr. Tedros said that. And even though within the World Health Organization, there were private critiques saying China is now doing exactly what it did in SARS-1. It's not providing access. It's not providing information. Tedros' instinct because of his background, because of his role. And wrongly was to have a”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China led the process of putting Tedros in this position. And in the earliest days of the pandemic, Tedros, in my view, even though I have tremendous respect for him, I think he made a mistake. The WHO doesn't have its own independent surveillance network. It's not organized to have it, and the states have not allowed it. So it's dependent on member states for providing it information. And because it's a poorly funded organization dependent on its bosses who are these governments, it's not its natural instinct isn't to condemn its bosses. It's to say, well, let's quietly work with everybody.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It exists within a political context. And so the current Director General of the World Health Organization, who was just re-elected for his second five-year term, is Dr. Tedros Adenome Gabriesus, who is from Ethiopia to Graham from Ethiopia. And in full disclosure, I have a lot of respect for Tedros. Tedros got his job. He was not America's candidate. He was not Britain's candidate. Our candidate was a guy named David Nabarro, who I also know and have tremendous respect for.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source