Blockbuster Report On COVID Origins Point To Lab Leak Theory: Dr. Makary Says “No Brainer”

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Guy Benson: Joining us now is Dr. Martin Makary, Fox News contributor. He’s a surgeon and a professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins, author of the book The Price We Pay at Marty Makary on Twitter. Doctor, great to have you back.

Dr. Makary: Good to be with you, guy.

Guy Benson: I want to just draw to your attention. I’m sure you’ve seen it already, but just to review for our audience, we mentioned this earlier in the show as well, The Times of London with I think you could call it a blockbuster report pointing yet again in the direction of the lab leak theory with some new details. Just quoting now from the piece, Fresh evidence drawn from confidential files reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic. The Sunday Times Insight team report Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began. Investigators who scrutinized top secret intercepted communications and scientific research believed Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the COVID 19 outbreak. That’s really the nut of it. There’s a few more details that are astounding. Doctor, let’s just start with that. People have been paying attention to this. Wouldn’t necessarily be surprised by any of that. We’ve seen at least similar reporting now for many months. But there was a time, a long time, where even drawing these types of intuitive conclusions, that was labeled misinformation. Conspiracy theories worthy of censorship and banishment and ridicule and that sort of thing. Including experts in the field. Just your response to what we’ve learned here from The Sunday Times.

Dr. Makary: Well, I think it’s obvious to any observer that the scientific evidence and common sense points to the lab leak. There’s never been an animal reservoir identified, and it’s not for lack of trying. The world epicenter was five miles away from the lab. We know they were trying to mammalian eyes back coronaviruses. That was an sort of very overt, publicly known attempt. They even applied for a grant to do exactly that. They had published something similar a year or two prior. And the genetic makeup really does suggest that something was inserted. If you remember back in January, before the pandemic, when China, the scientists over there, revealed the gene, the DNA sequence to the world of this coronavirus, that scientist was punished by the Chinese government, that that scientist is a world hero. When they released that DNA, that genetic sequence. Fauci had an emergency meeting and three scientists on that call, according to documents obtained by Fox News, told Fauci, Look, it came from the lab. We don’t see how it really there’s any other plausible source. They thought it was likely from the lab. That was their gut reaction when they first saw the genetic sequence. I think it’s a no brainer. The only reason that’s controversial is that it’s embarrassing that the NIH and the DOD was funding the Wuhan lab. That’s the only reason this is a political issue nowadays.

Guy Benson: Yeah, I tend to agree. I want to come back to Fauci in just a moment, but just a few more of these details from the Times of London story. The institute meeting in Wuhan was engaged, I’m quoting here, In increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines. That changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojang in Yunnan province, where people had died from symptoms similar to SARS. Rather than warning the world. The Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognized as the only members of COVID 19 immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic. They were transported to the Wuhan Institute and the work of its scientists became classified. Quote, A trail of papers starts to go dark. There’s another quote here in the story. It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and coverup of the COVID 19 pandemic. That’s attributed to one of the investigators who’s been doing this research. I mean, that’s huge. There was also a quote in the story about the biomedical security being totally inadequate compared to that of a dentist’s office. I mean, it goes on and on. And Dr.. It seems like a lot of the old conspiracy theories that were angrily rejected and censored are at least partially being vindicated, if not fully.

Dr. Makary: Well, that’s right. And Richard Ebright, the scientist you quoted, who basically said, you know, it’s very clear that the Virology Institute in Wuhan was involved in the creation and promulgation and cover up. He is a very top guy. He’s at Rutgers. He’s a highly respected professor of chemistry and chemical biology, and he’s been considered one of the top guys in this field for a long time. He is a part of a group called Biosafety Now. And I’ll tell you, the movement within the virology and chemistry community to say we should never be doing this. This stuff is dangerous. It shouldn’t happen. The promise that manipulating coronaviruses or any virus in a lab can yield the promise of predicting the next pandemic or coming up with the cure of a of an epidemic that has yet to happen has never happened. Those promises have never been achieved. So I think I put a lot of stock in what his what he says and his recent comments that you quoted.

Guy Benson: Yeah, he called it having reviewed the evidence from the Times of London that they were able to gather from what they say is intercepted communications from the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese officials. They gave it to Ebright, the journalist did, to bring his assessment to the table. And he called it, quote, by far the most reckless and dangerous research on coronaviruses or indeed on any viruses known to have been undertaken at any time in any location. I mean, that is an extremely tough, damning indictment there from Dr. Ebright, whom you just quoted and was quoted in This Times story. Which brings us back to your point about Dr. Fauci. I remember back in. February, the Biden administration’s Energy Department, which actually has a fair amount of stake in this discussion. And there’s a reason why they weighed in on this. They weren’t just, you know, going off on some tangent outside of their brief. This is actually part of what they do. The Energy Department updated their assessment of the situation, concluding that it is now, quote, most likely that COVID arose from a laboratory leak. That was a change for them. And I remember at the time we had you on this show, there were a lot of people saying, here we go. Isn’t this proof that the powers that be and a lot of the elites in the media and elsewhere got it wrong. Dr. Fauci was still hedging at that point. He had knocked down the lab leak theory. He had reportedly commissioned a study to knock it down and then cited that study later at the White House as if he had nothing to do with it, just some independent research, even though he had commissioned it and been a part of reviewing some of it, which seems at least to me, a bit unethical. But he’s been hedging at best ever since really putting it out there that it was unlikely to be true. The lab leak theory, he was swatting it down. Of course, he got that email from his buddy Daszak, who was making a lot of money off of these government grants on exactly this kind of research flowing from places like NAIA. But he got that email saying, hey, you know, thank you, Dr. Fauci, for dismissing this and suggesting that this isn’t true. And then as the evidence for the lab leak theory grew and grew and grew, Fauci was still clinging to this idea that he still felt that it was more likely that this was a natural origin phenomenon. But he was going to keep an open mind, and it was possible that it might be a lab leak theory. Is this just saving face? Why is he still hanging on to. This other theory and not just looking at what appears to be obvious reality as it exists.

