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

“But let's not get there. Let's not get distracted. As I was telling you, Lex before, and this is maybe an advertisement Has having now listened to a number of your podcasts when I'm doing long ultra training runs or driving in the mountains. Because in the beginning, you have to. Talk about whatever it is is the topic. But the really good stuff happens later. So”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gloves and maybe a face mask much less. So the French and the Chinese governments agreed that France would help build the first and still the largest BSL-4 plus some mobile BSL3 labs and they were going to do it in Wuhan. And Wuhan is kind of like China's Chicago. And I had actually been, it's a different story. I'd been in Wuhan relatively not that long before the pandemic broke out. And that was why I knew that Wuhan, it's not some backwater where there are a bunch of yokels eating bats for dinner every night. This is a really sophisticated, wealthy, highly educated and cultured city. And so I knew that it wasn't like that even the Huanan Seafood market wasn't like some of these seafood markets that they have in southern China or in Cambodia where I lived for two years. I mean, this is. It was a totally different thing.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's a great question. So after SARS-1, which was in the early 2000s, 2003, 2004, there was this effort to enhance, as I mentioned before, global capacity, including in China. So the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been around for decades before then, but there was an agreement between the French and the Chinese governments to build the largest BSL-4 lab, so biosafety level four, so in these what are called high containment labs. There's level four, which is the highest level. And people have seen that on TV and elsewhere where you have the people in the different suits and all these protections. And then there's level three, which is still very serious, but not as much as level four. And then level two is just kind of goggles and so on.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something doesn't mean that I need to oppose it. If Donald Trump says something that I think is correct, well, I want to say it's correct just as if he says something that I don't like. I'm going to speak up about that.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I agree. And even though, I mean, I think of myself as a progressive person, I certainly was a critic of a lot of what President Trump did. But on this particular case, even though he may have said it in an uncouth way, Donald Trump was actually, in my view, right. I mean, when he said, hey, let's look at this lab. He said, I have evidence, I can't tell you, I don't think he even had the evidence. But his intuition that this probably comes from a lab, in my view, was a correct intuition. And certainly I started speaking up about pandemic origins early in 2019. And my friends, my democratic friends were brutal with me saying, what are you doing? You're supporting Trump in an election year. And I said, just because Donald Trump is saying.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early days, they would say Lex is an axe murderer, you know, Lex's friend says he's not an axeburn. And we'd have a four-day debate. Is he or isn't he? And then at day four, someone would say, why are we having this debate at all? Because the original point is just is baseless. And so the media just got in the habit. Here's what Trump said and here's why it's wrong.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possibility of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist. So that message starts to percolate. And then in the United States, we have Donald Trump. And he's starting to get criticized for America's failure to respond, prepare for, and respond adequately to the outbreak. And so he starts saying, well, I know first after praising Xi Jinping, he starts saying, well, I know that China did it and the WHO did it, and he's kind of pointing fingers at everybody but himself. And then we have a media here that had shifted from the traditional model of he said, she said journalism. So-and-so said X, and so-and-so said Y, and we'll present both of those views. But with Donald Trump, he would make outlandish starting positions. So he would say Lex is an axe murderer.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A gag order preventing Chinese scientists from writing or saying anything about pandemic origins without prior government approval. And what that does means that there isn't a lot of data, not nearly enough data coming out of China. And so lots of responsible scientists outside of China who are data-driven say, well, I don't have enough information to draw conclusions. And then into that vacuum step, a relatively small number of largely virologists, but also others respected scientists. And I know we'll talk about infamous Peter Dazak, who say, well, without any real foundation in the evidence, they say, we know pretty much this comes from nature. And anyone who's raising the”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like China now. If local officials say, wait a second, I thought my job was to cover everything up, to support this alternative reality that authoritarian systems need in order to survive. Well, now I'm going to be held accountable for I'm not totally transparent. Like your whole system would collapse. So the national government, they have that choice and their only choice, according to the logic of their system is to be all in on a cover-up. And that's why they block the World Health Organization from sending its team to Wuhan for over three weeks. They overtly lie to the World Health Organization about human-to-human transmission. And then they begin their cover-up. So they begin very, very quickly destroying samples, hiding records. They start imprisoning people for asking basic questions. Soon after, they establish.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Government of China. Again, this is just hypothesis. The national government gets involved. They say, all right, this is getting much bigger. They go in and they realize that we have a big problem on our hands. They relatively quickly know that it's spreading human to human. And so the right thing for them to do then is what the South African government is doing now is to say, we have this outbreak, we don't know everything, but we know it's serious. We need help. But that's not the instinct of people in most governments and certainly not in authoritarian governments like China. And so the national government, they have a choice at that point. They can do option one, which is what we would here call the right thing, which is total transparency. They criticize the local officials for having this cover-up. And they say now we're going to be totally transparent. But what does that do in a system like the former Soviet Union?”