Up till the middle of 2020, the 9 closest relatives of this pandemic virus had been collected more than 1,000 miles from Wuhan by Wuhan scientists and brought to Wuhan.

All of their research on these bat coronaviruses... had been done at lower levels at BSL-2 and BSL-3 ... There's no requirements, even if people are sick. Even they fall sick, they don't have to report it. They don't have to quarantine. So, there would have been no record of someone being infected in the lab by such a virus.

When I pressed, for example, the Royal Society in London and also the Academy of Medical Sciences to hold a debate on the origin of a pandemic that's killing north of 10 million people, I was told the topic is too controversial ... The question of sort of opening it up to a proper conversation is just not acceptable within conventional science.

I had no idea about this whole history of collaboration between not just the US but many other countries across Asia and Europe with labs in China to do quite risky virus work that might have led to this pandemic. So here, it's not just whether Western scientists are afraid of provoking China; it's really a question of are they also complicit in the origin of COVID-19.

Actually, in the first week of January 2020, the sequence of the virus was being auctioned off to people who make diagnostics and to people who make vaccines. And we know that by, I think, January 4th, the vaccine production for this virus had jumped into high gear by one of these companies in China.

It's incredibly difficult to distinguish a lab-engineered virus from a natural virus, because any lab-engineered virus has to be derived from a virus that was found in nature. Scientists don't have a magical ability to just conjure novel viruses, the entire blueprint by themselves. They have to base it on something they found in nature.

Western virology feels worried that its entire research program—indeed the whole of biotechnology—might lose its funding, might lose its license, if a major accident is revealed to of happened as a result of work in a laboratory.