Dr. Makary: Well, I think it’s because it’s it’s embarrassing. They were funding the lab. So if you look at these scientists that originally told him, look, we think it came from the lab. A couple of those scientists wrote a puff piece in one of the top medical journals saying it definitely did not come from the lab and there was no evidence. They just stated it like it’s, you know, truth by statement. And so it came out. That’s right. And it came out later that they told the editor in a document that was uncovered that Dr. Fauci wanted us to write this piece they put in there. This was commissioned by Dr. Fauci and colleagues at the NIH. It was a plea for the Journal to publish it. So a lot of people are frustrated, just as you see the weaponization of government and the Justice Department. There’s been the weaponization of science. And a lot of people are very frustrated that Dr. Fauci now he’s interested in his legacy. He’s making the tour right now on this is on the speaking circuit. I was at a conference where he got a standing ovation from about three quarters of the members sitting in the audience. You know, he’s still working at the NIH. From all indications. He he’s in the directory, He’s active. He shows up at work a couple of days a week. He parks his car in the Nihad director spot. He still has federal agents surrounding him. And part of the explanation is that, one, he doesn’t want to let go in to, that he has the lawyers of the government helping him now in all of the legal mess that he’s in, after testifying before Rand Paul, that he did not find gain of function research in the Wuhan lab. So that’s the state of Dr. Fauci today.

Guy Benson: I think what he did. Right. I mean, whether he wants to split hairs about exactly whose money flowed from where he was overseeing money that did go to this kind of research at this lab, correct? That’s established, right?

Dr Makary: That’s that’s correct. What’s not clear is whether or not those dollars directly went to the actual test tubes and solutions for that particular experiment. That’s what he’s sort of hiding behind by parsing his words very carefully. He’s very good at that. But a lot of people are very frustrated with Dr. Fauci right now. And it’s unclear whether or not he actually is still the highest paid employee in the U.S. government. I think the public has a right to know, and I hope somebody asks. Karine Jean-Pierre or President Biden, a simple question Does Dr. Fauci still work in the government? Is he still the highest paid employee or has he left the government? Nobody seems to know. But all indications are he kind of hoodwinked. Everyone suggesting he’s retiring by saying he’s stepping down. But he may just have stepped down from the director job and still be on the payroll. And I guess I’d.

Guy Benson: Be willing to bet that Jean Pierre, if asked, that, would refer that question elsewhere. That would be my guess of how that would go. But I do want to play this one more sound bite for you, Doctor, before we let you go. And we’ve played this a couple different times, I just think it is illustrative of a very important point because as I stated earlier and as you personally experienced, if you just. In any way stepped away from the approved orthodoxy of a certain small handful of people who were determining what the capital s science was. And then many others just accepted it, swallowed it whole, enforced it ruthlessly, including almost everyone in the media. If you deviated from that whatsoever, you were turned into, or at least there was an attempt to turn you into a pariah. And for people, whether they were experts or just laypeople, if they were asking questions, raising issues, even citing evidence that didn’t align with what the official position was, in a lot of instances that could be censored, that could be throttled, that could be disallowed on social media accounts, could be suspended and that sort of thing. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Meta, he was talking about this in retrospect on a podcast recently. Here’s what he said in 27.

Zuckerberg Clip: So misinformation, I think, is has been a really tricky one because there are things that are kind of obviously false, right, that are maybe factual but may not be harmful since a guard or you’re going to censor someone for just being wrong. It’s, you know, if if there’s no kind of harm implication of what they’re doing. I think that’s there’s there’s a bunch of real kind of issues and challenges there. But then I think that there are other places where it is you just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier on in the pandemic where there were, you know, real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions. And, you know, unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that, you know, kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and, you know, asked for a bunch of things to be censored that in retrospect ended up being, you know, more debatable or true. And that stuff is really tough for it really undermines trust.

Guy Benson: The establishment asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. It really undermines trust. He’s right about that, doctor, but I feel like there are some lessons here that need to be learned broadly and stated pretty explicitly. What’s your reaction to hearing that from Mark Zuckerberg?

Dr. Makary: Well, it’s a little refreshing. I mean, it’s a moment of sort of unfiltered honesty from Mark Zuckerberg. And we get a glimpse into what was happening. We know that Google, for example, was unabashedly censoring any searches of Wuhan lab leak. They’re very open about they did that and they have said we just didn’t know. We didn’t want these theories to spread. And the problem is, in science, you need to challenge deeply held assumptions. You know, Mayo Clinic just fired one of their very best doctors or suspended him, Doctor Michael Joyner, for basically saying something that was out of line and in their suspension letter said he quote unquote, failed to communicate in accordance with prescribed messaging. That’s what Mayo Clinic said. We need people to speak up. We need people to tell Mayo Clinic, hey, that’s not cool. That’s not academic freedom. You want a doctor who’s going to speak out freely. All Dr. Joyner did is criticize the NIH, his bureaucracy, and say that testosterone in trans women is not fair in women’s sports. Now, if he can’t say that as a doctor, we don’t have freedom of speech in science. And that’s a very dangerous place to be in.

Guy Benson: Dr. Marty Makary, Fox News contributor, a surgeon professor at Johns Hopkins. We appreciate your time, as always.

Dr. Makary: Great to be with you, Guy. Thanks.