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Local officials in Wuhan understand that something is up. And exactly like in Chernobyl, these guys exist within a hierarchical system. And they are going to be rewarded if good things happen and they're going to be in big trouble if bad things happen under their watch. So their initial instinct is to squash it. And my guess is they think, well, if we squash this information, we can most likely beat back this outbreak because lots of outbreaks happen all the time, including of SARS-1, where there was multiple lab incidents out of a lab in Beijing. And so they start their cover up on day one. They start screening social media. They send nasty letters to different doctors and others who are starting to speak up. But then it becomes clear that there's a bigger issue. And then the national government...”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the Chinese government recognized that they needed to ramp things up. And then the World Health Organization and the World Health Assembly, they had their international health regulations that were designed to create a stronger infrastructure. So that was the goal. There were a lot of investments, and I know we'll talk later about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and I won't go into that right now. So there was all of this distributed capacity. And so in the early days, there's a breakout in Wuhan. We don't know, is it September, October, November, maybe December is when...”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, would it be okay if I give you my kind of macro view of the whole information space and why I believe this has been so contentious? So here's if I had to give my best guess and I underline the word guess of what happened and your background, your family background with Chernobyl, I think is highly relevant here. After the first SARS, there was a recognition that we needed to distribute knowledge about virology and epidemiology around the world, that people in China and Africa, in Southeast Asia, they are where the frontline workers and they needed to be doing a lot of the viral monitoring and assessment so that we could have an early alarm system. And that was why there was a lot of investment in all of those places in building capacity and training people and helping to build institutional capacity.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry to interrupt, but some people are saying that the first outbreak could have happened as early as September. I think it's more likely it's October, November, but for the people who are saying, The first outbreak, the first incident of a known outbreak, at least to somebody, happened in September, they make the argument, well, what if that also happened in mid-September of 2019? I'm not prepared to go there, but there are some people who make that argument.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is this like anything that we've seen before? And now it would help us both understand what we're facing and be better able to respond. So this was a password protected public access database. In 2019, in September 2019, it became inaccessible. And then the whole, a few months later, the entire database disappeared. The Chinese have said is that because there were all kinds of computer attacks on this database. But why would that happen in September 2019 before the pandemic, at least as far as we know?”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great starting point. Yeah, yeah. So, but there's a bigger story, but let me talk about that. So the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And we can go into the whole history of the Wuhan Institute of Virology either now or later, because I think it's very relevant to this story. But let's focus for now on this database. They had a database of 22,000 viral samples and sequence information about viruses that they had collected, some of which, the collection of some of which was supported through funding from the NIH. Not a huge NIH through the EcoHealth Alliance. It's a relatively small amount. $600,000, but not nothing. The goal of this database was so that we could understand viral evolution so that exactly for this kind of moment where we had an unknown virus, we could say, well,”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And let me put it this way if we had all of the information, if the Chinese government hadn't blocked access to all of this, because there's blood bank information, there's all sorts of information. And based on a full and complete understanding, we came to believe that all of the early cases were at this market. I think that would be a stronger argument than what this is so far. But everything leads to the fact that why is it that the Chinese government, which was, frankly, after a slow start, the gold standard of doing viral tracking for SARS-1, why have they apparently done so little and shared so little? I think it asks.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's certainly my view, what Michael Waraby's argument is, is that, well, what are the odds of that, that we're seeing this amplification at this particular?”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that could be true, and it probably is true. The question is, is this the source? Is this the place where this began? Or was this just a place where it was amplified? And I certainly think that it's extremely likely that the Huanan seafood market was a point of amplification. And it's just answering a different question.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Animals that are considered to be candidates as an intermediary species. And third, there was a bias, actually I'll have four things. Third, there was a bias in the early assessment in China of what they were looking for. They were asked, did you have exposure to the market? Because I think in the early days when people were figuring things out, that was one of the questions that was asked. And fourth, and probably most significantly, we have so little information about those early cases in China. And that's really unfortunate. I know we'll talk about this later because the Chinese government is preventing access to all of that information, which they have, which could easily help us get to the bottom, at least know a ton more about how this pandemic started. And so this is like grasping at straws in the dark with gloves.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, not in December. His argument is, well, what are the odds that you would have this number, this cluster of cases in the Huanan seafood market? And if the origin had happened someplace else, wouldn't you expect other clusters? And it's not an entirely implausible argument. But there are reasons why I think that this is not nearly as determinative as has been reported, and I certainly had a lot of, I and others had tweeted a lot about this. And that is first, the people who were infected in this cluster, it's not the earliest known virus of the SARS-CoV-2. It began mutating. So this is not the original SARS-CoV-2 there. So it had to have happened someplace else too. The people who were infected in the market weren't infected in the part of the market where they had these kinds of animals.