Her friend’s daughter is a “global citizen”, who travels the world writing stories about different people and recently spent time in Afghanistan. She asked Amy how, having been through the CCP’s influence, how does she keep an independent mind.
Amy recalls being encouraged by her parents. When she went to preschool, she did not enjoy it. One day, when she did not want to take a nap, Amy ran across the street and found herself in a comic store. She was caught by the school and her mother was told to punish her. Instead, her parents had a meeting with her and asked her why she was running away. Amy explained that she did not like the preschool. To her surprise, her parents agreed. Amy stayed home to read and lead local younger kids in games. She would also make up stories to tell them.
So, her parents let her develop in her independent thinking. Amy recalls asking elementary school teachers many questions, not wanting to simply accept what they said. She recalls being told that you have to seek the truth and not just accept what people told you.
Her luck ran out in the Cultural Revolution, when you could no longer express yourself to other people. So, she took solace by writing in her own diary. When the diary was found, she was almost killed for being “anti-revolutionary”. So, after that she never wrote in her diary anymore.
Amy recalls traveling was a way of searching for the truth. For 30 years in China she never gave up her own thoughts or individual thinking.
Recently, she’s noticed more and more people in the US believing conspiracy theories. She suggests that it is because we no longer trust the media. Amy is concerned that our constitutional protection of freedom of speech is not as strong as it used to be.
Nan introduces Richard Muller, describing his many awards and qualifications. Nan asks if Prof. Muller has heard about the inconclusive report on the Covid origins. He was surprised they never called him, though he is, at least glad that we’ve gone from improbable to inconclusive on the lab leak theory.
He suggests that there is a whistleblower. The fact is the virus did come from a lab. The virus has “fingerprints”, indicating that it was created in a laboratory. He mentions the circumstantial evidence, but “lets focus on the science”. In our previous history with coronaviruses with SARS and MERS, they came from an animal and the animal was identified in a few months. When a virus makes such a jump, it is not well adapted to jump to humans. Though, before it jumps to humans, there are “pre-pandemic infections”. These “pre-pandemic infections” did not happen with COVID. Viruses usually take some time to adapt to humans, but mutations are very rapid. In the case of Covid, these early mutations never happened.
Prof. Muller mentions a study in Seattle, which mutated COVID 3,800 times to see if it became more virulent. He suggests that COVID was 99.5% perfected for infecting humans.
Prof. Muller describes how the Wuhan Institute of Virology was exposing corona viruses to “humanized mice” in order to perfect viruses to infect humans. When it was released, it “hit the ground running”.
Prof. Muller describes the 80,000 animals tested to find the origin of the virus, but we could not find an origin. This is an unprecedented scenario, as all previous versions where much more easily identified.
Prof. Muller describes the nature of the mutation that makes this virus so dangerous. He describes how COVID has a furin cleavage site as a means of attaching that we don’t see in any other viruses.
He describes the sequence CGG CGG, which is rare in any natural viruses, but is normal in genetically modified viruses.
He suggests that if you do the statistical analysis of the probability that all these factors could be coincidental, that it came from a laboratory “wins hands down”.
Prof. Muller believes that it was an accidental release. He suggests that if you were going to do it on purpose, you would not leak it in Wuhan where you are doing the research. He suggests that the smart place to release it would be close to Fort Detrick in the US.
Billy asks how this type of research was condoned in the scientific community. Prof. Muller explains that the justification for it was, that we could understand these things before they occur in nature. However, there have been many leaks from laboratories. He also points out, that this virus is not something that would have occurred naturally. He suggests that it is worse that anything we’d expect from nature.
Prof. Muller suggests that “gain of function research” should be emulating viruses that might occur in nature. Since this virus could not occur in nature, it was likely developed as a bio weapon.
Prof. Muller shares his suspicion that the people in the laboratory where this took place, did not like doing this kind of work. He recalls that there were two Chinese scientists who concluded early that there were no bats in the wet market. They and their paper have since disappeared.
Amy asks how we can convince the world to recognize that this virus came from the lab. Prof. Muller says, “you have to use the science” and that “the science in this case is solid”. He suggests that, in the future, we need more transparency in all these sorts of labs to make sure that this sort of thing never happens again.
Michael Olsen asks Prof. Muller about his fellow associates at Berkley how they feel about his stance. One of them was rather candid with him, explaining that “if China found out” we were working on a theory that the virus came from a Chinese lab, they would no longer be able to work with them.
“The WHO must be horribly embarrassed” by their early assessment. Prof. Muller mentions the Biden administrations decision to shut down the State Department investigation was politically motivated. He thinks it is terrible that his colleges and those in government would give in to blackmail.
Billy and Nan discuss the difficulty Prof. Muller had getting his Berkley associates to help demonstrate that the structure of the COVID virus had to be made by scientists and could not have happened in nature. They discuss the 80,000 animals and 9,000 humans studied, with no evidence of how the virus transitioned from animal to human.
Michael Olsen recalls that Prof. Muller and his associate are statistically certain that the virus comes from a lab. Why then does our government say that the origin is inconclusive? If it is political and we are not “allowed to know” where this came from, does that make it more likely that we will see this again in the future?
Dick asks whether the virus was accidentally released, suggesting that he would not presume that it was accidental.
Michael Olsen suggests that “science is for sale, just like everything else is”.
Cornell Terry describes his future threat assessment work for the pentagon, in which they recognized the CCP as having a “lack of ethics” and their approach of using anything to defeat what they saw as threats. He suggests the CCP would be willing to sacrifice everyone besides their top leadership to achieve their goals. Cornell Terry suggests that it may be a little bit of both accidental and intentional.
Advocating for truth, Chuck discusses various politicking around the attempted investigations of the virus origin. He describes Dr. Fauci as a “squirrel crossing the street”.
Wendy has a comment about the deciduous dawn redwood tree in Wuhan.
Olsen asks “how do we know which science to listen to?” Billy thinks Prof. Muller’s science is pretty good.
Nick mentions humanized mice.