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goal here isn't to attack people on the other side. And if my feeling is if there is evidence that's presented that should change my view, I hope that I'll be open-minded enough to change my view. And certainly Michael Waraby is a thoughtful person, a respectful scientist. And I think this work is contributive work, but I just don't think that it's as significant as has been reported in the press. And so what his argument is, is that there is an early cluster in December of 2019 around the Huanan Seafood Market. And even though he himself argues that the original breakthrough case, the original case, the index case where the first person infected happened earlier, happened in October or November.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Juan seafood market, according to this, in my mind, not very credible theory, and then unloads his stuff and everybody gets infected Which doesn't even sell very many of these kinds of animals that are likely intermediate species and not anywhere else. So that means a little bit of a straw man. But on top of that, the Chinese have sequenced more than 80,000 animal samples, and there's no evidence of this type of viral evolution that we would otherwise expect.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't see that. And so there are some people who say, all right, well, one hypothesis is, are you have a totally isolated group of humans, maybe in southern China, which is more than a thousand miles away from Wuhan. And maybe they're doing their animal farming right next to these areas where there are these horseshoe bats. And maybe in this totally isolated place that no one's ever heard of, they're not connected to any other place. One person gets infected. And it doesn't spread to anybody else because they're so isolated. They're like, I don't know. I mean, I can't even imagine that this is the case. Then somebody gets in a car and drives all night, more than a thousand miles through crappy roads to get to Wuhan. It doesn't stop for anything, doesn't infect anybody on the way. No one else in that person's village infects anyone. And then that person goes straight to the...”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's trying like a virus, its goal is to survive and replicate. Yeah. No, it's true. It's like, oh, we're going to try this. Oh, that didn't work. We'll try exactly like a startup. And so we don't.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A viral evolution with the first SARS, you could track it by the genome sequencing that it was experimenting. And SARS-CoV-2 was very, very stable, meaning it had already adapted to humans by the time it interacted with us.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went into the pig pens, the viruses in those droppings infected the pigs, and then the pigs infected the humans. And that's why it's a plausible theory. It's just that there's basically no evidence for it. If it was the case that SARS-CoV-2 comes from this type of interaction, as in most of the at least recent past outbreaks, we'd see evidence of that. Viruses are messy. They're constantly undergoing Darwinian evolution, and they're changing. And it's not that they're just ready for prime time, ready to infect humans on day one. Normally you can trace the viral evolution prior to the time when it infects humans. But for SARS-CoV-2, it just showed up on the scene ready to infect humans. And there's no history that anybody has found so far of that kind of”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's certainly one very possible possibility, a possible possibility. I don't know if that's a word, but the people who believe in the wet market origin, that's what they're saying. So they had one of these animals. They were cutting it up, let's say, in a market, and maybe some of the blood got into somebody, maybe had a cut on their hand, or maybe it was aerosolized, and so somebody breathed it. And then that virus found this new host, and that was the human host. But you could also have that happen in, let's say, a farm. So it's happened in the past that let's say that there are farms, and because of human encroachment into wild spaces, we're pushing our farms and our animal farms further and further into what used to be just natural habitats. And so it's happened in the past, for example, that there were bats roosting over pig pens and the bat dropping.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who are making the case for a natural origin of the virus, what they're saying is it went from that to some intermediate species. And then from that intermediate species, most likely. There's some people who say it went directly bat to human, but through some intermediate species. And then humans interacted with that species. And then it jumped from that, whatever it is, to humans. And that's a very plausible theory. It's just that there's no evidence for it.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The virus that is SARS-CoV-2 existed in horseshoe bats. It was a horseshoe bat virus. And it evolved somewhere. And there are some people who say there's no evidence of this, but it's a plausible theory based on how things have happened in the past. Maybe that virus jumped from the horseshoe bat through some intermediate species. So it's like, let's say there's a bat and then it infects some other animal. Let's say it's a pig or a raccoon dog or a civet cat. They're all pangolin. There are all sorts of animals that have been considered. And then that virus adapts into that new host and it changes and grows. And then, according to the quote unquote natural origins hypothesis, it jumps from that animal into humans. And so what you could imagine, and some of the people who are making the case, all of the people actually...”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, great questions. So, viruses come from somewhere. Viruses have been around for 3.5 billion years, and they've been around for such a long time because they are adaptive and they're growing and they're always changing and they're morphing. And that's why viruses are, I mean, they've been very successful. And we are victims. Sometimes we're beneficiaries. We have viral DNA has morphed into our genomes. But now certainly in the case of COVID-19, we are victims of the success of viruses. And so when we talk about a backbone, so the SARS-CoV-2 virus has a history. And these viruses don't come out of whole cloth. There are viruses that morph. And so we know that at some period, maybe 20 years ago or whatever,”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would have to say it's just logic and deductive reasoning. So before I make the case for why I think it's most likely a lab incident origin, let's just say why it could be and still could be what we, natural origin, all of this is natural origin in the sense that it's a bat virus backbone, horseshoe bat virus backbone.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would stand by what I've been saying since really the middle of last year. It's more likely and not, in my opinion, that the pandemic stems from an accidental lab incident in Wuhan. Is it 90%? Is it 65%? I mean, that's kind of arbitrary. But when I stack up all of the available evidence and all of it on both sides is circumstantial, it weighs very significantly toward a lab incident origin.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source